‘A revivalist meeting?’
Berit took another mouthful, some water, and swallowed.
‘That’s what they reminded some people of, yes. Everyone who attended was a committed Maoist. They stood up one by one and bore witness to the way Mao’s thoughts had been like a spiritual atom bomb for them. After every speaker there was wild applause. Every now and then there’d be a break, and they’d have sandwiches and beer, then they’d carry on with a new round of personal statements.’
‘Like what?’ Annika said. ‘What did they say?’
‘They quoted the Master. Anyone trying to formulate their own phrases was immediately accused of bourgeois use of language. The only exception was “Death to the fascists in the Communist Association of Marxist-Leninists”.’
Annika leaned back in her chair, picking out a cashew nut from under a lettuce leaf and popping it in her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully. ‘But surely they were communists as well?’
‘Oh yes,’ Berit said, wiping her chin with the napkin. ‘But nothing upset the rebels more than those who almost thought like them. Torbjörn Säfve, who wrote a brilliant book about the rebel movement, called it “paranoid discontent”. The sort of posters people put up on their walls was a big deal for them. If anyone had a poster of Lenin that was bigger than the picture of Mao, that was regarded as counterrevolutionary. If the top edge of a picture of Mao was lower than the top edge of a picture of Lenin or Marx, that was enough for someone to be accused of a lack of conviction.’
‘I don’t suppose you knew an active rebel by the name of Göran Nilsson?’ Annika asked, looking expectantly at Berit.
Her colleague reached for a toothpick and pulled off the plastic. ‘Not that I can recall. Should I?’
Annika sighed and shook her head.
‘Have you tried the archive?’ Berit asked.
‘Nothing.’
Berit frowned in concentration.
‘The first of May that year, the rebels marched through Uppsala in a big, organized demonstration. As far as I remember, all the big papers covered it. Maybe he was involved?’
Annika got up, her tray in one hand and her purse in the other.
‘I’ll check right now,’ she said. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Why not?’ Berit said.
They went out of the canteen’s back door and took the emergency staircase to the second floor, then went through a narrow corridor to the huge text and picture archive. Everything ever printed in the Evening Post and Fine Morning News in the past hundred and fifty years was stored here.
‘The files are at the back on the left,’ Berit said.
They found the morning papers from May 1968 after a minute or so. Annika pulled down the bound bundle from the top shelf, covering herself in dust and dirt. She coughed and pulled a face.
2 May 1968: the front page was full of the rebels’ demonstration through Uppsala the day before. Annika frowned and looked more closely.
‘Are these your revolutionary rebels?’ she said in disbelief. ‘They look like any other middle-class kids, the whole lot of them.’
Berit ran her hand over the yellowing newspaper, a rustling sound beneath her dry fingertip, her middle finger stopping on the cropped head of the leader of the march.
‘That was a conscious decision,’ she said, her voice distant. ‘They were supposed to look like ordinary people as much as possible. They tried to agree on a prototype for the highly industrialized worker, but I don’t think that ever happened. But they did agree on a smart jacket and white shirt. They were really weird in Uppsala.’
She leaned back against the bookcase, folded her arms and looked blankly up at the ceiling.
‘A general strike broke out all over France in the first week of May, nineteen sixty-eight,’ Berit said. ‘One million demonstrated in Paris against the capitalist state. The rebels wanted to show solidarity with their French comrades and organized a revolutionary meeting on the Castle Hill in Uppsala one Friday evening. A gang of us from the Bulletin went along, it was really awful.’
She shook her head and looked down at the floor. ‘There were a lot of people there, at least three hundred, and the rebels made the mistake of carrying on like they usually did at their own séances, with readings from their holy scriptures. Most of the audience were just ordinary people, and they reacted as you’d imagine, started booing and laughing.’
Annika was absorbed in the story and took a step closer. ‘What scriptures?’
Berit looked up. ‘Readings from Mao, of course,’ she said, ‘Lin Biao’s pamphlet, Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!, the Chinese Communist Party’s Sixteen Points for cultural revolution … The rebels lost all their inhibitions at that meeting, and when the masses failed to support them they fell back on their usual tactics – savage, rabid diatribes.’ She shook her head at the memory.
‘One direct consequence of that meeting was that ordinary leftwing organizations were no longer allowed to sell The Spark and the Vietnam Bulletin in workplaces. Can you see your Göran?’
‘I’m going to stay and read for a while,’ Annika said, pulling over a rickety chair.
‘Well, you know where I am if you need me,’ Berit said, and left her among the paper and dust.
28
The telephone rang, making Anne start. She quickly pushed the bottle back in the drawer and locked it before she picked up the receiver.
‘What did you do to Sylvia yesterday?’ Mehmet’s voice was treacherously smooth, but Anne knew him, knew there was lava and sulphur bubbling beneath the calm surface.
‘Surely the real question is, what the hell was she doing at my daughter’s nursery?’ Anne said, as the world shattered into tiny pieces. Anger and despair turned the sky outside black.
‘Can’t we at least behave like adults?’ Mehmet said, the temperature of his voice rising.
‘And which particular adult plan had you worked out yesterday? That I’d get to the nursery and find that Miranda had disappeared? What was I supposed to think? That Miranda had left me because she’d rather be with Sylvia? That she’d been kidnapped?’
‘Now you’re just being ridiculous.’ He was no longer able to conceal his anger.
‘Ridiculous?’ Anne screamed down the phone, standing up. ‘Ridiculous? What the hell are you up to with your cosy fucking nuclear family? First you come round and say you and your new fuck want custody of my daughter, then she tries to steal her from nursery, what the hell are you up to? Are you trying to terrorize me?’
‘Calm down,’ Mehmet said, and the phone went ice-cold, the heated anger exchanged for hatred, the chill striking her ear, making her stiffen.
‘Go to hell,’ she said, and hung up.
She stood there, staring at the phone. He called her straight back.
‘So now Miranda’s yours alone? What happened to all your fine ideals about mutual responsibility? Your high-flown theories about shared parenting, that the child should belong to the collective and not the individual?’
Anne Snapphane sank onto her chair again. She had never imagined she could be sucked into such a stinking swamp of bitterness and ill-will and envy, the place where below-the-belt blows come from. And she couldn’t help it, she was there already, the quicksand had her, and if she struggled she would only sink to the bottom even faster.
‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘Who betrayed who? Who left who? Who’s trying to mess things up? It bloody well isn’t me.’
‘Sylvia spent the whole evening crying. She was inconsolable,’ Mehmet said, his voice sounding thick and tearful in a way that made Anne furious.
‘Good grief,’ she shouted. ‘It’s hardly my fault she’s got bad nerves!’
Mehmet paused for breath, gathering his larynx for a full-frontal assault.
‘Sylvia said that you had destroyed her, and there’s something you need to know, Anne: if you ruin things for my family, I won’t be responsible for my actions.’
Anne felt the air being squeezed o
ut of her lungs, all the oxygen disappearing from her brain.
‘Are you threatening me?’ she said. ‘Are you mad? Have you really sunk that low?’
The distance on the line grew, rolling round and round the swamp, and when he came back on the line he was light-years away.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘if that’s how you want it.’
And then it was silent, gone, the dialogue broken, and all around her everything was bubbling and frothing, and Anne leaned over her desk and wept.
Annika was getting more and more restless as she climbed the stairs back to the newsroom. Her search through the old editions had given her nothing but dirty hands and dusty jeans. The political climate of the time had not been consciously addressed in the contemporary media. Every day was just a new headline, then as now, with adverts to sell and stories to write and police reports to check.
The layout and print quality of newspapers in the sixties was terrible, scratchy fonts and badly reproduced pictures. She was glad she hadn’t been working then.
But every age has its own ideals, she thought as she headed towards her glass room. You live in an age just as much as you do in a place, and the sixties wouldn’t have suited her.
Did the twenty-first century, though?
She heard the phone start to ring and lengthened her strides.
‘I heard you were trying to get hold of me,’ said Hans Blomberg, the archivist of the Norrland News.
‘Oh, I’m glad you called,’ Annika said, pulling the door shut behind her. ‘How are you?’
A brief moment of surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’
She sat down on her chair, surprised in turn that he sounded so nonplussed.
‘The receptionist said you were ill, I was worried.’
‘Ah, yes, the tenderness of women,’ Hans Blomberg said, sounding as Annika remembered him, and she had to smile, picturing him sitting there in his cardigan next to his battered desk with the noticeboard above it, the child’s drawing, the sign telling him to hold out until retirement.
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Annika stretched back in her chair.
‘No, no,’ the archivist said, ‘just the usual. I’m past my sell-by date, but I’m probably okay in the fridge for a few more days before they throw me out.’
Her smile faded as he spoke. The tone was cheerful but his frustration was obvious.
‘Ha,’ Annika said brightly, choosing to ignore the bitterness. ‘To me you’re like a vintage wine.’
‘Oh, it takes a Stockholm girl to appreciate a real man. What can I help you with, young lady?’
‘A general question of an even older vintage,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to find information about a young man from Sattajärvi who lived in Luleå at the end of the sixties, probably worked for the Church. His name’s Göran Nilsson.’
‘Is he dead?’ Hans Blomberg said, his pen scratching in the background.
‘I don’t think so,’ Annika said.
‘So we’ll leave the dear departed alone, then. What do you want to know?’
‘Anything. If he won a jitterbug competition, demonstrated against imperialism, robbed a bank, got married.’
‘Göran Nilsson? You couldn’t have picked a more common name, then?’
‘I’ve looked everywhere but haven’t come up with a thing,’ Annika said.
The archivist groaned loudly. Annika could see him gripping the desk and heaving himself out of his chair.
‘This might take a few minutes,’ he said, and that was the understatement of the day.
Annika had time to look through a few websites, read about all the detached houses for sale in the Stockholm region, and fall in love with a beautiful, newly built house on Vinterviksvägen in Djursholm for a measly 6.9 million. She went to get some coffee and spoke to Berit, then tried to ring Thomas’s mobile and left a message for Anne Snapphane before there was a noise on the line again.
‘Well, I’ve looked for easier things,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘Have you any idea how many Göran Nilssons there are in the archive?’
‘Seventy-two and a half,’ Annika said.
‘Exactly right,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘And the only one from Sattajärvi I could find was in the wedding announcements.’
Annika raised her eyebrows, feeling her mood slump.
‘The wedding announcements? What, the kind of thing ministers did in church when people got married back in the eighteen hundreds?’
‘Well,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘it was actually obligatory until nineteen seventy-three, but you’re right about the church connection. The banns had to be read in church for three Sundays in a row before a wedding, to keep everyone happy.’
‘So why did they put it in the paper?’
Hans Blomberg thought for a moment. ‘That’s just how it was in those days, there was a special column. The cutting is from the twenty-ninth of September nineteen sixty-nine; do you want me to read it out?’
‘Yes, please,’ Annika said.
‘Parish assistant Göran Nilsson, born in Sattajärvi, now of Luleå, and student Karina Björnlund, born and living in Karlsvik. The wedding will take place in Luleå City Hall, Friday twenty November at two p.m.’
Her pen raced across the notepad as she tried to keep up with him, feeling the goosebumps prickle. She had difficulty breathing. Good God. Bloody hell, this is impossible!
She forced herself not to get too excited, not yet; she couldn’t be sure until she checked.
‘Well, goodness,’ Annika said hoarsely. ‘Thanks, thanks a lot. You’re a vintage champagne.’
‘Whenever, my dear, just give me a call.’
They hung up and Annika had to stand up. Yes! Her mind was racing, the rush of blood pumping in her ears. She ran out into the newsroom with her heart pounding, but somewhere near the sports desk she gathered her senses and realized that she actually didn’t have anything yet. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and hurried over to Berit.
‘Where’s the Minister of Culture from?’ she asked.
Berit looked up from her screen, glasses on the tip of her nose. ‘Norrbotten,’ she said. ‘Luleå, I think.’
‘Not from somewhere called Karlsvik?’
Berit took off her glasses and lowered her hands to her lap.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Where does she live now?’
‘A suburb, north of the city somewhere.’
‘Married?’
‘Living with someone,’ Berit said, ‘no children. What are you after?’
Annika rocked back and forth on her heels, shaking the noise from her head.
‘Just information,’ she said, ‘an old wedding announcement I need to check.’
‘A wedding announcement?’ Berit echoed as Annika walked off without explaining.
Back in her office Annika sat down at her screen and waited for her pulse to slow down. Then she raised her hands and let them slowly uncover the truth.
She started with the government site, and downloaded a PDF file about the head of the Ministry of Culture. It had a picture of Karina Björnlund giving a crooked smile, and information about her areas of responsibility: cultural heritage, art, the printed word, radio and television, faith communities.
In the personal section of the file it said that she was born in 1951 and raised in Luleå, and now lived in Knivsta with her partner.
Nothing about Karlsvik, Annika thought, and clicked on to an information website.
She looked up Karina Björnlund Knivsta on the census and found one match, a woman born in 1951. She clicked on background information and got the name of the parish she was born in.
Lower Luleå.
She bit the inside of her cheek, her palms were itching, she needed to look deeper. She went onto Google again, and did a general search for ‘karlsvik and lower luleå’: nineteen results. The top one was the history of a saw-fitter, an Olof Falck from Hälleström (1758–1830) in what was now the parish of Norrfjärden in Piteå c
ouncil district. Annika did a search within that page and discovered that one of the saw-fitter’s descendants, a Beda Markström, born 1885, had settled in Karlsvik in the parish of Lower Luleå.
She searched for a map and found it.
Karlsvik was a small community just outside Luleå, on the other side of the river.
She leaned back, letting the information sink in. It was making her scalp itch, her mouth dry, her fingers twitch. She jotted the main points in her notebook, then dialled the editor-in-chief’s internal number.
‘Have you got a few minutes?’
29
The air in the conference room on the seventh floor of the Federation of County Councils was sour with stale oxygen. Coffee fumes and old nicotine breath mixed with the sweat of middle-aged men in wool jackets. Thomas wiped his brow. Unconsciously he slid a finger under the knot of his tie and pulled it open to let in more air.
This was the conference group’s first official meeting, which meant that the hierarchies and structures had not settled in yet. The mood of back-slapping had slid into territorial scent-marking the longer the meeting went on. It would take at least one more marathon meeting before they could get anything sensible done.
The congress of the Federation of County Councils and the Association of Local Councils at Norrköping in June was due to consider one very large and very serious question. The two groups would each hold their own individual conference but with several common sessions. The main question was whether they should merge. The common and overriding theme of the congress was ‘the citizen and the future’.
Thomas opened his eyes wide, staring at the congress timetable.
He couldn’t escape. Sophia was with him everywhere. Now she was there between the lines of the committee’s proposals for long-term programmes, her heels clicking through the documentation about collaboration and the congressional information sent out to members of the Federation of County Councils.
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