The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  Ingrid sat stiff as a poker on the stool and observed her in silence, without changing her facial expression.

  ‘May I sleep here?’ asked Katarina, when the words came to an end. ‘I’m so terribly tired.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Ingrid. ‘You may not.’

  A long time had now passed since silence had fallen in the hall. The two women sat quietly, observing each other. The suitcase, whose only contents were a washbag, a couple of changes of clothes and a few diaries, started to be uncomfortable to sit on. Slowly, it occurred to Katarina that there was nothing for her here either. No warmth, no consolation. Her beloved preschool teacher did not remember her, and obviously had no interest in lightening her burden. Her indifference to Katarina’s life story was apparent. And indifference was a deadly sin.

  * * *

  Ingrid was lying on the sofa in the living room. Her wrists ached from the tightly pulled cord that rubbed against her bare skin, and the blood was pounding in her bruised fingers. Her feet were also tied together, but the pain in them was not as noticeable. It was very wet underneath her and she shivered quietly, lying there in the cooling urine.

  ‘I don’t intend to harm you,’ Katarina had said. ‘Just like you, I don’t intend to do anything. I do intend to let you lie here until you rot, in your own filth. You’ll get no food, no water and no medicine. I’m not going to torment you; the torment will come from yourself. Your hunger, your thirst, your bad conscience, your needs of one kind or another. I’m not going to provide for your needs. You’re your own responsibility, aren’t you? That’s how you see it, true?’

  At first Ingrid was too dazed to take in what the woman was saying, but now hours had passed and she’d had plenty of time to think and listen. How long did it take to starve to death? That probably didn’t matter; the hunger would gradually disappear until at last only a great, unbearable thirst would remain. How long could you live without liquids? A week, two weeks? She still felt no hunger, but her mouth was completely dry, so dry that she found it difficult to speak. But right now it was the pain in her wrists and the unpleasant pounding of the pulse in her fingers that she was most aware of. It felt as if her hands were going to burst and she wished they would simply go numb.

  At first she had not understood who the unpleasant woman was and what she wanted, but Katarina talked uninterruptedly for an hour and at last the words sank in. She was one of the children in the murdered Hans Vannerberg’s preschool class thirty-seven years earlier. She insisted that she had been badly treated by the other children and Ingrid’s own guilt in the whole thing rested on the fact that she, in her capacity as teacher, had taken no steps to stop the so-called bullying.

  The woman was obviously completely out of her mind, but even so, Ingrid could not help feeling rather unjustly treated. She had always done her best at her job, been friendly and nice to the children, and she felt that the children had liked her. She worked hard for many years at the preschool, taught the children to sew and make things, sang with them and played games. Of course, they could be a little annoying at times, and bickered with each other, but when Ingrid had been present there were never any fights or other mistreatment of the type that Katarina described.

  Of course, she had no control over what happened after the children left the preschool. You have to draw the line somewhere, and in this case it was simple: the line was at the gate at noon, when the children’s day at the preschool was at an end.

  ‘You knew what was going on, you could have talked to the children,’ Katarina said.

  Ingrid had no memory of any mistreatment, but in any case she answered, ‘I was a preschool teacher, not a therapist. Or a child psychologist, for that matter.’ But this did not go over well. After an unexpected outburst of complete madness, Katarina put her on the couch, hands and feet bound.

  She had roared that Ingrid was a human being after all, and as such, you don’t just stand by and watch other people – children – destroy one another. Ingrid had not made any objection, but inside she knew that, in fact, this was the only way to survive. Even as a little girl, Ingrid had learned not to poke her nose in other people’s business. When her father resorted to clenched fists against her mother, she realized that it was best for all concerned if she stayed out of the way. It was a wicked and nasty world they lived in, but if everyone minded their own business, existence would be more tolerable. I am the forge of my own happiness, she thought, and you are yours, Katarina. Of course, she did not say this out loud, but she knew this was the way life worked.

  The ache in her hands only increased and it was now beginning to feel unbearable.

  ‘Please, Katarina, can’t you loosen the cord a little?’ she begged pitifully. ‘It hurts so terribly.’

  ‘It hurts to live,’ Katarina replied with a smile. ‘You’re the forge of your own happiness, so make the best of the situation.’

  The insane woman had read her thoughts and obviously had no intention of doing anything to relieve her torment. Ingrid felt the stealthy onset of hunger. Her interest in food had ceased long ago. Food simply had no taste any more, but even so, she felt hunger pangs like anyone else and would need to eat a little something so as not to become confused and nauseated. Now she was lying here completely helpless, hungry, thirsty and in severe pain, and it would only get worse. Katarina said she intended to live in her house until her time was up, until Ingrid’s time in the hourglass had run out.

  There was no hope that anyone would come to visit, or even miss her. She was completely alone in the world, and she felt the tears streaming as she thought about that. She did not know when she had last cried – it must have been many years ago, perhaps when her sister passed away. Now she was alone, no husband, no children, no parents or siblings still alive. The few friends she had had over the years had grown old or disappeared, for one reason or another. She had left many of them behind, of course, in the move to Stockholm. It was hard to get old, hard to be alone. No one to talk to, no one to do things with, no one to come to her rescue in a situation like this.

  * * *

  Katarina was in the kitchen inspecting the contents of Ingrid Olsson’s freezer. It mostly contained bread, but also apples and plums parboiled in sugar, and sweetened berries. There were also some bags of homemade meatballs and casseroles. In the refrigerator there were large quantities of potatoes, and in the pantry she found rice and jars of preserves. She would not go hungry; there was food enough to last for weeks.

  When she thought about how long this might take, she felt restless. On the one hand, she had an incentive to get the whole thing over with as quickly, and as painfully, as possible, but on the other hand, she knew that the longer it went on, the greater the torment would be for Miss Ingrid. The most important element here was prolonging it, magnifying the old woman’s certainty that it would end in death and the uncertainty of how long it would take. That had become the purpose of it all, that it would drag on and on, and that she herself would not take any action.

  ‘Set an example,’ she said to herself.

  The choice of words was ridiculous because it was hardly worth setting an example for someone who would soon be dead, but even so that was what she would do. She was forced to hold back and not do anything rash that she would regret later.

  She peeled some potatoes and put them in a saucepan, which she set on the stove. Then she rummaged around for an old cast-iron frying pan and put in a dollop of margarine. She watched as the margarine slowly melted, and as she shook the pan a little, it started sizzling. The bag of meatballs was rock hard, but by using a bread knife she was able to hack a few pieces loose, which she rolled down into the cooking fat. From the living room she thought she heard smothered sobs, which made her happy, even as the self-pitying and monotonous noise irritated her. There was a popping sound in the pan as the ice melted and a drop of boiling-hot margarine splashed up and hit her in the eye.

  Before she knew what she was doing, she was out in the living room and found h
erself straddling the old woman. She struck her with clenched fists again and again on the face, after which she took hold of her grey hair with both hands and forcefully banged her head against the armrest. There was a crack somewhere inside the thin body below her and Ingrid screamed in pain.

  ‘Be quiet now, you old hag!’ Katarina screamed.

  Ingrid winced and was silent.

  ‘This is taking too long, much too long! I don’t know if I can put up with your ugly mug much longer. So die already! Die, so we’re finished!’

  It seemed like the old woman was on the verge of fainting. It was probably the broken hip that was so painful.

  ‘Say something!’ Katarina roared, continuing to shake her. ‘Don’t ignore me when I talk to you!’

  ‘You told me to be quiet,’ Ingrid whimpered, but her words were barely audible.

  ‘But now I’m telling you to answer. Have you broken your leg again, you bitch?’

  Ingrid nodded, and Katarina saw that she was trying to articulate the words ‘hip bone’, but it disappeared somewhere in the darkness into which she was sinking. Katarina continued to shake her, but gave up at last when she noticed that the old teacher was now beyond reach.

  She got down off the sofa, picked up the remote control on the table and turned on the TV. She flipped between channels for a while and found to her delight that the old lady had MTV. She used to watch MTV when she needed company, and now she sat for a while in front of Christina Aguilera and her well-built dancers, all moving in the same pattern in time with the music. The fury drained out of her as suddenly as it had come. She turned off the TV and went back into the kitchen, where she continued her food preparations.

  * * *

  When Ingrid opened her eyes again, Katarina was sitting in the armchair, eating.

  ‘Do you feel better now, after you’ve had some sleep?’ she asked in a calm, cool voice.

  It was hard to believe this was the same person who a few minutes earlier had jumped on her in uncontrolled rage and hit and screamed at her. For the first time Ingrid felt the terror really take hold of her. Her imprisonment had happened at a leisurely pace and in a controlled way, and she had been more surprised than afraid. But now it turned out that behind the cold, calculating façade there was also a wild, hysterical person, beyond all reason. A person who presumably didn’t know herself what was waiting around the next corner.

  ‘You said you weren’t going to hurt me,’ said Ingrid quietly, trying not to rouse the dormant insanity back to life.

  ‘But I lied,’ Katarina answered with an ice-cold smile. ‘Can’t a person indulge in that occasionally? Life is full of surprises, and I guess that’s a good thing. Imagine how predictable existence would be otherwise, and how meaningless, if you already knew how everything would end. You promised that everyone would get to drive the green car, but that didn’t happen. I never did. I pushed and pushed for a whole year, hoping to get to drive it at least once, but I never did. You lie when it suits you, so maybe we don’t need to turn my statements inside out.’

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Ingrid.

  Her tongue was sticking to her palate with every syllable. She really needed something to drink.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have a watch. I don’t care about time. This will take however long it takes, and that’s how it is with everything else too.’

  ‘Don’t you have a job?’ Ingrid asked. They might as well kill time by talking. When they talked she could concentrate on the conversation, and then she didn’t feel the pain as strongly.

  ‘No,’ Katarina answered. ‘This is my job – doing crazy things. Before, when I was in the hospital, I was in work therapy, but then they closed that down, so now I more or less do what I want.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘I live here with you, Miss Ingrid.’

  ‘But before? You must have lived somewhere?’

  ‘I live at home with my mum. If it suits me. In Hallonbergen. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I live in a shelter on Lidingö. I do what I want.’

  Ingrid looked at her for a long time, but Katarina took no notice of that. She seemed to be lost in her own thoughts now, looking dreamily out of the living room window into the November darkness. She was a good-looking girl. She was rather tall, straight-backed with a proud posture, and she had long, blonde hair. She was articulate, and her use of language made a reasonably educated impression. Did it really have to turn out this way, thought Ingrid, with a sudden flash of empathy. Then reality came back to her. She could hardly feel the pain in her hip any more, as long as she lay completely still, but her face ached, her stomach was crying out for something to eat, her mouth and throat for something to drink, and then her hands – the pain refused to go away. She needed to pee again. It had not yet dried completely from the last time before she had to go again. And on top of everything else, she felt humiliated, deprived of all pride and human dignity, reduced to a miserable little creature, lying there helpless, wetting herself.

  * * *

  Katarina ate her meatballs and potatoes in silence, and without noticing how they tasted. She was thinking about her mother, whom she had not seen since all this started. Her mother was old – even older than Miss Ingrid – and always had been. In photographs from before Katarina was born, she saw that her mother had always looked like an old lady. She wore peculiar hats and her stiff grey hair tied up in a bun at her neck. Even in pictures that must have been taken during the summer, she was unusually well wrapped up, with a warm coat, scarf and heavy winter shoes.

  How Katarina had come about was still a deeply buried secret, and no father had ever been mentioned. Her mother raised her on her own, and was very particular about her daughter being clean and neat. That she should carry herself like a little lady and be polite and obedient. She had been too, but still her mother never seemed quite satisfied with her. When Katarina came home from preschool and school beaten up and with her clothes in tatters, she had been met only with curses. Her mother was loving in her own way. Her concern for Katarina took up most of her time, but signs of affection were lacking.

  Instead, the time was devoted to her so-called upbringing and schoolwork. Katarina’s mother had been as different as you could get from the mothers in the storybooks at the library where her mother worked, and the mothers she saw in the courtyard where they lived. She was more like a kind of governess who sat alongside and studied everything Katarina did for the purpose of judging and evaluating. There had been hugs, at bedtime, but they were too hard and always given along with some admonition about doing better the next day. Katarina always fell asleep with a sense of failure, that she had done something wrong or incorrect that had to be atoned for. Still, she loved her mother. She loved her more than she had ever loved any other person.

  These days her relationship with her mother was different. The transformation had happened almost imperceptibly, and Katarina had no idea what caused this disturbance in the balance of power. Perhaps it was simply old age that softened her mother’s temperament. Whatever it was, she always seemed happy to see her and made an effort to make Katarina feel welcome, even spoiled – something her mother had previously been terrified of – when she came home. Katarina lived with her mother, periodically, in the apartment in Hallonbergen they had moved to after leaving Katrineholm, before Katarina became a law student at the University of Stockholm. Her studies were interrupted almost before they began, when Katarina was stricken with anxiety, which was followed by one bout of depression after another. Finally, she was hospitalized and spent several years in a mental institution, to which she returned at more or less regular intervals.

  She wondered what her mother would think if she found out what she had done. Katarina had always been careful to keep her mother in the dark about what happened at preschool and school, partly out of concern for her, partly because she suspected telling her about it would only have backfired. If the children were mean to Katarina, her mother woul
d have assumed that it was self-inflicted, because Katarina had not followed one or other of her mother’s instructions. The consequences would have been worse than they already were, scolding and reprimands about what Katarina saw as the lesser problem: torn clothes, scratched knees and bruises. Katarina shuddered at the thought of how her mother would react if she found out that her nice little girl was a murderer. She would never survive such a thing. She already had a bad heart and such news would surely send her straight to her grave.

  Yet she was doing it anyway. Even though she knew how the only person who ever cared about her would react, she did it. Her egotism and self-centeredness had got the upper hand, as her mother had always feared, and now she was busy doing the most forbidden things, simply to give her own life a little dignity and a measure of excitement – and maybe some enjoyment, too.

  She shook off the thought with a little laugh and glanced over at the woman on the couch. Was she peeing again? Maybe she should have let her go to the bathroom, anyway; the stench in here would be unbearable if this dragged on. But the humiliation of a grown person peeing and shitting herself decided it. If the old lady was going to suffer, then she should do so properly, even if it created some inconvenience for her too.

  She decided to investigate whether there was any alcohol in the house – she had not found any in the kitchen. She opened the door to the basement, turned on the light and went down a steep, narrow stairway that ended in a little hall. There were three doors. The first led to a storage area, containing an old bicycle and a clothes rack with old men’s and women’s clothes on hangers. The second door led to a small laundry room, with a washing machine, a dryer and an ironing board. The third door concealed a food cellar that was mainly used for jars of jam and preserves – it looked like Miss Ingrid made good use of the fruit the garden offered in autumn – but, more importantly, here she found a bottle of port wine and decided to open it.

  Katarina went back upstairs and took a long-stemmed glass out of a kitchen cupboard. As she entered the living room she noticed the stench of urine coming from the couch. She turned on her heels with a contemptuous snort and cautiously cracked open the outside door before she pulled on winter boots and coat and went out. She closed the door quietly behind her and carefully walked down the steps and around the end of the house. Here she found a small white iron bench, shaded from the exterior lighting by the wall of the house. She sat down, enclosed in the dense November darkness, and an ice-cold breeze rushed past her face. It was completely quiet around her, and all she could hear was the distant roar of cars on Nynäsvägen.