A summer with Kim Novak Read Free

I hated sports, and I had no idea how all the football players fitted on the pitch each break; there must have been at least fifty of them. But perhaps only a score of the best players actually kicked the ball, leaving the others to stand around and shout and get as grimy as possible. I don’t know. I never watched them play. I was on the girls’ side, as I said. My choice of location wasn’t going to impress anyone, but I tried to convince myself that there were more important things in life.
    And I wasn’t alone. Benny was there, along with Snukke, Balthazar Lindblom, Veikko, Arse-Enok, and a few others.
    And Edmund.
    After my father had suggested that we might spend the summer together, I realized I didn’t actually know anything about him.
    I knew what everyone knew: his father read girlie mags, and he was born with six toes on each foot.
    Otherwise, he was a blank page. He was tall and hefty. His glasses always seemed to be missing a lens or a side piece. We’d only been in the same class this past year, and there were rumours that he had a great big model train set and a great big collection of Wild West magazines, but I didn’t know if either was true.
    His father was also a screw; that was the connection. He and my father had been working together for the past year, and that’s probably how they had come to discuss their plans for the summer, and one thing must have led to another.
    I didn’t exactly have any commitments—except perhaps with Benny, who was out of the picture the whole summer anyway—so after circling each other warily over the course of a few breaktimes, I tested the waters.
    ‘Hi, Edmund,’ I said.
    ‘Hi,’ said Edmund.
    We were standing by the bike racks under the corrugated metal roof, casually kicking gravel at the girls’ bikes.
    ‘My dad mentioned something,’ I said.
    ‘I heard,’ said Edmund.
    ‘Oh yeah?’ I said.
    ‘Yep,’ said Edmund.
    Then the bell rang. And that was it for a few days. It was a promising start.
    Gennesaret wasn’t the name of the lake. It was the name of a house by a lake called Möckeln. It’s still called Möckeln, incidentally.
    It was twenty-five kilometres from town and it took more than two hours to get there by bike, but only an hour and a half back. The journey times varied because of Kleva, a punishing hill that rose to 1 , 300 metres about halfway there.
    Möckeln—a large, almost circular brown lake—was surrounded by a number of villages, but it was dominated by forest-fringed beaches. Gennesaret sat in solitary splendour on a pine-clad point and was part of my mother’s inheritance. A two-storey tumbledown wooden shack with no comforts other than a roof over your head and fresh lake water ten metres away. The ice usually took the jetty out every winter, and there was an outboard motor for the rowing boat that had lain in pieces in a shed since I was born.
    My dying mother wasn’t the sole owner of this house. There was an Aunt Rigmor who had inherited half of it, but she wasn’t of sound mind and therefore couldn’t lay claim to it.
    Rigmor’s tragic condition was the result of an accident that took place during one of the first summers of the war. The story had as firm a place in our family history as the Fall does in the Bible: she had collided with an elk; but what gave the story its mythological air was the fact that she was riding a bicycle at the time. Aunt Rigmor, that is, not the elk. She and a friend had been on a cycling holiday in Småland, and while freewheeling down one of the hills in the uplands she’d charged right into a magnificent twelve-pointer and then straight through the doors of the notorious Dingle asylum on the West Coast.
    Never to be discharged, it seemed. I had only seen pictures of her and she didn’t resemble Mum in the slightest. She looked more like a seal, actually, but with glasses and no moustache. Fitting for someone in Dingle.
    If my tragic aunt hadn’t been in the picture in the first