Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  Ewert had no children and he had no hair and his body had grown heavy. He had a limp, while Bengt walked with a light step. They were both policemen and shared past and present in the Stockholm city force. Both had been given a finite gift of time, but Ewert had used up his faster.

  Bengt let out an exasperated sigh.

  ‘It’s so bloody wet. I can’t even get the kids out of the house any more.’

  Ewert was never sure why the family asked him over for breakfast, whether it was because they thought it would be nice or whether it was out of duty. Maybe they felt sorry for him, so lonely, so naked outside the four walls of the police headquarters. Whenever they asked, he went and never regretted it, but still he could not help wondering.

  ‘She seemed well today. Sent her regards. At least, I’m sure she would have.’

  ‘And what about you, Ewert? Are you all right?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s maybe just that you look . . . heavier these days. No, more burdened. Especially when you talk about Anni.’

  Ewert heard him say this, but didn’t reply. He looked around and observed with disinterest the suburban life that he could not understand. The small villa was actually quite nice. Very normal. Brick walls, a bit of lawn, a bunch of neatly trimmed shrubs. Sun-bleached plastic toys scattered here and there. If it hadn’t been raining, the two children would’ve been running about in the garden, playing whatever kids of that age played. Bengt had had children rather late in life, when he was nearly fifty. Lena, who was twenty years his junior, had given him another chance. Ewert had no idea what a pretty, clever young woman like Lena saw in a middle-aged policeman, but he was pleased for Bengt, of course, even if he didn’t understand.

  Their clothes were soaking and started to hang heavily. They didn’t notice any more and forgot about the weather.

  Ewert leaned forward.

  ‘Look, Bengt.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jochum Lang gets out today.’

  Bengt shook his head. ‘Ewert, you’re going to have to let go of that one day.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. You weren’t driving.’

  ‘And I wasn’t in love with her, you mean. Never mind, you must let go. Leave the past behind you, Ewert. It was twenty-five years ago.’

  He had turned to look back.

  He had seen her reach out and grab the fleeing body.

  He sighed, rubbed his wet scalp, felt the old anger rise inside him.

  Jochum reacted to the hand holding him back and half turned, still running. He grabbed her and pulled hard, and Bengt, who was sitting next to her, had not been able to hang on to her.

  He sighed and rubbed his head again.

  In that moment, as she fell and the rear wheel bumped over her head, he had realised the rest of their life together was no more.

  Lang had laughed as he ran away. And he laughed when he was later sentenced to a few lousy months for grievous bodily harm.

  Ewert hated him.

  Bengt undid the top button of his shirt and tried to make eye contact with his old friend.

  ‘Ewert?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Lost you for a moment, there.’

  Ewert stared at the sodden lawn, at the tulips drooping in the neat border.

  He felt tired.

  ‘I’ll nail that bastard.’

  Bengt put his arm round his shoulder. Ewert pulled back. He wasn’t used to it.

  ‘Ewert, let it go.’

  It wasn’t long since he had held her hand; she had laughed like a child. Her hand had been cool, limp. Absent. And he remembered what it had once been like, warm and firm and very much present.

  ‘From today he’ll be walking the streets. Don’t you understand? Lang is walking, laughing.’

  ‘But Ewert, whose fault was it? Was it Lang’s? Or mine? I couldn’t hold on to her. Maybe it’s me you should hate. Maybe it’s me you should nail.’

  The wind was back, catching the rain and whipping it into their faces. The terrace door opened behind them. A woman came out holding an umbrella and smiling, her long hair tied back.

  ‘What are you two doing there? You’re crazy!’

  They turned round and Bengt smiled back.

  ‘Once you’re wet, it doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘Well, I want you indoors. Breakfast time.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Now, Bengt. The kids are hungry.’

  They got up. Their clothes stuck to their skin.

  Ewert looked up at the sky again and it was just as grey as before.

  It was still only morning; she could hear the birds outside singing to each other, as they always did. Lydia sat on the edge of the bed and listened. It was so nice; they sang just like the birds around the ugly concrete blocks of flats in Klaipeda. She didn’t know why, but she had woken several times last night, always after the same dream about her and her mum’s trip to Vilnius and the Lukuskele prison, so many years ago.

  In the dream her father was standing in the dark corridor of the tuberculosis ward, waving goodbye to her as she walked away, past the room called the HIV ward with its fifteen beds occupied by slowly decaying inmates. Then, from a distance, she turned to look back at him and saw him collapse. She stood still for a moment. When he didn’t get up from the flagged floor she ran to him as fast as she could, dragged and pulled at him until he was upright again, coughing and emptying himself of the blood and yellow stuff he had to get rid of. The whole scene was actually a rerun of something that had really happened, but it was her mum who had been crying and screaming until some of the ward orderlies turned up to take Dad away. The dream recurred every time she fell asleep last night and she had never dreamt it before.

  Lydia sighed deeply and shifted position a little. She had to sit further out on the edge of the bed to part her thighs just as widely and slowly as the man in front of her demanded.

  He was sitting about a metre away. A middle-aged man, in his forties, the age her father would have been now.

  He was her third customer today.

  He had come to see her punctually every Monday morning for nearly a year. He always knocked on the door just as the church bells started pealing outside her locked window.

  He didn’t spit. He didn’t want to force himself inside her. She didn’t have to do anything with his sexual organ. She didn’t even know what he smelt like.

  He was one of those who hugged her when she opened the door, but then didn’t touch her again. All he wanted was to sit with his cock in one hand and wave at her with the other to get undressed and do other things.

  He wanted her to thrust her crotch backwards and forwards while he squeezed his cock harder and harder. He wanted her to bark like a dog he once had. In the meantime, he kept squeezing his dick, which would go more and more pink until he fell back into the armchair and let his stuff flow over the black leatherette.

  By twenty past nine he was done. When the bells rang out for half past he would be gone. Lydia stayed where she was, sitting on the edge of the bed and listening to the birdsong. She could hear it again.

  The blood was dripping from the raw sore on his nostril, down on to the Östgöta Street pavement. Hilding was almost running. He was in pretty poor shape despite having been inside. He had never been one of those guys who worked off their hatred, or built up respect, in the prison gym, but now he was jogging along, raging at the fucking bitch at the Katarina-Sofia social and panicking, desperate for heroin, and was therefore out of breath when he arrived at the Skanstull metro station on the ring road.

  Sod their fucking handouts. He would just have to get the money himself.

  ‘Hey, you!’

  Hilding prodded one of the kids standing just in front of him on the platform. She was twelve or thirteen, that sort of age. She didn’t respond and he poked at her again. She turned away deliberately to look in the direction of the train they were waiting for.

  ‘Hey, I’m talking to you.’

  He’d seen her mobile phone. He reached out for it, to
ok a step forwards, grabbed it from her hand and dialled the number, despite her protests, then waited for the line to connect.

  Hilding cleared his throat.

  ‘It’s me, sis. Hilding.’

  She said nothing, so he continued.

  ‘Listen, sis. You got to lend me some.’

  She sighed, then replied. ‘You won’t get any money from me.’

  ‘Sis, I need food. Clothes. That sort of stuff. That’s all.’

  ‘Try Social Services.’

  He glared angrily at the phone, drew a deep breath and shouted into what he figured was the speaking end.

  ‘Fuck’s sake! I’ll have to sort it out myself then. Whatever, it’s your fault!’

  She answered in the same tone of voice as before. ‘No, it’s your choice, Hilding. And your problem, not mine.’

  She hung up. Hilding shouted abuse into the electronic void. He threw the bloodstained phone on to the platform. The fucking kid was still standing there crying when the train pulled in and he got on.

  He stood in front of the doors and kept scratching at the red, dripping wound on his nose. His pale, emaciated face was spotted with blood and crusty with drying sweat. Some kind of smell hung around him.

  At the Central Station he took the up-escalator. It was hardly raining at all when he emerged from the underground. Maybe it hadn’t rained all morning. He looked around; he was still sweating inside his buttoned raincoat, his back soaking. He crossed Klaraberg Street and the pavement on the other side, then slipped in between the houses near the Ferlin statue and through the gate to St Klara Cemetery.

  Empty, just as empty as he had hoped.

  On the grass, a bit away, some guy who was off his head, but nobody else.

  He walked past the large Bellman statue, to the bench behind it, under a tree he thought might be an elm.

  He took the weight off his legs, humming to himself. Felt with his hand inside the right coat pocket. There it was. Bag full of washing powder. He sifted it between his fingers.

  He put his other hand in the left pocket and pulled out the pack of twenty-five small plastic stamp envelopes, eight by six centimetres, each containing a little amphetamine, which was barely enough to cover the bottom. Hilding topped up all the bags with washing powder.

  He needed cash and would have it soon.

  It was evening. Her working day was at an end. No more customers.

  Lydia walked slowly through the flat, which was pleasantly dark, lit only by a few table lamps. It was quite big, with four rooms. Probably the largest she’d been in since she came here.

  She stopped in the hall.

  She had no idea why she kept looking for something hidden in the wallpaper pattern, somewhere behind the fine stippling of lines filling the barren surfaces between floor and ceiling. She often stood there, forgetting everything else; she realised that the wallpaper reminded her of something she had seen on another wall, in another room, long ago.

  Lydia remembered that wall and that room very well.

  The security police had stormed in and her dad and the other men in the room were pushed up against the wall, and voices were shouting things like Zatknis, zatknis! Then a strange silence.

  She had known that her dad had been in prison once before. He had put up a Lithuanian flag on the wall at home and was sentenced to five years in Kaunas prison for it. At the time she was too little to understand. She had shaken her head. It was just a flag. She still couldn’t understand. Of course they hadn’t given him back his army job afterwards. Once, she remembered it well, when the vodka was finished and his cheeks were flushed and they were all in the room with the stippled wallpaper, surrounded by weapons that were about to be sold, he had noisily demanded explanations, shouted out: ‘What choice did I have? When my children were screaming with hunger and the state wouldn’t help, what the hell was I supposed to do?’

  Lydia stayed in the hall. She liked evenings, the silence and deepening darkness that slowly wrapped around you and brought peace. She let her eyes follow the little lines upwards and had to crane her neck; the ceiling was high, as it was an old flat. She remembered times when she had worked alone in much smaller flats, but usually there were two of them, giving the men who knocked on the door a choice of girls to paw.

  Every day she had to have twelve customers. Sometimes there were more, but never fewer, because then Dimitri would beat her up or rape her from behind, again and again, to make up for the missing gigs. Always up the arse.

  She had her own ritual. Every evening.

  She showered. The too-hot water washed away their hands. She took her tablets, four Rohypnol and one Valium, washed down with a little vodka. She put on large, baggy clothes that hung on her body, so she had no curves, no one could see, no one could touch her. Even so, sometimes the aching pain down there couldn’t be silenced.

  Tonight she felt jabs of pain and knew why. There had been a couple of new customers and they were always a bit too harsh. She rarely complained; she understood now how important it was that they came back.

  Lydia got bored with the lines on the wall and turned to look at the front door. It was ages since she had been outside. How long was it? She couldn’t say for sure, but she thought maybe four months. She had thought about it, breaking the kitchen window; you couldn’t open it, or any of the others. She had thought about smashing the glass and jumping. The flat was on the fifth floor, though. Looking down scared her too much; she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to fall through the air towards the ground. She went to the door, touched it, sensing the cold, hard surface of the steel, closed her eyes and stood with her hand over the red light, breathing deeply and cursing herself for not understanding the electronic lock. She had tried to see what Dimitri did, but he knew she was spying and always made a point of standing in the way.

  She left the hall, walked through the unfurnished room that was inexplicably known as the sitting room, past her own room with the large bed she despised but had to sleep in.

  She walked to the end of the corridor, to Alena’s room. The door was closed, but Lydia knew that Alena was finished for the day and had showered and that she was alone.

  She knocked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘I know, but . . . can I come in?’

  Silence, just for a few seconds. Lydia waited and then Alena made up her mind.

  ‘Of course you can. Come in.’

  Alena was lying naked on the unmade bed. Her skin was darker than Lydia’s and her hair was still wet. If she left it like that it would be hard to brush tomorrow. At the end of the day Alena would often lie like this, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Janoz, that she had never told him she was going, that the years had passed, that she could still feel his arms and longed to be held again; it would only be for a few months, then she would come back to him, to Janoz, then they’d get married, later.

  Lydia stood still. She looked at Alena’s nakedness and thought about her own body, the one she had to hide in baggy clothing afterwards – she knew that was what she was doing, hiding. She looked and she compared and she wondered how Alena could bear to lie in the same bed without clothes on, and she realised she was looking at her opposite, someone who somehow let things linger, who didn’t hide it, who almost clung to it.

  Alena pointed at the bed, the side that was empty.

  ‘Sit down.’

  The room was just like hers – same bed, same set of shelves and nothing else. She sat down on the rumpled sheets. Where someone else had just been. For a while Lydia stayed inside the red wallpaper, watching its swirling little velvety flowers. Then she reached out for Alena’s hand, squeezed it and spoke in a near whisper.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘You know . . . as usual.’

  ‘Just the same?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They had met on the boat, so they had known each other for more than three years. Back then, they had laughed together. They were on their way. The
frothing white water in their wake. Neither of them had ever been at sea before.

  Lydia pulled her friend’s hand closer, still holding it tight, caressing it, interlocking her own fingers with her friend’s.

  ‘I know. I know.’

  Alena lay very still. Her eyes were closed.

  Her body wasn’t bruised, not like Lydia’s, at least not in the same way.

  Lydia lay down beside her, and in the shared silence their minds wandered, Alena’s thoughts drifting back to Janoz, and Lydia’s back to Lukuskele prison, to the shaven-headed men who coughed their lives away in the shabby prison hospital.

  Then suddenly Alena sat up, pushed a pillow between the small of her back and the wall and pointed at the evening paper on the floor.

  ‘Look at that, Lydia.’

  She let go of Alena’s hand, bent down and picked it up. She didn’t ask how Alena had got hold of a newspaper. She realised it was from one of the men who had been there today, one of the ones who took things with them, wanted something extra and got it. Lydia didn’t have many customers who gave her things. She wanted money. Cash was all Dimitri cared for, and she liked cheating him of it. Anyone who wanted extras had to pay, a hundred kronor each time.

  ‘Open it, look at page seven.’

  The customers were charged five hundred kronor and she knew what five hundred times twelve per day came to. Dimitri took nearly everything; they were only allowed to keep two hundred and fifty. All the rest was taken from them for food and their room and to repay their debt. In the beginning she had said she wanted more money, but then Dimitri had sodomised her over and over, until she promised never to ask again. It was then that she had decided to keep an extra hundred when she could. Do it her own way, more for the sake of cheating Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp than for the money itself.

  Some men wanted to beat her.

  She let them. They paid an extra hundred and she took the blows. Most of them didn’t hit her that hard; it was their way to get in the mood before sex. She took six hundred, gave Dimitri his five and kept her mouth shut. This had been going on for quite a while. She had saved quite a bit and Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp was none the wiser.