Two Soldiers (2 page)

“Go through again.”

Her chest, a small point slightly to the left, just there, it hurt so much.

She was sure they would see that she was trembling.

She walked through.

But only that
.

Not a peep. Not any other sound.

This time only, you have to be heard, you have to be searched, that’s all
.

She waited while the uniform that had been standing farthest away let the dog finish sniffing the belt, then it was given back and she pulled it through the loops on her jeans, tried to meet their eyes and then hurried over the concrete floor toward the visiting room that was in the middle, and a bit brighter than the others.

They locked the door from the outside.

She had sat on the chair before. She looked around.

It wasn’t a kind room.

She often did that, divided rooms and apartments and houses into kind ones and mean ones. This one was mean. There was plastic under the sheet on the bed and no one would ever sleep there. The yellowed porcelain sink and tap only had cold water. The window was barred and looked out over a strip of grass that led to a seven-meter-high wall and unpainted administration buildings.

She wasn’t as cold anymore, was barely sweating.

She washed her hands and dried them with some sheets of toilet paper from the roll at the end of the bed. She looked in the mirror, smiled as she always did—her little brother called it her mirror face—checked her lips, eyebrows, hair.

A metal door in a prison has heavy locks that make a very particular sound. When someone unlocks it, there’s a kind of clunking, quiet at first, then louder.

“One hour.”

He came in.

“We’ll come for you first, then her. OK?”

The two guards who’d walked in front of and behind him stopped in the doorway, nodded to her, and waited until she nodded back—they could go, they could lock the door again.

He pointed to the bed. She sat down; he pointed again; she lay down on her back; the pillow was hard and the plastic chafed her neck when the sheet slipped down.

He looked at her.

She knew how she had to lie when his hands undid her belt, pulled down her zipper, pulled off her pants.

Leon’s hand on her skin, just above the knee, her thigh, it pulled her underwear to the side and made her open her legs wider, his index finger and thumb against her labia.

———

Around the outside.

“Relax.”

Inside.

———

He found it, held it, pulled it out.

A plastic bag, hard to see through.

He weighed it in his hand.

Two hundred grams.

Leon smiled at her, the slippery, shiny plastic bag in his hand
, but maybe not enough for her to dare to smile back.

“You’ll come back. Here. In exactly fourteen days.”

Was he pleased, had she done well? She breathed in carefully, hesitated, and again. Then smiled.

“Put it up. Put it up again, but then
dump
it before you come. You have to smell. But have nothing up there.”

They were standing close. He wasn’t much taller than she was.

She shouldn’t have smiled.

Leon’s voice, raised again.

“Whore, d’you understand?”

His movements, angry.

“
Whore
, with your stupid fucking smile, you’re to smell but be empty, get it?”

His breath. She nodded.

“I get it.”

He looked at her.
I get it. You don’t get fuck all
.

Throughout the week, he’d made sure to mention that he was getting a visit, who was coming to visit, when she was coming again.

Two hundred grams in two-gram capsules.

Within a couple of days, every guard in every unit in Block D would know that a new and strong supply had got into D1 Left and they would all guess that this was how it got in.

He stared at her until she looked away and then put a hand on his own stomach, where there was pressure in his side.

He had taken eight condoms out of the packet that always lay beside the toilet roll at the head of the bed and filled each one with capsules, then swallowed them with cold water from the tap on the yellowing sink, and in a while he would throw up in another sink, in another cell.

“Reza.”

Österåker prison. One hundred grams.

“Uros.”

Storboda prison. One hundred grams.

“Go there now.”

Aspsås, Österåker, Storboda.

A visit to three prisons, every second week.

“I’m going there now.”

“They’ve got fines. Both of them. Five thousand in cash.”

“Five thousand?”

“Yes. Give them what they’re expecting first. Then tell them that they’ve got fines. You understand, whore?”

“I understand.”

Leon went over to the metal plate on the wall between the doorframe and the mirror, and touched the red button without pressing it and then came back to her.

“And Gabriel?”

“Yeah?”

“His report.”

He was very close, his breath just as hot.

“The kids have sold everything. Ninety thousand. And there’s more from Södertälje and maybe from Märsta.”

Her voice almost a whisper, as if she was reading to herself, it was important to get it right.

“Twelve houses in Salem and Tullinge. A hundred and forty-six thousand. Two debt enforcements in Vasastan. Fifty-five thousand. Two big barrels of gas from the Shell station in Alby. Nine thousand. A computer shop tomorrow, I think.”

He nodded. She didn’t know if it was good enough. She hoped so.

“And . . . one more thing. It’s important.”

“Right?”

“Gabriel said it was important to tell you that your phone’s being tapped.”

Leon had kept his hand by the red button, but now he let it drop, looked at her.

“Which one?”

“He said . . . Gabriel, he said . . .”

“
Which one
, whore?”

“He said . . . the one you share with Mihailovic.”

She had remembered. She closed her eyes. His eyes, she didn’t like them.

“And you are sure,
whore
, are you sure that’s what he said?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t want to be near him, his face was so tense. Instead of lashing out, as he turned back to the metal plate between the door and the mirror, he leaned toward the microphone and pressed the red button.

“We’re done.”

That crackling again.

“
Central security
.”

“Jensen. We’re done.”

“
Five minutes
.”

He was finding it hard to stand still, his breathing was irregular and his voice was raised.

“Are you living there?”

“Where?”

“There.”

Every time they were done, when they were standing there waiting, the same question.

“Yes.”

“In his room?”

“Yes.”

“All the time?”

“Yes.”

He was standing so close. She was scared.

“I moved here. You moved there.”

She waited in the room when he left, one prison warden in front of him and one behind him, down the spiral staircase, into the passage. They stopped in the first room on the right-hand side; he had to be naked when plastic-gloved fingers ran through his hair, felt under his arms, up his ass when he leaned forward.
I’m going to kill them all
. A new set of clothes and they continued down the straight, wide passage several meters under the prison yard, through the locked doors with small cameras that stirred into action as they approached, the corridor to Block D, one floor up, the unit on the left.

———

He hadn’t eaten all the day, and while the guards got ready for evening lockup, he’d emptied himself in one of the shower room sinks, handed out the first supplies in the unit, and then broken and emptied three two-gram capsules into a mug, stirred the cloudy water for a long time with his pinkie and drunk it before the powder had completely dissolved, then rinsed it down with more water so that it wouldn’t stick to his tongue or throat. He would hand out the rest tomorrow; it wouldn’t cost them anything this time, and every prisoner in the corridor would take too much and for too long over the next few days.

This time you’re to be heard, you’ll be searched, that’s all
.

He looked out the window.

You’ll come back. Here. In exactly fourteen days
.

It was already light outside.

Put it up again. But then dump it before you come. You have to smell and they’ll stand there with their dogs, doctors, and signed documents from the Prosecution Authority
.
You’ll be searched. But you’ll be empty
.

It had been dawn before, but now it was daylight.

As soon as the door had been locked, Leon had turned on the lamp that had no shade and gave off a hard, white light that stayed on all night. He had sat down at the simple wooden table against the wall by the window, had taken out some fine felt-tip pens and white A4
paper—real writing paper that you could buy in the prison shop, with thin blue stripes marking out each line, and started to write, and

after four fucking words had thrown the pens against the wall, stood up, and screamed
I’m going to kill them all
at the barred window and metal door and

screamed
I’m going to kill them all
again at the walls and ceiling and floor and bed and wardrobe and table and chair and

just after midnight he’d taken another four g and it had been difficult to get the black felt-tip pen to do what he wanted, as if his mind couldn’t catch his thoughts anymore because they were racing so fast and when they did stop for a moment, they couldn’t be held for long. He had read through the eleven pages

and realized that what had seemed so good when he wrote about dark and light and the difference between a seven-meter wall and a see-through wall was just bollocks and

when the first rush had passed he had written more, counted on his fingers, twenty-seven days, that’s when it would start,
they
would start.

Eleven pages.

Leon put down the pen and stood up, looked at the bedside lamp and turned it off, but never before it was light outside.

Out there, beyond the bars, sun already, it was a nice day.

The first floor of Block D.

D1 Left.

Cell 2.

He could see nearly the whole prison yard from here: the cracked asphalt, the small squares of brown grass, then the wall, maybe sixty meters away, so gray, so heavy. He knew that he had to hate it, that it was important. But he’d never managed. Not back then, long ago, when it had been more of a fence, nor later when it became more of a barrier with great rolls of barbed wire on top, nor even later when the first concrete wall, which had been three meters high, grew into this one, which was seven meters. He had tried to hate them, to spit on them, but it was as if they were just standing there, protecting, waiting, embracing.

Leon got up from the rickety table, looked out beyond the edge of the wall at the sun hitting a church tower in the distance, the treetops that moved slowly, as if hesitating, and the white fluffiness that was presumably a cloud in the blue sky. Gabriel,
one love best brutha
, had been over there yesterday, the neatly raked path in front of the churchyard fence where they always waited in the driver’s seat while the bitch who was carrying smiled at the guards. His best brother. The only one he trusted. The only one he needed. They’d said hello the first time one day in third grade; Gabriel had been sitting at the front of class with his track marks, punctures in his veins the size of craters, nine years old and a drug addict. His body had been caught in a house that burned down—Leon had never understood how or maybe Gabriel had just never told him—and white coats had treated the skin that screamed for morphine for nearly eight months. When he left the big hospital, he kept filling his prescription and injecting, and when his skin no longer screamed so much, they got together to sell what he didn’t need, and then when they started middle school they’d added amphetamines, which earned them more, and soon the two of them had a third of Råby covered.

Leon turned away from the view and the desk and lay down on the bed; the ceiling was yellow and changed to white by the wardrobe and gray by the sink and door. He swallowed, cleared his throat, carefully gathered the saliva with his tongue, rubbing in what he could find with slow movements; they stung, the big ulcers on the top of his tongue and the slightly smaller ones at the back of his throat. He had tried to knock back the amphetamine water without touching too much, but hadn’t been very successful; the ulcers itched and would continue to do so for another day or two.

The rattle of metal. The door opened. It was seven o’clock.

“Good morning.”

She popped her head around the door, tried to catch his eye.

He didn’t answer.

“
Good morning
.”

The female guard wasn’t going to give up, so he raised a hand to show that he’d heard and was alive, that was all she wanted to know, and what with the ulcers, he was going to talk as little as possible.

Leon got up, the letter on the table,

he turned the eleven pages over and pulled a pair of underpants out from a pile under the chair and then a towel from the shelf in the narrow wardrobe. He left the seven-meter-square cell and strolled down the corridor that was waking up, past eight open cell doors on either side, past the TV corner, the billiard table, the kitchen, and stopped just in front of the fish tank, the guards’ room with its big glass window. He stared at the bitch who had opened his door and demanded a
good morning
and she stared back and he pretended he was fucking her so she would look away or down, but she kept holding his gaze and he chose the gray door with the steamed-up window, went into the shower room and the one in the middle with water that burned your neck, shoulders, chest. When Alex came in, pale, tall, nineteen, and almost trustworthy, Leon nodded. Neither of them said anything,
their tongues and throats were as sore as each other and Leon sneaked a look at his dick—Alex didn’t write letters when he was wasted, he jerked off, tired pupils that had been open all night and a fiery red foreskin that was shriveled and loose, the shaking hand that had held it, tugged it relentlessly. They’d met for the first time at a secure training center in Örkelljunga; a sharpened knuckleduster had left three round marks on the right of his chest that were still visible, the bastard had been so in his face. A few years later at Bärby prison, from high up on his left shoulder all the way down to his hip, a long, wide scar with lighter edges, Alex had tried again and Leon had held him by the left arm and dragged him across the asphalt in the prison yard.

The hot water, he closed his eyes.

The metal door groaned when the older man came in, probably thirty or maybe even forty-something, some said fifty; it was always hard to count time when chemicals had broken down the years. He was so skinny and moved with a kind of rolling gait, a face that was distorted by eyes that wanted to close and eyebrows that shot up, several missing teeth, the sort who does ten months at a time for some crap hold-up with a bread knife and without a balaclava in some video shop or 7-Eleven, whatever is nearest. Almost shuffling the final steps into the shower at the far end, his arms potted with big holes like the ones Gabriel had had, but that carried on down the back of his hands and up his throat, needles that had obliterated the same veins, hollows that had turned into cartilage, so that every time more pressure was needed to get through. Leon watched him, the shuffling, he knew that the soles of his feet were the same, that was why he walked like that, only using the ball.

Leon nodded to Alex and they left the warm water at the same time and the old bugger had just enough time to turn around, his naked body almost transparent, his lips apart. Leon kept his hand open and the impact was hard when he hit him on the cheek; the man collapsed, lay still on the floor, fingertips covering the redness and lips even wider apart.

“What are you smiling at, you bastard?”

“I’m . . . not smiling.”

“You’re smiling.”

The hand again, the same force, the other cheek.