There is a story about the Upper Lake. Have you ever heard it?
It is Lillis’ voice, but is it then or now? They have walked along the water’s edge, away from the others, because Lillis is tired of the endless competition between Marina and Pia. Johanna is thinking that Lillis is also competing, but she never says it out loud. They are sixteen years old and will sleep in the cabin all the weekend and tomorrow—Marina has asked some boys—they’ll have a party.
Come on, let’s swim. Aw, come on, now! We’ll have to see if it’s true what they say about the Upper Lake. That somewhere out there, there’s a bottomless spot. Where those who have drowned live. They say that if you go down deep enough you can be caught in their trailing hair. Down there are those who died willingly, the suicides, and they’re all women, unhappy and full of despair. Men shoot themselves, but women drown themselves, that’s how it’s always been. It’s their hair you can feel under your feet, if only you dare swim out there.
Lillis throws her clothes into the high beach grass and starts wading out in the lake. Johanna has to do the same. Everything they share becomes meaningful and the more dangerous it feels, the more alive they become. Lillis has taught her that. They often play with death, strangle themselves with scarves until they pass out. It’s become an addiction to them, an obsession, they have to do it every day. Johanna is panicky as she pulls the noose tight, yet she pulls it until all air is gone, her temples start throbbing and it feels as if her eyes were forced out of her skull. She sees pinpoints of light and outside sounds disappear and then everything goes black. There’s no danger as long as you don’t make a knot in your scarf, Lillis has promised her, since it loosens when you pass out. Before you die.
There is a moment in every person’s life when you decide whether to walk with the living or with the dead. That time is now, before we go rigid. After, it is too late.
She can see that Lillis has started swimming out there and is pulling away. They are closing in on the middle of the lake. The cool water caressing her skin, so present and naked. She thinks that some boy may be standing somewhere on the beach, watching them, and it feels exciting, and then just a little bit shameful as she thinks about Lillis naked under the water maybe thirty feet ahead of her, her strokes powerful even though she is so thin and so cute, but it’s not like that. Nothing sexual, that is, between them, or that’s what she constantly tells herself even though it sometimes feels that way when Lillis snuggles into her arms on the couch or wherever. Like a puppy, sort of. But that’s how Lillis is, without any boundaries against what is dangerous.
And they’re alone under the sky, in the night, and they don’t give a rat’s ass for anyone else.
We have to know something about death to be able to choose, right? Otherwise, we’ll just be victims.
She doesn’t perceive it when it happens. Just sees that the surface of the water is suddenly smooth. You’re kidding, Johanna thinks, and swims to the spot where Lillis’ blonde head was just visible, swims around in circles, where the hell are you? She dives under to look, but it’s dark and impenetrable. All she sees is water and you can’t see water and she loses her sense of direction, of what is up or down, and she panics. That’s when she feels it. Something moving down by her feet, slithering around her legs. Fear overwhelms her and she has to get up right now, up to the surface. She kicks and hits something below, there really is something down there, and in her head she sees all the images of the dead, of eels slithering out of eye sockets, and that thing that is tangled around her feet is still there, pulling at her, and she kicks wildly and brandishes her arms, up, up, and she has no air left, must get away from there. She doesn’t breathe until she is at the shore. Doesn’t think until she has stood up. The lake is glittering and black. She shakes so hard that it takes forever to get her clothes back on. Next to her are Lillis’ clothes, spread out on the grass.
Time just passed, or perhaps it stopped. Finally she had to rise and walk back.
“Have you been out swimming? Where’s Lillis?”
Johanna doesn’t know where the lie came from. She had meant to tell them what happened, that Lillis swam out and disappeared. But then she would have to lie about the rest. About her being out there herself. About the dead in the water and her own panic, how do you tell someone something like that? About the sensation under her foot when it hit something soft and at the same time hard, and what she hadn’t even dared to think through: that it was Lillis’ face. Lillis, who just intended to scare her, that it had all been part of a plan, the stories about the dead and their silly hair. Lillis, who always trained to be able to swim farther underwater than anyone else in the public baths.
“She just split, I don’t know. Maybe she got upset about something.”
In the morning she had gone back to that place and picked up Lillis’ clothes, buried them. Cried and dug. It was too late for the truth. It was the summer when everything changed. In the fall they all disappeared in different directions, knots being untied. Marina would attend high school in town, the others started different courses. Johanna quit after a single semester, then graduated from a folk high school up north in Ångermanland. Lillis’ father was a heavy drinker and there never was any serious investigation. The police had appeared once to put their questions, and Johanna had described how Lillis was dressed when she disappeared: the sea-green angora sweater (stolen from H&M). They believed she had run away from home. She probably had reasons to.
The tree growing more or less alone at the edge of a grove. Johanna believes she recognizes the place and starts digging on the lake side of the trunk. Is it possible that fabric and angora wool are still there after thirty years in the ground, or do they decay? Sneakers? She digs, and there is nothing. Is it the wrong spot? Perhaps the wrong stretch of beach, new trees grown up, she has no idea of how much a forest can change over thirty years. Lillis is standing at the edge of the woods, looking at her. Johanna doesn’t dare turn, but she can feel her presence as something cold in her neck.
We had a deal. A deal about secrets and betrayal, have you forgotten that, Johanna?
She has dirt under her nails, reaching far up to her elbows.
That’s why she walks down to the water and kicks off her shoes, she tells herself. When she bends down to wash off the dirt she sees herself in a brief reflex, her adult self. She has never stopped being sixteen—it’s just new ages added, like layers in a cake. Then the moon disappears behind a cloud and she is gone. No, not gone, there she is: pretty far out in the water already, where it’s deep. She swims, still fully dressed, towards the middle of the lake, because she must. Closes her eyes and swims on, tries to find the power within her body, but there is only the awkwardness of her wet clothes and the fat that has lined her stomach; she can feel her own weight. At the middle of the lake she stops, treads water, looks around. It was here, just here. And she dives down, as deep as she can, looks and sees nothing, fumbles around and gets a grip. Something trailingly soft, and she seems to hear it whisper and sing. There is a moment . . . to walk with the living or with the dead . . . Now it is all around her, entangling her in its threads until she is caught and dragged down into the whispering darkness where no light will be and no dread to wake up to, just a quiet song, is that how death really is? She lets herself sink. Let me go, she wants to scream, I don’t want to die. Do you call that life, it whispers, that thing you believe yourself to be living? Now she has no air left, and she sees dots of light all around. Is it Lillis’ face she can see down below? Or someone else’s?
No, she sees herself, and she is young again, and will do anything to be allowed to belong. No, she wants to scream, NO, I DON’T WANT TO ANY LONGER, but she has no air and there are no sounds in the water. She kicks, grabs the hair entangling her legs, tears it loose and rises towards the surface, and there is air, cold and clear.
Deep into her lungs she pulls life and power and a sense of reality. What the hell is she doing out here in the lake? She swims as well as she
can manage, breathless and exhausted, towards land. Untangles her fingers from something in her hand.
Lisette, she thinks. She needs me, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
“Are you out of your mind—have you been swimming fully dressed?”
Pia is removing her makeup. Rubbing her face with expensive creams. Agge is snoring in her upper bed. Johanna looks around in the small scout cottage. No sea-green sweater.
“I was thinking about Lillis,” she says, guardedly. “I thought I saw her out there.”
“You must have drunk a lot. I didn’t think anyone had any contact with her since she got out of here. And come to think of it, I never understood why you hung out with her. Want some tea?”
Johanna finds her scarf and dries her hair with it, it’s still dripping. They sit down, each with her mug of tea. She has taken her wet clothes off and borrowed dry ones from the others. Seaweed, she thinks, the only thing out there is seaweed or some other kind of water plant. She is grateful her head is no longer spinning.
“What do you mean, why I hung out with Lillis?”
“You were cool, you were smart,” Pia says. “You never needed to pretend or act. I was always so impressed by you. And then you let yourself be used by her.”
Johanna stares at them, one at a time. A quick sensation of being visible, as if she suddenly was more clearly delineated. Was that really how they perceived her?
She gets one of Agge’s blankets and wraps it around herself.
“You know, before, when we were sitting around the fire—” she starts. “I didn’t think I had anything to contribute . . . I mean, my life is . . . it’s okay, but I guess no more than that.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Skål,” Marina says, raising her teacup.
That’s when the tears come, burning and overflowing. She rubs them away, sniveling, but they keep flowing. Suddenly she can’t remember what’s so wrong about her life. And she thinks that all of it was just nightly imaginings, nightmares; she knows drinking too much makes her feel unwell.
Pia puts her arm around her and the crying abates. While light is growing outside, Marina starts talking about her uncertainties: that feeling that they’ll discover what a failure she is as an executive, and Pia tells them that deep down she really isn’t sure of loving this new guy. Finally they fall asleep, each in her own bed.
The next morning they say good-bye, outside the cabin.
“Thanks for setting this up,” Johanna says, hugging Marina. The ghosts of the past night certainly seem childish in the morning light, the sun already high.
“What are you talking about? You were the one inviting us.”
Marina exchanges glances with the others.
“We were pretty uncertain all of us, but then we thought, what the hell, get away from hubbies and kids for a weekend, why not?”
A few strands of mist have remained since night and are dissolving on the lake. Marina holds up her cell.
“It says here for anyone to see that you created this page. Is anything wrong with you?”
Johanna grabs the phone from her hand.
She recognizes the Facebook page. “Return to Upper Lake.” At the top it clearly says that the group was created by Johanna.
She feels a taste of lake water in her mouth. A stinging sensation in her cheeks, a swaying unreality.
She hadn’t even logged in to Facebook in half a year. Doesn’t know why she’s on it at all, but on the other hand she doesn’t want to be left out. When the message arrived in her mailbox, nobody had contacted her in more than six months.
When she returns the cell phone her hand feels numb.
“We’ve got to do this again,” Agge says. “Same time next year?”
“Sure.”
She remains standing there for a while after the others have left. Remembers a strand of hair entangled in her hand. The lake has turned a pale blue. The air is so still that the images of the trees on the water seem as real as the forest around her.
“There really is another story about the Upper Lake,” she says, slowly, into the air. “Have you ever heard it? I think it’s about those trying to live, despite all.”
Just as she steps into her car she feels a sudden chill on her neck. A wind creeping across her cheek, a quick caress. And the leaves are immobile.
Born in Malmö in 1960, Tove Alsterdal is a journalist and playwright. For many years, she lived in Umeå and Luleå in the far north of Sweden, but is now based in Stockholm. She has written for the theater and radio. She has also written opera librettos, and, with Helena Bergström, the script for the feature film So Different (Så olika). She published her first crime novel, Kvinnorna på stranden (The Women on the Beach) in 2009, and her second, I tystnaden begravd (Buried in Silence), in 2012; they have established her as one of the major Swedish crime writers, a master of mood and subtle characterization.
HE LIKED HIS HAIR
ROLF AND CILLA BÖRJLIND
No other living Swedish crime writers—regardless of how many bestsellers they have written—have reached an audience as huge as have the writing team of Rolf and Cilla Börjlind, who have been immensely productive in the field, both separately and, for more than a dozen years, mainly together, though they published their first crime novel, Springfloden (Spring Tide), only recently, in 2012. The Börjlinds are by far Sweden’s most prolific screenwriters, with close to fifty full-length movies—virtually all of them about crime, and most of them made for TV—to their credit. They have written twenty-six Martin Beck movies, based on the characters created by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; one movie based on Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander character; and five adaptations of Arne Dahl’s novels. Additionally, they have created original TV crime dramas, such as Danslärarens återkomst (Return of the Dancing Master) in 2004, the eight-part Graven (The Grave) also in 2004, and the six-part Morden (The Murders) in 2009, reaching an audience of many millions, both in Sweden and abroad.
Before his enormously successful screenwriting career, Rolf Börjlind was known as Sweden’s perhaps funniest and certainly most bitingly satirical humorist. And lately, as noted, he and Cilla also have turned their hands to crime novels. Their highly regarded first novel showed a hardly surprising mastery of the form, both playing with it and utilizing it to perfection; it was sold to more than twenty countries. Their second novel, Den tredje rösten (The Third Voice), followed in 2013.
They had never before written a short story, so it is a great pleasure to present their first one here.
HE STILL HAD TIME TO PACE THE ROOM, THAT SIMPLE AND MEASURED surface that was his home. A word he never used. To him it was a surface, not a space. He had put in a couch and a table, and had a wooden balsa model of the Dakota on his windowsill. There was no carpet on the floor and the narrow mirror by the kitchen door was hung too low. He hadn’t put it there himself. When he wanted to see how his mouth looked he had to bend down; all he could see was dead meat. He had no relationship with his face, his eyes met the gaze of a stranger and he wondered why the nose was crooked.
He liked his hair.
It was the one thing he admitted as his. Brown, and slightly curly, it reminded him of his mother, the woman who had no hands. Her hair had been brown and curly, and her laugh—when she was finally told—was his only memory of her voice. But it made time pass.
That, and his pacing.
He was a night person, his biological clock set to night. That was when he came awake: when darkness fell, when he could escape being seen and could avoid seeing, when he could be indifferent to his surroundings, cut out, when he could walk from one neighborhood to another without knowing where he had gone.
Often, at night, he walked from one point to another and back along a different route. And always with the same purpose. It made time pass and it made him tired. And made it possible to fall asleep before light caught up with him.
That was important.
He had to fall asleep before it became ligh
t and sleep until it grew dark again. Sometimes he failed, woke out of a strange howl and stared out at the light, unable to go back to sleep.
Those times were when he missed it.
That which could lower him back into darkness. Which they had taken from him and which he had to get back.
In one way or another.
He began pacing the room, from wall to wall and back. For how long he didn’t know. He had no watch; usually he felt from his body when he was done, when he could go to sleep. Tonight it took a long time. He sat down on the edge of his bed, felt his body. He ought to be tired by now, more tired than he was.
It bothered him.
He went to his window to look out. Nothing moved; all was as usual. In the corner of his eyes he was aware of the charred hands on his window ledge, two of them. They lay there every time he had to go. Not every time, it struck him, just the times he had to lower himself into darkness.
Then they lay there, as a reminder.
He opened his window, carefully, watching the hands. It was quiet outside. On some nights he could hear a blackbird not far away, a blackbird singing in the middle of the night. He never saw it but he knew what it looked like. Its beak was the same orange-yellow color his mother had had when she was told.
And they had the same black eyes.
He closed his window and went to the shelf above the mirror. The small blue-and-white box stood where he had put it four nights ago. He stuffed it in the pocket of his long, dark gray coat and left the room.
He had to.
Outside a soft rain was falling.
He liked rain, he liked something to happen while he moved between the buildings. Not pelting rain, but a monotonous, quiet drizzle. Tonight the rain was perfect. He knew the address where he was going and was in no hurry. He kept to empty streets; if he met anyone he crossed to the other side.
He never looked back.
When he came to the right part of town he stopped, not far from a green container. He stood quietly, for a long time, hidden in the darkness of a broken streetlight. He thought about a sentence he’d read (where, he couldn’t remember) about a man standing on a bridge casting switched-off light across the water. Switched-off light, he liked that, as if your pocket was full of darkness and you could spread it when it became too bright.
A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 4
