Midwinter Sacrifice (6 page)

Who were you? Malin wonders.

Come back and tell me who you were.

6

Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.

Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.

But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?

Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.

It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.

The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?

Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.

‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’

Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.

Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.

‘Do you
want
eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.

‘Why else would I be asking?’

‘Are you seeing a boy?’

There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’

‘Good.’

A male reporter from the
Östgöta
newspaper is standing at the darkened crime-scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.

‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linköping. The police have . . .’

Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?

In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil people are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.

‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’

Perfume?

She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.

‘Who are you seeing?’

‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’

‘Of course.’

‘. . . the body is still hanging here.’

The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.

‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’

Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Högfeldt’s voice.

‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’

Daniel. What are you up to now?

Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’

‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.

‘Have you looked in the drawer?’

A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’

Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.

‘Really? No, I haven’t noticed anything.’

‘I’m always asleep at that time of day.’

‘In this sort of cold I stay indoors.’

‘I keep myself to myself, it’s better that way.’

The same response for Johan and Börje as for her and Zeke: no one knows anything, no one has seen anything. It’s as if the hundred-and-fifty-kilo body flew up into the noose in the tree, parking itself on the end of the rope in anticipation of attention.

Back to the studio.

‘Naturally we’ll be following developments in Linköping.’ Pause. ‘In London . . .’

Then Tove is standing in the door to the living room.

‘I read about that on the net,’ she says. ‘Are you in charge of it?’

But Malin can’t answer her daughter’s question. Instead she just gawps when she sees her, the child who was lying in bed this morning; the little girl who went into the bathroom just quarter of an hour ago is transformed. She is wearing make-up and has tied up her hair, and something has happened, a hint of a woman has superimposed itself over her daughter’s appearance.

‘Mum? Mum, hello?’

‘You look lovely.’

‘Thanks, I’m going to the cinema.’

‘I’m working on the case.’

‘It’s a good thing I’m going to Dad’s tomorrow, so you can work late.’

‘Tove. Please. Don’t say that.’

‘I’m off now. I’ll be home by eleven. The last screening ends about then, but we’re having coffee first.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Anna.’

‘If I said I didn’t believe you, what would you say?’

Tove shrugs. ‘We’re going to see the new Tom Cruise film,’ then Tove gives the name of a film Malin has never heard of. Tove is as liberal in her choice of film as she is selective in her taste in books.

‘I haven’t heard of that one.’

‘Oh Mum, you don’t know anything about stuff like this.’

Tove turns and disappears from Malin’s sight, but Malin can hear her rummaging in the hall. She calls, ‘Do you need any money?’

‘No.’

And Malin wants to follow her, doesn’t believe any of this, but knows that she shouldn’t, can’t, won’t. Unless she will?

‘Bye!’

Anxiety.

Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, Zeke: all parents are familiar with it, that anxiety.

It’s cold out.

‘Bye, Tove.’

And the flat closes around Malin.

She turns off the television with the remote.

Leans back on the sofa and takes a sip of her tequila, the one she poured herself after they’d eaten.

She and Zeke had been out to Borensberg and spoken to Liedbergh’s lover. The woman was around forty, neither beautiful nor ugly, just one of the mass of normal women with passions to live out, to fulfil. She offered them coffee and home-baked buns. She told them she was single and unemployed, how she tried to fill her days while applying for any jobs she thought she might stand a chance of getting. ‘It’s hard,’ Peter Liedbergh’s lover had said. ‘You’re either too old or you haven’t got the right qualifications. But something will turn up.’

The woman confirmed Liedbergh’s story. Then she shook her head. ‘It’s a good job he went that way. Who knows how long that man might have been left hanging there otherwise in this cold.’

Malin looked at the porcelain figurines arranged on the kitchen windowsill. A dog, a cat, an elephant. A little porcelain menagerie for company.

‘Do you love him?’ Malin asked.

Zeke shook his head instinctively.

But the woman didn’t take against the question.

‘Who? Peter Liedbergh? No, not at all.’ She laughed. ‘You know, it’s just something we women need, isn’t it, a bit of company?’

Malin sinks further into the sofa. She thinks about Janne, about how difficult he finds it to talk, how he sometimes feels like a black outline superimposed over her own. In the window she can see the tower of St Lars, and waits for the bells to ring, tries to hear if there are any whispering voices in the darkness.

If you weren’t deaf you would hear the sound of the branch breaking. You would hear the sound of fibres splitting, hear my body slicing through the cold and the air; you who are standing directly underneath would throw yourself to one side, but none of this happens. Instead all my many kilos land right on the tent, smashing the aluminium frame as if it were made of matchsticks, and the whole construction collapses and you who are standing there when I fall, you poor uniformed policeman, at first you notice something hitting you, then you feel my weight, and then you are flattened to the ground by my frozen hardness, and something inside you, you don’t know what, breaks, but you’re lucky, it’s only a bone, nothing the doctors can’t put right, your arm will be fine. I’m perfectly harmless in that respect, even now I’m dead.

Because you didn’t get me down, in spite of my pleas, I had to persuade the tree, and to be honest it was tired of having me hanging on the oldest of its branches. It’s ready to be cast off, the oak said, so go ahead and fall, fall on the tent, to the ground, and stir things up a bit down there.

And now I’m lying here on top of the screaming policeman, in a muddle of words, tent-pegs and canvas. The heater is roaring in my ear. I can’t feel its heat but I know it’s there. Beneath my hands I can feel the earth, made damp by your heat; pleasantly wet and nice, like the innards of something, anything.

Malin is woken by Tove’s voice.

‘Mum? Mum, I’m home. Don’t you think you should go to bed instead?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

Malin wakes slowly, grows doubtful. Whenever she had done anything silly, she always woke Dad to say that everything was all right. But before Malin has time to doubt Tove, her daughter says, ‘Have you been drinking, Mum?’

Malin rubs her eyes. ‘No, just a bit of tequila.’

The bottle in front of her, the half-bottle of cask-aged tequila, bought on the way home from the station, a third empty.

‘Okay, Mum,’ Tove says. ‘Shall I help you into bed?’

Malin shakes her head. ‘That only happened once, Tove. You only had to do that once. ONCE.’

‘Twice.’

Malin nods. ‘Twice.’

‘Well, goodnight, then,’ Tove says.

‘Sleep well,’ Malin says.

The clock on the sideboard says quarter to twelve. From behind Malin can see that Tove’s hair is now loose, and she looks like the little girl again.

A bit of tequila left in the glass. A lot more in the bottle. Another little one? No. No need. Malin gets up with an effort and stumbles towards the bedroom.

She can’t be bothered to get undressed and falls on to her bed.

And dreams dreams that might have been best undreamed.

7

Friday, 3 February

The jungle is at its most dense at night.

The damp, the insects, the damn wildlife, leaves, snakes, spiders, millipedes and mould growing in the sleeping-bag at night.

Then they land at the airport, endless masses of tiny lights, a starry sky on the ground and the Russian Tupolev plane plummeting straight down like a helicopter, the wings tear and he flaps with his soul in the cramped space, child and mother standing there, Tove, only little then, now: What are you doing here, Dad? You ought to be at home with me. I’m coming, I’m coming, and then they unload, break out of the plane’s innards: food, plumbing pipes, and they come towards them in the darkness; you can only see their eyes, thousands of eyes in the darkness, eyes to trust in, and the hungry scared muttering and the salvos from the automatic rifles. Back off or we’ll finish what the Hutus started. Back away and a millipede crawls over my leg, the mould grows, Kigali, Kigali, Kigali, the inescapable mantras of dream.

Get this fucking millipede away from me.

Janne, someone shouts. Tove? Malin? Melinda? Per?

Get this . . .

Someone cuts the leg off someone who’s still alive, throws it in a pot of boiling water and then eats first, before someone else lets their children share the rest. No one cares, but if you stole milk from anyone still fully alive the punishment is death.

Don’t shoot him, I say. Don’t shoot.

He’s hungry, he’s ten, his eyes are large and yellowish white; the pupils expand in time with the realisation that this ends here, now.
I can’t even save you either.

Then you shoot.

Dog, dog, dog, Hutu, Hutu, Hutu, your cries echo, and your greed, your fucking bastard humanity makes me want to drown you all in the latrines we came here to build for your sake, so that typhoid and cholera and other shit wouldn’t kill you in numbers that even the Hutus couldn’t match.

Janne. Dad. Come home.