Pen 33

by Anders Roslund

  Hilding had forgotten to smoke or to pass the pipe back again. He looked offended. His face, normally stripped of emotion, undefined, like he was wearing a mask with a fixed rigid expression, was now wavering between disgust and delight. He was aware of Tinyboy’s hatred, and it was a trip to hate along with him, but Tinyboy was the kind who was always walking the line. Hilding remembered how he beat that dickhead in the gym with the weight plates and dumbbells until he wasn’t moving anymore.

  “Fuck, Tiny, you’re joking.”

  Tinyboy grabbed the pipe, so happy when he was smoking.

  “I’m not joking. Why the hell would I joke about that? I wanna try it. The first perv who comes in here, I wanna try. I wanna see if it works. I want to feel again what it’s like to shove in the ice pick and twist it.”

  Lennart Oscarsson rushed past the guard, Bergh, who waved and gave him a thumbs up. And Oscarsson couldn’t decide if Bergh was being ironic or just didn’t realize that the TV cameras had stripped Oscarsson naked.

  He hurried through the first corridor, then decided halfway to swerve to the right and take the shortcut through Unit H.

  He took two steps at a time, thinking that they’d done everything they could: cognitive therapy, medication, group and individual therapy. Bernt Lund had been offered everything and still took the very first chance he got. He was thinking about Åke Andersson and Ulrik Berntfors, who Oscarsson had worked with for many years, and who, for some unknown reason, had opened the back door of the van and let out one of this country’s most dangerous human beings. Thinking about Bernt Lund, who was free now and on the hunt for little girls, thinking about the press conference he’d been preparing for for years, the one that should have been his springboard but instead felt more like a rape.

  No one had touched his privates, but the camera and microphone still felt like a violation.

  He had thought of himself as a willing participant, and so he believed he wouldn’t be completely deserted, but now he realized he was being used by somebody else for somebody else’s purposes.

  He thought about the hours that had passed since he woke up this morning.

  Thought, did life have to be so fucking complicated?

  Sometimes it felt like he couldn’t take it anymore. Middle age was pushing him toward old age, and he couldn’t keep up. There was no time for reflection, it would always be later, later, often he would just close his eyes. He wanted to close his eyes now and know that everything was over, someone else had decided and everything was clear—like when he was little, he’d sat in the middle of the floor and closed his eyes while Mom and Dad worked on their home, and when he opened his eyes again, they were done. Something happened while he waited quietly, refusing to participate. Someone else had taken care of it, and all he had to do was close his eyes for a moment, and it would be over.

  He unlocked the door to Unit H. He knew that both his colleagues and the inmates disliked it, no fucking unnecessary running, but it was a shortcut, and he was in a hurry. He said hello to one of the guards without remembering his name, nodded to some of the inmates who were playing cards in the TV corner. He passed the door to the shower room and was centimeters from running straight into Tinyboy Lindgren and his lackey. They were high as kites. Their staring eyes, their flapping movements, he could even smell it coming from the showers. The lackey mumbled Howdy, Hitler and Tinyboy Lindgren giggled and tried to congratulate him on his TV appearance. Lennart Oscarsson pretended not to see the outstretched hand. He knew as well as the rest of the staff that Lindgren had beaten up one of his inmates in the gym, but no one had seen anything or heard anything, so without proof they couldn’t do a thing, not even in a prison.

  Through the next locked door, down the stairs, out into the yard, over to the next building, up the two flights of stairs to Units A and B, the sex offenders, his domain.

  They were waiting for him. In a line in the meeting room.

  “Excuse me. I’m late. Far too late. I’ve just had so much on my plate today.”

  They smiled, wanting to express some kind of compassion, because they had also seen him on TV. It was still on when he walked by. Five new trainees who, starting tomorrow, would begin their jobs in the two units for pedophiles and rapists. They sat with pencil and pad at the oval table. This was the first day of their new lives.

  “Perv.”

  He usually started that way. He pulled the cap off a green marker, which smelled strongly, and wrote in capital letters on the glossy whiteboard.

  “P-E-R-V.”

  The five temps sat in silence. Fiddling with their pens, hesitating, should I write this down? Is it good to take notes or am I giving myself away? They were lost beginners, and he wasn’t helping them. He continued talking and occasionally wrote something on the board, a main point, a number.

  “They live here. For two to ten years, depending on what they’ve done, how sick they are.”

  Still silence. It was longer than usual.

  “Fifty thousand convictions—the amount of criminal cases last year in this shitty little country. How do we keep up? I can’t understand it. Out of those, five hundred and forty-seven were sexual offenses. Less than half made it all the way to prison.”

  A few took notes. Numbers were easier. Statistics demanded no opinion.

  “If we know, then, that at any given moment there are approximately five thousand people in Swedish prisons, two hundred and twelve sex offenders shouldn’t pose any problems. Right? Four percent. One out of twenty-five. But that’s exactly what they do. They are problems. They are risk. They are hate. Therefore, they have their own units. Like here. But sometimes, sometimes there just isn’t room. Then they end up on a waiting list, then we have to sneak them into a normal unit for a while. And if and when the other inmates realize there’s a perv serving in their unit, they’ll attack him. They beat him to a pulp until we intervene.”

  A man in his forties, retrained from something else, raised his hand as if he were in a classroom.

  “Perv? You both said it and wrote it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is it important?”

  “I don’t know. We call them that here. That’s what you’ll be calling them within a day or two. Because that’s what this is about. Wham bam thank you, ma’am.”

  Lennart Oscarsson waited. He knew what was coming next. He wondered which of them would start. He guessed it would be a younger woman near the front. She looked like the type. The young were the ones with the furthest to go. They still believed that change was possible. They didn’t understand time, which took your life and energy and, in exchange, gave you experience and compromise.

  He was wrong. It was the man again, who was retrained from something else.

  “Why so cynical?”

  He was upset.

  “I don’t understand. During our training, I learned what I already knew. That people aren’t objects. That you, my future boss, have this kind of attitude scares me.”

  Oscarsson sighed. He’d been through this performance several times before. He usually ran across them later, a few years older and in some other prison after they’d advanced to a new job. They usually joked as they recalled it, and defended these exchanges as a beginner’s unfulfilled ambitions.

  “You can think what you want. That’s your right. Call me cynical if that’s what gets you going. But answer this first: Have you come to Aspsås prison’s sex offender department because you want to see pervs as more than objects, because your dream is to change them?”

  The man, who tomorrow would commence his duties in Unit A, slowly lowered his hand and sat quietly.

  “I didn’t hear you. Is that correct?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “I was ordered here.”

  The principal prison officer tried not to show how pleased he was. He felt the performance was over. That was his main role. He gazed at them in silence, all five, one by one. One fidgeted, one kept writing down numbers, dili
gently recording them in a notebook.

  “Honestly now. Is there anyone here who joined this unit voluntarily?”

  After seventeen years at Aspsås he had yet to meet a single colleague whose professional dream ended among the pedophiles in Units A and B. You were ordered here. You applied from here. He, himself, had become the boss. Better pay and the hope of advancing to the next management position elsewhere. He walked slowly behind the five new employees in the conference room, leaving the last question unanswered so that they would comprehend and formulate their own answers. Only then would they understand and accept their placement in the coming months. He stopped at the window with his back to his students. The sun was high. It hadn’t rained for a long time. The inmates kicked up dust as they walked in the exercise yard. A few were playing football, others jogged along the barbed wire. In one corner, two were walking jerky and slow. He recognized Lindgren and his lackey, still high on hash.

  Micaela had left early. He must have been asleep then. Night after night, the same ritual: just as the city woke up outside his window, right after he’d heard the first newspaper delivered and the first trucks arriving, he finally fell asleep close to five thirty. Hours of thoughts crowded into an exhausted body until, finally, the restlessness could no longer resist, and he fell asleep, dreaming in a void until late morning.

  Fredrik had some bleary images of the morning: Micaela lying naked on top of him, and him not being up for it, and her whispering “bore” and kissing him lightly on the cheek before going to the bathroom. Marie’s room was on the other side of the wall from the tub, and she usually woke up when Micaela showered. When the water pushed forward along the pipes, it made a screeching sound. This morning David had also been there. Micaela had made breakfast for herself and the two children while Fredrik stayed in bed, his legs refusing to get up and keep them company, until he slipped into the void and the dreams again. He didn’t wake up again until just after eleven, when Marie changed the video and cartoon characters started screaming in falsetto.

  He had to start sleeping at night. This wasn’t working anymore. It just wasn’t.

  He wasn’t writing, and he wasn’t participating in other people’s lives. The morning had been when he did most of his writing, from eight until just after lunch. There wasn’t time now to drive from Strängnäs to his writing space in Arnö, a fifteen-minute drive every morning and afternoon. Marie had gotten good at spending the morning hours by herself, and Micaela, who thankfully worked at Marie’s nursery school, made sure, day after day, that the other staff were friendly to the child who never showed up until lunchtime.

  He was ashamed.

  He felt like an alcoholic who’d sworn himself to sobriety the night before, then woken up the next morning with a hangover. He was tired, had a headache, and felt anxious to start another day with the promise that today things would change.

  “Hello.”

  His daughter stood in front of him. He lifted her up.

  “Hello, my darling girl. Do I get a kiss?”

  Marie put a wet mouth against his cheek.

  “David left.”

  “Did he?”

  “His dad was here to get him.”

  They know me, he thought. They know I’ll take responsibility. They know that. He shook off his uneasiness, sat Marie down on the floor.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Micaela fed us.”

  “That was a long time ago. Do you want more?”

  “I want to eat at school.”

  It was a quarter past one. How long was the school open? Were they still serving lunch? Getting dressed took ten minutes, and they could drive there. The journey took five minutes. One thirty. They’d be there by one thirty.

  “Okay. Let’s get dressed. You can eat at school.”

  Fredrik searched for a pair of jeans in his closet. A white shirt was lying on the chair. It was hot outside, but he hated shorts. His pale legs looked silly. Marie ran through the hall with a T-shirt and a pair of shorts in her hand. He gave her a thumbs up and helped her turn her shirt right side out.

  “Good. What shoes?”

  “The red ones.”

  “Then red ones it is.”

  He lifted her feet one at a time, unbuttoned two buttons on a decorative metal buckle. They were ready.

  The phone.

  “It’s ringing, Daddy.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Marie ran into the kitchen, just barely reached the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator. She said hello and lit up, someone she liked. She whispered to her father.

  “It’s Mommy.”

  He nodded. Marie told her mother about the Big Bad Wolf chasing her yesterday and about how the little pigs had won and the Donald Duck shampoo that had run out and how she’d known that there were two in the bathroom cabinet on the bottom shelf. She laughed and kissed the phone and handed it to him.

  “For you, Daddy. Mommy wants to talk.”

  He still wasn’t awake. He stood up and held the phone to his ear, but his body was having a hard time distinguishing between the voice of the woman on the phone, whose name was Agnes, who he’d once desired more than anyone in the world, who’d asked him to leave, and the woman who just a few hours ago had been naked on top of him, whose name was Micaela, sixteen years younger than him, and who’d just left. He could still feel Micaela’s naked body and hear Agnes’s voice over the phone and was both here and there, and it made him dizzy, he couldn’t breathe, and he got hard. He turned around, so Marie wouldn’t see.

  “Yes?”

  “When are you coming?”

  “Coming?”

  “Marie is supposed to be with me today.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “She’ll be with you on Monday. We swapped, right? Right?”

  “No, we didn’t. Not now. Not today.”

  “Agnes, I can’t. I’m tired and in a hurry, and Marie is standing next to me. I’m not going to argue while she’s listening.”

  He gave Marie the phone again, spinning his hands around, their sign for hurry.

  “Mommy, I don’t have time. We have to go to school.”

  Agnes was smart enough not to take her irritation out on Marie. She never had. He loved her for it.

  “Now, Mommy.”

  Marie stretched up on tiptoe and hung up the phone. It fell down, banging against the microwave on the counter. Fredrik took a step forward, picked it up, hung it up on the wall.

  “Okay, honey. Let’s hurry.”

  They walked through the kitchen. He looked at the clock above the dining table. One twenty-five. They’d get there by one thirty. She could stay there until a quarter past five. Then she’d be able to both eat a late lunch and play outside for a few hours in the afternoon. She’d be satisfied—almost as if she’d been there a full day—by the time he picked her up again.

  One thirty. Sven Sundkvist looked at a green alarm clock standing on Ewert Grens’s desk. His shift had been over a couple of hours ago. He had the wine and cake in his car. He just wanted to go home, to Anita and Jonas. Have a calm dinner. He was turning forty today.

  It was as if his work, the days and nights he spent at the City Police, just wasn’t that important anymore. Until recently, he’d been prepared to do his duty, even on his wedding night, to choose divorce rather than compromising on the evening shift. He’d talked a bit with Ewert about it lately. They’d become closer during this year. Sven had tried to explain this forbidden feeling, how he’d ceased to care about which madman did what and whether said madman was headed to prison or not. As if he was finished, at the age of forty, waiting for retirement, the rest of it. Now all he wanted was to lie on his patio and eat breakfast in peace and quiet, go for long walks along Årsta Bay, be at home when Jonas came running from school with his whole life in his backpack. He’d been working for twenty years. He was supposed to work for another twenty-five years. He sigh
ed heavily. He just would not, could not, was not able to accept how his life was flying by in a lousy police station surrounded by increasingly thick binders of open investigations. Jonas would be thirty-two on the day his father retired. How the hell would they ever have time to spend together then?

  Ewert understood. He had no family. His days in uniform were all he had. He ate and drank and breathed police work. But he also knew what Sven knew, saw the insignificance of giving yourself over completely to a job that would come to an end one day. He often talked about how he, too, would cease to be one day. He understood, but he didn’t have the urge to care.

  “Ewert.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to go home.”

  Ewert was kneeling on the floor for a second time picking up the contents of his trash can. Two of the banana peels had been crushed, leaving large stains on the beige carpet.

  “I know you do. And you know we’ll be going home when we have Lund in custody again.”

  He lifted his head, trying to see above the desktop’s edge, looking for the clock.

  “Six and a half hours. And we don’t know shit. It may be some time before you get to eat your cake.”

  “Pick Up the Pieces,” with a full choir and orchestra, recorded in Sweden in 1963. Siw Malmkvist playing from the third mixtape, the one with a photo of Siw on its plastic case, a big blurry smile aimed at the adoring camera.

  “I took that picture myself. Did I tell you that? At Folkets Park in Kristianstad, in 1972.”

  He walked over to Sven, who was still sitting in the visitor’s chair, leaned toward him, and threw up his arm.

  “May I have this dance?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned around for a few quick dance steps. A remarkable sight, the half-lame Grens swinging around his desk to the music of the early ’60s and the heyday of the Swedish welfare state.

  ————

  They took Sven’s car. Grens had moved the cake box and the plastic bag with the expensive wine bottles from the passenger seat to the shelf in the rear window. They headed out from the police station toward route E18. The streets of the capital were empty. The heat had forced people to take their summer vacations at the beach with its cool water. The dark asphalt reflected what life there was, as if all breath were bouncing off its hard surface.