Until Thy Wrath Be Past

by Asa Larsson

  The fury inside him is like a red-hot poker. He stands up, has to struggle to stay on his feet. He goes looking for Tore, who is messing about with his Zündapp moped, fitting a bigger jet to the carburettor.

  “Come on, there’s a job we need to do,” he says.

  Herr Fernström’s black Volkswagen is parked in its usual place, a hundred metres from the school.

  Hjalmar has brought a crowbar with him. He starts with the rear and front lights. Soon the glass is lying like heaps of diamonds on the tarmac. But that’s not enough: he still has so much anger pulsating inside him that needs to come out, out. He smashes the windscreen, the side windows, the back window. There is a loud bang as the panes splinter, the glass shoots out in all directions, and Tore takes a couple of paces backwards. Some children walk past.

  “If you squeal on us, it’ll be your skulls next time,” Tore says, and they run off like startled mice.

  Tore places one foot on the frame of a shattered side window and vaults up onto the roof, bounces up and down several times until it is completely dented and ruined, then jumps down onto the road via the bonnet.

  It happens very quickly, all done within three minutes, and then it’s time to run.

  “Come on,” Tore shouts, already on his moped, having driven some way off.

  Hjalmar’s arms ache, and he feels sweaty. He’s calm now. He’ll never cry again.

  Opening the car door, he searches through the briefcase on the front passenger seat. Tore is shouting away, worried in case some adult should turn up at the scene. There is no wallet, just three maths textbooks – Tekno’s Giant Arithmetic Book, Practical Arithmetic, Geometry Manual – and a paperback entitled Turning Points in Physics – A Series of Lectures Given at Oxford University. Hjalmar tucks them all inside his jacket – apart from the Giant Arithmetic Book, which is simply too big: he has to carry that under his arm.

  I leave them to it. Soar up with the thermals. Up, up.

  I shall start things moving with regard to Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula.

  Martinsson is sitting in her office after the morning’s proceedings. They comprised cases of dangerous driving, G.B.H. and fraud. The documentation needs putting in order, and decisions must be made. She knows that if she knuckles down, it will take half an hour, no more. But she doesn’t feel like it; she is finding it hard to concentrate.

  The snowy weather has passed over. Quickly. As it tends to do in the mountains. Just when it felt as if it would never cease. When the wind was raging and howling, and the sticky April snow was forcing its way inside people’s upturned collars, wet and icy. Suddenly, everything died down. The clouds blew away. The sky became light blue and cloudless.

  Martinsson checks her mobile. Hopes her man will ring or text her. Outside the sun is shining down on the facades and roofs of buildings, onto all the newly fallen snow.

  Two crows are sitting in the tree outside her window. They are calling to her, enticing her out. Although she has no awareness of that.

  People don’t think about birds. Birds inspire them with big, ambitious thoughts, but people never ask themselves why this is the case. Never wonder how it is that twenty little birds in a birch tree at winter’s end, chirping and warbling, can open up people’s hearts and let happiness come flowing in. The barking of a dog doesn’t awaken such feelings.

  Then Martinsson looks up into the sky and sees a skein of migrating birds: all those massive emotions take possession of her. Just as when a hundred crows gather to form a croaking choir on a summer’s evening. Or an owl cries dolefully, or a great northern diver appears on a summer’s night. Or a swallow arrives with a clatter to feed its squeaking fledglings in their nest under the eaves.

  Nor do people ask themselves why it is that their interest in birds increases the older they get, the closer they come to death.

  Ah well, people don’t know very much until they die.

  The crows are cawing loudly, and Martinsson feels that she really must go out for a walk and make the most of the lovely weather. It occurs to her that it is a long time since she visited her grandmother’s grave. Good. She stands up.

  A flock of ravens lands in the parking area at the front of Hjalmar’s house. Their beaks and feathers glisten in the sun.

  My God, how big they are, Hjalmar thinks as he watches them through his window.

  He has the feeling that they are staring straight at him. When he opens the front door, they shuffle to one side, but none of them flies away. They caw and croak quietly. He is not sure if he should think this is creepy or captivating. They stare at him.

  I’ll pay a visit to Wilma’s grave, he thinks. Nobody could possibly think there was anything odd about that. I live in the village, after all.

  Snow covers Kiruna cemetery. High drifts between the cleared graves and paths. It is almost like walking through a maze. Martinsson looks around. It takes her some time to get her bearings. The snow makes everything look different. Hardly anybody has had the time to clear the graves since this morning’s storm. They lie hidden beneath the snow. The sun is glistening on all the whiteness. The beech trees form imposing portals with their hanging branches, heavy with wet snow.

  Martinsson usually reads the inscriptions on all the gravestones as she passes by them. She loves all the old-fashioned titles: small-holder, certificated forester, parish treasurer. And all the old names: Gideon, Eufemia, Lorentz.

  The grave of her grandparents is hidden under the snow. It was buried even before the latest storm. Her conscience pricks as she goes to fetch a spade.

  She starts digging. The newly fallen snow is light and easy to shift, but the snow underneath is wet, icy and as heavy as lead. The sun hurts her eyes but warms her back. It occurs to her that she never gets the feeling that her farmor is present when she comes here. No, she meets her farmor in other places. Without warning in the forest, or sometimes in her house. When she goes to the grave it’s more of an act of will, an attempt to make her thoughts and feelings home in on her farmor.

  But I know you’d want me to keep things neat and tidy here, she thinks to her grandmother, and vows to become a better grave-keeper.

  Now memories of her farmor start to surface. Martinsson is fifteen years old and riding her moped the 13 kilometres from Kiruna to Kurravaara, chugging up to the house on her Puch Dakota with her satchel over her shoulder. It’s almost the end of term, and in the autumn she’ll be starting grammar school. It’s 6.00 in the evening. Farmor is in the cowshed. Martinsson throws her jacket over the big cast-iron cauldron built into the wall. There is a grate underneath it. Farmor uses it to heat up water for the cows in winter. She sometimes uses the warm water to soften up dried birch sprigs so that the cows have birch leaves to eat together with soaked oats: Martinsson often helps her farmor tear the sodden leaves from the twigs. Farmor’s hands are always rough and covered in wounds. When Martinsson was a little girl she used to bathe in the cowshed cauldron every other Saturday. Short wooden planks were placed at the bottom so that she didn’t burn herself on the hot iron.

  All those noises, Martinsson thinks as she stands by the grave. All those calming noises that I shall never hear again – cows chewing, milk spurting onto the sides of the pail as Farmor does the milking, chains rattling as the cows stretch to reach more hay, the buzzing of flies and the chattering of barn swallows. Farmor giving me strict instructions to go and change – you can’t mess around in the cowshed wearing your elegant school uniform. Me saying: “Who cares?” and turning my attention to brushing down Daisy.

  Farmor never argued. Her strictness was only in her voice. My life with her was one of freedom.

  Then she died alone. While I was in Uppsala, studying for my exams. But I’m not ready to think about that yet. There are so many things for which I can never forgive myself. And that is the worst one.

  Martinsson is sweating, digging into the heavy snow with the spade, when a shadow falls over her. Someone is standing behind her. She turns round.<
br />
  It’s Hjalmar.

  He looks like a man on the run. A man who has been sleeping in his clothes in stairwells, a man who has been searching through rubbish bins and wastepaper baskets for bottles and tins with a deposit he can collect.

  Martinsson is frightened at first. But then her heart becomes heavy and she feels sorry for him. He looks really awful. He’s going rapidly downhill.

  She says nothing.

  Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He hadn’t expected to see that prosecutor here. He passed through the new part of the cemetery on his way to Wilma’s grave. All the new graves were free of snow, neat and tidy. The relatives must have been here the moment the sun came out. They had certainly spent their lunch breaks making sure everything looked presentable. Much loved and missed, it said on nearly all the stones. Hjalmar wondered vaguely what it would say on his own stone. Whether Tore’s wife Laura would look after the grave. She might well do, simply to stop people talking in the village. He paused for a few moments in front of a child’s grave. Calculated quickly on the basis of the inscribed dates how old Samuel had been when he died. Two years, three months and five days. There was an image of the boy on the top left-hand corner of the stone. Hjalmar had never seen anything like that before. Not that he visited the cemetery all that often. There was a wreath with a teddy bear in it, flowers and a lantern.

  “Poor little lad,” he said, feeling a tug at his heart-strings. “Poor little lad.”

  Then he couldn’t bring himself to stop at Wilma’s grave. Just walked past the temporary plastic nameplate on an aluminium peg: “Persson Wilma”. Gifts, flowers, a few flickering candles. He walked back through the old part of the cemetery wondering why the hell he had come, and then caught sight of the prosecutor.

  He recognized her by her overcoat and long, dark hair. He didn’t know why he decided to walk towards her. He stopped a few metres short. She was frightened when she turned round. He could tell.

  He wants to tell her she has nothing to be afraid of, but can’t produce a sound. Just stands there like an idiot. But that is what he’s been all his life. An idiot people are afraid of.

  She says nothing. The fear disappears from her eyes and is replaced by something else. Something he finds it difficult to cope with. He’s not used to it. He’s not used to people being quiet. He’s usually the one who says nothing and lets the others do the talking, lets the others decide what to do.

  “They can scatter my ashes to the winds,” he says eventually.

  She nods.

  “Have you come to visit the people you killed?” he asks after another pause.

  He knows about that, of course. He’s read about her in the evening papers. And people talk.

  “No,” she says. “I’ve come to visit my grandmother. And my grandfather.”

  She nods towards the grave she is clearing.

  Then it dawns on her what his question sounded like. There was an “also” there that he didn’t actually say. But it was there. Have you also come to visit the people you killed?

  She turns her head and points. Adds in a calm voice: “The ones I killed are over there. And there. But Thomas Söderberg isn’t buried here.”

  “You were acquitted,” he says.

  “Yes,” she says. “They said it was self-defence.”

  “How did you feel?”

  He stresses the “you”. Looks her in the eye. Then looks down at the snow as if he were standing in front of the altar at church, showing due deference.

  What does he want? Martinsson wonders.

  “I don’t know,” she says hesitantly. “At first I didn’t feel anything much. I didn’t remember much either. But then things got worse. I couldn’t work. I tried to get a grip, but in the end I made a mistake that cost my firm lots of money and prestige – they had a good insurance policy, but still . . . Then I went on sick leave. I hung around the flat. Didn’t want to go out. Slept badly. Ate badly. The flat was in a terrible mess.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  They fall silent as someone else approaches. She nods as she walks past. Martinsson nods back. Hjalmar doesn’t seem to have noticed.

  It occurs to Martinsson that he might be going to confess. What the hell should she do if that happens? Ask him to accompany her to the police station, of course. But what if he refuses? What if he confesses and then regrets having done so and kills her instead?

  She looks him in the eye for a while. And she recalls one of Meijer & Ditzinger’s clients, a prostitute who owned a number of flats. She made no attempt to hide her profession, having commissioned the law firm to sort out a tax problem. Måns Wenngren had been drunk on one occasion when they had gone out for an afternoon drink, and quite irresponsibly had started asking her if she was ever afraid of her clients. He had been flirtatious, flattering, fascinated. Martinsson had been embarrassed, had looked down at the table. The woman had remained friendly but never wavered in her integrity – it was obvious that she was used to this kind of curiosity. She said no, she wasn’t afraid. She always looked new clients in the eye long and hard. “That way you know,” she had said, “if you need to be frightened or not. Everything you need to know about a person can be seen in his eyes.”

  Martinsson looks Hjalmar in the eye long and hard. No, she doesn’t need to be afraid of him.

  “You ended up in a psychiatric ward,” he says.

  “Yes, in the end I did. I went out of my mind. It was when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa shot himself and his boy. I couldn’t cope with another death. It sort of opened all the doors I was trying to keep closed.”

  Hjalmar finds it almost impossible to breathe. That’s exactly what it’s like, he wants to say. First Wilma and Simon. That had been bad enough, although he managed to cope. But then there was Hjörleifur Arnarson . . .

  “Did you sink all the way down?” he says. “Did you hit rock bottom?”

  “I suppose I did, yes. Although I don’t remember much of the worst part. I was so poorly.”

  They gave me electric-shock treatment, she thinks. And they kept me under close supervision. I don’t want to talk about this.

  They stand there, Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula. For him it is so difficult to ask questions. For her it is so difficult to answer. They battle their way forward through the conversation like two hikers in a blizzard. Heads bowed, struggling with the wind.

  “I don’t remember,” she says. “I sometimes think that if you recall a situation in which you were really depressed, you feel all the sorrow flooding back when you think about it. And if you recall a situation in which you were really happy, the happiness comes back to you. But if your memory of a situation fills you with anxiety, the feelings you had don’t come back, no matter what. It’s as if your brain simply goes on strike. It’s not going to go back there. You can only remember what it was like. You can’t experience how it felt.”

  Depressed? Hjalmar thinks. Sorrow? Happiness?

  Neither of them speaks.

  “What about you?” Rebecka says eventually. “Whom have you come to visit?”

  “I thought I’d come and say hello to her.”

  She realizes that it’s Wilma he’s talking about.

  “Did you know her?” she says.

  Yes, his mouth says, although no sound is produced. But he nods.

  “What was she like?”

  “She was O.K.,” he says, and adds with a wry smile: “She wasn’t very good at maths.”

  Wilma is sitting at Anni’s kitchen table with her maths textbook open in front of her, tearing her hair in desperation. She has to read up on maths and Swedish in order to be able to apply to grammar school. Anni is at the sink washing up, watching Hjalmar Krekula through the window as he clears away the snow from the parking area in front of the house with his tractor. Anni is his aunt, after all.

  The air turns blue as Wilma curses and swears over her maths book. God’s angels come out in goose pimples when they hear her.

  “Hell, damnation, shit, fuck, cun
t,” she says, snarling.

  “Hey, calm down now,” Anni says disapprovingly.

  “But I don’t want to,” Wilma says. “I’m thick, I can’t understand a thing. Bloody algebra shit-talk. ‘When we multiply a conjugate pair, the radical vanishes and we are left with a rational number.’ I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to ring Simon, and we can go out on the snow scooter.”

  “Do that.”

  “Aaaargh! But I really have to learn this stuff!”

  “Don’t ring him, then.”

  Anni sees that Hjalmar has almost finished. She puts the coffee pan on the stove. Five minutes later he sticks his head round the door and announces that it is all done. Anni will not let him go. She tells him she has only just put the coffee on. She and Wilma will not be able to drink it all themselves. And she has thawed out some buns as well.

  He allows himself to be persuaded and sits down at the kitchen table. Keeps his jacket on, only unzipping it halfway as a sign that he does not intend to stay long.

  He says nothing. He hardly ever does; people are used to it. Anni and Wilma take care of the talking, know better than to try to include him by asking lots of questions.

  “I’m going to ring Simon,” Wilma says in the end, and goes out into the hall where the telephone stands on a little teak table with a stool beside it and a mirror behind.

  Anni gets up to fetch a 50-krona note from an old cocoa tin standing on the edge of the cooker hood. It is part of the ritual: she will try to persuade Hjalmar to accept the money for clearing the snow. He always refuses, but in the end he usually takes a bag of buns, or some beef stew in a plastic jar. Or something of the sort. While Anni fumbles around in the cocoa tin, Hjalmar pulls over Wilma’s maths book. He glances quickly through the text, then in about a minute flat he solves nine algebraic equations, one after the other.