The Hand that Trembles by Kjell Eriksson Read Free Book Online Page A

to lurch and the drivers of surrounding vehicles to throw themselves on their horns.
    He turned onto Regency Road and drove north, passing Brigade Street and taking a left onto MG Road.
    Sven-Arne Persson leant back in the rickshaw but observed everyone who drove up alongside them and he scrutinised the pavements as if he were a newcomer to the city.
    Somewhere in the crowd was Jan Svensk.
     
     
    Hotel Ajantha was located at the end of a side street on MG Road. He had never been to the hotel before but knew that its clientele consisted of Indians from the lower middle class as well as the occasional European on a tight budget. His chances of encountering Jan Svensk here were minimal.
    A man was snoozing on a couch in the dingy reception area, but he woke up when Sven-Arne walked in. The man blinked at him but made no attempt to get up. Sven-Arne greeted him in English and asked if there was a room for the night.
    The man got up reluctantly and walked over to the front desk, opened the ledger, and pointed at a row without saying a word, then turned and pointed to a posterboard that stated the cost of the room was 990 rupees per night. That was more than he spent on food for a week.
    ‘Okay,’ he said, and wrote down a name that he made up that instant: Lester Young.
    ‘Passport number,’ the receptionist said, unselfconsciously scratching himself in the crotch.
    Sven-Arne wrote down eight numbers without hesitation and said he was Australian.
    ‘One night, pay now.’
    Room 101 was spartan: a bed, a chair, a rickety table with a television set. That was all. Sven-Arne lay down on the bed. He stared at the blades of the fan and noticed the grey layer of dust that had sprouted like a fungus over the base attached to the ceiling. Somewhere a telephone rang and someone hollered ‘Hello.’ Muted voices floated through the open ventilation to the courtyard, steps on the stone patio and a man’s hoarse laughter. There was a life out there, a contextual web that had been torn from him in the blink of an eye.
    Images of his former native land came and went over the next few hours as he lay on the bed, incapable of getting to his feet, much less undressing and crawling in between the sheets. It was images of his past that he was fishing up out of his inner depths. He rarely or never read about Sweden in the Indian newspapers and was completely cut off from the great, decisive political events. Sometimes he accidentally came across a news item on Sweden, often about sports or amusing writings on climate or other rarities that had to do with the country’s exotic placement on the globe. It could be some ice hotel in the north, or now most recently a storm that had struck the southern parts and apparently taken out forests. Of course he had read about the killing of the foreign minister. He had met her during her time in SSU and recalled an enthusiastic young woman, and he remembered thinking she would either be broken or go very far. Now she was dead.  
    About the small world, about Uppsala county politics, his old friends and acquaintances, who had married, had children, or died during his twelve years abroad, he knew nothing.  
    From time to time he experienced a burning anxiety, a longing to meet someone from the past who could tell him. This happened especially in the beginning of his stay in Bangalore, but now and then this gnawing desire to get the information that created connections returned.  
    Out of nowhere he had the thought that Jan Svensk was perhaps the person who had been dispatched by an unseen hand as a messenger from his former life. Perhaps he had messages such as … well, what? What kind of information could seriously mean anything? What was there to gladden the expatriate, to add anything to his life? What did he need? Wouldn’t the knowledge of births and deaths, about neighbours’ and local politicians’ lives, simply knock him off-kilter, perhaps risk his entire existence?  
    He did not need this