Pen 33

by Anders Roslund

  IV

  (one summer)

  Tallbacka burned the day the verdict was announced. The attack on a forty-six-year-old man, who twenty years earlier had stripped naked in a schoolyard and was later sentenced to a fine, was the first of nine acts of violence in Sweden stemming from accusations of pedophilia and framed as self-defense. Three of the ones who were attacked and assaulted by local lynch mobs were also killed.

  INTERROGATOR (I): I’m beginning the interrogation.

  BENGT SÖDERLUND (BS): You do that.

  I: This interrogation concerns the events that took place after you threw Molotov cocktails.

  BS: Sure thing.

  I: I don’t like your attitude.

  BS: What do you mean?

  I: Your sarcasm.

  BS: If you don’t want my answers, that’s fine with me.

  I: We can do this for as long as you like. If you answer my questions this will go quickly.

  BS: You said it.

  I: What happened after you threw the last bottle?

  BS: It burned.

  I: What did you do?

  BS: I read.

  I: What did you read?

  BS: A verdict.

  I: Stop that now, dammit!

  BS: I read a verdict.

  I: What fucking verdict?

  BS: The Strängnäs father. The one who killed the pedophile who murdered his daughter. It was his verdict.

  I: Why?

  BS: Because society approved of what he did. Don’t you get that? Those bastards should be removed.

  I: What did you do then? After you read it?

  BS: I saw Flasher-Göran jump.

  I: Where?

  BS: From the window. From the kitchen window.

  I: What did you do then?

  BS: I set Baxter on him.

  I: You set Baxter on him?

  BS: Yes.

  I: Why?

  BS: He was getting away. He started to get up.

  I: And then you set your dog on him?

  BS: Yes.

  I: What did the dog do?

  BS: He bit the bastard.

  I: Where?

  BS: The arms. The thighs. A couple of nasty ones in the face.

  I: In the throat?

  BS: There, too.

  I: How long did he bite him?

  BS: Till I called him back.

  I: How long?

  BS: Two, three minutes.

  I: Two, three minutes?

  BS: Let’s say three. It was probably three.

  I: And then?

  BS: We left.

  I: You left?

  BS: Yes.

  I: Where’d you go?

  BS: Home. We called the fire department. It was burning so bad, I didn’t want it to spread. I live nearby.

  In addition to Flasher-Göran in Tallbacka, who died from complications related to a dog bite to the neck, a man in Umeå with two previous sex offense convictions was beaten to death with an iron pipe by four teenagers when he passed a playground just outside town.

  INTERROGATOR (I): I’m recording again now.

  ILRIAN RAISTROVIC (IR): That’s fine.

  I: Do you feel better now?

  IR: I needed a fucking break.

  I: We’re continuing.

  IR: Sure. What the hell.

  I: You did the majority of the beating?

  IR: I don’t know.

  I: That’s what the others said.

  IR: Then it must be true.

  I: Why did you hit him?

  IR: He was a fucking pedo.

  I: Pedo?

  IR: He groped two little girls’ boobs. His kid’s friends. Dammit, you get that.

  I: How did you hit him?

  IR: I hit. At him.

  I: How many times?

  IR: I don’t know.

  I: Guess.

  IR: Like twenty. Or thirty.

  I: Until he died.

  IR: I guess so.

  And in Stockholm two days later, perhaps the worst of them all: an alcoholic man surrounded by a group of screaming young men with baseball bats in the middle of the day.

  INTERROGATOR (I): Where were you sitting?

  ROGER KARLSSON (RK): On the other bench.

  I: What were you doing there?

  RK: I was checking him out. I know who he is. He’s been up to that shit for a long time.

  I: That shit?

  RK: To chicks. Small ones.

  I: What did he do?

  RK: He shouted at them. Three of them. He said they were sluts.

  I: He screamed sluts?

  RK: Then he tried to grab their asses when they walked by.

  I: Did he?

  RK: He’s so fucking slow. But he tried.

  I: What did you do?

  RK: They ran away. He scared them. He always scares them.

  I: What did you do then?

  RK: Hit him.

  I: How?

  RK: With a bat. In his gut. Then in the head.

  I: Just you?

  RK: The others did, too.

  I: The others?

  RK: There was a group of us. Waiting.

  I: Everyone had weapons?

  RK: Everyone had a bat.

  I: And when you hit him?

  RK: He shouted something. What the fuck, I think.

  I: What did you do then?

  RK: I screamed, too. Screamed he was a pervert.

  I: Then?

  RK: Then we hit him. All at the same time. It didn’t take long.

  I: When did he die?

  RK: I had a hammer, too. I used it.

  I: When did you use it?

  RK: Later. Just to be sure.

  I: That he was dead?

  RK: Yes. Mad dogs have to be put down. That’s the law now.

  It was difficult to identify him afterward. Two local police officers guessed, with the help of his clothes, his name was Gurra B., a local celebrity who’d sat drinking on that bench in Vasa Park for thirty years, shouting sexual epithets at anyone who passed by.

  They’d stripped naked as soon as they closed the front door. They’d made love for a long time, held each other until heat made them slippery and sticky, and they didn’t let go for twenty-four hours. It was as if someone might step in at any moment and take this closeness from them, as if skin against skin was more than security, it was a requirement for survival. Fredrik had never touched a woman that way before, needed her. He smelled her, caressed her, put his penis in her, but it was as if it weren’t enough. She wasn’t close enough for him, and he wanted her even closer. He’d even bitten into her a few times, her bottom, her thigh, her shoulder, and she’d laughed, but he’d been serious, had wanted to have her inside him.

  He hadn’t left the apartment for the whole week. The journalists had been waiting down there, with their questions and cameras and smiles. He wanted to stay indoors until the day they disappeared. Micaela had gone out to buy food on two occasions. The reporters hadn’t left her side, followed her from the fence along Stor Street down to the grocery, walked behind her in the store. They repeated their questions about how he was feeling, and she’d stayed quiet just as she and Fredrik had agreed. They’d shouted after her when she closed the front door again.

  He had avoided Marie’s room. She existed, but she wasn’t there, not for real. Her room, which would remain imprinted on his mind, demanded every part of him, and he simply wasn’t ready. He knew that sooner or later they’d have to move if life were going to go on, it wouldn’t be here, inside what remained of the other life.

  He was a free man, but still locked up. He didn’t read the papers, he couldn’t, and didn’t watch TV. A girl had been murdered and her father had killed her killer, and for him, that was it. He couldn’t understand how several weeks later they were still writing about it, that the public was still interested. He’d had a life, and now he had nothing, and even the life he didn’t have had been taken from him, made public.

  He’d held on to Micaela for the s
econd day, too. They had made love again and again. All their energy and sorrow and solace and guilt and fear and those last times, they transformed into intercourse, mechanically pushing the buttons they knew how to push in order to reach orgasm as soon as possible. They hadn’t been able to look at each other, or really feel each other, and knew that the stifling anxiety remained and would bloom again once they emptied themselves.

  He got drunk on the third day. That was how he’d long planned to die, when his time ran out, when his body got so weak that he knew the day had come. He’d been convinced that it would be easier that way, to die. He tried it now and sure enough, the alcohol had paralyzed, pushed the day away for a while, but the fear still stood there, insisting upon the terrible loneliness.

  Since then he’d mostly stayed in bed. Three days without sleep, he’d held her body tightly the whole time but couldn’t make love. He’d almost gone to get the bottle, but he didn’t have the energy to drink or eat. Micaela had said, again and again, they should contact a doctor. Fredrik had already been offered help but had declined it then, and turned it down again now.

  That’s probably why he didn’t react very much when Kristina Björnsson called that evening. It was half past eleven. He and Micaela looked at each other and thought it was a journalist but answered the call anyway. Micaela began—once she understood—hysterically asking questions during the call. Kristina seemed to be trying to comfort her in a legal way, but he couldn’t share their feelings, not at all, there was just nothing, not here.

  The prosecutor had appealed the district court’s verdict. It had been decided that he’d be taken into custody the next day. It was almost liberating.

  They would take his daily life from him again.

  They’d turn his hours into a process, something that took place outside him, which wasn’t reality, but still forced him to participate, and in that way he could avoid seeing the other reality, the reality inside him, both now and then.

  He ended the call and lay down in bed. He kissed her for a long time. He would try to make love to her.

  It was a black car, they were always black, with extra mirrors and windows you couldn’t see through. They’d picked him up early the next morning, three police officers—the two he recognized from before, the lame one and the proper one and a third one at the wheel, a tall, young one. They’d all met him at the door, dressed in civilian clothes, didn’t say much. They let him hold Micaela until he was done. They’d driven through Strängnäs in silence. Fredrik sat in the back seat with the old, lame officer beside him. A few minutes from the E20 highway and at a much higher speed, another black car had driven up behind them, and a motorcycle police officer in front.

  Grens had asked them right away to lower the sound of the police radio a little, and to put the CD he held in his hand into the car’s stereo. The proper one, Sundkvist, had asked if it was really necessary on the way back, too. Grens had muttered something, clearly irritated, until the tall young man said fuck it, put in the CD and pushed play.

  Siw Malmkvist. Fredrik was sure of it.

  you make promises and talk nonsense about cars and minks

  and think I should blindly be at your beck and call

  Grens closed his eyes, rocking his body slowly back and forth. Fredrik shuddered. The lyrics were unbearable. Her perky voice came straight from the late ’50s and early ’60s, from a naive Sweden, unspoiled and expectant, a dawning myth. It hadn’t really been like that. He’d been a child then, but he remembered his father and the beating and his mother and her Camel cigarettes and when she looked away. There was no Siw Malmkvist then or now. It was a lie, an escape, and he almost asked the policeman, whose eyes were closed, what it was he was running from—why he refused to let go of something that never even existed in the first place.

  She sang all the way. Fifty minutes to get to the Kronoberg jail and Grens didn’t open his eyes once, while the two in the front stared straight ahead, their thoughts seemingly elsewhere.

  They saw the protesters when they turned onto Bergs Street. Even more than last time—two hundred had turned to more than five hundred protesters.

  They stood facing the jail, shouting in unison, shaking their placards, spitting, jeering, throwing the occasional large stone at the entrance. A few seconds, then one of them noticed the motorcycle and the two black cars approaching. They ran toward them, holding hands, and made a ring around the three vehicles. They lay down on the ground, formed a human chain, the cars and the motorcycle could go neither forward nor backward. The tall young man looked around the car for support as he grabbed the police radio receiver.

  “Officer in need of assistance! I repeat, officer in need of assistance! A mob throwing stones!”

  Almost immediately, a voice from the speaker.

  “How many?”

  “Several hundred demonstrators outside Kronoberg!”

  “Reinforcements are on the way.”

  “There’s a chance he’ll be sprung!”

  “Drive on. Drive on!”

  Fredrik could see people outside the car, hear them screaming, could read their signs, but didn’t understand them. What were they doing here? He didn’t know them. Why were they using his name? What had happened had nothing to do with them. It was his fight, his hell. They were risking their lives. For what? Did they know? He hadn’t asked for this. There was no difference between them and the journalists standing outside his fence. They were living through someone else. Right now it was him. Why? Had they lost daughters? Had they shot and killed another human being? He wished he had the courage to roll down the window and ask, force them to look him in the eyes.

  They sat quietly in the car, surrounded, paralyzed. The young one looked stressed, was breathing heavily, waving his arms as he alternated between releasing the handbrake and changing gears. Sundkvist and Grens were both calm, didn’t seem to care, didn’t move, waited patiently.

  Again, the voice over the police radio in the dashboard of the car.

  “To all cars. Officer in need of assistance at Kronoberg, Bergs Street entrance. Approximately five hundred protesters armed with rocks. Please disperse the demonstration, nothing else. Leave your own views at home.”

  Grens looked at him, trying to read his reaction. He didn’t get it. Fredrik had heard the message, was astonished by the contents but revealed nothing, said nothing.

  The young man put the car in reverse, revved the engine, and drove a few centimeters just to test the demonstrators’ courage.

  They still lay there.

  They screamed.

  He put it in first gear and drove forward a couple of meters, revved the engine. They remained, mocking them now, singing about pigs.

  Suddenly, a few of them got up and walked over to the car.

  One lifted a stone and threw it at the rear window. The glass smashed and the stone bounced off the seat between Fredrik and Grens and hit the backrest of the driver’s seat before landing on the floor. Fredrik felt shattered glass on his neck, it hurt, and he looked at Grens, who was bleeding from his cheek. The young officer shouted dammit, dammit to hell, rolled down the side window and drew his weapon, aimed it toward the sky and let off a warning shot.

  The demonstrators threw themselves down on the ground.

  Suddenly, someone hit the young officer’s arm, another blow, and the gun fell from his grasp. A protestor in his twenties picked it up and held it with both hands, took aim at the young police officer’s face.

  Ewert Grens roared.

  “Drive! For fuck’s sake, drive!”

  The young man had a gun to his head. In front of him, people lay on the ground. Behind him people lay on the ground.

  He hesitated.

  The shot went off next to his left ear, passed out through the front window.

  He couldn’t hear anything after that, fixed his eyes on a tree farther away, pressed down on the accelerator. The people outside screamed as he drove over them. Their bodies hit the underside of the car uneven
ly. The car drove back out onto Bergs Street, just as the first of two SWAT team vans arrived. The demonstrators stood up now, ran as a group toward the new vehicles bearing combat-ready police officers and surrounded them, threw themselves against the sides of the vans, rocking them a few times, lifting them, overturning them both. Then they took a step back and waited for the riot police to crawl out, formed a line in front of them, some with their pants pulled down, and proceeded to pee on them.

  He didn’t get the same cell as last time. Another floor, more in the middle. But it looked the same: four square meters, a bed, a table, a sink to wash in and piss in. The same uniform hanging off him. No newspapers, no radio, no television, no visitors.

  He had nothing against that.

  They couldn’t break him. It was what it was. He didn’t want to read, didn’t want to meet anyone, had no wants.

  He passed another prisoner as they took him down the corridor to his cell. Fredrik had seen his picture several times before, one of Sweden’s best-loved criminals, who time and again charmed and gained people’s trust. The well-known prisoner started when he saw Fredrik. He turned and approached Fredrik, pounded him hard on the back and shoulder, told him he was a hero, that he should stand up for himself, and if the guards didn’t treat him well, just say something, and he’d make sure they behaved themselves.

  The guards behaved themselves. Whether they did so voluntarily or because they’d had help, the results were they didn’t stare so damn much through the hatch in the door, and he got more coffee, and when he went outside in the cage on the roof, they gave him more than an hour. He knew it, and the guards knew it, and there were a few days when he got twice his rations, two hours behind the chicken wire and barbed wire, with the sky above.

  Kristina Björnsson visited him every other day. She referred to documents and strategies, but there wasn’t much more now than there was before, their appeal wasn’t going to be so different from what they’d argued in the district court. She was there mostly to keep his spirits up, bring him greetings from Micaela, convince him to believe in his prospects, his future.