Some Kind of Peace: A Novel

by Camilla Grebe

  “Does she know you’re sleeping here?”

  I climbed out of the sleeping bag without answering and reached for the blue backpack I always have with me.

  “All I’m saying is… even if you don’t have anywhere else to go, this isn’t the best…”

  I rooted around in my backpack among ropes, plastic bags, and masking tape until I found it. My field knife has a broad, sharp blade of shiny-blue steel and is serrated along one side. With a practiced, imperceptible movement I hid it up my sleeve, stood up, and started slowly walking toward the self-righteous man with the silly little dog. The morality police on an evening walk.

  “This is not a camping site,” the man explained emphatically, as if he was trying to convince himself of what he had just said.

  “And I’m not a camper,” I replied, and with two quick leaps I was upon him, and he instinctively grabbed on to the tree behind him, as if seeking support.

  As a result, he was now perfectly positioned between the tree and my field knife.

  With a single motion I slit open his protruding belly, from the navel to the sternum. Something foul smelling and organic seeped out with a sigh as the man fell to the ground without a word, his back still resting against the large pine behind him.

  I tugged at the leash and pulled the growling little dog toward me to silence it. But the cut that wounded the dog in the neck also freed its collar, and with a stifled, wheezing bark, it disappeared into the night.

  It is evening. Outside my cottage, solid darkness has set in and I can hear the autumn winds chasing across the cliffs. All the lights are on and my big flashlight is always within reach, to be safe. I am curled up on my couch. There’s an empty plate on the table, still sticky from ketchup and food scraps, and in my hand I have my obligatory wineglass.

  Ziggy’s food bowl remains empty by the front door. I have decided not to put food out this evening, because I understand now he is not coming back, even if I sometimes think I hear the sound of his soft paws at night.

  The floor is covered with videotapes from my patient sessions, all dated and marked in Marianne’s neat handwriting. I rub my eyes. I’m trying to find a clue here. Is it even possible? Is there anything in all these conversations, in these hundreds of hours that might explain what is happening? A word, an unconscious gesture, or a revealing look?

  I fast-forward to one of my conversations with Peter. Arms wave spastically at double speed. His head jumps up and down. He is constantly adjusting his tie. People’s tics become so obvious when you play them at double velocity. I stop the tape.

  I feel faint. Peter’s face is frozen in a grimace on the flickering TV screen. His eyes are vacant. An evil person? I take a gulp of wine to calm myself and fast-forward a little farther.

  “How do these images make you feel, in retrospect?”

  “I’m so afraid. What if I were to actually lose control and do her harm? I do love her. These thoughts make me feel loathesome, like a damn sex criminal. I really don’t want to hurt her.”

  “Do you enjoy these fantasies?”

  “Enjoy them? No, I don’t enjoy them. I want to be rid of them. I wish they didn’t exist. That’s why I’m asking for help. To make them disappear.”

  “What do you do, if anything, to try to make them go away?”

  “I stopped having sex. If I don’t sleep with my girlfriend, the thoughts don’t come in the same way. But… what woman wants to be with a man who won’t have sex with her?”

  I am reminded of Sara and how her new man didn’t want to sleep with her. How much the absence of physical intimacy confused her and made her feel inadequate. For someone who understood a woman’s worth as her ability to attract men, the consequences are crystal-clear: She’s not woman enough.

  I sink to my knees among the videotapes, searching for the conversation with Sara that touches on this particular subject. My hands are uncertain and I know that once again I’ve had a little too much wine this evening. It takes me a few minutes to find the right tape.

  “It could be anything, from fear of not measuring up sexually, I mean, you’re attractive and young and so on, to physical ailments and emotional blocks. What do you think? After all, you’re the one who knows him best.”

  “I don’t think anything. Okay, it’s like this… it’s like he’s carrying a lot of… anger. As if he’s really angry… inside, and it comes out when we start getting close, physically close, that is.”

  I rewind a little. Sara moves jerkily backward in the consultation room and takes an extinguished cigarette from the ashtray and brings it to her mouth.

  “But I think he wants to, though something is holding him back. I mean, I can tell he wants to, but he pulls back when it’s about to happen. He gets almost… he gets almost angry. How can that make him angry?”

  I rewind again and force Sara to pick up the extinguished cigarette once more.

  “He gets almost… he gets almost angry. How can that make him angry?”

  I stop the tape and Sara freezes as she walks across the room—for a moment it looks like she is hovering above the floor. Like an angel. A nicotine-dependent angel with blond ringlets and scarred forearms.

  Why would Sara’s efforts at seduction provoke this guy to the degree that it made him angry? Why does a middle-aged man buy expensive gifts for a young woman and then get angry when she wants to get close to him? What type of relationship is he looking for? An older man, a younger woman—almost still a girl—platonic love, gifts, father and daughter. Could it be that simple? Was he looking for someone who could be his daughter?

  Suddenly, I remember something Sara said in one of our last conversations. I dig around again among the videotapes on the floor until I find it. I insert the tape and fast-forward several minutes. Sara looks unusually neat. A black top hangs loose on her thin upper body, and there are no holes or patches on her jeans. She has no makeup on and her hair is in a ponytail. She looks considerably younger than twenty-five. Sure, I think, she could pass as someone’s teenage daughter.

  “He likes it when I open them. Meaning, he wants to watch as I take off the wrapping paper and all that—because the gifts are always nicely wrapped, with gold ribbon and that kind of thing. Yesterday I got one of those down vests, you know, with leather on the outside.”

  “It doesn’t make you uncomfortable when he gives you so many things?”

  “Why should it?”

  “Well, for example, because maybe he wants something from you in return.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “At any rate, not…” (Sara mumbles something inaudibly.)

  “What did you say?”

  “At any rate not sex! He doesn’t want me…” (Sara sniffs.)

  “Here.” (I hand Sara the tissues.)

  “He doesn’t want me and he says it’s because I remind him too much of someone…”

  “Of who, Sara?”

  “I don’t know, his daughter maybe.”

  “Does he have a daughter?”

  “He doesn’t want to talk about it. He refuses to talk about her.”

  “But he says that you remind him of someone? Of her?”

  “Hmm.”

  I pause and close my eyes. So Sara’s boyfriend and presumably also her murderer is a middle-aged dad with a grudge against me and an in at the office? And the reason he avoids physical intimacy with Sara is that she reminds him too much of his daughter. That’s just what he wants, to get close to her in the same way a parent does. Loving her like his child. All her attempts at seduction are therefore refused with disgust. Who is this man? Obviously a disturbed person, but still intelligent enough to conceal his intentions and lead what appears to be normal life. I look at the clock. Ten forty-five. Too late to call Vijay.

  Then I hear it—a gurgling, growling sound and then a dull thud, coming from outside. I’m not scared; I’m simply surprised, as it doesn’t sound like a human noise. Still, my legs barely hold as I s
lowly try to stand up and peer out through the black windows toward the sea.

  The darkness out there is as impenetrable as a concrete wall. The room is bathed in a bright light that effectively prevents me from seeing what’s outside. Quickly, I reach for the light switch and squeeze my eyes shut. I’ve done it a hundred times before, but I still don’t like it. I turn off the lights and slowly accustom my eyes to the darkness. The outlines of the room emerge, summoned at first from memory rather than seen.

  There! A shadow is moving outside my window. I see it clearly—the silhouette of a person disappearing in the faded rosebushes. I don’t need to see more. With a quick movement, I turn the lights back on.

  Someone was in my garden, right outside my house. A man? Maybe he had even pressed his face against the window and watched me as I sat on the floor with my eyes glued to the TV. Perhaps he was looking at Sara?

  The thought makes me sick to my stomach.

  I wait a long time before I carefully crack open the patio door to look out. The waves and the wind are all I can hear. The raw chill in the night air feels like a damp breath against my body. The sky is black and I can discern neither trees nor cliffs, only the faint glistening in the sea.

  The light from the living room illuminates a little patch of grass in front of the house and glistens on what at first I think is a piece of black plastic but then realize is a dark, wet spot. I let go of the door, which immediately blows wide open in the wind, and go carefully down the cold wooden steps toward the grass.

  Crouching, I bring my hand toward the spot and think I must be mistaken when I sense heat radiate up from the ground. But when I look more carefully, I can see a fine steam rising—wet, slippery, like light fog on a summer morning. I touch the spot gingerly and look at my fingers.

  It is blood.

  Markus does the same things he always does when I call him over in the middle of the night. He wraps me up carefully in the blanket, brews strong coffee, and makes the necessary phone calls. In this case, he sends for technicians to investigate the blood.

  I don’t say much. A chill has spread inside me that no blankets or hot drinks can relieve. It is as if I only just realized that someone actually wants to hurt me. What have I done to cause all this? What is my guilt, and how can it be atoned for? When and where did this chain of events begin? And, most important of all, how can I stop it? Because I no longer doubt that there is more to this story and an ending that I’m not sure I want to see.

  A perceived injustice. Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone. Am I that, without guilt? Who bears the guilt that Sara’s life was so difficult? Who bears the guilt for her death? Her family, herself, society, the murderer—an evil person—or maybe me? And how can I be sure that I am completely without guilt, just because I never wanted to hurt her? It’s just like with Stefan, is all I can think. I fall asleep on the couch with the blanket pulled all the way up to my nose and the untouched coffee cup abandoned on the table.

  • • •

  “Time to wake up yet?” Markus looks contented, sitting there on my couch in a hoodie and jeans.

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten thirty. I thought you needed to sleep. The technicians were here, worked for three hours, had coffee in your kitchen, and went home.”

  “I’m sorry I—”

  “You don’t need to apologize. It was animal blood, by the way, not human blood.”

  “What kind of animal?”

  “They don’t know yet, but I imagine it was an injured animal you heard out there last night.”

  “But I did see someone.”

  “Yes, I know, but it’s incredibly easy to see wrong. You were afraid. It was dark. Maybe it was a deer.”

  “A deer?”

  “Yes, or a badger. There are a lot of badgers here. May have been a badger that was hit by a car—”

  “But nobody drives by here,” I interrupt him, annoyed.

  “Either way, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

  Markus goes to the kitchen and starts looking around in the cupboards. I can see his blond hair through the doorway. Outside, the sun is shining. It is a lovely day and the little bay is framed by fall leaves that have changed to every color from lemon-yellow to ocher and reddish-brown. The sea lies peacefully.

  “Don’t you have anything to eat?”

  “There’s a little bread in the freezer. Maybe some cheese, too, I’m not sure.”

  “There’s not a thing here. What do you actually live on?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “Sure,” says Markus as he continues to dig around in my kitchen. I’m not completely comfortable with him snooping around in my cupboards and drawers, so I raise my voice a little.

  “I mean really talk. I found things in the videotapes yesterday that I think are important.”

  Markus comes out of the kitchen, a pepper and two apples in his hand.

  “Tell me,” he says, sitting beside me on the couch.

  And I tell him. That Sara’s boyfriend was possibly looking for a father-daughter relationship, or happened to end up in one. About the segment where Sara suggests that he has a child, a daughter who resembles her. Markus listens attentively. He and his colleagues have watched all the tapes but had not noticed this in particular, he says.

  Finally, I also share my thoughts about guilt, that I wonder if I am guilty, directly or indirectly, in what happened to Sara and Marianne. I don’t mention Stefan. It’s still too hard to talk about.

  I expected him to dismiss my concerns and say that it’s obviously not my fault, but instead he simply shrugs and looks out the window.

  “I guess we’re in the same boat.”

  “You and me?”

  “Everyone. All people,” he explains, biting into one of the apples. “Everything we do. All the actions we take without being able to foresee the consequences. All the complicated connections between events, relationships between people. You pull on a thread at one end, and someone drops down dead on the other. It’s not anyone’s fault—or maybe it’s everyone’s? But to me, the intent is more important than the cause. The cause is mechanical, the intent has a direction, a force of its own.”

  I take the other apple from his hand and bite off a piece without saying anything. His comment surprises me. In some way, I hadn’t expected him to deliver such a well-reasoned, well-formulated insight. Somehow I had assumed that he was less sophisticated.

  Banal.

  A man who doesn’t require a user’s manual. A man whose reactions to any situation in life can be foreseen. And fended off, if necessary.

  “Whatever,” says Markus, looking at me, his eyes red from the night’s work.

  “There’s one thing I’m still wondering about. Marianne, she’s still unconscious. I need to ask you and your associates about her in order to form a better picture of who she is and how she lives. What did she do in her free time, for example?”

  “I don’t really know. Isn’t that strange? You see someone every day, and even so, you never get to know her. Not really.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “I think the one who knew Marianne best was Christer, her boyfriend.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not very much. Marianne describes him as friendly and, well… supportive. He has certainly been a big help to her in her career, or whatever you want to call it. Listens to her and understands her and so on. I think he is, or was, in finance.”

  “Yes, he said that. What is your impression of him?”

  “Well, I don’t know. It’s not like I know him very well. I’ve only met him a few times. But he seems intelligent and… sensitive, maybe. He seems to take an interest in several things—music, art. Smart enough not to seem pretentious, even if he is… uh, you know.”

  Markus doesn’t answer. He just bites into the apple again and looks out over the sea.

  That night I dream about Stefan again. I feel his presence strongly, his scent
is with me in my nostrils, his skin just out of reach of my hands, but he isn’t there. Sweaty and in a panic, as if I have a fever, I rush around the cottage and on the property to find him. I raise the thorny branches of the rosebushes, heavy with dark violet buds ready to burst open. I wander among the pine trees, stumble in the thicket, and fall. The damp, soft hair-cap moss gently catches my body.

  On the rocks, I stop and look out over the sea, which has a peculiar coppery color. When I turn my gaze toward the sky, I realize that it has given the sea its color; brown-red and ominous, it presses down over the bay. I walk down to my crooked, tarred little pier and hesitantly take a few steps out onto the brittle boards, already aware of what I will find: Stefan resting peacefully on his back in the glistening copper water. A bunch of seaweed forms a soft, billowing pillow whose fringes caress his cheeks like a thousand gentle fingers.

  “I miss you,” I say. “It’s always the same. I miss you and you aren’t here.”

  Stefan’s thin blue-white eyelids look like they are made of rice paper. They flutter; he opens his eyes and looks right at me.

  “But, Siri dear, do you still not understand? Don’t you get why I had to go?”

  I’m thinking about talking to Sven. Markus has warned me against this; he doesn’t want me talking to anyone the police have questioned. He would prefer that I move in with Aina and take a sick leave. “Get out of the game,” was how he put it. But instead I’m back at the office, walking down the corridor toward the room we call the Yellow Room.

  Sven’s room.

  He is sitting with his back to the door. A rust-brown corduroy jacket is tossed over his chair. His desk is covered with stacks of professional journals, notepads, and loose sheets of paper, which I recognize as case files that shouldn’t be there. Coffee cups, ashtrays, and apple cores are balanced on top of everything. Sven is a good therapist but a lousy administrator. In Marianne’s absence, his office and case files have devolved into chaos.