“What is it?” Maj asked. Her voice was shriller than she realized.
The cat bared its teeth. Maj saw its canines, its fierce predator stare. She could hear the pleading in her own voice. She tried to calm down and speak quietly.
“You’re not in danger, kitties. You don’t have to be frightened. I’m here to watch over you.”
She tried to turn on the light in the hallway and remembered the bulb was out. Where was her flashlight? It was no longer in her junk drawer. She found a paraffin candle and some matches. This is the way people lived in the olden days, she thought. People survived without electricity. They were fine.
Her hand gripped the candle as she started to walk downstairs. The flame flickered and she noticed her own shadow grow. She was in stocking feet. She felt dampness on her foot and lowered her candle to see. It looked like blood.
Something is seriously wrong, she thought. Someone was there. Someone was trying to scare her on purpose. Someone wished her ill. And this person, whoever it was, was here inside her house.
She hurried back upstairs and grabbed her purse. She glanced inside, saw her keys and money. She added a few cans of cat food. She put on her coat and her heavy outdoor shoes.
“Come, kitties, come with me,” she called them. To her relief, they followed her. “We’re going on a car ride.” They had to flee. She decided to leave through the upstairs front door.
Of course, the police, she thought. I have to go to the police. They can come and search the house and find the intruder. They’ll arrest him for sure!
With difficulty, she managed to raise the garage door from outside. Hasse’s Volvo was right there, waiting for her. She opened the back door and the cats jumped in. They settled intertwined on top of Hasse’s cap.
She got into the driver’s seat, pressed down the clutch, shifted into reverse, and hit the gas.
* * *
The door slammed. Anneli leapt up from her chair and stumbled into the hallway.
“Johnny?”
He was pale and traces of blood had spread beneath his nose.
She wanted to cry.
She watched him take off his sneakers and head right for the kitchen. He opened the cupboard door, took out the vodka bottle, and poured himself a drink.
“Want some?”
She nodded.
Johnny sank down by the kitchen table. He pushed aside the newspaper and took a swig. “Damn, it’s slippery outside.Sirens were going off constantly out there.”
“They announced the dangerous conditions on the radio.”
He pointed at his nose. “But I didn’t slip on the sidewalk. I fell on her goddamn outside stairs. This hurts like hell!”
“Poor thing,” she said. She took a sip of vodka. It both warmed and burned her throat. “What about . . . ?”
He gave her a wry smile. “My nose kept bleeding all the way to her door. I had to rummage around inside the house to find something to stop it.”
“Did she notice you inside?”
“She kept getting up and looking around, just like last night. Up and down the stairs like a yo-yo. But she never saw me.”
Anneli covered her eyes with her hands. “I hate this. I hate all of this.”
His glass slammed down on the table. Drops of vodka flew out. “Don’t think for a moment I don’t hate it too!”
“I know . . .” she whined.
“We both agreed to this. So don’t start saying it was all my idea.”
She shook her head heavily.
“It’s for her own good!” he yelled.
A short sob escaped her throat. “Yes.”
“And we need the money. We need it now! Not two years from now. Not a decade from now. Right now! With that view, we can get four to five million.”
“I know.”
“If only she hadn’t been so stubborn We had to do it. She forced us into it.”
“Yes.”
He lowered his voice but still did not look at her. “She’ll be fine, Anneli.”
She pulled a paper towel off the roll and blew her nose. “Yes,” she said again.
The doorbell rang. A sharp, demanding sound. They stared at each other. She saw fear in his eyes.
Don’t open it, he mouthed.
But she’d already gotten up and was looking out the peephole. Two people were standing outside. One man and one woman. She opened the door.
The two people pulled out their police identification.
“Are you Anneli?” the policewoman asked.
She nodded.
“May we come in?”
She stepped aside to let them past. Something had happened. Something worse than she’d imagined. She turned around, glared at Johnny.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” the policewoman said. She had short, almost stubbly blond hair. “It’s your mother, Maj Lindberg.”
A white blaze lit her skull. With a wail, she began to pound Johnny with her fists like hammers.
“You bastard! What the hell did you do to her?”
He did not defend himself. He shrank; became soft and small.
She felt the policewoman grab her shoulder. She quieted down.
“Let’s sit down for a minute, shall we?” the policeman said. “Let’s all be calm.”
Anneli pulled out a cigarette. Her hands shook as she lit it. She inhaled deeply and kept staring at Johnny. He looked at the floor. Blood had begun to drip from his nose.
“What did you just say?” asked the policewoman. “What are you talking about?”
Anneli shook her head.
The policewoman remained silent for a moment and stared at her. “Well,” she finally said, “again, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. For some reason, your mother was driving—”
“My mother never drives. Never! Not at night.”
The policewoman gave her a look that managed to be both sharp and sympathetic. “I’m afraid she was driving tonight. Do you have any idea why she would leave home on a night like this?”
Anneli took a deep ragged drag, wanted to scream.
The policewoman’s voice came from far away, as if it were a mournful chant: “She must have had some reason. She had two cats with her in the car. None of them . . . well, it’s extremely slippery outside, black ice, you know. It comes every year, but still takes us by surprise. So your mother, well . . . she lost control of the car and drove off the road by the bridge . . . Must have been an hour ago . . . and I’m sorry to inform you . . .”
PART III
HE BRUTALITY OF BEASTS
The Wahlberg Disease
BY CARL JOHAN DE GEER
Drottninggatan
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg
Those nights on Drottninggatan! The building was an island in a sea of ruins; soon they’d be erecting Celsing’s bombastic Culture House, including an artificial pond with a huge phallic sculpture made of glass, surrounded by spraying water. Though at that time, there was nothing but a huge hole left by demolition, noisy by day and gloomy by night.
Drottninggatan 37 is in the center of Stockholm, now mostly known for a shoe store called Jerns. The original building was from the eighteenth century, but it had been rebuilt many times. In 1964, I had access to rooms there on the top floor, previously an old photography studio once used by the legendary photographer Arne Wahlberg. An enormous sloped glass roof over the main room let in plenty of light. Several smaller rooms had been used as storage space and an office.
I wasn’t actually renting the rooms. I’d run across an old friend and colleague, a fashion photographer, who’d rented the place with what in those days was called a “demolition contract.” He’d just moved out, relocating his studio to a more permanent address. We were having a beer at Löwenbräu, at the time still located on Jakobsgatan, just a block from Drottninggatan.
“Take them,” he said, tossing a key ring onto the table. “The building is completely abandoned. They’ll start tearing it down pretty soon. You can hang out
there for now. The light is good. You’ll have to figure out the keys on your own.”
The building had been designated as a historical landmark by the Stockholm City Museum, which gave it some protection—at least, as far as the façade went. When I walked in, the abandoned shoe store seemed spooky. I had to go through it to get to the stairs. Shards of glass and unswept gravel covered the floor. In the evenings, the atmosphere was desolate and the crunching noise my shoes made echoed in a creepy way.
If you want to see what it was like, you can go to the library and look at page 49 in my photography book The Camera as Consolation: Part One (published in 1980). In Wahlberg’s former studio, my closest friends and I set up a ping-pong table. We met every Thursday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Håkan, Pierre, Staffan, Jackie, and me. We’d have little tournaments, and Staffan always won. When he was a teenager, he’d played for the team Engelbrektspojkarna. We should have realized that it was a bad omen: that our previous meeting place for ping-pong, the Co-op Union’s abandoned slaughterhouse and sausage factory, had burned to the ground one year before. The flames had eaten up our ping-pong table, complete with its net, paddles, and balls. We had no way of knowing that the same thing would happen again.
So I ended up spending lots of my time at Drottninggatan 37, high up on the sixth floor, working on my barely existent photography career during an extremely unhappy period in my life. I often had to stay in the building overnight. It wasn’t always easy. I realized right away that candles would be too much of a fire hazard. And flashlight batteries were expensive. Sometimes I’d have to choose between a Spartan dinner or a working flashlight at night. Earlier in the fall, things were more or less fine, since there was still running water and electricity, but as winter approached, the utilities were cut off. Soon I’d have to abandon the place.
As I said, it really wasn’t easy sleeping there. I would lie down on a lump of old clothes that smelled bad. I heard strange sounds in the supposedly empty building. I knew some homeless men lived here and they were restless at night. They had it rougher than I did; they slept right on the broken glass and trash. It was a real hell. They’d light fires in old tin cans, which made me nervous. They also snored. The most alarming sounds, however, were the determined footsteps coming up the stairs—and the knocking on my door. Then I’d grab my bag containing my ten-year-old Hasselblad 1000F. I’d gotten it cheap when Hasselblad released the 500C and all the professional photographers dumped their old 1000Fs—their shutters were loud and unreliable.
The sound is easy to imitate: cla-DUM-hiss. If that last hiss did not come, the shutter had frozen, which meant the shoot was over. I also had two magazines for 120 film, a Linhof tripod, and a Lunasix light meter. My camera bag was always packed so I could take off whenever I wanted. My only other possessions were a thermos and the clothes on my back.
The neighborhood around my building, with all its condemned and half-demolished buildings, did not invite strolls at night. I’d read that slums incited people to crime—a belief the psychologists and doctors of Sweden had held for a long time. According to them, this is how it worked: in these slum quarters, children and young people ran around without control, they’d shoplift, fight, and vandalize. A certain doctor by the name of Beijerot kept trumpeting this on television debates and in newspaper articles. Slums are vectors of criminality, he believed. The obvious cure was to tear them all down. I think he confused cause and effect; a rather common problem then, just like today.
Then a new concept came along to replace the old one: modernity. The city politicians, listening to the doctors, got caught up in the spirit of the times. Old buildings needed to be torn down because they were in the way. Highways were to be built through the city, opening it up to light and fresh air.
One night, smoke came in from under my door. I have never woken so fast in my life. I rushed down the stairs to locate the source. Broken furniture and heaps of old newspapers were burning in the stairwells of the fourth and fifth floors. I grabbed some fire buckets filled with sand (complete with small spades), part of the obligatory equipment of any office in those days. It was possible to put out small fires with them, which is what I did. I was coughing and sweating, my face and arms covered in soot, my clothes torn ragged by the time I got back up to the sixth floor. I opened all the windows I could and stood there for a long time, breathing in the city’s cool night air. I still had hot water left in my thermos, so I went to make coffee in another room. I used freeze-dried coffee, which I liked a lot back then. I also wanted to appear to be modern.
In those days, the old patriarchal society was falling apart. Changes in trade and manufacturing during the end of the fifties meant that many men (and it was mostly men who worked outside the home then) were losing their jobs. They comforted themselves with alcohol and, in their frustration, sometimes they beat their wives and kids. However, a new social structure was coming into being. Women started to demand, and get, divorces. If there were children, the women had the right to keep the apartment, so their former spouses were out on the street. Some of those became alcoholics with no other place to live but the street and they often met an early death. Perhaps it was a just punishment for treating their wives and kids so brutally.
When I was young, I loved cars. I had a Ford Prefect, one of the worst vehicles ever made, which was a somewhat larger version of the Ford Anglia, also just as bad. The Prefect was a four-door and I’d bought it one day when I’d managed to scrape together eighty kronor. It didn’t last long. It wasn’t Mr. Frost’s fault. This homeless guy had chosen to sleep in its backseat one chilly night. This car was so tall and narrow it had gotten the nickname “Hot Dog Stand.” The reason Mr. Frost (yes, that was really his name) could sleep there at all was because he was constantly exhausted. Whenever I’d go on an errand, he would be there in the backseat.
We didn’t talk much. I’d try to give him food, sandwiches, but he’d refuse them. He would just vomit up all real food. His alcoholism was so far advanced that the only calories he got were from sweet strong wine. He found it himself. I did not want to go to the State Liquor Store and get it for him. I looked young, so I had trouble buying alcohol. The cashiers mistakenly believed I was just sixteen with a fake driver’s license. I was, in fact, ten years older. Anyway. Once I was driving up the Western Bridge heading south when Mr. Frost got scared and started screaming. Smoke had begun to fill the inside of the vehicle, and I quickly opened the retractable front windshield, a feature not found on later models. (This one was from 1953.) Air streamed in but it made no difference. Cutting off the engine while still going up the bridge would be a mistake, I thought, but as soon as we crested the top, I let the car roll down to the Långholmen exit. Thanks to the fact that we still drove on the left in those days, I was able to pull off immediately and I parked the still smoking car on a piece of lawn. (Right-hand traffic was introduced three years later, even though a large majority of the Swedish population had voted against it.) When I opened the hood, I saw that a bit of rusty metal had fallen on the battery and shorted it out.
I abandoned the car where it was, and Mr. Frost and I hoofed it, somewhat unsteadily, through the city (images of destruction beneath white powdered snow) back to Drottninggatan 37. I let him in, and he disappeared immediately into the office of the former shoe store. Afterward, I stopped locking the front door. I was never sure how many individuals this saved from freezing to death on the streets; at least they could have a roof over their heads.
In the forties, Arne Wahlberg started getting migraines whenever he had to focus his camera. When I found that out, I began to call it the Wahlberg Disease. There was just one way to focus a camera in those days: you had to slowly turn the lens. On larger cameras, you’d expand or contract the bellows using a rack-and-pinion system until the image appeared in focus on the ground-glass screen.
As a photographer myself, with the same tendency to get migraines, this wasn’t surprising. Straining the eye to focus the camera could
set them off. You never get used to migraines. My siblings had them and so did my mother. Still, you got used to one thing: the nervous anticipation that, all of a sudden, it could go bang inside your brain. So I felt fine with the idea that the man who’d been here before me had suffered from the same illness. In the end, Wahlberg’s migraines forced him to give up photography. I hoped I would not be stricken by the same fate.
I slept so uneasily on Drottninggatan, I would wake to make nightly rounds. I soon became familiar with each and every corner of the building so that darkness was never a problem. The shoe store and its offices on the ground floor. The import firm on the second floor. The former lawyer’s offices on the third floor. The strange firm on the fourth floor—I never figured out what it had been. And “mine” on the sixth floor. All of it a labyrinth. Each room had its own smell.
Everywhere, except on my floor, were sleeping men. The rumor of an unlocked building spread and so the number of homeless men was growing. Bundles of men wrapped in blankets and rags. Some of them talked nervously in their sleep. Others seemed to plunge straight into unconsciousness. Mr. Frost was one of the latter. I felt I was being a good person. By leaving the front door unlocked, these individuals were saved from sleeping outdoors. One night, I even counted them: there were thirty-seven.
My own living arrangements were a bit marginal for some time. I had moved from one temporary address to another. It’s funny how memory can trip you up when it comes to years gone by. I remember 1964 to 1967 as three years of loneliness, filled with paranoia and masturbation. But if I check the facts, I was actually married during those years—in fact, I got married twice. And I remember relationships on the side as well. I remember one woman, also married, who would sneak off from her job as an office manager to meet me at number 37. Perhaps you’re wondering why I wasn’t living with my wife if I was, indeed, married. But I couldn’t live with her, even though we were friends, because she, too, was homeless. In those days she was living temporarily at the apartment of a writer on Västerlånggatan in Old Town.
Stockholm Noir Page 15
