Ghost Music Read online

  Twelve

  Both girls were blonde, although one of them had slightly darker hair than the other. One was about eleven years old, I would have guessed, and the other was maybe nine. The older one wore jeans and a scarlet cable-knit sweater. The younger one was wearing a dark blue woolen dress, and dark blue knitted leggings.

  “Hi, there,” I said. They didn’t seem to hear me, so I walked across to them, and stood beside the table.

  “Hi, there. My name’s Gideon. I’ve come to stay for a few days.”

  Still they didn’t seem to hear me. They didn’t even look up, so I began to think that maybe they couldn’t see me either.

  Eventually, I said, “Which one of you is Felicia?”

  At last the younger one lifted her face and stared at me. She was very white, almost anemic, and her hair was cut in the straightest of pageboys. Her eyes were pale blue, but swollen and pink, so I guessed that she was the one who had been crying.

  “Me—I am Felicia.”

  “Okay . . . so this must be Elsa, right?”

  Elsa looked up, too. Her caramel-colored hair was elaborately braided, as if she were prepared to appear in some Scandinavian opera about trolls and gods and Vikings with horns on their helmets. She was pretty, too, with a high forehead and wide-apart eyes and a mouth that was wonderfully sulky. When Elsa grew a few years older, she would have men walking into lampposts.

  “I did not know that anybody was coming here to stay,” she said. Her English was almost perfect, although her Swedish accent made her sound as if she were trying to talk and drink a smoothie at the same time.

  “Nobody told you two guys?” I asked her.

  “Nej,” they both echoed, shaking their heads.

  “They should have. If you’re anything like me, you don’t like surprises. Especially strange men appearing in your home without any warning.”

  “No, I do not like that either,” Elsa agreed, with an odd, sideways look that for some reason reminded me of Kate.

  “Do you like music?” I asked her, trying to change the subject.

  “I like music,” Felicia chipped in. “I won the singing prize at my school. I sang ‘Ack Värmeland Du Sköna’ and I won ten CD tokens.”

  “Yes,” said Elsa. “And you traded them all for two Barbies and a Barbie house.”

  “So, what is so wrong about that?” Felicia retaliated.

  “Barbie is a bad role model, that’s what.”

  I pulled a face. “Bad role model, huh? You’re talking about all of those trashy clothes she wears? All of those gold miniskirts and silver high-heeled boots?”

  “No, I mean that all Barbie cares about is material possession. Things like house and car and roller boot. Barbie has no spirit.”

  Kind of serious for an eleven-year-old, I thought, but then she was Swedish. “I see where you’re coming from,” I told her. “But she’s only a plastic doll, after all. She doesn’t even have a brain.”

  “Like Elsa,” laughed Felicia, pointing at her sister.

  “Still, I’m glad you like music,” I said. “That’s what I do. That’s my job, writing music. Maybe this evening I can play some music and you can sing for me. I can teach you a couple of new songs.”

  “Do you know any songs about people who are lost and do not know how to find their way back?” asked Elsa.

  I looked at her carefully, trying to work out exactly what it was she was asking me. “I’m not sure. I guess I know ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’—‘we are three little sheep who have lost our way—baa! baa! baa!’”

  Felicia laughed again, but Elsa remained serious.

  “I mean songs that they can sing, so that the people who remember them will hear them, and know that they have not gone forever.”

  “I’m sorry, Elsa. I don’t think I know any songs like that.”

  Elsa didn’t answer, but looked down at the chessboard.

  “Who’s winning?” I asked her, gently. I could tell that something had upset her.

  “Nobody.”

  “How come?”

  “Because nobody ever wins. Because we never have time to finish it.”

  Felicia said, “You cheat, anyhow. Whenever I have to go to the bathroom, she hides my prawns.”

  “Pawns,” said Elsa, as if she were tired of telling her. “‘Prawns’ is räka.”

  I said nothing for a while. I was tempted to lay my hand on top of Elsa’s, just to comfort her and show her that I cared about whatever it was that was bugging her. But of course it wouldn’t have been a good idea.

  “Did I hear Felicia crying a short while back?” I asked her.

  Elsa shook her head. “No. We never cry now.”

  “Never? Why not? Sometimes it can do you good, to have a darn good cry. I do it all the time.”

  “You do?” asked Felicia, in amazement.

  “For sure. I was moving into a new apartment not long ago, and I dropped a box right on my foot. You should have heard me howl!”

  Felicia giggled, but Elsa looked at me with the ghost of a smile and said, “You are telling a lie.”

  “Yes. But sometimes it doesn’t matter, telling a lie. Sometimes telling a lie is the only way we can face up to the truth.”

  “You think this?”

  “Yes, I think this. And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Elsa. I’m going to write a song especially for you, about people who are lost and can’t find their way back. Whenever you sing this song, you can think of me. And whenever I hear it, I’ll know that you’re not too far away. Okey-dokey-chimney-smokey?”

  At last I got her to laugh. She had a really cute way of doing it, pressing her fingertips against her lips, as if she were trying to push the laughter back in.

  “Check,” said Felicia, moving her queen two squares.

  “And you say that I cheat!” Elsa protested. “Your queen wasn’t there at all!”

  “Of course she was! You weren’t looking, that’s all!”

  The two of them were still squabbling when I heard the front door opening, and Kate calling out, “Hello? Gideon? Are you there?”

  “Hold on, girls,” I told them, and went out of the living room door into the hallway. Kate was there, wearing an ankle-length silver-fox coat, and a matching hat, with earflaps. Her cheeks were pink from the cold.

  “Look at you!” I said. “You look like Lara out of Doctor Zhivago!”

  “I’m sorry if we kept you waiting too long.” she smiled at me, and gave me a very chilly kiss. “We had to go to Stortorget to buy some food . . . otherwise we would have had nothing for supper tonight!”

  She tugged off her black leather gloves, and turned, and as she did so I realized that there were more people coming along the landing, carrying grocery bags. A bearded man in a long black coat; a woman in a puffy red windbreaker and black leggings; and two young girls, one wearing a blue windbreaker and the other a yellow one, both of them giggling.

  The landing light was behind them, and so it was only when they crowded into the hallway that I realized who the giggling girls were. I had the same feeling as standing in an elevator that suddenly drops down fifteen floors without any warning. They were Elsa and Felicia. There was no question about it. Although they were both wearing white furry earmuffs, Elsa had the same Valkyrie braids, and Felicia had the same straight pageboy.

  I stared at Kate, totally stunned, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Gideon—I want you to meet Dr. Axel Westerlund, and his wife Tilda, and their two daughters Elsa and Felicia. Everybody . . . this is my friend Gideon from New York!”

  Dr. Westerlund took off his glove and held out his hand to me. His beard was tinged with gray, which made him look older than he actually was. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a broad handsome face and brambly gray eyebrows and deep-set green eyes. It wasn’t difficult to see whom Elsa had inherited her looks from.

  “Hej, Gideon!” he said, and gave me a muscular handshake. “Kate was telling us so
much about you.”

  “Oh, yes?” I was so confused that I couldn’t think what else to say.

  “You are composer, yes? She says you write beautiful music.”

  “Almost beautiful,” Kate corrected him. “You can’t compose truly beautiful music to advertise baked beans.”

  I tried to turn around and take a look back into the living room, but Axel grasped my elbow and said, “This is my wife Tilda. Tilda works at St. Göran’s Hospital, in the pain clinic.”

  Tilda smiled and said, “Hej, Gideon! Welcome to Stockholm.” She was a very petite woman, blonde and pale, like Felicia, with strikingly unusual looks. Her nose was a little too long and pointed to be conventionally pretty, but her eyes were huge and mesmerizing, like two dark ponds you could drown in.

  “The pain clinic, huh?” I asked her. “That sounds pretty painful.”

  “That is what I do,” said Tilda, with great seriousness. “I ease people’s pain. To me, easing people’s pain is the most important of all things in the world.”

  I mentally kicked myself for being flippant, but I was finding it difficult to think about anything else but Elsa and Felicia. I had just left them playing chess in the living room, only a few seconds ago, and yet here they were again, freshly arrived from shopping. I was so thrown by the whole illogicality of it that I couldn’t decide if I was asleep or awake. Maybe I was still sitting on SAS flight 904, high up over the Arctic, snoring, with my head leaning on the shoulder of the passenger next to me.

  But—“This is Elsa,” said Tilda. “And this is her younger sister Felicia.”

  I took the girls’ hands, one after the other, and kissed the back of their wrists. “Very pleased to meet two such delightful young ladies,” I told them. I could feel the warmth of their hands, where they had been buried in their thick padded mittens, and they certainly didn’t feel like characters out of a dream.

  Kate took off her coat and gave me another hug. “It’s so good to see you, Gideon. How was your flight?”

  “Great. Very comfortable. They even fed us with caviar. When did you get in?”

  Kate gave me another kiss. “Tilda’s going to cook her special meatballs for supper. I hope you’re starving! Here—could you carry this shopping bag for me?”

  I picked up her shopping bags and followed her along the corridor toward the kitchen. When I reached the living room doors, however, I sidestepped and looked inside. There was nobody in there. No Elsa. No Felicia. And the chess pieces were all arranged just as they had been when I first arrived.

  “Come on,” said Kate. “Is anything wrong? You look very serious.”

  “I always look very serious. It’s my default expression.”

  Axel took everybody’s coats and hung them up in the cloakroom, while Tilda and Kate went into the kitchen and started to unpack the groceries. Elsa and Felicia rushed to their bedrooms, and I could hear them laughing and chattering in Swedish. I wished that I could understand what they were saying to each other.

  “Would you like a drink?” Axel asked me, coming into the kitchen.

  “Absolutely. One of your Swedish beers would go down well.”

  “I have only Finnish beer, I’m afraid. Lapin Kulta. We Swedes always prefer Finnish beer. Mind you, the Finns themselves prefer Norwegian beer while the Norwegians always buy their beer from Estonia. It is a kind of musical chairs of beer.”

  Kate and Tilda were unwrapping ground beef and smoked fish and purple broccoli. I laid my hand on Kate’s shoulder and gave her a kiss. It was great to see her, and I couldn’t believe how much I had missed her. The only trouble was, her arrival here had given a sense of reality to an event that couldn’t possibly have been real. Axel and Tilda had only two daughters, not four. So who had I been talking to in the living room?

  “Kate told me what an incredible apartment you live in,” I told Axel, as he passed me a glass of beer. “She was right. I’ve never seen any place like it.”

  “Well, it was in the Westerlund family for over a hundred and thirty years,” said Axel. “Passed down, from one generation of Westerlunds to the next. There are so many photographs of my grandparents and my great-grandparents, sitting on the window seats, looking out over Norrstrom Harbor. And myself, too, when I was a child, in a little sailor suit.”

  He led me into the living room. He lifted seven or eight hardwood logs out of a large brass scuttle beside the fireplace, and stacked them into the grate. Then he took a copy of Dagens Nyheter from the magazine rack, crumpled it up, and pushed it underneath the fire basket.

  “I understand that Felicia is good at music,” I told him. He was patting his pockets, looking for his matches.

  “Felicia? Yes . . . she won a school prize for her singing.”

  I sipped my beer. I was going to have to be careful how I phrased this. The beer, incidentally, tasted like watered-down Bud. Or even watered-down water.

  “Have you known Kate for long?” I asked him.

  “Kate? Hm, for a little while.” He scratched a match into flame and lit two corners of the crumpled-up newspaper.

  “I guess I was just wondering why she invited me here to meet you.”

  There was a long silence. Axel stood up, staring down at the hearth, while the dancing flames were reflected in his eyes.

  “You are a friend of hers, ja?”

  “Yes. A new friend, admittedly. But a very good friend. At least I hope I am, anyhow.”

  Axel sat down in a large armchair opposite me. The arms of the chair were carved like oak leaves, and he kept rubbing them, and fondling their curves. In the fireplace, the dry logs began to spit and crackle, and sparks flew up the chimney.

  “Do you have a family?” Axel asked me. “Do you have children of your own?”

  “No. Never quite happened. But I guess I still have plenty of time.”

  “Yes. But maybe, until you have children of your own, you cannot understand what sacrifices you are prepared to make to keep them safe.”

  I waited for him to explain himself, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “You are enjoying your Lapin Kulta?”

  I raised my glass. “Terrific. Never quite tasted anything like it.”

  “Be careful,” he cautioned me. “It’s strong. We don’t want you falling over.”

  The fire blazed more fiercely. One of the logs began to make a high, piping noise, like an asthmatic child fighting for breath.

  “You still haven’t told me why Kate invited me here,” I coaxed him.

  He looked me in the eye for the first time since he had started to light the fire. “You have to witness what happened for yourself. There is no other way around it. I cannot explain. I cannot accuse.”

  “Accuse? I don’t understand you. Accuse who? Of what?”

  But before he could answer me, Kate and the girls came into the living room. The girls were dressed differently from before—Elsa in a scarlet sweater and a short denim skirt, Felicia in a skinny blue sweater and jeans. Felicia kept putting the neck of her sweater into her mouth and chewing it, the way kids do.

  “It’s all coming together in the kitchen,” said Kate, perching herself on the arm of my chair and running her fingers into the back of my hair. “How are you two getting along?”

  “Well, we’re trying to find some common ground,” I told her. “Gynecology and song writing—they’re kind of opposite ends of the conversational spectrum. Unless you count, ‘Yes, Sir, She’s My Baby.’”

  I was trying to lighten the mood, but Axel didn’t seem to get the joke. “Elsa—Felicia—” he said. “Please set the table in the dining room.”

  “Which place mats, papa?”

  “Any you can find.”

  Once the girls had gone, Kate and Axel and I sat together in front of the fire. I tried to think of a way to explain that I had talked to Elsa and Felicia here in the living room, before they had actually come home. But Axel had talked so gravely about protecting his children that I thought he would probably find it unsettling, rather th
an amusing.

  And who could say for sure if I had really seen them at all? Maybe I had experienced some kind of weird déjà vu. After all, it might have been 4:00 PM in Stockholm, but it was still 10:00 AM in New York.

  “So, Gideon!” said Axel, summoning up a smile. “You must play us some of your music this evening, and sing us some of your songs.”

  “Of course. I promised Elsa that I would make up a special song, just for her.”

  Axel looked quizzical. “You did? When did you do this?”

  Oh, shit. “I mean, when I heard you had two daughters, I promised myself that I would make up a special song for them.”

  “That is very thoughtful of you, Gideon. We look forward to it.”

  Kate took hold of my hand and squeezed it, and smiled at me. Maybe she knew what was going on here. I was double-damned if I did.

  * * *

  As far as our conversation was concerned, our meal that evening was like A Dream Play, by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, which is all about a girl who comes from another world to find out if life is really as difficult as people make out. The characters change their identities, and merge, and say things like, “Who lives in the tower?” “I can’t remember.” “I think it’s a prisoner and he wants me to set him free.”

  In other words, one of those plays that you can’t make heads nor tails of, and makes you wish you’d stayed at home and watched The Simpsons instead.

  But the food was tasty, and the dining room was wonderfully gloomy and atmospheric. Although the ceiling was so high, Axel lit only two candelabra on the table, with five candles in each. The cutlery and the glassware sparkled, and the white linen shone, but we were surrounded on all sides by darkness, so that it was more like a séance than a supper.

  “Tilda,” I said, forking up another mouthful of meatball. “You are the best cook I ever met in my life. These meatballs are out of this world.”

  “I miss to make them,” she said.

  “Don’t you make them very often? If I could make meatballs like this, I’d be cooking them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day.”