Two Soldiers (14 page)

today

Gabriel lay on his back under a white and somewhat rusty
Mercedes Benz in the middle of a multistory parking lot in Skärholmen Centrum. Asphalt and grit rubbed against his thin T-shirt. He cut the cable to the alarm, put his cell phone down where he could see it. The stopwatch had already started
00:02
to measure his last day alone.

He had been incarcerated in secure homes in Småland and in Hälsingland and in locked units in Bärby and Eknäs, but had never voluntarily left Råby for several days in a row. She had shown him the plastic stick she’d pissed on—positive—it should have just been a drug test, but it was a sesame seed instead and he’d run barefoot to the car in the garage a few miles out of Södertälje, one single
00:05
bullet in his gun and only one chamber that it could be in, and for a long time he’d wondered whether to shoot or not, started the car again, and carried on south along the E4, stopping for the first time after twenty minutes and seventy-five kilometers at a gas station somewhere outside Nyköping and he’d hit the woman behind the counter across the cheek, nose, and neck with his open hand, she’d fallen to the floor and he’d eaten two hamburgers
00:10
that were nearly done and kicked her in the stomach when a man had come running in from the pumps and he’d pointed his gun at the bastard’s head and fired a shot past his ear and into the middle of the window, two hundred kilometers an hour to Jönköping and he’d driven into the center of the town, still dark, and the pub in the pedestrian precinct
00:14
had been empty and he’d ordered a beer, but the bartender idiot had refused to serve anyone who wasn’t wearing a top and shoes, so he’d walked out and kicked in the display window at Åhléns department store and grabbed a fucking
awful shirt and a pair of old-man’s shoes and gone back to the pub, got a beer from the idiot who’d forced him to commit a crime, then continued on south without getting out of the car before Värnamo and Ljungby and
00:17
it had started to get light as he approached Helsingborg and the harbor, he had been hot and sweaty and jumped in the water by the big ferries that bounced about like sesame seeds, he’d felt dizzy and screamed at them and spat at them and then went to Malmö and the Öresund Bridge, it was morning
00:21
by the time he’d driven into Copenhagen and suddenly everything had become blurred and shiny and cold and warm and he was sure that he was bigger than ever before and smaller than ever before, that from all the faces he’d first recognized Leon, who was waiting for him, then Wanda
00:24
who had walked along the pavement with her back to him with an even bigger sesame seed in her arms and kept on lying, then he’d maybe fallen asleep or he’d wandered around as it got light and then dark and then light again, then driven back and not slowed down until he could see Södertälje Bridge and Salem and Råby, he’d picked up Jon and Bruno outside Skärholmen and the faces that he’d hit three days earlier had looked at him but not said a word because they knew there was nothing to say.

He looked at the stopwatch on his cell phone.

He had cut the cable, broken the lock, melted down the plastic knobs, started the car.

00:29
.

Today, he’d always known, he would be better than ever. He checked the cell phone lying beside him on the asphalt again, this day, today.

They’d heard that he’d gotten the car started and came running from two different doors, Bruno and Jon had both kept guard and now opened the door to the passenger seat and backseat at the same time and got into the car that would be theirs for twelve hours—until they were all together again.

He stopped for the first time by Skärholmen swimming pool, left the motor running, and went into the chlorine-impregnated brick building where they’d gone once a week in third grade to learn to swim; he still felt uncomfortable when he thought about it, he’d refused every time, would never show himself naked with his disfigured skin. He paid the attendant, who just kept staring at him, seventy kronor, then went into the men’s changing rooms, the locker in the middle of the middle row. The lock buckled and the key got stuck and he jiggled it backward and forward until it opened. The Sig Sauer was small and black and just fitted in the inner pocket of his jacket. Three months ago, they’d stopped and mugged a policeman at the Råby roundabout, he was still missing his service gun. The metal of the muzzle in his armpit as he walked out again and dropped the dry towel into one of the laundry baskets. They carried on to Kungens Kurva and the huge ICA Kvantum supermarket, the locker furthest to the right in the middle row, a Russian gun, a Tokarev 7.62 millimeter that they’d taken from the fat, pale bikers who’d tried to move in on their turf, he put that in the other inner pocket. On to Råby and Råby Backe 7, second floor, door nearest the elevator, he rang the bell and she was at home like she was supposed to be and he tried to remember her name, down the hall to the first closet on the left, behind the suitcases, the real thing that was older and had been used for seventeen armed robberies and the replica that was brand-new, she opened a black trash bag and held it while he put in the two Kalashnikovs and gave her three thousand-kronor notes, one for each week, then finally down into her cellar room, with the lady’s bike that covered an arc torch and a closed aluminum stepladder stolen from the building suppliers in Masmo.

He’d dropped Bruno and Jon off at Råby Torg—they would move the boat at Slagsta Strand and sort out mattresses and food for the apartments—when suddenly he couldn’t bear it any longer, what was gnawing at him.

Inside.

The whole fucking time that he’d been sorting out the car, guns, arc torch, ladder. It had been gnawing at him. And he couldn’t
understand why. It had been gnawing at him since the sesame seed, something that was happening and no matter how much he tried not to think about it, it kept coming back.

He swallowed all the extra saliva he didn’t have room for.
It was tearing at him
. He took a deep breath and air caught in his chest.
Inside
. He hit his stomach with his hands hard and again and again, until his damaged skin was red.

It was eating him up inside
.

Gabriel had been on his way to the garage when he suddenly changed course, accelerated, headed toward the barrier that had its arm across the asphalt pathway, drove toward it, through it, metal that didn’t break but rather bent backward far enough for him to keep going over the bushes and rows of plants to the door of Råby Allé 67, left the keys in the car when he ran up the steps.

They were coming back to him. The past few days.

One bullet left in his gun and the ferry that turned into a fucking sesame seed and her positive piss, he was still running when he opened the door to the apartment and went down the hall. Wanda was sitting on the sofa and he screamed at her to take off her clothes and lie down on the floor, and then he went to the kitchen and the oblong cupboard and he took out the vacuum cleaner. He started with her feet until the attachment got stuck on her ankle and he carried on up her shin instead, knees and thighs and cunt, he avoided the damned belly, spent more time on her tits, careful with the nipples, up her throat, cheeks, and forehead, changed the attachment to the small round one when he got to her hair. Back down to the stomach, the attachment hard against her navel and maybe he was crying a bit but it was hard to tell because he was screaming all the time about whores and bitches and brothers and about the kind of whore who takes his brothers from him, her skin was red and clean when he turned off the vacuum and opened it in the middle, took out the bag and carried out the front door to the garbage chute where he emptied it like it was dirt.

———

They sat side by side in the car. It wasn’t gnawing inside as much anymore. But he didn’t say anything and she said nothing as they drove north in the middle lane of the E4, as they’d done every two weeks.

Not much farther now, not much longer now.

Into the Shell station to the right of the Täby exit, and the spot near the air and water booth.

Wanda was to stay in the car while he went into the shop, past the woman at the register who looked down and away. But this time he didn’t try to catch her eye from a distance, nor did he open the fridge and take out two cans of Coke and then go out again—suddenly he was standing in front of her and she jumped when she realized.

He had put down a packet of condoms next to a twin-pack of big batteries.

“This.”

She still didn’t understand. He was going to pay. He wasn’t threatening her.

“Yes?”

“How fucking much does it cost?”

She moved gingerly and without a sound when she read the prices and tapped them into the register, as if she wanted to be invisible.

“One hundred and fifteen kronor.”

He put the exact amount down on the counter, but she didn’t dare to pick it up until he’d gone out the door and got back into the car that she could see clearly through the window, always a Mercedes, always different from the time before.

Wanda was still sitting in the passenger seat and he handed her the condoms as he opened the box of 1.5-volt batteries and took out a knife and a metal cutter.

With the knife, he cut a hole in the plastic covering of a battery and peeled it off bit by bit.

He cut the metal part in two with the metal cutter.

Inside the plastic, inside the metal, there was a carbon rod in each battery—he took great care, they mustn’t break, handed them to Wanda.

Two oblong, black, weightless carbon rods in her hand. The only thing they needed today that couldn’t be found in a prison, where
every electrical apparatus accessible to the prisoners had batteries with either carbon in powder form or alkaline with no carbon content whatsoever.

She knew what she had to do.

She opened the door, her hand gently on his cheek.

“I love you.”

He stayed where he was and when she turned around, halfway across to the toilets, and looked at him, he’d taken out his cell phone and was pretending to talk on it, his back to her.

She had never said it before.

He had a brother, after all, he loved him.

He hated her.

———

The hard stone floor was cold. It smelled of urine and mold. She lay down and cried, the naked skin on her stomach and thighs was not red anymore, but she felt dirty. Gabriel had thought she was. She got up and turned on the faucet that only had cold water, and took off the rest of her clothes, she couldn’t really get close enough to the sink, so she scrubbed her whole body hard with her hands, fingers on her skin until it was red again, like Gabriel with the vacuum cleaner, she cried and scrubbed until she couldn’t scrub anymore and then she lay down again, back on the floor, her feet resting on the toilet seat.

Amphetamines in plastic bags or carbon rods in condoms, it didn’t matter, she still had to do the same—baby oil outside and inside her vagina, on the rubber surface, on her fingers, and then, bit by bit, until the pain took over.

———

They still hadn’t spoken to each other, he couldn’t and she didn’t dare, not when they left the highway, not for the last few kilometers on smaller roads past the small town and the church until they were in front of Aspsås prison. The words got stuck, Gabriel couldn’t even look at her; they sat side by side staring straight ahead. He didn’t know why, but felt that it might have something to do with the positive
plastic stick that she’d shown him, and the fact that he’d disappeared for three days and that this was the last and the first and that it would all start in a minute when Wanda walked through the gate in the wall in front of them. The only thing he knew for sure was that what was gnawing at him had come back and was even stronger.

They didn’t even look at each other when she got out of the car in the prison parking lot and he quickly reversed out again. He would park the car by the church and leave it there, then go to the bus stop and wait for her. He looked out of the window. She’d started to walk toward the prison gate and suddenly he slammed on the brakes, went back and wound down the window.

“Come here.”

No words for so long. It felt strange to be shouting after her.

“But visiting time . . . Leon, he’ll—”

“Come.”

She walked back and sat down in the car beside him and he looked at her and didn’t know what to say and she waited until he knew.

“Whore.”

He didn’t say it loud. And his eyes weren’t aggressive. She didn’t understand.

“I’ll never say that again. Your name is Wanda.”

She dared to look at him now, but still without saying anything, frightened, not of him, but of breaking the spell.

“This.”

A white tube in his hand. The one he rubbed on his 85 percent burn scars every day. The house that burned down, and the morphine that was the only thing that could still the pain, the body that rattled when he left the hospital, nine years old.

He handed her the cream that no one else had ever been allowed to rub into all that ugliness.

“This morning . . . I forgot . . . you put some cream on my back.”

She had tried a couple of times. But he’d screamed at her.

“I want you to do it.”

He turned around, back to her when he pulled up his shirt. They didn’t say any more. She rubbed the cream into his skin in the way
she’d seen him do it in the morning, smiling the whole time. He shivered a bit a first and perhaps turned away a fraction, but when she did it the second time, even though it wasn’t needed, he stayed still.

Then they went their separate ways. He toward the church and bus stop, she toward the gate and central security.

Now
.

The microphone in the wall, walking across asphalt, the blue uniform on a chair in central security with a finger on the list of registered visits.

It was because of this you had to be heard and searched
.

She left the room that had one single barred window and walls full of small lockers, went out into the entrance hall and through the gray metal detector, the two guards studying her like they normally did when the beeping noise broke the silence.