The Crow Girl (106 page)

She promises to get in touch with more definite information later, and ends the call.

Another phone call, this time to a van-rental company.

She books a light van with a capacity of twenty-two cubic metres, and is told she can pick it up in an hour. Which is good, because she’s got a fair distance to drive, and it’s also going to take her a while to carry the bags down to the van.

She stops.

An idea is starting to form in her head.

When you feel that you have always made the wrong decisions in life, sooner or later there has to come a time when you make the right one.

This is one of those times.

Victoria Bergman gets her phone out again and calls her bank.

She is put through to a woman who helps her conduct the transactions. It’s rather more complicated than usual, and at first the woman advises her against it.

But Victoria is certain. Unshakeably certain.

And Sofia doesn’t object.

The next call is received without any attempts to dissuade her. On the contrary, her idea is welcomed by the young man at the Audi centre in Smista.

When she hangs up everything feels lighter.

She’s put an end to her life in Stockholm.

And now she’s going to a place that still means something to her.

A place where she will be on her own, where the houses are all empty at this time of year, and the starry sky is as high and clear as it was when she was really small.

IT’S SAID THAT
the two industrial cities in the east of Ukraine, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, are the only cities in the world where the snow is black. But now she knows that’s wrong. Black snow also falls on the capital, and a swarm of ash flakes is hitting the car’s windows.

Madeleine is sitting in the back seat and the driver’s face is reflected in the windscreen against the dark backdrop of tall cranes, chimneys and factory buildings. His face is pale, thin, unshaven. His hair is black and his eyes bright blue, cold and agitated. His name is Kolya.

The streets disappear behind them in the night haze, and they drive out across one of the bridges crossing the Dnieper River. The water glints black and she wonders how long she’d survive if she jumped in.

On the other side of the river the road is lined with industrial buildings, and Kolya slows down at an intersection, then turns right. ‘It is here …’ he says, without looking at her.

He pulls into a smaller side road and parks by the pavement next to a high wall, then gets out and opens the door for her.

The night is glitteringly cold, and the wind makes her feel frozen.

Kolya locks the car, and they walk along the wall. They stop at a shabby wooden barrier, flaking with red and white paint, beside something that looks like a small sentry box. Kolya raises the barrier and gestures to her to go through. She does so, and he follows her and lowers the barrier behind them. Then he unlocks the gate to the main building.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he says, looking at his watch. A short, thin man in black steps out of the darkness and indicates that they should follow him.

They make their way to an internal courtyard and the man unlocks one of the doors to the building while Kolya stops and pulls out his cigarettes. ‘I wait outside.’

Madeleine goes into a corridor where the only window is completely covered with plywood. To the left there’s an open door, and she glimpses a large table inside with a row of guns lined up on top of it. The thin man is holding an automatic pistol and nods to her.

She goes in and looks around the room. Someone’s stripped off the wallpaper, scraping and plastering the wall ready for repainting, but evidently never started the work. Electrical cables hang diagonally across the walls, as though they were too short and had to take the most direct route to a socket.

The man passes her a gun. ‘Luger P08,’ he explains. ‘From the war.’

She takes the weapon, weighs it in her hand for a moment, and is surprised at how heavy it is. Then she pulls a bundle of notes from her jacket pocket and hands it to the man. Viggo Dürer’s money.

The seller shows her how the old gun works. She can see rust on it and hopes that the mechanism isn’t going to stick.

‘What happened to your finger?’ he asks, but Madeleine doesn’t answer.

As Kolya drives her through the night she thinks about what awaits her.

She’s sure Viggo Dürer is going to keep his part of the bargain. She knows him so well that she can trust him on that.

For her part, their agreement means that she can draw a line under the past, leave it behind and continue her cleansing process. Soon everyone who has ever owed her anything will be dead.

Apart from Annette Lundström. But she has already been punished enough. Losing her entire family and ending up in a state of psychosis. Besides, Annette was never more than a passive onlooker to the abuse.

Now Madeleine just wants to get back to her lavender fields, and there she’ll stay for the rest of her life.

Kolya slows down, and she realises that they’re almost there. He pulls over onto the pavement and parks next to a bus shelter.

‘Syrets station,’ he says. ‘Over there.’ He points at a low, grey concrete building some distance away. ‘You find the way to the monument? The menorah?’

She nods and feels in the inside pocket of her jacket. The rusty old gun is cold to her touch as she feels the ridged butt.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he says. ‘Then the area will be safe.’

Madeleine gets out of the car and shuts the door.

She knows she has to turn right at the station to get to the monument, but first she goes down the steps to the little shops beneath the building. Five minutes later she finds what she’s looking for, a small fast-food place, and asks for a cup of ice cubes.

She goes back up the steps and turns off towards the large park. Her teeth ache as she crunches the ice, and she remembers the feeling of losing a tooth as a child. The stinging, chill sensation of having a hole in her gum. The taste of blood in her mouth.

The path leads to a small open area before continuing into the park. A paved circle with a statue on a plinth at its centre. The sculpture is unassuming, and represents three children. A girl with her hands raised, and two smaller children resting at her feet.

From the inscription on the plinth, she reads that the statue was erected in memory of the thousands of children who were executed there during the war.

Madeleine chews her ice cubes, leaves the statue behind and continues along the path into the park. For the time being the scream is still inside her, but soon she’ll be able to let it out.

IT HAD STARTED
snowing somewhere near Hedemora, and she’s long since given up all hope of a clear, starry sky above the lake by the cottage in Dala-Floda.

But the sky is probably never as clear as it is in childhood memories.

The forest gets thicker, and it’s not far now. The last time she came this way her dad was driving and she remembers the journey as a haze of arguments. It was just before the cottage was sold, and Mum had got the wrong idea about the sort of price they could expect.

She remembers other trips as well, and is grateful that the place where he used to stop so that she could make him happy is no longer the same. The road has been widened and the lay-by is gone.

She passes all the familiar places. Grangärde, Nyhammar and, a bit further on, Björbo. Everything looks so different, uglier and blacker, even though she knows that can’t be right.

How can she have such bright memories, considering everything she went through up here?

Maybe it’s because of that summer when she was ten and met Martin and his family. A few weeks without Dad, with just Aunt Elsa in the next house as a babysitter.

One more bend, then the cottage, on the left-hand side.

She sees that the house is still there, stops the van next to the hedge and switches the engine off. The wind has dropped slightly, unless the forest is providing a bit of shelter, and the snowflakes are big, falling softly in the darkness as she heads towards the gate.

Like the other houses up here, their old cottage is still a holiday home and is deserted and shut up. But it’s changed beyond recognition. Two outbuildings, and a terrace running right along the front and round both ends, modern windows and doors, and a new roof.

The mixture of old and new is provocatively tasteless.

She goes back to the van and sits in the driver’s seat. She can’t be bothered to start the engine, and just sits there for a while. The snow is falling gently on the windscreen, and her thoughts drift off, back in time. She ran along this road so many times to get to the cottage Martin’s parents were renting. The house isn’t visible from here, and perhaps that’s why she can’t summon up the energy to start the van and drive on. She’s afraid of her memories.

I have to go down to the lake, she thinks, finally starting the van and continuing along the road. The cottage is visible from a bend and she casts a quick glance at it, enough to see that it too has been extended and adorned with a large terrace. It’s just as deserted as the rest of the village. From here the road slopes down, and now she can just make out the lake a short distance ahead. The road is like glass, and she has to drive with two wheels on the edge of the snowdrift to get any sort of grip. One final bend and she passes between two wooden posts and a sign indicating that this is a designated swimming beach.

She gets out and opens the back doors of the van.

Twelve bags containing fragments of her life, millions of words and thousands of pictures that all, somehow, lead back to her.

Getting to know yourself can be like trying to decipher a cryptogram.

Twenty minutes later she has unloaded all the plastic bags onto the snow-covered beach.

The ice hasn’t yet formed, and she crouches down by the water’s edge and runs her fingers through the ice-cold water.

Her eyes are used to the darkness now and the white snow gives enough light for her to be able to see a fair way out across the lake. The snow is still falling gently and somewhere out there, beyond the speckled white pattern overlaying the lake, she knows that there’s a large rock.

When she used to swim here as a little girl, the dark water would close around her and protect her from the world outside. There was security under the water, and she used to swim four lengths between the jetty and the diving rock, four times fifty metres, then lie on the beach to sunbathe. It had been on one of those occasions that she had first met Martin.

He had been just three years old then, and she had been his Pippi throughout that long, light summer. A Pippi Longstocking, a child yet somehow a grown-up, someone who had been forced to look after themselves.

With Martin she had learned to take care of others, but everything fell apart six years later when she left him alone by the Fyris River in Uppsala.

She had been gone five minutes. But that was enough.

Maybe it had been an accident, maybe not.

Either way, it was down by the river that Crow Girl got her name. She had been inside Victoria before that, but more as a nameless shadow.

Now she’s sure that Crow Girl isn’t one of her personalities.

The flickering she had felt under her eyelids, and the blind spots in her vision suggest that she was something else entirely.

Crow Girl is an immediate stress reaction to trauma. An epileptic disturbance of the brain, which when she was younger she had mistakenly interpreted as having an alien being inside her.

She walks back to the van and gets a towel out of her bag. Then she returns to the shore, takes her shoes off and rolls her trousers up over her knees.

Even after the first cautious step out into the water she feels numb. As if the lake itself had hands, gripping her ankles and squeezing them tight.

She stands there for a while. The numbness is replaced by a strong stinging sensation that almost feels like heat, and when it starts to feel pleasant she goes back up to the beach to get the first bag.

She pulls it behind her, letting it float on the surface. Once she’s ten metres out and the water reaches up to her thighs, she carefully empties the bag into the water.

Words and pictures drift slowly out across the black water, like little ice floes, and she wades back to the beach to get the second bag.

She works hard, bag after bag. After a while she forgets the burning sensation and takes off her trousers, jacket and top. In just her vest and pants she wades further out. The water soon reaches her chest, and she doesn’t notice that she’s forgetting to breathe. The lake’s cold embrace is contracting her muscles, and she can’t feel the bottom beneath her feet. The water around her is white with paper, and it sticks to her arms and hair. The feeling is indescribable. Euphoric, perfect. And somewhere beneath the elation she’s in control.

She isn’t scared. If she gets a cramp she can touch the bottom.

Everything will fade, she thinks. All these papers will lose their ink and print, the words will dissolve into the water and become one with it.

The light breeze is carrying the contents of the bags out into the middle of the lake. Little sinking icebergs, disintegrating as they disappear from view further out in the water.

Once the last bag is empty she swims back to shore, but before she climbs out she lies on her back for a little while, looking up at the falling snow. The cold is warmth and she feels an intense sense of freedom.

BABI YAR. THE
women’s ravine. This was where the city boundary once ran, and it was an inhospitable place, so the guards livened things up by asking their wives and lovers to come out.

The women’s ravine used to be a symbol of love. But she remembers the place the way it looked that autumn day almost seventy years ago, and can almost hear the ground moaning.

In less than forty-eight hours the Nazis exterminated the Jewish population of Kiev, more than thirty-three thousand people, and turned the ravine into a mass grave that was covered with earth and is today an attractive, verdant park. The truth, as always, is relative. It hides as a deep evil in the ground, under the beautiful surface.