Let The Old Dreams Die Part 26

This story is beginning to draw to its conclusion. I began by saying that I was going to tell you about a great love, and I don't know whether you think I have fulfilled that promise. Perhaps you are disappointed? Perhaps you were expecting something more dramatic?

All I can say in response is that for one thing you haven't heard the end of my story yet, and for another I feel that I have carried out my duty to bear witness, as I promised to do.

Because how do you picture a great love?

Perhaps it's something along the lines of Gone with the Wind or t.i.tanic that immediately springs to mind. But those aren't really about love as such, they are about the context. Everything seems grander when it happens against the background of a civil war, a s.h.i.+pwreck or a natural disaster. But that's like judging a painting by its frame. Like saying the Mona Lisa is a masterpiece mainly because of the ornate carvings surrounding it.

Love is love. In those dramatic stories the main characters are willing to give up their life for the other person on a purely practical level, but that's exactly what happens in an everyday love story that is also a great love. You give your lives to one another all the way, every day, unto death.

Perhaps it's true that we recognise great love by the fact that the people involved could easily have been actors in some major drama, if only the circ.u.mstances had been different. If Stefan had been a Montague from Ibsengatan and Karin a Capulet from Holbergsgatan, perhaps they might have woven their escape plans behind my ticket booth. To run away means life, to linger means certain death. I'm sorry, I'm losing the plot here. But I think you know what I mean.

Love is love. The way it is expressed changes.

I thought a lot about what Stefan had told me at the hospital, picturing the situation. The two of them in a bare, sterile interview room-at least that was how I imagined it. Gripping each other's hands to re-create the scene between the two children in Karlstad, something that would last their whole lives beginning in that moment.

It was a pleasant thought, but Stefan had been interrupted in his narrative, and it would be some years before I was given the full picture.

Perhaps that was a contributing factor in Karin's refusal to give up on her investigation into what happened to Oskar Eriksson-it was this case that had brought her and Stefan together. Perhaps it had a special place in her heart, which was now functioning perfectly.

When we celebrated Karin's seventy-fifth birthday in April 2004, she told me that at the very beginning of the investigation the police had received a great deal of information, mainly from people claiming to have seen Oskar Eriksson in various places in Sweden and even abroad. His picture had been all over the press, and in a case like that it was normal for people to see the missing person in every conceivable place. But none of the leads had produced any results.

It was on a number of these loose threads that Karin was still working some twenty-two years later. She rang people in the places where Oskar had allegedly been seen, carefully read photocopies of old newspapers. But n.o.body knew anything, and if they had known anything, they'd forgotten it.

Karin sighed and shook her head as we sat on the patio beneath the infra-red heaters, took a decent swig of her wine-good for the circulation-and said, 'I think it might be time to give up. Start doing crosswords or something instead.'

'You already do crosswords,' said Stefan.

'Do more crosswords, then.'

That evening I had the opportunity to look around Karin's study properly. She had kitted out a spare room upstairs with bookshelves and a desk. Dozens of files were lined up on the shelves, and the desk was piled high with papers, maps and printouts. Karin waved her hand and said, 'The nerve centre. All this to investigate one case, and do you know what the only practical result of the whole lot has been?'

'No.'

'The fact that Stefan and I met.'

Stefan walked over and weighed a bundle of papers in his hand; he shook his head gloomily and said, 'A singles night for the more mature individual would have been simpler, there's no denying that.'

'True,' said Karin. 'But then neither of us would ever have gone to such a thing.'

'No. You're right. So it was all worth it, wasn't it?'

They gave each other one of those looks that still had the ability to send a pang of sorrow through my heart, even after all these years. If I had been different, if life had been different. If anyone had ever looked at me that way.

Then the stoic in me took over. Socrates was able to stand on guard in the bitter cold for hours on end without uttering one word of complaint, and he emptied his cup of hemlock in one draught. He took his place within me, and the sorrow abated.

The following year Karin devoted no time to the investigation, apart from making one phone call to police headquarters every six months to check if there was anything new. There wasn't.

The final phase in my story begins in the summer of 2007. I had noticed that Stefan was sitting in an odd position when we were out on the veranda, as if he couldn't get comfortable. When we rowed out in the skiff to lay some nets, he pulled a face when he grabbed the oars, and allowed me to take over for once.

'Are you OK?' I asked as we headed out towards Ladholmen. 'Are you in pain?'

'My back hurts,' he said. 'And my stomach. It's as if there's something...I don't know...inside. Don't say anything to Karin.'

'But she's bound to notice.'

'I know. But I want to tell her myself. I think it's something... that's not good news.'

Stefan and I had once talked about the age difference between him and Karin, about the fact that statistically she was likely to die several years before him, and about his feelings. As Stefan doesn't exactly have the same controlled att.i.tude to life as I do, and tends to get worked up about things or to sink into a trough of despair, his answer surprised me.

'That's just the way it is,' he said. 'She's my life, she's my story. If part of the story is that I end up alone for a few years at the end, then so be it. There's no alternative. And when there's no alternative, there's no point in brooding on things. That's just the way it is.'

I imagine I would have said something similar if I had been in Stefan's shoes, and we ended the conversation with some jokey comment on how he and I could always sit around throwing bread to the pigeons until the grim reaper put a stop to our activities.

But that's not how things turned out.

Stefan's pains grew worse over the next few days, and Karin drove him to the hospital in Norrtalje, which referred him to Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. After a series of tests it was established that Stefan was suffering from pancreatic cancer. I remember with perfect clarity the day Karin rang to tell me.

I stood there with the phone in my hand, looking out of my window at what used to be their apartment. The flowerbeds were magnificent in shades of green and pink. Some children were sitting on the climbing frame with their heads close together and everything was summer and life as Karin uttered the words: 'Cancer. Of the pancreas.'

I knew. I'd read enough books and was generally well-informed enough to know. But I asked the question anyway: 'What are they going to do?'

'There's nothing they can do. They can slow it down slightly with radiotherapy and so on. But there's no cure.'

I couldn't form the words. 'How...how...?'

'In the worst case scenario a few months. At best a year. No longer.'

There wasn't much more to say. I put the phone down and looked over at what I still thought of as their balcony, their door. I remembered how I had noticed them because they held hands, the pop music they used to play, the faint sound of their voices on distant summer evenings. In search of lost time.

The tumour in Stefan's pancreas had spread to his liver, and barely responded to the radiotherapy. When I visited them in October he had been given a morphine pump so that he could administer his own pain relief. I had thought that he would look terrible, but sitting there on the veranda with a blanket over his legs, he looked healthier and more at ease than he had done in August.

When I mentioned this to him he gave a wry smile and clicked the pump a couple of times. 'It's just because the pain has gone. I actually feel OK. But it's gnawing away inside me, I know that. It's a matter of months now.'

'It seems so b.l.o.o.d.y unnecessary. Looking at you today.'

'Yes. We've both said the same. But there's nothing that can be done. That's just the way it is.'

Karin was sitting next to him, and he reached for her hand. They sat there holding hands and gazing out to sea. I had two years left to my retirement, and I couldn't remember when I last cried. But I cried then.

Silently I wept, and when Stefan and Karin noticed they put their arms around me to console me, absurdly enough. That made me cry even more. For them. For myself. For everything.

Stefan's liver could no longer cope with alcohol, but as we sat on the veranda that evening he made up for it by smoking more than ever. Karin drank wine and smoked, since it no longer mattered. We talked about what had happened when Karin had her heart attack, how she had felt ever since that she was living on borrowed time. She sighed and stroked Stefan's arm. 'I just never thought it would have to be paid back.'

'Don't think like that,' said Stefan. 'I could have been dead twenty-five years ago if what you believe is true.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

And that was when I was given the final piece of the information available on Oskar Eriksson. Stefan went back to what he had told me at the hospital, about the two children holding hands, which in turn had become the beginning of Stefan and Karin's story.

'But that wasn't quite all. The girl was about to kill me.' He stole a glance at his wife. 'According to Karin.'

'It's just a theory,' she said. 'Which very few people would subscribe to.'

'Anyway,' said Stefan. 'The children were sitting on the trunk rubbing their hands against each other's. I was on my way over to say something, since the girl was so inadequately dressed, and then... she turned to face me.'

Stefan grimaced with pain and clicked the morphine pump a couple of times; he took a deep breath and slowly let it out again, closing his eyes. A couple of minutes pa.s.sed without anyone saying anything; the only sound was the lapping of the waves on the sh.o.r.e and the faint ticking of the infra-red heater. I had started to think he wasn't going to say any more when Stefan exhaled once again and went on: 'So. I know this sounds strange. She was a child of perhaps twelve, thirteen, but when our eyes met I felt two things, as clear as a revelation: firstly that she intended to kill me, and secondly that she was capable of doing so. Because I had disturbed them. When she jumped off the trunk and I saw that she had a knife in her hand, the feeling didn't exactly diminish. We were standing a couple of metres apart. I looked at her and the boy, saw what they were up to. The girl looked as if she was on the point of hurling herself at me when the guard shouted that my train had arrived. I think that saved me. I backed away, and she stayed where she was with the knife in her hand.'

Stefan lit a cigarette and sighed with pleasure as he inhaled deeply. He looked at the cigarette and shook his head. 'Being able to smoke again. It's almost worth it.'

Karin thumped him on the shoulder. 'Don't say that, silly.'

'So what were they up to?' I asked. 'The children?'

Stefan ran his index finger down his palm.

'She'd cut her hand. So that it bled. He'd done the same. They were sitting there mixing their blood. That was why they were holding hands like that. And that's why Karin has her theory. Which isn't exactly popular with the police.'

'We know so little, we human beings,' said Karin. 'We know almost nothing.'

We gazed out over the sea and considered this while Stefan sucked on his cigarette. When he had stubbed it out he said, 'Do you know what the worst thing is? It's not the fact that I'm going to die. It's all the dreams I had. Which have to die. Which will never be fulfilled. On the other hand...' Stefan looked at Karin's hand, which was resting on the table. 'On the other hand there are so many that have been fulfilled. So perhaps it doesn't really matter.'

I don't remember what else was said that evening, but it was to be the last time I saw Stefan and Karin. At that stage Stefan's condition had been critical but stable, and the doctors believed he had at least a few months left, so when we said goodbye there was nothing to suggest that it would be forever.

But something intervened.

When I rang on the Monday a couple of weeks later, no one answered the phone. When there was no answer the following day either, I started to worry. On the Wednesday I received a card with a Stockholm postmark. It was a picture of Arlanda airport, and on the back it said, 'Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones. Thank you for everything, dearest friend. Stefan and Karin.'

I turned the postcard over and over, but I was none the wiser. Arlanda? Let the old dreams...had they gone abroad? Was there some new treatment available elsewhere? It seemed highly unlikely. After all, that was why I had taken the news so hard; I knew as well as they did that pancreatic cancer was untreatable. Anywhere.

I was free on the Sat.u.r.day and caught the bus to osternas. I had a spare key to their house and permission to use the place whenever they were away. However, I still felt uncomfortable as I unlocked the front door and called out, 'h.e.l.lo? Anyone home?' As if I were barging into something private. But I had to find out.

The house had recently been cleaned, and a faint smell of detergent lingered in the wooden floor. There wasn't a sound, and it was obvious that no one was at home. But still I crept through the hallway as if I were afraid of disturbing some delicate balance.

The fridge had been emptied and the water heater switched off. No radiators were on, and it was quite cold inside the house. When I opened Stefan's wardrobe to borrow a sweater, I saw that quite a lot of his clothes were missing. They had gone away, that much was clear. I pulled on a yellow woollen cardigan with big b.u.t.tons that Stefan loathed; he had kept it only because I used to borrow it when we were sitting on the veranda.

I went through the house and found more signs of a well-organised but definitive departure. The few photograph alb.u.ms they owned were gone, along with a number of favourite alb.u.ms from the CD rack. Eventually I found myself standing outside Karin's study. If the answer wasn't in there, then there was no answer to be found. I cautiously opened the door.

Yes, I might as well admit it. With every door I opened I was afraid I would find the two of them in a deathly embrace, in the best-case scenario achieved with an overdose of Stefan's morphine, in the worst-case with more obvious means.

But there were no beautiful corpses in Karin's study either. There was, however, a printout of a receipt, along with an envelope containing a photograph. Both were neatly laid out on the desk, as if they had been placed there so that I would find them.

The receipt was for plane tickets. Two one-way tickets to Barcelona, four days earlier. So far so good. They had gone to Spain. The photograph, however, made no sense at all. It showed a group of people who were presumably a family. Mother, father and two children standing on a street at night, brightly lit by the camera's flashbulb. The signs around them were in Spanish and Catalan, so it wasn't a great stretch to a.s.sume they were in Barcelona.

I looked at the envelope. It had been sent by the National Police Board a week earlier, and was addressed to Karin. Right down in the bottom corner someone had written 'Something for you, maybe?' and drawn a smiley. When I looked inside the envelope again I found a short letter from someone who lived in Blackeberg and had known Oskar Eriksson very well. He apologised for wasting police time, said the whole thing was completely crazy of course, but he asked them to look carefully at the enclosed photograph.

I did as the letter asked, and took a closer look at the picture. I thought I knew what he meant, but looked around on the desk for a magnifying gla.s.s. Instead I found an enlargement of the relevant part of the picture, which Karin had presumably printed out herself.

There was no doubt. Once I had seen the enlargement, it was as clear as day on the first picture too. To one side behind the family were two people who happened to have been caught in the camera flash. One was Oskar Eriksson, and the other was a slender girl with long, black hair. In spite of the fact that the photograph must have been taken immediately after his disappearance, Oskar had changed his hairstyle; it was cut short in a way that was more fas.h.i.+onable among young people today.

I remembered him as a chubby child, but the boy in the picture was considerably slimmer, and as he had been caught on the run, so to speak, he actually looked quite athletic. I looked at the enlargement again, and Stefan's story about what had happened in Karlstad came back to me. There was something vaguely menacing about the way the two children were moving behind the smiling, unsuspecting family. Like predators.

Then I spotted something that made me gasp. The father of the family was holding a mobile phone, and not just any mobile phone, but an iPhone. How long had they been around? A year? Two years?

I turned the photograph over and read the words in the bottom right-hand corner.

Barcelona, September 2008.

The photograph had been taken barely a month ago.

I sat at Karin's desk for a long time, looking from the receipt for the plane tickets to the photograph of Oskar Eriksson and the girl with black hair, moving through the night. And I thought about how the end can be encapsulated in the beginning, and I thought about Stefan and Karin, my dearest friends.

It's been two years now. I haven't heard if they're alive, but nor have I heard that they're dead.

Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones.

I hope they found what they were looking for.

To hold you while the music plays.

I want you to understand something. Are you listening? Yes. I want you to understand...it's important to me that you understand...I'm not doing this because I enjoy it. Can you understand that? I'm not going to enjoy this. This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you.

You're laughing. Yes, OK.

But you understand...the whole point is that it will hurt me too. That's the whole point. Can you understand that?

Of course you're not as au fait with these matters as I am. But if you were. If you had devoted an entire lifetime. To trying to...grasp. These issues. Then I think...

Did everything work out OK with the money?

Good.

I mean, it hasn't been all that easy for me to...stage this, as you perhaps realise. Neither when it comes to you, nor to those who will be here in ten minutes. You don't exactly belong to...my normal circle of friends, if I can put it that way. It's dead, incidentally.

My normal circle of friends. Is dead. Nothing strange about that. It's time. Of those who attended the seminary with me, only I and one other are still alive.

The seminary. That's where you train. That's what it's called. The seminary for priests.

I don't want you to drink any more now.

Good.