The Lemon Table Read Online Free PDF Page A

generation, regardless of merit, outside, considerations of civic worth applied. A father might wish to hand on his stall to his eldest son, but if the boy did not show enough seriousness, the gift would reflect upon the father. When Halvar Berggren succumbed to akvavit, frivolity and atheism, and transferred ownership of the third stall to an itinerant knife-grinder, it was on Berggren, not the knife-grinder, that disapproval fell, and a more suitable appointment was made in exchange for a few riksdaler.
    There was no surprise when Anders Bodén was awarded the fourth stall. The general manager of the sawmill was noted for his industry, lack of frivolity, and devotion to his family. If he was not unduly devout, he was charitable. One autumn, when the shooting had been good, he had filled one of the sawpits with scrap timber, lain a metal grid across the top, and cooked a deer whose meat he distributed among his workmen. Though not born in the town, he took it upon himself to show others its sights; visitors would find themselves at his insistence climbing the klockstapel beside the church. Leaning one arm against the bell-block, Anders would point out the brickworks; beyond it, the deaf-and-dumb asylum; and just out of sight the statue marking the spot where Gustavus Vasa addressed the Dale-carlians in 1520. A hefty, bearded and enthusiastic man, he would even suggest a pilgrimage to the Hökberg, to view the stone recently placed there in memory of the jurist Johannes Stiernbock. In the distance, a steamboat tracked across the lake; below, complacent in its stall, his horse waited.
    Gossip said that Anders Bodén spent so long with visitors to the town because this delayed his return home; gossip repeated that the first time he had asked Gertrud to marry him, she had laughed in his beard, and only began to see his virtues after her own disappointment in love with the Markelius boy; gossip speculated that when Gertrud’s father had come to Anders and suggested he renew his wooing, negotiations had not been simple. The sawmill manager had previously been made to feel impertinent in approaching a woman as talented and artistic as Gertrud—who, after all, had once played piano duets with Sjögren. But the marriage had prospered as far as gossip could tell, even if she was known to call him a bore on public occasions. There were two children, and the specialist who delivered the second advised Mrs. Bodén against further pregnancy.
    When the pharmacist Axel Lindwall and his wife, Barbro, came to town, Anders Bodén took them up the klockstapel and offered to walk them to the Hökberg. On his return home, Gertrud asked why he was not wearing the club-button of the Swedish Tourists’ Union.
    “Because I am not a member.”
    “They ought to make you an honourary one,” she replied.
    Anders had learnt to deal with his wife’s sarcasm by means of pedantry, by answering her questions as if they meant no more than the words they contained. This tended to annoy her further, but for him it was a necessary protection.
    “They seem an agreeable couple,” he said, matter-of-factly.
    “You like everybody.”
    “No, my love, I do not think that is true.” He meant, for instance, that at the present moment he did not like her.
    “You are more discriminating about logs than about members of the human race.”
    “Logs, my love, are very different from one another.”
    THE ARRIVAL of the Lindwalls in the town caused no special interest. Those who sought Axel Lindwall’s professional advice found all they could hope for in a pharmacist: someone slow and serious, who flatteringly regarded all complaints as life-threatening, while at the same time judging them curable. He was a short, flaxen-haired man; gossip wagered he would run to fat. Mrs. Lindwall was less remarked upon, being neither menacingly pretty nor contemptibly plain, neither vulgar nor soignée in dress, neither pushy nor reclusive in manner. She was just a new wife, and