Let the Old Dreams Die (33 page)

I don’t remember what else was said that evening, but it was to be the last time I saw Stefan and Karin. At that stage Stefan’s condition had been critical but stable, and the doctors believed he had at least a few months left, so when we said goodbye there was nothing to suggest that it would be forever.

But something intervened.

When I rang on the Monday a couple of weeks later, no one answered the phone. When there was no answer the following day either, I started to worry. On the Wednesday I received a card with a Stockholm postmark. It was a picture of Arlanda airport, and on the back it said, ‘Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones. Thank you for everything, dearest friend. Stefan and Karin.’

I turned the postcard over and over, but I was none the wiser. Arlanda? Let the old dreams…had they gone abroad? Was there some new treatment available elsewhere? It seemed highly unlikely. After all, that was why I had taken the news so hard; I knew as well as they did that pancreatic cancer was untreatable. Anywhere.

I was free on the Saturday and caught the bus to Östernäs. I had a spare key to their house and permission to use the place whenever they were away. However, I still felt uncomfortable as I unlocked the front door and called out, ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ As if I were barging into something private. But I had to find out.

The house had recently been cleaned, and a faint smell of detergent lingered in the wooden floor. There wasn’t a sound, and it
was obvious that no one was at home. But still I crept through the hallway as if I were afraid of disturbing some delicate balance.

The fridge had been emptied and the water heater switched off. No radiators were on, and it was quite cold inside the house. When I opened Stefan’s wardrobe to borrow a sweater, I saw that quite a lot of his clothes were missing. They had gone away, that much was clear. I pulled on a yellow woollen cardigan with big buttons that Stefan loathed; he had kept it only because I used to borrow it when we were sitting on the veranda.

I went through the house and found more signs of a well-organised but definitive departure. The few photograph albums they owned were gone, along with a number of favourite albums from the CD rack. Eventually I found myself standing outside Karin’s study. If the answer wasn’t in there, then there was no answer to be found. I cautiously opened the door.

Yes, I might as well admit it. With every door I opened I was afraid I would find the two of them in a deathly embrace, in the best-case scenario achieved with an overdose of Stefan’s morphine, in the worst-case with more obvious means.

But there were no beautiful corpses in Karin’s study either. There was, however, a printout of a receipt, along with an envelope containing a photograph. Both were neatly laid out on the desk, as if they had been placed there so that I would find them.

The receipt was for plane tickets. Two one-way tickets to Barcelona, four days earlier. So far so good. They had gone to Spain. The photograph, however, made no sense at all. It showed a group of people who were presumably a family. Mother, father and two children standing on a street at night, brightly lit by the camera’s flashbulb. The signs around them were in Spanish and Catalan, so it wasn’t a great stretch to assume they were in Barcelona.

I looked at the envelope. It had been sent by the National Police Board a week earlier, and was addressed to Karin. Right down in the
bottom corner someone had written ‘Something for you, maybe?’ and drawn a smiley. When I looked inside the envelope again I found a short letter from someone who lived in Blackeberg and had known Oskar Eriksson very well. He apologised for wasting police time, said the whole thing was completely crazy of course, but he asked them to look carefully at the enclosed photograph.

I did as the letter asked, and took a closer look at the picture. I thought I knew what he meant, but looked around on the desk for a magnifying glass. Instead I found an enlargement of the relevant part of the picture, which Karin had presumably printed out herself.

There was no doubt. Once I had seen the enlargement, it was as clear as day on the first picture too. To one side behind the family were two people who happened to have been caught in the camera flash. One was Oskar Eriksson, and the other was a slender girl with long, black hair. In spite of the fact that the photograph must have been taken immediately after his disappearance, Oskar had changed his hairstyle; it was cut short in a way that was more fashionable among young people today.

I remembered him as a chubby child, but the boy in the picture was considerably slimmer, and as he had been caught on the run, so to speak, he actually looked quite athletic. I looked at the enlargement again, and Stefan’s story about what had happened in Karlstad came back to me. There was something vaguely menacing about the way the two children were moving behind the smiling, unsuspecting family. Like predators.

Then I spotted something that made me gasp. The father of the family was holding a mobile phone, and not just any mobile phone, but an iPhone. How long had they been around? A year? Two years?

I turned the photograph over and read the words in the bottom right-hand corner.

Barcelona, September 2008
.

The photograph had been taken barely a month ago.

I sat at Karin’s desk for a long time, looking from the receipt for the plane tickets to the photograph of Oskar Eriksson and the girl with black hair, moving through the night. And I thought about how the end can be encapsulated in the beginning, and I thought about Stefan and Karin, my dearest friends.

It’s been two years now. I haven’t heard if they’re alive, but nor have I heard that they’re dead.

Let the old dreams die. We are dreaming new ones.

I hope they found what they were looking for.

I want you to understand something. Are you listening? Yes. I want you to understand…it’s important to me that you understand…I’m not doing this because I enjoy it. Can you understand that? I’m not going to enjoy this. This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you.

You’re laughing. Yes, OK.

But you understand…the whole point is that it will hurt me too. That’s the whole point. Can you understand that?

Of course you’re not as au fait with these matters as I am. But if you were. If you had devoted an entire lifetime. To trying to…grasp. These issues. Then I think…

[---]

Did everything work out OK with the money?

Good.

I mean, it hasn’t been all that easy for me to…stage this, as you perhaps realise. Neither when it comes to you, nor to those who will be here in ten minutes. You don’t exactly belong to…my normal
circle of friends, if I can put it that way. It’s dead, incidentally.

My normal circle of friends. Is dead. Nothing strange about that. It’s time. Of those who attended the seminary with me, only I and one other are still alive.

The seminary. That’s where you train. That’s what it’s called. The seminary for priests.

I don’t want you to drink any more now.

Good.

[---]

I remember when I was…yes, even when I was only…thirteen or fourteen. I started thinking about these things.

What it was really like.

The actual experience. It’s much more central than we are really prepared to admit, in fact. Here in Sweden, at any rate.

What?

Yes, they’ll get half of what you get. Their task is also quite… unpleasant, after all.

There is one thing I’m wondering about.

Do you find any form of…how shall I put it…moral satisfaction in this?

No. I don’t mean it like that.

I mean…

When you’re a child. And you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be…Robin Hood. And while you’re that person, you can…

No. That’s a different matter.

Have you never wondered?

No. Most people don’t, after all. Not even in my profession.

You must understand that this is something that has preoccupied me all through my life. In a way which is perhaps…unhealthy. But there’s nothing I can do about that. We are how we are.

Some people are driven down into the depths of the sea. Others
up to the peaks of mountains. Some study the stars. All their lives. In order to understand. Whatever that means.

For my part…

I saw a man pierced by a scythe when I was eleven years old. In through his stomach and out through his back.

I mean, you might think that would be…enough.

But he died immediately.

What?

No, it wasn’t anybody I knew.

[---]

Do you have anyone…particularly close?

Why is that, then?

No, I suppose it’s these…what are they called…pimples, in that case. Otherwise I think you have a nice face.

No, don’t drink any more.

[---]

This project…

Right. It’s seven o’clock. The others will be here at any moment.

This project has been on my mind for quite a while.

The fact is, I wish I had done it a long time ago.

As things stand now…

Well, it will be more like a last wish.

Not something from which I will be able to…gain any benefit.

And I suppose that’s how it should be, in some way.

[---]

It’s a bell-headed nail. It’s used for fixing tin roofs, normally.

Nails with the kind of head you really need for this…you can’t buy them. Not any more.

There. That was the doorbell. It’s time.

Can you go and answer it, I can’t get up.

I think it’s best if you…don’t get to know each other.

My friendship with Majken began with a telephone call.

I’d been annoyed with the Konsum supermarket chain for a long time; they make such a big thing out of being environmentally friendly, but they wrap their turnips in plastic. I can understand them doing that with peppers, or Spanish cauliflowers. But to wrap plastic around whole local turnips and then to call themselves ‘Green Konsum’ just isn’t acceptable. It’s hypocrisy, and nothing less.

I’m no expert when it comes to dealing with vegetables, but one thing I do know: turnips keep just as well as potatoes if you treat them the right way. And they don’t use plastic on potatoes. So every time I came home with a turnip and had to peel off a layer of thin plastic film before I could use it, I got annoyed.

The earth’s finite resources, fossil fuels, oil, plastic. You know all that stuff. I always have a couple of cotton bags with me when I go shopping. Little things, insignificant you might say. But many drops make a huge river, and a few tonnes of plastic will undeniably
turn into a mountain eventually. A mountain of plastic. And what do we do with that?

So I made a phone call.

We really want to hear what you think,
it says on their blue and white packaging. KF customer services, and the telephone number.

‘Majken,’ replied a voice on the other end.

I explained why I was ringing, expecting cool approval, an assurance that we are working to make our stores more environmentally friendly, thank you for ringing, your views are important to us. Something along those lines. I’ve done this before.

But Majken did more than agree with me. She chimed in. Did I know that Konsum spent more money on marketing its environmental policy than on implementing it? Did I know that a significant proportion of the goods labelled ‘ecological’ are actually produced by workers earning starvation wages, and using methods that would never be accepted in Sweden?

Well yes, I had read something about that, but now I was getting the information from the inside, so to speak, it had a different kind of credibility.

We talked about where all the money goes. Where the profits actually go. I said I always tried to shop at Konsum, because I believe in the idea of a co-operative, even though it’s gone a bit off course in recent years.

Majken laughed. ‘Gone a bit off course? You could say that. You could also say it’s been flayed alive, ripped to shreds and thrown on the rubbish dump. Do you know what the bosses at KF earn?’

I didn’t. She told me.

As the conversation went on I got a strange, sinking feeling in my stomach. Majken was the last person I would have expected to talk like this. I mean, she was the face of the company—or rather its voice—as far as the public was concerned, and her job was to deodorise and sanitise anything shady rather than highlighting it. I
asked her why she was so critical.

‘Is there any other way to be?’ she asked. ‘I know how things are, and I can’t just sit here and lie to you, can I?’

I had also expected the conversation to be short. A couple of minutes at the most. But I think we talked for over half an hour. I ended up telling her quite a lot about my life and my job as well. Twenty years as a cleaner and five as a carer for my husband, Börje.

‘How much do you earn?’ asked Majken.

‘Ten seven.’

‘After tax?’

‘No. Before.’

A long sigh.

‘Can you manage on that?’

‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘It’s…well, that’s why I buy turnips. As I said. Some months are a bit tight. If it weren’t for Börje’s disability pension, I don’t know what we’d do.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Why don’t you do a bit of shoplifting?’

The feeling in the pit of my stomach, which had disappeared while we were talking about other things, came back again. But still I answered, quietly, ‘I do.’

Majken laughed again, and a doubtless foolish smile spread across my lips. It was an appreciative laugh.

‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ she said. ‘Shoplifting is the only reasonable answer.’

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘But what was the question?’

I really liked her laugh. It came so easily, bubbling out. Her voice was an old person’s, if women of my age are old, but her laugh was something different, it came from a different source. The picture of her I had in my mind grew younger. I saw big blue eyes, a sparkle.

‘The question every store, every aspect of the consumer society asks us,’ she said. ‘
Have you earned this?’