“But how can that be?” I asked. “How can it always be in the same direction? We’re spinning around, after all.”
“Yes…” Johannes sounded uncertain, a little hesitant to start with. “… but we’re spinning around our own axis. And whatever is in the north is always in the north. Although the important thing in this case is not how it gets to be that way, but how it actually is. If you can just identify the North Star you need never get lost on a starry night.”
I didn’t laugh. Normally I would have, because the likelihood of any of us running the risk of getting lost at any point during the rest of our lives was, as far as I could determine, negligible. But Johannes’s tone was so totally sincere that it felt as if the information he was giving me was extremely useful and worth remembering, and instead of laughing I nodded thoughtfully. Then we sat there in silence among the palm trees in the darkness. It was like a mild, still summer night. I felt young. My thoughts wandered here and there: from this feeling of youthfulness to the North Star to Majken to Siv to my family-and from my family to the novel I was working on, which was about a family not unlike the one I grew up in, and from there to something I’d been wondering about recently. And now I broke the silence to ask Johannes:
“What do you think happens to the things we write here that are politically incorrect or taboo? Do you think they’re destroyed?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Everything is kept and archived.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Partly because we live in a democracy, and freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of a democracy; without the freedom of expression it would collapse. Therefore it is unthinkable to destroy literary or artistic works because the content does not agree with the norms and values of society. So even the politically uncomfortable is taken care of and archived, presumably in some underground vault beneath the Royal Library in Stockholm. Partly because man is a collector, a fanatic when it comes to documentation, with a compulsion to preserve everything that can possibly be preserved for posterity. Life and existence have no value in themselves. We mean nothing; not even those who are needed mean anything. The only thing of any real value is what we produce. Or to put it more accurately: the fact that we do produce something-exactly what it is that we produce is actually of lesser importance, as long as it can be sold or archived. Or preferably both.”
What he said sounded convincing. But I wasn’t completely sure he was right; I wasn’t completely sure that works of art weren’t destroyed. However, I did think that we probably had to assume they were not destroyed, that we had to live as if we believed everything people created was permitted to exist, somewhere.
We stayed for a little while longer, until the air began to feel slightly damp and chilly. Then we got up and left the garden, emerging into the light of the Atrium Walkway. Johannes walked with me to elevator H.
“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow evening?” he asked.
I accepted. He kissed me softly on the cheek, and we said goodnight.
That night I dreamed of Jock. We were on the beach. It was autumn, and windy. The clouds were sailing across the sky like fluffy ships. Between them the sun stretched out its golden arms to us, glowing, dazzling, warming, suddenly disappearing behind a racing cloud ship, popping out again and just managing to lay its warm hands on my head before disappearing once more. The sea was roaring and hissing. We were running along the beach. I stopped. The wind nipped at my cheeks with ice-cold teeth, tugged at my hair. Jock was capering and dancing around me, barking and looking up at me with those brown eyes. He was happy, playful. I bent down, picked up a stick from the sand, shouted “Fetch!” and hurled it away from me. He barked and raced after it, picked it up and came back, dropped it at my feet, looked up at me, panted, snorted, ears pricked forward, tail wagging like mad. I patted him. “Good boy, Jock,” I said. “Good dog.” And I picked up the stick and threw it again. And Jock shot after it, the sand whirling up around his paws, his ears flapping in the wind, he picked it up, came back and dropped it at my feet, and I patted him and praised him again. And we did it again, and again, the same thing over and over again, hour after hour, while the sea roared, the clouds sailed by, and the sun, slowly sinking toward the horizon in the southwest, stained the clouds pink and the sky orange. That’s all it was, the dream was just Jock and me and the stick and the beach and the sea and the sky and time passing by, and that was all, there was nothing else. And that was happiness.
11
Johannes had cooked fish with saffron in a cream sauce, accompanied by crushed potatoes; I could already smell the aroma when I stepped out of the elevator, and all I had to do was follow it through the door into section F2 and down the hallway to his door, where the nameplate announced that Johannes Alby lived here.
I knocked. He opened the door. He had an apron knotted around his waist and a wooden fork in his hand. He kissed my cheek and said:
“Welcome-you look lovely! Dinner won’t be long. Have a seat while I finish up.”
I sat down at the table, which was already set for two: blue stoneware plates, glasses with a stem, blue napkins folded into triangles beside the plates, two candles in brass holders, a box of matches. A stone-grayish pink, about as big as a medium-size cell phone, and containing a white, cone-shaped fossil-lay next to one of the candle holders as a decoration. Johannes disappeared into the kitchen with his wooden fork; I could hear the sound of clattering and banging, and he was whistling and humming. I picked up the matches and lit the candles. Johannes came in with two placemats and a carafe of something that looked like white wine, but turned out to be grape juice. He smiled. “It’s ready now,” he said, placing the mats and the carafe on the table before disappearing and returning with a big frying pan, a saucepan and two ladles. Before he sat down opposite me, he switched off the overhead light.
And so we sat there, just the two of us, in the glow of the candles. The food was very good. I complimented him. We didn’t talk much while we were eating, just looked at each other from time to time; for some reason I was feeling shy, and it’s possible that he felt the same. At one point toward the end of the meal, when the fact that he was looking at me made me feel embarrassed, I looked down at the table and at the pink stone with the fossil.
“Where did you find that?” I asked.
“On a beach. On the south coast. Between Mossby and Abbekås, to be more precise.”
I put down my knife and fork, looked up at him. “When?”
“When? Er… let’s see… More or less exactly two years before I ended up in here. Just about five years ago. Why?”
“Because that’s my beach!” I said. “Well, when I say mine… I used to go there with… with my dog. At least two or three times a week. What were you doing there? We might have bumped into each other.”
He looked at me.
“Yes,” he said. “Indeed we might.”
Then he told me what had happened when he found the stone, and why he had kept it:
“It was autumn. I was working on a novel-probably my last-and I’d hit a block, and was on the point of chucking the whole thing. But to clear my head and avoid doing something too hasty, I borrowed a car from some friends and took a trip to the south coast; the sea is more open there than it is around Öresund, and I wanted to be by the open sea, I wanted to know that it was a long way to the next shore. So I walked there, along the beach, hour after hour, from Abbekås harbor to Mossbystrand and back again, several times. It was quite late in the autumn, so the twilight came early and it was steel blue, as the autumn twilight can be by the sea if it’s cloudy. Anyway, as I was plowing along through the sand and it was beginning to get dark, I was looking at the stones and shells and driftwood and all the garbage the sea had washed up. And that was when I caught sight of this stone. It was lying by the water’s edge. The fossil was chalk-white in the dusk.”