Even If Everything Ends by Jens Liljestrand

Author:Jens Liljestrand [Liljestrand, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

3

WE DON’T INHERIT THE EARTH

THEY CHOSE MY FATHER TO be king.

I had just learned to read, and the box was on the carpet behind the shabby brown corduroy sofa in my grandparents’ basement, in a corner that smelled like damp and old darkness. A perfectly ordinary dusty, lead-gray box, dry and rough beneath my fingertips, a piece of paper with ANDERS! written in neat black marker in the plastic pocket on one side. Lift the lid of the box and it was full of black ring binders, the kind with stiff covers and metal prongs that nipped your fingers when you tried to open them, the kind that Grandpa might have brought home from the office. The folders themselves were stuffed with sheets of cardboard that had been trimmed and hole-punched by hand, labeled with stickers reading ANDERS! and the date. Granny had cut out newspaper articles and stuck everything to do with ANDERS! on those sheets of cardboard.

Two narrow, dirty windows up by the ceiling, at the same level as the ground outside, shaded by dog roses and a set of wooden steps. What little sun filtered through painted a rectangle, a grainy veil of light on the floor beside me as I traced a finger over the tall black-and-white guy with dark curls and a gap-toothed grin and a racket in his hand, standing beside boys who looked at least three feet shorter than him. The gap in his teeth eventually disappeared but the smile remained the same, year after year, appearing alongside framed certificates and bouquets of flowers, then cups and trophies and huge prize checks, the pictures got bigger and the articles longer, in the local papers at first, with ads for Karlskrona pizzerias and lighting shops and cut-rate jeans, then nationwide, with ads for package holidays and X-rated movie theaters and the Swedish Social Democratic Party; there were front pages and headlines and in-depth interviews and superstar portraits, with full-color shots instead of black-and-white. My dad’s handsome smile was everywhere as the air stood still in the cluttered basement where I was curled up on the old corduroy sofa, trying to feel something, anything, for him, graying with age, lumpy with glue.

The folders were at the top of the box, resting on a muddle of newspaper clippings, Granny probably ran out of energy to keep gluing them down in the end. Most were scraps of paper filled with match reports and sports columns, but there were also more and more clippings from gossip magazines, articles about his life with Johanna and the kids, blurry images from airports and hotel bars, taken from a distance on sandy beaches, Dad with his film-star looks and his long, dark curls, Jakob and Karolina pale and shy in the background. And once I’d dug through the sediment, all the way to the bottom, I found an envelope almost the exact same shade of gray as the box itself; it would have been easy to miss it was even there.

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