The Black Path (12 page)

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: So you have no trouble sleeping soundly?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
I’ve never slept soundly, but that isn’t the reason.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
[
he’s adopted a defensive stance now, she changes tack
]: Let’s go back to your upbringing then, can you tell us something about that? Born in Kiruna in ’64. Single mother who couldn’t look after you.

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
No, she wasn’t really capable of looking after a child. My half brothers and sisters who came along later were more or less taken into care straightaway, but as I was her first I lived with her until I was eleven.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: And how was that?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS
[
fumbles for the right words, closes his eyes sometimes, it’s as if he pauses to look at the scenes playing in his head
]: I had to manage on my own…a great deal. She was asleep when I went to school. She…used to get very angry if I said I was hungry…. She could disappear for several days at a time, and I had no idea where she was.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: It’s difficult for you to talk about this?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
Extremely.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: You have a family of your own now. A wife, two sons aged ten and twelve. In what way has your upbringing influenced you in that role?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
It’s hard to say, but I have no internal picture of how to live a normal family life. In school I used to see, how shall we put it, normal people. They had nice clean hair…and fathers. Occasionally I’d go to a classmate’s house, but not very often. And I’d see their homes. Furniture, rugs, ornaments, an aquarium with tropical fish. We had almost nothing at home. Social services once bought us a lovely secondhand sofa, I remember that. It had one of those holes in the back that you could open, and pull out a spare bed. I thought it was just the height of luxury. Two days later it was gone.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: Where did it go?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
I guess somebody sold it. People were always coming and going. The door was never locked, as far as I remember.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: And you were finally placed in a foster home.

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
My mother became extremely paranoid, and behaved in a threatening manner to the neighbors and people in town. She was taken into care. And when she was taken into care…

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
:…you were taken into care as well. And you were eleven at that time.

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
Yes. And you can always think back and wish…that things had been different, that I’d been taken into care earlier and so on…but that’s the way things were.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: Are you yourself a good father?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
That’s a hard one. I do my best, but of course I’m away from the family far too much That’s a disadvantage.

Anna-Maria Mella shifted position in her chair.

“That drives me mad,” she said to Sven-Erik. “If you confess your sin it doesn’t count, somehow. As soon as he says ‘I ought to spend more time with my children,’ that makes him a good person. What’s he going to say to his boys when they’ve grown up? ‘I know I was never there, but I can assure you I had a guilty conscience the whole time.’ ‘We know, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy. We love you, Daddy.’”

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
But I have a reliable wife who’s always there. Without her I’d never have been able to run this company and have children as well. She has had to teach me.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
[
obviously charmed by his gratitude toward his wife
]: What, for example?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS
[
ponders
]: Often really simple things. That a family sits down and eats together. That kind of thing.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: Do you think you appreciate “normal” life more than someone like me, who’s had an ordinary upbringing?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
Yes, if you’ll forgive me, I do think that. I feel like a refugee in the “normal” world.

When Diddi is in his third semester at Business School, he is finally able to leave the normal world. He has always had beauty and charm, but now he has money. He goes beyond Stockholm. Farther than Riche. He totters along the Canal Saint-Martin with two calf-legged models as the sun rises over Paris. Not because they’re so drunk they can’t walk properly, but because they’re pushing each other like playful children as they walk home. The trees droop over the water like abandoned women, dropping their leaves into the water like old love letters, every one blood-red, steaming. There’s the smell of newly baked bread from the bakery. Delivery vans go tearing by toward the city center, their tires bumping on the cobbles. The world will never be more beautiful than this.

He meets an actor at a pool party and is invited along on someone’s private jet to two weeks’ filming in the Ukraine. Diddi is able to show the required generosity. He has ten bottles of Dom Pérignon with him on the plane.

And then he meets Sofia Fuensanta Cuervo. She is much older than him, thirty-two, distantly related to the Spanish royal family on her mother’s side, and to John of the Cross on her father’s side.

She’s the black sheep of the family, she says, divorced with two children who are at boarding school.

Diddi has never met anyone who even came close. He is a wanderer who has finally reached the sea, and he wades out up to his elbows and drowns. Her arms can cure anything. He can lose himself if she only smiles, or scratches her nose. He is even filled with thoughts about himself and the children. Vague pictures of flying kites on the beach and reading aloud to them at night. He isn’t allowed to meet them, and Sofia doesn’t talk about them much. She goes to visit them sometimes, but he isn’t allowed to go with her. She doesn’t want them to get attached to someone who is suddenly going to disappear, she says. But he’s never going to disappear. He wants to stay there forever, his hands entwined in her coal black hair.

Her friends own huge boats. He joins them when they go hunting during a visit to the country estate of some acquaintances in the northwest of England. Diddi looks just wonderful in his borrowed hunting clothes and his little felt cap. He’s like a little brother to all the men, and all the women adore him.

“I refuse to kill anything,” he tells everybody with all the seriousness of a child. He and a thirteen-year-old girl are allowed to go along and join the beaters, and they talk for a long time about her horses; in the evening she persuades their hostess to place Diddi beside her at the table. Sofia lends him out and laughs, claiming her nose has really been put out of joint.

Diddi takes Sofia out to dinner, he buys her ridiculously expensive shoes and jewelry. He takes her to Zanzibar for a week. It looks like a theater set: the decaying beauty of the town, the intricately carved wooden doors, the skinny cats chasing little white crabs on the long white beaches, the heavy aroma of cloves lying there drying in great heaps on red cloths spread out on the ground. And against this backdrop of beauty breathing its last, soon the doors and the façades will have crumbled away, soon the island will be exploited to death, soon the beaches will be packed with noisy Germans and fat Swedes, against this backdrop is their love.

People turn and gaze after them as they wander along, their fingers entwined. His hair has been bleached almost white by the sun, hers is a shining black mane on an Andalusian mare.

At the end of November, Diddi rings from Barcelona wanting to sell. Mauri explains there’s nothing to sell.

“Your capital has been used up.”

Diddi tells him there’s a furious hotel owner after him who’s very keen for Diddi to pay up.

“I mean, he’s bloody livid, I have to sneak out so he doesn’t catch me on the stairs.”

At first Mauri bites his tongue during the long, embarrassing silence while Diddi waits for him to offer to lend him money. Then Diddi asks straight out. And Mauri says no.

After the telephone conversation, Mauri goes out for a walk in a snowy Stockholm. The rage of a person who has been abandoned follows in his footsteps like a dog. What the fuck was Diddi thinking? Did he think he could just ring up and Mauri would just bend over with his pants around his knees?

No. Mauri spends the next three weeks at his new girlfriend’s house. Many years later, sitting in an interview with Malou von Sivers, he wouldn’t be able to remember her name even if somebody were holding a gun to his head.

Three weeks after their telephone conversation, Diddi turns up in the kitchen on Mauri’s student corridor. It’s Saturday evening. Mauri’s girlfriend has gone out to dinner with her friends. Håkan, who lives on Mauri’s corridor, looks at Diddi as if he were watching him on TV. He forgets to look away and behave like a human being. Stares at him uninterruptedly, his mouth hanging open. Mauri feels an inexplicable urge to punch him in the face. So he’ll close his mouth.

Diddi’s eyes are white cracked ice covering a blood-red sea. Sticky snow is melting in his hair and trickling down his face.

Sofia’s love vanished with the money, but Mauri doesn’t know anything about that yet.

Inside Mauri’s room it all comes pouring out. Mauri’s a fucking con man. Twenty-five percent? Fucking ridiculous. He’s so fucking mean he screams when he has to go for a crap. Diddi can go along with ten percent, and he wants his money. Now!

“You’re drunk,” says Mauri.

He sounds very compassionate when he says it. He’s gone through the school of life and learned how to deal with exactly this sort of thing. He slips easily into his foster father’s stance and tone of voice. Soft on the outside, rock hard on the inside. He has his foster father inside him. And inside his foster father, his foster brother is waiting. It’s like those Russian dolls. Inside his foster brother is Mauri. But it will be many years before that particular doll comes out.

Diddi doesn’t know anything about any Russian dolls. Or he doesn’t care. He drills his rage into the foster father doll, screaming and going crazy. He will have only himself to blame if the foster brother comes out.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: So you were placed in a foster home when you were eleven. How was that?

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
It was a significant improvement on the way things had been. But it was a way of earning money for my foster parents, this business of fostering. They both did a lot of different things, one way or another. My foster mother had at least three jobs at the same time. She called my foster father the old man, and so did my foster brother and I. And he called himself that too.

M
ALOU VON
S
IVERS
: Tell me about him.

M
AURI
K
ALLIS:
He was a con man who kept himself more or less within the boundaries of the law, but he lacked scruples. A really small-time businessman. [
He smiles and shakes his head at the memory.
] For example, he bought and sold cars, the whole yard was full of old wrecks. Sometimes he went to other towns to sell. He’d put on a shirt and a dog collar, because after all people trust a man of God. “I’ve read the laws of the church from cover to cover,” he said. “Nowhere does it say you have to be ordained to wear a collar like this.”

Sometimes people who think they’ve been conned turn up at the house. Often they’re angry, sometimes they’re crying. The old man sympathizes, he’s sorry. He offers them a coffee or something stronger, but business is a matter of honor. The deal stands. He won’t let go of the money.

On one occasion a woman who’s bought a used car from the old man turns up. She’s brought her ex-husband with her. The old man can read him in an instant.

“Fetch Jocke,” he says as soon as the couple get out of the car in the yard.

Mauri runs to fetch his foster brother.