‘How do you know about that? You didn’t even know where I was.’
‘Now you seem to hear fine.’
‘The connection got better.’
‘The librarian called me. She was very pleased.’
‘How can she be pleased? There was almost a fight.’
‘It’s not very common for a poetry reading to lead to such violent reactions. I’ve been calling the evening papers trying to get them to include it in tonight’s issue.’
Humlin almost dropped the phone.
‘What have you done?’
‘I talked to the evening papers.’
‘I don’t want anything in the evening papers!’ Humlin yelled. ‘There were just a bunch of drunk men who spewed forth about my poetry. They wanted to know what I make per word.’
‘An interesting question.’
‘You think so, do you?’
‘I can work it out for you, if you like.’
‘Why would I want to know that? Should I start writing longer poems? I don’t want you to speak to any papers, in fact, I forbid you to.’
‘Sorry, it’s getting harder to hear you.’
‘I said, I don’t want to see anything about this in the papers!’
‘Call me back and try to get a better connection. I must get back to the evening papers.’
He hung up. Humlin stared furiously at the phone. When he tried calling back he was told that Lundin was in a meeting and would not be reachable until the afternoon. Humlin lay down on the bed and decided he would change publishers. He didn’t want anything more to do with Lundin. As a kind of revenge he spent an hour thinking out the basic plot of a crime novel, although he promised himself he would never actually write it.
In the late afternoon as the rain had begun to drizzle down over Gothenburg, Humlin took a taxi to Stensgården. It was a depressingly generic city suburb with rows of concrete apartment buildings laid out like blocks. He got out on the windy main square of Stensgården where the library lay wedged in between McDonald’s and the government-owned wine store. Once again his taxi driver had been an African man, and once again he had found the address without any problems. The sign for the library was broken and the front door was covered in graffiti. Humlin went in search of the librarian in charge who turned out to be almost identical to the woman at Mölndal library. He asked with obvious trepidation if she had invited any special groups to the reading.
‘What kind of groups?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps you’ve been doing a community outreach of some kind to bring in a new clientele to the library.’
‘And what kind of people are we talking about?’
‘I don’t know. I was just asking.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I should warn you that we are not expecting very many people tonight. At best I think we’ll have ten.’
Humlin looked at her with horror.
‘Ten people?’
‘We normally only get that many for poets. If we have a writer of crime fiction we naturally draw a larger crowd.’
‘How many more?’
‘Last time we had a hundred and fifty-seven people.’
Humlin had no more questions. He placed his overnight bag in the librarian’s office and left. Once he was back out in the deserted main square he tried to call Lundin again. This time he was there.
‘I hope you didn’t talk to any media people.’
‘Of course I did, but unfortunately they didn’t seem very interested.’
Humlin felt a huge weight lift from his chest.
‘So there will be no story?’
‘Probably not. But I’m not going to give up just yet.’
‘I want you to give up.’
‘Have you given any more thought to your crime novel?’
‘No.’
‘You should. Let me know when you have a title.’
‘I’m a poet. I don’t write detective fiction.’
‘Let me know when you think of a title.’
Humlin put the phone back in his pocket, pulled his coat more tightly around his body and started wandering across the square. After a few steps he realised that there was something different about this place. At first he didn’t know what it was, then he understood that it was the people. It was as if he had suddenly crossed over an invisible line into a foreign country. The people he saw on the street were different in colouring, dress and posture.
It struck him that he had never spent any time in this other new Sweden that was emerging, the ghetto-like city suburbs where every immigrant or refugee ended up. It also struck him again with fearful clarity that only ten people were coming to his reading tonight. What did his poetry possibly have to say to these people?
He walked around the square until he got too cold. He went into a cafe with Arabic music playing over the loudspeakers and looked for Pelle Törnblom’s phone number. He found it under ‘Törnblom’s Boxing Club’. Then he turned to the dark-skinned girl behind the counter and asked her if she knew where the boxing club was located.
‘On the other side of the church.’
Humlin did not recall having seen a church. The girl walked over to the fogged-up window and pointed it out to him, then returned to her magazine.
