Midwinter Sacrifice

by Mons Kallentoft

  Have to go out?

  Want to go out. Want to get on with this.

  Ball-Bengt.

  Who were you really?

  Sjöman’s voice on her mobile, Malin holding on to the cold steering-wheel with one hand.

  Monday people on their way to work, shivering in the bus shelters by Trädgårdstorget, breath rising from their mouths and winding into the air towards the haphazard collection of buildings round the square: the 1930s buildings with their sought-after apartments, the 1950s blocks with shops on the ground floor, and the ornate house from the 1910s on the corner where for decades there was a record shop, now closed down.

  ‘We had a call from an old people’s home in Ljungsbro, Vretaliden, and they’ve got a ninety-six-year-old man there who evidently told one of the carers a whole load of things about Ball-Bengt and his family. She was reading the paper to him, because his eyes aren’t good, and he suddenly started talking. The ward sister called, says she thinks we ought to talk to him ourselves. You may as well start off with that.’

  ‘Does the old man want to see us?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Gottfrid Karlsson. The nurse’s name is Hermansson.’

  ‘First name?’

  ‘She just said Sister Hermansson. It’s probably best to go through her.’

  ‘Did you say Vretaliden? I’m on my way.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to take Zeke with you?’

  ‘No, I’ll go on my own.’

  Malin brakes, does a U-turn, just completing it ahead of the 211 bus on its way to the University Hospital. The driver honks his horn and shakes his fist.

  Sorry, Malin thinks.

  ‘Have they found anything in the archive?’

  ‘They’ve only just started, Malin. You know he isn’t on the computer. So now we’re looking elsewhere. We’ll see if anything turns up during the day. Call as soon as you can if you find out anything.’

  Farewell pleasantries, then silence in the car, just the engine revving when Malin changes gear.

  Vretaliden.

  An old people’s home and sheltered housing in one, extended and modified over the years, strict 1950s architecture jammed together with 1980s postmodernism. The whole complex is in a hollow a hundred metres away from a school, just a few culs-de-sac and some red-roofed council houses between the two institutions. To the south is a field of strawberries belonging to Wester Horticulture, ending abruptly in a couple of glasshouses.

  But everything is white now.

  Winter has no smell, Malin thinks as she jogs across the home’s car park towards the main entrance, a glass box with a gently revolving door. Malin pauses. She worked at Åleryd nursing home one summer when she was sixteen, the year before she met Janne. She didn’t like it, and afterwards she explained it by thinking that she was too young to appreciate the old people’s weakness and helplessness, too inexperienced to look after them. And most of the practical work was off-putting. But she liked talking to the old folk. Playing at being a society lady when there was time, listening to them talk about their lives. A lot of them wanted to talk, to delve into their memories, those who could still speak. A question to get them started, and they were off, then just a few comments to keep the story going.

  A white reception desk.

  Some old men in wheelchairs that look like armchairs. Strokes? Late-stage Alzheimer’s? ‘You’ll water the plants, won’t you?’

  ‘Hello, I’m from Linköping Police, I’m looking for a Sister Hermansson.’

  Old age smells strongly of chemicals and unperfumed cleaning products.

  The young carer, with greasy skin and newly washed, rat-coloured hair, glances up at Malin with a look of sympathy.

  ‘Ward three. The lifts are over there. She should be at the nurses’ station.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  While Malin is waiting for the lift she looks at the old men in the wheelchairs. One of them is drooling from the corner of his mouth. Are they supposed to be sitting there like that?

  Malin goes across to the wheelchairs, takes out a tissue from the inside pocket of her jacket. She leans over towards the old man, wipes the saliva from his mouth and chin.

  The nurse behind the desk stares, not in a hostile way, then smiles.

  The lift pings.

  ‘There,’ Malin whispers in the old man’s ear. ‘That’s better.’

  He gurgles quietly, as if in response.

  She puts her arm round his shoulder. Then she dashes over to the lift. The door is closing; damn, now I’ll have to wait for it to come down again.

  Sister Hermansson has short, permed hair which looks like crumpled wire-wool on her angular head. Her eyes are hard behind thick, black-rimmed glasses.

  Maybe fifty-five, sixty years old?

  She is standing in a white coat at the nurses’ station, a small space situated between two corridors of hospital rooms. She is standing legs apart, arms crossed: my territory.

  ‘Gottfrid Karlsson?’

  ‘I’m really not in favour of this. He’s old. In this sort of extreme cold, it doesn’t take much to stir up anxiety on the ward. And that’s not good for our old folk.’

  ‘We’re grateful for any help we receive. And he evidently has something to tell us?’

  ‘I doubt it. But the carer who was reading today’s Correspondent out loud to him insisted.’

  Hermansson pushes past Malin and starts walking down the corridor. Malin follows, until Hermansson stops at a door, so abruptly that the soles of her Birkenstock sandals squeak.

  ‘Here we are.’

  Then Hermansson knocks on the door.

  A faint but crystal-clear: ‘Come in.’

  Hermansson gestures towards the door. ‘Welcome to Karlsson’s territory.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘No, Karlsson and I don’t get on particularly well. And this is his business. Not mine.’

  15

  It’s nice lying here waiting, not longing for anything in particular, watching time pass, being as heavy as I am yet still able to drift about.

  So here I go, flying out of the cramped mortuary box, out into the room, out through the basement window (I prefer going that way, even if walls are no obstacle).

  And the others?

  We only see each other if we both want to, so I’m mostly alone, but I know all the others, like molecules in a great big body.

  I want to see Mum. But maybe she doesn’t know I’m here yet? I want to see Dad. I want to talk to them both, explain that I know that nothing is easy, talk to them about my trousers, about my flat, about how clean it was, about the lies, about the fact that I was someone, in spite of everything.

  My sister?

  She had enough problems of her own. I understood, understand that.

  So I drift over the fields, over the Roxen, take the long way round to the beach and campsite in Sandvik, over Stjärnorp Castle, where the ruins seem somehow to glow white in the sunlight.

  I drift like a song, like little German Nicole in the Eurovision Song Contest: ‘Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Sonne, das wünsch’ ich mir.’

  Then over the forest, dark and thick and full of the very worst secrets. So you’re still here?

  I’ve warned you. There are snakes slithering along a woman’s leg, their poisonous fangs biting her genitals bloody.

  A glasshouse, a nursery, a vast field of strawberries where I sat as a lad.

  Then I drift downwards, past the place of nasty kids. I don’t want to linger there, and on instead to Gottfrid Karlsson’s corner room on the third floor of Vretaliden’s oldest building.

  He’s sitting there in his wheelchair, Gottfrid. Old and happy with the life he’s lived, and which he will carry on living for a few years yet.

  Malin Fors is sitting opposite him, on a rib-backed chair, on the other side of a table. She is rather subdued, unsure whether the old man opposite has good enough eyesight to meet her gaze
.

  Don’t believe everything Gottfrid says. But most of it will do as ‘truth’ in your dimension.

  The man opposite Malin.

  Doses of creatine have made his nose broad and full and red; his cheeks are grey and sunken, but still full of life. His legs are bony under the thin beige fabric of the hospital trousers, his shirt white and well-ironed.

  The eyes.

  How much can he see? Is he blind?

  The instinct of old people. Only life can teach us. When Malin sees him, memories of the summer in the nursing home come back to her. How some of the old people had come to terms with the fact that most of their life was behind them, and had found peace, while others seemed absolutely furious that it would all soon be over.

  ‘Please don’t worry, Miss Fors. It is Miss Fors, isn’t it? I can only see the difference between light and dark these days, so there’s no need for you to try to catch my gaze.’

  One of the peaceful ones, Malin thinks, and leans forward, articulating clearly and speaking louder than usual.

  ‘So you know why I’m here, Gottfrid?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with my hearing, Miss Fors.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘They read out the story in the paper to me, about the awful thing that’s happened to Cornerhouse-Kalle’s boy.’

  ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what everyone called Bengt Andersson’s father. Bad blood in that family, bad blood; nothing wrong with the lad really, but what can you do with blood like that, with that bloody restlessness?’

  ‘Please, tell me more about Cornerhouse-Kalle.’

  ‘Kalle? By all means, Miss Fors. Stories are all I have these days.’

  ‘Then please, tell me the story.’

  ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle was a legend in this community. They say he was descended from the gypsies who used to stay on a patch of waste ground on the other side of the Motala River, over by Ljung, near the manor. But I don’t know about that. Or maybe what they said was true, that he was the son of the brother and sister at Ljung Manor, the ones everyone knew were together like that. That the gypsies were paid to raise him, and that’s why Cornerhouse-Kalle turned out the way he did.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘It was in the twenties, I think, that Kalle was born, or the early thirties. This area was different then. There was the factory. And the big farms and the estate. No more than that. Kalle was lost to the rest of us right from the start. You see, he was the blackest of black children. Not in his skin, but inside. As if the doubt had condemned him, as if uncertainty became a sorrow that drove him mad, a sorrow that sometimes made him lose his grip on time and place. They say it was him who set fire to the estate farm, but no one knows. When he was thirteen he could neither read nor write – the master had driven him out of the school in Ljung – and then the county sheriff got him for the first time, for stealing eggs from Farmer Tureman.’

  ‘Thirteen?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Fors, he must have been hungry. Perhaps the gypsies were fed up with him? Perhaps the smart folk at the manor had grown tired of paying? But what do I know? Things like that were impossible to find out, not as easy as nowadays.’

  ‘Things like?’

  ‘Paternity, maternity.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘Then Kalle disappeared, didn’t come back for many years. There were rumours that he’d gone to sea, was in prison, terrible things. Murder, rape, child abuse. No one really knew. But he hadn’t been to sea, or I would have known.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I did my years in the merchant navy during the war. I know a sailor when I see one. And Cornerhouse-Kalle was no sailor.’

  ‘What was he, then?’

  ‘More than anything, he was a womaniser. And a drinker.’

  ‘When did he come back here?’

  ‘It must have been some time in the mid-fifties. For a while he worked as a mechanic in the factory garage, but that didn’t last long, then he got some short-term farm work. As long as he was sober, he did the work of two men, so they put up with him.’

  ‘Put up with what?’

  ‘With the women and the drink. There can’t have been many working women, maids or farmer’s wives who didn’t know Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was king of the dance floor at the People’s Park. What he couldn’t get into his head about numbers and letters, he made up for with his body. He had cloven hooves when he danced. He could turn on the charm like the devil. He took whatever he wanted.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Ah, that was probably his secret, Miss Fors. The secret that made him irresistible to women. He looked like a beast of prey in human form, he was physical appetite made flesh. Broad, coarse, dark, close-set eyes and a jaw that seemed chiselled from marble.’

  Gottfrid Karlsson falls silent, as if to allow the image of coarse masculinity to sink in to young Miss Fors.

  ‘Men are no longer made like that, Miss Fors. Even if there are still a number of unpolished people around here.’

  ‘Why “Cornerhouse”?’

  Gottfrid puts his liver-spotted, withered hands on the chair’s armrests.

  ‘It must have been at the end of the fifties, or early sixties. I was working as a foreman at Cloetta then. Kalle had somehow come into a sum of money and bought a plot with an old red wooden cottage on it, down by Wester’s, just a few hundred metres from here, by the bend, next to the tunnel under the main road, on what today is called Anders väg. The tunnel didn’t exist then, and where the road is now used to be a meadow. I put in an offer on the house myself, so I know. It was a large amount of money in those days. There had been a robbery at a bank in Stockholm, and there were rumours that that was where Kalle’s money came from.

  ‘He had met a woman by then, Bengt’s mother, Elisabeth Teodorsson, a woman so rooted in the soil that she seemed utterly unshakable, as if she would outlive the earth itself. But of course that didn’t happen.’

  Then the old man in front of her sighs and closes his eyes.

  The flow of words seems to have stopped.

  Perhaps the effort of digging through his memories has made him tired? Or has the story itself made him tired? Then his eyes open and the light in the foggy pupils is bright.

  ‘From the moment he bought the house he was known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Before that everyone knew who Kalle was, but now he got an extra name. I think that house was the start of the end for him; he wasn’t made for what you might call ordered circumstances.’

  ‘And then Bengt was born?’

  ‘Yes, 1961, I remember, but by the time he was born Cornerhouse-Kalle was behind bars.’

  Gottfrid Karlsson closes his eyes again.

  ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘No, not at all, Miss Fors. I haven’t finished what I have to tell you yet.’

  On her way out Malin stops at the nurses’ office.

  Sister Hermansson is sitting on the bench by the wall, writing up figures on some sort of diagram.

  She looks up. ‘Well?’

  ‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘It was good.’

  ‘Did you learn anything new?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘All those courses Gottfrid Karlsson took at the university after he retired have made him rather peculiar. So he may well have put ideas in your head. I presume he told you about the courses?’

  ‘No,’ Malin replies, ‘actually he didn’t.’

  ‘Then I should keep quiet,’ Hermansson says, and returns to her diagrams.

  Down in the entrance the old men in the wheelchairs have gone.

  When Malin emerges out of the revolving door and the cold hits her, Gottfrid Karlsson’s final words come back to her, as she knows they will do, over and over again.

  She was on her way out when he put his hand on her arm.

  ‘Be careful now, Miss Fors.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Just remember one thing, Miss Fors. It is always desire that kills.’
/>   16

  The plot where the house, the cornerhouse, once stood.

  The atmosphere now: middle-class pomp, a perfectly average, dull house. When could this pink-painted wooden villa with its factory-produced playful carvings have been built? 1984? 1990? Something like that. Whoever bought the house from Ball-Bengt knew what they were doing; presumably they bought cheap, sat out the recession, tore the house down, built a new bog-standard villa and sold up.

  Did you build someone’s life away?

  No.

  Because what is a house, other than property, and what does property do other than impose responsibility? Rent your house, own nothing. The mantra of the poor, the broad-minded.

  Malin has got out of the car, letting air into its suffocating staleness. Behind the stiff crowns of the birch trees she can make out the pedestrian tunnel under the Linköping road. A black hole where the hill on the far side becomes an impenetrable wall.

  The house opposite is a much extended 1950s villa, as is the neighbouring house to the left. Who lives here now? No Cornerhouse-Kalle. No drunks. Any womanisers? Any abandoned fatties whose souls were never allowed to grow?

  Hardly.

  Salesmen, doctors, architects, people like that.

  Malin walks up and down beside the car.

  Gottfrid Karlsson’s voice: ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle beat up a man at the People’s Park. He did that a lot. Fighting was a way of life for him. But this time the other man lost an eye. He got six years for that.’

  Malin walks over to the tunnel and the road and clambers up a slope via an unploughed cycle path. The aqueduct in the distance didn’t exist back then. Cars disappear and reappear through the fog. Malin can see the greenery, the summer glory, the canal boats gliding on the water over the road in the summer. There comes the world! And it isn’t yours, it isn’t yours. Your world will still be this little community, your loneliness, the laughter of the others as you chase errant balls.

  ‘Elisabeth made ends meet by sewing. She did adjustments for Slott’s ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Vasagatan. She took the bus every morning with Bengt on her arm and went to fetch the garments, then took them back on the bus in the evening. The drivers let her travel without paying. Then the boy got fat, and people said she used to let him eat butter and sugar just to keep him quiet while she was sewing.’