The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (15 page)

The one who spat and threw dirt puts down his beer can on the bench and starts laughing, for real this time.

‘Fucking Greek bastard, a
third
? Take your retarded kid and get lost!’

It’s not a very big restaurant. Nine tables. There are small, dark, round lamps that look like snow lanterns hanging above the red and white checked tablecloths draped over every table. At three of the tables men sit alone, drinking a glass of beer, and at two of them young couples are eating pizzas larger than their plates. Pappa goes up to the bar and to the bartender Mahmoud, orders a beer, a sixth of Finnish vodka and a large orange-flavoured Fanta, then sits down at the table by the window.

They’ve been here several times before. He usually likes coming here, a Fanta in the dark with Pappa. But not now. His whole throat is dry, and he can’t get the drink down, as if there’s a blockage somewhere between his chest and stomach.

‘You’re not drinking anything? Aren’t you thirsty? Take a sip.’

Leo shakes his head.

‘Don’t you like it?’

A sip. And it gets stuck where the others got stuck. Near his heart.

‘Do you know how much there is in here, Leo?’

Pappa’s envelope and the thick wad of cash inside it.

‘Eight thousand kronor. I have to work. Mamma has to work. Everybody needs money. And when I work, Leo … I can’t protect you, you have to be able to protect yourself. You have to be able to protect your brothers.’

Pappa has drunk half the beer and all of the vodka.

‘Your Mamma doesn’t understand that – that you
have to
protect yourself. Those parasites out there don’t understand – that you
have to
work.’

His father points towards the window; the men outside seem upset, one of them is standing up, the long-haired one who called Pappa a Greek bastard.

‘They huddle together on a fucking fence yelling because they don’t have anything else in their lives. They think they’re mates because they drink from the same beer cans. Brothers, Leo! Family. That’s much more! So much bigger! It means … belonging together. Protecting each other. Whatever happens, you stick together. People like that? Damn it! If you hit just one of them on the nose, the rest will fall into the same fucking heap.’

On the other side of the window, the guy with the long hair has stopped screaming, and walks towards the restaurant door with determined steps. And
they
are there too, Leo notices, running between the buildings across the street: Jasper and the Turks and the boys from Kullstigen. Every single time. Somehow Jasper always knows when there is going to be a fight and he always runs so he can be the first one there to watch. It’s as if he can’t get enough. Then again, he doesn’t have a father who hung a mattress from the ceiling.

But Pappa doesn’t see the other kids. He only sees the guy with the long hair. He juts his chin forward, and his bottom lip, lowers his forehead and stares through his eyebrows, like he always does when he’s made up his mind – and that’s when anything can happen.

‘Look at me, Leo. Pappa’s going to handle this. We’re a family. We protect each other.’

The door opens.

The guy in the moon boots. And he’s much bigger now – when
he
was the one sitting down, it was hard to see that he was taller than Pappa, stronger.

His long hair moves as he walks towards them. Flutters back and forth between his shoulders. Until he stops and looks at Pappa, who has put down his beer.

‘Got a light?’

He stands beside the table. A cigarette in his mouth. Pappa sits there, completely still.

‘Hey, wop, got a light?’

His long hair reaches all the way down to Pappa’s beer glass, and when he leans over he dips it into the beer, moves his head, stirs his hair in the beer. Then everything happens quickly. Afterwards, when Leo thinks about it, he’s not even sure it happened at all.

The hair in the glass.

Pappa unsheathing his red-handled Mora knife from his work trousers, grabbing hold of the hair tightly, while at the same time cutting it off.

‘
You damn
…’

The long-haired man staggers backwards, one hand on the place where his hair used to be.

‘
You fucking
…’

That damn door again. Three more come in, the curly blond and the two who had been sitting next to him. Pappa drops the hair onto the floor, like petals falling from a rose, they land near the legs of the chair. Then he stands up and does what Leo has seen Pappa do to others he’s talked to like that – but what he’d never understood before. He understands it now. Right fist hits the nose and left hits the chin, shoulders rotate and the upper body punches through the knuckles. The nasal bone cracks, and it occurs to him again how loud the noise is when a grownup falls down headlong.

It happens just as fast the second time. The one who’d been sitting on the fence – a single blow to his nose, and he falls onto the table near the toilets, which is usually empty.

The third man, the curly blond, still stands. It’s as if he’s waiting. And
when Pappa takes the next step, he turns his face away and holds up his arms.

‘No!’

He just stands there.

‘We won’t … we’ll never sit there again, we—’

‘Sit down.
Here
.’

Pappa pulls out the chair that he’s just been sitting in. And the men who were standing outside, on their way inside, are leaving now, running away.

‘Right here. But on the floor. Next to my son. And on your knees.’

The blond hesitates.

‘Sit!’

Then he sinks down onto his knees. And right behind him – the bartender, Mahmoud – seems to be in a hurry.

‘Ivan?’

‘I’m almost done.’

Mahmoud puts a hand on Pappa’s shoulder.

‘Ivan, for God’s sake, you can’t—’

‘I’ll pay for the damage. Just calm down. I can pay. OK?’

Pappa shows him the envelope, they look at each other for a moment until Mahmoud nods, lets go of Pappa’s shoulder, and Pappa turns to the man on his knees.

‘You’re no leader.’

The Mora knife. Pappa is holding it in his hand in front of the leader’s face.

‘A
real
leader doesn’t send his favourite loser to dip his hair into my beer.’

Moves it closer.

‘A
real
leader doesn’t send his lackeys. He goes first. He leads.’

The knife touches his mouth and nose, and the blond man starts to cry. Not much, but clearly enough.

‘Did you hear that, Leo?’

Pappa is holding the knife against the blond man’s face, but he’s looking at his son.

‘What?’

‘Listen!’

‘What, Pappa?’

‘A real leader
leads
.’

The blond man moves his head a little away from the knife, which still has flecks of white paint on its blade.

‘Stay on your knees! Next to my son!’

Pappa’s hand clutches the curly hair, baring a sweaty neck.

‘Leo?’

‘Yes?’

‘You see that? Always the first blow right in the nose. Always your whole body behind it.’

‘I saw.’

Pappa pulls on the curly hair until his knuckles whiten.

‘A good leader hits hard. Is fair. Never lets his brothers get hit. He takes responsibility and leads them. This loser parasite sent someone else! He doesn’t understand that a leader always goes first.’

The beer glass is still standing there, half full. Pappa nods towards the other glass, which is orange and about as full.

‘Drink up. We’re leaving now.’

Leo shakes his head. The place between his chest and stomach is like a messy knot, as if someone had pulled his throat apart and then tried to fix it.

‘You stay there!’

When they stood up from the table, the blond had also tried to rise.

‘You stay where I told you! The whole damn time! Until my son and I go through that door and you can’t see us any longer!’

It’s warmer outside. Or at least it feels like that.

The entrance to the Skogås shopping centre is still there. But the benches and railings are empty and the green beer cans are rolling around on the ground in the breeze, several cigarettes still burning.

Leo breathes in, breathes out, it’s easier now.

THEY’RE WALKING ALONG
the asphalt path that cuts through the high-rises, past a closed school and a deserted car park. There’s just one last hill left until home, when Pappa stops, turns around.

‘Do you hear that, Leo?’

The wind. Only the wind.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you hear it?’

‘No.’

‘Silence.’

Pappa nods towards the shopping centre.

‘The benches, Leo. The railings. Only half an hour ago the parasites were sitting there gaping. Now they’re gone. Because I decided they should be.’

They’re standing at a place similar to the one where Leo lay a few days earlier. The bushes, the lamp posts, the asphalt path towards the stairwell. He wonders if Pappa knows that, or if it just happened that way.

‘Willpower, Leo, you understand that? That’s what matters. If you have enough willpower you can change anything you want. You’re the one who decides. Nobody else! You decide, then you follow through.’

He runs up seven flights of stairs while Pappa takes the lift, racing him. If he takes two steps at a time, he’ll open their brown front door just before Pappa opens the lift. He passes the kitchen where his mother is standing with her back towards him at the aluminium worktop, her hands deep in a stainless steel bowl: meatballs, or steak. He passes Vincent’s room, where his younger brothers sit on the carpet in a city of cloth, with exactly seventy-seven soldiers, painstakingly placing the British commandos opposite the US marines, and Leo whispers that it’s all wrong, that they didn’t fight each other, and Felix whispers back that he knows that, but that’s how Vincent wants it.

Then he senses his father walking up behind him, quickly, straight into the workroom where the mattress is leaning against a wall. He jumps up on the stool with the mattress in one hand, and lifts it up, while taking down the lamp with his other hand.

‘Ivan?’

Mamma stands in the doorway.

‘I’ve already explained. I don’t want a mattress hanging there.’

‘It’s not a fucking mattress – it’s a punchbag. And it’s hanging there now. And it will continue to hang there until our son is ready.’

She wipes a hand across her forehead, doesn’t notice the streak of hamburger.

‘Hans Åkerberg. Jari Kekkonen. Those are their names. They’re in year
seven, at Skogås secondary school. We’ll talk to their parents. Talk, Ivan. Solve this.’

‘Talk? We’re not
talking
to their damn parents.’

‘Why shouldn’t we?’

‘Because that won’t stop this bullshit! Those kind don’t stop until you make them stop by yourself. That’s how it works. But you don’t understand that, Britt-Marie.’

Mamma rubs her hand against her forehead again. Even more stripes. She’s aware of it, Leo can see that she is, but she doesn’t care right now.

‘You have no idea what I know about how a child confronts another child. You’ve never been interested, Ivan. You never wanted to listen to anyone who is associated with me. My mother and father. Erik and Anita. My friends. You’re only interested in creating conflict! You want to isolate us. As a family. Just this bloody family!’

‘They attacked my son.’

‘Just us. Against the whole world.’

‘They knocked him down from behind, kicked him, and you want me to
talk
to his father! Should we invite him over for dinner, too?’

Pappa punches the mattress, which starts dancing between them.

‘It’s better that they stop this by themselves. Without us getting involved.’

Leo is waiting to go inside. He glances towards Vincent’s room instead, at the seventy-seven soldiers, who are actually on the same side, shooting at each other and falling down, until they all fall down, and can all be set up again.

Pappa is still standing there. Mamma is in the kitchen.

Leo walks towards the punchbag, takes off his shirt and stands in position with his weight on his left leg, strikes the first blow.

‘Right hand protects the right cheek.’

He doesn’t hold his right hand high enough, and Pappa takes a panther-like step forward and strikes his face gently with the palm of his hand.

‘Right hand protects the right cheek, Leo.’

Leo watches Pappa, clenches his right hand and hits with his left, and Pappa puts out his palm again. This time his chin stings a little – he’s still keeping his right hand too low.

He gets into position again.

LEO SITS ON
the edge of his bed in his thin underwear, yawning, his bare feet on the cold floor. Behind him is his shelf of precious things: Felix’s red VW Beetle, still in its original packaging, a silver trophy from the school championship, and his noisy New York Rangers alarm clock, with hands that look like hockey sticks and that read quarter to five. The morning is still dark behind the flimsy blinds.

Every day this week he’s been practising several times by himself, then once with Pappa in the evening, then having got up early in the morning.

This is the very last time.

He goes to the workroom, hits at nose and chin.
Today
. He feels it from his arm to his chest and stomach, all the way to his groin.

He rests on the balcony for a while afterwards, looking out over the roof of the school in the distance, washes up standing over the sink, and puts out food for breakfast. Felix gets up, rouses Vincent.

‘Leo – what is it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It
is
something.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘You seem weird. You’re not like usual. You don’t even talk like you usually do.’

Felix digs his spoon into the yogurt.

‘It’s as if … you’re sitting here, but not with me. You’re sitting here with you.’

‘I’m gonna take them today.’

‘Take them?’

‘Hasse. And Kekkonen.’

Felix stirs and stirs his damn yogurt, he doesn’t care about it, doesn’t want it.