‘How do you know Josef?’ I ask.
‘He’s the one who’s really called “Papi”. It’s just Dino and Lehel who call Goran “Papi”, because they’re actually related.’
‘And what does Papi mean, then? Dad?’
‘More or less. Josef is like a dad. Well, he’s more like a granddad these days. He’s old, but he’s still Papi. Our dads, I mean our own dads, they’ve got some stories about him.’
‘Is it right that he gets called “the man with no voice”?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘He can’t talk.’
‘And why not?’
‘Whoa. Too many questions.’
‘SHALL WE RING the bell?’
Karin shakes her head. We’re on the top floor of one of the blocks.
‘He already knows,’ she says, and opens the door. It’s a simple wooden one with a letterbox and ABEL written on a label that was once white.
The hall is large and neat, and a red-and-brown rug with a crocheted pattern muffles our steps. Straight down the corridor, the flat divides, with a room on each side. To the right is what looks like a big kitchen with a dining table and chairs; to the left, something resembling a living room. Karin takes her boots off, and gestures to me to do the same. She goes into the room on the left, and says something in Spanish to the two young men sitting in armchairs, each holding a video-game controller. In front of them, a TV is showing a meeting between two football teams. On a little table in between them lie two black pistols. One of the men pauses the game and looks up, says Karin’s name and then Papi, and something else.
‘What’s he saying?’ I ask.
‘That you can go in,’ she says. ‘But only if I go in, too.’
Beyond the men are two doors, both closed. The man gesticulates wearily towards one of them and watches us pass.
The door is opened by yet another man, about Karin’s age. He has thick black hair and pale skin, piercing blue eyes, and a pronounced, sharp nose that projects over his lip. He looks at Karin.
‘It’s late,’ he says.
‘I know. Thank you,’ says Karin.
The room consists of a single bed, an armchair, a television, and a bookshelf. The floor is covered with a carpet. Someone is sitting in the armchair — a man with yellowish skin and a white halo of hair around his head, his eyes fixed on a book. He’s wearing a white shirt, and grey suit trousers held up by simple black braces. The shirt is unbuttoned, revealing a vest and a chestful of bushy white hair. His nose is bony and low; his eyebrows, thick and straight. His shoulders are relaxed, hunched over the book. They are shoulders that once belonged to a wrestler or someone whose job involved moving pianos.
‘Josef Abel?’ I ask, standing a metre or so away from him.
Abel looks up, pulls a black leather-bound pad from his shirt pocket, and finds a pen. His breathing comes in noisy puffs. As he writes, I notice the scar circling his neck like a necklace: light pink, uneven, and thick from one side to the other, just above the collar bone. He shows me the notepad.
do I know you
Then his eyes come alive, and he tilts his head slightly to one side, scanning across my legs, my hands, my shoulders. He adds two words:
do I know you mr officer
‘Leo Junker,’ I say, and slight surprise is just visible in the old man’s face.
you were involved in that mess on Gotland
‘Yes, unfortunately. I need your help. Daniel Berggren — does that name mean anything to you?’
The man holds up a finger and turns around. He looks over his shoulder, picks up a book that is lying on the floor next to him, and pulls an envelope out of it, which he shows to me. It’s white, postcard-sized, and soft, as though it contains several sheets of paper. leo, is all that’s written on it, written in handwriting I don’t recognise.
‘It’s from him, is it? From Daniel?’
Abel nods, and that makes the envelope seem warm against my fingers.
‘When did he leave this?’
came by courier don’t know any more
‘I don’t really believe that.’
suspicious, eh?
The old man laughs — a mocking, panting laugh.
‘You’ve been in contact with Daniel Berggren, then?’
has something happened?
‘How well do you know him?’
His face goes tense, sombre.
quite well please don’t tell me you’re bringing bad news
‘I’m afraid I am,’ I say.
The old man is blinking. If he’s shocked or surprised, you can’t tell; maybe there’s a hint of a shake in the next word he writes on the pad:
suicide?
‘Almost,’ I say. ‘Murder.’
victim or murderer
‘Murderer,’ I say as I look around, pull a chair over, and sit down on it.
you’re lying that can’t be true
‘I’m afraid it is.’
Abel shrinks into a heap, as though he’d got a puncture. As he turns the page in his pad, he discovers that he’s just filled the last page. The old man opens his mouth and speaks, breathing in the words, his voice like a cracked ghost. It’s a terrible noise, the sound of someone speaking with glass shards in their voice box. A little while after he’s gone quiet, the words sink in:
‘New pad.’
The man who’s been standing next to Karin leaves the room and comes back with a new pad. In the meantime, Karin goes over, squats down on her heels, and chats to Abel. He’s pleased to see her. His eyes light up and he smiles, stroking her cheek when she tells him something. Karin is holding his hand between her palms. I’m holding the envelope. The sweat is making the envelope damp.
D isn’t a murderer
‘Maybe not directly,’ I say. ‘But indirectly. I need to know what you know. He was my friend, once. Now I’m afraid that he’s going to hurt people.’
what do you want to know?
‘How did you come to know him?’
he came to me
Abel strains to remember, before he continues:
after Jumkil
He looks at me, curious.
‘I know about Jumkil,’ I say.
his friend introduced us
‘The friend he was living with at the time, here in Alby?’
‘Yeah,’ Abel hisses, nodding. The sound is hollow and wheezy, makes me think of reptiles.
D had certain skills
‘I know.’
I made sure he used them he helped a lot of people
‘He helped a lot of people to disappear?’
and he helped a lot of people get here from their home countries
Abel hesitates before adding: for money
‘And you had money,’ I say.
That makes the old man crack a smile, showing his sorry excuse for a mouth with its many missing teeth; those that are still there are crooked, deformed, and unhealthily yellow.
understatement, he writes.
‘I see. Drugs?’
Abel tenses up in his chair, stares at me for a long while, as though this is a crucial moment.
among other things but that was then I’m old now
‘You were hardly young twelve years ago.’
I was younger mr officer
‘Did you know that Daniel was really called something else? That his name was John?’
don’t remember
‘John Grimberg.’
Abel taps the words he’s just written, as if to emphasise them, and adds: we called him the invisible man
‘Why?’
The old man writes a longer reply.
he got in trouble after a thing
with S, he disappeared then, didn’t see him for some time, then he came back, like an apparition
‘When did you last see Daniel?’
a couple of months ago
‘Under what circumstances?’
‘Whoa.’ I hear Karin’s voice behind me, and feel a hand gripping my shoulder, tightly. ‘Is this an interrogation, or what?’
‘No.’
‘Take it easy, right?’ she says. ‘Lean back.’ She lets go of my shoulder. ‘He doesn’t like being pushed.’
‘I’m not pushing.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
Abel smiles apologetically and blinks at Karin. On the TV, in the background, a music video is flickering. A big whale is floating through space, and looks as if it’s about to swallow the earth. Looks welcoming.
‘A couple of months ago, you met Daniel,’ I say. ‘What was the deal?’
he was here on business
‘Someone was going to disappear?’
Abel nods.
‘Does he still use the name Daniel Berggren?’
that’s the name he’s always used with me
‘How do you get in touch with Daniel if you need to get hold of him?’
send a letter
‘To what address?’
He writes something down and rips it from the pad, gives it to me. It’s a P.O. box.
‘This isn’t a real address.’
it’s the one I’ve got
‘So what happens when you contact him by letter?’
he comes here
‘After how long?’
2–4 days
I look at the address in my hand and stand up from the chair. I wonder where the box is. Wherever it is, it’s likely to be close to Grim’s home. That box must be important for him.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
you don’t want to thank me you want to lock me up for drugs and violence, he writes, because you think I’ve hurt the children of Alby
‘Yes,’ I say.
I nearly say something, but I don’t really know what. I stare at Abel, try to decide if there’s anything I could threaten him with. There isn’t. I take a couple of steps back, on my way out. He writes something else on the pad and waves me over again.
do you think you make the world a better place?
‘I think I did think that, once,’ I say. ‘But that was then. I have changed.’
people don’t change mr officer, he writes, they adapt
XXIV
Sitting in an underground train, I open the envelope. The carriage is almost empty — just a few passengers dotted about, sitting with their heads leaning against the windowpanes. The lighting is pale yellow, making my skin look sickly.
It looks like some kind of diary, several pages long, written in the kind of handwriting Grim probably doesn’t use anymore. In some parts he writes differently, modified and distorted as if to conceal his identity. You can tell, though. It’s like he was trying on some old clothes for the first time in ages, and wasn’t sure what persona, what character, they conveyed.
In the period leading up to my disappearance I go to a psychologist. She becomes increasingly flippant and I can’t understand why. I remember one afternoon in her office, she asks me what’s wrong. I say that I don’t know, that it may or may not have something to do with my family, or my friends, I don’t know. Anja’s dead, maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s the junk. She asks how my family are these days. I say fine, everything’s fine. There’s only Dad left and he’s fine.
‘What about me?’ I ask.
‘What do you mean?’
I don’t know what to say, I feel so disorientated.
‘Yes, what about me?’ I repeat, feeling helpless.
‘It will be okay,’ she says, ‘when you get a bit older everything will be fine. You grow out of things.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I don’t think so.’
She tilts her head slightly. She looks down on me, she doesn’t say so but I know it’s true. I’ve met so many people like her now, and they are all the same.
I manage to disappear. It takes time. Giving someone an ID card and a pat on the back is one thing, but really disappearing is another. Especially if, as I have, you’ve ended up in all sorts of unusual registers. I don’t manage to fix all of them. Certain entries are too old to be altered, buried deep in the machinery of Swedish bureaucracy. I bribe whoever I can, threaten civil servants via decoys, and report false changes of address and bank details. I try and get myself certified dead but for that you need a corpse and I’m not prepared to go that far. 2003 and everything else is in place. I choose the name with great care and at twenty-four John Grimberg is a man who vanishes into thin air.
I switch to a lighter drug because I need a clear head right now. It doesn’t work out and in the end I’m back on the horse. To keep functioning I start taking black market medication. No clinic would prescribe Subutex for the likes of me. I’m still taking them, but no one knows about that — well, apart from you. Twice a day I take methadone, sometimes more often than that. Recently it’s been more.
After a while, once I’ve managed to become someone else, things start ticking over on their own. Through Abel I start helping people get new identity documents, start investigating whether it’s possible to completely erase any trace of someone. It’s one thing getting rid of yourself. Someone else is a much bigger ask.
Before long I’m all over the place, helping people left and right and earning insane amounts of money. If I told you how much you would laugh, it’s ridiculous. But during all that time, all those years, even when things were at their worst, not even then did I think of you. I hadn’t forgiven you, but I’d moved on. Besides, I had no idea who you were, where you were, or even if you were alive. That uncertainty felt good.
And then, just three weeks ago, everything fell apart. Imagine it taking that long! Since then I’ve been writing this to you, Leo.
Are you listening? Can you hear me? I’m going to make sure that you listen.
Dad got sick and after a while he died. I’d tried to see him as much as possible before he had to go into hospital.
I think we both knew we’d had it, but neither of us said anything. I think he knew what I was up to, but he didn’t mention that either. We played cards, watched films, went and played darts every now and then in some bar, that sort of thing.
I don’t know if he felt the same, but it seemed to me that we had an unspoken agreement. We just made sure we had each other, that’s all. We both needed that.
Then he had to be admitted and I visited him in hospital. I used a false name and Dad heard it, I think, because he called me it once, and smiled. The last time we saw each other he was very weak and it took a while before he recognised me. That’s when something grabbed me, when I saw his face.
I’d put so much distance between myself and everything else that had anything to do with Salem. I had to, to survive. So when I saw him there it was a shock, as though everything came back to me. Suddenly, no time had passed, despite the fact it’s been nearly sixteen years. He was all I had left. And then he died. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I started dreaming and the dream was just one thing: the colour red, how I was ensnared by it, and couldn’t get free. I floated through the funeral in a daze.
I was the only one left, and had to take care of the estate. Dad had taken care of Julia’s and Mum’s deaths. He claimed to have thrown everything away and I hadn’t been down in the basement, so when I did go down there I got a shock. Everything was there. He hadn’t even thrown my old clothes away. As I’m writing this I just don’t understand why he didn’t say anything, why he claimed to have thrown it all away. But as I stood there all I could think about was how he’d fitted it all in. Even the furniture from Jul
ia’s room was down there. Her bed, desk, shelves, everything. The bed was still made. Can you imagine? The bed was still made! The bedclothes were full of mould but you could still see the pattern, the little colourful dots. For some reason I took the boxes off the bed and pulled the cover back. There were some of her clothes lying in there. They were half-rotten, just like the bedclothes, but I still recognised them.
You’ve no idea how the little everyday things can bring the past crashing back, like a black hole inside of you that sucks you in. That was the first time I had a relapse with the heroin, in there. I went out and scored and sat down among the stuff and just shot up.
When I started going through the boxes I found clothes I hadn’t seen for ages. They belonged to you. That blue hoodie with the Champion logo on, do you remember that? I don’t suppose you do. I even found Julia’s notepad, where you had written each other’s names. I found Mum’s old photo album, which she’d put together during those moments when she felt a bit happier. I remember she was very particular about the order, which photo should come after what. It started when it was just her and Dad, then I popped up here and there and then Julia. She was wearing her necklace in several of the photos.
That storage room was like stepping into another time. Everything swirled around me. Memories of Mum, Dad, and everyone else. It was just like I told you, do you remember I said several times that if anything happened to Julia we wouldn’t be able to stick together? And that’s what happened, slowly but surely. I don’t think I cried. I lived down there for several days (don’t bother looking, I’m not there anymore), going through all that stuff, not doing anything else. I watched those old films we made, the ones we recorded ourselves. First up was one called ‘LOVE KILLER’. Do you remember that one?
I burnt the lot in a steel drum in the yard. Everything, apart from the stuff that was too big to fit. I took that to the dump. But everything else, every last fucking memory, I torched the lot. I am no one. Have nothing. On the outside, everything’s fine after Dad’s death, but inside it’s like I’m disintegrating. I feel so incredibly lonely. Invisible. For the first time.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. When I was twenty I could live like this, didn’t think about missing anything. That I was just gliding through life. These thoughts keep me awake at night. The isolation is complete. I feel anonymous, it’s like everything’s suddenly caught up with me. I’ve started hallucinating. Sometimes I manage to sleep but sometimes I can go days without.
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