Before the Frost (19 page)

They drove toward Malmö and Linda saw the sea shimmering to her left.
I don't want to die here,
she thought. The thought came out of nowhere.
I don't only want to exist. Not like Zeba. And not be a single mother like her, or thousands of others whose lives become one long damned struggle to pay the rent and the babysitters and getting someplace on time. I don't want to be like Dad, who can never find the right house and the right dog and the wife he needs
.

“What was that?” Wallander asked.

“Nothing.”

“That's funny. It sounded like you were swearing.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“I have a strange daughter,” Wallander said to Lindman. “She curses without even knowing it.”

 

They turned onto the road that led to Henrietta's house. The memory of being caught in the steel trap made Linda's leg throb. She asked what would happen to the man who had set the trap.

“He went a little pale in the face when I told him he had snared a police cadet. I'm assuming he'll have to pay a hefty fine.”

“I have a good friend in Östersund,” Stefan Lindman said. “A policeman. Giuseppe Larsson is his name.”

“He sounds Italian.”

“No, he's from Östersund. But he has a connection of sorts with an Italian lounge singer.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Linda leaned forward between the seats. She had a sudden urge to touch Lindman's face.

“His mother had a dream that his father was not her husband but an Italian singer she had heard perform at an outdoor concert. It's not just us men who have these fantasies.”

“I wonder if Mona has ever had the same thoughts,” Wallander said. “In your case it would be a black dream father, Linda, since she worshipped Hosh White.”

“Josh,” Lindman said. “Not Hosh.”

Linda wondered vaguely what it would have been like to have a black father.

“Anyway,” Lindman said. “My friend has an old bear trap on the wall at his place. It looks like an instrument of torture from the Middle Ages. He always said that if a person ever got caught in one, the steel teeth would cut all the way through the bone. The animals that get trapped in them have been known to gnaw their own legs off in desperation.”

Lindman stopped the car and they climbed out. The wind was gusty. They walked up to the house, in which several of the windows were lit up. When they entered the front yard, all three of them wondered why the dog hadn't started to bark. Lindman
knocked on the door, but no one answered. Wallander peeked in through a window. Lindman felt the door. It was unlocked.

“We can say we thought we heard someone call ‘Come in!'” he said tentatively.

They walked in. Linda's view was blocked by the broad backs of the two men. She tried standing on tiptoe to see past them but winced with pain.

“Anybody home?” Wallander called out.

“Doesn't look like it,” Lindman said.

They proceeded through the house. It looked much as it had when Linda was there last. Papers, sheet music, newspapers, and coffee cups were scattered all over. But she recognized that this superficial impression of disarray only disguised a home comfortably arranged to meet Henrietta's every need.

“The door was unlocked,” Lindman said, “and her dog is gone. She must be out on an evening walk. Let's give her a quarter of an hour. If we leave the door open she'll know someone's inside.”

“She may call the police if she thinks the house is being burgled,” Linda said.

“Burglars don't leave the front door wide open for everyone to see,” her father said.

He sat down in the most comfortable armchair, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes. Lindman put his boot in the front door to keep it open. Linda picked up a photo album that Henrietta had left lying on the piano. The first pictures were from the early 1970s. The colors were starting to fade. Anna sat on the ground surrounded by chickens and a yawning cat. Anna had told Linda about the commune outside Markaryd where she had spent the first years of her life. Henrietta was holding her in another picture from that time, in baggy clothes, clogs, and a Palestinian shawl around her neck.
Who is holding the camera?
Linda wondered.
Probably Eric Westin, the man who was about to disappear without a trace
.

Lindman walked over to her and she pointed to the pictures, explaining what she knew about them: the commune, the green wave, the sandal maker who vanished into thin air.

“It sounds like something out of a story,” he said. “Like
A
Thousand and One Nights
. I mean the part about the Sandal Maker Who Vanished into Thin Air.”

They kept turning the pages.

“Is there a picture of him?”

“I've seen a few at Anna's place, but that was a long time ago. I have no idea where they would be.”

Pictures of life in the commune gave way to images of an Ystad apartment. Gray concrete, a wintry playground. Anna was a few years older.

“By this time he had been gone for several years,” Linda said. “The person taking the pictures is closer to Anna than before. Pictures in the commune are always taken from a greater distance.”

“Her father took those pictures and now Henrietta is the one taking them. Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

They flipped through to the end of the album, but there was no picture of Westin. One of the last pictures was of Anna's high school graduation. Zeba was included at the edge of the frame. Linda had been there too, but she wasn't shown.

Linda was about to turn the page when the lights flickered and went out. The house was plunged into darkness and Wallander woke up with a start. They heard a dog barking outside. Linda sensed the presence of people out there in the night, people who did not intend to show their faces, but rather shied away from the light and were retreating even farther into the world of shadows.

21

He only felt secure in total darkness. He had never understood why there was always this talk of light in connection with mercy, eternity, images of God. Why couldn't a miracle take place in total darkness? Wasn't it harder for the Devil and his demons to find you in the shadows than on a bright expanse where white figures moved as slowly as froth on the crest of a wave? For him God had always manifested Himself as an enveloping, deeply comforting darkness.

He felt the same way now as he stood outside the house with the brightly lit windows. He saw people moving around inside. When all the lights suddenly went out and the last door of darkness was sealed he took it as a sign from God.
I am his servant in the darkness,
he thought.
No light escapes from here but I shall send out holy shadows to fill the void in the souls of the lost. I shall open their eyes and teach them the truth of the images that reside in the shadow-world
. He thought about the lines in John's second epistle: “For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.” It was the holiest key to his understanding of God's Word.

After the terrible events in the jungles of Guyana he could recognize a false prophet: a man with smooth black hair and even white teeth, who surrounded himself with light. Jim Jones had feared the dark. He had cursed himself countless times for not seeing through the guise of this false prophet who would lead them so astray—to their deaths. All of them except himself. This had been the first task God had assigned him: to survive in order to tell the world about the false prophet. He was to preach about the kingdom
of darkness, which would become the fifth gospel that he would write to complete the holy writings of the Bible. This too was foretold at the end of John's letter: “Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be complete.”

This particular evening he had been thinking about all the years that had gone by since he was last here. Twenty-four years, a large part of his life. When he left he was still a young man. Now age had started to claim his body. He took care of himself, ate sensibly, kept himself in constant motion, but the process of growing old had begun. No one could escape it.
God lets us age in order for us to understand that we are completely in his hands. He gives us this remarkable life, but as a tragedy so that we will understand that only he has the power to grant us mercy.

He stood in the darkness and thought back to all that had happened. Everything had been what he had dreamed of until he followed Jim Jones to Guyana. Even though he missed those he had left behind, in the end he had been convinced by Jim that this loss was necessary to prepare him for the higher purpose God held in store for him. He had listened to Jim, and sometimes he had not thought about his wife and his child for weeks at a time. It was only after the massacre, when the whole community lay rotting on the fields, that they returned to his consciousness. But by then it was too late. The void created by the God that Jim had killed in him was so devastating that he could not think of anyone but himself.

He had retrieved the money and papers he had stored in Caracas, then took the bus to Colombia, to the city of Barranquilla. He remembered the long night he spent in the border station between Venezuela and Colombia, the city of Puerto Paez, where armed guards watched over the travelers like hawks. Somehow he had managed to convince these guards that he was John Clifton, as his documents stated, and he even managed to convince them that he didn't have any money left. He had slept with his head on the shoulder of an old Native woman who carried a small cage with two chickens on her lap. They had not exchanged any words, just a look, and she had seen his exhaustion and suffering and offered him her shoulder and wrinkled neck to rest his head. That night he
dreamed about those he had left behind. He woke up drenched in sweat. The old woman was awake. She looked at him and he dropped back against her shoulder. When he woke up in the morning she was gone. He felt inside his shirt and touched the thick wad of dollar bills. It was still there. He wanted her back again, the old woman who had let him sleep. He wanted to lean his head against her shoulder and neck and stay there for the rest of his life.

From Barranquilla he took a plane to Mexico City. He washed off the worst of his filth in a public restroom. He bought a new shirt and a small Bible. It had been confusing to see the rushing crowds again, this life that he had left behind when he followed Jim. He walked past the newsstands and saw that what had happened had made the front-page headlines. Everyone was dead, he read. No one was thought to have survived. That meant they must think he was dead too. He existed but he had stopped living, since he was presumed to be one of the bloated bodies found in the jungle.

He still didn't have a clear plan. He had $3,000 left after paying for the fare to Mexico City, and if he was frugal he could get by on that for quite a while. But where should he go? Where could he find the first step back to God, out of this unbearable emptiness? He didn't know. He stayed in Mexico City, in a small hostel, and spent his days attending various churches. He deliberately avoided the large cathedrals as well as the neon-lit tabernacles run by greedy and power-hungry clergy. Instead he sought out the small congregations where the love and the passion were palpable, where the ministers were hard to tell apart from those who came to listen to their sermons. That was the way he had to find for himself.
Jim hid himself in the light,
he thought.
Now I want to find the God who can lead me to the holy darkness
.

One day he woke up with the overwhelming feeling that he had to leave. He took a bus going north the same day. To make the journey as cheap as possible, he took local buses. On certain stretches he hitched rides with truck drivers. He crossed the border into Texas at Laredo, where he checked into the cheapest motel he could find. He spent a week at the public library catching up on everything he could find that had been written about the catastrophe. To his consternation he found that there were former members of the People's
Temple who were accusing the FBI and CIA and the American government of fostering hostility toward Jim Jones and his movement, thereby inciting the mass suicide. He started to sweat. How could they defend the false prophet?

During the long sleepless nights it occurred to him that he should write about what had happened. He was the only living witness. He bought a notebook and started to write, but he was overcome with doubt. If he were going to tell the real story he would have to reveal his true identity: not John Clifton, as his documents claimed, but another man with another nationality and name altogether. Did he want that? He hesitated.

Then he read an interview with a woman named Mary-Sue Legrande in the
Houston Chronicle
. There was a photo of her: a woman in her forties with dark hair and a thin, almost pointed face. She talked about Jim Jones and claimed to know his secrets. In the interview she presented herself as a distant spiritual relative of Jim. She had known him at the time he had the series of visions that would later lead him to found his church, the People's Temple.

I know Jim's secrets,
said Mary-Sue Legrande. But what were they? She didn't say. He stared at the photograph. Mary-Sue seemed to be looking right back at him. She was divorced with a grown son and now owned a small mail-order company in Cleveland. Her company sold something called “manuals for self-actualization.”

He put the newspaper back on the shelf, nodding to the friendly librarian before walking out onto the street. It was an unusually mild day in December, shortly before Christmas. He stopped in the shade of a tree.
If Mary-Sue Legrande can tell me Jim Jones's secrets I will understand why I was taken in by him. Then I will never suffer this same weakness again.