Open Grave: A Mystery Read online

  Bertram von Ohler was somewhat concerned. His daughter was actually scientifically educated, a medical doctor, but still firm in the intellectually lightweight, stupid theory of astrology. It didn’t fit together.

  She was a lesbian besides—a pure defense measure, she asserted, in this era of male violence—and for the past ten years living together with a nurse with Finnish background. A woman of whom Bertram disapproved. Maybe it was the Finnish accent. Liisa Lehtonen had been a successful competitive shooter and won medals at a number of international competitions.

  If anything could be associated with violence it must be firearms, the professor asserted, but according to his daughter this was solely about mental balance and psychic energy. Liisa was a Virgo.

  But despite the astrology, her sometimes meddlesome lifestyle advice, which might concern diet, exercise, wine drinking, open window at night, or basically anything at all, and as the cherry on the cake Liisa with accent and gun cabinet, and thereby self-imposed childlessness—despite all this Bertram von Ohler loved his daughter.

  She was the youngest of the siblings and therefore also the one who fared the worst due to their mother’s capricious moods and increasing misanthropy. The two sons, ten and thirteen years older, had moved away from home as soon as possible and thereby avoided the worst tumult.

  The oldest was christened Abraham, as a concession to his mother. He had studied in Lund and remained there, even adopted a Scandian accent.

  Carl, named after his grandfather, moved into a student apartment belonging to the Kalmar student association. By tradition the family was registered there. Bertram’s great-great-grandfather originated from a family of pharmacists in Kalmar.

  Like his brother Carl studied medicine and after several turns at various Swedish hospitals ended up in California, where he was now a moderately successful researcher in diabetes. According to his father a completely worthless field, an opinion he never uttered to anyone however.

  He was proud of his children, happily bragged about them, as fathers do, remembered their birthdays, likewise the wives’ and grandchildren’s. Abraham had three children and Carl two. When Liisa’s birthday was, however, he had no idea.

  He had actually never needed to send money to his children after they left home, except for the costs for university studies. They never talked about money at all. It was there, had always been there. Since the seventeenth century.

  The progenitor of the Swedish part of the Ohler family, originally from Hannover, had been recruited by Axel Oxenstierna to build up the administration of the Royal Mint. Apparently a lucrative occupation, because already after a decade Heinrich Ohler had built up a considerable fortune. That Queen Kristina contributed a few estates on Öland and right outside Västervik did not make circumstances worse.

  From that soil the Ohler family tree sprouted, where one branch became the “pharmacists/doctors.” There was also a minister branch, an officer branch, and an agricultural branch.

  Just as happily as Bertram talked about his children and grandchildren, he could also, not without pride, tell the story of poor Heinrich, who came to Stockholm with an empty hand. In the other hand he had a knapsack.

  * * *

  In his bed, whose headboard was war booty from Bratislava, the professor argued with selected representatives on the extensive tree and came to the conclusion that the Nobel Prize outshone all else that had been presented to the family: being raised to nobility, loads of medals and distinctions, and through the centuries membership in a number of learned societies.

  A conclusion even his father Carl would have endorsed—that was the professor’s final, triumphant thought before he fell asleep at four o’clock in the morning.

  Two

  The voice was not reminiscent of anything he had heard before, sharp and aggressive but at the same time anxious.

  It was Swedish, with no obvious dialect or accent—he was always attentive to that sort of thing—but still a voice foreign to the extent that when he told his daughter about the episode a few hours later, he hesitated when she asked if it was a foreigner.

  “In a way,” he said. “Maybe it was an immigrant, someone who has lived here a long time.”

  “Maybe someone who was disguising their voice,” his daughter suggested, “someone you know.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “Have you called the police?”

  Bertram von Ohler laughed, even though he’d had that thought himself, because half-awake in the early morning hours he had experienced the call as an actual threat, just as real as if someone stood in front of him with a weapon raised to strike.

  “It’s the sort of thing you have to expect.”

  “But what did he say exactly, is there something you’ve missed?”

  Misunderstood, he realized that his daughter meant.

  “No, he said he would see to it that I ‘would never receive the prize,’ and then he muttered some vulgarities.”

  “What were they?”

  “You don’t want to hear that.”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Abusive language never deserves to be repeated. Besides, it didn’t mean anything.”

  The fact was that what he called abusive language was what perplexed him the most, but there was no reason to drag his daughter into that.

  He regretted mentioning the episode to her at all, and tried to guide the conversation to something else, said that Agnes showed up, even though she was supposed to be off. She had obviously congratulated him, but in that reserved way that only a person from a Roslag island can do, as if a Nobel Prize did not mean all that much, whether in Söderboda or in Norrboda.

  No, she had viewed the matter purely professionally. The house must be, if not decontaminated, then gone through anyway and more thoroughly than what Ohler had allowed until now. She had threatened to bring in her sister Greta to help out.

  “Then I gave her free rein, just so she doesn’t involve that ghost under any circumstances.”

  Birgitta laughed heartily and the professor understood that for the moment he had diverted the danger, but to be really certain he continued.

  “Agnes will order new curtains in the drawing room and the library and ‘polish’ all the floors, as she says. Then it will be the silver’s turn.”

  “You’re lucky to have her.”

  “Of course,” said the professor.

  “That was lovely of you, those statements you made on TV. But you must be sure to use a comb, your hair was standing straight up.”

  “It was windy.”

  “But why didn’t you go inside the house?”

  “Agnes phoned and forbade me from letting anyone in. If she hadn’t been on Gräsö visiting her sister she would have come here and organized the world press.”

  He was rewarded with another laugh. He felt a need to keep his daughter in a good mood, perhaps as apology for not telling the whole truth about the telephone call at dawn.

  “But it was beautifully expressed, that part that you weren’t alone.”

  I was alone, he thought.

  “Do you wonder what Mother would have said?”

  That was a question that the professor found no reason to speculate about.

  “Do you ever miss her?”

  “No.”

  Perhaps he ought to have said something beautiful here too, even if it wasn’t true? He knew that his daughter was of two minds about her mother.

  “Do you suppose they’re excited here at work?” she continued, apparently unperturbed by her father’s abrupt responses. “Angerman called from Milan to congratulate, but I think he was mostly thinking about the company, because he said something to the effect that it was good I kept my maiden name, that it could benefit us in contact with customers, especially in the U.S. He invited me to go along to Boston next week.”

  “Pill-rollers,” said the professor.

  “If they were even that,” said Birgitta with a sigh.

  Under normal c
ircumstances he would have asked what she meant, but he was bothered by his daughter’s unnecessary talk about Dagmar.

  He had not thought about Dagmar at all, not even on a day like this one. During the night’s review of the family tree she did not even show up in his thoughts. She was as if erased; never before had he experienced that so clearly.

  “I’m not going to invite any of her relatives,” he said unexpectedly vehemently.

  “But Daddy! Not even Dorothy?”

  He knew that his daughter kept in contact with Dorothy Wilkins, widow of Dagmar’s brother Henrik, whom he despised but never commented on. He was convinced that Dorothy maintained contact with his daughter solely to keep herself informed about the Ohler clan, primarily the patriarch himself. Now as before he chose to pass over her with silence.

  Birgitta sighed.

  “She’s old,” she said.

  “She stays alive just to get to see me die,” he mumbled. “There is something vulture-like about her.”

  “That’s not true!” his daughter countered. “You can be generous now.”

  I’ll never invite her, he thought, increasingly embittered, and he realized that he had to end the conversation before it got out of hand completely.

  Dorothy was otherwise the one who had followed him the longest of all, from his student days in the 1940s. She was the daughter of one of his father’s friends from youth, who’d come from England to Uppsala in May of 1945, right after the war ended. Perhaps her father had the idea of marrying off his daughter to the young and promising Bertram. The project had failed because no interest ever arose—from him in any event.

  Dorothy went back to England but returned later and was introduced to Dagmar’s brother. They took a liking to each other and she and Henrik got married after only a few months.

  Early a widow and childless she had visited all the family gatherings in the Ohler house as long as Dagmar was alive but after that more and more seldom. Now it must have been ten years since she last visited the house.

  Should he let her return now? Never! Not even a Nobel Prize and a large portion of generosity could get him to change his attitude.

  “No, now I have to rest a little,” he said, an argument his daughter could not oppose, as she often insisted that he ought to take it easier. “I’m going to meet some journalists this afternoon. I have arranged it so there is only one meeting with the press today.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “That’s not at all necessary. I have Agnes. She’s as good as three people. Besides, the meetings will take place at the hospital. I wanted it that way.”

  When they ended the conversation he thought about whether he had been too brusque toward his daughter. She meant so well and was actually the only one, besides Agnes, who seriously cared about how he was doing. His sons showed a formal interest, called now and then and questioned him about the “situation,” perhaps told some piece of news from work or family life, that was all. They never discussed any scientific questions or asked for advice. They probably considered his knowhow antiquated. No filial affection was ever expressed by either Abraham or Carl, not even indirectly. Bertram was not surprised, and not particularly distressed. It had always been that way in the Ohler family.

  He himself had never been molly-coddled by his parents, even though he was their only child. On the contrary. His father, Carl, prescribed corporal punishment, and his mother, Lydia, carried it out, when it was considered necessary to shape Bertram into a respectable son and citizen. “Respectable” was one of his father’s favorite words; “proper” another.

  Bertram was not bitter about this after the fact. Those were the times. They didn’t know better. When he became a father himself other upbringing methods had replaced corporal punishment. For that reason he had never hit his children.

  * * *

  The sun was shining in through the windows that faced southeast and revealed that the study belonged to an old man. The piles of books and folders, the old kind in a depressing dirty shade of brown that cluttered up a few side tables, had something tragically forgotten about them. The glass of the bookcases was not smeared even by the handles, no one had consulted any medical works for a long time. Only the flies marched back and forth across the frosted glass leaving their tracks.

  A stuffed, shabby kite hawk—a gift from his colleagues at the clinic on his sixtieth birthday—hung its head tiredly and its eyes had lost their former luster. Only after many years did he understand the slightly malicious gibe in giving him that particular kind of bird, but he let it sit there on its perch above the liquor cabinet, which these days contained only a lonely bottle of port wine and an almost empty bottle of cognac.

  Should he have his old friend Hjalmar take a look at the kite? Then he remembered that he had seen the obituary. The taxidermist was gone. There was a time when they used to meet and discuss specimens.

  He decided to draw the curtains but instead went around the desk, sat down on a neglected visitor’s chair—God knows by whom, or when, it was last used—and observed the room from a different perspective. He studied the bird, which did not look any more spry from that direction.

  A Nobel Prize winner’s study, where during an entire professional career he had honed his theories, despaired and suddenly become optimistic, wandered around, slapped his palm on the desk in a moment of brilliant clear-sightedness, or touched his head when he realized a chain of thought had broken.

  He could imagine it that way. He visualized the study, the whole house, as a future museum. He would always be there, if not physically then at least through the objects, in the way they were arranged. The ingenuity, originality, and industry would shine, but in gentle colors. An Ohler did not need to shout. It was enough to point to all the branches on the framed, glass-covered family tree that his father Carl had made in the forties: thought, governing, the Word, in the form of members of Parliament, officials, and ministers; natural science, the systemization the pharmacists and doctors were responsible for—a Julius von Ohler was helpful to Linnaeus; the prosperity and improvement of agriculture were the noblemen’s contribution—a Gustaf von Ohler was particularly active in the development of Swedish plant cultivation. And to defend this construction there were the warrior Ohlers who fought at Narva as well as in Copenhagen and in the Finnish archipelago.

  They were all hanging like lightly curled leaves in an extensive crown. He himself was there in the upper right-hand corner of the chart. When the chart was made he was a blank page; now he was a prize winner.

  The family tree spoke for itself. Agnes would only need to clean the glass and dust off the frame. But wasn’t it hanging a little crooked?

  She would have to clean up in general too, he continued his reflections, but not too meticulously, it could be a little messy, right here in the study he could meet the horde of journalists that would stream in. He could have a tray brought in with a tea cup, a teapot, and a plate of crackers, set it on the serving table, a neat little piece of furniture that some relative had dragged home from China, feign activity, to show that there isn’t time enough to leave the study, for even in the autumn of his old age, when his workmates were either buried or subjected to nursing care, Bertram von Ohler is still active.

  He smiled to himself at his childish vanity. Wasn’t the Nobel Prize good enough in itself, so why this mental theater?

  Three

  Associate Professor Johansson’s house was equipped with a four-meter-high glassed-in tower, where he cultivated his sun-loving plants. In the winter the thermostat made sure that the temperature was favorable for Mediterranean flora, around twelve degrees Celsius. He was particularly proud of a magnificent olive tree.

  From his tower he had a good overview of the neighbors. Partly hidden behind foliage he could observe the peaceful life on the block.

  He often had his morning coffee up there, read the newspaper, and puttered. So too this morning. The front page of Upsala Nya Tidning was naturally taken up by
the news about the prize.

  The associate professor lived at number seven and Professor von Ohler at number three. Sandwiched between these two scientists was a true humanist, Torben Bunde, literary scholar and writer, who from time to time entertained Uppsala residents with newspaper articles. It might be mental bric-a-brac about all sorts of questions—why the bells in Vaksala Church were tuned in minor, while those in Holy Trinity were tuned in major—or else flattering pieces appeared about some representative from the local rural gentry who happened to own a painting whose signature Torben Bunde found intriguing, or was simply of interest because Bunde played bridge in the house.

  But principally his contribution consisted of very seriously intended reviews of books, preferably works that few had heard of and even fewer read.

  It was a mystery to the readers that the editors let these screeds be published year after year. There were those who maintained that it was a conscious tactic. Through publication the image of the literary scholar as a fool, a charlatan, was reinforced, and the intent was thus that people should be amused at his expense. The section was called “Culture and Entertainment” after all; the literary scholar could very well be put in the latter category.

  The price was high, however; those who were not initiated in the intricate academic game in the city, such as souls incorporated into the city from Östervåla or Lycksele, observed it all with wonder.

  Associate Professor Johansson was convinced that Bunde in number five was now wrestling with considerable problems. He had seen him retrieve the newspaper from the mailbox by the street and immediately unfold it, and then remain standing as if paralyzed. Obviously it was there and then the news reached him that his neighbor had been presented with the world’s most prestigious scientific prize.

  How would Bunde react? Send flowers, like so many had done thus far—too expensive; visit his neighbor—an absurd idea, because it had never happened before; call—improbable, as Bunde was hard of hearing; write an article in homage—less probable, as despite unlimited self-confidence he surely had the feeling that he was not conversant in the subject; write a scathing article where he went on the attack against the selection of prize winners—more likely, even though he was no more conversant in that subject.