A Darker Shade of Sweden (4 page)

She doesn't perceive it when it happens. Just sees that the surface of the water is suddenly smooth. You're kidding, Johanna thinks, and swims to the spot where Lillis' blonde head was just visible, swims around in circles, where the hell are you? She dives under to look, but it's dark and impenetrable. All she sees is water and you can't see water and she loses her sense of direction, of what is up or down, and she panics. That's when she feels it. Something moving down by her feet, slithering around her legs. Fear overwhelms her and she has to get up right now, up to the surface. She kicks and hits something below, there really is something down there, and in her head she sees all the images of the dead, of eels slithering out of eye sockets, and that thing that is tangled around her feet is still there, pulling at her, and she kicks wildly and brandishes her arms, up, up, and she has no air left, must get away from there. She doesn't breathe until she is at the shore. Doesn't think until she has stood up. The lake is glittering and black. She shakes so hard that it takes forever to get her clothes back on. Next to her are Lillis' clothes, spread out on the grass.

Time just passed, or perhaps it stopped. Finally she had to rise and walk back.

“Have you been out swimming? Where's Lillis?”

Johanna doesn't know where the lie came from. She had meant to tell them what happened, that Lillis swam out and disappeared. But then she would have to lie about the rest. About her being out there herself. About the dead in the water and her own panic, how do you tell someone something like that? About the sensation under her foot when it hit something soft and at the same time hard, and what she hadn't even dared to think through: that it was Lillis' face. Lillis, who just intended to scare her, that it had all been part of a plan, the stories about the dead and their silly hair. Lillis, who always trained to be able to swim farther underwater than anyone else in the public baths.

“She just split, I don't know. Maybe she got upset about something.”

In the morning she had gone back to that place and picked up Lillis' clothes, buried them. Cried and dug. It was too late for the truth. It was the summer when everything changed. In the fall they all disappeared in different directions, knots being untied. Marina would attend high school in town, the others started different courses. Johanna quit after a single semester, then graduated from a folk high school up north in Ångermanland. Lillis' father was a heavy drinker and there never was any serious investigation. The police had appeared once to put their questions, and Johanna had described how Lillis was dressed when she disappeared: the sea-green angora sweater (stolen from H&M). They believed she had run away from home. She probably had reasons to.

The tree growing more or less alone at the edge of a grove. Johanna believes she recognizes the place and starts digging on the lake side of the trunk. Is it possible that fabric and angora wool are still there after thirty years in the ground, or do they decay? Sneakers? She digs, and there is nothing. Is it the wrong spot? Perhaps the wrong stretch of beach, new trees grown up, she has no idea of how much a forest can change over thirty years. Lillis is standing at the edge of the woods, looking at her. Johanna doesn't dare turn, but she can feel her presence as something cold in her neck.

We had a deal. A deal about secrets and betrayal, have you forgotten that, Johanna?

She has dirt under her nails, reaching far up to her elbows.

That's why she walks down to the water and kicks off her shoes, she tells herself. When she bends down to wash off the dirt she sees herself in a brief reflex, her adult self. She has never stopped being sixteen—it's just new ages added, like layers in a cake. Then the moon disappears behind a cloud and she is gone. No, not gone, there she is: pretty far out in the water already, where it's deep. She swims, still fully dressed, towards the middle of the lake, because she must. Closes her eyes and swims on, tries to find the power within her body, but there is only the awkwardness of her wet clothes and the fat that has lined her stomach; she can feel her own weight. At the middle of the lake she stops, treads water, looks around. It was here, just here. And she dives down, as deep as she can, looks and sees nothing, fumbles around and gets a grip. Something trailingly soft, and she seems to hear it whisper and sing.
There is a moment . . . to walk with the living or with the dead . . .
Now it is all around her, entangling her in its threads until she is caught and dragged down into the whispering darkness where no light will be and no dread to wake up to, just a quiet song, is that how death really is? She lets herself sink. Let me go, she wants to scream, I don't want to die.
Do you call that life
, it whispers,
that thing you believe yourself to be living?
Now she has no air left, and she sees dots of light all around. Is it Lillis' face she can see down below? Or someone else's?

No, she sees herself, and she is young again, and will do anything to be allowed to belong. No, she wants to scream, NO, I DON'T WANT TO ANY LONGER, but she has no air and there are no sounds in the water. She kicks, grabs the hair entangling her legs, tears it loose and rises towards the surface, and there is air, cold and clear.

Deep into her lungs she pulls life and power and a sense of reality. What the hell is she doing out here in the lake? She swims as well as she can manage, breathless and exhausted, towards land. Untangles her fingers from something in her hand.

Lisette,
she thinks.
She needs me, even if she doesn't want to admit it.

“Are you out of your mind—have you been swimming fully dressed?”

Pia is removing her makeup. Rubbing her face with expensive creams. Agge is snoring in her upper bed. Johanna looks around in the small scout cottage. No sea-green sweater.

“I was thinking about Lillis,” she says, guardedly. “I thought I saw her out there.”

“You must have drunk a lot. I didn't think anyone had any contact with her since she got out of here. And come to think of it, I never understood why you hung out with her. Want some tea?”

Johanna finds her scarf and dries her hair with it, it's still dripping. They sit down, each with her mug of tea. She has taken her wet clothes off and borrowed dry ones from the others. Seaweed, she thinks, the only thing out there is seaweed or some other kind of water plant. She is grateful her head is no longer spinning.

“What do you mean, why I hung out with Lillis?”

“You were cool, you were smart,” Pia says. “You never needed to pretend or act. I was always so impressed by you. And then you let yourself be used by her.”

Johanna stares at them, one at a time. A quick sensation of being visible, as if she suddenly was more clearly delineated. Was that really how they perceived her?

She gets one of Agge's blankets and wraps it around herself.

“You know, before, when we were sitting around the fire—” she starts. “I didn't think I had anything to contribute
. . .
I mean, my life is
. . .
it's okay, but I guess no more than that.”

“Isn't that enough?”

“
Skål
,” Marina says, raising her teacup.

That's when the tears come, burning and overflowing. She rubs them away, sniveling, but they keep flowing. Suddenly she can't remember what's so wrong about her life. And she thinks that all of it was just nightly imaginings, nightmares; she knows drinking too much makes her feel unwell.

Pia puts her arm around her and the crying abates. While light is growing outside, Marina starts talking about her uncertainties: that feeling that they'll discover what a failure she is as an executive, and Pia tells them that deep down she really isn't sure of loving this new guy. Finally they fall asleep, each in her own bed.

The next morning they say good-bye, outside the cabin.

“Thanks for setting this up,” Johanna says, hugging Marina. The ghosts of the past night certainly seem childish in the morning light, the sun already high.

“What are you talking about? You were the one inviting us.”

Marina exchanges glances with the others.

“We were pretty uncertain all of us, but then we thought, what the hell, get away from hubbies and kids for a weekend, why not?”

A few strands of mist have remained since night and are dissolving on the lake. Marina holds up her cell.

“It says here for anyone to see that you created this page. Is anything wrong with you?”

Johanna grabs the phone from her hand.

She recognizes the Facebook page. “Return to Upper Lake.” At the top it clearly says that the group was created by Johanna.

She feels a taste of lake water in her mouth. A stinging sensation in her cheeks, a swaying unreality.

She hadn't even logged in to Facebook in half a year. Doesn't know why she's on it at all, but on the other hand she doesn't want to be left out. When the message arrived in her mailbox, nobody had contacted her in more than six months.

When she returns the cell phone her hand feels numb.

“We've got to do this again,” Agge says. “Same time next year?”

“Sure.”

She remains standing there for a while after the others have left. Remembers a strand of hair entangled in her hand. The lake has turned a pale blue. The air is so still that the images of the trees on the water seem as real as the forest around her.

“There really is another story about the Upper Lake,” she says, slowly, into the air. “Have you ever heard it? I think it's about those trying to live, despite all.”

Just as she steps into her car she feels a sudden chill on her neck. A wind creeping across her cheek, a quick caress. And the leaves are immobile.

Born in Malmö in 1960, Tove Alsterdal is a journalist and playwright. For many years, she lived in Umeå and Luleå in the far north of Sweden, but is now based in Stockholm. She has written for the theater and radio. She has also written opera librettos, and, with Helena Bergström, the script for the feature film
So Different (SÃ¥ olika).
She published her first crime novel,
Kvinnorna på stranden (The Women on the Beach)
in 2009, and her second, I tystnaden begravd
(Buried in Silence),
in 2012; they have established her as one of the major Swedish crime writers, a master of mood and subtle characterization.

HE LIKED HIS HAIR

R
OLF
AND
C
ILLA
B
ÖRJLIND

No other living Swedish crime writers—regardless of how many bestsellers they have written—have reached an audience as huge as have the writing team of Rolf and Cilla Börjlind, who have been immensely productive in the field, both separately and, for more than a dozen years, mainly together, though they published their first crime novel, Springfloden
(Spring Tide),
only recently, in 2012. The Börjlinds are by far Sweden's most prolific screenwriters, with close to fifty full-length movies—virtually all of them about crime, and most of them made for TV—to their credit. They have written twenty-six Martin Beck movies, based on the characters created by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; one movie based on Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander character; and five adaptations of Arne Dahl's novels. Additionally, they have created original TV crime dramas, such as
Danslärarens återkomst (Return of the Dancing Master)
in 2004, the eight-part
Graven
(The Grave)
also in 2004, and the six-part
Morden
(The Murders)
in 2009, reaching an audience of many millions, both in Sweden and abroad.

Before his enormously successful screenwriting career, Rolf Börjlind was known as Sweden's perhaps funniest and certainly most bitingly satirical humorist. And lately, as noted, he and Cilla also have turned their hands to crime novels. Their highly regarded first novel showed a hardly surprising mastery of the form, both playing with it and utilizing it to perfection; it was sold to more than twenty countries. Their second novel,
Den tredje rösten (The Third Voice)
, followed in 2013.

They had never before written a short story, so it is a great pleasure to present their first one here.

HE STILL HAD TIME TO PACE THE ROOM, THAT SIMPLE AND MEASURED
surface that was his home. A word he never used. To him it was a surface, not a space. He had put in a couch and a table, and had a wooden balsa model of the Dakota on his windowsill. There was no carpet on the floor and the narrow mirror by the kitchen door was hung too low. He hadn't put it there himself. When he wanted to see how his mouth looked he had to bend down; all he could see was dead meat. He had no relationship with his face, his eyes met the gaze of a stranger and he wondered why the nose was crooked.

He liked his hair.

It was the one thing he admitted as his. Brown, and slightly curly, it reminded him of his mother, the woman who had no hands. Her hair had been brown and curly, and her laugh—when she was finally told—was his only memory of her voice. But it made time pass.

That, and his pacing.

He was a night person, his biological clock set to night. That was when he came awake: when darkness fell, when he could escape being seen and could avoid seeing, when he could be indifferent to his surroundings, cut out, when he could walk from one neighborhood to another without knowing where he had gone.

Often, at night, he walked from one point to another and back along a different route. And always with the same purpose. It made time pass and it made him tired. And made it possible to fall asleep before light caught up with him.

That was important.

He had to fall asleep before it became light and sleep until it grew dark again. Sometimes he failed, woke out of a strange howl and stared out at the light, unable to go back to sleep.

Those times were when he missed it.

That which could lower him back into darkness. Which they had taken from him and which he had to get back.

In one way or another.

He began pacing the room, from wall to wall and back. For how long he didn't know. He had no watch; usually he felt from his body when he was done, when he could go to sleep. Tonight it took a long time. He sat down on the edge of his bed, felt his body. He ought to be tired by now, more tired than he was.

It bothered him.

He went to his window to look out. Nothing moved; all was as usual. In the corner of his eyes he was aware of the charred hands on his window ledge, two of them. They lay there every time he had to go. Not every time, it struck him, just the times he had to lower himself into darkness.

Then they lay there, as a reminder.

He opened his window, carefully, watching the hands. It was quiet outside. On some nights he could hear a blackbird not far away, a blackbird singing in the middle of the night. He never saw it but he knew what it looked like. Its beak was the same orange-yellow color his mother had had when she was told.

And they had the same black eyes.

He closed his window and went to the shelf above the mirror. The small blue-and-white box stood where he had put it four nights ago. He stuffed it in the pocket of his long, dark gray coat and left the room.

He had to.

Outside a soft rain was falling.

He liked rain, he liked something to happen while he moved between the buildings. Not pelting rain, but a monotonous, quiet drizzle. Tonight the rain was perfect. He knew the address where he was going and was in no hurry. He kept to empty streets; if he met anyone he crossed to the other side.

He never looked back.

When he came to the right part of town he stopped, not far from a green container. He stood quietly, for a long time, hidden in the darkness of a broken streetlight. He thought about a sentence he'd read (where, he couldn't remember) about a man standing on a bridge casting switched-off light across the water. Switched-off light, he liked that, as if your pocket was full of darkness and you could spread it when it became too bright.

Perhaps that was what he could do?

Switch off?

After all, he had the box in his pocket.

He turned to the container near him, having seen a movement, a woman alone pulling herself up to drop an unmarked plastic bag into the container. He watched her tired body and wondered what was in the bag. Perhaps a black wig and a tube of lip gloss? He watched her disappear in the darkness and remained standing. There were nights when he followed people walking alone, often on the opposite side of the street, followed until they disappeared into a doorway or a bar. He conceived of it as having company.

Tonight he wanted to be alone.

He twisted around.

The dogs were whistling down by the bus stop.

Sometimes he imagined that, that the dogs were whistling, late at night when shadows were his only company. The dogs nobody knew about, long, crooked, narrow bodies suddenly just there, out of nowhere, crossing a darkened street to disappear, then suddenly breathe right next to him and disappear again.

He heard them whistling to each other, the dogs, and he knew what it was all about.

Him.

It was connected to the third puppy, the drowned one. The one he pushed into the bucket many years ago and that fought for its life under the sole of his boot. A life it had just been given and that would be taken away from it, because it was the third and was deformed, lacking a fully developed spine. Sometimes he thought about it, being deformed. The animal was deformed and would have died anyway. He just did what the dog owners ought to have done; he took care of it. But the way the animal struggled under his boot left its trace in him. He had thought it would be quick.

It wasn't.

And while the animal fought and twisted under the sole of his boot there was time for him to start thinking. That wasn't a good thing. Suddenly he was thinking about what he was doing and about what moved under his foot. What had been only a quick decision to rid the world of pointless suffering turned into something else. The deformed animal refused to give up and forced him to make an entirely different decision.

He had to kill a puppy.

He might have lifted his foot and said that it didn't work, the pup didn't die, then give it back to its owners. But he didn't. That was what he considered now, in the soft rain. Himself as hostage to a situation he had created and that forced him to kill. Or confess that he was unable to do it.

He killed the pup.

That's why the dogs whistled to each other those special nights when he walked in the company of shadows and knew that he was a hostage again. And had to kill.

Or confess.

He waited until the lights went out in the stairwell and all sounds ceased. Then he pulled on his rubber gloves. In darkness he climbed one floor up and rang the bell by the door of the one he had chosen. It took the old woman a while to open.

“Yes,” she said. “What's it about?”

“I'm looking for Ester.”

“Yes, that's me?”

“I'm sorry.”

Later, when he sat on the kitchen chair watching the thin, white cotton thread hanging from her mouth, he wondered about that. About why he had said, “I'm sorry.” It was nothing he had planned, it just came to him spontaneously at the doorway. As if he apologized for what would happen.

It confused him.

The duct tape was the first thing he pulled out in the foyer. Putting it over the thin woman's mouth made quick work. When he lifted her into the kitchen he noticed how slight she was. Almost like a scarecrow he'd built once, just as fragile and wiry.

If he were to build a new scarecrow now he would name it Ester.

With a few blue cable ties he fastened her thin feet and arms to a kitchen chair. In the cupboard above the stove he found a glass. He filled it with water from the faucet next to the stove. He saw the woman's eyes follow his every movement and wondered what she was thinking about. Who he was? Probably, or perhaps more about what he intended to do. He put the glass down on the table in the middle of the kitchen and took out the blue-and-white box. A second before he would open it he hesitated and looked up at the old cobbler's lamp hanging from the ceiling. The light from the filament was soft. He watched the lamp. It was the kind of light he could stand, artificial light you could turn off at will.

He opened the box and pulled out a tampon. He put the thin plastic wrapping in his pocket; he disliked untidiness. With his left hand he pulled the tape from the woman's mouth. She opened it wide to scream, he had no idea for whom. He pushed the tampon down her air pipe to drown her yelling. Now she was silent. He grabbed her jaws with one hand and poured half a glass of water into her mouth before closing it.

Now he was done.

He pulled up another kitchen chair and sat down, almost directly opposite the old woman. He knew that the tampon was swelling inside her throat now, and there was nothing for him to do but to wait. He glanced down at the chair he was sitting on, an unpainted wooden chair. He liked wooden chairs, simple, functional furniture without any frills. His mother had five chairs around their kitchen table, all wooden and all unpainted. For a while they were four in the family, but never five. He never wondered about the fifth chair.

Then.

Now he did. For whom was it intended? He looked at the bound woman in front of him. Her knees were shaking, she no longer could breathe, her eyes bulged a bit. Was the fifth chair intended for visitors? But they never had any visitors. He supposed it was one of his mother's secrets, an extra chair for something unexpected. He smiled slightly. Now the woman's head sank down to her chest, she had stopped shaking. He bent forward and saw the thin white cotton thread hanging down from the corner of her mouth. It would soon be still. He wondered what was flashing through her mind right now. Where was she going?

We know so little about those things, he thought.

Soon he would leave.

He was on his way back, on foot, to his carefully measured surface. The streets were empty, his steps followed the edge of the gutter; he never needed to raise his eyes. At this time there were no movements in this part of town. A couple of hours ago homeless people had shambled past, carrying sacks full of empty cans; drunken teenagers had hunted for cabs or drugs; lonely hookers had tried enticing customers by lowering prices—everything had been drawing to an end. He had seen it a thousand times and another thousand.

Now it was all empty.

Now there were only gulls picking at the pools of vomit and the echo of distant sirens. Nobody saw him. Or perhaps at a distance? Perhaps a sleepless elderly man stood in a costly window a block away looking down at him? Perhaps the man wore a dark green smoking jacket and held a black cheroot in his hand? Perhaps he was listening to the Vienna Boys' Choir? The man who had come to his mother one night and tied a purple bow around her neck had done so. She didn't know that he was sick; she listened to “O Tannenbaum” and let the man stitch a veil of rapture to cover her eyes.

Then the man waved at the young boy.

He raised his head to glance up at the well-to-do building fronts. Perhaps he might glimpse the man?

The faucet water was freezing. He always washed his hands when he got back, held them under the running water until they grew numb, disappeared, until he could bite them without feeling anything. It made him calm. The day before he put a picture up on the wall above his bed. It was the only picture in the room. It pictured a young boy pushing a strange metal funnel under the skirt of a kneeling woman. Both wore medieval clothes. In the background two liveried men were sharing a melon. The picture was in color. He liked falling asleep to the picture and waking up to it. The only thing he lacked in the picture was sound. It looked as if the two men in the background were talking to each other; he would like to know what they said. Was it about the melon? Or about the strange funnel?

Now he lay in bed watching the picture. He was lowered in darkness and knew that he would be able to fall asleep. All he had to do was to ponder the question to which he always fell asleep; why didn't anyone ask for help? He often wondered about that. He could stand in a park, perhaps hidden by a maple, and watch faces walk by, silent, expressionless, as if nothing had happened.