Nothing prepares you for the head-breaking coldness of the air in Sweden, especially after nine hours sitting in an airplane. You can feel it slamming directly down from the Arctic, making your eyes water and your nose run and your ears tingle so much that they hurt.
Nothing prepares you for the gloom either, even at two o'clock in the afternoon, but then Stockholm is even farther north than Moscow, and by late September winter is already setting in.
I stood in line for a Volvo taxi and it drove me due south on E4 to the city center. It was so hot in the taxi that I had to unbutton my coat, and the taxi driver reeked of cigarettes. Outside, I could see nothing but snow-covered fields, and pine forests, with only an occasional light shining through the branches. You have to wonder to yourself: who would want to live out here, so far from civilization, in the gathering darkness of a Scandinavian winter?
At last, however, we reached the suburbs. A few clusters of small cement-colored houses at first, and then brightly lit apartment blocks and shopping malls. Then we arrived at the city center, with its busy overpasses and crowded squares and its streets of tall, narrow, eighteenth-century houses.
“This is Old Town,” the taxi driver told me, as we drove around a square with a bronze fountain in the center. He pointed across
a dark stretch of glittering water, to a tall brick building with a lanternlike tower. “That is city hall. That is where they talk all elkshit.” He gave a cigarette-thickened laugh, and turned around to wink at me.
We drove along Skeppsbron, the wide street overlooking the harbor. I could see three-masted sailing ships moored beside the dock, as well as yachts and motor launches. In the near distance, beyond the harbor, there was another island, with lights twinkling. Only a faint reddish streak remained in the sky to remind me that it was still daytime. I don't think I had ever felt so far away from home.
The taxi driver did a U-turn and pulled up outside an ocher-colored five-story building with an arched doorway and a decorative bay window.
“Three hundred forty-five kroner,” he announced. “You want sex club?”
I tugged four hundred-kroner bills out of my wallet and handed them over. “It's okay, thanks.”
“Chat Noir club, Birger Jarlsgatan. Very good live genuine sex.”
“Really, no thanks.”
“You want gay club?”
“No thanks. Just keep the change, okay?”
“How about restaurant? Fem SmÃ¥ Hus, Nygatan. Very good reindeer with lingonberry sauce.”
I climbed out of the cab and approached the front door of No. 44. There were three worn-down steps and the door itself was solid ten-paneled oak, bleached by hundreds of years of sunshine and salt, with a black iron knocker in the shape of a grinning troll. There were five doorbells, with tarnished brass name plaques beside three of them, but the plaque for the second floor, where the Westerlunds lived, was engraved with the name b. olofsson. Maybe the Westerlunds had never bothered to change it.
I pushed the button and waited. For some reason the taxi driver
hadn't driven away, but was still sitting in his cab, with the engine running, watching me. I pushed the button again.
Now I knew why Kate had given me the keys. It may have been dark, but it was only 3:35 in the afternoon, and the Westerlunds must have all been at work, or at school. I took the two keys out of my coat pocket, chose the larger one, and let myself in.
Inside, the hallway was gloomy and cold, with a flagstone floor. I managed to find a light switch, and it illuminated a bright clear-glass lantern hanging from the ceiling. On one side of the hallway stood a side table, with a vase of cream silk roses on it, and a brass letter-rack. On the other side hung a gold-framed mirror, blotchy with age like the surface of a stagnant pond, with a reflection of me in it, looking pale and tired and unsure of myself.
There was a
smell
, too, quite unlike New York. A smell of very old building and coffee and something that might have been cheese.
At the far end of the hallway I could make out a shadowy spiral staircase, with stone steps, leading upward. I picked up my bag and was just about to climb up to the second floor when there was a sharp knocking at the front door. I put down my bag and opened the door.
It was the taxi driver, and he was smoking.
“Yes?” I asked him.
Smoke streamed out of his nostrils. “You stay in this house?”
“That's the idea, yes. And, listen, I don't want to know about sex clubs or gay clubs or restaurants or any other tourist attractions, thank you.”
“You know what happen in this house?”
“No, I don't know what happened in this house, and to tell you the truth I don't care. Now, please, I'm very tired and I just want to get my bag upstairs.”
“If you know what happen in this house, you stay in hotel. I know good hotel. Amaranten, on Kungsholmsgatan. I fix you best room, cheap.”
“Please, no thank you,” I told him. “Now, go away, will you?”
The taxi driver was about to say something else, but then he shrugged, and walked back toward his cab. Halfway across the sidewalk, however, he stopped, and turned around. “I give you warning, remember that!”
“Okay, okay. You give me warning. Now, good-bye, already.”
He shook his head one more time, climbed into his taxi and drove away. Jesus. And I used to think that New York taxi drivers were persistent.
I closed the front door, picked up my bag yet again, and climbed up the spiral staircase. Halfway up to the second floor, the timer on the lights clicked off, and I was left in total darkness. I shuffled my way up the next few steps, keeping my left shoulder against the wall, and even then I took one too many steps when I reached the top, and stumbled forward into the darkness, colliding with another side table, and knocking something metallic onto the floor. It sounded like a vase.
Putting down my bag, I groped around the walls until I found a light switch. Another lantern showed me that I was standing on a long landing, with a narrow mustard-colored rug running along it. I had knocked over a tall copper jug, so that dried stalks of honesty had scattered across the floor. I picked them all up and rearranged them as artistically as I could. Any broken bits and pieces I brushed up into my hand and dropped them inside the jug.
At the end of the landing there was a wide black-painted door. I approached it, and took out my second key. The door unlocked almost silently, and I pushed it open. Inside the hallway, there was a table lamp with a green and yellow glass shade, which had obviously been left on for my benefit.
I carried my bag inside. Kate had been right. This apartment was vast, and awe-inspiring. The hall alone was nearly half the size of my living room at St. Luke's Place, with a window that looked out over the harbor, and a huge faded tapestry hanging on
the wall, with an ocean scene of galleons and sea monsters and scudding clouds.
To the right of the hallway, a long corridor led to a wide pair of double doors, glazed with small octagonal panels of yellowish glass, and then farther, to seven or eight more doors.
The apartment was warm, but very stuffy, and silent. I took off my overcoat and hung it over the back of a carved wooden chair. Kate had promised that she would arrive not long after me, and she had told me that I should make myself at home, but all the same I couldn't help feeling as if I were trespassing. A silver clock chimed a quarter of four, with a very fussy, elaborate melody.
I opened the double doors and stepped into the living room. Three table lamps had been left on in here, too, and I began to feel a little more welcome. The living room was at least forty feet long, with a bay window and two side windows, and a huge fireplace with a stone surround. It was furnished with three large couches, in pale Scandinavian oak, all of them upholstered in blue and gold, as if they had once belonged to some minor Swedish royalty. Between two of the couches stood a walnut table with a checkered top and chess pieces on it, and it looked as if the players were coming close to the end of their game. I picked up the red bishop and, strangely, he had his hand held over his eyes, as if he were grieving, or didn't want to look at me.
I wandered around the apartment for a while, unsure of what I should do, cautiously opening doors and peering inside. The first door opened into a cloakroom, with at least a dozen coats and padded jackets in it, including three long black furs and dozens of different walking sticks and two pairs of snowshoes. The next door led into a broom closet, smelling of furniture polish. Then I discovered a restroom, with a mahogany-seated toilet that truly deserved to be called a throne, and a sepia stained glass window. The cistern was gurgling softly to itself, and the faucet was dripping.
Four doors along the corridor I found the kitchen, which was
tiled floor to ceiling with blue and white ceramic tiles. Against the left-hand wall stood a stainless-steel range with a polished brass handrail, like a Central Pacific locomotive, and almost the same size. Scores of ladles and sieves and shiny brass saucepans hung from the ceiling, and on the massive oak hutch there was a gathering of antique kitchen gadgets whose purpose I couldn't even guess at.
I picked up one of the gadgets, which looked like a French press, except that it had a double-jointed brass handle attached to it. I tried pumping the handle up and down to see what it was supposed to do. It made a sharp squeaking noise, but I still couldn't work out what it was for. Slicing coleslaw? Churning yogurt? But as I pumped it faster and faster I thought I heard somebody crying. I stopped, and listened. Silence, for a moment, but then I heard it again. A child's voice. A young girl's, very high, very distressed.
I carefully put the gadget down, and went to the kitchen door. I could hear a child talking and sobbing at the same time, although I couldn't understand what she was saying. It sounded as if she were down at the far end of the corridor, where one of the doors was slightly ajar, and I could see a dim light flickering, like the light from a candle.
I thought: go easy now, dude. If there's a young girl in this apartment, you need to be extremely careful, especially if she's hysterical.
I walked along the corridor until I reached the room where the crying had been coming from. I knocked, and called out, “Hello? My name's Gideon! I was invited to spend the week with your parents! Is everything okay?”
I waited, but the crying had stopped now, and there was no answer. I knocked again. “Is everything all right in there? I thought I heard somebody crying.”
Still no answer. The poor girl probably didn't understand a word I was saying, and was sitting there terrified. Very slowly, I
pushed open the door, and said, “It's okay . . . I'm a friend of your parents. I won't hurt you, honestly.”
Inside the room there was an old-fashioned wooden bed with a high headboard and a multicolored patchwork quilt. Beside it was a wooden chest with heaps of dolls sitting on top of it, most of them homemade rag dolls with mad grinning faces. A single candle was flickering in a glass bowl, almost down to the end of its wick.
A royal blue dressing gown had been thrown across the end of the bed, but there was no sign of its owner, nor anybody else. No crying girl. In fact, no girl at all.
I ducked down sideways and looked under the bed. Nobody. Then I went across to the painted wooden clothes closet. I hesitated for a moment or two, and then opened it. Nobody in there either.
If there
had
been a crying girl in here, she must have climbed out of the window. I went to look out. The window was bolted top and bottom, from the inside, and the window ledge outside was only a couple of inches wide, and covered in rotten lead. Apart from that, it was a sheer drop down to a very narrow alleyway, with nothing at all that anybody could have clung onto. Thirty feet below I could see people jostling their way up and down the alleyway with woolly hats on, and scarves wound round their necks. It was dark out there, and growing colder all the time.
I blew out the candle before I left the bedroom. Then I went back to the living room. I might as well watch some TV before Kate showed up. Maybe I could catch up with some Swedish news, and even practice a few words of the language. I had bought a Swedish phrasebook at Newark airport, and tried to familiarize myself with “good morning” and “good evening” and “where can I get beaten with birch twigs?” but I had discovered from my first few minutes on Swedish soil that the Swedes don't pronounce their language anything like they spell it. I had said
“talar du engelska?”
to the female customs officer at Arlanda and she had said, coldly, “Sorry, sir, I do not speak Greek.”
I went back to the kitchen to see if I could find myself a beer. I was sure that the Westerlunds wouldn't begrudge me one bottle of Pripps. There was a huge old-fashioned Electrolux fridge in the corner of the kitchen, but when I opened it, I found that it was completely empty. Not even a bottle of mineral water.
I checked my watch. Maybe I should venture out and find myself a bar. But then Kate should be here at any moment, and I didn't really relish the idea of drinking in an unfamiliar city on my own, like some lonely salesman.
It seemed strange, though, that the Westerlunds should have nothing in their refrigerator at all. Even if you eat in restaurants every single night of the week, you always have
something
in the refrigerator, even if it's nothing more than a few shriveled tomatoes and a triangle of moldy Kraft cheese.
I settled for a mug of water, from the kitchen faucet. It was very cold and very clear, and made my teeth ache. Then I went back into the living room.
As soon as I walked through the door, I stopped dead. Two young girls were sitting at the walnut table, playing chess together.
Both girls were blonde, although one of them had slightly darker hair than the other. One was about eleven years old, I would have guessed, and the other was maybe nine. The older one wore jeans and a scarlet cable-knit sweater. The younger one was wearing a dark blue woolen dress, and dark blue knitted leggings.