Three Seconds

and would never again be able to live outside a nursing home. When he read the report later, Sven Sundkvist had come across her name in several places. Anni Grens. He had had no idea that they were married.
    ‘Ewert, what on earth are you doing?’
    He was packing something into the large brown cardboard boxes. That much was plain to see. But not what. Sven Sundkvist knocked again. The room was completely silent, and yet Ewert Grens still didn’t hear him.
    It had been a difficult period.
    Like all others who grieve, Ewert’s first reaction had been denial –
it hasn’t happened
– and then anger –
why have they done this to me?
But he hadn’t moved on to the next phase, he just carried on being angry,his way of dealing with most things. Ewert’s grieving process had probably not started until very recently, a few weeks ago – he was no longer as irascible, but more reserved, more pensive, he talked less and presumably thought more.
    Sven went into the room. Ewert heard him, but didn’t turn round, sighing loudly instead as he often did when he was irritated. Something was bothering him. It wasn’t Sven, something had been bothering him since he had gone to the nursing home, which usually gave him peace. Susann, the medical student who had been there for so long and looked after Anni so well and who had now become a junior doctor, her comments, her disgust,
you can’t regulate your grief
, well it was bloody easy enough for a little girl to run around Lidingö spreading her twenty-five-year-old wisdom,
what you’re frightened of has already happened.
What the hell did she know about loneliness?
    He had driven away from the nursing home faster than he’d intended, straight to the police headquarters, and, without knowing why, gone down to the stores to get three cardboard boxes and carried them to the office that he’d had for as long as he could remember. He had stood for a while in front of the shelf behind his desk and the only things that meant anything to him: the cassettes of Siw Malmkvist songs that he had recorded and mixed himself, the early record sleeves from the sixties that still had strong colours, the photograph of Siwan that he had taken one evening in Kristianstads Folkets Park; everything that belonged to a time when all was good.
    He had started to pack it all away, wrapped in newspaper, and then stacked one box on top of the next.
    ‘She doesn’t exist any more.’
    Ewert Grens sat on the floor and stared at the brown cardboard.
    ‘Do you hear me, Sven? She will never sing in this room again.’
    Denial, anger, grief
.
    Sven Sundkvist was standing directly behind his boss, looking down at his balding pate and seeing images from all the times he had waited while Ewert slowly rocked back and forth alone in his room in the dismal light – early mornings and late evenings and Siw Malmkvist’s voice, standing dancing with someone who wasn’t there, holding her tight in his arms. Sven realised that he would miss the irritating music, the lyrics that had been forced on him until he knew them by heart, an intrinsic part of all the years he had worked with Ewert Grens.
    He would miss the picture.
    He should laugh, really, because finally they were gone.
    Ewert had gone through his adult life with a crutch under each arm. Anni. Siw Malmkvist. And now, finally, he was going to walk alone. Which was presumably why he was crawling around on the floor.
    Sven sat down on the tired sofa and watched him lift up the last box and put it on top of the two others in a corner of the room, then laboriously and carefully tape it up. Ewert Grens was sweating and determined. He pushed the boxes until they were exactly where he wanted them and Sven wanted to ask how he felt, but didn’t, it would be wrong, mostly out of consideration to himself, because the very fact that Ewert was doing what he was doing was answer enough in itself. He was moving on, though not yet aware of it himself.
    ‘What have you done?’
    She hadn’t knocked.
    She had walked straight into the room and stopped abruptly in the absence of music, in front of the gaping hole on the shelf behind the desk.
    ‘Ewert? What have you done?’
    Mariana Hermansson looked at Sven who first nodded at the gap on the shelf and then at the pile of three cardboard boxes. Never before had she been to his room without hearing music, the now removed Siw Malmkvist. She didn’t recognise it without her voice.
    ‘Ewert …’
    ‘You want