The Troubled Man (38 page)

When Linda heard that Baiba still hadn’t had anything to eat, she sent Wallander into the kitchen to make an omelette and went with Baiba out to the garden. He could hear Baiba laughing through the open window. That made his memories even stronger, and his eyes filled with tears. He worried that he seemed to be growing sentimental—a state he had virtually never experienced before, except when he was drunk.

They ate outside, moving with the shade. Wallander spent most of the time listening as Linda asked questions about Latvia, a country she had
never visited. Just for a short time, a family is being resurrected, he thought. It will soon be over. And the question, the most difficult question of all to answer, is what will be left?

Linda stayed for just over an hour before announcing that she needed to go home. She had brought a photo of Klara with her, and she showed it to Baiba.

“She might grow up to look just like her grandfather,” Baiba said.

“God forbid!” said Wallander.

“Don’t believe him,” said Linda. “There’s nothing he’d wish for more. I hope to see you again,” she said as she stood up to go home.

Baiba didn’t reply. They hadn’t talked about death.

Baiba and Wallander remained in the garden and started talking about their lives. Baiba had a lot of questions to ask, and he answered as best he could. Both of them still lived alone. Some ten years earlier Baiba had tried to enter into a relationship with a doctor, but she had given up after six months. She had never had any children. Wallander couldn’t tell if she regretted that or not.

“Life has been good,” she said forcefully. “When our borders finally opened up, I was able to travel. I lived frugally, wrote several newspaper articles, and I was a consultant for a firm that wanted to establish itself in Latvia. I earned the most money from a Swedish bank that is now the biggest in the country. I went abroad twice a year, and I know so much more about the world we live in than I did when we met. I’ve had a good life. Lonely, but good.”

“My torture has always been waking up alone,” said Wallander, then wondered if what he had just said was really true.

Baiba laughed as she replied.

“I’ve always lived alone, apart from that short time with the doctor. But that doesn’t mean I’ve always woken up alone. You don’t need to be celibate simply because you’re not in a steady relationship.”

Wallander felt pangs of jealousy at the thought of strange men lying by Baiba’s side in her bed. But he didn’t say anything.

Baiba suddenly started talking about her illness. As ever, she was objective.

“It started with my feeling constantly tired,” she said. “I soon suspected there was something more ominous behind the weariness. At first the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Burnout, old age; nobody had the right answer. I eventually visited a doctor in Bonn that I’d heard about, a
man who specializes in cases that other doctors have failed to diagnose. After a few days giving me various tests and taking samples, he was able to tell me that I had a rare cancerous tumor in my liver. I traveled back to Riga with a death sentence stamped invisibly in my passport. I admit that I leaned on all the contacts I had and was operated on remarkably quickly. But it was too late; the cancer had spread. A few weeks ago I was told that I now have metastases in my brain. It’s taken less than a year. I won’t last until Christmas; I’ll die in the fall. I’m trying to spend the time I have left doing what I want to do more than anything else. There are a few places in the world I want to visit again, a few people I want to see again. You are one of them—perhaps the one I’ve wanted to see most of all.”

Wallander burst into tears, sobbing violently. She took his hand, which made matters even worse. He stood up and walked around to the back of the house. When he had pulled himself together, he returned.

“I don’t want to bring you sorrow,” she said. “I hope you understand why I was compelled to come here.”

“I have never forgotten the time we spent together,” he said. “I’ve often wanted to relive it. Now that you’re here, I have to ask you a question. Have you ever had any regrets?”

“You mean that I said no when you asked me to marry you?”

“It’s a question I think about all the time.”

“Never. It was right then, and it must remain right now, after all these years.”

Wallander said nothing. He understood. Why should she have considered marrying a foreign policeman when her husband, also a police officer, had just been murdered? Wallander remembered how he had tried to persuade her. But if the roles had been reversed, how would he have reacted? What would he have chosen to do?

They sat for a long time in silence. In the end Baiba stood up, stroked Wallander’s hair, and went back into the house. Since he could see that her pain had started again, he assumed she was giving herself another injection. When she didn’t come back, he went inside to investigate. She had fallen asleep on his bed. She didn’t wake up until late in the afternoon, and once she had overcome her initial confusion about where she was, her first question was if she could stay the night before catching a ferry to Poland the next morning and driving back to Riga.

“That’s too far for you to drive,” said Wallander firmly. “I’ll go with you, drive you home. Then I can fly back.”

She shook her head and said she wanted to go home on her own, just as she had come. When Wallander tried to insist, she became annoyed and
shouted at him. But she stopped immediately and apologized. He sat down on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “How long does she have? When is Baiba going to die? If I had the least suspicion that my time was up now I wouldn’t have stayed. I wouldn’t even have come in the first place. When I feel that the end is imminent and unavoidable, I won’t prolong the torture. I have access to both pills and injections. I intend to die with a bottle of champagne by my bed. I’ll drink a toast to the fact that despite everything, I was able to experience the singular adventure of being born, living, and one day disappearing into the darkness once again.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

Wallander immediately wished he could bite his tongue. How could he put a question like that to someone who was dying? But she didn’t take offense. He realized with a mixture of despair and embarrassment that she had no doubt long ago grown used to his clumsiness.

“No,” said Baiba. “I’m not afraid. I have so little time. I can’t waste any of it on thoughts that would only make everything worse.”

She got out of bed and made a tour of the house. She paused at the bookcase, noticing a book on Latvia that she had given him.

“Have you ever opened it?” she asked with a smile.

“Lots of times,” said Wallander.

It was true.

Afterward, Wallander would remember the time spent in Löderup with Baiba as a room in which all the clocks seemed to have stopped, all movement ceased. She ate very little, spent most of the time in bed with a blanket over her, occasionally injecting herself, and wanted him to be near her. They lay side by side, talked now and then, were just as often silent when she was too tired to converse or had simply fallen asleep. Wallander also dozed off from time to time but woke up with a start after a few minutes, unused to having somebody so close to him.

She told him about the years that had passed, and the astonishing developments that had taken place in her homeland.

“We had no idea in the days you and I were together what was going to happen,” she said. “Do you remember the Soviet Black Berets who took potshots all over Riga for no obvious reason? I can admit now that in those days I didn’t believe the Soviet Union would ever loosen its grip on us. I imagined the oppression would only increase. The worst of it was that nobody ever knew who could be trusted. Did your neighbors have anything to gain by you being free, or did that frighten them? Which of them were reporting to the KGB, which was everywhere, like a giant ear that nobody could get away
from? Now I know I was wrong, and I’m grateful for that. But at the same time, nobody knows what the future holds for Latvia. Capitalism doesn’t solve the problems of socialism or the planned economy, nor does democracy solve all the economic crises. I think that right now we are living beyond our resources.”

“Isn’t there talk of Baltic tigers?” Wallander asked. “States that are as successful as countries in Asia?”

She shook her head with a bitter expression on her face.

“We’re living on borrowed money. Including Swedish money. I don’t claim to be a particularly knowledgeable or perceptive economist, but I’m quite sure that Swedish banks are lending large sums of money in my country with far too little security. And that can only end one way.”

“Badly?”

“Very badly. For the Swedish banks too.”

Wallander thought back to the years at the beginning of the 1990s, when they had had their affair. He recalled how scared everybody was. So much had happened in those days that he still didn’t understand. Superficially, a major political development had drastically altered Europe, and hence the balance of power between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union. Until he traveled to Riga to try to solve the case of the dead men in a rubber dinghy that drifted ashore near Ystad, it had never occurred to him that three of Sweden’s nearest neighbors were occupied by a foreign power. How could it be that so many of his generation, born in the late 1940s, had never truly comprehended that the Cold War actually was a war, with occupied and oppressed nations as a result? During the 1960s it often seemed that distant Vietnam lay closer to the Swedish border than did the Baltic countries.

“It was difficult to understand for us as well,” said Baiba in the middle of the night, when the first light of dawn was beginning to change the color of the sky. “Behind every Latvian was a Russian, we used to say. But behind every Russian there was somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Even in the Baltic countries, the way the Russians thought was dictated by what the U.S.A. was doing.”

“So behind every Russian was an American, is that right?”

“You could put it like that. But nobody will really know until Russian historians tell us the full truth of everything that happened in those days.”

Somewhere during this rambling conversation, their unexpected meeting came to an end. Wallander fell asleep. The last time he’d checked his watch it
said five o’clock. When he woke up over an hour later, Baiba had left. He ran outside, but her car was no longer there. Under a stone on the garden table was a photograph. The picture had been taken in 1991, in May, at the Freedom Monument in Riga. Wallander remembered the occasion. Somebody who happened to be passing had taken it for them. They were both smiling, huddled up close, Baiba with her head resting on his shoulder. Next to the photograph was a scrap of paper that seemed to have been torn out of a diary. There was nothing written on it, just a drawing of a heart.

Wallander thought he should drive to Ystad right away, to the quay where ferries to Poland came and went. He was already in the car and had started the engine when he realized that this was the last thing she would want him to do. He went back into the house and lay down on the bed, where he could still smell her body.

He was tired out, and fell asleep. When he woke up a few hours later, he recalled what she had said. Behind every Russian there was somebody else. She had given him something to think about that might be relevant to Håkan and Louise von Enke.
Behind every Russian there was somebody else
.

Who, he wondered, was standing behind them? And which of them was standing behind the other? He didn’t know the answer, but could see that it was important.

He went out into the garden, got the ladder the chimney sweep always used, and climbed up onto the roof with a pair of binoculars in his hand. He could see the white ferry heading for Poland. A large part of the most important and happiest time in his life was on board and would never return. He felt a combination of sorrow and pain that he had difficulty coping with.

He was still on the roof when the garbage truck arrived. But the man who collected the bags of trash didn’t notice Wallander, perched up there like a crow.

Wallander watched the garbage truck drive away. The Poland ferry had vanished in a bank of fog drifting in toward the Scanian coast. His thoughts scared him. Baiba was close to the brink of the abyss at the edge of the unknown. She had said she had a few months, no more.

He suddenly seemed to see himself as he really was. A man filled with
self-pity, a thoroughly pathetic figure. He sat there on his roof, and the only truly important thing as far as he was concerned was that Baiba was going to die, not him.

In the end he climbed down and took Jussi for a walk, which was more of an escape. He was who he was, he finally concluded. A man, good at his job, even astute. All his life he had tried to be part of the forces of good in this world, and if he had failed, well, he wasn’t the only one. What else could a person do but try his best?

The sky had clouded over. Expecting it to start raining at any moment, he walked with Jussi through fields where the grass had recently been cut, or was lying fallow, or was waiting for the combine. He tried to think a new thought after every fifty strides but couldn’t manage it. It was a game he used to play with Linda when she was a child. Now he tried to think thoughts about his life, about Baiba’s courage in the face of the inevitable, and about the courage he was sure he lacked himself. He walked slowly along the edge of fields, allowing Jussi to roam freely.

Wallander had worked up a sweat, and he sat down by the side of a small pond surrounded by rusty remains of old agricultural machines. Jussi sniffed at the water, drank, then came to lie down at Wallander’s side. The clouds had begun to disperse; it wasn’t going to rain after all. Wallander could hear emergency sirens in the distance. Fire engines this time, not an ambulance or some of his colleagues. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure up Baiba. The sirens were coming closer; they were behind him now, on the road leading to Simrishamn. He turned around. The binoculars he’d had with him on the roof were still hanging around his neck. The sirens were very loud and clear now. He stood up. Could one of his neighbors’ houses be on fire? He hoped it wasn’t the house occupied by the Hanssons, an old couple: Elin was practically immobile, and her husband, Rune, could barely walk with the aid of a walking stick. The sirens were getting closer and closer. He raised the binoculars and saw to his horror two fire engines coming to a halt outside his own house. He started running, with Jussi ahead of him on the path. He occasionally stopped to view his house through the binoculars. Every time, he expected to see flames shooting through the roof, where he had been sitting not long ago, or smoke belching from shattered windows. But there was none of that. Only the fire engines, whose sirens were now silent, and firemen swarming around.