47
Lund, 1986 and onwards
The young man taps his finger against the silken paper of the law textbook.
He’s got plugs in his ears to shut out all the noise of his corridor in the block for students from Ostergotland in Lund. He uses his implacable blue eyes to photograph the pages of the book. Look, see, memorise. Law is the simplest of subjects for him, words to fix in his memory, and then use as required.
He is in Lund for three years. He doesn’t need any longer to accumulate the points and the marks he needs to serve at the district court in Stockholm. Three years of forgetfulness, to suppress the narrowness of a city like Linkoping, of a school like the Cathedral School, of a life like his has been.
Of course they are here as well, people with surnames that are inscribed with quill pens in the House of Nobility, but less notice is taken of them here.
He scales the facade of the Academic Association’s handsome building one night. Down below the girls stand and scream. The boys scream as well. He travels to Copenhagen to buy amphetamines so he can stay awake and study. He smuggles the pills beneath his foreskin, smiling at the customs officials in Malmo.
He keeps to the edges of the carnival that takes place during his second year. He arrives late at pubs and bars, shows his face, fuelling the rumours about who’s the smartest of all the smart students, about who gets the prettiest girls.
He is merely a body in Lund. Yet also whispers and guesses. Who is he, where does he come from, and one evening he beats up a boy from Linkoping in a car park behind one of the student union buildings. He had told anyone who wanted to know who Jerry Petersson really was: a nobody. A nobody from a nothing flat in a nothing area of a nothing city.
‘You know nothing about me,’ he screams as he stands over the prostrate boy, who is no more than a black shape in the light of a solitary street lamp. ‘So you won’t say anything. You let me be whoever I want to be. Otherwise I’ll kill you, you bastard.’ He leans over, picks up a piece of metal from the ground, holds it like a knife against the boy’s throat, screams: ‘Do you hear this, do you hear them? Do you hear the lawnmower, you bastard?’
He learns all about the female gender. Its softness, its warmth, and that they’re all different and can be transformed in different ways, and that they can act as his chrysalis and give birth to him time after time after time.
He learns what physical longing means as he lies in his student room and dreams about the woman who should have been his, the woman he still dreams will one day be his.
Those dreams are his secret.
The secret that makes him human.
48
It’s getting closer, Malin.
You can feel it in your black dream, spun of secrets.
People who can’t make sense of their lives, who never get to grips with their fear. Crying for help with mute snake voices.
Condemned to wander in misery.
They’re all in your dream, Malin. He’s there, the boy.
Malin.
Who is that, whispering your name?
The world, all human life, all feelings cremated, all snakes slithering around the bloated hairless rats in the overflowing gutters of the city.
Only the fear remains.
The most ashen grey of all feelings.
I want to wake up now.
Maria.
I fell asleep far too early.
Wide awake, Fredrik Fagelsjo thinks as he looks at the bracket clock on the mantelpiece, how its black marble pillars seem to melt into the black stone of the open hearth. The clock is about to strike half past eleven.
Raw weather outside, dry heat in here. Lake Roxen raging wildly just a few hundred metres away.
The fire is crackling, the logs shimmering in tones of orange and glowing grey, the whole room smells of burning wood, of calm and security.
He turns the cognac glass with an easy hand, raising it to his nose and inhaling the aroma, the sweet fruit, and he thinks that he will never drink anything but Delamain. That the last thing he will drink in his life here on earth will be a glass of Delamain cognac.
It was good that Ehrenstierna could use his contacts. Those nights in the cell were terrible. Lonely, with far too much time to think. And he realised something, it came to him as that stuffy old superintendent was going on about his family, about Christina and the children. He realised that the money and Skogsa and all that crap really didn’t matter at all. He’s got all that matters here, and Christina, their socially unequal love, and the children, are everything. What they have works, even if Christina has never got on with Father, even though she’s become one of them as the years have passed.
The children. He’s neglected them to get what he thought he wanted, what Father wanted.
I’ll have to cope with a month in Skanninge Prison next summer. I can do it. I know that now.
Christina and the children are staying with his parents-in-law. It was arranged long ago, and no time in custody would change that, they had agreed on that. But he would stay at home. Enjoy the Villa Italia in the autumn darkness.
They ought to be home soon.
Fredrik Fagelsjo loves the peace and quiet of the villa on an evening like this, but he’d quite like to hear the sound of the car pulling up now.
Hear the children rush up the steps in the rain.
Their footsteps.
Fredrik pours himself another cognac.
They’re still not back, and he wants to call his wife, but holds back the urge. They’ve probably just stayed to watch a film or they’re playing a game, one of those common parlour games that his mother-in-law, terrible woman, loves.
The castle.
It’s part of a dead man’s estate now, belongs to Petersson’s father. The police haven’t tracked down any other rightful heirs, but they’ve still got the money, thanks to some old bag in a branch of the family that they’ve never had anything to do with. Money that’s leaped out of their history.
Father’s going to make an offer.
The natural order restored.
Because who should live at Skogsa if not us? Even if it isn’t really that important, it’s ours. And we need to pass it on.
Jerry Petersson.
Someone who moved out of his class. Who didn’t know his place, who never knew his place. That’s the simple way of looking at it, Fredrik thinks.
He was drowned in his own ambitions.
A solicitor named Stekanger is in charge of his estate. A good, quick offer and the matter will be dealt with, if Petersson’s father accepts it. If he refuses, we’ll raise the offer a little. The land is ours, and no kids except mine will get to play there, I feel that very strongly, against my own inclinations.
Then I’ll get to grips with the farming. Grow crops for biofuel and make the family a new fortune. I’ll show Father I know how it works, that I can create things and make them happen.
That I can be ruthless. Just like him.
That I’m not just a bank official who’s only good at losing money, that I can carry the family into the future.
Fredrik feels his cheeks burn as he thinks of the stock options, the losses, and how incredibly stupid he has been.
But now there’s money again.
I’ll show Father I’m good enough to have my portrait on the wall at Skogsa. And once I’ve shown him, I’ll tell him that his opinion of me doesn’t mean anything, that he can take his portrait and go to hell.
He gets up.
Feels the parquet floor sway beneath his feet as the cognac goes to his head.
He sits down again. Looks at the picture of his mother, Bettina, beside the clock. Her gentle face enclosed by a heavy gold frame. How Father has never been the same since she went. How he seems almost lost, left behind.
Fredrik was eavesdropping outside his mother’s sickroom at the castle during her last night of life. Heard how she made Father promise to look after him, their weak son.
His mother wasn’t at all l
ike that female detective who arrested him out in the field after he tried to get away from the police in the city, yet Fredrik finds himself thinking about her for some reason.
Malin Fors.
Quite good-looking.
But trashy. Bad taste in clothes and far too worn-out for her age. She’s got that cheap look that all country girls from poor families have. What distinguished her from others like her was that she seemed completely aware of who she was. And that it bothered her. Maybe she’s intelligent, but she could hardly be properly smart.
Are you going to be back soon?
The old villa seems to have secrets in every corner, and the damp and rain are making the house creak, as if it’s trying to send him a message in Morse code.
Then Fredrik hears something.
Is that the car pulling up, his wife’s black Volvo? The clock strikes. Of course, it must be them. The children are probably asleep in the car now, if they were going to be spending the night with her parents Christina would have called.
He gets up.
Walks unsteadily out into the hall where he opens the double doors.
The rain is driving against him, but he can’t see any sign of a car in the drive.
Solid darkness outside.
And the rain.
Then a pair of car headlights come on over by the barn.
Then they go off again.
And on again, and he can’t see the car well enough to see what model it is, but it looks like it’s black, it is, and he wonders why his wife doesn’t drive right up to the house in weather like this, maybe the damp has caused engine trouble, and he steps out onto the porch and waves, and the headlights flash again, over and over again. His wife and children. Do they want him to run over with an umbrella? Or is it his father? His sister?
Flash.
Flash.
Fredrik pulls on his oilskin.
Opens the umbrella.
Flash.
Then darkness.
He heads through the rain towards the car, which now has its lights off, maybe fifty metres away.
Darkness.
He can almost feel his pupils expand, his eyes working feverishly to help his brain make sense of the world, as if the world disappears without the right signals.
He should have switched on the garden lights. Should he go back?
No, carry on towards his wife and kids.
He’s approaching the car.
His wife’s car.
No.
Tinted glass, impossible to see through.
Something moving inside the car.
An animal?
A fox, a wolf?
A quick sound from whatever it is that’s moving.
And Fredrik goes cold, his body paralysed, and he wants to run like he has never run before.
It’s only a dream, Malin thinks. But it never seems to end.
Fear only exists in the dream.
Something knocking deep inside me.
The fire, the fire I shall one day go into, is nothing to be afraid of.
I’ve given in. And that frightens me.
What I am, is my fear. Isn’t that right?
PART 3
The carefree and the scared
Ostergotland, October
The film doesn’t stop just because I want it to.
It’s endless, and the images become more and more blurred, indistinct, grey, as their edges smoulder.
No matter what happens, they won’t catch me.
I shall defend myself.
I shall breathe.
I won’t hold back any of the rage. I shall let the young snakes, the last of them, leave my body.
I have to admit that it felt good this time. It wasn’t a sudden outburst like the first time. I knew what I was going to do. And there were a thousand reasons. I saw your face in his, Father, I saw all the boys in the schoolyard in his face. I undressed him like they undressed me, I pretended I was laying him on an altar of young snakes.
It made me calm, the violence. Happy. And utterly desperate.
The darkness is getting thicker now, the raindrops are balls of lead crashing onto the ground, onto the people.
It’s my turn now. I’m the most powerful.
No one will ever again be able to turn away from me. And who really needs those pigs with their traditions, names, the sense of superiority they acquire at birth. The pictures flicker, black and white with pale yellow numbers. The story of me, the one firing out of the projector, is approaching its end now.
But I am still here.
Father embraces me again in the pictures, and he’s thin, and Mum won’t survive the cancer for much longer. Come to me, son, stand still so I can hit you.
I have a friend.
It’s possible to escape loneliness, captivity. The strangers and the fear, all the things that are unbearable. Life can be a blue, mirror-calm sea.
Money.
Everything costs.
Has a price.
The boy sitting in the garden in the pictures on the white projector-screen doesn’t know that yet, but he has a sense of it.
Money. It should have been my turn.
Father, you have no money. You never have had. But why shouldn’t I? Your bitterness isn’t mine, and maybe we could have done something together, something good.
But things went the way they went.
A rented flat, a terraced house, feeble little abodes.
I am running alone through the garden in the pictures. The devil take anyone who creates loneliness, and the fear that comes with it.
The devil take them.
Boys. Living and dead, men with skins to try to fit into.
Then the reel ends. The projector flashes white. Neither the boy nor the man is visible any longer.
Where should I go now? I’m scared and alone, a person who doesn’t exist in any pictures. All that is left is the feeling of young snakes crawling beneath my skin.
49
Friday, 31 October
The solicitor, Johan Stekanger, speeds up and puts the windscreen wipers on full, and they flap like hens with their necks wrung over the windscreen in front of him.
The Jaguar responds to his commands and they glide past the bus in plenty of time to avoid a sad black Volvo estate.
The heated seat is warming his arse agreeably. It’s particularly rough outside at this time of the morning. The car still smells new and fresh, of chemicals, and the grey interior undoubtedly matches the season.
The art on the walls of the castle, every wall covered by pictures that don’t seem to be of anything at all, but which he understands are worth a great deal.
Hence the idiot in the tweed suit in the seat next to him, a Paul Boglover, sorry, Boglov, an expert in contemporary art, down from Stockholm to document and value Jerry Petersson’s art collection.
Boglov is presumably hoping he’ll get the chance to sell the rubbish, Johan Stekanger thinks as they pull up in front of the castle, beyond the bridge over the now empty moat.
He hasn’t said much.
Maybe he’s picked up on my dislike of him, Johan Stekanger wonders. That was actually one of the reasons why he moved back to Linkoping after studying in Stockholm. The people here were more homogenous, and you hardly ever saw any queers on the city’s well-kept streets. He’s always had trouble with queers.
The clock on the dashboard says 10.12.
An estate inventory of the most grandiose variety, the largest he’s ever dealt with. There’ll be a hefty fee at the end of it, that much is beyond question.
So it was worth putting up with an art-loving queer from the queer metropolis.
He can’t stand me, Paul Boglov thinks, as the ill-mannered solicitor in the cheap green suit and the blond hair hanging down over his collar taps the code into the alarm panel beside the main door of the castle.
But why should I care what he thinks?
Backwoods bigot.
‘Well, welcome to the splendour of Skogsa.�
�
‘Bloody hell!’
The words are out of Paul Boglov’s mouth before he can stop them, and when he finally manages to tear his eyes from the enormous painting on the wall of the entrance hall, he sees the philistine solicitor beside him grinning.
‘Really? Valuable?’
‘It’s a Cecilia Edefalk. From her most famous series.’
‘Doesn’t look like much if you ask me. A man rubbing suncream on a woman’s back. I mean, he could have rubbed it onto her front!’
I’m not going to respond to that, Paul Boglov thinks.
Instead he takes out his camera, photographs the painting, and makes some notes in his little black book.
‘There’s stuff like that in almost every room.’
Paul Boglov goes from room to room, taking photographs, doing calculations, and reacting with childish surprise, and with each room the feeling of making a great discovery grows within him. Was this what it felt like when they discovered the Terracotta Army in China?
Mamma Andersson, Annika von Hausswolff, Bjarne Melgaard, Torsten Andersson, a fine Maria Meisenberger, Martin Wickstrom, Clay Ketter, Ulf Rollof, a Tony Oursler head with the lights switched off.
Impeccable taste. Contemporary. Must have been bought during the last decade.
Did Jerry Petersson choose the works himself?
A feeling for quality. That’s something you’re born with.
And the philistine.
His idiotic comments.
‘Looks like an ordinary photograph if you ask me.’
About the little Meisenberger.
‘A bit of glass with holes in.’
About the Ulf Rollof above the bed in what must have been Jerry Petersson’s master bedroom.
Art worth thirty million kronor. At least.
Almost all the rooms have been checked when Paul Boglov gets a glass of water in the kitchen and reads through his notes, checking the pictures of the works in his camera.
It’s all in the eye.
Petersson, or someone else, must have had a perfect eye for art.
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