Part 26 (1/2)

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.