Page 77 of The Living and the Dead

They sipped their coffee. Sander waited, but Jakob didn’t elaborate.

“He told me about the house, anyway,” Sander said. “Funny story.”

Jakob raised an eyebrow, and Sander recounted what Filip had said. When he was done, Jakob shook his head.

“It’s a wonder he’s still alive, Filip. You know, that Frans Ljunggren was always so sly. He had quite a few demands for that bottle of liquor. Nothing homemade, he said, it had to be real, boughten liquor, so of course that meant Filip had to go to Systemet to buy it. And once Filip got himself clean, I don’t think he was as scared of anything else as he was Systemet. As I’m sure you recall, Frans Ljunggren wasn’t what you’d call a generous soul. He liked that house and wasn’t about to give it to just anyone. So he wanted to see if Filip could go in the liquor store and buy Frans a bottle without falling off the wagon.If he could do it, Frans would sell. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the poor bastard, but Filip did what it took.”

Sander’s phone buzzed. A text from Olivia, wondering how it had gone, if everything was okay at the house on Backavägen, how much farther he had to drive.

She thought he was on his way back. He probably should have been.

It was high time to leave.

He tried to catch Felicia’s eye. She didn’t look up; she was sitting with her mother, Alice, and a man Sander didn’t recognize.

Sander left the village hall and went back to his car, and just like that he was gone again, almost as if he’d never returned.

58

He pulled up at the house in Snöstorp. All he was supposed to do was make sure it was still standing, go through the mail, and make sure the timed sprinkler system was worth the outrageous price they’d paid for it earlier in the summer. Then: on the road again.

Hardly anyone was home on Backavägen. When Midsummer arrived, everyone on the street had loaded their lives into SUVs and RVs and headed off on vacation.

Well, almost. The Johanssons were back. The house across the street had a trampoline in the yard, with a safety net. When Sander stood on the lawn, he could see the neighbor girl’s head bouncing up and down, her hair following. From a distance she looked a little like Josefin, his daughter. They played together on occasion.

Symbols: pale skin, a lull, a casket, a gravestone. An empty hook in the hall where a coat used to hang. That was all. Those were the kinds of images people had of death. When was the last time he’d attended a funeral? January, in the year 2000. Over twenty years ago. Was that unusual? What was the average interval between funerals for a man of his age?

He went back inside, inhaled the scent of his own home, his own life. It was another hot day. He wanted to take off his suit jacket but decided not to. He went into the bedroom he and Olivia shared and sat down on the bed, thinking about how lucky he was to have Oliviaand the kids in his life, to have people to miss and long to see, people who missed him and wanted to see him too. He wondered if Sten Persson had had that.

—

That summer turned out to be a very tough one, as he would recall later. A heat wave settled over the country like a threat; people couldn’t handle it. For days there wasn’t a hint of a cloud in the Halland sky. Only nights brought relief.

That was also the summer his dream came back.

Sander was eighteen and back out in Skavböke, picking his way through ruins. It hurt to breathe, as though the very air were dangerous. He looked around, searching for some sort of answer. There was a hint of the unfinished here, an action waiting to be taken. Then he lowered his gaze to the ground.

He realized he was supposed to dig. He stuck his hands in the earth and clawed up soil, grass, and scrub. He dug down as deep as a grave, and soon his shoulders, back, and fingers were aching; a pang appeared dreadfully close to his heart. At last he touched something.

For a moment, Sander took in the face that had emerged. Pale violet and stiff, more a mask than a face, but then its eyelids fluttered and the face was staring back. Sander’s scream was so loud he woke himselfup.

They say everything you encounter in a dream is a shard of yourself, like pieces of a shattered reflection. In that way, dreams are an enigmatic sojourn.

But if this dream was an answer, what was the question?

The tall trees swayed gently in the summer breeze, and above them, in the bright blue sky, curly little wisps of clouds drifted by like cotton candy, and as he focused on those, he thought,Yes, concentrate on those, like cotton candy, it’s simpler that way, everything will be so much simpler if you just let everything be as itis.

He held tight to that thought the way the victim of a fall grabs frantically for the railing.

59

Sander was sitting at the kitchen table and going through the mail when he heard something dripping. It’s strange; sometimes sounds are there the whole time but you don’t notice them. Then, suddenly, they pierce the fog.

He turned his head. Not in here.

The bathroom faucet. It was leaking, even though it was off.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. A video call from Olivia. In the background, waves crashed as loud and clear as a highway.