Late One Summer
From the novel Sensommar
by Johan Bargum
- Norstedts and Söderström & Co Förlags AB, 1993
- Translated by Ken Schubert
- (Translation approved for the Internet by the author)
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Back when it happened she had long light-brown hair. It went something like this: a couple of years earlier I had moved away to Robertsgatan. Carl had stayed on at Mama’s four-room flat on Nervandersgatan. Maid’s quarters with a private entrance; he came and went as he pleased. It occurred to me that he didn’t bother to leave quite simply because it was more comfortable that way, cheaper.
I hardly ever saw him. He was gone the few times I dropped by Mama’s. It was always, Carl’s over at the business college. Carl’s so studious. Carl’s getting such good marks.
He might not have been home, but Mama spoke of nothing else.
When I learned he was engaged, I was amazed. Where had he found the time?
Mama had started prattling about her future daughter-in-law. She was so happy for Carl’s sake, she said. Klara came from a good family, respectable people – a euphemism which meant that they weren’t well-off. But that didn’t seem to worry Mama. Nothing related to Klara seemed to worry Mama. On the contrary. Klara was wise and prudent. Klara had such a warm heart. Plus, she called at least once a week and chatted so pleasantly. To judge by Mama’s description, Klara was the most kind, considerate, and charming girl Carl could have wished for: a dream daughter-in-law.
Mama went on ad nauseam.
When do I get to meet this eighth wonder, I asked, can’t you throw a little party or something?
But Mama evaded my question: Carl was so seldom free and Klara’s prelims were coming up and she herself was busy just about every day.
It seems as though we were all busy back then. I was lecturing at the University, writing my thesis on Prokofief, and preparing myself for the academic career I imagined I could make a go of.
One afternoon I caught sight of Carl through the window of a little goldsmith’s shop on Fredriksgatan. He was standing at the head of the display counter along with a woman whose back was turned to me. They were evidently absorbed in trying wedding rings on each other.
All I saw was her back – and her long, light-brown hair.
It didn’t seem like quite the right time to rush in and introduce myself.
I ran into her a week later. I had just concluded a lecture; the students were streaming out of the hall. Gathering up my papers, I noticed that one woman had remained. No book-bag, no notebook or pen lay on her desk. Sitting there without moving, she just stared musingly into space. She was not one of my students, and that flattered me a bit: someone had come just to listen to my brilliant analysis of The Rites of Spring, someone who, enthralled by my presentation, had stayed behind to savor her impressions. As I was going out the door, a thought flashed through my mind; I turned to look at her from behind; that hair, I recognized her.
I went over and sat down beside her.
“You’re Klara, aren’t you?”
She nodded thoughtfully.
“I see,” I said.
She said nothing.
“I assume you know who I am.”
She nodded once more.
“Pleased to meet you.”
No reply.
“Better late than never.”
Silence. The conversation was going nowhere fast.
“Klara,” I said, “is something the matter?”
With that she finally turned toward me. She looked at me, her pale-blue eyes searching and strangely sleepy at the same time, and I understood my brother; I thought, I understand him, My God, My God…
She said, “That’s just what I don’t know.”
A mild late-summer serenity hovers over these September days, my last ones out here. The summer guests have gone away. The birds have re-conquered the countryside, the grebes and mergansers are browsing in the reeds, huge flocks of thrushes invade the blueberry shrubs to fortify themselves for their long journey. From the woods I hear the great black woodpecker’s jeering call: fie, fie, fie upon you!
In the morning the fog spills in from the sea. For a few moments you see only a gray veil pressing against the porch windowpanes.
I try to recall my days with Klara. A veil falls over them as well, a curtain that I try, without success, to draw aside.
A few small peep-holes are all I have.
Carl had flown to San Francisco. He would be back in three days.
Three days.
His job was signed, sealed and delivered. In two weeks he would go and take Klara with him. Something he had yet to tell Mama.
For her part Klara had not yet told him that she was considering not going along at all.
Three days: only a few peep-holes.
Can you sit in cafés, restaurants, night-clubs for 12 hours on end and just talk, as if you had known each other always, your whole life, and that still not be enough? Are such things possible?
Three days.
Newspapers and letters lying unopened in the mailbox. Meetings, lectures I had not bothered to cancel, had simply not shown up for. Drawn curtains. Unplugged telephone.
I had no idea that you can be so entranced.
She stretched her arms back over her head. Stroking the bed frame with the palms of her hands, she stared up at the ceiling in search of something more distant still. It looked odd, as if she were waving, or trying to say: I give up. Between her breasts I discovered a fragrance that belongs only in a nursery, in a place that is less than a memory.
And a few moments later: yes, that’s what it’s all about, now and forever, amen.
Are such things possible? They are.
She sat in my easy-chair, hands folded in her lap, shoulders slightly hunched. Motionless, as if exhausted from heavy labor. She had put on my old robe, the one that belonged to Carl before he grew out of it. The phonograph played silently, it had played silently the whole time, as if we were two refugees in a besieged city. Schubert’s D-Major Quintet, Second Movement. Tears ran down her chin and disappeared in the dark blue terry cloth of the robe, and she looked completely happy.
Do you ever know what’s really happening? Is it always only afterwards that all the questions begin?
She was boiling some eggs. She had on a jacket and pair of trousers she had found in my closet, and I had realized at once that I would never again be able to look at them as before, that I would have to wear them every day, or else get rid of them. She hard-boiled two eggs, humming the whole time an American pop tune, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, and it didn’t occur to me to comment on it, despite the fact that I didn’t know if it was a subconscious association or whether she did it deliberately. A kind of inexplicable shimmer surrounded her as she busied herself at the stove, as if the air’s very molecules were about to explode upon contact with her skin, as if boiling eggs was the most joyous of worldly endeavors. She rinsed them under the faucet; she held the sizzling eggs under the cold stream of water and felt them, like a warm cliff under a man’s shivering body, gradually transfer their warmth. Then she walked up to the kitchen table, where I sat staring at her, dumb as an obedient spaniel. Holding the eggs out to me, one in each hand, she said: so you are your brother’s keeper after all, and burst into ringing laughter, and I realized right then and there that I would never again be able to see an ordinary egg without remembering her laughter, and, furthermore, that this was only a minor sample of all the things I would never again experience in the same way.
It’s only afterwards that you begin to ask why.
The first rays of dawn filtered in through the drawn shutters. While she slept a sense of sorrow and abandonment fluttered over her face. I laid the breakfast tray carefully on the bed. The aroma of the coffee awakened her; she smiled slightly, stretched and sighed. Is this the last morning, she asked. Carl’s plane lands in ten hours, I replied, though I didn’t know whether or not that answered her question. Did you know that the famous Alcatraz Penitentiary is located on an island near San Francisco, she said. Is that how you feel, I asked, like you’re going to a prison? She sat up in the bed. Taking a slice of bread and spreading it with butter, she performed even that task with such grace and dignity that I grew weak at the knees and had to sit down. Perhaps, she said, though of course only tourists go there these days.
She put on her overcoat, and, even as we were preparing to leave, I knew already that these rooms would always remember her, that the floors would ask me, where are her feet, and the walls, why have you deprived us of her shadow?
But when we had stepped outside, the world crashed down upon me, the light, the traffic, the people, it all crushed in; everything seemed to demand an explanation, where have you been, what have you done? As we strolled down the hill towards the Swedish Theater, I heard the voice of conscience for the first time, and it said, you’re going straight to campus, you bum, and you’d better come up with a hell of a good explanation on the way. We stood outside the Skillnad Pharmacy and waited for the light to change. She looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, but I didn’t dare to meet her glance, certain as I was that everything that had happened was written on my face. I was on the verge of tumbling out of our cocoon, I was about to flop back down into reality, splash! Run off with your brother’s fiancé, what could possibly be worse?
She said, You’re just like Carl. Only the other way around.
Crossing over Skillnadsgatan, we stopped on the island in the middle of the street; in the underground shelter was a candy-shop where she wanted to buy something. We were standing outside the entrance. Are you going to wait here, she asked. I nodded. Smiling, she looked at me for a moment. Though actually you should have been Carl’s little brother, she said, strolled down the stairs, stepped into the subterranean depths and disappeared.
Then I split, leaving her there, a retreat I immediately began to justify to myself: no upsetting scenes, no humiliating repartee, a pleasure to have met but, sorry; an elegant little unstated rejoinder to an unstated question; furthermore it was she herself who had written the entire script; Carl’s little brother! it was hard to avoid the thought, wasn’t it obvious that when it came down to it she too had desired this very climax?
So first thing I knew I was on my way to campus, assiduously involved in editing, synthesizing, analyzing. As always.
How come?
In order to dare to stand at the starting line once again, to make it through an unpleasant talk with the department head, to confront my students, to grade a paper on Sibelius’ Fifth, to sit in the campus café and shoot the bull with my colleagues?
For the sake of one last desperate hope: this time I shall not stumble?
Because I am my brother’s keeper, after all?
Because I wanted to avenge him?
Because I have always been so f–ing scared of him?
She called a week later. “Can you drive us to the airport?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I thought it might be good for the both of us, brother dear,” she said.
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