Two Soldiers (35 page)

———

He couldn’t sleep.

They were lying side by side on her white sofa, and he was sweating and shivering and he’d gotten cramps in his feet and calves like he
used to when he was little and the skin that had disappeared had still burned.

Gabriel looked at her. She was asleep and she had no earrings on. He rubbed her soft earlobes with his thumb and index finger. She’d sold them. And bought a gray-and-black picture.

He had a smoke. He drank two cans of beer. He even got out his gun that was lying in a bag in the hall and took out one bullet at a time and put one bullet at a time back in, but it didn’t help; what he was feeling just got stronger, weed and alcohol and holding a gun normally made him feel calm but not now.

Her disc. He put it in and started it.

There was no sound.

He hadn’t thought about that, last time. The gray and black and grainy, the thing that was moving so slowly, you couldn’t hear it.

He couldn’t see anything
.

A heart. Two kidneys. Buds that would become arms and legs.

And if he couldn’t see anything, how could it be there? And moving so fucking slowly
?

It wasn’t there.

He was there. And Wanda was there. And soon Leon, his beloved brother.

He would be able to touch him for the first time in five months, that was all there was, not her fucking picture, which was her fault.

———

That time, the last time, he’d said
hello
and she hadn’t even answered.

She could have turned around, looked at him. But she said nothing, pretended not to hear, just got onto the train and turned her back.

He was going to get the package. That was the only reason. She would open the door and he would take it and she could be as silent as she fucking liked.

Leon hurried down the stairs of Råby Allé 124. He should maybe have stayed where he was, but it was night and the others were asleep and would still be asleep when he got back—and he’d be moving
around in the dark—and he’d made the first phone call—and they’d be moving very soon anyway.

He’d known it so well, the place called Slagsta Strand, but he’d lain there between Alex and Marko on the wet planks at the bottom of the boat until the helicopter had done its last sweep and disappeared. Råby was two kilometers and a hundred police officers away. They’d sat on the beach that they used to run to as kids when they were at school, when they’d swum at night, washed away whatever was sticking to their skin. He remembered what it was like to be naked and light and that it was always cold and that he always shivered a bit afterwards, but nothing more; he’d been so young and it was so long ago, faded and hard to get hold of and he felt nothing when he thought about it, nothing except that fucking lump you get from feeling nothing.

The gray door, right at the bottom, opposite the elevator. He opened it a few centimeters, listened.

They’d split up at Hallunda Centrum and he’d run over the big hill behind the metro line and down the other side and the helicopter again, the searchlight, flying low, he’d had to lie in the ditch in the short stretch between Botkyrka church and the Shell station that they’d robbed four times the summer they were twelve, he’d got up when the helicopter flew toward Södertälje and he’d run alongside the E4 to the concrete pipe that went under the road to the other side and he’d felt a surge in his legs and stomach and chest when he’d seen the windows with no curtains in the distance and caught the smell that only existed there.

He was sure. There was no one else on the other side of the door. He dropped down onto the hard surface and crawled out into the garage that connected the whole area underground.

The helicopter had turned back but the sound was still distant and it was dark and he had started to walk, step by step closer to the buildings that were his childhood, and he’d seen blue flashing lights and pigs with bright torches, and then suddenly in the pit of his stomach, far down in his balls, as if he were proud, helicopters and road blocks and motorcycles and cars all because of him. He had sneaked past the first
few buildings, loud music from an open window and then another with a man and a woman screaming at each other, next building, and the next building, he’d been so close.
Stop
. Someone had shouted behind him, it had been a man’s voice.
Stand still
. A pig voice, he knew exactly what they sounded like. And he’d managed not to run, took several deep breaths, so fucking close, and then turned around.

He crept through the garage, between the cars that were standing there, he knew every dent in the concrete wall, every pipe, pillar, trash can, pile of tires.

A man’s voice had shouted
stop
and he’d turned around. They were waiting a bit farther up by one of the entrances to a stairwell, four pigs with flashlights, and they’d been shouting at someone else. He’d pressed himself in against the wall while they searched through someone’s pockets and checked someone else’s ID and then moved on. Someone else. He’d run the last stretch to the door and into the garage he was now lying in, and he’d waited for Alex and Reza and Marko and Uros while the kids had blocked the elevators and the stairs to the apartment at the top with the mattresses on the floor and beer and pizza in the fridge.

Leon breathed in the smell of the garage, the second time within twenty-four hours, crawled slowly under the cars and faster over empty parking spaces.

A couple of meters away, the gray door called Råby Allé 34.

He knew exactly how it would feel. Strange how our first experiences follow us. He had slept in other beds in recent years, walked up other stairs, but every step here, he wanted to laugh out loud and hit someone, he wanted to be alone and surrounded by the people he knew, every time on these stairs, he could feel it the whole way from top to bottom.

The third floor. He rang the bell.

He heard her, put his hand over the peephole, she wasn’t going to stand there looking at him.

“Open up.”

He pressed down the door handle. It was locked.

“Open up, for fuck’s sake!”

He was standing in front of a door that someone had unlocked for them for the first time when he was four and a half, and she had come home.

“Open, or I’ll kick it in!”

And he was there to collect the package. That was the only reason.

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“You shouldn’t be here. I’ve explained to you before. And yesterday . . . the girl, the car trunk, the pictures . . .
you’re never coming in here again
.”

“Open up!”

Ana stood by the closed door and looked through the peephole that was covered by a hand.

She had stood in front of him that time. The day before he turned sixteen.

Her son.

And she’d explained to him that she had opened the door for the last time, whispered something about being frightened even though you love someone, about the strength that doesn’t come back no matter how much you try, that with Gabriel he’d been unreachable for so long, and even more so with the others who seemed to make him so much stronger, but that he’d also become unreachable when he was alone and that when a person couldn’t get any further she had to give up or go under, and that’s what she’d done, given up.

“I want to talk to you!”

“Never again.”

“About my dad.”

She looked through the hole, which was black.

He was standing on the other side. Thirty centimeters away.

The black, his hand, she could almost touch it.
About my dad
. He’d never said anything like that before.

She turned the key, pushed down the door handle, opened.

She saw a boy, eighteen years old, tense face and unkempt hair, clothes like they all wore. He saw a woman, thirty-five years old, tense face and long hair that had started to turn gray, a dressing gown that
looked like all the other dressing gowns she’d had. Maybe she was smiling slightly, or maybe it was one of the expressions a face makes when it recognizes something and for a moment sees something else. Maybe he wanted to touch her, his palm brush her cheek, but he didn’t reach out his arm and if you don’t stretch out your arm you can’t reach and can’t touch.

“Where is it?”

“Your dad. You wanted—”

“I wanted you to open. Where is it?”

He was standing in her hallway and she was so small, just like that time on the platform, and he wanted to say
hello
again, talk, about whatever.

“Where
the fuck
is it?”

He smelled of beer. And his clothes smelled of sweat.

“It’s not here.”

“
Where
?”

“I threw it away.”

He was standing so close.

He’d instructed Gabriel to give her the plastic bag, she was to look after it even though they could have given it to someone else. And he’d just rung on this door out of all the others, after lying hidden on a mattress for twenty-seven hours.

He didn’t care about her.

“You have not.”

And why should he? A thirty-five-year-old cow who didn’t want to open the door?

“I know that you haven’t thrown it away.”

She should never have thrown it away, it protected him, helped him to survive, he knew that somehow it would always be like this.

Maybe he had wanted to reach out to her, touch her. He didn’t do it. He hit her.

“Just like your dad.”

He hit her again.

“
Just
like your dad.”

He walked toward her as she backed away, down the hall he’d run along so many times as a kid, into the kitchen that had been breakfast and lunch and supper and, sometimes when it was cold outside, tea that she made herself that tasted of raspberries, and yet didn’t at the same time.

He raised his hand to hit her again.

“Out there.”

She pointed to the hall, the door.

“The trash chute. At the bottom.”

He lowered his hand, which was still shaking, prepared, and walked over to the kitchen table where they had sometimes baked some round, heavy bread together and where he and Gabriel had divvied up packets of morphine in the beginning, and that he’d plunged a knife into four times one evening, the great gashes were still there if he lifted up the flower pot and tablecloth that she always put over them. There was a drawer between the two chairs and he pulled it open, screwdriver on the left, red and long. He took it with him and hurried back out into the hall, her black coat on a hanger under the hat shelf, keys always in the left pocket.

“So you won’t be able to lock anyone out.”

He should have gone down the stairs slowly, quietly. He ran. Down to the ground floor, on, stopped at the bottom by the door into the garage. And then turned around. Another door, equally gray, but not as thick.

Screwdriver against the doorframe, by the bolt.

A hard push.

The gap opened, another push, again, again until it was wide enough for him to lift the door, force it open. The stench of trash, he didn’t breathe, rummaged around among the plastic bags that were leaking and milk cartons that weren’t empty, cutting himself twice on broken bottles.

It was lying there. A white plastic bag with strips of heavy tape. In between four large bags that reeked of fish. He leaned over the edge of the container and managed to reach the bottom with his fingers,
which slipped on the wet plastic surface before he managed to get hold of it and he stood up with the gun in his hand.

Lahti L-35. Finnish. He aimed into the air, his arm slightly to the side, even when he opened the door and went into the kitchen.

She was sitting there, a cup of coffee as always, and a cigarette.

“Like a child.”

He aimed at her now.

“What did you say?”

“You’re standing there . . . posing like a child.”

He didn’t let go of the gun when he hit her again on the right cheek.

She fell and he kicked her on the thigh, the hip, her cunt.

“You’ll show me some respect, whore!”

She lay there, her neck sore when she gradually lifted her head and looked at him.

“
Just like your dad
.”

———

Wanda was still asleep beside him on the sofa, without her earrings. Gabriel had crept back up beside her and she hadn’t noticed, he’d stroked his fingers over her bare lobes and she’d turned toward him in her sleep, her face to his.

Freezing. Sweating. It didn’t stop.

He’d seen something moving slowly that was gray and black and five millimeters long and a heart and kidneys and buds instead of arms and legs. And for the first time in a while he’d thought about a fire that had taken a father he couldn’t remember and a little brother who he sometimes remembered in the mornings and 85 percent of his skin that he missed every day. He’d sunk into the picture that wasn’t of anything and stood in the middle of a fire. He’d waited in front of a door that was locked, and his father was standing on the other side and he was seven years old and had pulled at the door to get into the flames that were so high and his dad who was shouting at him that he had to let go and get out and when he hadn’t done that, shouted that he’d get a good beating if
he didn’t leg it—he’d let go and he’d run away from the fire and that stupid fucking picture in front of him that moved so slowly and he couldn’t see whatever it was that was five frigging millimeters. He’d thrown the remote control at the TV screen and pressed himself closer to Wanda and that was where he was lying now when he took her arm and shook her and when she didn’t wake up, slapped her, but not as hard as normal, and shouted
it’s your fault
and started to walk away and out. He was going to meet him now; only one brother, only one love.

———

The image was gone. How did that happen?

When he closed the front door and went down the stairs, it stayed in there. With her.

Gabriel stood completely still.

It didn’t come. It hadn’t followed him.

He walked on. He took out his gun like he usually did, but this time opened it and took out the only bullet, spun the chamber, and fired at his temple, a clicking sound.