SILENCED
KRISTINA OHLSSON is a political scientist and until recently held the position of Counter-Terrorism officer at OSCE. She has previously worked at the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defence, where she was a junior expert on the Middle East conflict and the foreign policy of the EU. Her debut novel, Unwanted, was published in Sweden in 2009 to terrific critical acclaim and won a Gold Pocket Award. Kristina lives in Stockholm.
SARAH DEATH has translated works by many writers including Kerstin Ekman, Astrid Lindgren, Sven Lindqvist, Steve Sem-Sandberg and Per Wahlöö. She has twice won the triennial George Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, and was awarded the Swedish Academy’s Translation Prize in 2008. She is the editor of Swedish Book Review.
First published in Sweden by Piratförlaget under the title Tusenskönor, 2010
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS Company
Copyright © Kristina Ohlsson, 2010
English translation copyright © Sarah Death, 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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SILENCED
CONTENTS
IN THE BEGINNING
THE PRESENT
FRIDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2008
WEDNESDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2008
THURSDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2008
FRIDAY 29 FEBRUARY 2008
SATURDAY 1 MARCH 2008
SUNDAY 2 MARCH 2008
MONDAY 3 MARCH 2008
TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2008
AUTUMN 2008
IN THE BEGINNING
Such a refuge ne’er was given
The meadow with its grassy greenness and wild flowers had always been hers. It had not been particularly hard to make a deal with her sister; all she had to do was agree that she could have the attic room in the summer house. She would never understand how her sister could ever accept a swap like that – a boring old attic room for a meadow. But she kept quiet. After all, her sister might decide to impose further demands on her.
The meadow, overgrown and left to run wild, was beyond the boundary of their garden. When she was younger, the tallest plants had reached right up to her chin. Now she was older, they only came up to her waist. She strode through the grass with light, easy movements and searching eyes, felt the flowers and stalks grazing her bare legs. The flowers had to be picked in silence, otherwise it would not work. There had to be seven different kinds and they had to be picked on midsummer’s eve and put under her pillow. Then she would see him, the man she was going to marry.
At least that’s what she had thought when she was little and picked midsummer flowers for the very first time. Her sister had teased her.
‘It’s Viktor you want to see,’ she said with a laugh.
She had clearly been naïve and stupid, even back then. It was not Viktor at all, but someone else. Someone secret.
After that first time she had repeated the same ritual every year. She was too big now to believe in that superstitious old stuff any more, of course, but it still felt like an important thing to do. After all, there wasn’t exactly much else to keep her occupied, she noted cynically. Year after year her parents insisted they came and celebrated midsummer out here in the country, and every time it felt more of a trial. This year it was even worse, because she had been invited to her friend Anna’s party. Anna’s parents were having a big midsummer celebration and their children’s friends were invited, too.
But her dad wouldn’t let her go.
‘We’ll celebrate midsummer the way we always do,’ he said. ‘Together. That’s the way it’s going to be, as long as you’re still at home.’
Panic swept over her. Couldn’t he see how unreasonable he was being? It would be years before she could even begin to think about leaving home. Her sister’s disloyal behaviour didn’t help, either. She was never invited to parties, anyway, and thought being on their own with their parents in the country was fine. She even seemed to like the peculiar guests who emerged from the basement at dusk and were made welcome on the glazed-in verandah, where Mum let the Venetian blinds down to make it difficult to see in.
She hated them. Unlike the rest of the family, she found it impossible to feel any sympathy or pity for them. Scruffy, smelly people who didn’t take responsibility for their own lives. Who couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do than lurk in a basement out in the sticks. Who were satisfied with so pathetically little. She was never satisfied. Never.
‘You must love your neighbour,’ her dad would say.
‘We must be grateful for what we’ve got,’ said her mum.
She had stopped listening to them a long time ago.
She caught sight of him just as she was picking the fourth flower. He must have made some sort of sound, otherwise she would never have noticed him there. She swiftly raised her focused gaze from the meadow and flowers, and her eyes were dazzled by the sun. Against the light he was no more than a dark silhouette, and it was impossible to see his age or identity.
She screwed up her eyes and shaded them with her hand. Oh yes, she knew who he was. She had seen him from the kitchen window a couple of evenings ago, when Dad came home late with the new batch of guests. He was taller than most of them. Not older, but taller. Sturdier. He had a very distinct jawline that made him look the way American soldiers used to in films. Square-jawed.
They both stood stock-still, eyeing each other.
‘You’re not allowed out,’ she said with a haughty look, although she knew there was no point.
None of that lot in the basement ever spoke any Swedish.
Since he did not move or say anything, she sighed and went back to picking her flowers.
Harebell.
Ox-eye daisy.
Behind her, he was on the move, slowly. She glanced furtively back, and wondered where he could be going. Saw that he had come closer.
She and her family had only ever been abroad on one occasion. Just once they went on a normal package holiday, sunbathing and swimming in the Canaries. The streets were teeming with stray dogs that ran after the tourists. Their dad got very good at chasing them away.
‘Shoo,’ he would roar, throwing a stone in some other direction.
It worked every time. The dog left them and went chasing after the stone he had thrown.
The man in the meadow reminded her of the stray dogs. There was something unpredictable in his eyes, something indecipherable. Maybe anger, too. She was suddenly unsure what he would do next. Throwing a stone did not seem an option. One glance towards the house confirmed what she already knew, that her parents and sister had taken the car into town to get some fresh fish for the celebration dinner. Another ludicrous so-called tradition her parents had invented to preserve their image of a normal family. As always, she said she didn’t want to
go with them, preferring to pick her flowers in peace and quiet.
‘What do you want?’ she asked irritably.
Irritably and with a growing sense of alarm. There was nothing wrong with her instincts, she recognised the scent of real danger. And this time, all her senses were telling her she’d got to take control of the situation.
The flower stalks felt rough in her hand as she clasped them tight. She only had one left to pick. A humble daisy. A weed with pretensions, her dad liked to call it.
The man took a few more steps towards her. Then he just stood there, a few metres from her. A broad, sneering grin spread slowly across his face. And at that moment, she knew what he had come for.
Her legs were quicker than her thoughts. Her spinal reflex signalled menace and at the same instant she broke into a run. The edge of the garden was less than a hundred metres away; she shouted for help again and again. Her piercing cries soaked into the silence of the meadow. The dry earth muffled the sound of her springing steps and the heavy thud as he brought her down after only twenty metres’ flight. Almost as if he had known from the outset that she wouldn’t get away and had just let her run for the thrill of the chase.
She fought like an animal as he tossed her over onto her back and wrenched at her clothes, so forceful and methodical that her overheated brain registered that this was something he must have done before.
And when it was all over and she lay there weeping in the hollow their bodies had made in the green depths, she knew this was something to which she could never reconcile herself. In her clenched fist, every knuckle raw from her hopeless fight, she was still clutching the summer nosegay. She dropped it as if it were burning her fingers. The flowers were entirely redundant now. She already knew whose face she would see in her dreams.
When her parents’ car pulled up outside the house, she was still lying in the meadow, unable to get up. The clouds looked as though they were playing a clumsy game in the blue sky. The world seemed unchanged, though her own was shattered for ever. She lay there in the meadow until they realised she was missing and came out to look for her. And by the time they found her, she was already another person.
THE PRESENT
Though He giveth or He taketh,
Our Father His children ne’er forsaketh;
His the loving purpose solely
To preserve them pure and holy.
FRIDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2008
STOCKHOLM
Unaware that he would soon be dead, he delivered his final lecture with great enthusiasm and commitment. Friday had been a long day, but the hours had passed quickly. His audience was attentive, and it warmed Jakob Ahlbin’s heart that so many people besides himself were interested in the subject.
When he realised just a few days later that all was lost, he would briefly wonder if it had been his last lecture that did it. Whether he had been too open in the question and answer session, revealed that he was in possession of knowledge nobody wanted him to have. But he did not really think so. Up until the very moment of his death he was convinced it would have been impossible to ward off disaster. When he felt the pressure of the hard hunting pistol against his temple, everything was already over. But it did not stop him from feeling great regret that his life had to end there. He still had so much to give.
Over the years, Jakob had given more lectures than he could remember, and he knew he had put his talent as a fine speaker to good use. The content of his lecture was usually much the same, as were the questions that followed it. The audience varied. Sometimes its members had been instructed to attend, sometimes they sought him out of their own accord. It made no difference to Jakob. He was at ease on the podium whatever the occasion.
He generally began by showing the pictures of the boats. Perhaps it was a mean trick, but he knew that it always hit the spot. A dozen people in a boat that was far too small, week after week, increasingly exhausted and desperate. And like a faint mirage on the horizon there was Europe, like a dream or a flight of the imagination, something they were never meant to experience in real life.
‘We think this is an unknown phenomenon for us,’ he would start. ‘We think it belongs to another part of the world, something which has never happened to us and never will.’
The picture behind him quietly changed and a map of Europe came up on the screen.
‘Memories are short sometimes,’ he sighed. ‘We choose not to remember that not so many decades ago, Europe was in flames and people were fleeing in panic from one country to another. And we forget that, barely a century ago, more than a million Swedes decided to leave this country for a new start in America.’
He ran his hand through his hair, stopped for a moment and checked that his audience was listening. The picture behind him changed again, now showing Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman, a still from the film of Vilhelm Moberg’s Emigrants series.
‘A million people,’ he repeated loudly. ‘Don’t for one minute be fooled into thinking Karl-Oscar and Kristina saw their trip to America as anything but a punishment. Don’t imagine they wouldn’t have stayed in Sweden if they could. Just think what it would take to force you to make a break like that, to leave your old life behind and start all over again in another continent without a krona in your pocket and with no more of your possessions than you could cram into one pitiful bloody suitcase.’
The expletive was deliberate. A clergyman swearing was apparently highly shocking.
He knew very well where he could expect to run into opposition. Sometimes it came when he showed the Karl-Oscar and Kristina picture. Sometimes it was later. This afternoon it happened straight after the first time he swore. A youth sitting in a row near the front clearly found it provocative and raised his hand before Jakob could go on.
‘Excuse me interrupting,’ he said in a shrill voice, ‘but how the hell can you draw a parallel like that?’
Jakob knew what was coming next, but still frowned, playing along for the good of the cause.
‘Karl-Oskar and Kristina and all the other Swedes who went to America worked themselves into the ground when they got there. They built that damn country. They learned the language and adopted the culture. Got jobs straight away and kept their heads down. This lot who come over to Sweden nowadays don’t do any of that. They live in their own little ghettos, don’t give a shit about learning Swedish, live on benefits and don’t bother to get jobs.’
The hall went quiet. A sense of unease swept through the audience like an unquiet soul. Unease that there might be trouble, but also the fear of being exposed as someone who shared the young man’s opinions. Quiet muttering spread through the hall and Jakob waited a few moments longer. He had often tried to explain this to any politicians who would still listen: staying silent did nothing to defuse thoughts and frustrations like those just expressed.
The young man shifted in his seat, folded his arms, squared his chin and waited for the clergyman to answer. Jakob let him wait, assuming an expression to indicate that the recent comment had come as news to him. He looked at the picture behind him, and then back at his audience.
‘Do you think that’s what they thought when they made the journey here? Take the ones who paid up to 15,000 dollars to get from burning Iraq to Sweden. Did they dream of a life in a crummy ’60s complex from the ‘Homes for a Million’ programme, on some sink estate way out on the edge of the city? Of being stuck there with ten other adults in a three-roomed flat, day after day, with nothing to do, separated from their family? Alone? Because 15,000 is how much it costs for one person to make the trip.’
He held one long finger straight up in the air.
‘Do you think they ever, in their wildest imagination, could have thought that they would be met with the sort of exclusion we’re giving them? Offering a trained doctor a job as a taxi driver if he’s lucky, and someone less educated not even that.’
Being careful not to look reproachful, Jakob turned his eye on the young man who had spoken.
‘I believe they t
hought like Karl-Oskar and Kristina. I think they expected it would be like getting to America a hundred years ago. Where the sky was the limit for anyone prepared to put their back into it, where hard work paid off.’
A young woman caught Jakob’s gaze. Her eyes were shining and she had a crumpled paper tissue in her hand.
‘I believe,’ he said gently, ‘there are very few people who would choose to sit staring at the wall of a flat on an estate if they felt there was any alternative. That’s the conclusion my work has brought me to, anyway,’ he added.
And that was about where the mood changed. Exactly as it always did. The audience sat quietly, listening with growing interest. The pictures kept on changing, keeping pace as his tale of the immigrants who had come to Sweden over recent decades unfolded. Painfully sharp photographs documented men and women shut in a lorry, driving across Turkey and on to Europe.
‘For 15,000 dollars an Iraqi today gets a passport, the trip and a story. The networks, the people smugglers, extend all over Europe and reach right down to the conflict zones that force people to flee.’
‘What do you mean by a story?’ asked a woman in the audience.
‘An asylum seeker’s narrative,’ explained Jakob. ‘The smuggler tells them what they need to say to have a chance of being allowed to stay in Sweden.’
‘But 15,000 dollars?’ a man asked dubiously. ‘That’s a huge amount of money, does it really cost that much?’
‘Of course not,’ Jakob replied patiently. ‘The people behind these networks are earning incredible sums. It’s a ruthless market, and totally unjust. But it’s also – in spite of its brutality – to some degree understandable. Europe is closed to people in need. The only ways in are illegal ones. And they are controlled by criminals.’
More hands were waving and Jakob answered question after question. Finally there was only one hand left, a young girl’s. The one clutching the crumpled tissue. She was red-haired, with an overgrown fringe hanging down like a curtain over her eyes, giving her an anonymous look. The sort of person you can’t describe afterwards.
Silenced: A Novel Page 1