Let the Old Dreams Die (32 page)

‘I just wanted to tell you that the operation went extremely well. No complications, and I think I can promise that your wife will experience a considerable improvement in her quality of life once she gets through the rehabilitation stage.’

I put my arm around Stefan’s shoulders, but his mouth was hanging open and he didn’t seem to understand what he had been told.

‘It went…well?’

‘As I said, it went extremely well. The blood vessels we took from your wife’s leg to replace those that were damaged were of a surprisingly high quality for a woman of her age. In all probability her heart will work much better in a couple of months than it did before.’ The doctor held up a warning finger. ‘But the smoking. The smoking…’

Stefan leapt to his feet and looked as if he might be on the point of giving the doctor a hug, but he came to his senses and merely grabbed his upper arms.

‘She’s not going to so much as look at a cigarette packet from now on, and neither am I! Thank you, doctor! Thank you! Thank you!’

The doctor gave a brief nod and said, ‘She’s in the recovery room at the moment, but you can see her in a couple of hours. We’ll be keeping her in for a few days.’

‘You can keep her for a month as long as she gets better.’

‘She’s going to be fine.’

The doctor’s predictions were correct. Two days after the operation Karin was allowed to go home, and after only three weeks she was able to go for walks in a way that had been impossible for her for years. It wasn’t so much the weakness of her heart as the pain from
the scars on her legs that prevented her from going even further, but after another month those too had healed.

Walking became a new passion for both of them. Karin started walking with Nordic poles, Stefan beside her. Sometimes he would read aloud from a poetry anthology as they walked. Both of them gave up smoking, apart from the odd evening on the veranda when they might smoke
one
cigarette each if for some reason the atmosphere was particularly festive.

This story is beginning to draw to its conclusion. I began by saying that I was going to tell you about a great love, and I don’t know whether you think I have fulfilled that promise. Perhaps you are disappointed? Perhaps you were expecting something more dramatic?

All I can say in response is that for one thing you haven’t heard the end of my story yet, and for another I feel that I have carried out my duty to bear witness, as I promised to do.

Because how do you picture a great love?

Perhaps it’s something along the lines of
Gone with the Wind
or
Titanic
that immediately springs to mind. But those aren’t really about love as such, they are about the context. Everything seems grander when it happens against the background of a civil war, a shipwreck or a natural disaster. But that’s like judging a painting by its frame. Like saying the
Mona Lisa
is a masterpiece mainly because of the ornate carvings surrounding it.

Love is love. In those dramatic stories the main characters are willing to give up their life for the other person on a purely practical level, but that’s exactly what happens in an everyday love story that is also a great love. You give your lives to one another all the way, every day, unto death.

Perhaps it’s true that we recognise great love by the fact that the people involved could easily have been actors in some major
drama, if only the circumstances had been different. If Stefan had been a Montague from Ibsengatan and Karin a Capulet from Holbergsgatan, perhaps they might have woven their escape plans behind my ticket booth. To run away means life, to linger means certain death. I’m sorry, I’m losing the plot here. But I think you know what I mean.

Love is love. The way it is expressed changes.

I thought a lot about what Stefan had told me at the hospital, picturing the situation. The two of them in a bare, sterile interview room—at least that was how I imagined it. Gripping each other’s hands to re-create the scene between the two children in Karlstad, something that would last their whole lives beginning in that moment.

It was a pleasant thought, but Stefan had been interrupted in his narrative, and it would be some years before I was given the full picture.

Perhaps that was a contributing factor in Karin’s refusal to give up on her investigation into what happened to Oskar Eriksson—it was this case that had brought her and Stefan together. Perhaps it had a special place in her heart, which was now functioning perfectly.

When we celebrated Karin’s seventy-fifth birthday in April 2004, she told me that at the very beginning of the investigation the police had received a great deal of information, mainly from people claiming to have seen Oskar Eriksson in various places in Sweden and even abroad. His picture had been all over the press, and in a case like that it was normal for people to see the missing person in every conceivable place. But none of the leads had produced any results.

It was on a number of these loose threads that Karin was still working some twenty-two years later. She rang people in the places where Oskar had allegedly been seen, carefully read photocopies of
old newspapers. But nobody knew anything, and if they had known anything, they’d forgotten it.

Karin sighed and shook her head as we sat on the patio beneath the infra-red heaters, took a decent swig of her wine—good for the circulation—and said, ‘I think it might be time to give up. Start doing crosswords or something instead.’

‘You already do crosswords,’ said Stefan.

‘Do more crosswords, then.’

That evening I had the opportunity to look around Karin’s study properly. She had kitted out a spare room upstairs with bookshelves and a desk. Dozens of files were lined up on the shelves, and the desk was piled high with papers, maps and printouts. Karin waved her hand and said, ‘The nerve centre. All this to investigate
one
case, and do you know what the only practical result of the whole lot has been?’

‘No.’

‘The fact that Stefan and I met.’

Stefan walked over and weighed a bundle of papers in his hand; he shook his head gloomily and said, ‘A singles night for the more mature individual would have been simpler, there’s no denying that.’

‘True,’ said Karin. ‘But then neither of us would ever have gone to such a thing.’

‘No. You’re right. So it was all worth it, wasn’t it?’

They gave each other one of those looks that still had the ability to send a pang of sorrow through my heart, even after all these years. If I had been different, if life had been different. If anyone had ever looked at me that way.

Then the stoic in me took over. Socrates was able to stand on guard in the bitter cold for hours on end without uttering one word of complaint, and he emptied his cup of hemlock in one draught. He took his place within me, and the sorrow abated.

The following year Karin devoted no time to the investigation, apart from making one phone call to police headquarters every six months to check if there was anything new. There wasn’t.

The final phase in my story begins in the summer of 2007. I had noticed that Stefan was sitting in an odd position when we were out on the veranda, as if he couldn’t get comfortable. When we rowed out in the skiff to lay some nets, he pulled a face when he grabbed the oars, and allowed me to take over for once.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked as we headed out towards Ladholmen. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘My back hurts,’ he said. ‘And my stomach. It’s as if there’s something…I don’t know…inside. Don’t say anything to Karin.’

‘But she’s bound to notice.’

‘I know. But I want to tell her myself. I think it’s something… that’s not good news.’

Stefan and I had once talked about the age difference between him and Karin, about the fact that statistically she was likely to die several years before him, and about his feelings. As Stefan doesn’t exactly have the same controlled attitude to life as I do, and tends to get worked up about things or to sink into a trough of despair, his answer surprised me.

‘That’s just the way it is,’ he said. ‘She’s my life, she’s my story. If part of the story is that I end up alone for a few years at the end, then so be it. There’s no alternative. And when there’s no alternative, there’s no point in brooding on things. That’s just the way it is.’

I imagine I would have said something similar if I had been in Stefan’s shoes, and we ended the conversation with some jokey comment on how he and I could always sit around throwing bread to the pigeons until the grim reaper put a stop to our activities.

But that’s not how things turned out.

Stefan’s pains grew worse over the next few days, and Karin drove
him to the hospital in Norrtälje, which referred him to Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. After a series of tests it was established that Stefan was suffering from pancreatic cancer. I remember with perfect clarity the day Karin rang to tell me.

I stood there with the phone in my hand, looking out of my window at what used to be their apartment. The flowerbeds were magnificent in shades of green and pink. Some children were sitting on the climbing frame with their heads close together and everything was summer and life as Karin uttered the words: ‘Cancer. Of the pancreas.’

I knew. I’d read enough books and was generally well-informed enough to know. But I asked the question anyway: ‘What are they going to do?’

‘There’s nothing they can do. They can slow it down slightly with radiotherapy and so on. But there’s no cure.’

I couldn’t form the words. ‘How…how…?’

‘In the worst case scenario a few months. At best a year. No longer.’

There wasn’t much more to say. I put the phone down and looked over at what I still thought of as their balcony, their door. I remembered how I had noticed them because they held hands, the pop music they used to play, the faint sound of their voices on distant summer evenings. In search of lost time.

The tumour in Stefan’s pancreas had spread to his liver, and barely responded to the radiotherapy. When I visited them in October he had been given a morphine pump so that he could administer his own pain relief. I had thought that he would look terrible, but sitting there on the veranda with a blanket over his legs, he looked healthier and more at ease than he had done in August.

When I mentioned this to him he gave a wry smile and clicked the pump a couple of times. ‘It’s just because the pain has gone. I
actually feel OK. But it’s gnawing away inside me, I know that. It’s a matter of months now.’

‘It seems so bloody unnecessary. Looking at you today.’

‘Yes. We’ve both said the same. But there’s nothing that can be done. That’s just the way it is.’

Karin was sitting next to him, and he reached for her hand. They sat there holding hands and gazing out to sea. I had two years left to my retirement, and I couldn’t remember when I last cried. But I cried then.

Silently I wept, and when Stefan and Karin noticed they put their arms around me to console me, absurdly enough. That made me cry even more. For them. For myself. For everything.

Stefan’s liver could no longer cope with alcohol, but as we sat on the veranda that evening he made up for it by smoking more than ever. Karin drank wine and smoked, since it no longer mattered. We talked about what had happened when Karin had her heart attack, how she had felt ever since that she was living on borrowed time. She sighed and stroked Stefan’s arm. ‘I just never thought it would have to be paid back.’

‘Don’t think like that,’ said Stefan. ‘I could have been dead twenty-five years ago if what you believe is true.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

And that was when I was given the final piece of the information available on Oskar Eriksson. Stefan went back to what he had told me at the hospital, about the two children holding hands, which in turn had become the beginning of Stefan and Karin’s story.

‘But that wasn’t quite all. The girl was about to kill me.’ He stole a glance at his wife. ‘According to Karin.’

‘It’s just a theory,’ she said. ‘Which very few people would subscribe to.’

‘Anyway,’ said Stefan. ‘The children were sitting on the trunk rubbing their hands against each other’s. I was on my way over to
say something, since the girl was so inadequately dressed, and then… she turned to face me.’

Stefan grimaced with pain and clicked the morphine pump a couple of times; he took a deep breath and slowly let it out again, closing his eyes. A couple of minutes passed without anyone saying anything; the only sound was the lapping of the waves on the shore and the faint ticking of the infra-red heater. I had started to think he wasn’t going to say any more when Stefan exhaled once again and went on:

‘So. I know this sounds strange. She was a child of perhaps twelve, thirteen, but when our eyes met I felt two things, as clear as a revelation: firstly that she intended to kill me, and secondly that she was capable of doing so. Because I had disturbed them. When she jumped off the trunk and I saw that she had a knife in her hand, the feeling didn’t exactly diminish. We were standing a couple of metres apart. I looked at her and the boy, saw what they were up to. The girl looked as if she was on the point of hurling herself at me when the guard shouted that my train had arrived. I think that saved me. I backed away, and she stayed where she was with the knife in her hand.’

Stefan lit a cigarette and sighed with pleasure as he inhaled deeply. He looked at the cigarette and shook his head. ‘Being able to smoke again. It’s almost worth it.’

Karin thumped him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t say that, silly.’

‘So what were they up to?’ I asked. ‘The children?’

Stefan ran his index finger down his palm.

‘She’d cut her hand. So that it bled. He’d done the same. They were sitting there mixing their blood. That was why they were holding hands like that. And that’s why Karin has her theory. Which isn’t exactly popular with the police.’

‘We know so little, we human beings,’ said Karin. ‘We know almost nothing.’

We gazed out over the sea and considered this while Stefan sucked on his cigarette. When he had stubbed it out he said, ‘Do you know what the worst thing is? It’s not the fact that I’m going to die. It’s all the dreams I had. Which have to die. Which will never be fulfilled. On the other hand…’ Stefan looked at Karin’s hand, which was resting on the table. ‘On the other hand there are so many that have been fulfilled. So perhaps it doesn’t really matter.’