Lifetime (38 page)

‘Yes,’ Anne said quietly. ‘The door was unlocked.’

Gunnar’s sigh was heavy but still relieved.

‘Now I know,’ he said, patting her on the shoulder as he got up. ‘You’re a good kid, Anne.’ Then he left the same way he’d come in.

The long, straight street was lined with a variety of three-storey apartment buildings from the 1940s and 1950s: yellow brick, grey stucco, balconies with iron railings.

The damp oily-smelling wind whipped at Annika as she passed a boat service centre, a satellite-dish store, a tanning-bed salon with the blinds down, a club for people who liked to build scale models, and a karate club.

The courtyard that supposedly housed the offices of the Nazi Party was interchangeable with the other yards on the block: sheet-metal garages, a large dumpster, a platform for beating carpets, posts to hook up engine pre-heaters, a few drastically pruned birch trees and some patched asphalt. A flight of stairs led down to a metal door at basement level. Annika cautiously made her way along the uneven concrete floor and knocked firmly on the door. No reply.

She tried the door, pulling on the handle. It opened. Music welled out of the depths of the room, a poor-quality recording of something heavy-metallish, a hoarse youth shouting: ‘Fight the system, fight the system, fight the system, knock it down, burn it to the ground, politicians don’t work for the people, they’re only in it to rip us off, they’re sticking it to us in the ass.’

Annika stepped into the gloom, feeling the bass line hit her in the gut, and felt her way down a dusty passage, a smell of mould in the air. Further down, on the left, a door stood ajar, emitting waves of light and sound. It was metal, painted black, and icy cold to the touch. The squeal of the opening door drowned out the white-supremacy anthem, causing the young woman inside to stop in her tracks. Annika walked into the room and met the girl’s gaze, black as outer space, her rigid body ready to run.

‘All right if I come in?’ Annika shouted to be heard over the music.

Hannah Persson sprang to life, turning around and switching off the stereo, the sudden silence producing a surreal impression of a deafening echo in the room.

‘What do you want?’ she said, the feral expression back in her eyes again. She had been crying. Her eyes were glazed and her eyelids were swollen.

‘To talk, that’s all,’ Annika said.

‘About what?’

Hannah Persson’s hostility was too forced to be convincing. Annika walked into the room and looked around. The windows were nailed shut and the walls were plastered with racist propaganda posters.

‘All sorts of stuff,’ she said. ‘About you, why you’re a Nazi, what it was like to be arrested, what happened at Yxtaholm . . .’

‘Why should I tell you anything?’

Annika stood in front of Hannah Persson, face to face, looked her in the eye and realized that the girl had probably been drinking.

‘You asked me a few questions,’ Annika replied calmly. ‘Still interested in an answer?’

The girl’s eyes went slightly out of focus and she took two steps back.

‘What do you mean?’

Annika looked away and walked over to a bookcase containing a few slim volumes and pulled out
The Destiny of the Angels.
On the back cover the following prodigious questions were posed: Does a race, the Nordic peoples, have the right to exist, the right to live? Are they entitled to claim the conditions they need to exist?

‘Read this?’ Annika asked, holding up the book. Not getting a reply, she then picked up the next one.
The Treatise on Race
, by the same author, purported to contain a proclamation of racial rights, racial purity and racial independence.

‘That’s a deeply philosophical book,’ Hannah Persson said.

‘In what way?’ Annika asked.

‘It discusses what happens when a race is subjected to living conditions that can lead only to their gradual destruction.’

The girl’s face had become animated. Two red spots flamed on her cheeks. Under the influence of booze but still lucid, she turned to Annika.

‘So what conclusions does it reach?’ Annika asked.

‘That we cannot escape our obligation: choice. Do we, the Nordic peoples, have the right to acknowledge our racially unique features? Do we have the right to be cognizant of the physical and spiritual beauty that would be lost for ever if we were deprived of the conditions we need for our survival?’

Annika was stunned by the blatant racism, its rankness hitting her like a gust of fetid breath.

‘My guess is that this book says the answer to those questions is yes,’ she said.

Once again the predator, the young Nazi smiled at Annika’s dismay.

‘In the midst of a culture and a dominant moral doctrine that says no,’ she added, walking up to Annika and taking the book from her hand.

‘Ever considered why society and your book have different answers?’

Deep in thought, Hannah Persson leafed through the book reverently, the forced smile still in place. Choosing to read aloud from the book instead she intoned:

‘Due to several unfortunate factors, ranging from altruism and self-sacrificing generosity to the hazardous objectivity that places the non-vital interests of others before the vital needs of their own people, the Nordic peoples literally throw away their wealth, their culture and civilization, their material welfare, and, above all, the natural richness inherent in their unique racial and genetic characteristics on a physical, mental, aesthetic and spiritual plane.’

Hannah closed the book and looked Annika in the eye.

‘Discussing issues like these is seen as being immoral,’ she went on, the predator just barely kept below the surface. ‘Northern Europeans who try to raise them are defamed and called evil. All over Scandinavia, the media as well as the cultural and political establishments actively thwart the vital interests of the Nordic peoples. Lots of ignorant people such as yourself contribute to a self-destructive process that you don’t even understand.’

Fascinated, Annika asked the girl: ‘How did you come by these opinions?’

The insolent teenager was back now and the girl merely shrugged.

‘I do have a brain, you know, even though nobody seems to think so,’ she said. ‘I do my own thinking. In school, they claim to teach you to think for yourself, but then they get pissed off if you do. We’re supposed to come to our own conclusions, just as long as they’re identical to everyone else’s.’

‘Why Nazism?’

‘Because of one of those survivors,’ she said, her voice thin and grating as she went over to sit down on a mattress next to the wall.

‘This old biddy came to our school and showed black-and-white pictures from the concentration camps, and they were awful, of course – all the girls cried but me – but everything was kind of vague. I never figured out where the old lady fitted in. Afterwards there was supposed to be a panel discussion, and not much happened until some patriots sitting up front started to question some of her facts.’

Hannah Persson leaned back against the wall, pulled her feet up, wrapped her arms around her legs, and rested her head against her knees.

‘They called it “Democracy Week”, and we were supposed to listen to this survivor person. But when the patriots started to ask questions, the principal stopped the debate and threw them out. What kind of democracy is that?’

The little Nazi rocked jerkily back and forth on the mattress.

‘And you know what?
Katrineholms-Kuriren
wrote that the patriots had caused a riot during “Democracy Week”, and that just wasn’t true! The paper lied! I was there – there wasn’t any riot, the patriots were only trying to join the discussion, but they didn’t get a chance!’

Her eyes were huge and wide, and filled with artless indignation.

‘Did these . . . patriots go to your school?’

‘It was an open forum held at the school auditorium. Lots of other people were there.’

Annika put the deeply philosophical tome back on the shelf and looked at some of the others:
Twilight of the Norse Gods, Sturm 33, Land of Our Fathers and How to Protect It.

‘Do you do a lot of reading?’ she asked the girl.

‘Pretty much. It’s just that the books are so expensive. You can’t exactly get the paperback versions over at the local news-stand.’

Hannah Persson grinned apologetically, not with her predator’s expression this time.

‘When we met in the parking lot, you asked me a question,’ Annika said again, determined to press on despite her shaking hands.

The young Nazi’s eyes gleamed.

‘Yeah, I remember,’ she said.

‘I killed my boyfriend,’ Annika said. ‘I hit him with a piece of pipe. He lost his balance and fell into a blastfurnace.’

Hannah Persson’s eyes had changed. Now their expression was rapt and alert.

‘Why did you do it?’ she asked, in the same pretty childlike voice as when she had stood by the police tape at Yxtaholm.

‘Otherwise he would have killed me,’ Annika replied. ‘It was either him or me.’

She swallowed hard.

‘Actually,’ she said. ‘It was because he killed my cat.’

The Nazi blinked, causing the swastika on her face to twitch.

‘What a bastard,’ she said. ‘He killed your cat?’

‘He slit its stomach open. Its name was Whiskers.’

‘Why?’

The unsteadiness of Hannah Persson’s voice revealed how upset she was.

‘Because it rubbed up against him. Or because I loved it. Or just because it was in the way, I don’t know. Sven didn’t need a reason to get violent. All he wanted was power. If he didn’t have it, he took it.’

The girl nodded and swallowed.

‘The master race has always done that, oppressed the weak. How did you feel afterwards?’

Annika tried to steady her breathing.

‘Not really that much, at first. I didn’t realize what I’d . . . Later on I was miserable for months, could barely manage to stay alive. For years after that I lived in a void. Life had no colour, everything was either black or white, somehow. Meaningless.

‘Have you ever regretted it?’

Annika stared at the bright-eyed young woman and was overcome with the same sense of nausea as she had felt in the parking lot at Yxtaholm.

‘Every day,’ she said in a low, hoarse voice. ‘Every single solitary day since then, and I’ll keep on regretting it until I die.’

‘The oppressed have to be able to defend themselves, though.’

‘Do you feel for them? The oppressed?’

Hannah shot back her answer in a tinny voice.

‘Of course I do.’

‘In what way?’

The girl flinched and shrank away.

‘Why did you get a gun?’ Annika asked.

The young Nazi’s stare met hers. Hannah’s eyes were still bright, but now they were suddenly filled with tension. She opened her mouth to speak but held back. Annika persisted.

‘Who did you want to kill?’

Hannah Persson’s eyes filled with her tears and she sucked in her lower lip, making herself look like a mere child.

‘No one,’ she whispered.

‘No one? You went to the trouble of getting a gun, but there wasn’t anyone you wanted to eliminate?’

The answer was barely audible:

‘Just myself.’

Stunned, Annika looked at the girl. Hannah was crying, her chin pressed to her chest and her hair spilling down into her lap. Once her shoulders stopped shaking, she looked up and her expression was somehow simultaneously blank, immature and knowing.

‘There was this candlelight vigil last winter,’ she whispered. ‘This young guy had been murdered by a group of ethnic intruders, and we gathered at the railroad station one afternoon to show our sympathy and respect.’

She sat up straighter, swiped away a few tears and it was as though the light of the vigil torches was reflected in her eyes as she gazed at the boarded-up window.

‘We weren’t carrying any flags or banners, just torches and candles. All of the national groups supported the demonstration and had sent officials; it was so tasteful, so dignified and really nice. We walked together, all of us, the boy’s family at the head of the procession, and we put down flowers and lit candles. It was really sad. I cried the whole time, and it felt so good, you know?’

The girl looked at Annika, tears streaming down her face.

‘We grieved for our patriot, together. Can you see what a powerful experience that was?’

Annika nodded. Her throat was dry and she tried to clear it.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I can see that it would be. And you wanted them to do the same thing for you?’

Hannah nodded again. Then she dissolved into tears, crying with the ease that alcohol provides.

‘Where did you get the gun?’ Annika asked her a few minutes later, her voice gentle.

‘I sent away for it, got it from
Soldiers of Fortune.
It’s their anniversary-edition revolver, celebrating twenty-five years of freedom fighting, only it’s been remodelled. The original is only for decoration.’

‘How did you smuggle it into Sweden?’

‘I didn’t. It was the postal services. “Global Priority Mail.” It said “CD records” on the package.’

‘Have you told the police?’

She hesitated and then nodded.

‘I squealed,’ she confessed.

‘What do you mean?’ Annika said. ‘It was the postal services. They deserve it.’

Hannah Persson chuckled and dried her tears.

‘So what actually went down over at the castle?’

Hannah Persson shook her head in contempt.

‘At any rate,’ she said with the superiority of one who knew it all, ‘the papers got it all wrong. The whole crowd was drunk and they started fighting. Michelle Carlsson was running around with no clothes on, screwing that pop star all over the place. People were crying and hitting each other and none of that was in the papers.’

‘You don’t always put everything in the paper,’ Annika explained in a serious voice.

‘Why not, if it’s the truth?’

‘Well, there’s personal integrity to consider.’

‘But you couldn’t care less about the integrity of patriots. You write bad stuff about us all the time – lots of lies, too.’

The words came out as a knee-jerk response. There was no aggressive edge to them. Annika managed to smile.