Karin Alvtegen - Shadow

With relief Kristoffer said that would be fine, and they agreed on a time. He asked if he should bring anything, and Torgny suggested picking up a pizza for him. There was a pizzeria right around the corner.

Everything felt suddenly lighter. It was the passive uncertainty that was so taxing; now he was on his way again.

Not until he pulled on his shoes did it occur to him that he hadn’t mentioned his name.

He took the path across the cemetery and continued towards the bus stop. There were no seats on the bus but he was happy to stand. It made his restlessness less obvious. A mother with a child in a pushchair stood in the crush by the central doors. The boy was shrieking and kept trying to climb out of his prison, to his mother’s increasing exasperation. She looked tired and had dark circles under her eyes; the boy was bright red in the face and the hair sticking out from under his cap had stuck to his sweaty forehead. Finally the mother’s patience ran out; grabbing the boy roughly by the arm, she shoved him back down in the pushchair. A man with a briefcase gave the woman a disapproving look. The boy stopped screaming at once and rubbed his arm where his mother’s hand had grabbed it.

Why not like fish roe? thought Kristoffer. Or tadpoles? Why did human offspring have to be dependent on and at the mercy of their progenitors, marked for life by their mistakes?

He got off the bus and looked for the pizzeria. He ordered two pizzas and sat down to wait. Although it was only five o’clock, several of the tables were occupied. Two people at one table, two at another, a party of four – scattered throughout the room, all the customers sat with invisible barriers between the tables. In the endless space-time of eternity they all happened to be gathered right here, right now. For one single moment. Kristoffer imagined a scenario. What if a madman came in the door and took them all hostage? In an instant everything would change – the barriers would be torn down and together they would form a unit. United by a common threat they would quickly organise themselves into a group and do everything possible to work together. But as long as no threat was in sight, they sat there and did their best not to notice one another.

‘Your pizzas are ready.’

Kristoffer stood up and paid for them.

He cast one last look at the diners before he walked out the door.

Clearly the threat of climate change was not scary enough.

Torgny Wennberg had given him the code to the front door, and he balanced the pizza cartons on one knee as he keyed in the numbers. The lock buzzed and he pushed open the door. A list of residents informed him that Torgny lived on the third floor, and since it was difficult to pull open the grille of the lift with his hands full of pizza, he decided to take the stairs. He pressed the doorbell and the next moment the little point of light in the middle of the peephole turned black, and Kristoffer knew that Torgny was looking at him. He smiled, and the next moment the door was opened. Kristoffer smiled a little more.

‘Hello, here I am with the pizza.’

Torgny Wennberg stood quite still and stared at him. He didn’t move a muscle to indicate that he was going to let him in, and his expression made Kristoffer unsure.

‘I’m the one who rang you before, a few hours ago. I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

He got no reply. Instead Wennberg clapped a hand to his mouth. Kristoffer was confused. Maybe the man was sick or something. The deep furrows in his unshaven face testified to a hard life. His hair was grey and bushy, and the hand he’d put to his mouth shook in a disturbing way. A stale smell of old cigarettes infiltrated the pizza aroma, and Kristoffer began to regret that he’d come. Torgny looked like somebody Kristoffer might turn into if he weren’t made of sterner stuff. As always, when faced with someone else’s obvious weakness, he felt a slight contempt.

Torgny lowered his hand.

‘Is it really you, Kristoffer?’

In the moment that followed, all his senses took on a sharpness he had never felt before. Everything froze.

‘How do you know my name?’

And when Torgny replied, the door he had always searched for opened up wide. He dropped the pizzas and wanted nothing more than to run away from there.

‘Because you look just like your mother.’

F earing tranquillity I upheld chaos, unaware of the deep domicile of joy in my sheltered breast.

Axel read the words he had written. He didn’t know where they had come from, he just wrote them all of a sudden, and for a short while he thought he was back. Such a long time had passed since the spirit of creativity had granted him a rewarding day of work. To fix the words to the paper had seemed like hard physical labour, since none of them voluntarily wanted to find their place. The story he was trying to tell faltered through thirty pages; stacked on the desk they constituted an insult if the time it had taken to write them were taken into account. None of his characters wanted to settle down in the life he was trying to give them. The delivery date he had rashly promised the publishers was fast approaching, and Gerda had informed him yesterday that someone from the bank had rung looking for him. He still hadn’t rung back, well aware of what they would tell him. With the money from the Society for the Promotion of Literature prize, the advance from the publishers, and the Swedish Church writers’ grants, he had kept the household running since the summer, but now the money was starting to run out. He had asked for a reprieve on his mortgage interest and the bank had granted it – with compound interest on the interest he was already unable to pay, naturally. Conscious of his profession and its irregular income, the bank had regarded the house as sufficient security, but now the deadline had passed and he knew the banker would want to discuss a solution to the problem.

With hindsight it was plain to see that he and Alice had had delusions of grandeur when they bought this desirable home. Everything it seemed to represent had blinded them, since it fitted so perfectly into their vision of the future. Back then in the mid-fifties Alice had still been writing, and with the relatively steady income from two writers the monthly mortgage had seemed reasonable. But reality had brought a different future than the grandiose one they had envisioned for themselves. He was now expected to support the whole household while she moped about like a martyr, drowning her sorrows in other people’s books, vintage wine and TV. Soon he would need to have a talk with her about money. Explain that they would have to let Gerda go and possibly sell the house and buy something smaller.

That conversation was not something he was looking forward to.

He heard the telephone ring. A single ring before it stopped. He glanced at the clock. It could very well be the bank looking for him again. Only a minute passed before there was another ring. He shoved back his chair irritably and got up.

Gerda was still on the phone when he entered the kitchen. She was standing with her back to him and didn’t hear him come in, which gave him a chance to listen in.

‘I can leave him a message, but unfortunately he can’t be disturbed right now because he’s working… No, I’m sorry, that’s not possible.’

There was silence for a few seconds before Gerda with a repeated ‘no’ tried to get a word in edgewise. If it was the bank she was talking with, their persistence was highly alarming.

‘She is unfortunately not available at the moment, either. I’ll have to take down your number and ask him to call you back… Yes, in that case you may ring again. Yes. No, that’s not possible. I don’t know, but I’ll tell him that you asked. Goodbye.’