Åke Edwardson - Frozen Tracks

The old man limped up to him.

“Been a long time,” he said.

He didn’t reply.

“I didn’t recognize the car,” said the old man.

“It’s new.”

“It don’t look new,” said the old man, staring at the hood.

“I mean it’s one you haven’t seen before.”

The old man looked at him. There were specks of dirt on the old man’s face. He’d always looked like that. It had nothing to do with age, didn’t mean that he could no longer take care of his personal hygiene or anything like that.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” the old man asked. “It’s the middle of the day, a weekday.” He looked up at the sky as if to get confirmation of the time. Then he looked back at his visitor and snorted: “But you couldn’t have driven your streetcar here.” He snorted again. “That’d been something to look at.”

“It’s my day off,” he said.

“A long way to drive.”

“Not all that far.”

“You might as well live at the other side of the globe,” said the old man. “What could it be?” He looked up again at the Big Calendar in the Sky. “Is it four years since you were last here? Five?”

“I don’t know.”

“Typical.”

He heard the beating of wings overhead. He looked up and saw a few crows flying from the cowshed to the farmhouse.

“Now that you’re here you’d better have a cup of coffee,” said the old man.

They went in. He recognized the smell in the hall, and suddenly he was back here again, but at a different time.

He was a little boy again.

Everything in the house looked just the same as before. There was the chair he used to sit on at that other time. She had sat opposite him, big, red.

She had been nice, at first she had, that was when he could still feel that his boyish body had softness in it, when it still wasn’t too late.

Was that the way it was? Did he remember correctly?

It belonged to that other time. Then those misters and ladies had decided that he shouldn’t live with his mom. He’d gotten a foster father, and the old man was fussing at the stove now and the water was bubbling away after a while, and the old man produced a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard behind him.

“Yes, nothing’s changed, as you can see,” he said, and served up a little basket full of buns, still in their plastic wrapping.

“Yes.”

“Not as neat and tidy as it used to be, but apart from that, nothing’s changed,” said the old man.

He nodded. Assumed it was a joke.

The old man served coffee, then sat down again and looked at him just as he used to do, with one eye sinking down and the other lifted up.

“Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

He’d been back a few times. Perhaps because this was the nearest he’d had to anywhere that could be called home. And he’d liked the countryside, no doubt about that. All those smells.

“I wrote,” he said.

“That’s not the same thing.”

He took a sip of coffee that tasted like the soil in the fields outside must taste, or the tar that had been used to upgrade the farm road when he used to live here. That was a smell to remember.

“What are you after, then?” said the old man.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. Do I have to want something?”

The old man drank some coffee and took a bun, but only held it in his hand.

“I’ve got nothing to give you,” he said.

“Since when have I asked for anything?”

“Just so as you know,” said the old man, who then took a bite of the bun and kept on speaking with his mouth full. “There’s been a break-in here. In the cowshed, just imagine that. Somebody breaks into a cowshed where there’s no animals and nothing to steal. For Christ’s sake.”

“How do you know there was a break-in, then?”

“Eh?”

“How do you know there was a break-in if there wasn’t anything to steal?”

“You see that kind of thing if you’ve had the same cowshed all your life. You see if somebody’s been in there.” He washed the bun down with a mouthful of coffee. “You see that kind of thing,” he said again.

“Really.”

“Oh yes.”

“But nothing was taken?”

“A few things, but that doesn’t matter.” The old man was staring into space now. “That’s not the point.”

He said nothing,

“The point is that you don’t want anybody prowling around when you’re not there. Or are fast asleep in bed.”

“I can understand that.”

The old man looked at him, his eyes pointing in different directions.

“You don’t look all that well,” he said.

“I’ve been, er, been sick.”

“What’s been up with you?”

“Nothing serious.”

“Flu?”

“Something like that.”

“So you came here to get a whiff of cow shit.”

“Yes.”

“Well, all you need to do is breathe in deeply,” said the old man, who snorted again, although he might have been laughing.

“I have.”

“Take as much as you like.”

He raised his cup to his mouth again but couldn’t bring himself to drink. The damp air in the kitchen made him shudder. The old man hadn’t had time to light a fire after his work in the fields. God only knows what he’d been doing out there.

“I think I have a few things here still.”

The old man didn’t respond, didn’t seem to have heard.

“I was thinking about it the other day, and I remembered a few things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Toys.”

“Toys?” The old man refilled his cup, the black sludge that could kill. “What do you want toys for?” He looked hard at his visitor. “Don’t tell me you have a kid?”

No answer.

“Do you have a kid?” the old man asked again.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“They are my… memories,” he said. “My things.”

“What are these toys you’re on about?”

“They’re in a box, I think.”

“Oh Lord, for God’s sake,” said the old man. “If there’s anything it’s upstairs, and I haven’t been up there since Ruth died. “ He stared at his visitor again. “She asked about you.”

“I’ll go up and take a look,” he said, getting to his feet.

The stairs creaked just like they used to.

He went into the room that was once his.

It smelled of nothing, as if this part of the house no longer contained any memories. As if everything had disappeared when the old man stopped using the upstairs and made up a bed in the small room behind the kitchen. But things hadn’t disappeared, he now thought. Nothing disappears. They are still there, and they’re getting bigger and stronger and more awful.

The faint afternoon light was trying to force its way in through the little window at the gable end. He switched on the light, which was a naked forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. He looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. A bed that he hadn’t slept in. An armchair he remembered. Three wooden chairs. A wobbly table. Three overcoats were hanging on a rail to the right.

There was sawdust on the floor, in three little piles. There were a few cardboard boxes in the far corner under the window, and he opened the one on the left. Underneath a few tablecloths and handkerchiefs he discovered the two things he was looking for: He picked them up, tucked them under his left arm, and carried them down to his car.

The old man came out.

“So you found something?”

“I’ll be going now,” he said.

“When will I see you again, then?” asked the old man.

Never, he thought.

Winter parked behind the building that contained half the shops in Doktor Fries Square. It wasn’t his first time here. Once he’d had a toothache so bad that he had had double vision for a few seconds before getting out of his car. When Dan, his dentist, had touched the tooth responsible Winter had felt for his gun. Not really. But the tentative touch by the dentist had almost made him lose consciousness.