Authors: Åsa Larsson
“They were just asking routine questions about Mildred,” he said.
They nodded, but he could see they were still wondering. What an expression. Routine questions.
“Did they talk to you?” he asked.
The woman who’d spoken to Sven-Erik answered.
“Yes, the tall man wanted the wolf foundation’s accounts.”
Stefan went rigid.
“But you didn’t give them to him? They’ve no right to…”
“Of course I did! There’s nothing secret in them, is there?”
She looked at him sharply. He could feel the others’ eyes on him as well. He turned on his heel and went quickly back into his room.
The parish priest could say what he liked. Stefan needed to speak to him now. He rang Bertil on his cell phone.
Bertil was in his car. His voice broke up from time to time.
Stefan told him the police had been there. And that they’d taken the foundation’s accounts away with them.
Bertil didn’t seem particularly bothered. Stefan said that as they were both on the board of the foundation, nothing that was actually illegal had taken place, but even so.
“If this gets out you know how it’ll sound. They’ll have us down as embezzlers.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said the parish priest calmly. “Look, I’ve got to park, talk to you later.”
From his calm tone, Stefan understood that Bertil wouldn’t stand by him if the trip to the USA came out. He would never admit that they’d both talked it over and agreed. “There’s plenty of money just lying there in the foundation’s account,” Bertil himself had said. And they’d discussed some kind of developmental trip. They were on the board of a nature conservancy foundation, but knew nothing about wolves. And so it had been decided that Stefan would take a trip to Yellowstone. And somehow Kristin and the younger boys had ended up going too, that’s how he’d got them back from Katrineholm.
It was understood that neither of them was going to tell Mildred that the money came from the foundation. But of course somebody in the office had to go running to her with the story.
She’d confronted him when he got back from the trip. He’d calmly explained the necessity of having someone on the board with some degree of knowledge. He was the most appropriate person, as a hunter and somebody who knew the ways of the forest. He could gain a respect and understanding that Mildred would never achieve if she tried for a thousand years.
He’d been expecting an outburst of rage. Some small hidden part of him was almost looking forward to it. Anticipating with pleasure the red evidence of her loss of control against the deep blue background of his own assured calm.
Instead she had leaned against his desk. Heavily, in a way that made him think for a moment that she might have some secret illness, something to do with her kidneys or her heart. She’d turned her face toward him. White beneath the early spring suntan. The eyes two black circles. An absurd cuddly toy with button eyes that’s come alive and begun to speak, and is suddenly very frightening.
“When I speak to the church council about the hunting permit at the end of the year, you’re to lie low, do you understand?” she said. “Otherwise we’ll let the police sort out whether this was right or wrong.”
He’d tried to say that she was making herself look ridiculous.
“Your choice,” she said. “I’ve no intention of pandering to you forever.”
He’d gazed at her in amazement. When had she pandered to him? She was like a bundle of nettles.
Stefan thought about the parish priest. He thought about his wife. He thought about Mildred. He thought about the looks the office staff had given him. Suddenly it felt as if he’d lost control of his breathing. He was panting like a dog in a car. He must try to calm down.
I can get out of this, he thought. What’s the matter with me?
Even when he was a boy he’d gravitated toward companions who oppressed and exploited him. He had to run errands and give them his sweets. Later on he had to slash tires and throw stones to prove the priest’s son wasn’t a coward. And now he’s an adult seeking out people and situations where he ends up being treated like dirt.
He reached for the telephone. Just one call.
L
isa Stöckel is sitting on the steps of her gingerbread house. The drugged-up pastry-chef’s tour de force, as Mimmi calls it. She’ll be going down to the bar soon. She eats there every day now. Mimmi doesn’t seem to think it’s strange. In her kitchen Lisa now has only a bowl, a spoon and a tin opener for the dog food. The dogs are wandering about outside by the fence. Sniffing and pissing on the currant bushes. She almost thinks they look slightly quizzical when she doesn’t shout at them.
Piss wherever you want, she thinks with a half-smile.
The hardness of the human heart is a remarkable thing. It’s like the soles of your feet in summer. You can walk on pinecones and on gravel. But if the heel cracks, it goes deep.
Hardness has always been her strength. Now it’s her weakness. She tries to find the words to say to Mimmi, but it’s hopeless. Everything that needs saying should have been said long ago, and now it’s too late.
And what would she have said then? The truth? Hardly. She remembers when Mimmi was sixteen. She and Tommy had already been divorced for many years. He drank his way through the weekends. It was lucky he was such a good tiler. As long as he had a job, he stuck to beer from Monday to Thursday. Mimmi was worried. Obviously. Thought Lisa ought to talk to him. Asked: “Don’t you care about Daddy?” Lisa had answered yes. It was a lie. And she was the one who’d decided there was to be no more lying. But Mimmi was Mimmi. Lisa didn’t give a shit about Tommy. Another time, Mimmi had asked: “Why did you actually marry Daddy?” Lisa had realized she didn’t have a clue. It was a staggering discovery. She hadn’t managed to remember what she’d thought or felt during the time when they started going out, went to bed together, got engaged, when he put his ring on her finger. And then Mimmi came along. She’d been such a wonderful child. And at the same time the bond that would always link Lisa with Tommy. She’d worried about her maternal instinct. How is a mother supposed to feel about her child? She didn’t know. “I could die for her,” she’d sometimes thought as she stood watching Mimmi sleep. But it meant nothing. It was like promising people trips abroad if you won millions on the lottery. Easier to die for your child in theory than to sit and read to them for quarter of an hour. The sleeping child made her feel sick with longing and pangs of conscience. But when Mimmi was awake, with her small hands grabbing at Lisa’s face and up her sleeves searching for skin and closeness, it made Lisa’s flesh crawl.
Getting out of the marriage had felt like an impossible task. And when she finally did it, she was surprised at how easy it was. All she had to do was pack and move out. The tears and the screaming were like oil on water.
Things are never complicated with the dogs. They don’t care about her awkwardness. They are totally honest and relentlessly cheerful.
Like Nalle. Lisa has to smile when she thinks of him. She can see it in his new friend Rebecka Martinsson. When Lisa saw her for the first time last Tuesday evening, she was wearing that calf-length coat and the shiny scarf, definitely real silk. A stuck-up top-notch secretary, or whatever she was. And there was something about her, a microsecond’s hesitation perhaps. As if she always had to think before she spoke, made a gesture or even smiled. Nalle doesn’t bother about things like that. He goes marching into people’s hearts without taking his shoes off. One day with Nalle, and Rebecka Martinsson was walking around in an anorak from the seventies, her hair tied back with a rubber band, the sort that pulls out half your hair when you take it off.
And he doesn’t know how to lie. Every other Thursday Mimmi serves afternoon tea at the bar. It’s become one of those events that the ladies from town travel out to Poikkijärvi for. Freshly baked scones with jam, a wide variety of cakes. The previous Thursday Mimmi had shouted angrily: “Who’s taken a bite out of my cakes?” Nalle, who’d been sitting there having a snack of a sandwich and a glass of milk, had immediately shot his hand up in the air and confessed: “Me!”
Blessed Nalle, thinks Lisa.
The very words Mildred used a thousand times.
Mildred. When Lisa’s hardness cracked, Mildred poured in. Lisa was totally contaminated.
It’s only three months since they lay on the kitchen sofa. They often ended up there, because the dogs had taken over the beds, and Mildred used to beg “don’t push them off, can’t you see how cozy they are?”
Mildred is always really busy at the beginning of June. End of term services in schools, confirmations, playgroups breaking up for the summer, church youth groups finishing off and lots of weddings. Lisa is lying on her left side, leaning on her elbow. She is holding a cigarette in her right hand. Mildred is asleep, or she might be awake, or more likely somewhere in between the two. Her back is covered in hairs, a soft down all along the length of her spine. It’s like a special gift, the fact that Lisa who is so fond of dogs has a lover whose back is like a puppy’s tummy. Or perhaps a wolf’s stomach.
“What is it with you and that wolf?” asks Lisa.
Mildred has had a real wolf spring. She got ninety seconds on the evening news program, talking about wolves. There was a concert, with the proceeds going to the wolf foundation. She’s even preached a sermon about the she-wolf.
Mildred turns onto her back. She takes the cigarette from Lisa. Lisa doodles on Mildred’s stomach with her finger.
“Well,” she says, and it’s obvious she’s making a real effort to answer the question. “There’s something about wolves and women. We’re alike. I look at that she-wolf and she reminds me of what we were created for. Wolves are incredibly patient. Just imagine, they can live in polar regions where it’s minus fifty degrees, and in the desert where it’s plus fifty. They’re territorial, their boundaries are set in stone. And they roam for miles, completely free. They help each other within the pack, they’re loyal, they love their cubs more than anything. They’re like us.”
“You haven’t got any cubs,” says Lisa, regretting it almost immediately, but Mildred isn’t offended.
“I’ve got you lot,” she laughs.
“They’re brave enough to stay in one place when it’s necessary,” Mildred continues her sermon, “they’re brave enough to move on when they have to, they’re not afraid to fight and attack if need be. And they’re… alive. And happy.”
She tries to blow smoke rings while she thinks about it.
“It’s to do with my faith,” she says. “The whole of the Bible is full of men with a major task to do, a task that comes before everything, wife, children and… well, everything. There’s Abraham and Jesus and… my father followed in their footsteps in his work as a priest, you know. My mother was responsible for where we lived, visits to the dentist, Christmas cards. But for me Jesus is the one who allows women to start thinking, to move on if they have to, to be like a she-wolf. And when I’m starting to feel bitter and weepy, he says to me: Come on, be happy instead.”
Lisa carries on doodling on Mildred’s stomach, her index finger traces a path across her breasts and her hip bones.
“You know they hate her, don’t you?” she says.
“Who?” asks Mildred.
“The men in the village,” says Lisa. “The ones on the hunting team. Torbjörn Ylitalo. At the beginning of the eighties he was convicted of hunting crimes. He shot a wolf down in Dalarna. That’s where his wife comes from.”
Mildred sits bolt upright.
“You’re joking!”
“I’m not joking. He should really have lost his gun license. But Lars-Gunnar is a policeman, and you know how it is. And it’s the police authorities who decide these things, and he used his contacts, and… Where are you going?”
Mildred has shot up off the kitchen sofa. The dogs come rushing in. They think they’re going out. She doesn’t take any notice of them. Pulls on her clothes.
“Where are you going?” asks Lisa again.
“Those bloody old men,” says Mildred furiously. “How could you? How could you have known about this all along and not said anything?”
Lisa sits up. She’s always known. After all, she was married to Tommy and Tommy was a friend of Torbjörn Ylitalo. She looks at Mildred, who fails to fasten her wristwatch and pushes it into her pocket instead.
“They hunt for free,” snaps Mildred. “The church gives them everything, they won’t let a single bloody person in, least of all women. But the women, they work and sort things out and have to wait for their reward in heaven. I’m so bloody tired of it. It really does send out a message about how the church regards men and women, but enough is damned well enough!”
“My God, you can swear!”
Mildred turns to Lisa.
“You ought to try it,” she says.
M
agnus Lindmark was standing by his kitchen window in the dusk. He hadn’t switched on the lights. Every contour, every object both inside and outside had become blurred, begun to dissolve, disappearing into the darkness.
However, he could still see Lars-Gunnar Vinsa, the leader of the hunting team, and Torbjörn Ylitalo, the chairman of the hunting club, walking up the road toward Magnus’ house. He hid behind the curtain. What the hell did they want? And why weren’t they driving? Had they parked a little way off and walked the last part? Why? He had a really bad feeling about this.
Whatever they wanted, he was bloody well going to tell them he didn’t have time. Unlike those two, he did actually have a job. Well, okay, Torbjörn Ylitalo was a forester, but he didn’t do any bloody work, nobody could pretend he did.
Magnus Lindmark didn’t often get visitors nowadays, not since Anki and the boys left. He used to think it was a pain in the ass, all her relatives and the boys’ friends coming round. And it wasn’t his style to pretend and smile sweetly. So in the end her sisters and friends used to clear off when he got home. That had suited him down to the ground. He couldn’t do with people sitting around rabbiting for hours. Hadn’t they got anything else to do?