The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (18 page)

The last slice of onion in one hand, the last piece of smoked pork in the other, he swallowed, washing it down. The coffee table covered with piles of filled-in Keno tickets. A draw every day, at 18.55.

Ivan leaned forward, lifted the remote control, turned up the volume on the TV.

The first yellow ball was 30. The second, 40. Third, 39. A cluster. It was looking good. Fourth, 61, in the bottom left corner. Fifth, 51, in the box just above. Wrong side. Wrong cluster.

He lowered the volume, leaned back in his chair. He didn’t wait for the rest of those yellow balls. The match was already over – 61 never entered into his system, it was the figure that according to his calculations occurred least often.

The vast majority of people didn’t understand that this was precisely what it was about, seeing patterns. There were no coincidences. Patterns always recurred. Everything was part of a cycle and belonged together.

Ivan was holding forty Keno tickets that had just become worthless. His map towards the future. And the eleven crosses that were his directions for getting there. He crumpled them up, dropped them on the floor.

The next draw was tomorrow at 18.55.

He muted the TV and was about to get up when he heard a different sound. Outside the window. A car stopping and a car door being opened. He drew back the curtain.

A large pickup truck with a construction company logo on its side had stopped just outside. A young man was approaching. Fairly tall.

It wasn’t until those powerful strides had made it halfway to his stairs and front door that he saw who it was. Shorter hair. Angular jaw. Wide shoulders that he’d grown into. Someone who had left boyhood behind.

Leo.

Ivan looked around the kitchen, which overflowed into the hall. First he moved the empty wine bottle from the table to the bin bag under the sink, then threw the crumpled Keno tickets into the rubbish.

The doorbell rang.

He hurriedly put a pair of brown shoes on his bare feet, a grey jacket over his painting shirt. He wasn’t going to have time to clean up after a lifestyle that hadn’t changed.

He opened the door and they stood there, Ivan looking down, Leo looking up, seven steps and four and a half years between them.

‘New truck?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s damn shiny – you having a hard time finding jobs, Leo?’

‘Unlike you, I take care of my things.’

‘A builder’s truck should be dusty, Leo. Lots of work means lots of dust. Not much of a vehicle, really … no space if you need to bring in extra manpower. Two people working together. That must be why you’ve come here? Or maybe you’re hiring dwarves. Are you, Leo?’

‘I have two more identical vehicles. Or – we have two more. That belong to our firm.’

It wasn’t much. A blink, a slight twitch in his cheek, the lower lip shooting forward slightly. But Leo saw it.

‘So, son … you’ve got some … employees?’

‘Three.’

‘Three? Well … be wary of the union. The builders’ union. They’ll butt into everything you do. Like the Gestapo. And you know, Leo, employees, they only make trouble.’

‘I don’t think they will. You know, Pappa, I’ve just completed a major construction project in Tumba. Solbo Centre. Seven hundred square metres. Commercial property, good money. We’ve just finished it.’

‘We?’

‘And I didn’t come here to hire … how’d you put it? Extra manpower. I came here to give you this.’

Leo took an envelope from his breast pocket, one he’d checked so many times. He held it out.

‘Forty-three thousand.’

Ivan took the envelope, white and a little wrinkled, opened it. Five-hundred-kronor bills. Used. The kind stored in security bags in armoured vans.

‘That thirty-five grand you thought I owed you. And five thousand in interest.’

Fingers smelling of onion, Ivan took them out one at a time, counting them.

‘And three thousand more,’ continued Leo.

‘For what?’

‘One for each rib.’

Four years ago, Leo had thrown down the tool belt and started walking away while the old man stood there screaming. Leo didn’t remember the rest, or what they’d shouted at each other when Pappa grabbed hold of him, but he knew he’d turned round, punched as he’d been taught to punch, but not to the nose – to the body.

‘I can afford it, Pappa.’

He’d looked his father in the eyes and followed through with all his weight, through the shoulder, the arm, the fist.

‘So just take it. You need it.’

And could feel as soon as he connected that something had broken inside.

They had stood in silence afterwards. Pappa crouched forward with his right arm raised, not realising that it was his son who’d struck first.

‘I have enough damn work. You might have broken three of my ribs, but you didn’t break me.’

Ivan held the envelope in one hand, the other braced against the closed
door, balancing his frozen body – thin jacket over short-sleeved summer shirt in thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

‘But if I understand you correctly … You think it was OK for you to just pull out like that, just leave? This money, Leo, my money, was an advance that you never earned out.’

‘I worked for you for four years and got shit pay every week.’

‘You got what you deserved. No more, no less.’

‘I didn’t come here to argue with you. I came here to give you your fucking money. We’re even now.’

Leo stepped towards the car.

‘And how … are your brothers?’

Leo turned round.

‘They’re good.’

Here they come. The questions.

‘So you … see them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they still live there, with her, in that … Falun?’

‘They live here. In Stockholm.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘How … what … they’re studying?’

‘Working.’

‘With what?’

‘They work with me.’

‘Work with you?’

‘With me.’

‘Vincent … too?’

This man, fifty-one years old with no socks on inside his shoes, suddenly seemed so much older. The chin and lower lip even further out, the face pale, he really was freezing.

‘Yep. Vincent, too.’

He held on tight to the steps’ wet iron railing, as if his bones couldn’t support him.

‘But he’s only sixteen, seventeen years old, isn’t he?’

‘Like I was when I started working for you.’

‘I thought he lived there, with …
her
.’

The envelope lay awkwardly in his hand, and he stuffed it into his breast pocket.

‘Is he tall?’

‘About your height. And mine.’

‘Good genes.’

‘And in a few years, he’ll be even taller.’

‘Very good genes.’

The frozen body froze no more, and Ivan found the strength to walk towards Leo.

‘And Felix?’

‘Better than ever.’

‘It’s been such a long time.’

And Leo knew what was coming.

‘Leo? Son? Damn it, why don’t you talk to them!’

‘I don’t think Felix—’

‘So we can meet! Together. All four of us!’

‘—wants to see you. At all. Ever.’

He was close now, a few steps away, and Leo caught a whiff of the remnants of yesterday’s Vranac.

‘But you surely—’

‘And you know how he is. When Felix has decided something, he’s decided.’

‘What the hell, that was fourteen years ago!’

‘And you still haven’t said sorry?’

‘How can he be so damn unforgiving! Can’t he just let it go?’

‘It’s like spit in your face. Right, Dad?’

‘You could surely talk to him. So we could meet. Couldn’t you?’

Those eyes. The conviction.

‘Anyhow, I’m in the middle of a job, too. A big one. Hotel, fifty-five rooms that need wallpapering, woodwork that needs to be painted. And all the windows, you know, at least thirteen thousand per room, really fucking big. And I’ve been thinking a lot about you. That we should do it together. Me and you. And now – your brothers.’

Those fucking black eyes that intimidated him, that he’d grown up with, and fled from.

‘Listen … Pappa?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I don’t run errands for you any longer.’

This time those eyes couldn’t get to him.

‘You only give a damn about yourself! You know that, Leo?’

Leo looked at a man who seemed to have shrunk with age. Eyebrows that stuck out wildly like antennae, clothing that wasn’t clean – and from this close he could smell new sweat bringing old sweat back to life.

‘This is what you’ve always done. Put yourself first.’

Leo didn’t answer.

‘Just like a snitch.’

‘What the hell did you say?’

‘You come here. So fucking cocky, eh. Not a word for years. I wasn’t supposed to get shit from you. So why the hell come here now with forty-three thousand? Forty-three thousand! Did you conjure it out of thin air? Is that what you want me to believe? Nah, nah. How the hell did you earn that kind of money? Without me? What the hell kind of job pays this much?’

Ivan pulled a hand-rolled cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit it.

‘You come here to tell me about your brothers who don’t want to meet their father. To stuff them down my throat like I’m a fucking goose? To stand there acting like you’re better than me? Just like a snitch would! A
potkazivanje
!’

‘I didn’t say a damn word back then, and you know it!’

‘You ratted on me.’

Every time. And it didn’t matter if he kept shouting or broke three more of those ribs. It would keep going, remain the same. Leo breathed slowly, reached out and tapped his fingertips against the breast pocket of his father’s cheap shirt.

‘We’re even.’

He sped through a residential area.
Snitch
. Sped past the school, the public pool, the library.
Snitch
. Then he slowed down, abruptly. Pappa’s voice,
snitch
, it didn’t go away like it used to.

Empty parking spaces outside the red, low-rise buildings of Ösmo Square. He stopped there for a moment with the engine off, staring at the shops, the banks, a café, a shoemaker, a dry cleaner, a florist.

I didn’t say anything. I was ten years old, sitting in front of those fat fucking cops.

If he stared just a little further into the distance, past the corner with the small kiosk, he could see the brick chimney of the house where Pappa sat now, where they’d lived and worked together, back when it was still
possible. Where, ten years after that little boy had kept his mouth shut like he was told to, Leo had thrown down his tool belt, met a single mother who was five years his senior, and decided to move in with her in a one-bedroom flat in Hagsätra.

No snitch would have been able to rob a security van.

Three months later, he and Anneli had signed a joint lease on a three-bedroom flat in Skogås. It had been his whole world. Until now.

Did you ever do that, old man, rob a security van?

Leo opened the car door and started walking towards the little corner store. He put a pack of Camels on the counter and tried to avoid making eye contact with Jönsson, who was still hanging on to a grey tonsure, the remnants of hair he didn’t have back then either.

‘Anything else?’

‘Nope, that’s all.’

‘Anything for your dad? A bag of rolling and some Rizla papers, right?’

‘Not today.’

He dug some money out of the side pocket of his work trousers, a few used 50-kronor notes from the robbery, plaster dust on his hands as he handed them to Jönsson who put them in the cash register, which was always slightly open – the click of the spring mechanism as the drawer slid out, which was the same as no receipt.

‘It’s been a while since we saw you, son.’

He’d reached the newspapers by the door.

‘Yep. It’s been a while.’

‘Listen,’ said Jönsson, smiling. ‘Say hello to your dad from me.’

They always had leads on you. And do the police have any leads on me?

Leo didn’t answer. A packet of cigarettes and some change in his hands, he just nodded and left.

No. They don’t. Not a trace.