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from this address you’ll be coming?”
    “If I’m working.”
    This pleased the professor, it was like having your very own chauffeur. He got into the backseat, only hired hands insisted on sitting next to the driver, his father had maintained, and it was an understanding that Bertram von Ohler shared.
    “Everything fine?”
    “Thanks,” said the professor.
    The taxi took off. It was warm and pleasant in the car. The professor leaned back, closed his eyes, and for a few moments he was back in his youth, in the family’s old Packard, with Olsson at the wheel. That was his name, Gerhard Olsson, strange that I even remember his first name, because no one called him anything other than Olsson. Then he disappeared during the military call-up, somewhere in Norrbotten, drowned in a river. The new one, what was his name, Wiik it definitely was, but no first name showed up. He was not many years older than Bertram himself, with one leg shorter than the other, which was probably why he was rejected by the military, smelled of tobacco. He stayed with the family until …
    The professor opened his eyes. Wonder if Agnes knows? She ought to .
    Then there was no more chauffeur. The caretaker had to manage the little driving there was, and then mainly in the summer to the house on R å dmans ö that his father Carl bought during the war. It was a real find, a classic Victorian mansion, owned by an alcoholic factory owner who became insolvent and quickly needed cash.
    It was Consul Wendt who had tipped him off about the house, because even though he backed Hitler while the Ohlers, despite their German background, had always been Anglophiles, they socialized. After the war all quarrels were forgotten and the Wendt son later was elected to parliament as a conservative.
    But he did not want to think about former caretakers and Nazis. That led too far, there was simply not room for all the history. Or it was not allowed to take up room. Like the story with Wiik, his behavior when Anna quit, threatened unbelievably enough to report Carl. That invalid who could not even become a private, and whom Carl took on out of pure charity, threatening with the police!
    Or else with Dagmar, why should he think about her? That they fell in love and got married, what did that mean today? Nothing! Three new leaves on the family tree were the result, good enough, but brooding about Dagmar and all the other dung in the story was of no use.
    “My father always took taxis,” he said.
    The driver laughed. A happy fellow, the professor observed, yet not insistent. He drove nice and easy too, no sudden careening, an ideal chauffeur.
    “Was he a professor too?”
    “That’s right. How did you guess?”
    The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders.
    “You see that sort of thing,” he said.
    “He was one of the country’s foremost gynecologists.”
    “I see,” said the driver, braking in front of the entry to number seventy.
    “That was quick.”
    The driver turned around.
    “Here is my telephone number,” he said, handing over a card. “Call if you need a taxi.”
    The professor pulled out his wallet with some effort.
    “Keep the change,” he said, extending a hundred-kronor bill.
    “It’s too much.”
    “I’m not exactly destitute,” said the professor, “and it will soon be December. Then there will be replenishment.”

 
    Six
    Associate Professor Gregor Johansson was taking a nap. It was a lifelong habit. When he was a student and in the early years of his professional career it was sometimes hard to get away, find a place to stretch out for a while. No more than ten or fifteen minutes was needed, even if since retirement it had become considerably longer than that.
    He used his father’s method, and also his parlance. If he were to be encouraged to remember any special expression from his childhood it was just these words, “I’m going to lean back awhile,” that would come to him unbidden.
    There was also a childhood odor track: the