Midwinter Sacrifice (12 page)

‘Please don’t worry, Miss Fors. It is Miss Fors, isn’t it? I can only see the difference between light and dark these days, so there’s no need for you to try to catch my gaze.’

One of the peaceful ones, Malin thinks, and leans forward, articulating clearly and speaking louder than usual.

‘So you know why I’m here, Gottfrid?’

‘Nothing wrong with my hearing, Miss Fors.’

‘Sorry.’

‘They read out the story in the paper to me, about the awful thing that’s happened to Cornerhouse-Kalle’s boy.’

‘Cornerhouse-Kalle?’

‘Yes, that’s what everyone called Bengt Andersson’s father. Bad blood in that family, bad blood; nothing wrong with the lad really, but what can you do with blood like that, with that bloody restlessness?’

‘Please, tell me more about Cornerhouse-Kalle.’

‘Kalle? By all means, Miss Fors. Stories are all I have these days.’

‘Then please, tell me the story.’

‘Cornerhouse-Kalle was a legend in this community. They say he was descended from the gypsies who used to stay on a patch of waste ground on the other side of the Motala River, over by Ljung, near the manor. But I don’t know about that. Or maybe what they said was true, that he was the son of the brother and sister at Ljung Manor, the ones everyone knew were together like that. That the gypsies were paid to raise him, and that’s why Cornerhouse-Kalle turned out the way he did.’

‘When was this?’

‘It was in the twenties, I think, that Kalle was born, or the early thirties. This area was different then. There was the factory. And the big farms and the estate. No more than that. Kalle was lost to the rest of us right from the start. You see, he was the blackest of black children. Not in his skin, but inside. As if the doubt had condemned him, as if uncertainty became a sorrow that drove him mad, a sorrow that sometimes made him lose his grip on time and place. They say it was him who set fire to the estate farm, but no one knows. When he was thirteen he could neither read nor write – the master had driven him out of the school in Ljung – and then the county sheriff got him for the first time, for stealing eggs from Farmer Tureman.’

‘Thirteen?’

‘Yes, Miss Fors, he must have been hungry. Perhaps the gypsies were fed up with him? Perhaps the smart folk at the manor had grown tired of paying? But what do I know? Things like that were impossible to find out, not as easy as nowadays.’

‘Things like?’

‘Paternity, maternity.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘Then Kalle disappeared, didn’t come back for many years. There were rumours that he’d gone to sea, was in prison, terrible things. Murder, rape, child abuse. No one really knew. But he hadn’t been to sea, or I would have known.’

‘How?’

‘I did my years in the merchant navy during the war. I know a sailor when I see one. And Cornerhouse-Kalle was no sailor.’

‘What was he, then?’

‘More than anything, he was a womaniser. And a drinker.’

‘When did he come back here?’

‘It must have been some time in the mid-fifties. For a while he worked as a mechanic in the factory garage, but that didn’t last long, then he got some short-term farm work. As long as he was sober, he did the work of two men, so they put up with him.’

‘Put up with what?’

‘With the women and the drink. There can’t have been many working women, maids or farmer’s wives who didn’t know Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was king of the dance floor at the People’s Park. What he couldn’t get into his head about numbers and letters, he made up for with his body. He had cloven hooves when he danced. He could turn on the charm like the devil. He took whatever he wanted.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Ah, that was probably his secret, Miss Fors. The secret that made him irresistible to women. He looked like a beast of prey in human form, he was physical appetite made flesh. Broad, coarse, dark, close-set eyes and a jaw that seemed chiselled from marble.’

Gottfrid Karlsson falls silent, as if to allow the image of coarse masculinity to sink in to young Miss Fors.

‘Men are no longer made like that, Miss Fors. Even if there are still a number of
unpolished
people around here.’

‘Why “Cornerhouse”?’

Gottfrid puts his liver-spotted, withered hands on the chair’s armrests.

‘It must have been at the end of the fifties, or early sixties. I was working as a foreman at Cloetta then. Kalle had somehow come into a sum of money and bought a plot with an old red wooden cottage on it, down by Wester’s, just a few hundred metres from here, by the bend, next to the tunnel under the main road, on what today is called Anders väg. The tunnel didn’t exist then, and where the road is now used to be a meadow. I put in an offer on the house myself, so I know. It was a large amount of money in those days. There had been a robbery at a bank in Stockholm, and there were rumours that that was where Kalle’s money came from.

‘He had met a woman by then, Bengt’s mother, Elisabeth Teodorsson, a woman so rooted in the soil that she seemed utterly unshakable, as if she would outlive the earth itself. But of course that didn’t happen.’

Then the old man in front of her sighs and closes his eyes.

The flow of words seems to have stopped.

Perhaps the effort of digging through his memories has made him tired? Or has the story itself made him tired? Then his eyes open and the light in the foggy pupils is bright.

‘From the moment he bought the house he was known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Before that everyone knew who Kalle was, but now he got an extra name. I think that house was the start of the end for him; he wasn’t made for what you might call ordered circumstances.’

‘And then Bengt was born?’

‘Yes, 1961, I remember, but by the time he was born Cornerhouse-Kalle was behind bars.’

Gottfrid Karlsson closes his eyes again.

‘Are you tired?’

‘No, not at all, Miss Fors. I haven’t finished what I have to tell you yet.’

On her way out Malin stops at the nurses’ office.

Sister Hermansson is sitting on the bench by the wall, writing up figures on some sort of diagram.

She looks up. ‘Well?’

‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘It was good.’

‘Did you learn anything new?’

‘In a way.’

‘All those courses Gottfrid Karlsson took at the university after he retired have made him rather peculiar. So he may well have put ideas in your head. I presume he told you about the courses?’

‘No,’ Malin replies, ‘actually he didn’t.’

‘Then I should keep quiet,’ Hermansson says, and returns to her diagrams.

Down in the entrance the old men in the wheelchairs have gone.

When Malin emerges out of the revolving door and the cold hits her, Gottfrid Karlsson’s final words come back to her, as she knows they will do, over and over again.

She was on her way out when he put his hand on her arm.

‘Be careful now, Miss Fors.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Just remember one thing, Miss Fors. It is always desire that kills.’

16

The plot where the house, the cornerhouse, once stood.

The atmosphere now: middle-class pomp, a perfectly average, dull house. When could this pink-painted wooden villa with its factory-produced playful carvings have been built? 1984? 1990? Something like that. Whoever bought the house from Ball-Bengt knew what they were doing; presumably they bought cheap, sat out the recession, tore the house down, built a new bog-standard villa and sold up.

Did you build someone’s life away?

No.

Because what is a house, other than property, and what does property do other than impose responsibility? Rent your house, own nothing. The mantra of the poor, the broad-minded.

Malin has got out of the car, letting air into its suffocating staleness. Behind the stiff crowns of the birch trees she can make out the pedestrian tunnel under the Linköping road. A black hole where the hill on the far side becomes an impenetrable wall.

The house opposite is a much extended 1950s villa, as is the neighbouring house to the left. Who lives here now? No Cornerhouse-Kalle. No drunks. Any womanisers? Any abandoned fatties whose souls were never allowed to grow?

Hardly.

Salesmen, doctors, architects, people like that.

Malin walks up and down beside the car.

Gottfrid Karlsson’s voice: ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle beat up a man at the People’s Park. He did that a lot. Fighting was a way of life for him. But this time the other man lost an eye. He got six years for that.’

Malin walks over to the tunnel and the road and clambers up a slope via an unploughed cycle path. The aqueduct in the distance didn’t exist back then. Cars disappear and reappear through the fog. Malin can see the greenery, the summer glory, the canal boats gliding on the water over the road in the summer. There comes the world! And it isn’t yours, it isn’t yours. Your world will still be this little community, your loneliness, the laughter of the others as you chase errant balls.

‘Elisabeth made ends meet by sewing. She did adjustments for Slott’s ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Vasagatan. She took the bus every morning with Bengt on her arm and went to fetch the garments, then took them back on the bus in the evening. The drivers let her travel without paying. Then the boy got fat, and people said she used to let him eat butter and sugar just to keep him quiet while she was sewing.’

Malin stands at the railing above the pedestrian tunnel, looking down at the house, at the red cottage that once stood there. So small, but, for a boy, a whole universe, the stars in the night sky reminders of how transitory our lives are.

‘When Kalle got out Elisabeth was pregnant within a week or so. He was permanently intoxicated, old before his time. It was said that he was beaten by the other prisoners in the jail for something he had done in Stockholm. They said he had once grassed on someone to the police. But women were still just as crazy about him. He would spend Saturdays in the park. Skirts or fighting.’

Black tiles. Smoke from the chimney. Probably from an open fire.

‘Then Bengt’s sister Lotta was born. And it went on from there. Kalle drank and fought, he hit his wife and the boy, and the girl when she wouldn’t stop crying, but somehow they managed. Somehow. Kalle used to stand outside the bakery roaring at people as they walked past. The police let him be. He had got old.’

Malin goes back to the house, hesitating before she steps on to the driveway. There’s an ancient oak tree in the far corner of the plot. That oak must have been there in your time, Ball-Bengt, mustn’t it?

It was there in my time.

I used to run round that oak with my sister. We played there to keep Dad away, to force him to stay away with our laughter, our yelling, our childish shrieks.

Oh, how I ate.

As long as I ate there was hope; as long as there was food there was faith; as long as I ate there was no other reality but food; as long as I ate, my grief at what never was stayed in its dark hole.

But what good did all the running and eating do?

Instead it was Mum who disappeared. First the cancer took her liver, she spilled away from us within a month or so, and then, yes, what happened then . . . that was when the never-ending night began.

‘Social services should have taken the children away then, Miss Fors, when Elisabeth died. But they couldn’t do anything. Kalle wanted to keep them and that was the law. Bengt was perhaps twelve years old, the little girl, Lotta, six. As far as Bengt was concerned, it was probably already over by then. Damaged goods, fit only for throwing away. He was the loneliest of the lonely, the corner kid, a monster to stay away from. How do you talk to people who look at you like you’re a monster? I watched it happen from a distance, and if I have committed any sin, it was that I passed him by then, when he was somehow still there for real, if you understand my meaning, Miss Fors. When he needed me and the rest of us here.’

But the mother? Elisabeth. When is a raised hand to fend off a blow the only power you have left? When your hands are so badly beaten that you can no longer sew?

Malin walks round the house.

She feels eyes watching her from within. How they stare at her, wondering who she is. Fine, you carry on staring. Newly planted apple trees, an idyll of scented flowers: do you know how easy it is for that to fall apart and vanish, never to reappear?

Mum, even if you haven’t got the strength, come back.

Was that your prayer, Bengt?

I can’t say anything more now.

Even we, I, have limits.

I want to drift now.

Drift and burn.

But I missed her, and I was worried about my sister; maybe that was why I fought back, I don’t know, to hold it together somehow. You can see the houses that surrounded ours. I could see how it was supposed to be, how it could be.

I loved him, my dad, that’s why I raised the axe that evening.

Piss kids, dirt kids. Scared kids, teased kids. Never-go-to-school kids. Alcoholic’s kids.

A girl, a little Lotta who has stopped talking, who smells of wee, who stinks of a misery that has no place in the newly polished Social-Democrats’ ‘people’s home’.

Two Caterpillar boots breaking the hard crust of the snow in the back garden of a dream villa, a door opening, a suspicious male voice: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

The young police officer, expecting the question, holds up her ID. ‘Police. I’m just taking a look at the plot. Someone who lived here a long time ago is under investigation.’

‘When? We’ve lived here since 1999.’

‘Don’t worry. It was a long time ago, before this house was even built.’

‘Do you mind if I go in? I’m letting in so much cold air.’

The salesman variety. Highlights in his hair even though he’s almost forty.

‘Go ahead. I’m almost done.’

A mother vaporised by cancer, a father who destroys anything that comes within arm’s length. A howl full of longing echoing from the history of this place, these forests and fields.