The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (44 page)

‘Leo. Felix. Vincent. Go to your rooms.’

‘And why should they do that?’

‘Because I want to talk to you, Ivan. Alone.’

‘You? Do you know what our son did today?’

Now – when Pappa holds it up – she sees the jacket, one shoulder of which was facing the wall with a broad scarf hanging over it. The hole is even bigger now. Even Pappa’s fingers can fit through it.

‘He defended himself. Us. Our honour. Leo stood there – facing a knife! For our sake. You can speak, Britt-Marie. Do it! But then you speak to us. All of us. We’re a family. If you believe that your son did the wrong thing today, you tell him. In front of all of us.’

‘Leo didn’t do anything wrong, Ivan.’

Her legs won’t give way because she’s made a decision.

‘
You
did something wrong.’

‘Me?’

Pappa drops the jacket. But not his hand.

‘
I
taught our son to defend himself!’

‘And if Hasse’s father reports this to the police?’

He moves closer.

‘For what?’

‘You threatened him, Ivan.’

‘There are no witnesses. Right?’

He looks at her, at their three sons.

‘Did anyone here hear me threaten Hasse’s father? Any of you? Or is my wife the only cop in here?’

He looks at his eldest son the longest.

‘Leo, did you? Did you hear that?’

And waits until he gets an answer.

‘No, Pappa. I didn’t hear anything.’

‘But
I
heard it, Ivan.’

Mamma is standing close to Pappa. Close to Pappa’s hand. But she doesn’t care.

‘I heard you threaten him. And I can repeat
exactly
what you said.’

‘Are you … going to snitch on me?’

He moves his hand closer until it is almost touching her face.

‘Snitch? Is that what you’re going to do?’

‘No, Pappa!’

Felix runs towards Pappa and Mamma, and the hand that shakes in front of her face.

‘Pappa! You can’t! Pappa …’

He screams, pulling on the pockets of Pappa’s trousers, until he lowers his hand.

‘You will
never
turn against my family again.’

And then it’s as if everything is suddenly in motion.

Leo watches as Pappa goes through the kitchen and out onto the balcony and leans over the railing. Mamma rubs her hands against her eyes and goes to the bathroom, closes the door and turns on the tap. Felix follows her and tries to grab her and stands knocking at the door wanting to get in. And Vincent runs towards his room to his balls that are bombs, sobbing loudly as he releases them.

Everything is in motion, nothing is still.

Except Leo.

He’s the only one who remains, who doesn’t raise a hand or scream or cry.

And he knows now.

That Pappa is trembling in the apartment that has become smaller. But this time
both
outside and inside.

SHE ACTUALLY LIKES
the dark. The long nights at the nursing home, the silence, someone coughing in the room for patients who need special supervision, someone who needs to be turned in bed, or someone waking up from a nightmare who needs comforting – a pillow under the head, a gentle hug, a glass of water. The darkness hanging beyond the window of their bedroom is different – it is hunting her. She’s been tossing and turning until she ends up on her right side, watching him as he snores just a caress or a slap away, both his hair and the pillowcase plastered with sweat. He’ll wake up in a few hours full of anxiety and look at her and ask her forgiveness without putting it into words.

She hears footsteps in the apartment, and moments later the front door opens and closes. She sits on the edge of the bed, searches under the bed for her slippers with tassels on them and then goes out into the hall.

No one is there.

Kitchen, living room, workroom, Vincent’s room. Everything looks as it should. Until she enters Leo’s and Felix’s room and realises that one of the beds is empty.

She rushes to the kitchen, the balcony. She knows that if someone’s gone down the stairs, then they should leave through the front door.

All of Skogås seems to be asleep. And the door is still closed, no shadows under the streetlamps.

She goes back and sinks down into the abandoned sheets. Bedspread on the floor and the three pillows on top of each other.

Felix.

He screamed at Pappa to keep his hand away from her face and pounded in panic on the door of the bathroom, and he had disappeared before when words turned to threats. But never like this, at night. Maybe that’s why she’s freezing, even though it’s not really cold. And doesn’t feel the hand on her right shoulder, even though it’s been there a long time.

‘Mamma?’

She jumps. Leo. He’s awake.

‘You need to sleep, sweetheart.’

‘I’ll look for him.’

She takes him in her arms. He’s getting big. His ten-year-old body barely fits.

‘You
have to
sleep, it’s me and Pappa who …’

‘I know where he is.’

‘He didn’t go out by the front door.’

‘I know – he went out the back.’

Her eldest son is putting on clothes from a messy heap on the chair – jeans, sweater, jacket, shoes – and the apartment door slams shut for a second time that night.

She stands alone in the kitchen. In here the clock is round and ticks too loudly – no matter where she is in the flat it consumes seconds. She moves the full ashtray and the Keno tickets, and stares at the walls of a home that used to be hers.

One bed with a man snoring, a sweaty brow, anxiety.

One bed empty because someone’s run away.

One bed empty because its occupant is searching for the one who ran away.

And one bed empty because she’s resting her elbows heavily on the kitchen table and wondering if he ran away because he heard the phone conversation she had with her mother just before midnight, whispering, but with a sharpness and clarity that comes from having made a decision.

THE MOON IS
nearly full tonight, and its light scatters in the clear sky and trickles down onto the back of a seven-storey building in a Stockholm suburb.

Leo breathes in, breathes out. In front of him is a steep hill where they like to play, which separates the housing estate from a forest that shrinks a little every year.

He gets ready to run just as he always does, his back against the building’s rough walls, and then full speed towards the hill, and then up it, and he feels the crevices and stumps on his feet, which he uses to brace himself to get even further up. His heart pounds against his ribs and neck. Breathes in, breathes out. The crevice, the stump, the bulge – and he’s up. The rocky hillside soon turns into an actual defensive wall, built for some war. They often play here; the walls are steep and angular and pitted with small cavities that resemble caves. He moves quickly along it, a snake winding through the dark forest terrain, patches of snow on the ground.

He knows that he’s gone at least another hundred metres every time he passes a new cavity in the wall, squares that were dug out during the war and that Leo, Felix, Jasper and Buddha usually hide in when they themselves are playing war with air guns amid the low-rise buildings. Jasper always wins – he’s best at camouflaging himself. One time he even cut off his hair and taped dry, yellow grass to his head.

After four hundred metres, there’s a cavity that empties into a copse – the crooked trees where Greger’s father hanged himself. After six hundred metres he passes the crag that Little Billy fell off last summer – his mother ran a hair salon in building ten; she closed it after that, wandering around Skogås until, eventually, she just wandered away. Leo still remembers what the body looked like, but he decided then never to think of it again.

‘Felix?’

Over there. By a cliff like a precipice. He comes closer, stops, listens.

‘Little brother? Where are you?’

His little brother is sitting at the very edge.

‘Felix! I see you.’

One more step. As close as he dares to go. The moonlight makes Felix appear a little bigger.

‘I want to be on my own.’

‘You can’t stay here, Felix. It’s the middle of the night. You have to come home.’

‘No.’

‘Mamma’s up. And she’s worried.’

‘I’m not going home.’

Leo takes one step at a time, small ones, so Felix won’t notice. And then he’s there.

‘Why?’

Only one more step, one
short
step, and he’d walk right over the edge of the cliff and fall towards the rocks below, just like Little Billy did.

‘Cos it’s gonna be bad.’

‘Bad?’

‘I heard Mamma.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I heard her say she was leaving.’

Leo sits down. Not too close. But almost.

‘She’s not leaving.’

‘I heard her.’

Darkness. Silence. And something that cracks, crackles, just like the ice did earlier today. It’s the wind grabbing hold of bare branches and damp leaves.

‘You heard … what?’

‘She made a phone call. After we went to bed. When she thought we were asleep.’

‘And?’

‘To Grandma. She had that voice.’

The grey rock is cold, Leo notices only now how the chill penetrates his body from below and crawls up and then out of the holes on his jacket.

‘She said: “It’s not working any more.” Loads of times.’

‘She’s said that before. She always comes back.’

‘I heard it! She’s not coming back! Not this time.’

The cracking. It’s louder now, you can hear it more often as the wind strengthens. But there’s another sound, too. The cars driving along the old road on the other side of the forest. He’s never thought about how many people there are moving around at night.

‘It’s cold, Felix.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have a hat or gloves.’

‘Because it’s not cold.’

Leo searches his coat pockets and finds the red-and-white striped stocking cap. He takes it out and puts it on Felix’s head.

‘You lose eighty per cent of your body heat through your head.’

‘What?’

‘That’s just how it is.’

Felix readjusts the striped hat, which has ended up too low on his forehead. Then they sit there, close to each other, looking at the bright round moon.

‘Leo?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m thinking about Pappa.’

‘Yeah?’

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘And?’

Felix’s legs are dangling over the edge, as they have been the whole time.

‘Should we tell him? That Mamma’s leaving?’

HE’D ALWAYS LIKED
April. Life – a whole world waking up around him. It made him want to sit down in the bilberry bushes, on the moss-covered rocks, and let the sun warm his forehead and cheeks as it streamed through the treetops in narrow, bright strips of light.

He leaned back against the car that had taken him here for many years, a beaten-up Volvo hatchback whose bolts were so corroded by rust they barely held it together. This was probably the last spring it would get through. Maybe a summer too, if he was lucky. Then he’d be ready to take it to the scrapyard, and say goodbye.

The short stretch of unmade road led between the sharp bend and the lowered barrier. That was where he parked every night, lit a cigarette, and waited the five minutes required by his work manual.

Six-month inspection.

Here they came. A green van carrying two uniformed members of Defence Area 44’s security service, who greeted him with a firm handshake that always lasted a little too long. One of the security officers nodded at his left hand, the burning cigarette that would soon reach its filter.

‘I thought you’d quit?’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘No … but didn’t your wife …’

‘Listen, I’ll smoke any damn time I want to.’

A deep inhalation, straight into the bottom of his lungs, then he stubbed out his cigarette in the same place as he’d done last night and every other night, just above the first U on the boom’s square sign,
NO ACCESS FOR UNAUTHORISED TRAFFIC
.

‘OK. OK. I hear you,’ said the security officer with a rare smile. ‘In that case … where do you live now?’

‘Probably in the same damn neighbourhood of studio flats that you do.’

The other went over to the barrier’s thick padlock, the same sort found at the approach road to every arms dump.

The key didn’t work.

The security officer tried the next. And the next.

‘It … they … don’t work. None of them.’

They examined both the key and the padlock. No damage. Nothing looked out of place. He tried them all one at a time, sixteen different keys.

‘I guess we’ll have to walk.’

‘I do that every night – 150 metres there, 150 metres back. Ten armouries. It adds up to quite a bit of exercise,’ said the inspector, patting his stomach – sixty years old, he was still slim – and set off.

They were both panting behind him, twenty years younger but completely exhausted after walking through the forest for just a few minutes. Right before they reached the top of the hill, he lengthened his stride just enough for them to still be able to keep up, while also leaving them breathless.

The inspector arrived at the cube, its walls easily two and a half metres wide, stopping in front of what looked like the door of a safe. He held up the same bunch of keys as before; after a few seconds of shuffling he found the right one, and turned it.

‘Well, this one works anyway.’

The door swung inwards. The first security officer stepped inside – and stopped abruptly.

‘What the
fuck
?’

His companion stepped in past the inspector – but didn’t say anything. He just stood there, completely still.

‘What is it?’ The inspector twisted from side to side behind their broad backs trying to see what they were looking at.

He took a slightly crouched step forward, pushing his way through the doorway and the narrow opening between their shoulders.