Europa Blues Read Free Page A

of conscience. The guard had glared suspiciously at his identical, albeit slightly larger frame. Lying about such a thing in the house of God … He had wandered around inside the cathedral for an utterly peaceful thirty minutes after that, drinking in Donatello, Michelangelo, Pinturicchio, Bernini, Pisano. When he came back out again, the children had been sitting calmly on the cathedral steps, slurping Italian gelati. Not even Anja, slurping worse than the children, had seemed particularly annoyed.
    He had even switched his mobile phone off.
    But sitting there now beneath the blue-and-white parasol, trying to remember how he had been planning to divide five watermelons between seven people of varying sizes, his thoughts turned to his Uncle Pertti. Thoughts of gratitude. And also of guilt.
    He had completely forgotten the man was still alive. And now he wasn’t.
    Strictly speaking, Uncle Pertti had been his mother’s uncle, and during his childhood the legend of him had never been far away. The hero from the Winter War. The doctor who became one of the greats in Mannerheim’s army.
    Söderstedt himself had no siblings – that was presumably why he and his only-child wife had five children together – and his side of the family was microscopic. His parents, themselves both only children, were long since dead, and he had no other relatives. As a result, there had been no other heir.
    Arto Söderstedt fumbled with his knife and thought: five divided by seven, hmm, that’s 0.714 of a watermelon each, assuming everyone gets an equal amount, but if they went by bodyweight instead …
    He paused, glancing at his big, shadow-drenched family which, in turn and increasingly grumblingly, was looking at his passive knife. Were they really worthy heirs to Pertti Lindrot, the great hero of the Winter War, victor at Suomussalmi; one of the architects of the famous motti tactic, used to crack the Red Army’s road-bound troops by splitting them into smaller units as they passed through forests, surrounding them and defeating them?
    ‘Just cut it into pieces,’ his second oldest daughter Linda said impatiently.
    Arto Söderstedt looked at her, offended. He would certainly never work so sloppily. No, no. Arto was sixty-five kilos, Anja roughly the same; Mikaela weighed forty and Linda thirty-five, Peter too; Stefan weighed twenty-five and little Lina twenty. Two hundred and eighty-five kilos in total. Of that, twenty-three per cent – sixty-five divided by two hundred and eighty-five – should go to each of the parents. And twenty-three percent of five watermelons was …
    ‘Just cut it into pieces,’ little Lina echoed.
    … was 1.5 watermelons. More than one whole melon for each of the parents. Was that really how he had envisaged it?
    If that was the case, there would be only 0.35 of a watermelon for little Lina, and that didn’t seem fair.
    Fair.
    Was it fair that he, a man who had just gone up to his eyeballs in debt to buy a big family car, suddenly found that the whole thing had been paid off and that he had so much left over that he could, immediately and without the family’s knowledge, go online and rent a house in Tuscany for two months?
    No, it wasn’t especially fair.
    But what was fair in life?
    Certainly not 0.35 of a watermelon for the little one, he thought with sudden decisiveness, cutting the melon into pieces and dividing them fairly between the various members of his enormous family.
    More than a million. Who could have known that old Uncle Pertti, whose very existence he had forgotten, was sitting on such riches? With the money came memories, though Arto Söderstedt could really only remember him as a stinking mouth and a handful of half-rotten teeth. A hero who had let himself go, but whose heroic halo always shone brightly. As though he had the
right
to let himself go, that was how he understood his parents’ attitude. He had always had the impression that it had been his parents, Pertti’s last living