Before the Frost (4 page)

Suddenly there was someone by her side, speaking in careful, soothing tones. It was a woman with a round, childish face, perhaps not much older than Linda. She was wearing a police uniform and behind her there were two patrol cars with flashing lights. Only the officer with the childish face approached her. Linda sensed the presence of others farther back, but they had clearly delegated the responsibility of talking that crazy teenager out of jumping to this woman. She told Linda her name was Annika, that she wanted her to come down, that jumping into a void wouldn't solve anything. Linda started defending herself—how could Annika possibly understand anything about her problems? But Annika hadn't backed down, she had simply stayed calm, as if she had infinite patience. When Linda finally did climb down from the railing and start crying, from a sense of disappointment that was actually relief, Annika had started crying too. They hugged each other and stood there for
a long time. Linda told her that she didn't want her father to hear about it. Not her mother either, for that matter, but especially not her dad. Annika had promised to keep it quiet, and she had been true to her word. Linda had thought about calling the Malmö police station to thank her many times, but she never got further than lifting the receiver.

 

She put the photograph back into the bookcase, thought briefly about the police officer who had been killed, and went to bed. She was woken up in the morning by Kristina getting ready for work. Kristina was her brother's opposite in almost every regard: tall, thin, with a pointed face and a shrill voice that Linda's dad made fun of behind her back. But Linda loved her aunt. There was something refreshingly uncomplicated about her, and in this way too she was her brother's opposite. From his perspective, life was nothing but a heap of dense problems, unsolvable in his private life, attacked with the force and fury of a ravenous bear in his work.

Linda took the bus to the airport shortly before nine in the hopes of catching a plane to Malmö. All of the morning headlines were about the murdered police officer. She got on a plane leaving at noon and called her dad when she got to Sturup.

“Did you have a good time?” he asked when he came to pick her up.

“What do you think?”

“How could I know? I wasn't there.”

“But we talked on the phone last night—remember?”

“Of course I remember. You were rude and unpleasant.”

“I was tired and upset. A police officer was murdered. No one was in a good mood after that.”

He nodded but didn't say anything. He let her off when they got to Mariagatan.

“Have you found out anything more about this sadist?” she asked.

At first he didn't seem to understand what she was referring to.

“The bird hater? The burning swans?”

“Probably just a prank call. Quite a few people live around the lake and someone would have seen something if it wasn't.”

Wallander drove back to the police station and Linda walked up to the apartment. Her father had left a note by the phone. It was a message from Anna,
Important. Call back soon.
Then her father had scribbled something she couldn't read. She called him at work.

“Why didn't you tell me Anna called?”

“I forgot.”

“What have you written here—I can't read your handwriting.”

“She sounded worried about something.”

“How do you mean?”

“Just that. She sounded worried. You'd better call her.”

Linda called but Anna's line was busy. When she tried again there was no answer. At seven o'clock in the evening, after she and her dad had eaten, she put on her coat and walked over to Anna's place. As soon as Anna opened the door Linda could see what her father had meant. Anna's expression was different. Her eyes darted around anxiously. She pulled Linda into the apartment and shut the door.

It was as if she were in a hurry to shut out the outside world.

5

Linda was reminded of Anna's mother, Henrietta. She was a thin woman with an angular, nervous way of moving, and Linda had always been a little afraid of her.

Linda remembered the first time she had played at Anna's house. She must have been around eight or nine. Anna was in another class at school and they had never been able to figure out exactly what had drawn them to each other.
It's as if there's an invisible force that brings people together. At least that's the way it was with us. We were inseparable—until we fell in love with the same guy, that is.

Anna's father had never been present except in pale photographs. Henrietta had carefully wiped away all traces of him, as if she were telling her daughter that there was no possibility of his return. The few photos Anna owned were stashed away in a drawer, hidden under some socks and underwear. In the pictures he had long hair, glasses, and a reluctant stance, as if he hadn't really wanted to pose for the camera. Anna had showed her the pictures in the deepest confidence. When they became friends her father had already been gone for two years. Anna quietly rebelled against her mother's determination to keep the apartment free of all traces of him. One time Henrietta had gathered up what remained of his clothes and stuffed them in a garbage bag in the basement. Anna had snuck down there at night and rescued a shirt and some shoes that she hid under her bed. For Linda this mysterious father had been a figure of adventure. She had often wished that she and Anna could trade places, that she could exchange her quarreling parents for this man who had simply vanished one day like gray wisps of smoke against a blue sky.

They sat on the sofa and Anna leaned back so half of her face was in shadow.

“How was the ball?”

“We heard about the murdered police officer in the middle of it and that pretty much ended it right there. But my dress was a success. How is Henrietta?”

I know what she's doing,
Linda thought.
Whenever Anna has anything important to talk about she can never come right out and say it. It always takes time.

“Fine.”

Anna shook her head at her own words.

“Fine—I don't know why I always say that. She's actually worse than ever. For the past two years she's been composing a requiem for herself. She calls it ‘The Unnamed Mass' and she's thrown the whole thing in the fire at least twice. Both times she managed to salvage most of the papers, but her self-esteem is about as low as a person with only one tooth left.”

“What does her music sound like?”

“I hardly even know. She's tried to hum it for me a couple of times—the very few times she's been convinced that what she was working on had value. But it doesn't sound like anything close to a melody to me. It's the kind of music that sounds more like screams, that pokes and hits you. I have no idea why anyone would ever listen to something like that. But at the same time I can't help admiring that she hasn't given up. Several times I've tried to persuade her to do other things in life. She's not even fifty yet. But every time she's reacted like an angry cat. It makes me wonder if she's crazy.”

Anna interrupted herself at this point as if she were afraid of having said too much. Linda waited for her to continue.

“Have you ever had the feeling you were going crazy?”

“Only every single day.”

Anna frowned.

“No, not like that. I'm not kidding.”

Linda was immediately ashamed of her lighthearted comment.

“It happened to me once. You know all about that.”

“You're thinking of when you slit your wrists. And then tried to jump off the overpass. But that's despair, Linda. It's not the same
thing. Everyone has to face their despair at least once in their life. It's a rite of passage. If you never find yourself raging at the sea or the moon or your parents, you never really have the opportunity to grow up. The King and Queen of Contentment are damned in their own way. They've let their souls be numbed. Those of us who want to stay alive have to stay in touch with our sorrow and grief.”

Linda had always envied Anna's fanciful way of expressing herself.
I would have had to sit down and write it all down if I were going to come up with anything like that,
she thought.
The King and Queen of Contentment.

“In that case I guess I've never really been afraid of losing my mind,” she said lightly.

Anna got up and walked over to the window. After a while she returned to the sofa.
We're much more like our parents than we think,
Linda thought.
I've seen Henrietta move in just the same way when she's anxious: get up, walk around, and then sit down again.

“I thought I saw my father yesterday,” Anna said. “On a street in Malmö.”

Linda raised her eyebrows.

“Your father? You saw him on the street?”

“Yes.”

Linda thought about it.

“But you've never even seen him—not really, I mean. You were so young when he left.”

“I have pictures of him.”

Linda did the math in her head.

“It's been twenty-five years since he left.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four, then. How much do you think a person changes in twenty-four years? You can't know. All you know is that he must have changed.”

“It was him. My mother told me about his gaze. I'm sure it was him. It must have been him.”

“I didn't even know you were in Malmö yesterday. I thought you were going in to Lund, to study or whatever it is you do there.”

Anna looked at her appraisingly.

“You don't believe me.”

“You don't believe it yourself.”

“It was my dad.”

She took a deep breath.

“You're right; I had been in Lund. When I got as far as Malmö and had to change trains. There was a problem with the line. The train was cancelled. Suddenly I had two hours to kill until the next one. It put me in a terrible mood since I hate waiting. I walked into town, without any clear idea of what I was going to do, just to get rid of some of the unwanted, irritating time. Somewhere along the line I walked into a store and bought a pair of socks I didn't even need. As I was walking past the Saint Jörgen Hotel a woman had fallen down in the street. I didn't walk up close—I can't stand the sight of blood. Her skirt was bunched up, and I remember wondering why no one pulled it down for her. I was sure she was dead. A bunch of people had gathered to look, as if she were a dead creature washed up on the beach. I walked away, through the Triangle, and walked into the big hotel there in order to take their glass elevator up to the roof. That's something I always do when I'm in Malmö. It's like taking a glass balloon up into the sky. But this time I wasn't allowed to do it—now you have to operate the elevator with your room key. That was a blow. It felt as if someone had taken a toy away. I sat down in one of the plush armchairs in the lobby and looked out the window and was planning to stay there until it was time to walk back to the station.

“That's when I saw him. He was standing on the street. Now and then a gust of wind made the windowpane rattle. I looked up, and there he was on the sidewalk looking at me. Our eyes met and we stared at each other for about five seconds. Then he looked down and walked away. I was so shocked it didn't even occur to me to follow him. To be perfectly honest I still didn't believe I had really seen him. I thought it was a hallucination or a trick of the light. Sometimes you see someone and you think it's a person from your past, but it's really just a stranger. When I finally did run out and look around, he was gone. I felt a bit like an animal stalking its prey when I walked back to the train station—I tried to sniff out where he could be. I was so excited—upset, actually—that I hunted through the inner city and missed my train. He was nowhere to be found. But I was
sure that it was him. He looked just like he did in the picture I have. And my mother once said he had a habit of first looking up before he said anything. I saw him make that exact gesture when he was standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the window. When he left all those years ago he had long hair and thick black-rimmed glasses; he doesn't look like that now. His hair is much shorter and his glasses are the kind without frames around the lenses.

“I called you because I needed to talk to someone about it. I thought I would go nuts otherwise. It
was
him, it
was
my father. And it wasn't just that I recognized him; he stopped on the sidewalk outside because he had recognized me.”

Anna spoke with total conviction. Linda tried to remember what she had learned about eyewitness accounts—about the rate of accuracy in their reconstructions of events and the potential for embellishment. She also thought about what they had been taught about giving descriptions at the academy, and the computer exercises they had done. One assignment consisted of aging their own faces by twenty years. Linda had seen how she started looking more and more like her father, even a little like her grandfather.
Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces,
she thought.
If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognize your face it's because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.