The Crow Girl (39 page)

A PROPER SUMMER
storm would have been a more suitable backdrop to the interment of Bengt and Birgitta Bergman’s remains, but the sun is shining and Stockholm is looking its very best.

The trees in the park next to Hammarbyhamnen are showing off every sort of colour, from soft golden brown to dark purple, the most beautiful being the dark green maple leaves.

There are a dozen or so cars at the Forest Cemetery, but she knows none of them belongs to anyone taking part in the ceremony. She’s going to be the only person present.

She switches off the engine, opens the door and gets out. It’s chilly, and she takes a few deep breaths of the fresh air.

She can see the priest in the distance.

Sombre, with his head bowed.

On the ground in front of him stands an urn large enough for two people’s ashes.

Dark red cherrywood. A degradable material, it had said on the undertakers’ website.

A little over a thousand kronor.

Five hundred each.

They’re the only ones there. She and the priest. That’s what she decided.

No death notice, nothing in the papers. A quiet farewell without tears or strong emotions. No soothing talk of reconciliation, no feeble attempts to elevate the dead to something they never were.

No eulogy ascribing virtues to them that they never possessed, nothing to make them sound like angels.

No new gods are going to be created here.

She says hello, and the priest explains what’s going to happen.

Since she declined any funeral service, only the obvious phrases will be spoken.

Their delivery into the hands of God the creator, and the prayer about Christ’s death and resurrection being fulfilled in those created by God in His image have all been got out of the way before the cremation, without Sofia.

Dust you are, to dust you shall return.

Our Lord Jesus Christ shall awaken you at the end of days.

It will all be over in less than ten minutes.

Together they walk past a small pond and in among the trees of the cemetery.

The priest, a tall, skinny man of an indeterminate age, carries the urn. His thin frame has the slowness of an ageing man combined with eyes that suggest a young boy’s curiosity.

They don’t speak, and she has trouble tearing her eyes from the urn. Inside it is what remains of her parents.

After cremation the charred bones were left in a tray to cool. Anything that hadn’t burned, like Bengt’s hip replacement, had been removed before the bones were crushed in the mill.

Paradoxically, when her father died he also came to life for her. A door had been opened, as if a hole had been cut in the air. It’s open wide in front of her, offering freedom.

Impressions, she thinks. What impressions have they left behind? She remembers something that happened a long time ago.

She was four years old, and Bengt had laid a new floor in one of the rooms in the basement. The temptation to press her hand down on the smooth, thick cement had been stronger than her fear of the anger she knew she would get. The little handprint had been there right up to the fire. It was probably still there, under the ruins of the burned-out house.

But what is left of him?

Everything physical he has left behind has been destroyed, sold or sent to auction, scattered on the wind. Soon to be anonymous objects in the possession of total strangers. Things with no known history.

The impression he has left inside her, on the other hand, will live on in shame and guilt.

A guilt she will never be able to atone for, no matter how hard she tries.

It will only go on growing and growing for her.

What did I actually know about him? she wonders.

What was hiding in the depths of his soul? What did he dream of? Long for?

He was driven by a constant lack of gratification. No matter how hot he was, he was also shaking with cold. No matter how much he ate, his stomach was always stinging with hunger.

The priest stops, puts the urn down and lowers his head in prayer. A piece of green cloth with a hole in its centre has been spread out in front of a headstone of red granite from Vånga.

Seven thousand kronor.

She tries to catch the priest’s eye, and, when he finally raises his head, he looks at her and nods.

She takes a few steps forward, walks round the piece of cloth, bends over and takes hold of the cord fastened to the red urn. The first thing that strikes her is how heavy it is, and the rope digs into her hands.

Carefully she goes over to the hole, stops and slowly lowers the urn into the black hole. After a brief pause she lets go of the cord, letting it fall to land on the lid of the urn.

Her palms sting, and when she holds her hands up she sees an angry red mark on each hand.

Stigmata, she thinks.

THE MOST POPULAR
attraction at the Gröna Lund fair is a renovated viewing tower, one hundred metres tall, visible from large parts of Stockholm. Passengers are pulled up to a height of eighty metres, where they hang for a moment, then fall back down at a speed of almost one hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. The fall takes two and a half seconds, and as the ride brakes, passengers are subjected to a force equivalent to three and a half Gs.

In other words, when it lands each human body weighs more than three times as much as normal.

Body weight matters on the way down.

A person travelling at a speed of a hundred kilometres an hour weighs over twelve tons.

‘You know they closed Free Fall last summer?’ Sofia laughs.

‘Really? What for?’ Jeanette squeezes Johan’s arm as the queue they’re standing in moves a few steps forward. The thought that Sofia and Johan will soon be hanging up there makes her dizzy.

‘Someone at some fair in the States had their feet cut off by a wire. They had to close this one to do a complete safety check.’

‘Christ … stop it! Now really isn’t the time to mention that, when you’re about to go up.’

Johan laughs and nudges her side.

She smiles at him. It’s been a long time since she last saw him this excited.

Over the past few hours Johan and Sofia have worked their way through the Kvasten roller coaster, the Octopus, Extreme and the Catapult. They’ve also got photographs of themselves screaming on the Flying Carpet.

Jeanette had stayed on the ground the whole time, with a lump in her stomach.

They reach the front of the queue, and she steps aside.

Johan almost backs out, but Sofia steps up onto the platform and he follows her with an unsteady smile.

An attendant makes sure their safety harnesses are fastened properly.

Then everything happens very quickly.

The cradle starts to move upward, and Sofia and Johan wave nervously.

Just as Jeanette sees their attention being drawn to the views of the city she hears the sound of breaking glass right behind her. Agitated voices.

Jeanette turns round and sees a man about to hit another man.

It takes Jeanette five minutes to calm the situation down.

Three hundred seconds.

Popcorn, sweat and acetone.

The smells are confusing Sofia. She’s having trouble working out which ones are real and which imaginary, and as she passes the radio-controlled cars the air feels stiflingly electric.

An imaginary smell of burned rubber merges with a real, sickly sweet gust from the men’s toilets.

It’s started to get dark, but it’s a mild evening and the sky has cleared. The tarmac is still damp after the sudden downpour and the flashing coloured lights reflected in the puddles hurt her eyes. A sudden scream from the roller coaster makes her start, and she takes a step back. Someone walks into her from behind, and she hears them swear.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

She stops and closes her eyes. Tries to filter out her sensory impressions from the voice in her head.

What are you going to do now? Sit down and start crying?

What have you done with Johan?

Sofia looks around and realises she’s alone.

‘… he said he wasn’t scared of heights but when the safety harness folded down it started to rain and when they were sitting tight she could tell he was shaking with fear and when the gondola started to move he said he’d changed his mind and wanted to get down …’

Her cheek stings, and she can feel that it’s wet, salty. The hard gravel is scratching her back.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Can someone call a medic?’

‘What’s she talking about?’

‘Does anyone know any first aid?’

‘… and he was crying and was scared and at first she tried to comfort him when they rose up higher and higher and could see right across Uppsala and all the boats on the Fyris River and when she told him that he stopped whining and said it was Stockholm and the Djurgård ferries they could see …’

‘I think she’s saying she’s from Uppsala.’

‘… and right at the top there’s thunder and lightning then everything went quiet and the people below were like little dots and if you wanted to you could squash them between your fingers like flies …’

‘I think she’s going to faint.’

‘… and right at that moment your stomach flies into your throat and everything comes rushing towards you and it’s just like you want it to be …’

‘Let me through!’

She recognises the voice but can’t quite place it.

‘Get out of the way, I know her.’

A cool hand on a hot forehead. A smell she recognises.

‘Sofia, what’s happened? Where’s Johan?’

Victoria Bergman closes her eyes.

THE NIGHTMARE IS
dressed in a cobalt-blue coat, slightly darker than the evening sky over Djurgården and the Ladugårdsland inlet. It’s fair-haired, blue-eyed, and has a little bag over its shoulder. Its too-small shoes are red and chafe her heels, but she’s used to that and the wounds are now part of her personality. The pain makes her alert.

She knows that if she can only find it in her to forgive, they will be free, both she herself and those who are forgiven. For many years she has tried to forget, but has always failed.

She can’t see it herself, but her revenge is a chain reaction.

A snowball was set in motion a quarter of a lifetime ago in a tool shed at the Sigtuna College for the Humanities, and she got caught up by it before it continued its journey towards the inevitable.

One might ask what the people who made the snowball know of its onward journey. Nothing, in all likelihood. They’ve probably just moved on. Forgetting the occurrence as if it were nothing more than an innocent game that both began and ended there in the shed.

She herself is trapped, frozen in the moment. For her time is immaterial, it has no healing effect.

Hate doesn’t thaw. It hardens, to sharp ice crystals surrounding the whole of her being.

The evening is slightly cool, and the air damp from the scattered showers that have succeeded one another all afternoon and evening. Cries can be heard from the roller coaster. She stands up, brushes herself off and looks around. Stops, takes a deep breath and remembers why she’s there.

She has a task, and she knows what she has to do.

Just below the tall, renovated lookout tower she watches the fuss a short distance away.

The fair’s coloured lights cast sharp reflections on the damp tarmac.

She realises the moment when she must act has arrived, even if this wasn’t how she had planned it. Fate has made it easier for her. So simple that no one will be able to understand what’s happened.

She sees the boy a short distance away, alone outside the railings of the Free Fall ride.

To forgive something that can be forgiven isn’t really to forgive, she thinks. Real forgiveness is forgiving something unforgivable. Something only a god can do.

The boy looks confused, and she walks slowly over to him as he turns away from her. That makes it almost laughably simple to get close, and now she’s only a few metres away from him. He is still standing with his back to her.

True forgiveness is impossible, mad and unconscious, she thinks. And seeing as she expects the guilty parties to show contrition, it can never be accomplished. The memory is and will remain a wound that can never heal.

She grabs the boy hard by the arm.

He jerks and turns round as she pushes the syringe into the top of his left arm.

For a couple of seconds he looks into her eyes, confused, before his legs crumple beneath him. She catches him and puts him down gently on a bench.

No one has seen her manoeuvre.

Everything is perfectly normal.

She takes something out of her bag and carefully pulls it over his head.

The mask is made of pink plastic, shaped like a pig’s snout.

JEANETTE KIHLBERG KNOWS
exactly where she was when she heard that Prime Minister Olof Palme had been murdered on Sveavägen.

She was sitting in a taxi, halfway to Farsta, and the man next to her was smoking menthol cigarettes. Gentle rain and feeling ill from too many beers.

But the moment when Johan vanishes will always be a black stain. Five missing minutes. Stolen from her by an overly refreshed plumber from Flen on a short visit to the capital.

A step to the side, her eyes fixed upward. Johan and Sofia hanging in the cradle on the way up, and she feels dizzy even though she’s safe on the ground.

Suddenly the sound of breaking glass.

Animated shouting.

Someone crying, and Jeanette sees the cradle continue to rise.

Two men are shoving each other, and Jeanette gets ready to intervene. She glances up at Johan and Sofia. Their legs from below. Swinging.

Johan is laughing at something.

Soon at the top.

‘I’m going to kill you, you bastard!’

Jeanette sees that one of the men isn’t in control of his movements. Drink has made his legs too long, his joints too stiff, his tranquillised nervous system too slow.