Until Thy Wrath Be Past (15 page)

“I’m sure he could,” she replied to herself. “I think that dog makes him porridge every morning.”

“What happened to his face?” Martinsson said.

“I’m not sure,” Mella said, “but according to what I’ve heard, admittedly not from him directly . . .”

She came to a sudden stop.

“What’s the matter?” Martinsson said.

Following Mella’s gaze, she saw Hjalmar and Tore Krekula sitting in their car in the police-station car park. When they noticed Mella, they got out and came towards her. Mella could feel her stomach churning with fear and anger. She thought about Jenny, her daughter.

“I just thought I’d inform you,” Tore Krekula said, “that we’ve been to see your boss to complain about police harassing people in Piilijärvi.”

“How . . .” Mella said.

“It’s your attitude,” Tore said. “You march round the village acting so damned superior, and people feel they are being accused and harassed. Lots of us feel that way. And lots of us are going to complain to your boss.”

“Do that,” Mella said, looking him straight in the eye. “Done much texting lately?”

“Sure,” Tore said casually, returning her gaze.

Neither of them looked away.

In the end Martinsson took Mella by the arm.

“Come on,” she said.

She looked hard at Hjalmar.

Hjalmar put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula stood there like two dog owners, each with their pit bull terrier on a lead.

In the end Mella allowed herself to be led away. Tore shrugged off his brother’s hand.

“Shall we go?” Hjalmar said.

Tore spat in the snow.

“Bitch,” he called after Mella as she entered the police station.

His mobile rang and he answered it. Listened for a while without speaking. As he hung up he said, “Let’s get going. Time to pay Hjörleifur Arnarson a visit.”

I’m at Anni’s. She’s gone down to the lake on her kick-sledge. The sun is hiding behind the treetops. There’s been a midday thaw, and there’s a strange, magical haze above the lake.

She hears a hare scream on the far shore. It sounds like the cry of a little baby. Ghostly through the haze. The hare was probably taken by a fox. Hares get careless in the mating season.

There are some who sacrifice their lives for love, she thinks.

As that thought comes to her, she becomes aware of her sister standing behind her.

Kerttu. Also on her kick-sledge, she parks next to Anni and gazes out over the lake.

“You shouldn’t talk to the police,” she says. “You shouldn’t let them in.”

Anni says nothing. I try to glide in between them, but there are so many threads connecting the two sisters.

Anni doesn’t turn her head. Instead she sees Kerttu in her mind’s eye. The Kerttu she is looking at is young and smooth-skinned. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but in fact more than sixty years have passed.

It is May 1943. Kerttu is on her way home, her hair in curlers, expecting Isak Krekula to pick her up in his lorry. She is sixteen years old. A lot of years will pass before she weeps over the loss of her son in the forest. Isak Krekula is twenty-two, but already owns eight lorries, has his own haulage firm and several employees. For many years now he has been the hero of his village. He has transported supplies across the border into Finland, to both German and Finnish troops during the Winter War and the Continuation War against Russia.

He has returned home to the village full of adventure stories. Sat in people’s kitchens and recited the Swedish mantra “Finland’s cause is ours”, and perhaps sounded self-important, but his listeners have encouraged that. They have brewed real coffee, produced biscuits to dunk, and laughed when Krekula has told them about how he jokes with both the Finnish and the Swedish soldiers to keep their spirits up – after all, he speaks both languages fluently, just like the rest of the villagers. “I came to Kousamo. My God, but the lads were freezing. And hungry. I told them: ‘Those bloody Russkies will all have frostbitten arses, and
perkele
, they’ll starve to death.’ They couldn’t stop themselves laughing. Then we’d unload food and tobacco and weapons. There were tears in plenty of eyes, believe you me.”

The villagers would have been sitting by their wirelesses listening to reports from the front line; the women would have been knitting mittens and jumpers and socks for the Swedish volunteers. They would have handed the clothes over to Krekula for delivery to the troops, and would have felt extra-pleased when he came back and told them how the boys nearly ended up fighting over the jumpers the women had made, and how they sent greetings and thanked them all from the bottom of their hearts. “And they wondered if I couldn’t bring a few pretty unmarried girls with me next time.”

The volunteers had been welcomed back to Sweden with parades and receptions in town halls and cathedrals.

Krekula’s pockets are full of cash. He earns a lot of money from these transports. His haulage firm grows bigger and bigger. But nobody begrudged him that before the winter of 1943.

Then comes Stalingrad, and the tide turns against the Germans. Foreign Minister Christian Günther, who had urged Sweden to follow the example of Finland and support the Germans against the Soviet Union, had backed the wrong horse. Sweden supports the allies. Finland’s cause is not ours, dammit. Finland is a German lackey.

Now the returning volunteers are greeted with silence and averted eyes. Krekula still transports goods across the border, but he no longer circulates around the kitchens of the village. He takes Kerttu with him in his lorry. They have been going steady since she was fourteen, and she is as pretty as a picture. Spends ages posing in front of her mirror and avoiding doing any chores, and Anni is tempted to give her a good smacking. Krekula seldom comes in to say hello, hangs around in the road instead. Matti, the girls’ dad, looks away and growls grumpily when Kerttu bids them a hasty goodbye and runs outside. He keeps the family going on the little he earns from farming and fishing. But he feels the shame of the poverty-stricken when his daughter comes home with a new dress that Krekula has bought her, or a fancy headscarf or some perfumed soap. Anni and her mother are a stark contrast to all that finery. If the family were better off, perhaps Kerttu would not be so head-over-heels in love – but what can Matti do?

Kerttu continues to strut through the village and couldn’t care less what people say. Not that they dare say very much, as several of the local men drive lorries for Krekula and others are involved in building him a new garage. The bottom line being that they all need to earn a living.

But Anni knows about the gossip. One day when she is visiting one of the families in the village, the youngest daughter catches sight of Kerttu through the window. She starts singing, “If you want to see a bright star, look at me”. One of her sisters immediately shuts her up and gives Anni a look combining shame and scorn. She does not apologize. Anni knows that the song is often sung behind Kerttu’s back.

The singer who made it popular, Zarah Leander, is out in the cold now, hated by everyone for fraternizing with the Nazis. On the other hand, the anti-fascist composer and revue artist Karl Gerhard’s songs are being played on the wireless again. The wind changes direction rapidly. Kerttu is the village’s little Zarah Leander.

All those threads between the sisters. Anni is over eighty, the age Kerttu soon will be. But they’re unable to say a word to each other about what they think and know. Eventually, Anni says she’s going back indoors. Whereupon Kerttu heaves her kick-sledge around and heads off home.

Anni stays put for a while, watching the mist. Then, suddenly, she senses my presence.

“Wilma,” she says.

I wish I were able to touch her. Instead, I remind her of when we went swimming in the lake. She even swam underwater. Came up snorting.

“I didn’t know I was still capable of that!” she gasped in jubilation. “Why do we stop doing things simply because we grow old?”

I shouted back to her,“I’m not going to stop. I’ll carry on swimming until I’m ninety!”

Later, in the kitchen, when we were both sitting in front of the stove with fluffy towels wrapped around us, Anni grinned and said, “So you’ll stop swimming when you’re ninety, will you? Why?”

Now she starts crying as she turns round and trudges back to her house.

I move on.

I’m sitting on the edge of the autopsy bench, observing myself.

The pathologist has been in a continuous bad mood. Angry because he’s been forced to do his post-mortem examination again. A week ago my body looked quite decent. But now, after being exposed to the air, I’m bluish and swollen. My flesh is distintegrating.

Now he’s cutting up my right hand, and suddenly his bad mood seems to have blown away. He starts humming. Is it a song? What a voice he has! It sounds like two stones being rubbed together.

He takes off his gloves and makes a phone call. Asks to speak to Anna-Maria Mella. He starts by complaining about what a hell of a nuisance it is, having to repeat the post-mortem, and how he’d be grateful if in future he’d be informed when there’s suspicion that a death has been anything other than accidental, so he knows what to look for. I can hear that the woman at the other end of the line is being very patient with him. He grumbles and groans, but in the end can’t contain himself any longer. He simply has to tell her about the hand.

“I thought you might be interested in something,” he says, and when he hears her tense, expectant silence, he pauses dramatically, coughing and clearing his throat, and almost succeeds in driving her mad.

“
Khrush
. . .
khrush
. . .” he croaks before continuing. “She has a fracture in her fifth metacarpal . . . that is, you know, the bone in the hand behind the little finger on the way to the wrist. A common injury caused when defending oneself . . . It could very well have been caused by her . . . by her hitting her hand against a door, for instance . . .”

I must get away from here. I can’t bear to look at this body any more. Not long ago the skin was tight and alive. I had fantastic breasts. I think about how Simon used to hug me. I remember how he would stand behind me, kiss my ears and my neck, and put his hands inside my clothes. The soft, sweet noises he would make which meant that he wanted to make love to me. Saying “Mmm” to each other, we knew exactly what we meant.

Now I have no body. That blue, swollen, disintegrating lump of flesh on the steel bench beneath the fluorescent lamps isn’t really my body.

I am so terribly lonely.

Hjörleifur Arnarson is also lonely. I’m standing outside his house. His dog can sense my presence. She’s staring in my direction. The fur on her back bristles, and she whimpers restlessly.

Several weeks can pass between occasions when Hjörleifur talks to other human beings. Not that he misses the contact. He thinks a lot about women, of course, but it’s more than thirty years since he had a relationship with one. He dreams about a woman’s soft skin and rounded body. He leads his own eccentric, wild existence out there in the forest. In summer he wanders around naked and sleeps outdoors. Every day, summer and winter, he bathes in Lake Vittangijärvi.

He didn’t see us when we were there, diving. When he arrived at the lake we had already been dead for two hours. I wasn’t even in the lake any more. He wondered about that hole in the ice, too big to be used just for fishing. He thought perhaps there was someone enjoying a wintry bath in the lake, just like him. But why in the middle of the lake? And the remains of the door were floating around in the hole, lots of bits of wood; he couldn’t fit them together.

Then he saw our rucksacks in the lay-by. Assumed they belonged to people who would be returning shortly. He hung around for a while. Investigated the contents of the rucksacks, but didn’t take anything. He was curious, hoping for an opportunity to chat. But nobody turned up, of course.

When he came back for his dip the next day, the rucksacks were still there. And the following day. It started snowing the day after that. The rucksacks were covered in snow. So he took them home.

Now he goes upstairs and takes the rucksacks out of a cupboard. He has shut them away very carefully, so that mice and rats couldn’t get at them and poke around and crap all over them.

No doubt the rucksacks belonged to the kids that policewoman was asking about, he thinks. He’ll hand them over when she comes back tomorrow, tell her exactly where he found them and about the bits of wood floating around in the hole – which doubtless came from the door she was also asking about.

But before he does that, there are one or two things he wants to remove. There’s a first-rate, brand-new Trangia stove in one of the rucksacks, and a big merino wool pullover with a windproof lining in the other one. Hjörleifur has never owned such a splendid pullover. And the kids no longer need the stuff, so there’s no reason why he shouldn’t keep it.

He carries the rucksacks downstairs. It’s so cold upstairs. Much nicer in the kitchen, where the wood-burning stove is crackling and spitting away, warming the place up with its living heat.

He is so busy unpacking the rucksacks and sifting through the contents, picking out what he wants to keep and what he’ll put back, that he doesn’t hear the snow scooter pull up not far from his house.

It doesn’t worry him that the dog starts barking – she does that sometimes. For all sorts of reasons. A squirrel, perhaps. Or a fox. Or snow tumbling down from the trees. She’s such an old softie.

It’s only when he hears the front door closing and footsteps approaching down the hall that he realizes he has visitors. Two men appear in his kitchen.

“Now then, Hjörleifur,” one of them says. “We hear you’ve had a visit from the police.”

He looks at them. His instinct tells him to run. But there’s nowhere to run to.

Only one of them does the talking. The other one, who’s big and fat, stands leaning against the door frame.

“What have you told the police, Hjörleifur? What did they ask you about? Come on, let’s hear it!