Midwinter Sacrifice (44 page)

You believe in goodness, Malin thinks, and asks, ‘How did he survive?’

‘Fantasy worlds. His own universe. Some hole in a forest, he never said where. Computer programs. Different faiths. Everything that we human beings clutch at to get a grip on life. Education. And by getting away from them. He managed it. He must have had immense internal strength. And a sister who seems to have cared about him. Even if she couldn’t do anything on her own. He talked about her, albeit fairly incoherently, about something that had happened in the forest. It was like he lived in parallel worlds, and had learned to distinguish between them. But then it was as if every time we met the horrors of his childhood took over more and more. He was quick to lose his temper.’

‘Violent?’

‘Never in here. But possibly elsewhere. They burned him with candles. He described a cabin in the forest where they tied him to a tree and burned him, then threw hot water over him.’

‘How could they?’

‘People can do anything to another human being when they somehow stop seeing them as a human being. History is full of examples. It’s nothing particularly unusual.’

‘And how does it start?’

‘I don’t know.’ Viveka Crafoord sighs. ‘In this case with the mother. Or even further back. I think it was her refusal to love him, combined with the fact that she needed him. I don’t know why she never had him adopted. Maybe his mother needed something to hate? Something to channel her fury at? Her hatred must also have been what fuelled the contempt of her husband and sons.’

‘Why didn’t she want to love him?’

‘I don’t know. Something must have happened.’

Viveka pauses.

‘During that last year he would lie on that chaise longue where you’re sitting now, crying and raging in turn. He would often whisper, “Let me in, let me in, I’m freezing.”’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I tried to comfort him.’

‘And now?’

‘He stopped seeing me about a year ago. The last time we met he stormed out. Lost his temper again. Yelled that no words could ever help, that only action could put everything right, and now he knew, he’d found out something, he yelled, said he knew what needed to be done.’

‘And you didn’t contact him again?’

Viveka Crafoord looks surprised. ‘All my treatments are voluntary,’ she says. ‘My patients have to come to me. But I thought you might be interested in this.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘His cup has overflowed. All his worlds have merged together. Anything could happen.’

‘Thank you,’ Malin says.

‘Do you want to know his name?’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I thought as much,’ Viveka Crafoord says, and turns towards the window.

Malin gets up to leave.

Without looking at Malin, Viveka Crafoord asks, ‘What about you, how are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s written all over you. You don’t often see it so clearly, but it’s like you’re carrying a sorrow, a loss, that you haven’t come to terms with.’

‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

Outside great snowflakes are sailing to the ground; Malin thinks that they look like the remnants of beautiful stars that were pulverised far out in space, billions of years ago.

71

Ljungsbro, 1961

The disgusting little shit.

I’m putting a terry nappy on him.

I’ve padded the inside walls of the wardrobe. I might toss him an apple, a bit of dry bread, but he doesn’t scream any more. If you hit a kid on the nose enough times he learns that screaming means pain, and that it doesn’t help.

So I shut him in.

He cries silently as I put his two and a half years in the wardrobe.

Post-natal depression.

Thanks a lot.

Child benefit.

Thanks a lot.

Drowned father. One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five kronor every month. They bought it, the authorities, seeing as it was so tragic. Fatherless. But I didn’t want to give him up and not get the money.

My lies aren’t lies because they’re mine alone. I am creating my own world. And the interloper in the wardrobe makes it real.

So I lock up.

And go off.

They sacked me from the factory when they saw my stomach; we can’t have that at the chocolate conveyor-belt, they said.

And now I lock the wardrobe and he cries and I want to open up and tell him that he only exists here because he doesn’t exist; choke on the apple, stop breathing, then perhaps you’ll get away. Fucking little brat. And yet not.

One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five old riksdaler a month.

I saunter through town to the grocer’s, and I hold my head high but I know how they whisper – Where’s she put the boy? Where’s the boy? – because they know you exist, and I feel like stopping and curtseying to the ladies, telling them that the boy, the sailor’s boy, I’ve got him in a dark, damp, padded wardrobe. I’ve even put in an air-vent, just like the one they put in the box when they kidnapped Lindbergh’s son; you probably saw the report in the
Weekly News
.

I am quiet around him, but still, somehow, words find their way into his head.

Mummy, Mummy

Mummy

Mummy

and those noises disgust me, they’re like damp snakes on a wet forest floor.

Sometimes I see Kalle. I named him after Kalle.

He looks at me.

He looks all wrong on his bicycle, and he’s given in to the bottle now, and the woman, the fair one, has borne him a son. What does he want that for? Does he imagine he can get any order to that bloodline? I’ve seen the boy. Blown up like a balloon, he is.

The secret is my revenge, a kiss blown through the air.

Don’t think you can get at me, Kalle. That you did get at me. No one gets at Rakel.

No one, no one, no one.

Then I open the wardrobe.

And he smiles.

The fucking little brat.

And I hit him to wipe the smile from his face.

72

I glide through the cold, the day as chalky-white as the fields below me. The tower of Vreta Kloster is a sharpened point on my way out to Blåsvädret and the Hultsjön forest.

The voices are everywhere. All the words they have spoken over the years twisted around each other to form a terrifying and beautiful web.

I have learned to distinguish the voices I want to hear, and I understand them all, even far beyond the apparent meaning of the words.

So who do I hear?

I hear the brothers’ voices: Elias, Jakob and Adam. How they resist, but still want to talk. I start with Elias, listen to what you have to say.

You must never show you’re weak.

Never, ever.

Like he did, the illegitimate one. He was older than me, Jakob and Adam, but he still blubbed in the snow, like a woman, like a weakling. If you show you’re weak, they’ll take you.

Which they?

The bastards. Everyone out there.

Sometimes, but I never say this to Mother or my brothers, I wonder what harm he really did. Why Mother hated him, why we had to hit him. I look at my own children and wonder what harm they could do, what harm Karl could really have done? What did Mother turn us into? Maybe you make children commit whatever cruelties you like.

But no, mustn’t think like that.

I know that I am not weak. I am nine, and I am standing at the entrance to the newly built, white-plastered building of Ljungsbro school, it’s early September and the sun is shining and the woodwork teacher, Broman, is standing outside smoking. The bell has gone and all the children rush to the entrance, me first, but just as I’m about to open the door Broman holds up first one arm, then the other, in the air and he shouts, STOP, NO FILTHY LITTLE BRATS IN HERE. And he shouts louder and louder and his words make the whole crowd of children stop, their little muscles frozen. He grins, grins, and everyone thinks they’re the little brats, and then he shouts, IT SMELLS FILTHY HERE, ELIAS MURVALL, IT SMELLS FILTHY, and that’s when the giggling starts, then laughter, and Broman’s cigarette-hoarse shouting, LITTLE BRAT. He shoves me to one side, holds me hard against the glass of one door with his hairy arm as he opens the other door and lets in the rest of the children and they laugh and go past and whisper, Little brat, shit, it smells of shit here, and I won’t put up with it. I make sure I explode, I open my mouth, and I bite, I dig my eye-teeth deep into Broman’s arm. I feel the flesh give way and just as he starts to scream I feel the taste of iron in my mouth and who’s crying now, you bastard, who’s crying now?

I let go.

They wanted Mother to come to the school and talk about what had happened.

That’s shit, she said, as she held me tight in the kitchen, we don’t do that sort of shit, Elias.

I am still drifting and listening. I’m high up now, where the air is too thin for human beings, and the cold is quick to destroy, but your voice is clear here, Jakob, so pure and radiantly clear, transparent like a window frame without glass.

Hit the bastard, Jakob, Dad yelled.

Hit him.

He’s not one of us, no matter what he might like to think.

He was skinny and thin and although he was twice my height I kicked him right in the stomach while Adam held him. Adam four years younger, but still stronger, run wild.

Dad in his wheelchair on the porch.

How it happened?

I don’t know.

They found him in the park one night. His back broken, his jaw too. Mother said he must have run into a real man there in the park and that it’s all over for Blackie now, and then she passed him another drink, let him drink himself to death, it’s high time, and oh how he drank. We would push him round the houses and he would rave in his drunkenness and try to stand up.

I was the one who found him when he fell downstairs. I was thirteen then. I came in from the garden where I’d been pulling unripe apples off the trees to throw at cars driving past on the road.

The eyes.

They were staring at me, white and dead, and his skin was grey instead of the usual red.

I was scared. Wanted to scream.

But instead I closed his eyes.

Mother came down the stairs, just out of the bath.

She stepped over the body, reached out to me and her hair was wet but still warm, and it smelled of flowers and leaves and she murmured in my ear, Jakob. My Jakob.

Then she whispered, If you have to do something, you don’t hesitate, do you? You know what has to be done, don’t you? And she hugged me tight, tight, and then I remember the church bells and the black-clad people on the patch of gravel in front of the church in Vreta Kloster.

The patch of gravel.

Edged with walls and remains from the twelfth century.

I’ve landed there now and I can see what you must have seen, Jakob. What did the sight do to you? But everything had already happened long, long before then, hadn’t it? And I think you’re doing what has to be done, just as I’m doing now.

But it isn’t your voice that’s strongest here. That’s Adam’s, and what he says sounds sensible and mad at the same time, as despairing and obvious as the winter cold.

What’s ours is ours, and no one can take it from us, Adam.

Mother’s voice with no space for me.

I was probably two the first time I realised that Dad hit him, that there was someone who was always there, but who was only there to be hit.

There is an obvious quality to violence that doesn’t exist in anything else. Drink your skull to pieces, smash a skull to pieces, smash to pieces, smash apart.

That’s how it is.

I smash things apart.

Mother.

She also likes things to be obvious.

Doubt, she says, isn’t for us.

It was different with the new kid.

He didn’t know.

Turkish. Came to our class in year five. From Stockholm. His mum and dad had got jobs in chocolate heaven. He must have thought he could mess me about. I was the little one, after all, the one on the edge, with all the stains on his clothes, the one you could, well, do what you liked with, just to prove you were someone in the new place.

So he hit me.

Or tried to.

He used some fucking judo technique and got me down, then he punched me until my nose started to bleed, and then, just when I was about to fly at him again, the teacher and the caretaker and the PE teacher, Björklund, showed up.

My brothers got to hear about it.

The Turk lived in Härna. We waited for him by the canal, under the birches by the water, hidden down the slope behind the tree trunks. The fool used to go home that way.

And he came, just as my brothers had planned.

They leapt up and knocked him off his bike and he was lying there in the gravel by the side of the canal, screaming and pointing at the tears in his jeans.

Jakob stared at him, Elias stared, and I stood by a birch tree and I remember wondering what was going to happen now, but I knew.

Elias started kicking the Turk’s bike, and when he tried to get up Jakob kicked him, first in the stomach and then in the mouth, and the Turk started whimpering and blood was coming out of the corners of his mouth.

And then I bent the bike frame and heaved the bike right out into the canal. And I ran up and kicked the Turk.

And I kicked.

Kicked.

Kicked.

His parents didn’t even report it to the cops.

They moved just a few weeks after that. At school they said they’d gone back to Turkey, but I don’t believe that. They were that other sort, Kurds. Like fuck would they have gone back.

On the way home from the canal I was sitting behind Elias on his Puch Dakota. I was holding on to his waist and the whole of his big body was vibrating, and Jakob was riding his moped next to us.

He smiled at me. I could feel warmth from Elias.

We were, we are, brothers.

One and the same.

Nothing odd about that.

73