Strindberg's Star (32 page)

“Times change,” said Eva.

Don closed his eyes and tried to find his way back, in the catalogue of his mind, to the image on the screen in the war museum.

“I didn’t have very much time, but of course I thought that there
had to be something that could link them together; Baudelaire and the man in the mine.”

“Yes?”

“But what I had time to pick up was just that they shared a morbid fascination with hell. The man wrote Niflheim on the wall of the mine, of course, and Náströndu, ‘the shore of the dead.’ Baudelaire praises the devil in the foreword of the collection.”

He saw Baudelaire’s lines before him again; at the very top it said
Au lecteur.
Then he made an attempt in his poor French:

“It’s the devil who …” he began.

“It’s the devil who controls our movements,” Eva whispered. “In all that is repulsive we find delight.
Chaque jour
… Each day we sink deeper into hell. And we move through the shadows and the stench without fear.”

He nodded.

“About like that.”

There was flickering up by the ceiling, and then the light in one of the glass globes went out.

“Which poem did the lines on the postcard come from?” said Eva.

“It was taken from a long exposition about necrophilia, a detailed description of a man’s longing to have sex with the corpse of a woman.”

“What was it called?”

“‘The Martyr.’
Une Martyre, dessin d’un Maître inconnu
, drawing of an unknown master, just as the girl said.
Un cadaver sans tête épanche, comme un fleuve
, a headless corpse whose blood runs down onto fabric that drinks with the thirst of a meadow, and so on and so on.”

He took a breath. “Shall I take the postcard?”

“Not yet.”

A gust of wind tore at the willows outside the mausoleum. Another of the lights seemed to have become tired; it ticked with a snapping sound.

“T
he martyr,” Eva mumbled to herself. “Maybe he means Malraux.”

“A martyr for his country,” Don said, “sure. Or maybe he’s referring to himself, that he, the man in the mine, was martyred, and endured sorrow and loss for his French second lieutenant. That that was what made him take his own life.”

Eva had sunk down with her head in her hands. Don was going to ask if something was wrong, but maybe she had just been sitting and thinking, because she said, “How did the poem go, word for word?”

“Do you want it in Swedish?”

She shrugged.

Don closed his eyes and recited from memory:

When he opened his eyes, he saw that the attorney was looking at him, puzzled.

“Did you say: ‘in braids that have become stiff: tell me, has he kissed your cold teeth in farewell?’”

“That’s how it was translated.”

“Sounds strange.”

“Maybe you have to be strange to translate Baudelaire the right way,” said Don.

She sat thoughtfully, holding the postcard up to the light. Whispered through the words again.

“
Les suprêmes adieux
. Kissed your cold teeth in farewell. So … how did the end go in the original text?”

“The original text?”

“How does the poem sound in French?” asked Eva.

“Do you really want to hear it?”

“If you stop trying to do French
r
’s.”

Don closed his eyes and found his way back to the supervisor and the humming computers of the research room. Then he began to read from the image in his photographic memory:

Dis-moi, tête effrayante, a-t-il sur tes dents froides

Collé les suprêmes adieux?

It was quiet. Then:
“Collé les suprêmes adieux?”

Don nodded.

“Nothing about a kiss?
Une bise, un bisou, une baiser
?” He shook his head.

“
Coller
—it’s really more like ‘glue,’” said Eva. “Those last lines literally mean ‘glued his final good-bye to your cold teeth,’ or maybe, ‘to your cold mouth.’ What could the man in the mine have wanted to glue to his beloved’s mouth?”

Don looked up at her, questioningly, as she stood up.

“Could it be that …”

“You don’t think …”

“… that the lip print on the postcard was made
after
Malraux’s death, when he had already been interred? Maybe the man in the mine opened the niche and then sealed it again? In that case, what else could he have wanted to hide with his lover down there?”

Don clawed at his hair.

“I think you should go out to the taxi and ask if he has any tools,” said Eva.

*

B
y the time Don had finally managed to make his way back out to the gates, his boots were covered in mud.

The taxi was dark, and he thought, a bit relieved, that the driver had probably fallen asleep. But then the headlights came on and the sudden wave of light blinded Don. He raised his hand to his eyes and had to grope his way forward in order to knock on the driver’s window.

The window was rolled down: “And your friend?”

“She’s still there,” said Don. Spoke loudly to be heard above the rain.

“You know what time it is? I’ve been sitting here waiting for almost an hour.”

“Yes, we …”

“Have you seen the dead?”

“They are where they are.”

The driver moved his lips, but his words were drowned out by the downpour. Don continued as loudly as he could:

“It’s just that … we need to borrow some tools.”

For an instant he wondered whether the man had heard the question, but then a sparse row of teeth appeared again from inside the car.

“You can rent some,” said the driver, looking at him with eyes heavy from liquor. “For three hundred euros you can take what you want from the trunk.”

Don wondered whether he could make up some excuse to tell Eva, but then he took out Hex’s roll of bills and started counting them under the umbrella.

“Two hundred fifty,” he said.

“Three hundred if you’re going to dig around in the cemetery. And another three hundred if you want me to wait.”

A bluish red tongue moved quickly over his row of teeth.

Don walked a short distance away, swore to himself, and counted once more through what he had.

“Three hundred for everything,” he said when he came back, looking down at the taxi window again.

The driver took the crumpled bills from his hand and then bent forward and opened the trunk from inside the car.

When Don turned around to go have a look, he heard one last croaking yell. He looked back and saw a hand stretching out through the window with a small business card. Apparently he was a good customer. When he had taken it, the driver immediately rolled up the window, presumably to retain the dry warmth of the car’s interior.

U
nder the spare tire in the trunk there was a wrapped-up bundle of big chisels, which Don tucked into his waistband. After some rummaging, he also managed to find a black rubber flashlight whose bulb was nearly burned out.

It went out several times on the way back through the cemetery, and when it did work it emitted an orange-red glow that only reached a few yards in front of him.

W
hen he approached the entry to the mausoleum, he could see that Eva had managed to move the wooden hatch away from the lower level on her own. The stairs were visible again, and the smell from down there had already started to come back.

“
A groyse shand,
a great shame,” Don mumbled as he walked up to her and held up the tools.

Then he chose a long chisel with a wooden shaft and aimed the flashlight at the top step.

“The dead should not be disturbed,” he said.

“I can go myself,” said Eva.

He could feel his chest tightening and took one more turn through
his shoulder bag to dig out two Tramadol. Then he saw Eva disappear down the stairs, and he realized that he didn’t have a choice.

T
he flashlight was truly bad. After a few seconds it went out, and he had to shake it to get the light to come back. He could see Eva squinting up at him in the orange-red beam of light. She was standing on the last step above the flood.

“So where is Malraux’s plaque?” she asked.

Don moved the light along the wall, a few yards across the brown water.

“Tué à l’ennemi,”
Eva whispered.

He extended the long chisel to her.

“Here you go.”

But it was only a meaningless gesture, because he knew very well that he was the one who would have to go down into the dirty sewer water. Don felt with the tip of his shoe for a first careful step under the surface and then the icy cold water ran in under the laces in his boot.

He pushed his foot down completely under the surface, and with a few more squelching noises his leg had sunk down to the knee.

“It’s probably not particularly deep,” Eva informed him from behind.

Don heard himself grunt out some sort of answer, and then he quickly moved all the way down the stairs.

The sludge covered him up to his waist, and he struggled with all his might not to breathe through his nose. At the same time, he was forced to hyperventilate to keep his body going.

He waded back along the long side of the staircase, and when he got up to Eva, he handed the black flashlight up to her.

“Maybe you can help me out and aim the light.”

An orange-red beam swept over the ceiling, down along the wall, and landed on number 1913 and the name Camille Malraux.

Don waded over to the plaque through the thick sludge and held the chisel up in both hands so that he wouldn’t drop it, now that the cold was making his arms shake. It felt as though something under the water was clinging to his legs, hanging there around his ankle like a slimy rope that was trying to hold him back.

“You never cease to amaze me, Don Titelman.”

Don didn’t know if he had just thought the words himself or whether he had really heard Eva’s voice, but now he was finally close enough to support himself against the plaques on the wall. Looked back toward the attorney, where she was crouching on the dry portion of the staircase.

After he had searched around Malraux’s plaque with his fingers, Don found a small opening that seemed promising. He drove the large chisel into it as far as he could, which was an inch or two. Still, he leaned backward with all his weight and tried to break it as quickly and as hard as he could.

A chip crunched loose from the concrete, and the splash was so big that he got water in his face.

“A bisel naches!”
Don swore.

But then he was forced to bend over, because he had happened to smell a powerful dose of the stench. In the wave of nausea, he heard a voice that sounded like Eva’s. He thought that it sounded as though she had said she was going to go get something. Don just had time to turn around and see her disappear up the stairs. His boots filled with the ice-cold sludge, his socks, inside his pants, all the way to his bare skin.

“Reboineh shel oilem …”

W
hen Eva finally came back, she showed Don her hand. It was holding a rough gray stone, which she stretched out as far as she could. He waded back to her and took it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come down here?”

The attorney chuckled, but then she held her hand to her mouth to avoid breathing in more than was necessary.

W
ith legs like immobile blocks of ice, Don tried to stagger back to Malraux’s plaque again. There wasn’t much time left before he wouldn’t be able to get anything else done.

He drove the long chisel into the crack and pounded its shaft with the stone. The handle broke on the second attempt, and after a while striking the stone against metal made his hand start to go numb.

Soon he couldn’t manage anymore, and he hoped that the chisel was far enough in to be able to withstand a hard blow from the side. He gathered momentum with his whole body and landed the blow so perfectly against the protruding shaft that he continued forward when the plaque suddenly turned and gave way.

Then Don gathered himself again and grasped the edge of the stone with his fingers and began to shift it completely out of its position.

When it finally came loose, the headstone was so heavy that he immediately lost his grip. With a dull clatter, it fell to rest under the surface of the water, just in front of his feet.

Don looked up again and saw that Eva had now directed the flashlight into the long, narrow sarcophagus. The light hit a pale yellow clump, which was covered in grayish black wisps. It took a second before he realized that what he was looking at was the crown of a skull.

“What now?” he asked Eva.

“Can’t you try to lift him out?”

“Gotenyu …”

“Just grab hold of his shoulders and pull.”

D
on clenched his teeth and looked into the burial compartment. Malraux lay on his back, with his feet turned inward.

He moved his hands carefully along the concrete walls of the sarcophagus
to avoid touching the corpse’s cheekbones and the remains of what had once been ears. He fumbled around, without being able to see what he was doing, and found something bony which he hoped was the Frenchman’s shoulder.

“Careful now,” Eva whispered.

Pulling only on one shoulder yielded no results. The corpse’s back seemed to have become stuck on the concrete. But when Don also got hold of the other shoulder and yanked, the skeleton came loose from the last bits of skin with a sound like a zipper being pulled down. It came out of the sarcophagus so rapidly that it was only by pure reflex that Don managed to catch the back of the skull in his right hand to stop the skeleton from sliding out.