On February 20 she pulled in every minor smuggler who came in on the morning ferry, and was rewarded with a plethora of dirty looks and muttered imprecations. There was a kind of pleasure in it.
I do not belong here.
He arrived on the afternoon ferry.
As soon as he appeared she knew he had something to hide, and this time she knew what it was.
A child. Their child.
She lifted the desk flap and went to meet him.
Village on the hill
‘So you’re walking along between the buildings, and you just feel that…no. No, no, no. You shouldn’t be here. It’s wrong here, you see?’
Let the Right One In
The first time Joel Andersson became aware of the problem, he felt nothing more than a vague unease he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets looking up at the building that had been his home for twenty-three years and four months.
It was a quarter past six, and the sun was so low that the entire block, except for the apartments on the top floor, lay in shadow. As he watched the shadow moved further up, nudging at his kitchen windowsill.
Seized by a sudden desire to see the sun before it disappeared, Joel dashed inside and found the lift waiting on the ground floor. As he pressed the button for the eighth floor he realised he was stiff after gazing upwards for such a long time. He rubbed the back of his neck and the ligaments crunched beneath his fingertips as the ageing lift moved upwards.
He didn’t know what it was. He’d stood outside for a long time looking at the sturdy rectangle of the apartment block, dotted with windowpanes, experiencing something like seasickness: a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were about to lose his balance.
‘Midlife crisis,’ he muttered to himself as he unlocked his door—one of four on the top floor. He ignored the post and junk mail and went straight over to the kitchen window, where he was rewarded with the sight of a bright red sun waving goodbye to Sweden before continuing its world tour across the Atlantic, via Hässelby.
The sun went down, its rim notched by pine trees, and the feeling of nausea returned. A subway train the size of a toy train slid into Blackeberg station and Joel tried to focus on it, to visualise the straight, familiar tracks, the timetable that was being followed, everything in its place, but the feeling of unease grew so strong that he had to move away from the window and sit down.
What’s going on? What’s wrong?
He didn’t suffer from vertigo, of course not, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to live here. He’d had the odd moment of dizziness when he moved in twenty-three years ago, but there had been other reasons for that: Lisbeth had decided she wanted a divorce after two years of marriage, she and the twins had stayed on in the apartment in Vällingby and Joel had taken the first decent place he could find nearby. Which turned out to be in Blackeberg.
In those days when he stood by the kitchen window feeling dizzy, it was mainly due to the immediate possibility of suicide. Just open the window and jump. Like sleeping with a razor blade under the pillow, but even more straightforward.
As time went by he got used to his role as a weekend dad, but swore solemnly that he would never be tied down again—a promise he had had no difficulty in keeping, since he had never fallen in love again.
Anita?
Well, yes. That was something else. They were seeing one another.
His stomach was churning. He tried to suppress the feeling by going into the living room to look at the ship.
The model of a three-masted schooner took up approximately a quarter of the floor surface, but appeared to take up even more space because it had been placed right in the middle of the room, and wherever you wanted to go in the apartment, you had to walk around it.
Joel caressed the miraculously smooth surfaces and felt the usual reverence for that life, that era. His stomach settled and he was able to breathe deeply and with a sense of relief. It had taken him a few years to realise it was probably this reverence that had made him start building the ship. He never felt sorrow. Others who had seen his model did. First of all amazement, reverence. And then sorrow. Or perhaps it was envy, who can say?
He knew the exact number of matchsticks. Eighty-seven thousand eight hundred and sixty-three. He calculated that it would take approximately another twenty-three thousand to finish it. In the beginning he had been able to place fifty matches in one session. These days he worked more slowly, less frequently. He was afraid of finishing it, because what would he do then? Put it in the water?
The idea was as ridiculous as it was obvious. The ribs and planks were made with microscopic precision. It wasn’t a question of just snapping the heads off the matches and gluing them in place. No, every match was carefully cut to the perfect shape with a miniature electric band saw, then fixed in place with waterproof epoxy resin. The hull was completely watertight and would be able to float.
The first obstacle when it came to launching the ship was that it was far too wide to fit through the door of the apartment. This was a conscious decision; he had chosen this scale to eliminate any impression that the ship could have been brought into the apartment. He wanted people to see and appreciate that it was built here.
However, the balcony window was an option.
Yes. He would have to send for a crane when the time came. Or the fire brigade, perhaps. ‘Hello, I have a ship that needs to go in the water right away! Come quickly!’
So no launch, then.
The other obstacle was that he didn’t know a thing about ships. If he put the schooner in the water he wouldn’t have a clue how to set the sails to stop it heading off towards the end of the world. He had immersed himself in the details of constructing this particular model, certainly, but he knew nothing about sailing.
What really impressed new visitors—the woman who came to read the electricity meter, the man who fitted new kitchen cupboards—when they had got over their initial amazement at the size of the model, was the precision. There wasn’t one incorrect angle, not one discordant relationship between two details. This was partly thanks to those who had built the original ship, bringing together the practical and the beautiful, but visitors saw only Joel’s work.
It might have been his imagination, but he thought the woman who came to read the meter might have been interested in him. Not that kind of interest, necessarily, but the fact that he had built the ship gave Joel an air of dignity, sincerity and…yes, reliability. He had done something with his time. He had assembled his hours, his years into a creation that was something more than himself, something greater.
When he walked out onto the balcony, the feeling in his stomach returned. He tried to dismiss it as hunger, and succeeded so well that he actually did feel hungry. He couldn’t be bothered cooking anything, so he pulled on his jacket and got in the lift, intending to go down to the square for a pizza. He stopped on the ground floor and rang Anita’s doorbell to see if she wanted to go with him.
The nameplate on the door said ‘Andersson’. No one answered. They had joked about the fact that they wouldn’t need new nameplates if they got married. They lived just about as far from one another as possible within the same building. Anita was on the ground floor, right-hand side, Joel on the top floor, left-hand side; joking apart, they were quite happy with the situation.
Joel went out, passing the swimming pool where the windows were still boarded up with black planks of wood after the terrible events twenty years earlier. Two children had been killed and one had been kidnapped by some lunatic who thought he was a vampire. Neither the perpetrator nor the kidnapped child had ever been found.
As he walked beneath an oak tree that formed a gateway leading to the carpark, something hit his head and he looked up. A couple of giggling children were perched among its branches. He recognised their faces; they lived in his block.
‘Sorry, granddad. It was an accident.’
Joel considered scooping up a handful o
f acorns and throwing them back, for fun. Couldn’t be bothered. Instead he said, ‘I don’t think it was an accident, but I forgive you anyway.’
The joke, if it was a joke, went over the children’s heads. They looked at one another and giggled again, more because he’d said something weird than because it was funny.
He carried on. Another acorn came whizzing down, but missed his head and bounced away in front of him. A thought along the lines of Young people today. No respect began to take shape, and he cut it off before it managed to develop into a rant. That’s the way miserable old farts think. He didn’t want to be a miserable old fart. His bitterness towards life had bloomed in all its black glory when he was between twenty-eight and thirty-two, approximately. Since then the flowers of bitterness had withered. He was neither happy nor sad, neither disappointed nor contented. He stuck one match to another and went on living.
At the pizzeria he had a marinara and a beer. The feeling of unease had left him as soon as he walked out of the apartment block, and had been replaced by his current sense of stillness. A few regulars were sitting at a table filling in their coupons for the harness races. He knew their names, they knew his. Nothing more.
It was just after seven. He thought about ringing Lasse to ask if he fancied going to the movies, but when he checked the ads in a paper someone had left behind, there was nothing he wanted to see that he hadn’t already seen. Besides, Lasse had said he was working overtime almost every evening at the moment. Some building project in Hammarbyhamnen that was running behind.
Not much on TV either. Perhaps he would go to the movies on his own. No. He knocked back the last of the beer and belched quietly. He hadn’t really wanted to go to the cinema when he locked up the ironmonger’s, it was just that now he didn’t want to go back to the apartment. To the problem. He closed his eyes and tried to see. Couldn’t catch it.
‘Joel!’
He opened his eyes. Berra, one of the regulars, had turned around on his chair and was looking at him.
‘Are you sitting there dreaming?’
‘No, I just…’ Joel spread his hands in a gesture that might mean anything.
‘Give me a number.’
‘Err…twenty-seven.’
Berra shook his head. ‘They’re not running that many horses yet. We can’t agree here, so you have to decide.’
‘What are the alternatives.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Just give me a number.’
‘Five, then.’
Berra looked down at the papers in his hand and raised his eyebrows.
‘Five?’
‘Yes?’
The others at the table were guffawing. Berra scratched his head, looking as if someone had just come up with incontrovertible proof that two and two made five. He looked sceptically at Joel.
‘But that’s Black Riddle. Definitely…long odds, if I can put it that way.’ Berra pursed his lips, made his decision and turned back to the others. ‘OK, let’s fill it in.’
The others protested, but Berra stuck to his guns, and since they couldn’t agree anyway, Black Riddle it was. Joel heard something about ‘Three hundred kronor straight down the toilet’ and ‘Better hedge our bets’. He placed his knife and fork neatly on the plate, stood up and held out a hundred-kronor note to Berra.
‘Can I join in?’
Berra looked at the note, at Joel, at the others. Joel folded the note between his fingers so that it wouldn’t look threatening. ‘If I’m sabotaging the system, I can at least make a contribution.’
‘No,’ said Berra, and the others shook their heads in agreement. ‘We were only joking. If you want to join in that’s fine, but you don’t have to feel…’
Joel moved the note closer, and Berra took it. ‘But in that case we’ll hedge our bets on a couple more, because Black Riddle…well, you know.’
‘No,’ said Joel. ‘I’m in if you don’t hedge your bets.’
Berra looked at the others, who shrugged. It didn’t make any difference, after all; they wouldn’t have been able to hedge their bets anyway without Joel’s fresh capital. Berra waved the hundred-kronor note at the coupon. ‘So what shall we put it on, then?’
‘You know better than me.’
Berra nodded and a new discussion began. When Joel had pulled on his jacket, Berra pointed at the lines and said, ‘Don’t you want a copy?’
‘No. Let me know if I win anything.’
‘There’s not much chance of that with Black Riddle, but…sure.’
Joel set off home. As soon as he started down the hill from the square, the feeling came creeping up on him again. He placed his hand over his heart. Wasn’t it beating faster than usual?
Fear.
It was a form of fear. He hadn’t felt like this for a long time. He had read a series of articles in Dagens Nyheter last summer about panic attacks. They were most common among young people, but could affect a person at any age. The fear itself wasn’t dangerous, but the premonition led to panic, which led to…
A rose is a rose is a rose…
The tower blocks stood out like darker silhouettes against the grey sky. From where Joel was standing, the buildings were almost exactly in a line. He stopped, looked. Tilted his head to one side, squinted.
What the hell…
The sides of the buildings stood next to one another, two lines running from the ground to the sky. Joel blinked hard and looked again. No. He wasn’t seeing things: the lines were not parallel. They weren’t parallel because the closest block, his block…was at an angle. Only a degree or two, but enough to make the two sides next to one another form a very long, upside-down V instead of two Is.
He took a few steps back, a few steps forward, to the side, but however he looked, the phenomenon remained. The building was listing towards the east. When he stood at his kitchen window watching the sunset he had been standing on a sloping surface, about to fall over backwards.
People on their way home from the subway looked at him as he stood there motionless, staring up at the building. They looked in the same direction to see if they could spot what he was gazing at, but didn’t seem to notice anything odd. Nothing was moving, thank God. The block wasn’t about to collapse. In the end he couldn’t help himself; he stopped a young man.
‘Excuse me?’
The man took off his earphones.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, but…would you mind looking at those apartment blocks and telling me if you can see anything strange?’
The man immediately did as Joel had asked. He stared for a few seconds, then shook his head. ‘No. Like what?’
‘It’s listing. The building nearest to us is listing.’
The man looked again. For a little while longer this time. Music was whispering from the earphones round his neck.
‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, it is. A little bit.’ Joel looked at him encouragingly and the man pushed his lips forward, repeated, ‘Yes, it is.’ He was about to put the earphones back on, but stopped and said, ‘Maybe that’s normal?’ He replaced the earphones and went on his way.
Joel stayed where he was. Did tower blocks list slightly? He couldn’t remember ever reading about any such building falling over all by itself. Not in Sweden, anyway. But the bad feeling had only come today. It must have happened overnight, during the storm.
He’d called Anita around ten, because he couldn’t stand the way the building swayed when the wind was strong enough. Couldn’t sleep. So he had called Anita, and as soon as he said who it was, she asked, ‘Is it the wind?’
‘Yes. Can I come down?’
He could. He had spent the rest of the night in her apartment. Been beaten at Scrabble then made love routinely, without passion or any sense that something was missing. It was fine just the way it was. Neither of them wanted more, neither of them wanted to stop. They didn’t want to merge their lives. If differences of opinion arose, they simply stayed away from one another for a few days and let things settle down. Then they
got together again.
They had parted in the morning with a dry kiss, a caress on the cheek, and Joel had gone off to the ironmonger’s feeling relatively happy. That was the state he was aiming for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its opposite, and depression was hard to break. You could be relatively happy all the time, if you took it easy.
At the bottom of the stairs Joel stopped and looked at the list of names. Column after column of names he couldn’t put a face to. Right at the top of the left hand column: Andersson. Down at the bottom of the right hand column: Andersson. Between these known poles an undivided village on a hill. Plastic letters that could be swapped around all too easily, rearranged into new names without faces.
He didn’t bother ringing Anita’s doorbell because there were no lights on in her apartment; instead he went straight up in the lift. Now that he had something concrete to which he could attribute the bad feeling, it was no longer so strong. His building was falling down, that was all. Probably quite normal.
But he couldn’t shake off the thought. As soon as he got inside he took the spirit level out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen and placed it on the floor. He lay down on his stomach next to it so that he could see properly and studied the little air bubble. It was possibly a fraction of a millimetre closer to the window. He changed position and lay alongside the spirit level with his feet pointing towards the kitchen window.
Yes. He could feel it. He might possibly have been a little oversensitive, but his head was definitely lower than his feet. He took a pair of pliers, broke open a bearing that was lying among all the rubbish in the drawer and tipped the balls on the floor. They didn’t roll away.
Hard to stop once you’ve started. He thought for a while, then remembered what to do. He took out a reel of thick string and tied a heavy nut on the end, opened the kitchen window and lowered the nut until it reached the ground, tied the end of the string to the broom handle, fixed it in place with a stool and measured so that it was protruding exactly thirty centimetres through the window. Then he wound the string around the handle several times so that it was hanging free above the ground. A plumb line.