She started walking, past the pottery room, the woodwork shop and the model railway. She reached the end of the corridor and carefully went down the creaking stairs, past the cafeteria and library. She checked the doors, shutting and locking them.
The front door stuck in the cold, it always did. She managed to force it shut with a groan, and locked it with a tangible feeling of relief. She took several deep breaths before embarking on the slippery journey down to the street.
Snow was falling, thin and sharp, falling silently and gently in the still air. It had got considerably colder during the evening, the temperature continuing to plummet as the snowflakes stopped.
The new snow crunched under the rubber soles of her boots. She took her kick-sledge and pushed it ahead of her on squeaking runners down towards the main road.
I ought to walk more, she thought.
Snow had settled on the porch, but her legs were frozen and she decided to leave it for Thord. She scraped her boots on the coir brush, unlocked the door and stepped into the hall.
She was so hungry she felt faint.
She pulled off her boots, hung up her coat, went into the kitchen without turning on the light, and opened the fridge door.
She had prepared a starter of prawns and eggs before she left, and took it over to the table, wolfing it down so fast that she got mayonnaise on her nose. Afterwards she sat there panting, feeling empty inside, and stared at the sink, realizing how tired she was.
She had to open the nursery early next morning; she would have to be up at half past five to get there in time.
I should go to bed, she thought, without moving.
She sat there in the dark kitchen until the phone rang.
‘Are you still up? You know you should be in bed.’
She smiled at her husband’s voice.
‘I was just going,’ she lied.
‘Did you have a good evening?’
She sighed gently. ‘That youngster can never get enough attention, she needs constant reassurance.’
‘And the sculpture?’
‘Nothing.’
A short silence. ‘You haven’t heard anything?’ Thord asked.
‘Heard anything?’
‘From them?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘I’ll be home at two. Don’t you lie there waiting, though.’
She smiled again. ‘I was just …’
They hung up and she climbed slowly up the stairs. The twiggy shadow of a snow-covered birch swept across the walls as a car drove past, headlights on full.
In spite of everything, she was lucky. The girls had grown into healthy, motivated individuals, good people with the right basic values that society needed. And Thord – her jackpot in life.
She ran a finger over the wedding photo that took pride of place on the landing.
She washed her face and brushed her teeth, undressed and went onto the landing again. She folded her clothes and put them on a chair next to the linen cupboard.
She had just pulled on her nightgown when the man stepped out of the closet. He looked just as she remembered him, except a little heavier and greyer.
‘You!’ she said in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’
She wasn’t frightened. Not even when he raised his gloved hands and put them round her neck.
Panic only hit when her airway was blocked and the adrenalin shock reached her brain. The room tilted, she saw the ceiling arching over her and his face coming closer, his hands rigid as steel round her neck.
No thoughts, no feelings.
Only the muscles of her bowels relaxing and the unexpected warmth in her underwear.
Friday 20 November
36
Thomas walked into the apartment like a stranger, feeling like he’d been away for a long time. The attic flat on Grev Turegatan in Östermalm was light-years away, but now he was home, he felt it in his whole body. It was a huge relief to him.
Home, where he lived.
The apartment sounded like it usually did, with the gentle murmur of people sleeping and poor ventilation. The air was cool from the badly fitted windows and smelled of cooking, as usual. He hung up his coat, put his tennis racket and sports bag down on the hall floor, pulled off his shoes. He saw the reality of his deception in front of him, the unused sports kit, the dry towel.
He gulped and shrugged off the guilt. He padded in to the children in his socks, leaned over them, their wide-open mouths and pyjamas and stuffed toys.
This was reality. The attic flat in Östermalm was cold and calculated, the furniture studied and ingratiating. Sophia Grenborg’s flat was blue and stripped back; his home was warm and yellow with sleeping children and swinging streetlamps.
Then he went towards the bedroom, walking slowly on feet that grew ever heavier. He stood in the doorway and looked at his wife.
She had fallen asleep lying across the bed with her tights and top and underwear on, her mouth open just like the children’s. Her eyelashes cast long shadows across her cheeks. She was breathing deeply and evenly.
His eyes roamed across her hard body, edgy and muscular and powerful.
Sophia Grenborg was so white and soft, she whimpered all the while they made love.
Suddenly he was overcome with an unexpected feeling of complete and utter shame. It made him feel sick. He backed out of the room, leaving her there, lying across the bed without a cover.
She knows, he thought. Someone’s told her.
He sat at the kitchen table, resting his elbows on his knees, and ran his fingers through his hair.
Impossible, he thought. She wouldn’t be sleeping so soundly if she knew.
He sighed deeply, unable to escape.
He knew he would have to lie next to her, unable to sleep, listening to her breathing and longing for hair that smelled of apples and the traces of menthol cigarettes.
He stood up in the dark, confused, knocking his hip against the sink. Surely he wasn’t longing to get away?
Or was he?
A sticky little hand patted Annika on the cheek.
‘Mummy? Bye bye, Mummy.’
She blinked at the light, not sure for a moment where she was. She realized a second or so later that she had fallen asleep with half her clothes on. She looked up and saw Ellen leaning over her with limp pigtails and peanut butter round her mouth.
A broad grin broke out inside her.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘I’m going to stay at home today.’
Annika stroked her daughter’s cheek, cleared her throat and smiled. ‘I don’t think so. I’ll pick you up after lunch,’ she said, struggling up by straining her stomach muscles and kissing the girl on the mouth, licking at the peanut butter.
‘Before lunch.’
‘It’s Friday, so there’ll be ice-cream today.’
The girl pondered this. ‘After,’ she said finally, and ran out.
Thomas looked in through the door, his usual, normal face with its tired morning eyes and hair sticking out.
‘How are you feeling?’
She smiled at him, shut her eyes and stretched like a cat.
‘Okay, I think.’
‘We’re off now.’
When she opened her eyes he was gone.
Today she didn’t wait for the silence. She was in the shower before the front door had closed behind them. She washed her hair, put on a facepack, trimmed her split ends and massaged her legs with cream. She put on mascara and filed her nails smooth, and picked out a clean bra. She made coffee and a sandwich that she knew she would have trouble eating.
Then she sat at the kitchen table and felt the anxiety rush towards her, rolling out of the corners like dark clouds of smoke and poison gas, and she fled, leaving the coffee and sandwich and an unopened yogurt on the table.
Outside the snow had stopped, but the sky was still solid grey. Hard shards of ice were being blown about in the wind, along the streets and pavements, catching on her face and h
air. She couldn’t make out any colours; the world had turned black and white, the sharp stone twisting in her chest.
Sophia Grenborg. Grev Turegatan.
She knew where that was. Christina Furhage used to live there. Without thinking, she started walking.
The façade was honey yellow and heavy with plaster embellishments, icicles hanging from the extremities, the glass of the bay windows shimmering unevenly, the door carved and dark brown.
Her feet and ears were freezing. She stamped the ground and adjusted her scarf better.
Wealthy middle-class, she thought, going up to the door.
The intercom was the modern sort that didn’t give away where in the building people lived. She stepped back and looked up at the façade, as though she’d be able to work out where Sophia Grenborg’s flat was. The snow blew into her eyes, making them water.
She crossed the street and stood in the doorway opposite, pulled out her mobile and dialled directory inquiries, then asked for Sophia Grenborg’s number, Grev Turegatan, and was put through. If Sophia had a caller-display phone then her number wouldn’t show, only the number for directory inquiries.
The phone rang. Annika stared at the building. Somewhere in there it was ringing and ringing, a telephone beside a bed where her husband had been last night.
After the fifth ring an answerphone clicked in. Annika held her breath, listening to the woman’s happy, breezy voice. ‘Hello, you’ve reached Sophia, I can’t take your call right now, but—’
Annika hung up, the breezy voice ringing in her ears, the stone in her chest starting to glow and spit.
She went back to the door, pressed one name after the other until an old lady finally answered.
‘Electricity,’ Annika said. ‘We need to read the meter in the basement, can you let us in?’
The lock buzzed and she pushed the door open on well-oiled hinges.
The stairwell was all gold and black marble, wooden panels of heavily polished oak reflecting the light from bronze lamps. A thick dark-blue carpet swallowed all sound.
Annika ran a finger along the beautiful grain of the dado rail as she walked towards the list of occupants beside the lift.
Sophia Grenborg’s name was listed in splendid isolation for the sixth floor.
Slowly she started to climb the stairs all the way up to the attic floor, soundlessly, slightly giddy.
Sophia’s front door was more modern than the others in the building – white and minimalistic.
Annika stared at the brushed bronze nameplate, her feet wide apart, anchored to the marble. Her chest rose and sank, the stone tore and pulled. Then she took out her mobile again and dialled directory inquiries again, this time asking for the number of the Federation of County Councils.
‘Sophia Grenborg, please,’ she said.
The voice that answered sounded just as breezy as it had on the answer machine.
‘My name’s Sara, and I’m calling from the journal County Council World,’ Annika said, staring at the nameplate. ‘I’m calling a few people before Christmas to see if I could just ask one quick question.’
Sophia Grenborg laughed, a light, tinkling sound. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose so …’
‘What would you like for Christmas?’ Annika said, running the palm of her hand over Sophia’s front door.
The woman at the other end laughed again. ‘A kiss from my beloved,’ she said, ‘although some bath salts would be good, too.’
Everything went black before Annika’s eyes, a dark sheet drifting past through her brain.
‘Beloved?’ she said in a flat voice. ‘Would that be your husband?’
More laughter. ‘He’s a bit of a secret at the moment. County Council World, you said? That’s a decent magazine, you cover the things that matter in our field really well. Which issue will this be in?’
Annika closed her eyes and ran a hand over her forehead, the stairwell was starting to tilt, a sucking wave shifting from wall to wall.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘The questionnaire! Will it be out before Christmas?’
She was forced to crouch down, leaning her back against the door.
‘We don’t quite know how much space we’ve got, it depends on adverts.’ Did County Council World have adverts? She had no idea.
The line fell silent. Annika could hear Sophia Grenborg breathing, listened to the other woman’s rhythmic intake of air.
‘Well,’ Sophia said, ‘if there wasn’t anything else …’
‘My surname’s Grenborg too,’ Annika said. ‘Do you think we could be related?’
The laughter was less hearty this time. ‘Hmm, what did you say your name was?’
‘Sara,’ Annika said. ‘Sara Grenborg.’
‘Which branch of the family?’
Was she imagining things, or had Sophia’s accent got a bit posher?
‘Södermanland,’ Annika said.
‘We’re from Österbotten, from the Väse manor-house. Are you descended from Carl-Johan?’
‘No,’ Annika said. ‘From Sofia Katarina.’
All of a sudden she could no longer be bothered to listen to Sophia La-di-da bloody Grenborg, and she hung up in the middle of a word.
She sat in silence and waited for her pulse to stop racing, resting a hand against Sophia Grenborg’s front door, gradually absorbing the woman into her bloodstream.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the cold staircase, listened to her voice, saw her sitting doing her lovely work in her lovely Federation, just loving the articles in County Council World. A woman so cold and well-behaved and appreciated that her own husband had chosen to kiss her outside NK, a woman who was everything she would never be.
She left the building without looking back.
37
The man woke up with the pink duvet cover tickling his nose. He snorted, then groaned as the pain from his stomach reached his head. The wooden panels in the ceiling swayed slowly to and fro, he looked away and stared into the boarded walls, shocked at how bad his breath smelled. The smell was taking him over.
La mort est dans cette ville, he thought, panting for breath.
He could see the doctor’s face floating above him, as it had the day he woke up from the anaesthetic, his friend’s clenched jaw and evasive gaze; he had already been informed about the consequences and alternatives and understood immediately.
Inoperable, untreatable. Three to six months from the diagnosis. The remaining time would entail a lot of pain, sickness, digestive trouble, weight loss, severe nausea, extreme tiredness, low blood pressure. Treatment consisted of anti-sickness medicine, painkillers and nutritional supplements.
He knew he would fade, almost rot, away. The smell would become more intrusive, his friend the doctor had advised him not to try to hide it with scent or aftershave. It wouldn’t help.
He gazed around the room, looking over the kitchen area in the corner and the panels on the walls and the colourful rugs on the plastic floor, trying to find something that wasn’t moving. He stopped at the window. Through the gap in the heavy curtains he could see blue daylight, cold, crisp. Gradually the world stopped swaying and he was able to breathe more easily, sliding into his dreamlike state where the limitations of reality were gradually wiped away.
‘I’m from Bojen Sailing Club; I’d like to book a seminar room from seven p.m. on Tuesday,’ he heard himself say with a peculiar echo in the background. In front of him the librarian had big books open on the desk. He knew she no longer believed him, because he couldn’t possibly be a sailor and a fly-fisherman, a butterfly collector and a genealogist.
Everyone who came to the meeting had a codename, regular names like Greger or Torsten or Mats. His choice of Ragnwald was met with frowns. You shouldn’t give yourself airs; but he was better than them and they knew that.
He laughed quietly in his in-between-world, returned to the old works that fever-hot night in early summer 1969 when the world was on the brink of the great revolution an
d they were ready. They had prepared for armed struggle and had guards patrolling the camp day and night. The company carved cudgels by the campfire, they discussed guerrilla warfare and practised self-defence.
In Norway the antagonism between leftwing activists and the others had been much greater than in Sweden. A radical bookshop had been bombed. They were convinced that it would soon be their turn, and they weren’t about to let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.
The fact that they were doing their training in Melderstein was particularly amusing, because the regime at the old works was religious. But because he had booked it as a parish assistant in Luleå no one had questioned his motives, and they had held thundering Maoist meetings in the little works church.
He was filled with the complete sense of harmony he had experienced in those few days, reliving once again how his capacity to remember all the quotations had given him a central position in the leadership, even though the delegates had come from all over the country. They practised battle skills and survival through the night, and it was there that he met Red Wolf.
He smiled at the ceiling, drifting off on the waves, seeing before him her soft face and thin little body. She was so young and so wide-eyed and she saw him as a Master. No one else had his experience of the Rebel movement and the Student Union occupation. He was secure on his throne, and even though little Red Wolf had only come to keep her friend company at the summer camp without realizing what it was about, she was swept up in it. She became a Servant of the Revolution quicker than he had dared hope, and she did it for his sake.
For his sake.
Karina who kissed him behind Melderstein church. He could still recall the taste of her chewing-gum.
He turned over in the bed.
In Bojen Sailing Club they had formed cells where they decided where people would live and work: a flat in Örnnäset and the nightshift at the ironworks; a small cottage in Svartöstaden and work with the local council. They had organized strikes, worked through tenants’ associations, unions, according to Mao’s political theory about the people’s front, the people’s movements, but it was all going too slowly. They spent too long discussing things; the Fly-fishing Club was full of false authorities who loved the sound of their own voices. The movement’s popularity brought with it a load of pretend revolutionaries who only came for the girls and the beer. After Melderstein the mood became rancorous. Two comrades challenged him for the leadership, with the support of others, so he took his family and left. He left bourgeois, small-town communism to die its slow, natural death, and formed his own group to plan how to get hold of real power.
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