Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  None at all. It had been completely blank.

  Pointing to the shock had made sense. Everyone knew shock made people act irrationally. Johanna had told him about a father who had dashed about on the motorway outside Fagersta, gathering up his dead child’s scattered body parts, shouting at people to help him so they could start putting the child back together. A completely ordinary father, stunned by shock.

  Yes, he blamed the shock. He could also blame the shame. When it was time for Geir’s funeral, he had let it be known that he couldn’t face Geir’s loved ones and colleagues, who thought he had acted cowardly, and indirectly blamed him for Geir’s death. I think I was already feeling ashamed in the car, he had said. It was something he had arrived at through speculation and Johanna had understood. Everyone had understood. Or at least they had made out as though they understood. During the weeks following the incident, he had been wrapped in a cocoon of understanding. The department had sent flowers. The police officers who came to his house to ask questions had put on their kid gloves.

  And then he had been fired. That was what they were supposed to talk about. It was half past ten at night and a fine rain was pattering against the plastic roof of the veranda. She was concerned about his memory lapses and wanted him to seek help. That was what she was getting at. He tried to dismiss her concern and when that didn’t work he changed tack and claimed William had misunderstood. Of course he knew he had lost his job. He had just gone out to Grimsö to pick up some things. Some personal belongings. A map, among other things.

  ‘So you don’t have memory lapses?’

  ‘No, I do, but mostly from that night and the days that followed. That’s blurry, but otherwise it’s not too bad.’

  ‘Do you remember acting violently?’

  ‘What do you mean violently?’

  ‘You’ve shoved me several times, and William too. He’s terrified of you and to be honest, so am I.’

  ‘There’s no need to be.’

  ‘One night when I tried to stop you from leaving the house, you grabbed me by the throat.’

  ‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

  She showed him her neck.

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘I grabbed you by the throat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must have been sleepwalking then.’

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I must have been. If what you’re saying is true.’

  ‘Are you implying that I’m lying to you?’

  ‘It just seems so strange.’

  She crossed her arms and smiled.

  He leaned forward.

  ‘I mean, how do you think it feels when someone tells you you’ve done all these awful things that you can’t remember doing? Huh! Am I supposed to just accept it? You could say whatever the fuck you want and I’m supposed to be all like, oh really sorry, I was bad, I shouldn’t have done that, sorry, sorry.’

  She pulled out her phone. Opened something on it and handed it to him across the table. He pushed his glasses up to his hairline.

  It was a picture of her throat. Her head was back and her chin tilted up. A small root system of red streaks fanned out across her skin.

  ‘Did I do that?’

  ‘How do you think it feels when someone who’s hurt you denies it even happened?’

  ‘I’m not denying it, I’m just asking.’

  ‘It was the first night you left the house. Since then, I haven’t stopped you. I’m sure you can understand why.’

  He didn’t respond. Her tone had hardened and he noticed it was getting his dander up, but he didn’t want that to show.

  ‘You don’t remember this?’

  He heaved a sigh.

  ‘That’s frightening. That you don’t remember. And it can’t go on like this.’

  He pulled his glasses back down.

  ‘You think it’s frightening. How do you think it makes me feel?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter how you feel. Because by tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten. And then we’ll be here again. I should start bloody recording it.’

  ‘But I do have memories, Johanna. Faint memories. I can’t sleep. I have nightmares and then I can’t go back to sleep. So I go outside for some fresh air. What’s so weird about that?’

  She snorted derisively.

  ‘It’s nice in the woods. Relaxing.’

  ‘Relaxing? Yeah, I know what relaxes you.’

  She shook her head at his perplexed look.

  ‘Don’t play dumb.’

  He was silent for a moment, pondering what to say.

  ‘Let me explain what it’s like. When I’m out there, it’s kind of like a dream. Like being half naked. Half waking. It’s hard to explain. I suppose it’s the shock that hasn’t worn off. These things take time, Johanna. But we can’t let it get to us. It will pass.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Anyway, isn’t it dangerous to stop a sleepwalker? Aren’t you supposed to get out of their way? Because things like that can happen.’

  She studied him through narrowed eyes.

  ‘I think I’ve heard that,’ he said. ‘That you should get out of their way.’

  ‘So you’re sleepwalking, that’s your explanation?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Just now you said you couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘I obviously meant I must have been sleepwalking that time you tried to stop me. Since I reacted like I did and grabbed you. But normally I go for walks. Long walks. I’m aware of that.’

  She looked at him with eyes sizzling with suppressed rage.

  ‘I know who she is.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ve followed you, Anders. I’ve seen her.’

  ‘Seen whom?’

  ‘You go to that construction trailer.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, will you?’

  ‘It’s that woman, that Finnish woman who came here. The wolf woman.’

  ‘Wolf woman?’

  ‘She was from some organisation. Some predator organisation or whatever. And she asked lots of questions about the wolf you were going to move. Maybe a month ago. You don’t remember that?’

  He shook his head, even though she had clearly meant it as a scornful swipe at him rather than a question. He looked at her, pleadingly. He was at the end of his tether, couldn’t she tell? But there was nothing in her face, no trace, to suggest she intended to retreat so much as an inch.

  He stood up and went back inside. He didn’t know where to go, so he ended up in the bedroom and when he heard her footsteps, he quickly closed the door behind him. She opened it. By then, he had sat down on the edge of the bed. He was hunched over, with his head down and his elbows on his knees, as though inviting her to sit down next to him and maybe stroke his back.

  She didn’t.

  She leaned against the doorpost, arms crossed.

  ‘I can see why you’d be worried.’

  The words came out in a slurred mass.

  She laughed at him.

  ‘Worried? That’s how I felt the first few weeks, Anders. There’s nothing left of that now, just so you know. Nothing but a lot of fucking anger.’

  She was screaming now, venting the fury that had been simmering under the surface.

  ‘You watch TV all day, feeling sorry for yourself, and at night you sneak out and fuck some bloody slag in the woods! And then you pretend nothing’s going on.’

  ‘But I don’t, I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s all you ever say.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like. What it’s like in here.’

  He slapped his forehead hard. His voice was breaking. She turned around. She couldn’t even look at him any more.

  ‘And this might be the worst thing,’ she said. ‘That you feel so damn sorry for yourself. First you deny everything, and then you sit here feeling sorry for yourself. It’s a pattern. You come in here every time. Do you
know that? You sit there, in that exact spot!’

  ‘What am I supposed to do then? I don’t know what to do …’

  ‘You need to get help, Anders. Because this has got out of hand.’

  He nodded and she left, and he stayed on the bed and looked at the floor and when he eventually got up, it was because he was wondering why Johanna hadn’t come to bed even though it was past eleven.

  Diana sat in front of her computer with a referral open, but she wasn’t looking at the screen; she was gazing out the window, at the forest of downy birches and willow thickets covering the slope outside the house. A lettuce-green jungle that reached all the way to the dark band of spruce trees and mountains that bulged up under a grey blanket of clouds to the north. Grey, grey, grey. The rain hurled itself in rattling showers against the glass and she felt sorry for Kiruna. When she finally got to ride the dragon, it rained.

  She had been happy but not particularly surprised to suddenly one morning find a merry-go-round and a rollercoaster in the park. The day before Midsummer, the lawns in the park had been white and they had built a small snowman and crowned him with a wreath of frostbitten birch twigs, and in the girl’s wondrous world the sudden appearance of the carnival seemed like a similar phenomenon. Something that just happened. A natural kind of magic.

  Merry-go-rounds were not the only thing to appear out of thin air. While the festival was on, the city teemed with returnees; it was like Christmas Day. That’s why she had opted to stay home. She hated when people came back to town. And she was tired. That was what she had told Håkan and it wasn’t an outright lie. She didn’t want to meet a horde of drunken ghosts and she was tired. As usual. Håkan claimed it was chronic, maybe one of those illnesses the evening papers were always writing about? A hidden epidemic. That only afflicted working women.

  Her real reason for staying at home was something else: she had got it in her head that she would bump into Susso in the crowd. She knew it wouldn’t happen, but the premonition was so vivid and insistent that she had let it influence her decision to stay home. You go, she had said. I have to get some work done before I go on leave.

  After her run-in with Gudrun in the park, she had started thinking about Susso and with these thoughts, an older image of the city had surfaced. This image seemed like an overexposure and given the nostalgic atmosphere the returnees generated, she wasn’t sure which Kiruna was waiting outside their front door. Was it present-day Kiruna, or Kiruna in 1998?

  She tried to visualise Susso, but her face kept slipping away. Did she even have a picture of her?

  She watched the screen. Moderate ethyl consumption. No family history of dementia. Somatically healthy. The marker blinked in the diagnosis field. Retrograde amnesia and nascent dementia, she had written. Now she typed: Something else?

  Then she opened her web browser and typed:

  Susso Myrén.

  TROLL HUNTER’S PICTURE POLICE’S ONLY CLUE. The article was from January 2005. There was no picture of her. She clicked on a link. There she was. She was standing in front of a snow bank. Rosy cheeks and squinting eyes. Inca hat and Lovikka mittens. And that coat. It was the same one she had worn in secondary school. Or was it an identical one? Neither possibility seemed less distressing than the other.

  She closed her laptop and pushed her chair back. Opened the door to the walk-in closet and pulled out the moving box lurking in the dark under the clothes that hung in there. It contained stack upon stack upon stack of papers and was so heavy the handle on one side had ripped. This is where Håkan and she had mingled their lives together. Implicating them. The way Kiruna was an implication of their genes.

  Håkan’s yearbooks looked virtually untouched. Had he even opened them? She flipped to ninth grade, scanned the grey faces until she found him. She found his name too. Håkan Hellström. He had a side parting and his shirt was buttoned all the way. He was, in fact, the only person in his class wearing a button-down shirt, aside from the teacher, who wore both a shirt and a waistcoat. They had probably had a great relationship. Håkan had always had perfect grades. Not good, like hers, perfect. From the first term to the last. It had probably made him a strange bird. At least that’s how he looked, squeezed in between lads in Adidas jackets and young men with intense stares and black crosses on their hands. In medical school, on the other hand, he had found his peers and blossomed. He had been a shining star. Who had he been before he started studying medicine? She didn’t know. His yearbook picture offered no answers.

  She didn’t have any yearbooks. She and Susso had vandalised theirs. Writing nicknames, established and made up. Drawing devil’s horns. Goatees and Hitler moustaches. Boils and warts with hairs growing out of them. Big, flappy ears. Speech bubbles full of obscenities. Anna Hedlund and Carina Aaro’s faces had been overlaid with so much ink the paper had ripped. They had drawn a sombrero on Jerry Brynerfors, who was so inbred he looked Mexican and who they therefore called Diego, and next to Odd Enoksson, who was a head taller than everyone else in his class, including the teacher, she had written ‘PATHETICALLY TALL’, and level with the top of his head she had drawn a stickman with round specs and an arrow and written ‘Robert Pershing Wadlow’. He was the world’s tallest man. Eight feet eleven inches he’d been. He hadn’t stopped growing until he died. If he hadn’t died, he might have hit nine feet. Maybe ten. At least that’s what Susso had claimed. She had read about him in The Guinness Book of World Records. There hadn’t been a lot of books in the freezing little flat where she lived alone like Pippi Longstocking, but she did have The Guinness Book of World Records, several editions even; they had been lined up on the shelf where she kept her CDs and video cassettes as well. Every year, her dad had given her that book for Christmas up at Riksgränsen and now, thinking about it, it struck her how depressing that was. How paltry. He bought his abandoned daughter one book and one book only, and that was the one he picked. The Guinness Book of World Records. Diana had read the books too, but hadn’t found anything to support Susso’s claims that Robert Pershing Wadlow could have reached ten feet. She had not been convinced a person could grow that tall. Probably not even nine feet. For the same reasons trees had to stop growing eventually. There were limits. Gravitation imposed limits. But she had never disputed Susso’s claims. She always kept her doubts to herself. She never called Susso on anything, and that had been a prerequisite for their friendship. It had been built on the fact that she never called Susso on anything.

  Now she was sorry she didn’t have the yearbooks any more. She would have liked neatly stored memories too. Like Håkan’s. Memories you could show others. Representative memories. For Kiruna’s sake, if for no other reason. What was she going to think about her mother? True, destroying the yearbooks had been hilarious. That was some consolation. To be honest, she couldn’t remember a time when she had laughed more. Tears had streamed down their cheeks; Susso had lain prone on the table with the pen in her hand, paralysed by silent laughter. No, she had never laughed like that again, laughed so hard she didn’t know what to do with herself. That was something she had only ever experienced with Susso.

  She dug deeper into the box and pulled out a handful of stapled A4s that said ART IN KIRUNA. By Susso Myrén and Diana Sillfors, class 8B. She couldn’t believe her eyes. An extant school assignment!

  Someone had added an F in pencil before the word ART. Probably Susso, but she couldn’t be sure; their handwriting was difficult to tell apart. Which was actually odd considering that they hadn’t learnt to write in the same school. They had been influenced by each other later on. When Susso started writing the letter E like an L with two bars instead of an I with three bars, she had followed suit. Or maybe it had been the other way around. Everything between them was intermingled.

  It was a school assignment about various works of art in the city. The assignment had been to select a number of pieces they were familiar with and write what they knew about them and then find each piece of art and describe it and see if they could learn
something new, either by going to the library or by asking someone, anyone. Susso had been new in town and hadn’t known any of the public artworks, not even the Northern Lights Obelisk; she had asked if that fat guy in Asterix had a cousin in northern Sweden. Diana smiled at the memory while she flipped through the papers.

  This is what they had written about The Thinking Sami:

  Location: By Park School

  Year it came to Kiruna: 1927

  What we knew before: It’s next to Park School. It’s of a

  Sami, thinking. It’s nice. It looks at the church.

  What we saw when we got there: It was made by

  Ingrid Geijen or Geijer. It’s made of black stone. It

  has a knife with genuine Sami patterns in its belt. It

  has shoes with tassels. And it has mittens with Sami

  patterns. It’s looking out at the town or at Restaurant

  Lapplandia or something in that direction. Not at the

  church, which is what we thought.

  Interview with Kiruna resident number 1:

  Do you know anything about it?

  No

  Do you know who made it?

  No. I don’t know anything.

  But maybe you know the name of it?

  No!

  Interview with Kiruna resident number 2:

  What do you know about it?

  Well, nothing.

  Do you know what year it’s from?

  Well, no.

  We couldn’t find a lot of facts about The Thinking Sami.

  His name might be Olle. He looks pretty pathetic.

  There it was again!

  That word. They had used it in virtually every other sentence back then. Everything, absolutely everything, was potentially pathetic, in one way or another.

  Wasn’t she being pretty pathetic now, digging through an old box full of memories from her childhood while a cold rain pelted a city that was about to be torn down? That was going to be packed and then unpacked. Be resurrected, but not really. Not ever.