Åke Edwardson - Frozen Tracks

“Well, a dispute, to use your word.” She looked at Halders. “Not quite antiaircraft fire, but there were a few occasions-several occasions-when he yelled into the telephone, and sometimes there was shouting, sort of, coming from his room.”

“What kind of shouting?”

“Well, just shouting. You couldn’t hear what they were shouting. It was just a few occasions.”

“Who is ‘they’?” asked Djanali.

“Gustav, and the person in there with him.”

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it a he or a she?”

“A he. A guy.”

“Was there more than one?”

“Not as far as I could see.”

“You mean you saw him?”

“I don’t know for sure if it was the one who was shouting. But a guy did come out of his room shortly after I’d heard them shouting. I was on my way to the kitchen and he came out of the room and headed for the stairs.” She nodded in the direction of the landing. “From the corridor.”

“Did you see him on several occasions?”

“No. Just once.”

“Who lives in Gustav’s old room now?” asked Djanali.

“A girl,” she said. “I’ve hardly met her either. She’s only just moved in.”

“Would you recognize the guy who came out of Gustav’s room?” asked Halders.

“I really don’t know,” she said, looking at Aneta Djanali. “It’s not so easy. It was just the color of his skin. Plus there are lots of them living here.”

“Now you’ve lost me,” said Aneta Djanali.

“Just because people have the same colored skin, that doesn’t mean that they look alike,” said the girl, and started gesticulating. “This has always bothered me. The fact that people’s appearance gets tied up with the color of their skin.” She seemed to smile, briefly. “And it’s not just us, in the so-called Western world. There are people in China who can’t tell one white person from another.” She nodded at Aneta Djanali. “I guess you’re familiar with this. Or have thought about it, at least.”

“So this guy who came out of Gustav Smedsberg’s room-you’re saying that he wasn’t white?” asked Djanali.

“No, he looked like you. He was black. Didn’t I say that?”

He saw a flash of sunlight as he emerged from the apartment building where he lived, a reflection. It was an ugly building, but the flash of sun was beautiful.

Other people said that the sun comes from the sky, but he knew better. The sun comes from somewhere else, where it’s warm and quiet and everybody is nice to one another. A place where there’s nobody who… who does things people shouldn’t do. Where children dance, and grown-ups dance alongside them, and play and laugh.

He suddenly felt sweat on his brow, but it wasn’t the sun-it wasn’t warm enough.

Since he’d been… forced, yes, actually forced to stay away from work, things had gotten worse.

Pacing around and around the apartment.

The films? No, not now. Yes. No. Yes, yes.

Things had gotten worse.

He went to the chest of drawers and took out the things that had belonged to the children and held them in his hand, one after another. That amusing little silver thing that was a bird. He spent ages wondering what kind of bird it was. A canary, perhaps? It certainly wasn’t a Rotty, ha ha.

The green ball was also fun, soft and terrific for bouncing. It didn’t look like it would be a good bouncer, and felt very soft when you picked it up-but boy, could it bounce!

Now he was holding the car. The little blue-and-black car he’d gotten from the boy he’d chatted with that first time. It was the same car. No, it was the same make. He wasn’t exactly an expert, but surely it was the same make as his own car? Yes. Kalle, that was the boy’s name, and it had been such fun, sitting in the car and talking to Kalle. What’s that you’ve got? Can I take a look? Hmm. Lovely, isn’t it? I’ve got a car too. It looks just like this one. But a little bit bigger. No, not just a little bit. A lot bigger! Much, much bigger! It’s the one we’re sitting in now. We can go for a little drive in this car, and you can drive your car at the same time, Kalle.

But that isn’t what had happened. Not that time.

He drove Kalle’s car over the floor, through the living room and then over the threshold into the kitchen, brrrmmm,

Brrrmmm; it echoed all round the room when he imitated the sound of the engine, Brrrrmmmmm!

And now he was opening the door of the big car. The sweat was still there on his brow. Worse than ever.

He drove. He knew where he was going. His face hurt because he was clenching his teeth so hard. No, no, no! He only wanted it to be fun. Nothing else, nothing else, but as he drove he knew that it would be different this time, and so it didn’t matter that when he tried to turn left he actually turned right at the first intersection, and then at the second one.

He could have driven with his eyes closed. The roads followed the streetcar tracks. He followed the streetcar tracks. He could hear the streetcars even before he saw them. The rails glinted in the sun, which was still shining. He kept as close to them as possible, because when he did that he didn’t feel so frightened.

THE LIGHT OVER THE FIELDS WAS AS SOFT AS WATER. IT SEEMED as if everything was sinking down toward the ground. Trees. Rocks. Fields glowing black, the soil plowed into furrows, like a sea that had stiffened and would not thaw and come to life until the spring.

What am I doing? What have I done? What have I done?

He could see a tractor in the distance. He couldn’t hear anything, but saw that it was moving. It had been working out there in the fields for so long that its paint had rubbed off and disappeared, and so everything out there was the same color, the machine and the countryside, the same rubbed-off November glow that always seemed to be gliding through the day toward dusk.

He felt calmer now, after driving for an hour, but he knew that was only temporary, just as everything all around him was temporary. No. Everything around him was not temporary. It’s eternal, he thought. It’s bigger than anything else.

I wish I loved it, but I hate it.

He turned in through the gates that seemed to have acquired a new layer of rust on top of the old one. The farm road was almost the same as the fields out there, churned up by the tractor wheels that were still rotating out on the prairie.

He was standing in the farmyard now.

I once dreamed about the prairie. I could have had a horse and ridden through that glade and never come back.

I could have flown in the sky. Lots of people could have seen me.

I’ll do that one day.

The wind was whipping pieces of straw and twigs into a circle in the middle of the yard.

There was a smell of dung, as always, and straw and seeds and soil and rotten leaves and rotten apples and rotting wood. The smell of animals lingered on even though there were no animals left.

Not even Zack. He walked over to the dog pen that seemed to be hovering above the ground, as if waiting for the wind to come and whisk it away over the fields and roads.

He missed Zack. Zack was a friend when he needed a friend, and then Zack had passed away and everything had been as it had always been.

He heard the tractor approaching down the road, and soon it would grunt its way in through the gate and stop more or less where he was standing now.

He turned around. The old man parked the tractor, turned off the engine, and clambered down in a way suggesting habit rather than agility. His body would keep on moving as per routine long after it had lost all its softness.

All its softness, he thought again. When you’re a child everything inside you is soft and everything outside you is hard, and you eventually become hard as well.