The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [4]
Now Slobodan’s empire stood at the threshold of yet another venture. This time he turned to a new continent for inspiration. The restaurant was christened Dakar, and from the start, it worked. The walls were decorated with photographs from West Africa, some of them enlarged to nearly a square meter, depicting images from markets, daily life in the village, and sporting events.
The photographer was a Senegalese man from the southern regions of the country who had traveled around taking pictures for many years.
Slobodan wanted to lay it on thick. He was going to invest in the “gilded package,” as he put it. The goal was to convince diners to overlook the restaurants Svensson’s Guldkant and Wermlandskällaren in favor of Dakar.
“That old bolshevik,” he said disdainfully about the owner of the fish restaurant where the bourgeois Uppsala establishment liked to lunch. “I’m going to make sure the ladies sashay on over here. I’m going to get so many stars that the world press will line up outside. My menus will be printed in schoolbooks as examples of the complete kitchen.”
There was no limit to Slobodan’s visions and conviction that he would take Uppsala and the world by storm.
“I need chefs!” he exclaimed at the first meeting with Hammer and Armas.
“What you need is money,” Hammer said.
Slobodan turned sharply to him and the chef awaited the invectives that usually followed objections of this sort, but the restauranteur’s steely gaze was this time replaced with a grin.
“That’s been taken care of,” he said.
Three
“On my way,” Johnny Kvarnheden mumbled, and turned up the volume on the car stereo. The late-evening sun was bathing in Lake Vättern. Visingö looked like a towering warship, steering south, and the ferry to Gränna resembled a beetle on a floor of gold.
There was something cinematic about his flight, as if someone had directed his melancholia, set the lights, and added the music. He was conscious of this cinematic effect and was steered, allowed himself to be steered, caught in the classic scene: a lone man leaving his old life behind, on his way to something unknown.
A telephone call was all it had taken, a split second of deliberation in order for him to make up his mind, pack his few possessions—too few, and in too much of a hurry—and set out on the road.
He wished that his road trip could last forever, that the contents of the gas tank, his hunger, and his bladder were his only constraints. That the trip could be the focus, that he could fly down the highway unconnected to everything except the friction between his tires and the asphalt.
If there had been a camera, he would have turned it on the road, toward the black of the asphalt, the traces of traffic, and the grooves from the teeth of the snow-clearing trucks, not at his face or the landscape that flickered past. The sound track would not be Madeleine Peyroux’s voice from the CD player, but the rhythmic thumping from the roadway. The stiffness of his shoulders and the cramplike grip of his hands on the steering wheel would be the voice that spoke to the viewer.
He kept his disappointment and grief at bay, but also his hopes and dreams. He thought about descriptions of food, plates of one prepared dish after another. The fact that he was a chef saved him for the moment.
He was worthless as a lover, couldn’t even get it up anymore, and was just as worthless as a partner. This had slowly but surely become clear to him, and this insight had struck him with full force yesterday evening when Sofie described his attempts as “pathetic.”
“You aren’t living,” she said, in a sudden burst of volubility, “and your so-called attentions toward our relationship are ridiculous. It is nauseating. You don’t know how to love.”
He reached out and touched her, pressed his body against her, and felt desire for the first time in months. Repulsed, she shook him off.
“Nauseating,” he said out loud. “What kind of a word is that?”
He passed Linköping and Norrköping. Then he thundered on into Sörmland with an accelerating desperation