The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  The kind boozers smoke.

  When the heat from his inside has evened out, it’s pleasant to walk around outside in the middle of the night. Only a small city can feel like this—a connection but empty all the same. The first sign that there are also people out this way is the cyclist behind them. They hear the dynamo pressing against the front wheel and how she comes closer, passes, and disappears.

  Druggie-Lars. A good name. That’s what he has dubbed his character.

  It’s Druggie-Lars who is going to snatch the ICA lady’s bag.

  But a Druggie-Lars costs money to create, which is why Leo had to wake his brother up a little while ago and force him to get up at two in the morning.

  “I borrowed a book today. At the school library.”

  “Oh. Is that why we’re here?”

  It’s a lot longer to school in Falun than it was in Skogås just outside Stockholm. Leo remembers how their father used to stand on the balcony, at the top of the block of apartments, following their backs as they crossed the parking lot and went through the bushes.

  Four years ago. Another life.

  “No. But I had to borrow something to make the plan work.”

  “Leo—I don’t get it.”

  “You’ll understand. And that damn book, it was almost good. About the US and things that happened there. A lot about prohibition of booze and a guy named Al Capone.”

  “I’ve heard that name.”

  “And I thought about Papa.”

  “Did they write about him? About Papa?”

  “Of course not. But I thought that Papa would probably act like Al Capone. If it was against the law to drink booze in Sweden, I mean.”

  “What do you mean, act?”

  “Like Al Capone. He sold alcohol anyway. Pissed on the rules.”

  They are approaching a meadow with occasional trees spreading thin against the night sky. On the other side of the meadow, partially lit by another cycle path, is the school.

  “No, Leo. I don’t think so.”

  “What?”

  “That Papa would act like him, Capone. Papa doesn’t like selling things, does he? He would drink up all the booze himself. And then beat people up.”

  They have reached Leo’s part of the school—the secondary school. Felix has hardly ever been there. He’s still in primary school and they are like two different worlds with a guarded border crossing that you don’t pass through willingly since you know that there will be fights waiting on the other side with those who are much more powerful than you. When they moved here, he was in first grade and started in a new class in the middle of the term. Completely new—that’s what he was. Most kids hate to change schools and classmates, but he liked it. Not like Jonna, he remembered her clearly, Jonna who always wore her hair in a yellow clip and cried so much before her move that the teacher had to interrupt the music lesson. She didn’t want change—while he was the opposite. Moving was perfect. No one in his new class had any idea about what happened, how his father was in prison for a firebomb.

  He was so sure that all the terrible stuff would stop when his father vanished, and his mother and those social service ladies decided that a move of a hundred miles was for the best. They would be normal. He would stop feeling the scraping and burning against his ribs, sometimes right up to his throat.

  Now the fire in his chest has begun again.

  They have come all the way to the schoolyard and are squatting, concealed, behind an electrical cabinet, remaining still and silent as another cyclist approaches and passes.

  The Skogås school was made with white limestone bricks, whereas this one was made with light-yellow plaster and was formed of two buildings linked together by a glassed-in middle section where students could stay during the breaks.

  “Your job is to keep watch.”

  “Watch? For what?”

  “You’ll understand. It has to go quickly now. No one can see us.”

  Suddenly Leo starts to run. Felix wants to ask where, but it’s too late and he decides to follow after him, over the asphalt, which is damp, steam coming out of their mouths when they breathe. They sneak the last bit to the assembly room, the middle wing. All of its large windows have a smaller window above for ventilation.

  “Leo—what do you mean by watch?”

  “If someone else comes on the cycle path, your job is to knock on the window ledge. With this.”

  Leo holds up a coin. One krona. It gleams in the shine from the streetlight.

  “And then you have to hide.”

  “Hide? And you?” Felix is still breathing heavily from the run and every word is clipped when he pushes it out. “What the hell will you do?”

  His big brother doesn’t answer, just smiles and sticks his hand into the schoolbag and fishes out what looks like a Phillips screwdriver. Then he jumps up on the lower window’s narrow ledge and balances as he stretches on his toes toward the smaller oblong window above.

  Felix is watching everything from a strange angle, crooked and from below, and what he’s taking part in is for that reason hard to interpret. But if it’s happening as it seems to be, Leo is pushing his hands halfway into the vent window and is removing the screw that holds the metal frame in place with his screwdriver as if by magic. The frame is to prevent anyone from opening the window entirely. It takes a while and the position for doing the work is far from ideal, so he is sliding slowly downward on the slippery ledge.

  Meanwhile Felix keeps watch, his face flushed red, his cheeks burning with everything but excitement—he just wants to go home.

  Leo is also hot, even hotter than before. Even more tension is trying to make its way out. He has planned everything—and it will work. Inside the window there is the assembly room with the oblong tables where he and the others in class 8B play cards or just hang out between classes. The cafeteria opens at two o’clock every afternoon, and then a disgusting array of food—cinnamon buns, chocolate balls, pastries and cheese sandwiches, juices in small square packs with straws in plastic wrap—is served and purchased. For today’s lunch, it was some kind of white fish and the cafeteria sales were enormous as a result.

  The money is kept in a white cash box that is emptied daily at twenty past four. According to the rules, only a small amount of change should be left. But every other Friday that’s not the case. If he has understood correctly, it has to do with Leisure-time Lena’s schedule. She is replaced by the gym teacher, who comes in and takes care of the sales once a fortnight. Then the box is locked up over the weekend in one of the kitchen cabinets, without being emptied, until Monday, the next time Leisure-time Lena is on duty.

  That’s why he stayed longer today, in spite of his gnawing worry about Vincent, who still refused to take off the bandage. After his last class he strolled—instead of hurrying home as he should have—into the school library and pretended to be borrowing books. After a while he even started reading one of them a little, the one about Capone and prohibition. Because if you sit in the right place, in line with the back bookshelves, from there you can watch the assembly room. He was doing that when he looked up from the page of the book and noticed the gym teacher selling another chocolate ball and another bun. Until it was twenty past four, and she placed the cash box in the cabinet behind the café’s counter.

  He was also watching the school janitor from his vantage point, who was on his regular Friday rounds. He checked that everything was as it should be, went around and tried every window, pushed chairs and tables back to the right place and then, just as planned, went to the library. As quick as lightning, Leo moved two reading tables away—a table the janitor would place him at later if anyone asked, a place that you couldn’t see into the assembly room from.

  You have to go home, he explained, the school is closing, and Leo pretended to obey and packed up his bag as the janitor watched. Then, when the last zip was fastened, he remembered his math homework, which he had forgotten, in cabinet 442. He promised to run the entire way there—if the jan
itor would only keep an eye on his bag.

  He ran, but not to the cabinet. Instead he ran to the place that it wasn’t possible to peer in to. The assembly room. He placed a chair against the wall there and turned the two handles of the upper vent window.

  The same window they are now standing outside.

  Leo heaves himself up, slides in easily through the opening, lands softly on the assembly room’s floor, and sneaks up to the counter in the café.

  He realizes how different it feels, being in the school in the middle of the night. In still and abandoned rooms, which are slowly being filled with his own movement.

  And suddenly it comes back, the eager, alive, tense, joyful feeling.

  When he cleaned up the blood and saved his mama’s life, the same feeling had made him light and happy on the inside and stronger than ever on the outside. He wasn’t even afraid that his father might come back and start hitting again.

  The cabinet is equipped with a padlock. That’s why he packed more items in his bag: a chisel as well as a hammer. He won’t tackle the padlock itself; that would be too much. He’ll go for the small, fragile hinges.

  Two blows are enough—they fall to the floor and he can bend the cabinet door outward.

  The white tin box is standing on the lower shelf.

  He looks around the dark assembly room filled with movements that are only his—and moves the box into his bag.

  He is about to leave when his gaze fastens on the large door at the end of the cabinet. From behind the door comes the smell of chocolate and coconut flakes, something he and every student can recognize almost immediately.

  Since I’m here anyway . . .

  It’s an ordinary wooden door. If he presses the hinge exactly at the locked bolt, he should also be able to pry it up with a little force and separate it from the doorframe without it making a sound.

  ———

  The deserted bike path slumbers on—not a single person has passed Felix during the time he’s stood watch. Now and then he has glimpsed Leo through the window. It seems that first he broke into a cabinet and then the door to another room.

  Leo had said he was getting a box. That’s what he was going to do in there. Hasn’t he found it yet?

  Now. There. Finally.

  Felix sees his big brother approach in the dark carting a black trash bag, before he throws something out through the vent window.

  “Felix?”

  It’s a similar trash bag—but an empty one.

  “Fill it.”

  Then he throws something else. A carton. It lands in the wet grass, chocolate balls. There’s a picture of them on the side.

  The next carton has a different picture. Coconut balls. Fluffy. It says so on the carton.

  “This is not a fucking box, Leo. A box—that’s what you were going to take. That’s what you said. That’s why you woke me up.”

  Leo meets his gaze without replying. Then he’s gone again. Felix hears him running back to the room behind the café counter and wooden door.

  One full turn. And another. Felix spins when he looks around, searching, but cannot see a soul. His hands are shaking anyway as they unfold the empty trash bag and drop the cartons in.

  If someone comes.

  Two more cartons. They almost land on his foot. Pear juice. Mazarin tarts.

  I can hide myself. But I have to leave this fucking bag.

  He catches them and lets them be enveloped by the black plastic.

  And then the next cyclist comes passing by and maybe sees and stops, understanding what’s going on.

  More juice boxes. More cartons. Hard drops that thump when they hit the ground.

  “Leo! Come out now, dammit!”

  “In a minute.”

  Leo smiles quickly before he returns to the darkness of the schoolhouse. And now Felix feels just as he does before beginning to cry. Shit. He’s so fucking scared, but the worst part is that Leo doesn’t listen. That’s happened before, Leo vanishing into himself.

  Never, ever, ever am I going to help him again.

  Then the final cartons fly out.

  When Leo jumps back out, anxiety is matched by anger in Felix’s chest. But Leo, on the other hand, is calmer and happier than ever.

  “Little brother—what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The whole bag is full, Felix, you know. Vincent is going to—”

  “If you eat too much, you get tired. Doesn’t matter how good it is.”

  “Felix? It’s good to have it. If something happens, I mean.”

  “Happens?”

  “You never know.”

  “What would happen? Tell me! Leo—what the hell is going to happen?”

  They walk back the same way through the same silent night. But everything has changed. They have done something they’ve never done before. For that reason, Leo thinks the sack is light when he is carrying it. For that reason, Felix thinks it’s heavy when it’s his turn. The boxes of sweets scrape against his back, but hell if he’s going to cry. Or whine. Not a chance. He’s not going to say a word on the way home.

  The windows in the block of apartments are dimmed, all except the watchman’s, who is always awake. A luminous nose in the gray façade’s face. And inside, in the stairwell, every door is sleeping. The ceiling light on the second floor switches on, the German shepherd on the third floor snarls, otherwise everything waits for tomorrow.

  They enter their equally silent apartment.

  The two peek into Vincent’s room, and he does what the neighbors do; he snorts and breathes slowly.

  “I told you so.” Leo winks at Felix. “Mummies always sleep long and soundly. Something about the bandages, I think.”

  Leo thinks the tin box ought to sit in the middle of the table. He chooses the same spot where Mama put down the hot oven dish just before . . . before.

  “Felix—get the kitchen towels.”

  “Why?”

  He is going to attack it exactly as Mama does when she hits the pork cutlet with a wooden mallet.

  “Just do it.”

  Felix vanishes into the hall, returns right away and Leo stares at the single towel in his outstretched hand.

  “One?”

  “Yeah?”

  “All of them, Felix, all there are.”

  Felix slinks through the hallway to Mama’s bedroom and one of the wardrobes there. A whole pile of white towels in his arms, each with three letters embroidered with red thread in one corner. BMA. Britt-Marie Axelsson. Mama’s name when she was little.

  “Satisfied?”

  Leo counts six, puts them under the cash box, takes the tools out of the backpack, and wraps the seventh towel around the head of the chisel. Then he takes a step backward and decides to turn the box upside down. It’s easier to access that way.

  “Hold it.”

  “The cash box?”

  “With your hands. One on each side.”

  “Are you going to open it up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’m not holding it.”

  “Felix?”

  “What if you miss?”

  “Trust me. A single blow. That’s all it takes.”

  Leo balances the chisel in his hand, letting its rather sharp edge rest against the narrow gap of a few millimeters running parallel to the lock mechanism. He sneaks a quick glance at Felix, who has his eyes closed but holds it as he is told. Leo aims and strikes. A good hit—but just when the hammer meets the chisel and the force should transfer from one tool to the next, Felix releases his grip. And without resistance the lock manages to fend off an external force trying to push its way in.

  They both watch the tin box slide across the tabletop until it reaches the edge, tips over, and falls to the floor. An angry thump goes through the kitchen walls out into the hall, toward Vincent and toward the front door.

  “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to hold it!”

  “You might hit me. Instead of the box.”


  Leo rubs his hand over the now wrinkled towels, flattens them out, picks up the box, and puts it in the same place as before.

  “Felix—Vincent is going to wake up next time. Or the neighbors. Hold it right this time.”

  Felix grasps the tin’s ice-cold sides, squeezes his eyes shut, and holds it tight while Leo aims and strikes again in the middle of the lock mechanism.

  And this time he succeeds. A minimal opening gets slightly wider. The chisel’s edge in exactly the right place. The whole weight of his body over the kitchen table and he pries and pries until they both perceive an almost infinitesimal click.

  The lock gives in.

  He is careful to press together the top and bottom of the tin when he turns it the right way up again. This kind of cash box has a loose plastic shelf for coins and everything would fall out all over the place.

  He opens it rather grandly. The shelf with its compartments lies exactly as it should lie. Each one is nearly full.

  He empties out the coins onto the towels, chasing and pushing together those that are about to roll away.

  “Felix—start sorting. Fifty-öre pieces, one krona, five kronor. All of them need to be separated.”

  He has deliberately refrained from trying to see how much is hiding under the plastic shelf. But he knows roughly how much he wants it to be—enough for everything. Now he takes a peek. And there are notes there, exactly as there should be. Five-kronor notes. But not the amount he needs, he is rather certain of that. He picks them up and counts.

  Twenty-seven five-kronor notes.

  One hundred and thirty-five kronor.

  Not enough. Can the coins be enough to make up the rest?

  His eager hands collide with Felix’s slower hands as they help each other with the sorting. Three stacks. Different heights. He counts silently to forty-seven kronor and fifty öre.