by Arne Dahl
‘But there are hidden statistics too,’ said Gunnar, seemingly unaffected by the wine. ‘I should think Sweden has the highest in the world.’
‘You mean home-distilled?’ asked Paul.
‘And black-market spirits. But above all, home-distilled schnapps.’
‘Why’s it called brännvin?’ asked Viggo, still incessantly stroking his daughter’s head. ‘It’s not wine, is it?’
Ludmila searched her linguistic memory banks and came up with an answer.
‘The word came to Swedish in the Middle Ages. It was called “brännevin” back then, from the Low German “bernewin”, which means “burnt, or distilled, wine”. In Dutch, it’s called “brandewijn”, which eventually became “brandy”.’
Paul noticed how admiringly Gunnar was looking at her. After all these years, it transpired that this was what his taste in women was like.
‘But that’s no answer,’ Viggo obstinately pointed out. ‘We’re still in the same old spot. Why did they call it a wine when it was a spirit?’
‘Because the word “spirit” didn’t exist,’ said Ludmila. ‘It didn’t appear in Swedish until the end of the eighteenth century, and it was a French import, not a German one. It comes directly from the French “esprit”.’
‘So wine meant spirit and spirit didn’t mean shit?’ Viggo half rhymed, unexpectedly aggressively.
‘Language is constantly changing, Viggo,’ Ludmila said calmly.
‘And don’t you shout at my lady,’ Gunnar said, equally calmly.
It wasn’t the fact that the bells of the Gustav Vasa Church had just struck nine in the distance that interrupted the slightly soured discussion, but the fact that Jorge had just placed a laptop computer in the middle of the dining table.
The nine peals reverberated through Paul’s conscience. With each one, a realisation grew. It was as abrupt as it was absurd. Eventually it was so complete and so overbearing that he had to gulp down an entire glass of Duca d’Aragona to stop himself from breaking the golden rule.
Jorge had attached a little device to the top of the laptop screen. Then he spun the computer around so that it was facing his seat at the table, sat down and called out to the group.
‘Gather round, people!’
They got reluctantly and sluggishly to their feet. Hultin took a couple of elegant sidesteps and smiled awry. His wife Stina propped him up and said, neutrally: ‘They say wine counteracts strokes, but somehow I doubt that’s true.’
Gunnar squeezed his former giant’s body in behind Ludmila’s chair and touched her lightly on the neck. Kerstin launched herself sidelong over Cilla, who laughed loudly and, Paul thought, entirely without cause. Astrid moved over to Viggo and knocked fondly on his head; Viggo simply kept stroking his sleeping daughter’s thin hair. Paul shuffled over and stood at the back. Sara came over and put an arm around him. He barely noticed.
The screen crackled and a strange figure appeared.
‘Hello, wage labourers,’ the strange figure said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Viggo exclaimed. ‘Everyone’s favourite Finn.’
‘Arto,’ said Jorge, who had seemingly sobered up, ‘how’re things? We’re having a house-warming.’
‘So I see,’ said Arto Söderstedt’s slightly jumpy image. ‘I’ve just given up my daily Vin Santo, myself. From today. Came to that drastic decision after three glasses.’
A general murmur broke out in the flat on Birkagatan. Jorge hushed them with great authority.
‘How are things?’ he asked.
‘Great, thanks,’ said Arto. ‘If it weren’t for an upcoming trip. Don’t people get robbed all the time in Ukraine?’
‘You’ve just broken the golden rule, haven’t you?’
‘Right, yes. Sorry. No, but like I said, things are great. Aside from the fact my daughter lost her virginity, that I’ll be having another baby, and that ancient goddesses of revenge are creeping among the basil plants.’
Kerstin and Sara cleared their throats loudly. The Söderstedt-like figure put his hand to his mouth and made the sign of the cross.
‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘Slip of the tongue.’
‘Baby?’ Viggo shouted. ‘For God’s sake, you old buck. We’re having another one, too.’
‘Speaking of bucks?’ Arto replied. ‘That’s great, congratulations. Good for the babysitting, too.’
‘The family OK?’ asked Jorge.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We had a little Heimlich incident a couple of hours ago, but otherwise fine. Show me the flat.’
Jorge detached the little camera from the top of the screen and slowly turned it round, round, round.
‘Wow,’ said Arto. ‘Such green hair.’
‘Twenty laps every Sunday,’ Sara said laconically.
‘Though we’ll see tomorrow,’ said Jorge.
‘No, listen, it looks really nice. Is the nursery ready?’
‘What is this, kids’ club?’ said Jorge.
Sara said: ‘Soon.’
They quickly moved on from that topic without further ado. Arto said goodbye to each of them in order. Anja appeared on-screen for a moment and said, sceptically: ‘The wonders of technology.’
At that very moment, the picture vanished into a cluster of peculiar multicoloured squares. The screen looked more like a church window.
That was what Paul Hjelm thought, at least. The church bells were still echoing through him.
He was about to shatter.
The bacchanal group moved slightly unsteadily back to the sofas and armchairs after that.
Paul paused at the bookcase on his way over. For a brief moment, the ringing of the church bells disappeared, only to be replaced by something else. He pulled a book from the shelf. It was called The Big Nowhere. The author was James Ellroy.
Jorge was puffing on a cigarette with the inexperience of a schoolgirl. He laughed and pointed.
‘There are your wolverines. James Ellroy.’
‘Though there aren’t actually any wolverines,’ Kerstin said, smoking just as inexpertly and with a portion of snus tobacco shoved beneath her lip.
‘“Wolverine Blues”,’ said Jorge, giving Sara a wet, smoky kiss.
The bottle of Cragganmore was opened and asymmetric waves of discussion poured through the little flat until salsa music started streaming from hidden speakers and their unrhythmic feet began pounding the neighbours’ ceilings. Hultin and Stina were dancing a waltz. They looked like a couple of wounded lemmings on their way towards a cliff edge. Jorge smoothly asked Cilla to dance, and they glided around the room with professional dance steps. In just a few minutes, she was transformed from blonde dishcloth to dark, mysterious Latino dance queen. The lights were probably just too low. Gunnar and Ludmila were dancing cheek to cheek. It looked lethal: a cat in the arms of a grizzly bear. A sucker fish on a shark. Viggo and Astrid reluctantly handed Charlotte to Sara, who sat there stroking her with long, lingering movements, and headed out onto the dance floor like a couple of mediocre folk dancers.
Only Paul and Kerstin remained standing where they were, watching the spectacle from a distance.
He was suddenly struck by a vision of a dying civilisation’s staggering dance steps over an abyss. He saw figures like empty, storyless shells which, like marionettes, carried out their capers over depths they would never come close to unless their puppeteer let go of the strings and they tumbled loose-limbed down into the abyss. And by that point, it was already too late.
It lasted just a moment, and ultimately wasn’t particularly rewarding. Distance is simply cowardice, he thought in confusion, finding Kerstin’s hand and leading her to the dance floor. She let herself be led. In reality, it was more like she was leading and he was simply imagining that he was the one doing it. As he buried his cheek in her unruly dark hair, smelling scents he hadn’t smelled for years, the internal church bells disappeared, and when he put his ear to the thin, thin patch above her left temple, he imagined he was making direct contact
with her thoughts. And that wasn’t the worst.
He had no idea how they ended up in the taxi, but there he was, with Cilla’s blonde hair flowing over his shoulder, hearing her say: ‘I know the two of you had an affair.’
He should probably have been indignant, but he wasn’t. He slowly stroked her hair, staying silent.
‘It’s OK,’ said Cilla. ‘It was a long time ago, I know.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘She said plenty of things. I really like Kerstin.’
‘You already knew?’
‘I suspected. But I also knew it had been over a long time.’
‘Did you ask her?’
‘No. She told me herself. It seems like she’s putting the past behind her. Fixing the holes in time, she said.’
Paul actually smiled. He really had been in direct contact with her thoughts earlier. Maybe they were Kerstin’s thoughts he had been thinking. Maybe that was the real reason her cranium had been thinned out. So that her thoughts could reach him more easily.
Cilla continued: ‘It’s OK, Paul. I had an affair too. Back then.’
What about now? he thought. Shouldn’t I be feeling indignant now?
‘When we were separated?’ was all he asked.
To restore a little order.
‘Yeah, that spring, whenever it was. It was just a short thing. But oddly enough, I wouldn’t undo it.’
‘Nor would I,’ said Paul.
‘Haven’t you noticed that something is happening to her?’
‘To Kerstin? No, not really.’
‘She said she went through a crisis. A metamorphosis, she called it. She hadn’t really even dared admit it to herself, she said.’
‘Did she say what it was?’
‘Not exactly. But I think she’s finding religion.’
They fell silent. That was that with the direct contact, then, Paul thought, feeling the everyday come rushing back into the taxi.
Religion?
When they finally crawled into bed and were much too tired and preoccupied to carry out all they had been thinking about in the taxi, the church bells returned. Just before he fell asleep, he realised he had been released from his vow of silence. The golden rule no longer applied.
He told Cilla. The fact that she was sleeping deeply, snoring away peacefully next to him, didn’t make a difference.
The main thing was that he didn’t burst.
He might already have been half asleep himself when he said: ‘Surely there wasn’t a church in Buchenwald.’
32
ON COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS, we should skip over Sunday without comment, leaping forward in time to Monday instead.
Monday 15 May.
Monday mornings can vary greatly. For some, they represent nothing more than the pure joy of being able to get back to work again after a long, boring weekend of loneliness or matrimonial misery. For others, they represent the endless suffering of having to drag themselves up out of bed and face the meaningless, creativity-crushing week ahead of them. For others still, they are a torment, a reminder that everyone else is off to work, all those joyful souls who actually have a job to go to.
And then there is one final category. One which belongs to the happy few who, despite having had an extraordinarily pleasant weekend, look forward to getting back to work with the enthusiasm of a child.
Paul Hjelm belonged to this group.
It was time for him to return to Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from those awful days in February 1945. The diary was still at the police station – had he had it at home, Sunday wouldn’t have passed by in silence.
He managed to piece together rather a lot of things.
Though it had started slowly. Not that ‘slowly’ was really the right word. It started with self-contempt.
He felt like a rapist.
The ten or so yellowed pages of the diary were spread across his desk. Wherever the pencil had touched the paper, it had formed letters. Those letters weren’t simply a bank of information about an objectively reconstructable event from the past. They were words from the brink of death, and those words had reverberated through him and hurled him into the abyss. He had cried at those words, tears which had come from the very core of his being. The words had evoked a time and an experience that had started to pale away. They were almost holy, somehow.
He had the text in front of him now, splayed out like a victim, and he was planning on getting to work on it with the entire arsenal of rational structures which formed the basis of Western society: logic, analytical focus and stringent penetration.
He would, quite simply, be raping the text.
Like any good middle-aged, heterosexual, white, European man should.
To leave it untouched in its cocoon would be to shy away from the truth; it would be tantamount to renouncing knowledge, accepting a mystical and unchanging condition of fear, stepping back into a dark period of time and preparing the way for vague, inhuman forces.
Wasn’t there any way of analysing it soberly and critically and still – perhaps precisely by doing so – managing to keep the striking mystery alive?
That felt like the deciding question. And not just for Leonard Sheinkman’s diary, not just for this case in its entirety, not even just for Paul Hjelm’s entire working life, but for society as a whole.
What had Kerstin discovered?
Had she realised that without mystery we are all just empty shells?
At that moment, Paul Hjelm got the better of himself, as is often said when things return to the same old rut, and immersed himself in the text. Using logic, an analytical focus and stringent penetration, he took on Leonard Sheinkman’s diary from a week of decisive importance in 1945, not long before the end of the war.
Leonard Sheinkman hadn’t been in Buchenwald, Germany’s largest concentration camp, built on a desolate little hill named Ettersberg in 1937, just seven kilometres outside the cultured city of Weimar. A place where there definitely wasn’t a church just outside the window.
There were two possible explanations: either the church was just an image – something in which to ‘see time’, as Sheinkman had constantly written – or else it actually did exist, while simultaneously being an image used to ‘see time’. What spoke so clearly in favour of the latter was that the church had been described in such detail, and in combination with the Allied bombings, which had intensified in Germany during February 1945.
Everything pointed towards Sheinkman having been in a town, not on a desolate little hillside.
So why had he gone through life claiming to have been in Buchenwald? Why had he told his children that he had been held in Buchenwald of all places?
Once again, there were two possible explanations here: either whatever he had been subjected to in that town was so awful that even the nightmare of Buchenwald appeared a kinder and more manageable alternative, or else he had something to hide.
Paul Hjelm decided that could wait. The town could wait too – it was, at present, still seemingly unidentifiable. He took on the place itself instead.
It was clearly an institution. The prisoners were being kept in cells of some kind. There was a list, and when you reached the top of that list, you were subjected to something terrible. The result of whatever you were subjected to was that your personality was, in some way, erased. That was what had happened to his comrade Erwin. ‘When I speak to him, there is no one there. He is nothing but an empty shell. Over the spot where it has been running out of his head, an innocent little gauze dressing.’ That dressing appeared again. ‘Their bandages shine like lanterns on their empty skulls.’ And: ‘Soon, the little bandage will be pressed to my temple.’
Temple, Paul Hjelm thought, closing his eyes.
Of course.
A thin wall was separating Paul Hjelm from Kerstin Holm. On the other side of that wall, a conversation with Europe was currently under way. Or rather, a conversation with Professor Ernst Herschel from the history department at the University of Jena.
He was rather reluctant. A so-called challenge.
‘It was a mistake mentioning it to Josef,’ he said in academic-sounding English. Broken but grammatically sound.
‘Josef?’ asked Holm.
‘Josef Benziger in Weimar. He was a student here. A very promising student. I don’t understand how he could become a policeman.’
‘What was the context of you mentioning it to Josef?’
‘We met for a beer and I scolded him for not continuing his postgraduate studies. I was careless enough to mention my new research project. Mostly to show him what a titbit he was missing.’
‘So it’s your new research project?’
Silence from Jena. Kerstin continued.
‘What’s preventing you from talking about this new project?’
‘Several things, Frau Holm.’
‘Fräulein,’ Kerstin Holm said youthfully.
‘It’s an extremely sensitive project, Fräulein Holm. Within a few years, I hope that my research group will be ready to publish our results. But at this stage, the entire project is in quite an unsatisfying position, from a scientific point of view.’
The academic preserve, Kerstin Holm thought. It was obviously important to pick each word she said carefully here. Some well-paid American professor was probably hovering in the background somewhere, and Professor Herschel wasn’t ready to sacrifice him.
Not even to support an international murder investigation.
She could force him. She could take a hard line with him and get hold of a court order which would force him to talk. But there were two problems with that: firstly, it would take much too long, and secondly, most of the important information – the kind of thing people only told others in confidence – would be lost. She had no choice but to coax him.
‘We won’t reveal any of your research,’ she said.
Professor Ernst Herschel laughed.
‘Fräulein Holm,’ he said, ‘we are both employed by the state. We know how little we earn in comparison to every little errand boy in the private sphere. The world is, at present, incredibly unfair, and I wouldn’t hold it against you if you sold the information to Bild-Zeitung for a couple of million. We both know that public institutions leak like sieves. The police don’t know a thing that the press doesn’t also know within a few hours.’