When Vincent had seen the bomb for the first time three days ago, he’d challenged the man who’d taught him to walk. He knew he was probably the one who’d started this.
‘It doesn’t matter any more, Felix. No one died.’
He’d started this. Maybe he was the only one who could finish it.
‘Let’s forget it. Never talk about it again. And you two … stop arguing.’
He looked at Felix who was standing in the doorway, at Leo righting the overturned chair, at Jasper who, losing patience with the missing buttons, had taken off his shirt.
‘Vincent’s right.’
Leo bumped into the table, bottles colliding with glasses which collided with the police scanner, and pointed at the TV, where scenes of chaos from Central Station were replaced by scenes from a small town south of Stockholm – police tape and curious onlookers in front of two bullet-riddled banks whose vault doors stood open.
‘It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that we’re here together. And that they’re out there still with no idea who we are or what we’re going to do next.’
A black horse. With a thick and streaming mane. And when it rises on its hind legs it watches him. Vranac. A label on a wine bottle.
That’s what other people see. But this horse is free and can’t be tamed. He can see it. And all the while, other people think they’re just drinking affordable red wine that tastes like plums and earth.
Ivan was sitting on a bench next to his kitchen table. He’d been doing this most of the day; sometimes it happened like that, cold outside and too much time on his hands. A firm grip on the cork as it came out, poured half into the pan over a couple of tablespoons of sugar that would melt slowly, then into a big coffee mug that was almost clean. A typical day. But not really. After the first ten Keno tickets and the first bottle and the first cigarette, he’d called his eldest son. It was only the second time he’d called him in several years and without his address book he wasn’t sure he had the right number. It was. But not the right voice. Irritable and short and I don’t have time. Then an extended news bulletin on the radio about a bomb in a storage locker in Stockholm that had exploded while they were trying to disarm it. A bomb in the middle of the city. He’d been living in Sweden for three decades; bombs were something that happened in other places, places he’d left behind. And then, twenty more Keno tickets, and maybe half a bottle more, quite a bit of tobacco, and Radio Stockholm on talking about a bank robbery, about two bank robberies, right here, in Ösmo, just five hundred metres from his window.
A typical day. But not really.
A black horse rearing up. He remembered a white horse that he’d been given by eight-year-old Leo on his pappa’s thirty-fifth birthday. A white porcelain horse that lay down, resting. His son had seen the label on this bottle so many times, he’d thought it was the horses that Ivan liked.
More sips. Earth and plums. And warmth from his throat to his chest.
The window had been open, but he hadn’t heard any shooting, he knew what it sounded like – the sound was easy to distinguish from a firecracker, a gunshot petered out so much faster. He should have heard it if someone was shooting.
Above the narrow radiator in the bathroom hung four socks that he’d washed by hand. The wine had neutralised the pain in his knee and helped now against the dampness of his socks as he slid his feet into his worn-out shoes.
Two jackets on the hat rack. He wavered between the light grey and the dark grey one. Light grey.
Hands jammed into his jacket pockets, the fabric stretched across his back, he went out and down the stairs and through the gate. The envelope filled with cash still made it difficult to button the shirt breast pocket, though it had become thinner. Pocket money. Forty-three thousand that was now twenty-nine and a half thousand. Rolling, Rizla, Vranac and a lot of Keno.
Down a sleepy street past villas and townhouses, down the hill and round the bus shelter outside the library, and there he met the first police car. Then the cordoned-off square, where cops in uniforms and ridiculous hats were walking around, talking to anyone who would talk to them under the Christmas lights shaped like snowflakes and Santas and Christmas trees. Fucking Christmas. Gluttony. People fattening themselves up – dead pigs fed to living pigs. Manufactured joy, everyone laughing until their children started to scream. But for once those Christmas lights would be put to good use, illuminating the scene of a crime. The largest Santa shone the brightest, its light landing on all those self-important faces; they had a story to tell that was unique and for a moment it made them unique.
Ivan stretched his head above the crowd. He saw them more clearly now, the fronts of the banks, and people moving around inside.
The busybody.
There he was. He was one of them. Ivan was sure.
That busybody who’d waved his fucking badge in his face, trying to insinuate that Ivan Dûvnjac was a fucking little rat who sneaked into other people’s homes.
He pushed his way through the curious onlookers and watched as the little busybody walked around the bank premises looking at fallen security cameras and overturned chairs and upside-down cash boxes. Next to him, on her knees, a woman dressed in a solid white plastic jumpsuit with plastic gloves was picking up cartridge cases. Ivan waited there until the busybody turned and looked at the people looking at him.
You should recognise me. You sought me out, provoked me. And now you look at me like I don’t exist. Because you didn’t come round looking for me to ask about fucking burglaries.
Then the busybody moved behind the counter and into what Ivan guessed was the vault. And he saw what the cop had been standing in front of, looking at without understanding it.
Eight bullet holes in a security window.
And together they formed a … face. With two eyes and a nose and a mouth with a crooked smile.
A fucking sneer. At that busybody and his colleagues.
Ivan stood there in the late afternoon darkness outside the bank and looked at a face among the shards of glass and bullet casings, and he tried not to listen to the people around him, talking and talking about what they’d seen, which had already started to change and expand. And he thought about the clusters. Events that didn’t seem like they belonged together, but they did, just like the number sequences on a Keno ticket. He thought about that busybody and the envelope in his breast pocket and two banks robbed just five hundred metres from his home and a smile that was a sneer, smiling at the people who were in pursuit, but also at the people standing there looking on right now, at him.
He broke away from the crowd and with every step the feeling of being watched grew stronger, two hollow eyes that never blinked lingering on his back.
then
part two
46
THEY’RE STILL STANDING in the confines of the lift, motionless, in the kind of light that hurts your eyes. They’re still looking at each other in the narrow gap at the very top of the mirror, where the layers of spray paint are a little thinner. And once in a while, but just for a moment so Pappa won’t notice, Leo glances at the Mora knife in his father’s hand, still visible even though Pappa is gripping the wooden handle so hard that his knuckles have turned white.
‘I’ll be damned. You actually did it.’
Pappa’s voice is trembling from within. And Pappa swallows it, just as Leo usually does.
‘I could have lost you.’
‘Pappa, everything’s going to be fine. I thought everything through. They followed me here. And you saw it all. Saw me hit them on the nose, like this, in the middle.’
‘Open the door.’
‘Don’t you want to see? Like this, in the middle—’
‘Are you ever going to open the damn lift door?’
Pappa’s voice almost sounds normal. He isn’t trembling quite so much inside.
Leo opens the lift door, then the door to the apartment.
He knows that it’s the same four-bedroom flat on the seventh floor in the middle of S
kogås – the one he left not long ago. He knows that, of course. And yet, it’s as if the rooms are smaller.
Cramped. Tight.
It feels as if he has to crouch down not to hit his head on the ceiling when Pappa tells him to take off his jacket and sweater. He’s cold enough to get goose bumps from his stomach to his neck as Pappa inspects the rip in the sleeve of his jacket and then the hole in the shoulder. Then the scratch on Leo’s shoulder just where the clavicle ends, which isn’t bleeding any more. Pappa runs his fingers over its dry, uneven surface.
‘It doesn’t hurt at all, Pappa, it barely even touched …’
Pappa has already gone into the kitchen. He turns on the stove, heats up his wine and sugar. He sits down at the kitchen table, pours himself half a glass.
Leo watches his back; he’d like to sit down beside him, show him the scratch again, the blood that’s turned brown and which he can’t feel. He walks down the hallway that used to feel so much longer, stops at the open door – Vincent, who has placed all his soldiers on the floor in one big group, crawls under his bed and retrieves a new tennis ball from among the clumps of dust, then turns to Leo with a smile.
‘Look, Leo, it’s a bomb. Everybody’ll fall over at the same time.’
Then Vincent drops the ball on his soldiers again and again, fetching it after each drop, until all of the soldiers are lying down, together.
‘We’re going to take it down, Leo,’ Felix whispers right behind him. ‘The punchbag. We’re going to go in and shut the door.’
Felix moves the three-legged stool to the middle of the workroom, climbs up, stretching towards the hook in the ceiling, though he can’t reach it.
‘There should be a lamp there. The one Pappa took down. If it was still there, then Kekkonen would never have stabbed you with Pappa’s knife … and you would never have almost died.’
‘Nothing happened. Felix? I beat them. Both of them.’
‘It will never be OK. Never! You hear me?’
Felix tries again, in the middle of the stool, on tiptoe, arms shaking. His hand stretches just a little higher and his fingers touch the hook, but he can’t get the punchbag off. He sits down on the stool, biting his lip, like he does when he’s crying and doesn’t want anyone to see.
‘Are you sad?’
He’s seven years old. If you’re only seven years old you can’t take down a damn mattress from a hook on the ceiling.
‘Nuuh.’
A severed, half no.
‘I hear you.’
‘It’s not me. It’s the stupid bag. And that stupid ceiling hook.’
Felix gets up and punches it, punches it again and again, until he tires himself out. And then he watches as Leo reaches up, pushes the punchbag up towards the ceiling, until the loop slides off the hook and the mattress falls to the floor. Then Felix hands him the lamp, and Leo puts it in place on his first try.
They leave the room, already the smallest one in the apartment, but now it feels even smaller, too small to enter ever again.
Vincent’s room is larger. They each sit down on one corner of a rug that depicts a city, watch as their little brother stands up all the soldiers, then releases a tennis ball from each hand, two bombs at the same time.
They have been sitting there for quite a while when they hear sounds they know well coming through the walls – tooot-toot-toot-toot-toot – then again – tooot-toot-toot-toot-toot – then again – tooot-toot-toot-toot-toot.
‘Come on!’
Vincent leaves his soldiers standing, lined up, unbombed, runs to the window and climbs up on the box full of Lego.
‘Leo! Felix! Come here!’
They stand on either side of their younger brother, looking out of the window. The light-blue ice cream van that’s honking so loudly stops outside building two – the building Jasper lives in, whose father throws condoms off the balcony that land in a tree on their way down and hang there like white leaves – then outside building four – where Marie lives, who Leo almost fooled around with once – and then at house number six – where the Turkish family lives, Faruk and Emre and Bekir – and then honks again as it drives towards their front door, where it will stand as long as customers keep arriving.
‘Boys!’
That stupid honking. That was why they hadn’t heard his heavy footsteps in the hall.
‘My boys!’
It’s hard to know whether Pappa is angry or not. The voice doesn’t sound it. But he has those eyes.
‘Ice cream! Damn it! My boys are going to have some ice cream. Get your jackets!’
Vincent runs again, from the window to the hallway to the front door. Felix moves more slowly, but follows him. Leo remains where he is, the soldiers at his feet and both tennis balls in his hands. He lets go and they fall over, all of them.
Then he goes to help Vincent put on shoes that were once his and the snowsuit that Felix loved so much, zipping it all the way up and then putting on the hat that had only ever belonged to Vincent – while Pappa empties the last of his bottle of wine into two squash bottles with pictures of blackcurrants on their labels.
It was almost winter as he was riding the lift with Pappa less than an hour ago. Now, when they open the door, it’s spring – the birds, the trees, the sun. And there is the ice cream van, waiting in exactly the spot where the Mora knife was dropped.
‘Boys, have whatever you want!’
Pappa has a 100-kronor bill in his hand. He looks different. He’s been drinking his black wine, but that’s not it. He’s trembling again. Even though he’s smiling. Even though he’s drinking from one of the blackcurrant squash bottles. Pappa is trembling. Inside.
‘That one.’
They choose.
‘Maybe … that one.’
Actually, Vincent chooses.
‘No. That one.’
The green ones that taste like pears, a whole box of them.
‘Now, boys, let’s go for a walk. We’re going to have some ice cream and go for a walk!’
Pappa is tall, even compared to the other fathers. And when he puts Vincent on his shoulders, he’s quite a way from the ground. Leo walks next to him, Felix a few steps behind. They each have their own green ice lolly in their hands, and Pappa drinks from the second blackcurrant bottle. They walk across a large car park, towards a field and a football pitch with new goalposts and new nets, then on to a wood near the shore of the bay, where you can hear the cracking sound of ice breaking up.
47
THEY’RE ON A peninsula, a solid area of land sticking out into the water, making the coastline less even. Huge boulders lying on top of each other, a jigsaw with edges that don’t fit together properly. There are only two trees on the entire peninsula, pines, not very tall, with branches that are darker at the bottom from the moisture trapped there as the snow rapidly melts.
Drevviken Lake is almost three hundred metres across. Next summer Leo will swim all the way from one side to the other. He tried last year. He swam as far as the middle one evening when the surface of the water was smooth. And he would have made it. He’s sure of it. But he turned round because Felix and Vincent were screaming from the top of a stone slab so loudly it echoed off the bluffs, telling him to hurry back because he’d just eaten and he’d sink like a stone if he kept swimming. He wonders sometimes if that’s really what would happen; it’s deep out there.
It only takes half an hour by boat to get from here to the beaches of Sköndal, where his grandparents live. Maybe when he’s bigger he could swim all the way to their house some time, if he sticks close to land where the waves are smaller and he doesn’t eat beforehand, and if he has some dry clothes tied onto his back in a plastic bag.
Pappa is sitting under one of the pine trees swallowing loudly. When Pappa makes a noise, at least you know where he is and what he’s up to. It’s when he doesn’t make any noise, that’s when you feel your whole body preparing.
The second blackcurrant bottle is almost empty now, a few drops more and
then all gone, and Pappa puts it down on the ground. It rolls down the embankment towards the ice and the thin strip of meltwater that has appeared along the shore.
‘Pick up your lolly sticks.’
Leo searches the ground for lolly sticks dropped into the wilted grass and brown leaves. They’ve eaten so many that his stomach still feels bloated.
‘Every single one! And then come here. Holding your sticks.’
They count to eleven, and then walk over to the two pines, and Pappa stretches out his hand.
‘Give them to me.’
They’re supposed to sit around him, like three Indians around their chief.
‘Good. Now, you each take one back.’
‘One each?’
‘One stick for each of you.’
They grab them and sit down as before, holding three lolly sticks, waiting.
‘Now you’re going to break them.’
They all hear what Pappa said, but they don’t understand him.
‘In the middle. Break them.’
Break it. Take it apart. A lolly stick?
‘Leo?’
Pappa’s voice is impatient, annoyed – the tone that means anything can happen.
Breathe in, breathe out.
The lolly stick lies like a bridge between Leo’s hands, and he pushes on it, breaking it into pieces. So easy.
Felix then does the same thing as Leo – the two ends, one in each hand. It hurts as the stick presses against the skin and bones. Again. Again.
‘Felix?’
Felix presses again, doesn’t pay attention to the pain as the edges dig in deep. And it breaks. Soft ribs protrude like antennae from each fractured edge.
‘Vincent?’
A three-year-old body with three-year-old legs on his way to the water, the wind in his thin hair, he gets down on his knees and picks up something from the shore, then comes back with a stone that dwarfs his hands. He puts the lolly stick on the uneven surface of the bank. Three-year-old arms high above his head, he brings the stone down hard on the stick. He repeats this several times.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 28
