Swallowed by the Cold: Stories

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In the village of Elmsta, which straddles the mainland and an island about two hours north of Stockholm, there is an uneven asphalt tennis court, veined with cracks and loosely traversed by a shoddy net. It was on this court that Rolf Strand played the best tennis of his life. He lost the first set, but came back to win the next three by an average margin of four games. His opponent — an aging former tennis professional whose prosthetic left arm made a swishing whistle whenever he hit from his backhand — twice broke Rolf’s serve, but Rolf was hitting well to both sides and ran the tennis pro to exhaustion. Rolf was happy about this. Who can say how the tennis pro felt? He had only recently lost an arm.

In the canal behind the court, boats waited for a drawbridge to rise. The pilots and passengers of these boats looked up at the bridge impatiently in spite of the nice weather. His summerhouse was on the eastern shore of the island across a small stand of deciduous trees from a family who had twice invited Rolf to dinner and who, he suspected, must have been Buddhists because they were so kind. On his way home from the courts, Rolf rode his bicycle onto the bridge and stopped at its center. He looked at his watch. The leather strap was pliable with sweat. It was twenty minutes of the hour and he felt good. His racket was strapped to the back of his bicycle and did not cause him trouble. He looked down at a sailboat that had come to a stop where the canal narrows to a single lane. Large digital clocks mounted on either side of the bridge notified the boats of the current waiting time. At O’Mally’s in Gamla stan, where Rolf had taken a young woman named Karin Johansson on a date nearly fifty years before, a similar clock counted down the minutes remaining until St.

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