The Prize

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THE northern night had come early to Stockholm this day, and that meant that autumn was almost gone and the dark winter was near at hand.

For Count Bertil Jacobsson, as he walked slowly through the lamplit Humlegården park, his lion-headed brown cane barely brushing the hardened turf, it was a happy time, his favourite time of the year. He knew the promise of this cold premature night: the winds would come, and the mists sweep in from Lake Mälaren, and eventually, the snow and ice; and there would be no guilts about locking himself in his crowded, comfortable apartment, hibernating among his beloved mementoes of half a century, and working on his encyclopaedic Notes.

Emerging from the park, Count Bertil Jacobsson arrived at last on the pavement of Sturegatan. The evening’s constitutional was over, and the final exciting business of the night-the culmination of ten months of intensive and abrasive activity-would soon take place. For a moment, almost wistfully, he turned to look back at the park. To any other man, what had recently been so lush and green might now seem stark and denuded, the trees stripped of foliage and outlined grotesquely in the artificial light like gnarled symbols of life’s end in a surrealistic oil. But Jacobsson’s peculiar vision transformed the scene by some special alchemy to a kind of initiation of life, a nativity when nature was reborn, and the old year at last delivered of first life. Again, he told himself, his favourite season had arrived, and tonight, this night, would be a memorable one.

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