The Crow Girl (107 page)

A tiny wooden vice. A thumbscrew. One more turn. Then another.

It needs to be felt. The pain must be physical. It must spread from the thumb to the heart, carried in the blood. The thumbscrew controls pain, which becomes meditation.

Her finger is starting to turn blue. One turn, then another, then another. The screams of the dead pulse in her finger.

Viggo Dürer, born Gilah Berkowitz, has ten minutes left to live, and she falls to her knees in front of the memorial, a menorah, a seven-armed candelabra. Someone has hung a garland of flowers on one of its sturdy arms.

Her body is old, her hands gnarled, her face pale and watery.

She is wearing a grey coat with a white cross on the back.

The cross is the sign for a liberated prisoner from the concentration camp in Dachau, but the coat isn’t her own. It was meant for a young Dane whose name was Viggo Dürer. In other words, her freedom is false. She has never been a free person, neither before nor after Dachau. She has been in chains for over seventy years, and that’s why she has come back here.

Her agreement with Madeleine will be concluded.

At the bottom of the ravine she will finally find peace together with those she once sent to their deaths.

She turns the thumbscrew once more. The pain in her finger is almost mute now, and tears are clouding her eyes. She has seven minutes left to live.

What is conscience? she thinks. Regret? Can you regret an entire life?

It had begun when she betrayed her family during the occupation. She had revealed their roots to the Germans and they had set off for the Jewish cemetery near Babi Yar with all their belongings loaded onto a wheelbarrow. It was envy that had driven her to inform on them.

She was a
mamzer,
an illegitimate child who didn’t belong.

That autumn day she had made up her mind to live the rest of her life as someone else.

But she had wanted to catch a last glimpse of her father and two older brothers, and had come out here. Not far from where she is now there was a clump of trees surrounded by tall grass. She had lain hidden there, barely twenty metres from the edge of the ravine, and witnessed the whole thing. The pain in her finger throbs as the memories come back to her.

One of the Germans’ Sonderkommandos and two Ukrainian police battalions took care of the logistics. Because it had been a systematic, almost industrial process.

She had seen hundreds of people led up to the ravine to be shot.

Most had been naked, stripped of their possessions. Men, women and children. It hadn’t made any difference. A democracy of extermination.

Another turn of the thumbscrew. The wooden screw creaks as she turns it, but the pain has disappeared. It’s just a strong pressure that feels hot. She has learned that mental pain can be driven out with physical means, and she closes her eyes and can see it all before her once more.

A Ukrainian policeman had walked up with a rusty old wheelbarrow full of screaming babies. Another two policemen had joined him, and together they had thrown the tiny bodies into the ravine.

She hadn’t seen her father, but did see her brothers.

The Germans had tied a group of young boys together, two or three dozen tied up with barbed wire that cut deep into their naked flesh, and those who were still alive were forced to drag their dead or unconscious comrades.

Both of her brothers had been in the group, and had been alive when they fell to their knees at the edge of the ravine to be shot in the back of the head.

She has five minutes left to live, and at last she undoes the little wooden thumbscrew and puts it in her pocket. Her finger throbs and the pain returns.

She kneels down, the way her brothers had in the same place, and she is both now and then at the same time. She had turned her own family in, and everything had started with that.

Everything she has done in her life can be traced back to what happened on those autumn days.

She had been part of the informant community. Stalin’s dictatorship turned friends into enemies, and not even the most dedicated Stalinists had been safe. When the Germans came it continued, but with the roles reversed. Then you had to inform on Jews and Communists, and she had only done the same as everyone else. Adapting and trying to survive. That was impossible as a Jewish girl,
mamzer
or not, but perfectly feasible as a strong young man.

It hadn’t been easy to hide her physical gender from others, and hardest of all in Dachau. It would probably have been impossible if it hadn’t been for the protection of the guard commander. To him she had been an
Ohrwürmer
, an earwig, both male and female.

Mentally Gilah Berkowitz is both male and female, or neither, but outwardly the social advantages have made it most practical to perform as a man.

She had even married one of the young girls from Sigtuna College, Henrietta Nordlund, and the marriage had been ideal. She had provided for Henrietta in exchange for her silence and regular appearances as a wife.

She couldn’t have wished for a better wife. But in recent years Henrietta had become something of a burden.

The same applied to Anders Wikström, and it had been necessary to arrange an accident.

It’s a quiet night, the tall trees shut out all noise from the city, and she has just three minutes left to live. She identified her executioner ten years ago, when Madeleine was just ten years old.

The same age she was when she betrayed her father and brothers.

Now Madeleine is a grown woman with many lives on her conscience.

Gilah Berkowitz listens for footsteps, but it’s still quiet. Only the wind in the trees and the dead in the ground. A low moaning.

‘Holodomor,’
she mutters, pulling the coat with the white cross tighter around her.

Images flood through her. Dried-out faces and emaciated bodies. Flies on a pig’s cadaver and the memory of her father at the dinner table with the silver cutlery in his hands. On the white plate is a pigeon. Father had eaten pigeons and she had eaten grass.

The Holodomor was Stalin’s stage-managed famine, and that act of organised mass murder had taken the life of her mother. They had buried her outside the town, but the grave had been plundered by the starving masses because the recently dead were still edible.

And during the war the Nazis made gloves of human skin and soap out of an entire race, and both have now become exhibits on show for the price of a museum ticket.

Everything sick ends up in museums.

If she is sick then everyone is sick, and she wonders if it was a coincidence that she arrived in Denmark, which has the most embalmed corpses in the whole world. The skulls of the dead had holes drilled in them to let out evil spirits, then they were lowered into the bogs.

Not far from Babi Yar is the Monastery of the Caves, containing the mummified bodies of monks who shut themselves in cramped holes to get closer to God. Now they’re in glass cabinets and their bodies are like little children’s. They’re covered in fabric, but their shrunken hands stick out, and sometimes a fly manages to get behind the glass and crawl on the fingers, eating whatever’s left. The corpses in the dark caves are exhibits, and the price of crying over them is the same as for a thin wax candle.

Now she suddenly hears steps, heels striking stone, slowly but purposefully. Which means that she has just a minute or so left to live.

‘Konets,’
she whispers. ‘Come to me.’

She thinks of the art she has created, and she has neither an explanation of what she has done nor any answer as to why she has done it. Art creates itself, because it is inexplicable and primitive.

It is Gnosis, child’s play, liberated from express intentions.

If she hadn’t seen her brothers die at Babi Yar, and if her mother had lived and not died in the great famine, then she would never have forced two Kazakh brothers to kill each other with their bare hands while she looked on dressed as her mother, a true Jewess.

Mamzer
is the word for what she has done.
Mamzer
is regret and exclusion and it is life and death at the same time, frozen moments of what has been lost.

Becoming an adult is a crime against your own childhood and simultaneously a denial of Gnosis. A child has no gender and being genderless is closer to the primitive, the original. Discovering your gender is a criminal act against the original creator.

I am an insect, she thinks, as she listens to the steps behind her. They slow down and stop. I am a centipede, a myriapod, and I cannot be explained. Anyone who understood me would have to be as sick as I am. There is no analysis. Commit me to the moaning earth.

She thinks no more as the bullet drills through her bowed head, but her brain has time to register a bang and the flapping of birds escaping into the night sky.

Then darkness.

ONCE SHE HAS
dried herself and got dressed, she sits beside the lake for several hours. What had once fitted into a small, enclosed room is now spread over an area of at least a hectare. At first it had looked almost like water lilies, but now there are just a few grey stains in the darkness.

A few of the sheets had drifted back to shore. A few incomprehensible lines from a book, maybe a photograph from a newspaper or a note about Gao Lian or Solace Manuti.

Then spring will come and all these papers will rot into the sand or at the bottom of the lake.

As she drives back through the village it has stopped snowing, and she doesn’t so much as glance at the cottages. She just concentrates on the road winding its way south through the forest.

Soon the snow disappears from the surface of the road; the conifers become mixed forest with birch and maples interspersed with pine and fir. The landscape becomes flatter and the van feels as light as a feather on the tarmac.

The weight she has left behind makes the wheels turn faster. She no longer has any baggage to drag around, and it occurs to her that the van-rental company has branches all over the country, and that she could return the van in Skåne if she wants.

She sticks just above the speed limit on main roads, but not because she’s in a hurry to get anywhere. One hundred kilometres an hour is a meditative speed.

She actually has everything she needs with her. In her bag is her purse, driving licence and bank cards, as well as a clean set of underwear. The damp towel is draped over the passenger seat, steaming gently from the seat warmer.

She doesn’t have to worry about money, and the payment to the housing cooperative is through direct debit.

She’s approaching Fagersta. If she continues along Route 66 she’ll be back in Stockholm in a couple of hours, whereas Route 68 heads south towards Örebro.

She stops in a lay-by a kilometre or so from where the road splits.

Straight ahead is home, back to the past. If she deviates from the planned route it will take her towards something new.

A journey without a goal. She switches the engine off.

During the past few weeks she has effectively shaken off her previous life. She’s torn it down, dismantled it into small pieces, and thrown away those parts that don’t belong to her. False memories have been deconstructed and hidden memories brought out and crystallised. She has reached clarity, a cleansed state.

Catharsis.

She will no longer give names to her characteristics, will not distance herself from her being by inventing other selves. She has freed herself from all the names: Gao Lian, Solace Manuti, the Worker, the Analyst and the Moaning Minnie, the Reptile, the Sleepwalker and Crow Girl.

She will never again hide away from life, letting unknown parts of her deal with things she finds difficult.

Everything that happens from now on happens to Victoria Bergman, no one else.

She looks at her reflection in the rear-view mirror. At last she recognises herself; it’s not the contorted and cowed face she wore when Sofia Zetterlund was the one in charge.

It’s a face that’s still young, and she can see no regret in it, no traces of a life full of painful memories. That must mean that she has finally accepted everything that has happened.

Her childhood and adolescence were what they were. A living hell.

She starts the van and pulls out onto the road again. One kilometre, two kilometres, and then she turns right, towards the south. The last of her doubts leave her and the black forest rushes past outside the windows.

From now on she’s not going to have any plans.

Everything that belongs to the past no longer has anything to do with her life. It has made her who she is today, but her past will never poison her again. Never influence her life choices and future. She has no responsibility for anyone but herself, and she realises that the decision she is making right now is definitive.

A new sign with a new place name, but she continues straight on as she thinks about Jeanette. Are you going to miss me?

Yes, but you’ll get over it. People always do.

I’m going to miss you too, she thinks. I might even love you, but I don’t yet know if it’s for real. So it’s better that I leave.

If it’s genuine love, I’ll come back. If I don’t, then that’s fine. Then we’ll know it wasn’t worth gambling on anyway.

It starts to get light as she’s driving through the forests of Västmanland. Forest, and more forest, with the occasional break where a patch of woodland has been felled, or for the odd meadow or field. She passes through Riddarhyttan, the only community along this stretch of road, and when the forest takes over again she decides to take things to their natural conclusion. Everything must be removed, everything must go.

She looks at the time. Quarter past eight, which means that Ann-Britt ought to be at work. She takes her mobile out and calls the practice. Ann-Britt answers after a couple of rings. Victoria gets straight to the point and explains what she’s decided to do, and how the practical concerns ought to be dealt with. Slightly curious about Ann-Britt’s reaction, she asks if she has any questions.