Åke Edwardson - Sail of Stone

No one had heard him.

He had seen the light from the city above, only a few lights.

He had thought of her then, briefly.

He had seen the telephone booth that shone in the fog. It never rang.

He would ask her.

She would do it.

She had done as he’d asked.

Now he was no longer certain.

She had looked at him last time with an expression he didn’t recognize.

He hadn’t asked.

He left the harbor behind him and walked through Seatown. The houses clung to one another, squatting under the viaducts. He walked toward his house through the streets that didn’t have names. This is where the streets have no names, he thought. He often thought in English, almost always.

Sometimes there might be a fragment of the old language, but it was only when he was very upset. There were only two other places where the streets had no names, and those were heaven and hell.

He had been to both places. Now he was traveling between them.

The houses had numbers, apparently without any order. Number seven stood beside number twenty-five, six beside thirty-eight. He lived in the black house, at the southern gables. It was number fourteen. That meant that the house had been the fourteenth one built in Seatown. That was the system here. His was the only black house.

Fredrik Halders lay on the sofa with his feet on its arm. An odd lamp hung from the ceiling above the sofa. Or maybe it was his perspective.

“Have I seen that lamp before?” he asked, pointing up.

“That’s a question you probably have to ask yourself,” said Aneta Djanali from the floor, where she was sitting and leaning over some photographs.

Halders giggled; at least that’s how it sounded to Aneta’s ears.

He tried to turn his head from his supine position, but that was a mistake. His neck would never be the same again. He had taken a blow once when he was being a bigger idiot than usual, and it could have been his last mistake. He would never regain his original bull neck. That was just as well. Everyone knew what happened with bull necks in the end.

“Is it from Africa?” he asked.

“What do you think?” she asked, without looking up.

He studied the underside of the lamp again. It had a pointed base and something else above that was green.

“It’s from Africa,” he said.

“Good, Fredrik.”

He applauded himself. That was called Chinese clapping.

“Can you guess from which country?” He heard Aneta’s voice from the floor. “And to make it harder I want to know what the country was called before what it’s called now.”

“ That is a tricky question,” he said.

“I realize that.”

She was aware of the level of difficulty. They had talked about her homeland only three times per hour every day since they started working together and since they started to see each other during their free time. Speaking of talking. It was Fredrik who kept on talking about her exotic origins and her wonderful homeland, which he pretended not to be able to find on any map of the world, but which he, under all the talking, kept close tabs on, just as he actually kept close tabs on most things, under his tough exterior.

“This country’s former name starts with the letter u, ” she said.

“Uuuuuh…,” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good start,” she said.

“Ukraine,” he said.

“That’s not in Africa,” she said.

“Well, shit.”

“The second letter is p, ” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Silesia!” he shouted at the ceiling.

“Where’s that?”

“In Africa,” he said.

“Not in my Africa, anyway,” she said.

“Isn’t that a film?” he said. “ My Africa? ”

“To get you on the right track, I can tell you that this country’s name is made up of two words,” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Soppero!”

“One of them is right,” she said.

“Lower Soppero!”

“But it started with u, didn’t it?”

“Shit, right.”

“Now I’m done helping you,” she said.

“If we talk about something else maybe I’ll think of it,” said Halders. He propped himself up on his elbow. He could feel it in his neck. “What are those pictures?”

“From last summer,” she said.

“Am I in them?” he asked.

She held up a photo that she’d developed and copied herself. She and Fredrik were standing behind Fredrik’s children, Hannes and Magda. She could see the cord of the shutter cable coming from Hannes’s hand. He looked like he was concentrating, but happy. Everyone looked happy in that photograph.

They looked like a family.

“Where did we take that?” Halders asked from the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“Don’t start that again,” he said.

“Do you see the waves behind us?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah, but which sea is it?”

“The North Sea, of course.”

“The Old North Sea, it roars and rooolls,” said Halders.

“Not that day,” she said. “There wasn’t a single ripple.”

“Do you think an African would dare to jump in the North Sea no matter the season?”

“I will refrain from answering,” she said.

“Have you heard about the African who came to Sweden as an exchange student for a year and went home afterward, and his friends asked him how the weather was up there, and he said that the green winter was okay but the white one was horrible?”

“No, I haven’t heard that one,” said Aneta, “please tell me.”

“Uuuu…,” said Halders.

“I hear you’re still working on the name of that country.”

She looked at the photograph in her hand again. That day had been perfect. Such a perfect day. Fredrik had played Lou Reed in the evening. Lou Reed sounded like Fredrik looked.

The perfect family.

She thought suddenly of Anette Lindsten, safe in a secret location, maybe her childhood home or some other secret place.

Somewhere there must be a wedding picture. The perfect day. A light across their faces. Anette and Hans, their origins in nature, linden, stone, rapids, leaves…

Do you take this woman… to love her in sickness and health…

To beat her in sickness and health.

Nature to nature, dust to dust.

“Did you ever want to hit Margareta?” she asked.

Halders’s jaw dropped, it dropped.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Don’t be so shocked. You know what I was doing yesterday. I’m just trying to imagine how it can happen. How things like that can happen.”

“Jesus, Aneta, this is like a parody of the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ It’s a question you can’t answer yes or no to.”

“That’s not the question I was asking.”

He didn’t say anything. She looked at him. He was a violent man; she had always seen him as an intense man, but in a literal sense. I take down the bad guys literally, as Halders put it. He almost always did. He was a desperate man, and he wasn’t alone in that. He could control his rage. He walked through life angry, but he could control it. Many others could not.

“There was one time during the divorce,” he said slowly. “Or before. One time, or a few. I would get so angry that I wanted to… wanted to…” He looked straight at Aneta. “Wanted to hit something, but there was never never ever the slightest risk that it would be her. Never.”

“What was it, then? Or who?”

“Dammit, Aneta, you know me. Not a person… well, some thief once, but you get what I mean. No one close to me. At home.” He started to rub his neck, suddenly, a nervous gesture. “I would bang my fist into a cupboard door. It happened. I kicked a leg off a kitchen chair once.”