Blackwater (22 page)

It’s a warm little hotel. The jockeys from the trotting races usually stay there. There are photographs of them and their harnesses on the walls. She’s left up the Christmas decorations, too.

Barbro, my dear. You should have seen them. Red and green paper garlands. Turquoise, orange, red, silver and gold glass balls. Gnomes. Nasty malformed little monsters in red stocking caps all flopping in the same direction. German.

I liked them. They looked like the gnomes we always had on the table at Christmas when I was a child. And those were sure to have been German. The sweets were German too. Everything was fairly Germanic in those days.

Her name is Frances. I didn’t think much about her to start with. Handsome woman, anyhow. Dark, with an American Indian profile. She had been married to a gambler. Sometimes he had owned horses, sometimes only shares in them. He lost and that was the end for them. I’ve heard she even had to go out cleaning at the hospital. The house went, of course. He had cars most of the time and he was occasionally flush.

He died while he was on the way up. She knew it was temporary and he would soon have lost again. But then he went and had that coronary. A jockey once told me that when he was in hospital, he stammered out slurred instructions to her on how to lay the bets for him. She nodded and wrote them all down. The jockey saw her doing it. But she never carried them out, for when he died, she still had the money. She bought the hotel – it was called the Three Lilies then. It was dreadfully shabby, but she restored it.

That was where I got a room. Sheer chance. Do you believe in chance? I suppose you do. Nowadays it’s commonplace to believe in chance.

I go to bed in this nice warm little hotel. I am tired but not drunk or anything.

Perhaps it can be said like this. One thing at a time.

When I’m about to fall asleep, I see I’ve forgotten to pull down the blind. The street light is shining straight on to my face, but I can’t be bothered to get up again. I let it be. I can hear cars going past all the time. There’s a set of traffic lights outside. Sometimes a bus engine can be heard ticking over loudly.

So no peace. Nothing like that. No special atmosphere or premonition. Nothing.

I’m just lying there. I’m tired and can feel my blood pressure on a down. You know about my low blood pressure. But that doesn’t explain anything. I’ve always had it. Even collapsed in the bathroom once. Remember, when I broke my glasses?

Hang on.

I’m lying there with my eyes closed, I think. Then it comes. Like a light from inside. Like, like . . . anyhow, like a feeling of light. Not in my eyes. In my body. As if it’s expanding with light. It’s all round me. There’s nothing else but light. I am in the middle. I know everything. Not in words. Blissful.

Well, that’s a word.

I don’t know what words to use. Perhaps that’s why I’ve said nothing. I’m lying in the middle of everything that exists and there is nothing to explain and nothing to achieve. Only this prolonged feeling of bliss. It lasted quite a long time. An orgasm, but more powerful. Like continous waves, one after another in the light within me and around me.

It retreats. I begin to see the room again, the window and the street light. I fall asleep like a child and sleep as soundly as you normally do only when you’re small. Not until the next morning do I begin to marvel at it.

It’s hard for me to leave that warm little overfurnished hotel. The explanation seems to be there and I wonder whether to ask Frances. I would like to ask rather cautiously if anyone else had seen anything in that room, a light or something.

But I hadn’t really seen anything. Not with my eyes. So it’s pointless asking her. During the following weeks I read up about experiences of that kind, but that leads nowhere. I ought to have been hungry and exhausted, according to all the medical books. But I wasn’t. I had eaten a substantial dinner and I was tired, nothing more. In the other kind of books, which I had trouble getting hold of at first, because it’s an alien field to me, there’s an abundance of words. Words like ‘bliss’, for instance. There are too many. But I’ll stick to bliss.

I get tired of reading. Haven’t time, either. It’s so self-referential. Like the jargon of politics or economics. Or medicine for that matter. It’s the first time I notice the way writing is built up round feelings. Words are used as a kind of climbing frame to reach an emotional climax. At a pinch, writers fabricate feelings and force them to a climax. Even in expositions of council finances. I get sick of it.

I circle round the hotel, both in my mind and quite literally when I’m in Östersund. Some time in March, I stay the night there again and ask to have the same room. She sees nothing strange about that. Most of her customers are regulars and she thinks I want to be one of them. I sit watching television in the hall in the evening. You can get coffee out of a thermos jug and she has put out ginger biscuits and crisp rolls.

I like it there. You would probably say it’s tasteless because for you aesthetics are a matter of coordination. Those pale blue, mid-blue and grey shades of our living room. The light-coloured wood of the furniture. Bentwood. Metal rods. I think they’re beautiful, too. The collection of glass in the window. The great tapestry you gave me for my fortieth birthday, showing a mountainside.

Frances never seems to have discovered any central perspective. She sees one thing at a time. Things lie about like islands. And when you see them, they are fun or great or whatever. Never actually indifferent. Not to her, anyway. She’s been given lots of horses as presents, in china and wood, even stuffed ones with woolly manes. She puts bright-orange winter cherry into a pottery vase flaring in every possible colour and says that her grandmother always had it in that vase and on that very shelf below the mirror. Everything here means something to her.

Sometimes there’s a rich, sweet smell in the stairwell and the hall. That’s means she’s making a sponge cake for the jockeys sitting gloomily around. If things have gone well, they go out to celebrate. They’re not allowed to drink in the hall.

I stay overnight there occasionally and I still think a lot about what happened. But I no longer think I’ll ever understand what it was. It’s enough for me to be allowed to go there occasionally, allowed to sleep in that room. I never pull down the blind. Perhaps I’m waiting, after all, but nothing further happens.

Of course, I’ve become a kind of house doctor. Frances is healthy, sleeps well and needs only a little antihistamine in the spring when everything is in flower. But the jockeys have all kinds of needs. They’re interested in amphetamines, but that’s out of the question. I may give them the occasional slimming pill, but only when testing out a drug. If I started prescribing it, heaven knows where I would end up. Sleeping draughts, of course, and a good deal of Librium and Valium. But in justifiable amounts. I’m certainly not the bloody pill doctor they say I am.

Then there was Christmas Day three years ago. We both had our mothers staying. Things were slightly tense, but still cordial. You took coffee and candles round on a tray and sang, ‘Good morning, good morning, both master and mistress,’ and then you all went off to church. The early service had been just too early. I set about fixing the mulled wine, spiking it a bit, planning to give the ladies some before lunch to keep things cordial a little longer. Then Frances phoned.

A guest had died. He was in bed in his room and he was dead, she said. She thought he had taken his own life. There were several empty medicine bottles on the bedside table, one of them prescribed by me.

I told her to keep calm and wait, and I would phone the police and the hospital for her. But she said no, she wanted me to come. I explained I couldn’t do that. Maybe he could be saved. We must get hold of an ambulance quickly.

Not until I was in the car and heading for Östersund did it occur to me that Frances and I had become close. I had confidence in her. I was quite sure he was beyond saving. She’s practical. I shouldn’t have done this. But I had confidence in her judgement.

He had gone to his room on the 23rd and hung up the
please do not disturb
notice. When she found it still there on Christmas morning, she thought he had forgotten it, so she knocked on the door. She was going to take him early-morning coffee. There were six guests at the hotel, of whom this one and two others were regulars. It was Frances’s turn to keep the hotel open over Christmas. One hotel always stays open and the others refer guests to it.

The room was cold and smelt bad. He really was dead, and he had been dead a long time. A thin body. Fine pyjamas. Everything appeared to have been carefully prepared. He had wished to do it tidily, but he had assembled drugs that guaranteed no pleasant sleep. He had vomited and in the end had not been capable of leaning out of bed to rid himself of his vomit. His skin was whitish grey. The bedclothes and mattress were soaked with urine.

It was a long time since I had seen a corpse that had been around for a while. I remembered my first bodies at the School of Anatomy in Uppsala and was furious Frances had had to see this, as if she had been abused. Not by him, not by this pale, troubled little gambler – professional or semi – who had crept in here in his brand-new pyjamas on the evening before Christmas Eve. He knew nothing about death.

On the table by the bed were jars that had contained various antidepressants. I felt uneasy when I saw the label with my prescription on one of them, but I was also glad it was only one.

Frances had a request. She had already had a plan when she phoned me. Racing people are superstitious, she said, worse than anyone else. I’ll never get my regulars back after this. That’ll be the end. The trainers, the owners, the big gamblers and the nervous little semiprofessionals. The jockeys – they’re the worst. None of them will come and stay here again. He was nice but he didn’t know what he was doing when he did this here. I suppose people think mostly about themselves at such a time.

She simply wanted to get her other guests out of the way to some other hotel before calling the police and ambulance. Then there would be some chance that it wouldn’t get out that it happened at the Sulky. She had also worked out how to do it.

We said she had called me in because she was in pain. I diagnosed a kidney-stone attack and phoned a hotel owner she knew. Fortunately, he wasn’t away, though I think she knew that. Frances was pale and extremely determined.

He agreed to take in the guests, but we couldn’t get them all to leave at the same time. We waited all of Christmas Day. I told you it was an attempted suicide and I had to stay until I knew which way it was going. I was terribly afraid you’d phone the hospital to ask for me. Frances stayed in her room and didn’t show herself.

By the time the last guest had gone, it was eight in the evening. Then I stood outside that room, ready to go in. I was to pretend I had to disturb him to tell him he would have to change hotels, then pretend to find him. It was sickening. And it was even colder in there now.

Frances had to look as if she were in pain when the police came. It was complicated and unpleasant. I had never been involved in anything like this before. I felt as if we had murdered him. He was so helplessly cold, actually stone cold when they came. He had apparently turned off the radiator before lying down. Had he been afraid it would be a long time before anyone knocked?

We didn’t know. In a way, he was probably being considerate. Well, then I was go back home, but I simply couldn’t. I don’t think Frances could have coped with being alone in the empty hotel.

That was probably roughly what I told you, that I hadn’t the energy. That I was affected by what happened. My patient had died. I would stay overnight.

I wonder whether you thought I was escaping from Christmas celebrations and the mothers.

We were overcome by hunger, quite literally. She got out marinated herring and carved some ham. We had a schnapps each. We ate thick slices of dark bread and I remember there was a crisp, sweet crust on it. We spread butter. Everything was good. The pilsner. The jellied veal. The liver sausage one of the guests had brought her.

She smelt strong. Not bad, but strong. That long, curly, dark-auburn hair hung down over her shoulders. She dyes it with henna. Where it’s grown out, you can see that it’s streaked with grey. The bush down there is dark brown, a real bush. She was still in her dressing gown. This is not the kind of thing I can tell you, nor am I doing so. I’m only trying out words.

For our exhilaration. Our hunger.

She hadn’t shaved her legs, probably because it was winter and she usually wore trousers or quite thick stockings. Her skin felt prickly to the touch, up to her knees. Then she was soft, white. Then prickly again. Curly. Smelt. It was like two hairy animal coats we had down there, chafing against each other, courteously as animals do.

She has a long pear-shaped arse. Long legs with clearly defined muscles and sinews. Her stomach arches. The furrow in her spine goes down to the dark slit between her buttocks. I wanted to be there and everywhere. Always, really.

But we go on living in that parsimonious way you have to live. Calculated. Usually with words. But for those hours there were no words.

In the end it ceased between you and me.

Presumably I have gone wrong. Or else right. I don’t know.

The women didn’t stay long. A day or so went by before he noticed they had gone. He was shut in with his aching foot. And ali he could see through the window overlooking the river was the racing water and flickering leaves. The women’s voices vanished, like the voices of birds. When?

The Silver Fox could sometimes just be seen on the other side of the river, and Johan occasionally heard the sound of a shotgun. Shooting grouse in the middle of the breeding season, was he? Like Pekka. Johan couldn’t care less.

Pekka always laughed off Gudrun’s lectures, and she didn’t really bother all that much about closed seasons, either. She just wanted them all to be respectable, to be decent people, as she put it. Johan had recently begun to understand what that meant to her. She was waging a continual battle. Hunting seasons. Changing shirts. No dogs in the kitchen. Theirs was to be like a house in Byvången. Or preferably Östersund.