The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  Leo is walking slowly along the asphalt when suddenly his legs begin to run of their own volition, over the bridge and the stream that divides central Falun and every year is flooded with meltwater.

  Gave? Or took? Fucking gold thread or fucking black thread?

  He lengthens his stride and runs faster. He doesn’t care which it is and has decided not to become like Papa, but to be better than that, better than someone who escapes to a claustrophobic room because he doesn’t dare to remain in his own body.

  The town center starts on the other side of the bridge and he hurries past the library, toward the pedestrian precinct where H&M is and a gray jacket with a hood put on a mannequin in the middle window.

  He has a wig and a ciggie. Now he’ll get the rest.

  He goes in and takes the escalator up to the men’s department. He already knows where it’s hanging—in the far corner to the right, on a steel rack with large signs for this year’s autumn jackets. There are about six of them. He skips over the large, small, and medium sizes. He grabs the hanger with the last one in XL. Light gray with a hood just like the one in the shop window. Not a hoodie, but a real jacket for men who go into the forest and pick mushrooms and need to pull up the hood to protect themselves from the rain and hear the drops landing while shots from the moose hunt are falling in the distance. He goes past the empty fitting room. It isn’t going to fit anyway and he puts it down on the counter and waits for the shop assistant who is folding the sleeves so neatly.

  “This is extra large, you know that? And the item runs rather large—it won’t fit as you might expect.”

  She isn’t very old. He guesses twenty-five. Her gaze is intense as she assesses his narrow shoulders and lanky body.

  “I know. It’s a present.”

  Her smile is beautiful.

  “Well . . . would you like it wrapped?”

  “Wrapped?”

  “If it’s a present, I mean. I’d like that. If it was for me.”

  “Yeah . . . that’d be fine.”

  He watches her fingers as they fold the paper, which is the same shade of red as her nail polish, and curl the ribbon.

  “That’ll be ninety-nine kronor and fifty öre.”

  He nods, a little nervously. Has he convinced her? Is she still wondering? But he decides then that it doesn’t matter. He’ll dye it and fill it up with padding.

  She puts it in a plastic bag and he pays for it with money from another plastic bag, which is in his pocket and is as big as a tennis ball. She smiles the pretty smile again.

  “Piggy bank?”

  “Piggy bank.”

  He’s on his knees in the bathroom, resting his chest against the edge of the bathtub and dipping an outstretched arm into the four-inch-deep lukewarm water.

  He had gone from H&M with the gift-wrapped autumn jacket to the sewing shop on Holm Street. He explained that his mama asked him to buy padding, some finished pieces for filling out shoulders and some of the sort that feels like vacuum cleaner filters and is sold by the yard. Three yards, that should do it, and a little dye—the dark green shade. He paid for it with one-krona coins, the last ones from the parking meters.

  Leo stirs the lukewarm water with his hands protected by Mama’s rubber gloves, the ones she uses to prevent rashes as she scrubs the floor or does the dishes. He doesn’t care about rashes but wants to avoid dye residue on his skin, which can’t be scrubbed away and so can be easily identified. He stirs with his hands like with the ladle in the semolina porridge, around and around, until the dye is dissolved. The instructions describe how a garment should be processed in the washing machine so that the dye will be distributed evenly over the fabric, but he doesn’t want it to be even. He wants it to look crappy. So he empties the contents of the glass jar into the bathtub and lays down the light gray jacket, washes it around and rubs the fabric against itself so that it will be blotchy and unevenly dark. When the material has absorbed what he thinks is enough dye, he rinses it under running water. He wrings the water out of it like out of a wet towel, hangs it up on an inflatable plastic hanger, and starts to dry it with a hairdryer.

  “What are you doing, Leo? That noise,” Felix at the bathroom door. “Turn off the dryer—I can barely hear the TV.”

  “Forget about that. But bring the map.”

  “What? What map?”

  “Your map. The same one as before. Just get it.”

  Felix gets it—and Leo finally switches off the hairdryer and instead folds out the map on the toilet lid. The paper reduces reality to a scale of 1:5000. He leans over it and studies the details.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The bicycle paths.”

  Felix creeps up beside his big brother. The last time it was lying like this, on Vincent’s floor, it had been about the bicycle paths from the ICA shop. Escape routes.

  “You shouldn’t do that. You promised.”

  “You don’t need to worry, little brother. I can do it without you.”

  “Alone? Against Click?”

  “Felix, do you remember what you said? ‘Vincent is a damn mummy. And Mama’s in the hospital. And Papa’s in custody. And now are you also going to get arrested?’ That’s precisely why. Although not the last thing. Don’t you get it? It’s just us left. Only we can fix it.”

  “We? I said I wouldn’t come along. Because it’s an idiotic idea. You got it, again, when you visited Papa, right? You two. . . . There’s always something with you two.”

  All of a sudden Leo leaves the bathroom with the map still on the toilet lid. Felix looks out into the hall and sees a box being pulled out and his big brother returning with a pen in his hand.

  “Here.”

  Leo draws a cross on the open map, not far from one of the bicycle paths, in the green field designating forest.

  “Okay, Felix. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. But don’t tell me that my idea is lousy because it fucking isn’t. I’m going to do it. No matter what you say.”

  He draws a line from the middle of the cross to the nearest bicycle path, and continues, a blue line of ink all the way to the square. To the ICA.

  “I’m going to tell Mama if you do it.”

  Leo freezes. He rarely gets angry, at least not with Felix. He is now. But not in the way Papa gets; Leo gets angry so that he’s on the verge of crying, as if he’s sad at the same time.

  “Dammit, Felix!”

  He screams loudly, not caring if Vincent hears it.

  “We’re brothers! We never, ever, ever tell on each other! You know that!”

  And Felix knows that it’s in earnest.

  “Okay. I won’t blab.”

  And that it reaches deep inside.

  “But it’s still a shitty idea.”

  Vincent heard them. Now he’s standing there and looking at them. Bandaged. The chocolate-colored part at the mouth has come loose entirely and is hanging and wobbling about. The arms scribbled with ink are even more scribbled on. He has found the green marker too and green veins are winding around all over the gauze bandages.

  “Okay. He gets to decide if my idea is lousy or not.”

  “The mummy, Leo? Is he going to decide?”

  “He’s the little brother of both of us. Of course he gets to decide.”

  He puts his hand on one of Vincent’s shoulders, as their father did in the detention center. But Vincent doesn’t flinch.

  “What do you think, Vincent? Should I, or should I not, hoodwink Click?”

  The bandaged boy looks alternately at his two older brothers who are waiting for his answer. So he does that. He answers.

  “Yes. No.”

  He pulls on the bandage, which trembles around his mouth, alternating between up and down.

  “Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.”

  Until Felix starts to clap ostentatiously.

  “You hear him. He says no.”

  “He says yes. And no. He’s just being silly.”

  The hand on the shoulder t
urns into a hug.

  “Vincent—this is serious. You get to say only one thing. If I should—or I shouldn’t.”

  This time their little brother hesitates, as if he’s taking the time for a well-considered decision. He takes hold of the stumps of bandage around his mouth and pulls them up to his nose.

  “You should.”

  Now it’s Felix who freezes.

  They are waiting for him. And they have to wait. Then he shrugs.

  “Well. Now we know. Mummies prefer shitty ideas. But when it’s over, Leo, you have to buy me a brand-new map. You’ve ruined this one with your fucking pen and your fucking crosses.”

  “If you turn me in, I’ll turn you in.”

  THE SMELL OF oil, always evident lower down in large vessels, seemed completely gone here on the upper deck for first-class cabins, and the hard floors were replaced by soft carpeting. But it was just as cramped. The cart with the suitcases bumped against the corridor walls and ventilation pipes as Sam looked for the cabin door, number 571. It even swayed slightly, as always on the sea, even though he was still at Värta Harbor with barely an hour until departure.

  559. 561. 563.

  Just a few doors left before he could swipe the plastic card through the card reader and walk into the suite for the escape’s final stage.

  He was enveloped by the odd calm that sometimes crept in through his skin and locked itself in his chest, forcing his tense body to relax. The calm only came from the feeling of knowing you have done everything you can and thus can do no more. What will happen will happen because you no longer affect the outcome. The agitation, the pursuit, and the adrenaline had increased further and made his racing heart thump out of rhythm when Leo decided to turn and drive back—If I have to, I’ll kill your brother, Sam, but I’ll come back. Suddenly it was as if all that never existed. A temporary, nameless visitor he had already forgotten. Going quietly into the luxurious cabin, putting the suitcases with 103 million down on the floor and checking to be sure the champagne was precisely as cold as it should be. Right now, this was his entire world. Here, in one of the armchairs upholstered in reddish brown leather, he would sit and look out through the window facing the sea while he hoped that Leo was on his way back. That their shared journey would have a shared ending.

  Unlike him, Leo had someone to lose.

  He had turned around and risked everything because of that. Leo had brothers and parents who would miss him and he would miss them. Leaving forever meant so incredibly much more to him. As for himself, Sam didn’t miss anyone. And no one missed him.

  He abandoned the sea view for what stood on the cart. He caressed an expensive bottle with the tip of his index finger. Dom Pérignon. Neither of them had any experience of how this particular champagne tasted. The important thing was that it was the most expensive on the ship’s menu. No. We aren’t free, yet. When we are sitting on that goddamn boat. On the way to Riga and St. Petersburg and Sberbank Rossii. He picked off the glittery metallic paper around the neck of the bottle, which he then pressed entirely down into the bucket of ice. He turned the drinking glasses up. Then, in the suite, we’ll drink. Bring in a case of champagne. Then we’ll be free, Sam. And he remembered how difficult it had been to offer Leo a drink in the little cottage’s kitchen before the first robbery.

  Two knocks.

  He listened, holding himself back.

  Two more knocks on the door of the cabin.

  He took a quick look at the clock radio on the nightstand by one of the beds. Six thirty-three. Twenty-seven minutes until departure.

  You made it back in time.

  Sam turned the round doorknob halfway and let the door glide open.

  It wasn’t Leo.

  “Hello, Sam.”

  It was his brother.

  “Your accomplice isn’t coming.”

  His own brother.

  “You see, right now he’s sitting in the back seat of a patrol car in handcuffs, on the way to Kronoberg detention center.”

  John.

  “The same complex where he picked up more than a hundred million today. And I know he did it with your help, Sam.”

  John?

  I don’t understand.

  It shouldn’t be you standing there.

  “Accomplice? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  His voice sounded steady, Sam was certain of that. Even though the bits that should present reality in front of him didn’t fit together at all.

  “Sam, are you going to let me into your fucking cabin?”

  Farther off in the narrow corridor, other voices were audible, more passengers looking for the right cabin number. To attack John here, now, was too great a risk. So he stood to the side and let him come in. He noted that beneath the unbuttoned leather jacket, which he had also worn at the unannounced visit to the island, a dark-brown holster with a service revolver could be seen.

  “Champagne, Sam? Not bad.”

  In spite of the first-class ticket, the cabin wasn’t particularly large. Now it became even smaller. Wherever they positioned themselves, they stood too close to each other.

  “A pity there isn’t anything to celebrate any longer.”

  Sam watched his younger brother wiggle the champagne bottle until the pieces of ice scraped against each other just as much as they scraped against the metal bucket. He watched him study the suitcases on the floor and try to decide whether they were large enough for ten boxes of banknotes from the confiscations room. At the same time, he held up a ticket identical to the one Sam had himself—Leo’s ticket.

  “I couldn’t stop you then. From killing our father. But I can stop you today. Today I’m the one who decides what the ending is.”

  The submerged bottle was as cold as it was wet when Sam fished it up and pulled out the cork.

  “Okay, John—how does it end?”

  A single blow.

  His hand was tight around the neck of the bottle while the light-and-frothy amber liquid ran over his fingers.

  A single blow with the thick bottom against John’s temple and I decide the ending, again.

  “Like all fairy tales. Happily. You take your suitcases, which I assume contain one hundred and three million kronor, and accompany me to Kronoberg.”

  “You didn’t stop me then. You aren’t going to stop me now. You’re here alone, John. If you planned to arrest me, you’d have brought along a whole army. So deep down you’ve already decided.”

  “Sam, I have decided. But I had a hope that it could end . . . in a dignified manner. That’s why I came alone. To give you a chance to surrender. If you don’t do that, now, they’re going to be standing there on the other side of the Baltic waiting for you—and then it won’t be particularly dignified.”

  “So you’re going to tip them off? About me? Again?”

  “If you don’t give me any other choice.”

  Sam took a step forward and the room shrank even more.

  “You know, little brother, I stabbed a family member to death before when there wasn’t any other choice. It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to stab another family member who doesn’t give me any other choice and leave him lying in a bed just like I left our father. And then when I stroll across the gunwale in Riga, a maid will find you on those white sheets just as fucking bloody as he was.”

  “I know you aren’t a murderer. And you know that, too.”

  They looked at each other, for a long time. The expensive bottle remained hanging in Sam’s hand, so much heavier than a serrated fishing knife.

  He couldn’t kill someone for money.

  Just as he wouldn’t have killed then for his own sake.

  “I put a stop to our father—otherwise you would have ended up dead, John. You wouldn’t be standing here. So now you’ll look away! You owe me that. You owe me twenty-three years.”

  With those words, Sam had taken a step that shrank the distance between them. Now it was John who came closer.

  “You�
�re wrong, Sam. Yeah, it was me, then. But it’s a fucking long time since I was afraid of beatings. Of someone standing in front of me and threatening me. Sure, you’re the big brother. You’re sixty pounds heavier. And you have everything to lose if you come with me—and all the same you don’t fucking scare me. It was you who held the knife. Chose to hold the knife. You’ll never escape it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying, John! It was you who called me, back then. And you will never escape that! Don’t you remember? You have to come here, brother. Papa is going to kill me. I can’t take it anymore. You must remember that! I fucking came. For your sake. Stabbed him twenty-seven times for your sake. And then, John—fuck, John!—it was you who called the cops! I saved you and you called the police. I didn’t do anything wrong, John! You did something wrong. You owe me this! Live with it, brother.”

  If either of them were to take another step, they would crash into each other. So they stood there and stared. Closer than they had been in twenty years—close enough to be able to feel each other’s breath and follow each other’s eye movements.

  Then the ship sent a tremor moving upward from the engine room. Then a loudspeaker announced that it was fifteen minutes to departure.

  “Give me that.”

  John Broncks nodded toward the champagne bottle hanging with its neck in Sam’s tightly clenched hand. When nothing happened, he reached over and coaxed it out of Sam’s grip. And then he poured some into the glasses, which bubbled over, and he gave one to Sam.

  It tasted like golden apples and toasted bread with a hint of citrus. It was the right temperature—but neither of them experienced it.

  It was a drink shared by strangers with memories in common, a farewell forever to the past.

  THE FLATSCREEN TV on the shelf over Dráva’s long, narrow bar lacked sound, but it didn’t matter. Out of the moving puzzle of events without voices, a strange slide show emerged.

  Ivan smiled as the excited cops in helmets with black visors and automatic weapons in their hands ran after each other in a long line. They looked like the tail of a large rat slinking down into the underground station next to the police station. At least fifteen, maybe twenty of them.