More Bitter Than Death

by Camilla Grebe

  “She’s all I have left. I love her, don’t you get that?” Henrik pleads.

  Henrik and I look into each other’s eyes and I let his words sink in. After everything that’s happened, he loves her. Love again. What does that word mean, anyway? Can I trust him? What’s the alternative? Certain death in a burning house? A twenty-foot fall onto a heap of scrap metal?

  I help Tilda up and through the window and he carefully receives her little body. He tells her to hold on tight around his neck, and then he climbs down. I wait a few seconds and then start climbing out the window backwards, legs first. I ease myself down the teetering ladder, collapse onto the ground below, and lie there on my back in the freezing snow.

  Breathing. I hear voices behind me in the storm.

  Someone is crying. It’s Henrik. And the little girl is comforting him. Tilda tells him that everything will be okay, that he shouldn’t be scared, that she checked all over, and there aren’t any lions here.

  Excerpt from the Forensic Psychiatry Report

  The neuropsychological examination showed that Tobias Lundwall suffers from a moderate developmental disability. In practical terms this means that Lundwall’s behavior more closely resembles that of a child in the latency phase than that of an adult.

  He has limited intellectual faculties, so his ability to engage in abstract reasoning and assimilate information is impaired. It is surprising that Lundwall’s disability was not detected sooner.

  In addition, Lundwall has certain autistic tendencies, but they are not considered severe enough to merit an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. His psychiatric evaluation also revealed some antisocial, schizoid, and paranoid characteristics, but the patient does not meet enough of the diagnostic criteria for any of these disorders.

  Nothing in his files suggests that Lundwall, despite his mild developmental disability, should have had a delusional conception of reality, an impaired ability to make judgments, or an inability to differentiate between right and wrong. Thus, despite the very brutal nature of the crime he committed, the patient cannot be said to be suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder and there is therefore no basis for sentencing Tobias Lundwall to forensic psychiatric care pursuant to Chapter 31, Section 3, of the Swedish Penal Code.

  Antonio Waezlaw, MD, forensic psychiatrist

  UNIVERSITY OF STOCKHOLM

  FIVE MONTHS LATER

  “Yowza!” Vijay says, eyeing my belly.

  “Don’t say it!” I say, flashing him a warning look. He grins, exposing two perfect rows of white teeth, and then pats me lightly on my enormous belly with his right hand. He’s holding a cigarette in his left hand. He quickly puts it out in a vase of wilting flowers when he sees my glare.

  “Sorry! There’s a hell of a lot of stuff you’re not supposed to do around pregnant women,” Vijay complains.

  I carefully remove a stack of papers from the visitor’s chair and wipe the sweat off my forehead. Even though it’s only April, it’s been warm for a week now.

  “How are you doing?” Vijay asks, cocking his head to the side, studying me as he plops down into his chair. It creaks. Then he puts his big feet up on his desk. His tennis shoes are green and orange and look like they’re straight out of the seventies. When he spins his chair around to put a few books, each one as thick as a brick, back on the shelf behind the desk, I see that his curly, gray-speckled hair is gathered into a little ponytail at the back of his neck.

  “Good, I’m feeling good,” I say. “But I’m starting to get really sick of this.” I gently pat my belly, which is stretched taut, like an inflated beach ball inside Markus’s old denim shirt.

  “When are you due again?” he asks.

  “They say I’ll deliver next week.”

  “They say?”

  “We’ll see, won’t we? I’ve been talking to junior here and I told him to hurry it up already.”

  “You know, there’s an acupressure point in the hand—” Vijay begins.

  I raise my palm in protest. “Please, I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”

  But he’s already standing beside my chair. He sits down on the desk in front of me, loosely grips my left hand, and presses hard between my thumb and index finger.

  “I guess it can’t hurt,” I mumble, wiping more sweat from my forehead. “How are things at home?”

  He doesn’t respond for a bit, doesn’t look at me, just keeps massaging and pressing on my hand. Then he says, “Empty.” Nothing more, just that single, miserable, lonely word.

  I nod and refrain from pointing out that the city is full of attractive men, that it’s springtime, that he’s good-looking and desirable, because I know he already knows all that. The man he loves left him, and he’s entitled to his grief. It would be wrong to demand that he should leave that behind too, like some article of discarded clothing.

  Vijay clears his throat and lets go of my hand but remains seated on the desk in front of me.

  “What about Markus?”

  I shrug. “Same old, same old.”

  He nods and changes the topic. “You heard the verdict came back yesterday?”

  “It was hard to miss. It was pretty much front-page news in every Swedish newspaper. I don’t understand how you can sentence a developmentally disabled person to ten years in jail.”

  “Ten years is the standard sentence for murder. You can get life too, if the crime is particularly heinous, although the bar is pretty high. I mean, Susanne Olsson’s murder was horrifically brutal, and then there was that woman, the neighbor he killed, the woman they found in the burned-out house. But I’m no judge, just a shrink.”

  I lean back; the powerful kicks in my stomach almost take my breath away. I try in vain to find a comfortable position.

  “But Tobias is developmentally disabled. Okay, it’s a mild disability, but his IQ is maybe fifty-five, which means he has the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old. You can’t just send a guy like that to jail. How’s he going to fare in there? What kind of a society are we to sanction that?”

  Vijay shakes his head and smiles cryptically. “Sometimes I don’t get you.”

  “Why?”

  “That so-called ten-year-old almost took your life and that of your unborn baby, and you want him free and out on the street again?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just don’t think it’s right to send mentally disabled people to jail. It’s barbaric, uncivilized. We might as well legalize the death penalty then.”

  Vijay looks contemplative for a moment and I know he’s working up to one of his little lectures.

  “As I’m sure you know, the Swedish legal system doesn’t actually draw any distinction between whether a criminal is healthy or has any sort of mental disability. There used to be the option of special sentencing guidelines for the mentally disabled, but that no longer exists. The specialized hospitals disappeared in the nineties, when they got rid of the legal concept of ‘unaccountable.’ Now the only alternative is forensic psychiatric care, and to receive that, the offender needs to be suffering from a serious mental illness. Most criminals who fall into that category are psychotic. Some are suffering from dementia too, or have some severe form of brain damage. Being a little slow is absolutely not enough to qualify you for forensic psychiatric care. A developmental disability doesn’t constitute grounds for forensic psychiatric care, either. So the only option is incarceration.”

  “Doesn’t that violate the UN’s rules?”

  “Sure it does. And sure, we Swedes are very quick to criticize Americans for executing developmentally disabled and mentally ill people. But we still throw them in jail here. You know they did a study a few years ago that showed that between five and ten percent of the Swedish prison population was developmentally disabled, meaning they had an IQ of under seventy. That means that several hundred developmentally disabled people are sentenced to prison every year in Sweden. There are prisoners who have the mental capacities of preschoolers. The darker your skin, the more likely you ar
e to end up in jail in Sweden too, since our system has a notoriously hard time assessing the mental health of immigrants. Our nifty little questionnaire doesn’t work if you only speak Kurdish, right? Anyway, there’s probably many more examples than we even know about.”

  “Like I said, it’s barbaric. Plus, it’s just nonsensical. Henrik, who is developmentally normal, was sentenced to forensic psychiatric care because he was depressed when he committed his crime. Still, they say that he’s basically healthy now, so he’ll probably be out again very soon. And Tobias, who has a chronic mental disorder, will rot in jail. For ten years. What kind of country is this?”

  Vijay shrugs. “Welcome to reality, my dear.”

  I shake my head. “No, the problem isn’t that I’m starry-eyed. This is wrong. It’s unworthy of a civilized society. Tobias, who is so naïve, who has obviously been bullied and picked on by older kids his whole life—how’s he going to fare in jail?”

  “They do come up with individually tailored plans at those prisons. So they can meet each prisoner’s particular needs.” There’s a sarcastic bite to Vijay’s tone.

  “Yeah, right,” I reply.

  “Another observation is that no one had actually ever diagnosed his handicap. If I understand his case right, he had problems starting at the age of eighteen months, and his parents and teachers had countless conversations with the medical establishment and mental health officials. Why didn’t anyone figure out what was wrong with him sooner? They might have been able to help him then. They might have been able to prevent what happened.”

  I don’t know what to respond; I just feel anxious and hopeless after hearing all this. “Did Tobias ever say why he did it?” I ask.

  “No, he refused to talk about the crime at all, kept silent as a wall. He never confessed. They arrested him just as he was trying to help Kattis out of her totaled car. He was screaming something incoherent about how they had to help her, that that was all that mattered. That was basically all he said, and then he clammed up. During all the questioning sessions, not a word. If they hadn’t had forensic evidence, they wouldn’t have been able to convict him for Susanne’s murder. But they found those bloody latex gloves with his fingerprints inside them in the backseat of his car. And his shoes had traces of Susanne’s blood on them. They also found some of his hair in Susanne’s apartment. My guess is that he somehow thought he was helping Kattis by committing the crime. She had really bad-mouthed Henrik and his new girlfriend. Anyway, thank God he didn’t kill the little girl too.”

  I nod, recalling those small, dirty arms wrapped around my neck, the smell of urine and mildew in that suffocating closet, the smoke billowing up between the floorboards and then vanishing up near the ceiling, the heat rising toward us from downstairs.

  Vijay studies me in silence and I wonder what he’s thinking, how he feels about all the injustices, the lopsidedness of our Scandinavian “model” society.

  “All of this . . . ,” I say. “It really gets me down. I’ve been thinking about Hillevi’s kids too. Did you know they’re back with their dad now?”

  Vijay shakes his head sadly. “I didn’t know. But that was expected, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe, but it’s still wrong, so unbelievably wrong. They need a safe home somewhere. They shouldn’t have to live with their abuser.”

  Suddenly I remember the dream I had one night last fall: how Hillevi came to me in her bloody slip and asked me to take care of her kids, how I promised to do precisely that. And yet they’re back with their abusive father now. I wish I could have done more, that I could have actually helped those kids.

  Then there’s another kick, and I am brought back to Vijay’s office. I look out the window. Light-green leaves sway in the breeze outside. I get up from the chair with great difficulty. “Hey, I have to get going now. I’m going to have coffee with a . . . friend.”

  He nods and absentmindedly says, “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  “Ha. Thanks a lot for giving me permission,” I retort.

  Vijay smiles. “You have my permission, dear. And, oh, yes! The book. I’ll get it for you.”

  As we part, he gives me a warm if slightly strained hug. My belly is in the way and he has to really contort himself to actually accomplish the hug. “Call me when . . . well, you know.” He gestures toward my stomach and I nod, wave, and leave him there in his cramped little professor’s office.

  Outside the brick building, the air is warm and the sun feels nice on my face. I hear birds singing from the big old trees that line the walkway to the psychology department. People are lying on their backs in the grass smoking, laughing, studying for exams.

  As the weather warms, Stockholm is coming back to life again.

  As I walk through the door of the café, Kattis flashes me a big smile. Her long brown hair is down for once and it suits her, makes her look more grown-up and more feminine in some way.

  It’s even warmer inside than outside, if that’s possible. The little café is filled with the scents of pastries and coffee.

  “God, what a beautiful belly you have,” Kattis says dreamily.

  I laugh. “Oh, if you only had any idea how ridiculously tired I am of this by now.”

  “Well, it’s not long now. Chin up.”

  I nod. I know all about keeping my chin up by now. There is nothing blessed about being pregnant. It’s really an ailment, despite the claims of those Earth Mother midwives in their sensible shoes and pinecone necklaces. I’ve never felt so crummy in my life. All I can think about is that it’ll be over soon, and I can finally have my body back. Sometimes that feels more important than the baby. So far babies are purely abstract. Although I can feel this one living inside me—kicking, doing somersaults, hiccuping—it still doesn’t feel real. It’s like a dream.

  “How about you? How are you doing?”

  She twists her hair around her fingers and smiles cautiously. “I’m good. I’m unbelievably glad Tobias’s trial is over. I slept the entire day yesterday, I was so wiped out. As if I’d run a marathon. Is that normal?”

  “Totally. It’s the tension letting up.”

  She’s quiet for a while. She sips her coffee and watches me over her cup. “Did you bring . . . ?”

  “Yup.” I bend down, dig around in my old, worn purse, and pull out the book. A General Theory of Love. I have no idea why Kattis wants to borrow this, even though I recall our having discussed it at some point. I didn’t know she was much of a reader in the first place, let alone of academic treatises in English. She takes it with a Mona Lisa smile on her face and runs her hand over the cover as if it were a little puppy that had been lost and has finally been found again.

  She says, “You know, sometimes I just feel like I want to understand everything that has happened this year.”

  I nod and look out across the café, filled with Stockholm residents who are taking spring seriously, wearing shorts and T-shirts, interspersed with old women in fur coats and hats.

  “And . . . well, you know all that stuff with Henrik has also been really hard. I mean, he was sentenced to forensic psychiatric care, but . . .”

  “What?”

  She suddenly looks embarrassed, presses the palms of her hands against her blushing cheeks, and seems to study the ceiling above us.

  “The people I’ve talked to say they’ll be releasing him soon,” she says.

  “And?” I ask.

  She twirls her hair again, smiles hesitantly, and looks me in the eye. There’s something girlish about the look on her face. Her delicate, chiseled face is completely smooth and without makeup. She smiles cautiously.

  “Oh, I can wait.”

  “Wait? For what?” I ask, feeling a tingle travel down my spine, all the way from my neck to my groin. As if someone had poured cold water down my back. And suddenly I know what she’s going to say, and it’s as if the background noise in the café dies away, as if all the conversations at the little tables around us have paused, as if the clatter from
the kitchen has ceased.

  “For Henrik. Maybe he and I could be a thing again?”

  GNESTA

  EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER

  So, this is love.

  He realizes that it is only right that he too should get to experience it, although he hadn’t been expecting that.

  Not him.

  Not with her, anyway.

  Girls like her don’t fall in love with guys like him. That’s just how it is. And once again he is astounded that he’s actually lying here in bed next to her. That he, of all people, is the one getting to touch her soft, pale skin, cup his hands over her small, pink nipples, kiss her inner thighs and the forest of light-brown hair that grows there, hear those little smothered sounds she makes as he moves more heatedly inside her. The noises confusingly evoke both porn movies and the sound an injured animal makes, so that he feels both horny and worried: Is he doing this wrong? Is this hurting her?

  But she just smiles, says it’s perfect, nice, so nice that it feels like she’s coming apart. She explains to him that it’s like a kind of pain even though it’s not. And he understands what she means, because when he explodes in her, when he dies in her arms, he feels something similar. All the pain and all the pleasure and all the feelings wash over him like a gigantic, frightening, but also liberating wave.

  No one is more beautiful than she is.

  He had that thought the very first time he met her, and it was simultaneously arousing, forbidden, and yawningly mundane. It had been part of the reality he had just gotten used to: there were certain things in life that just weren’t meant for him, for people like him, doors he would never be able to open, places he would never get to see, emotions he could never expect to experience.

  Love, for one.

  He noticed her right away when he started going to the Employment Center. He noticed how her long brown hair was streaked with fire when the sunlight hit it, how her eyes could change from the palest gray to the darkest thundercloud violet.