The Crow Girl (75 page)

She was lying on her stomach and the sun was baking her body. She had folded the big beach towel so it covered her head, but had left a little gap so she could see what was going on if she had her head facing the side.

Nine Lego figures.

And Karl and Annette’s little girl, playing happily by the water’s edge.

Everyone was naked except for the pig farmer, because he said he had eczema and couldn’t stand the sun. He was down by the water, keeping an eye on the girl. His dog was there too, a big Rottweiler that she had never learned to trust.

She sucked her tooth. It never seemed to want to stop bleeding, but it wouldn’t come out.

Closest to her, as usual, sat her foster-father. Every now and then he ran his hand down her back or rubbed some sunscreen on her. He had asked her twice to turn over and lie on her back, but she pretended to be asleep and unable to hear him.

She turned her head under the beach towel and looked in the other direction. There the beach was completely empty, nothing but sand all the way to the bridge and the red-and-white lighthouse in the distance. But there were more seagulls in that direction, possibly because some visitor hadn’t tidied up properly when they left.

‘Turn onto your back now.’ His voice was mild. ‘You might burn.’

She obeyed without a word, and shut her eyes as she heard him shake the bottle of sunscreen. His hands were warm, and she didn’t know what she ought to feel. It was nice and nasty at the same time, just like her tooth. It itched in a tingly sort of way, and when she ran her tongue around its root its wobbliness made her shudder, in the same way that she shuddered at the touch of his hands.

She knew that her body was more developed than many girls the same age. She was much taller than they were, and had even started to get breasts. At least she thought she had, because they felt swollen and itched as if they were growing. And that was why her tooth itched, because it would soon fall out. There was a new tooth that was going to grow from beneath the old one, an adult tooth.

He stopped touching her, sooner than she was expecting.

A subdued female voice asked him to lie down, and she heard her elbows press into the sand.

She cautiously turned her head. Through the gap in the towel she saw it was the fat woman, Fredrika, and she sat down beside him with a smile.

She thought about the Lego figures. Tiny plastic people that you could do whatever you liked with, and they carried on smiling even when you melted them in the oven.

She couldn’t stop watching as the woman leaned over towards his waist and opened her mouth.

Through the gap in the towel her head was soon moving slowly up and down. She had just been for a swim, and her hair was stuck to her cheeks and it all looked very wet. Red and wet.

She thought about when they were up at Skagen and her foster-father hit her for the first time. It had been on a beach with a lot of people, and they were all wearing swimming costumes. She had gone over to a man sitting alone on his blanket, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking. She had pulled down her swimming costume in front of him because she had thought the man wanted to see her naked.

He had just looked at her with a wry smile as he blew out the smoke, but they had been furious and Daddy P-O had dragged her away by the hair. ‘Not here,’ they had said.

Now everyone was just curious, and the shadows of their bodies were starting to block the light.

Her tooth itched, and she could feel how cold the air was when the sun disappeared.

They looked on and she looked on. There was nothing to be ashamed of.

One of the new, fair-haired women took out a camera. It was the type that froze the pictures and spat them out at once. A polar camera, that was it. They made the molecules stand still.

The windbreak rustled, and she shut her eyes again when the camera clicked.

Then suddenly her tooth came loose.

The hole in her gum ached and felt cold, and she rolled the tooth around her mouth as she watched.

It itched, and tasted of blood.

THE BEGINNING OF
the end is a burning blue car at the highest point of Tantoberget.

A burning hill in the middle of Södermalm isn’t the sort of thing that Jeanette ever expected to be the missing piece that would help her see the whole picture. As she and Jens Hurtig pass Hornstull at high speed and catch sight of Tantoberget, it looks like a volcano.

Before the patch of land between became a park, Tantoberget was pretty much a dump, a cemetery for human refuse, and now, once more, it has become a site for scrap and waste.

The fire at the highest point of the park is visible from most of Stockholm, and the flames leaping up from the burning car have set fire to an autumn-dry birch. It’s sparking and crackling, and the fire is threatening to spread to the little allotment cottages a dozen metres away.

Hannah Östlund and her classmate from Sigtuna College for the Humanities, Jessica Friberg, are wanted by the police on suspicion of two murders. The car that is being devoured by the flames up on the mountain is registered to Hannah Östlund, and that’s why Jeanette has been called in.

As she opens her car door to get out, she can smell the hot, poisonous, black smoke.

It stinks of oil and rubber and melting plastic.

In the front seats of the car, through the fatally hot flames, she can see the silhouettes of two lifeless bodies.

THE EVENING SKY
is bathed in the yellow glow of light pollution from the centre of Stockholm, and only the Pole Star is visible to the naked eye. The artificial lights in the form of street lamps, neon tubes and light bulbs make the open site below the Skanstull Bridge gloomier than if the city had been blacked out and the starry sky the only source of light.

The few nocturnal pedestrians crossing the older Skans Bridge alongside and glancing up towards Norra Hammarbyhamnen see nothing but light and shadows, in an alternately dazzling and blinding display of light pollution.

They don’t see the crouched figure walking along the old, abandoned railway track; they don’t see that the figure is carrying a black plastic bag and turns off the track to stand on the quayside, where it’s swallowed up by the shadows of the bridge.

And no one sees the bag being swallowed by the black water.

The figure opens a car door and gets into the driver’s seat, puts the light on and pulls a bundle of papers from the glove compartment. After a couple of minutes the light goes out and the car starts.

The woman in the car recognises the sky’s sick yellow light from other places.

She sees what other people don’t.

Down on the quay by the old goods line she had seen small trucks rattle past, fully laden with dead bodies. Out in the water she saw a frigate flying the Soviet flag and knew that the crew was sick with scurvy after months on duty in the Black Sea. The sky over Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula had been the same mustard yellow as here, and in the shadows of the bridge lay the ruins of bombed-out houses and the slagheaps of waste from the rocket factories.

She had found the boy in the bag at the closest metro station to the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev over a year ago. The station has the same name as the concentration camp the Nazis constructed on the site, where so many people she had known were killed during the war.

Syrets.

She can still taste the boy in her mouth. It’s a yellow, fleeting taste a bit like rapeseed oil; like light-polluted skies and fields of grain.

Syrets.
The very word seems to drip with the yellow taste.

The world is split in two, and only she knows it. The two worlds are as different as an X-ray picture is from a human body.

The boy in the plastic bag is in both worlds right now. When they find him they will see how he looked when he was nine years old. His body is preserved like a photograph of the past, embalmed like an ancient boy king. A boy forever.

The woman in the car keeps driving north, through the city. She looks at the people she passes.

Her senses are highly refined, and she knows that no one can have any idea of what she’s like inside. No one knows what goes on inside her. She sees the anguish that is permanently present around people. She sees their evil thoughts painted in the atmosphere surrounding them.

She herself can’t be seen. She has a capacity to be invisible in a room full of people, her image doesn’t register on their retinas. But she is always present in the moment, observing her surroundings and understanding them. And she never forgets a face.

A short while ago she saw a woman on her own go down to the quayside of Norra Hammarbyhamnen. The woman had been unusually scantily clad for the time of year, and she had sat by the water for almost half an hour. When she eventually stood up to leave, a street lamp had lit up her face and she had recognised her.

Victoria Bergman.

It’s been more than twenty years since she last saw her, and then the girl’s eyes had been burning, almost invincible. They had contained an immense strength.

Now she had seen a dullness in them, a sort of tiredness that had spread through her whole being, and her experience of people’s faces tells her that Victoria Bergman is already dead.

To eat your own children is a barbarian act!

– Soviet proclamation, Ukrainian SSR, 1933

FATHER HAD EATEN
pigeon, and was telling stories to little Gilah, his daughter.

‘Darling
tokhter
.’

She was hungry, had only had grass to eat, but it was probably worse for the boy in the other house. His body was so weak that he fell over when he tried to walk.

‘Story. About boat and witch.’

Father kissed her on the forehead, and she noticed the bad smell from his mouth. ‘Once upon a time there was a father and a mother, and they had a little girl whose name was Gilah Berkowitz. She was so small, but she grew very fast. Just like you …’

He smiled, poked her tummy, and it tickled, but she didn’t laugh.

‘One day little Gilah said to her father: I want a boat of gold with oars of silver, so I can fetch food for you and my brothers. Please, make me a boat like that, Father.’

‘Please, Father,’ she whispered.

‘Little Gilah got her boat of gold and silver, and every day she went down to the river and fished, and came home with food for her father, mother and brothers. And every evening her mother went down to the river and called: Come back to shore now, little Gilah.’

Mother is sick, she thought. Her mouth all black, and her face completely white.

Father looked at her. ‘What did little Gilah say then? When Mother was calling for her?’

‘Boat of gold, let Gilah drift to the shore,’ she said, and heard her mother coughing in her bed.

Father’s hands were cold and his face was shiny. Maybe it was fever. A girl who lived at the end of the street had died of fever and been eaten by her mother. The girl’s mother was an ugly, mean witch. Not like her own mother, who had been so pure and lovely before she got sick.

‘Yes, that’s what happened. Every day for many, many years. Little Gilah grew and got bigger and bigger, and Mother came to the shore each evening and called, but then one evening …’ He fell silent as Mother coughed in her bed again.

But Gilah didn’t want to listen to Mother’s cough. ‘Tell me more,’ she cried instead, and laughed as Father lifted her up. ‘Into the oven with the witch!’

He held her high in the air. Now he was tickling her tummy again, and this time it was properly funny.

But soon Mother coughed even louder and Father no longer looked happy. He turned silent and serious and put Gilah down on the floor and ran his hand through her hair.

She could see he was sad, but she wanted to hear the end of the story, when the witch went up in flames.

‘I can’t tell you more. I have to look after your mother. She needs water.’

There isn’t any water, Gilah thought. It’s hot and dry and Mother has said that everything out in the fields that Stalin hasn’t taken has died. Mother has also said that she’s going to die soon, that she’ll cough herself to death. Drying out, just like the crops.

‘There’s no point getting water,’ Gilah said.

Father looked at her sternly. ‘What do you mean?’

He probably knew, because he had always said Mother was an oracle, someone who knew everything that was happening out in the world, and who was always right.

‘Mother says she’s going to die.’

His eyes were wet and he didn’t reply, but he took Gilah’s hand. Then he stood up, went over to the closet, and took out his hat and coat, even though it was so hot outside. He shivered, and then he left.

Gilah stood by the window and watched her father go down the street. She knew it was dangerous out there, and only Father was allowed to go out, not Mother, not her brothers, and not her. There were dead bodies lying out there, and they had to be eaten because there was hardly anything else to eat, except for grass, leaves, bark, tree roots, worms and insects. Eaten up. Because they weren’t doing any good otherwise, those dead bodies.

Gilah Berkowitz had never eaten chicken before.

Father says he stole it, but she didn’t believe him.

Now it was on her plate. Her brothers didn’t want any, and when she tasted it she couldn’t understand why. It was the best thing she’d ever eaten.

A pity Mother was dead and couldn’t taste it.

She ate the moist meat greedily, and felt her strength returning. But she wasn’t happy because she was thinking of Mother the whole time.

The way she had looked when she died. Her skin yellow, and her mouth black. Gnarled, and sort of shiny.

She had spent her last days screaming before she gave up.

Since then the house had been quiet.