Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  “Come here.”

  No words for so long. It felt strange to be shouting after her.

  “But visiting time . . . Leon, he’ll—”

  “Come.”

  She walked back and sat down in the car beside him and he looked at her and didn’t know what to say and she waited until he knew.

  “Whore.”

  He didn’t say it loud. And his eyes weren’t aggressive. She didn’t understand.

  “I’ll never say that again. Your name is Wanda.”

  She dared to look at him now, but still without saying anything, frightened, not of him, but of breaking the spell.

  “This.”

  A white tube in his hand. The one he rubbed on his 85 percent burn scars every day. The house that burned down, and the morphine that was the only thing that could still the pain, the body that rattled when he left the hospital, nine years old.

  He handed her the cream that no one else had ever been allowed to rub into all that ugliness.

  “This morning . . . I forgot . . . you put some cream on my back.”

  She had tried a couple of times. But he’d screamed at her.

  “I want you to do it.”

  He turned around, back to her when he pulled up his shirt. They didn’t say any more. She rubbed the cream into his skin in the way she’d seen him do it in the morning, smiling the whole time. He shivered a bit a first and perhaps turned away a fraction, but when she did it the second time, even though it wasn’t needed, he stayed still.

  Then they went their separate ways. He toward the church and bus stop, she toward the gate and central security.

  Now.

  The microphone in the wall, walking across asphalt, the blue uniform on a chair in central security with a finger on the list of registered visits.

  It was because of this you had to be heard and searched.

  She left the room that had one single barred window and walls full of small lockers, went out into the entrance hall and through the gray metal detector, the two guards studying her like they normally did when the beeping noise broke the silence.

  “Waist height.”

  You need to talk to them now.

  “Same as last time? A stick up my ass while you have a look?”

  “Can you go through again?”

  You need to talk to them, remind them about the last time.

  “Your fingers inside me, remember? Bet you’ve been fantasizing about doing it again.”

  She walked through the arch again, through the beeping noise.

  “Waist height. Take off your belt.”

  They got their warrant, and they used it and they had no luck.

  “Soon, you can feel me up again, you can watch and maybe even jerk off. You probably have to pay for it otherwise.”

  “Just stand where you are.”

  They’ll search you. They’ll get right up close, threaten you, frighten you. But this time they won’t have permission to search you inside, no prosecutor would give out papers again without reasonable grounds.

  She took off her belt and stepped onto the two foot rests, the long plastic detector against her thighs and into her groin, over her hips. She got down again, waited while the dog sniffed her belt, smiled at the uniforms when she got it back, and walked toward the visiting room that they had pointed out.

  ———

  She undressed like he wanted her to and lay down on the bed as soon as they locked the door behind him. He would be the one to take it out, she had done it once herself, she wouldn’t do it again. He squatted down close to her, it was lubricated and slipped between his fingertips when he pulled it out.

  Twenty-eight days ago she’d taken something in and he had made sure that it was noticed. Fourteen days ago she’d smelled of it but dumped it, so they stood there with the papers that gave them the right to search something that was empty. She had just walked past some uniforms that didn’t have a warrant and smuggled in the only thing they didn’t have.

  Leon looked at the condom encasing the two carbon rods lying in his hand, put it to his mouth, swallowed.

  “We’re done.”

  He had pressed the red button by the door, bent down to the microphone.

  “Already?”

  “Visit over. I want to go back. Can you let me out?”

  ———

  He leaned over the sink with the cell door shut and his fingers down his throat and threw up a condom with two carbon rods in it, then rinsed it and walked down the corridor toward door number 10.

  He walked in without knocking. Smackhead was sitting at the small table in front of the window, his back to him.

  “You got everything?”

  The face that turned around, that Leon hated so much. So close he could hit it. But he couldn’t, not today, he needed him, after all.

  “Yes. I’ve got everything.”

  He went closer—on the table, two glass bottles that you could buy in the prison shop and that had once contained carbonated orange fizz and then were soaked in water until the labels came off; the two felt-tip pens that had been beside a notebook in one of the class rooms in D3; the electrical tape that was always on one of the shelves in the workshop and was now hanging in long strips down the back of the chair; the nail clippers that had been at the bottom of his wet bag and were one of the few sharp instruments permitted in a cell.

  “And the rest?”

  Smackhead nodded toward the closed cell door.

  “Out there.”

  Leon got closer and at least bumped into the skinny body hard as he leaned over and put the condom down on the table beside the bottles, the two carbon rods very obvious, and the grinning fucker gave a satisfied nod.

  “And my price?”

  “Two hundred and fifty Gs.”

  “I want half a kilo.”

  “You want to be part of this? Or what?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll get two hundred and fifty.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “That’s what you’ll get.”

  Smackhead looked around the cell. A few square meters. Then he turned back to the barred window, looked out, toward the wall that was never-ending.

  “Two hundred and fifty. If I’m in.”

  You fucking bastard.

  You’ll be in for exactly as long as we need you.

  “Right. You’re in. How long?”

  “The others . . . they took three hours.”

  “You’ve got one and a half. Deliver it to my cell.”

  Leon opened the cell door and Smackhead spoke in a low voice.

  “I’ll get started when you get started.”

  ———

  Leon hurried toward the unit kitchen, filled a large pan with water and put it on a hotplate, opened the fridge and took out the cell phone that he knew was still safe from the hole on the inside of the door, went back to his cell, careful that the door was well closed when he phoned.

  “Brother?”

  He listened.

  People. Traffic. Cars.

  His true brother and the whore were on the bus on their way back.

  “Reza?”

  “Yep.”

  “Uros?”

  “Yep.”

  Both silent again, listening to the other’s world.

  “The car?”

  “Yep.”

  “The gun?”

  “Yep.”

  “The apartments?”

  “Yep.”

  He wanted to say so much. He could do that later.

  “One love, brother.”

  “One love, brother.”

  ———

  He left the phone in the cell when he went back to the kitchen fridge to collect another one.

  The square buttermilk carton farthest back behind the others.

  He was in a hurry, wasn’t as careful as he normally was, after all, he wasn’t going to use it again.

  He poured the old buttermilk out, tore off the whole top of the ca
rton, and picked out the plastic-wrapped package.

  The third cell phone in the unit.

  The one he shared with Mihailovic. The one he now knew was tapped.

  A good place that had worked for years—he had wrapped the phone in plastic, split the bottom of the carton with a razor blade, emptied out the buttermilk and put the phone in, sealed the bottom again with the flame from a lighter that melted it together, then poured in new buttermilk—Swedish prisons were full of buttermilk cartons hiding cell phones.

  From now on he could use two cell phones.

  The one that he knew was safe and was free to call from. And this one, that he would only use when he wanted those listening to hear.

  He put it in his pocket and turned around to look at the stove, the big pan of water had just started to boil and he lifted it off the hotplate.

  He was ready to begin.

  ———

  He used both hands to move the pan of boiling water from the stove out into the corridor and the glassed-in wardens’ office. He could see them both in the inner room, the young female bitch and the older male jerk, sitting there drinking their fucking coffee. He put the pan down on the floor and took a five-kronor coin from his pant pocket, pressed hard as he drew it across the reinforced glass from the lower right-hand corner to the upper left-hand corner, then from the lower left-hand corner to the upper right-hand corner, a cross scratched onto the pane of glass when he saw them both get up and run toward him.

  “What the—”

  Leon bent down and lifted up the pan, it was odd, he remembered another time—a child shrink he didn’t think about very often—thoughts do that, suddenly they’re there getting in the way—he had been carrying another pan of boiling water, he had been violent and kept behind reinforced glass—and he now did the same as he had back then: threw the boiling water at the glass, at the cross where the two lines met, then used all his might to hit the same point with the pan—he had been so small, jumped down from the first floor and landed on the newly laid asphalt, ran away and kept away for nearly thirty-six hours—now, like then, the glass fractured into a spider’s web that turned to snowflakes which fell to the floor in small, small pieces. And then—a couple of steps back to be standing far enough away, he’d let the guard bastards do what it said they should do in the rules—press the alarm button on the piece of plastic, run out, lock the door to the unit, and call for reinforcements. He stayed standing where he was and watched them until they disappeared, the plastic boxes on their belts flashing as they were on the belts of sixty-eight other guards who were on duty right now in Aspsås prison.

  ———

  The door to Cell 10 opened at exactly the same time that Leon Jensen smashed the glass wall and set in motion a well-prepared sequence of events in Unit D1 Left. The others . . . they’ve taken three hours. Sonny Steen ran down the corridor toward the kitchen and the cleaning closet as fast as his feet, which were tender from years of injections, would carry him. You’ve got one and a half. The vacuum cleaner was standing beside the mop and he pulled the cord out as far as it would go and cut it with the nail clippers. As soon as he was back at the table in his cell, he would first cut off the plug, then cut two pieces half a meter long, peel off the plastic at either end and plait together the bared copper wires—two fifty-centimeter cords that ran in parallel to one and the same plug.

  One that would be plugged into the wall in a couple of hours.

  The first step to making a cutting torch.

  ———

  The last pieces of glass from the big window in the wardens’ office fell to the floor and settled in even smaller shards at Leon’s feet. Both the guards had run out of the door to the unit and locked it behind them. Smackhead was now on his way back to his cell with the long vacuum cleaner cord in his hand. And the moment that he gave the all-clear, fourteen prisoners left their cells. Four went to the TV corner—the standard lamp with a wide blue shade gave off a strange light when the metal foot hit the TV screen and the round table where matchsticks worth two-thousand kronor were traded between various poker and casino players every day broke into pieces when it hit the concrete wall. Three of them forced open the door to the wardens’ office and tipped over the desk and shelves and the coffee machine and pulled out the telephone lines and all other cords, three others went to the kitchen to pull out and empty all the drawers on the floor and wrench off the oven door and the doors to all the closets and hurl all the plates and glasses and coffee cups against the wall, and four men got hold of the billiard table, lifted it and carried it on their shoulders over to the guards’ room and heaved it through the empty glass window that had been shattered by a scratched cross and boiling water.

  ———

  Sonny Steen sat at the table that was attached to the wall and looked out across the prison yard. His cell was number 10 and was at the other end of the corridor, a good distance from the warden’s office, but he heard them kicking off out there and knew that he had one and a half hours from now. He felt stressed. He’d built around ten before but had always had plenty of time, now his bony hands were shaking, he wasn’t used to trying to lengthen every minute that he normally dreamed away. He tried to think about the other machines, calm himself with the knowledge that they’d all worked, like the one that Jochum Lang had ordered in Hall prison, or the one he’d made years before, which was still one of the great mysteries of the Swedish prison service: Popescu’s escape from the bunker at Kumla prison. He’d been doing time himself in Block H, just under the bunker, and had hoisted the machine up through the window, bit by bit.

  The two cords that were half a meter long and joined together in a single plug lay ready on the table—he now cut another two pieces from the vacuum cleaner cord, a couple of meters each, stripped the plastic off them, and wound the shiny naked copper wires round and round the empty bottles.

  He put them down on the table, looked at them.

  This was how he had fooled the security system that existed in every prison and remand jail, the automatic fuse. No one could kill themselves with electricity, if the resistance was too great, the automatic fuse cut off the power.

  Copper wires from a vacuum cleaner cord wrapped around two bottles.

  He had just built his own resistors.

  The lights would continue to shine as normal when Jensen turned on the cutting torch.

  ———

  Once the fourteen inmates in D1 Left had destroyed the wardens’ office, the TV corner, and kitchen, they split into groups of three or four and went into one cell at a time brandishing chair legs, billiard cues, and frying pans and smashed first the lamps, wardrobes, beds, tables, and then the porcelain sinks until everything was in pieces all over the floor. Leon checked the time on his cell phone: thirty minutes. He had said one and a half hours, sixty minutes left. When the final sink, his own, was broken and lay in pieces between the splinters of the wardrobe and the bed’s disemboweled mattress, he walked toward the kitchen and cleaning closet and the bucket that had been left behind the cleaning cart and a couple of mops fourteen days ago: a brown brew of sliced bread, apples, cinnamon buns, and sugar cubes in water. He put the bucket down in the middle of the corridor and went to collect the fourteen plastic mugs that were still intact and filled them with 12 percent mash, which always guaranteed rage and aggression in connection with any prison disturbance—they would continue to wreak havoc until he no longer needed them.

  ———

  He had recognized the smell, strong mash, and had been on his way out to get his share, but turned around again when he saw Leon Jensen. He had an hour before the people waiting outside the locked door to the unit would have backup and would force the door open. The double cord and plug and the two resistors were ready. Now he wound them together, the ends of the copper wires from the two cords and those that were wrapped around the two bottles, and with his few remaining teeth, he bit off several pieces of electrical tape to hold them together even more securely.
/>
  He was ready with half the cutting torch.

  To make the second half, he now took the carbon rods out of their protective condom, emptied the two felt-tip pens of their contents so that they were simply two hollow plastic containers, divided what was left of the vacuum cleaner cord into two equally long pieces, and bent down to put it all together.

  ———

  The broken tables, chairs, cupboards, sinks, plates and glasses and a smashed TV set, trashed billiard table, a fridge and a freezer in pieces, and a tipped-up stove. They sat in the middle of it all, fourteen prisoners on the corridor floor, dipping their plastic mugs into the big metal bucket and filling them, drinking it up, spitting out the apple cores, and filling them again. Two of them—both junkies who weren’t used to alcohol—threw up several times and were punched hard don’t fucking waste our mash by those who guarded every single drop. Leon stood at a distance, keeping an eye on the evil-smelling liquid and the door to Cell 10, where Smackhead was doing what he was supposed to do. Soon, when the bucket was empty, they would all get up on his command and, full of alcohol, would together drag all the debris and push it against the door to the unit, which was locked from the outside, locking it from the inside with a barricade of broken furniture, a floor mop, and two billiard cues rammed between the doorframe and door handle.

  ———

  Half done. The other half—he peeled the plastic off either end of the two remaining lengths of the cord, threaded each through an empty felt-tip pen, and used electrical tape to make two handles. His fingers got black as always when he taped the carbon rods to one end of each cord.

  ———

  Drunk on moonshine and power and the fact that fucking something had happened that broke the silence and tedium, the fourteen inmates ripped to pieces the last remaining curtains, pulled off the wallpaper strip by strip, tore up the gray-and-yellow linoleum that covered the hard concrete floor. While they did this, Leon went over to the barricaded door, listened to the first members of the Aspsås task force arrive—he guessed about twenty of them with helmets, shields, batons—and heard them immediately start to take off the door’s two hinges. And when he moved over to the kitchen window that looked out across the prison yard, there they were: four special police force vans drove in through the main gate and across the asphalt toward Block D and parked immediately outside the entrance. Eight fully equipped policemen jumped out of each van, armed with Tasers and Sig Sauers. They ran into the building and up the stairs to the door where the prison’s own task force made way, ten minutes, no more, then they’d be in.