The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  She had died in childbirth. His father was a travelling musician who never paid any attention to him and had died young, from cirrhosis of the liver, after many years of heavy drinking. Dan—who was born Daniel Brolin—grew up in an orphanage in Gävle and later, from the age of six, as one of four foster children on a farm to the north of Hudiksvall. He had to work extremely hard there with the animals and the harvest, mucking out the stables and slaughtering and butchering the pigs. The farmer, his foster father, Sten, made no secret of the fact that he had taken on his foster children—all of them boys—because he needed extra hands. When the boys came to live with him, Sten was married to a red-haired thickset woman called Kristina. But she had pretty soon taken off and had not been heard of since. She was said to have gone to Norway, and people who met Sten were hardly surprised that she had tired of him. He was tall and imposing and by no means ugly, with a carefully groomed beard which was beginning to turn grey, but there was something grim about his mouth and forehead which frightened people. He seldom smiled. He did not like socializing or small talk, and he hated pretension and refinement.

  He was always saying: “Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t think you’re anything special.” When the boys in their high spirits declared that they wanted to become professional footballers when they grew up, or lawyers or millionaires, he would always snap back: “One should know one’s place!” He was stingy when it came to praise and encouragement, and certainly when it came to money. He distilled his own spirits, ate the meat of animals which he himself had shot or slaughtered, and the farm was as good as self-sufficient. Nothing was ever bought unless heavily discounted or in a clearance sale. He got his furniture at the flea market or it was passed on by neighbours and relatives. His house was painted a strident yellow, and nobody knew why until it transpired that Sten had gotten the paint free, from surplus stock.

  Sten had no appreciation of beauty and he never read books or newspapers. That did not trouble Daniel since there was a library at the school. But he was bothered by the fact that Sten disliked all music unless it was jolly and Swedish. All Daniel had inherited from his biological father was his surname and a nylon-stringed Levin guitar, which had been abandoned in the attic of the farmhouse until Daniel picked it up one day, and which he came to love. It was not only that the instrument seemed to have been waiting for him. He felt that he was born to play it.

  He soon learned the basic chords and harmonies and realized that he could copy tunes from the radio having heard them only once. For a long time, he played the usual repertoire of a boy of his generation: ZZ Top’s “Tush,” the Scorpions’ ballad “Still Loving You,” Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and several other rock classics. But then something happened.

  One cold, autumn day he stole out of the cowshed. He was fourteen years old and school was a nightmare. He was quick to learn, but found it difficult to listen to the teachers. He was disturbed by the racket around him and yearned to get back to the silence and calm of the farm, even though he hated the work and the long days. He escaped whenever he could, to find time for himself.

  On this particular day, just after 5:30 p.m., he came into the kitchen and turned on the radio, which was playing something corny and dull. He fiddled with the dial and tuned to P2. He knew very little about the station, he had thought it was mostly oldies, and what he heard only confirmed his prejudice. It was a clarinet solo and the sound jarred on his nerves, like the buzzing of a bee or an alarm going off.

  But he kept listening, and then the sound of a guitar came in, a tentative, playful guitar. He shivered. There was a new feeling in the room, a sense of reverence and concentration, and he felt himself come alive. He heard nothing else, not the other boys swearing and arguing, or the birds or tractors or distant cars, or even the sound of approaching footsteps. He just stood there, cocooned in an unexpected joy, and tried to understand what made these notes different from everything he had ever heard before. Why did they affect him so much? Then suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his scalp and neck.

  “You lazy little shit, you think I don’t see how you’re always sneaking off?”

  Sten was pulling Daniel’s hair, shouting and swearing. But Daniel barely noticed. He was focusing only on one thing: listening to the end of the tune. The music seemed to be showing him something unknown, something richer and greater than the life he had so far been living. Although he did not manage to hear who had been playing, he glanced up at the old kitchen clock above the tiled stove as Sten dragged him out of the room. He knew that the exact time was important.

  The next day he used one of the school telephones to ring Radio Sweden. He had never done anything like it before. He did not possess that kind of resourcefulness and self-confidence. He never put his hand up in the classroom even when he knew the answer, and he had always felt inferior to city folk, especially if they worked in as glamorous a profession as radio or television. But he made the call anyway and was put through to Kjell Brander, in jazz programming. In a voice which almost failed him, he asked which tune had been playing at just after 5:30 p.m. the day before. To be on the safe side, he hummed a bit of the tune. Kjell Brander recognized it immediately.

  “Cool! You like it? You’ve got good taste, young man. That was Django Reinhardt’s ‘Nuages.’ ”

  No-one had ever called Daniel “young man” before. He asked how to spell the name of the song and added, even more nervously:

  “Who is he?”

  “One of the best guitarists in the world, I’d say. And yet he played his solos with just two fingers.”

  Daniel could not subsequently remember what Kjell Brander had told him and what he later found out for himself. But gradually he learned that there was a story behind the man, and this made what he had heard only more precious. Django grew up in poverty in Liberchies in Belgium, sometimes stealing chickens just to survive. He began to play the guitar and violin at an early age and was considered very promising. But when he was eighteen, he knocked over a candle in his caravan, setting alight the paper flowers his wife sold to earn a living, and the blaze spread. Django suffered serious burns, and for a long time it was thought that he would never play again, especially not when it turned out that he had lost the use of two fingers of his left hand. Yet with the help of a new technique he was able to keep on developing his playing, and he soon became world famous and a cult figure.

  But first and foremost, Django was a Gypsy—or Roma, as people now said. Daniel was also Roma. He had learned this the hard way—through the pain of being excluded, and being called a “gyppo” and worse. It had never crossed his mind that this was anything other than deeply shameful. Now Django allowed him to look upon his origins with a new pride. If Django could become the world’s best with a severely damaged hand, Daniel too could become something special.

  He borrowed some money from a girl in his class, bought a compilation record of Reinhardt’s tunes and taught himself all the classics—“Minor Swing,” “Daphne,” “Belleville,” “Djangology” and many more—and in no time at all he changed the way he played the guitar. He abandoned his blues scales and instead played minor sixth arpeggios and solos with diminished major and minor seventh scales, and with each day his passion grew. He practised until he had leathery calluses on his fingertips. His fervour never dimmed—not even when he slept. He played in his dreams. He thought of nothing else, and whenever he had the chance he would make for the forest, sit on a rock or tree stump and improvise for hours on end. Hungrily he absorbed new skills and new influences, not just from Django but also from John Scofield, Pat Metheny and Mike Stern, all the modern jazz guitar greats.

  At the same time, his relationship with Sten deteriorated. “You think you’re special, don’t you? You’re just a little shit,” his foster father would often snarl, adding that Daniel always walked around with his nose in the air. Daniel could not understand it, he who had always felt inferior and inadequate. He tried his best to oblige, even though he neith
er wanted to, nor could, stop his playing. Before long Sten began to beat him around the ears and punch him, and sometimes his foster brothers joined in. They hit him in the stomach and on his arms, and punished him with loud noises, metal scraping against metal or saucepan lids clashed together. Daniel now hated the work in the fields, especially in summer when there was no escape from the muck-spreading, ploughing, harrowing and sowing.

  During the summer months the boys would work from morning until late at night. Daniel tried hard to be liked and accepted again, and sometimes he succeeded. In the evenings he was happy to play requests for his brothers, and occasionally he won applause and a certain appreciation. Yet he knew that he was a burden and made himself scarce whenever he could.

  One afternoon, as the sun beat down on the back of his neck, he heard a blackbird singing far away. He was sixteen and already dreaming of his eighteenth birthday, when he would come of age and could leave this place far behind. He was planning to apply to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, or get a job as a jazz musician, putting so much effort and ambition into his work that one day he would get a record contract. Dreams spun around in his head day and night. At times, as happened now, nature fed him a sound which he developed into a riff.

  He whistled back at the blackbird, a variation on its song which became a melody. His fingers moved as if over an imaginary guitar, and he shuddered. Later, as an adult, he would think back to those moments when he believed something would be irretrievably lost if he did not sit down straightaway to compose, and nothing in the world would stop him from sneaking off to get his guitar. Daniel could still recall the illicit thrill in his chest as he raced down to the water at Blackåstjärnen in his bare feet, overalls flapping and guitar in hand, and settled on the dilapidated jetty to pick out the melody he had been whistling and give it an accompaniment. It was a wonderful time, and that is how he would remember it.

  But it did not last long. One of the other boys must have seen him go and ratted on him. Sten soon appeared bare-chested and in his shorts, and furious, and Daniel, who did not know whether to apologize or simply disappear, hesitated a second too long. Sten managed to grab hold of the guitar and yanked it away with such violence that he fell over backwards. It was not a bad fall; it just looked ridiculous. But something in Sten snapped. He got to his feet, his face puce, and smashed the guitar against the jetty. Afterwards he looked shocked—as if he did not quite understand what he had done. But it made no difference.

  Daniel felt as if a vital organ had been torn from his body. He yelled “idiot” and “bastard,” words he had never before uttered in front of Sten. He ran across the fields, burst into the house, stuffed his records and some clothes into a backpack, and left the farm for good.

  He made for the E4 motorway and walked for hours, until he picked up a lift in a tractor-trailer as far as Gävle. Then he continued south, sleeping in the forest, stealing apples and plums and eating berries he found along the way. An old lady who drove him to Södertälje gave him a ham sandwich. A young man who took him to Jönköping bought him lunch, and late in the evening on July 22 he arrived in Göteborg. Within a few days he had gotten himself some low-paid, cash-in-hand work down at the docks. Six weeks later, living on virtually nothing and having occasionally slept in stairwells, he bought himself a new guitar, not a Selmer Maccaferri—Django’s guitar, which he dreamed of owning—but a second-hand Ibanez.

  He decided to make his way to New York. But it was not as easy as people said. He had neither a passport nor a visa and you could no longer earn passage on a ship, not even as a cleaner. Early one evening, when he had finished his work in the harbour, a woman was waiting for him at the dockside. Her name was Ann-Catrine Lidholm. She was overweight and dressed in pink, and she had kind eyes. She told him she was a social worker, and that someone had called her about him. That was when he found out that people were searching for him, that he had been reported as missing, and he followed her reluctantly to the social welfare agency on Järntorget.

  Ann-Catrine explained that she had spoken to Sten on the telephone and had a positive impression of him, which made Daniel even more suspicious.

  “He misses you,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” he said, and told her that he could not go back. He would be beaten, his life would be hell. Ann-Catrine listened to his story and afterwards gave him a few options, none of which felt right. He said he could manage on his own, she didn’t need to worry. Ann-Catrine replied that he was still a minor and that he needed support and guidance.

  That was when he remembered the “Stockholm people,” as he thought of them: psychologists and doctors who had visited him every year of his childhood. They had measured and weighed him, interviewed him and taken notes. And they had made him take tests, all kinds of tests. He never much liked them and sometimes he had cried afterwards. He felt lonely and exposed to scrutiny, and he had thought of his mother and the life he never had with her. On the other hand, he did not hate them either. They would give him encouraging smiles and praise, and they said what a good and clever boy he was. There had never been a single unkind word. Nor did he see the visits as anything out of the ordinary. He thought it perfectly normal that the authorities should want to see how he was getting along with his foster family, and the fact that people were writing about him in medical records and protocols did not bother him. To him, it was a sign that he counted for something. Depending on who came to see him, he sometimes even viewed the visits as a welcome relief from work on the farm, especially more recently when the Stockholm people had shown an interest in his music and filmed him as he played the guitar. A few times, they seemed impressed and whispered to each other, and he had gone on to dream of how those films might get around and end up in the hands of agents or record producers.

  The psychologists and doctors never gave more than their first names, and he knew nothing about them—apart from one woman who shook his hand one day and introduced herself with her full name, presumably by mistake. But that was not the only reason he remembered her. He had been entranced by her figure and her long strawberry-blond hair, and the high heels which were so unsuited to the dirt paths around the farmhouse. The woman had smiled at him, as if she genuinely liked him. Her name was Hilda von Kanterborg and she wore low-cut blouses and dresses, and had full red lips which he dreamed of kissing.

  This was the woman he thought of when he asked if he could make a call from the social welfare offices. He was given a telephone directory for the Stockholm area and nervously flicked through it. For a moment he was convinced that Hilda von Kanterborg had been a cover, and that was the first time it crossed his mind that the Stockholm people might not be regular officials of the social welfare system. But then he did find her name and dialled the number. There was no answer, so he left a message.

  When he returned the next day, having spent the night at Göteborg City Mission, she had returned his call and left another number. This time she answered and seemed happy to hear his voice. Straightaway he realized that she knew he had run away. She told him that she was “terribly sorry” and said he was “exceptionally gifted.” He felt unbearably lonely and stifled an impulse to cry.

  “Well, help me, then,” he said.

  “My dear Daniel,” she said, “I would do just about anything. But we’re supposed to study, not to intervene.”

  Daniel would return to that, time and again, over the years; it was one of the factors that made him take on a new identity and guard it with all his might. But right then, gripping the receiver, he felt miserable and blurted: “What, what are you talking about?” Hilda became nervous, he could tell. She swiftly began to talk about other things, how he needed to finish school before he made any rash decisions. He said that all he wanted was to play the guitar. Hilda told him he could study music. He replied that he wanted to go to sea and make his way to New York to play in the jazz clubs there. She advised strongly against that: “Not at your age, and not with everything you’ve got going for
you,” she said.

  They talked for so long that Ann-Catrine and the other social workers were beginning to get impatient, and he promised to think about the options she had given him. He said he hoped to see her. She said she’d like that, but it did not come to pass. He was never to see her again.

  People seemed to appear from nowhere to help him get a passport, a visa and a job as a kitchen worker and waiter on a Wallenius Lines freighter. He never understood how it all happened. The freighter would take him not to New York, but to Boston. He found a slip of paper stapled to his employment contract with the following words in blue ballpoint pen: “Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts. Good luck! H.”

  His life would never be the same again. He became an American citizen and changed his name to Dan Brody, and the years that followed were full of wonderful, exciting experiences. And yet, deep down, he felt disillusioned and alone. He nearly had a breakthrough at the start of his career. One day, jamming at Ryles Jazz Club on Hampshire Street in Cambridge, he played a solo which was both in the spirit of Django and at the same time something else, something new, and a murmur went through the audience. People began to talk about him and he got to know the managers and scouts of record companies. But in the end they felt he was lacking something, courage perhaps—and self-confidence. Deals fell through at the last minute, and he was eclipsed by others who were less talented and yet somehow more enterprising. He would have to be satisfied with a life in the shadows; he would be the one sitting behind the star. He would always miss the fervour he had felt as he played on the jetty at Blackåstjärnen.

  —

  Salander had tracked down several larger hand-motion data sets—used for medical research and to develop robots—and had fed them into Hacker Republic’s deep neural networks. She had been working so hard that she had forgotten to eat and drink, despite the heat. Finally she looked up from the computer and poured herself a glass, not of water, but of Tullamore Dew.