But Pappa doesn’t see the other kids. He only sees the guy with the long hair. He juts his chin forward, and his bottom lip, lowers his forehead and stares through his eyebrows, like he always does when he’s made up his mind – and that’s when anything can happen.
‘Look at me, Leo. Pappa’s going to handle this. We’re a family. We protect each other.’
The door opens.
The guy in the moon boots. And he’s much bigger now – when he was the one sitting down, it was hard to see that he was taller than Pappa, stronger.
His long hair moves as he walks towards them. Flutters back and forth between his shoulders. Until he stops and looks at Pappa, who has put down his beer.
‘Got a light?’
He stands beside the table. A cigarette in his mouth. Pappa sits there, completely still.
‘Hey, wop, got a light?’
His long hair reaches all the way down to Pappa’s beer glass, and when he leans over he dips it into the beer, moves his head, stirs his hair in the beer. Then everything happens quickly. Afterwards, when Leo thinks about it, he’s not even sure it happened at all.
The hair in the glass.
Pappa unsheathing his red-handled Mora knife from his work trousers, grabbing hold of the hair tightly, while at the same time cutting it off.
‘You damn …’
The long-haired man staggers backwards, one hand on the place where his hair used to be.
‘You fucking …’
That damn door again. Three more come in, the curly blond and the two who had been sitting next to him. Pappa drops the hair onto the floor, like petals falling from a rose, they land near the legs of the chair. Then he stands up and does what Leo has seen Pappa do to others he’s talked to like that – but what he’d never understood before. He understands it now. Right fist hits the nose and left hits the chin, shoulders rotate and the upper body punches through the knuckles. The nasal bone cracks, and it occurs to him again how loud the noise is when a grownup falls down headlong.
It happens just as fast the second time. The one who’d been sitting on the fence – a single blow to his nose, and he falls onto the table near the toilets, which is usually empty.
The third man, the curly blond, still stands. It’s as if he’s waiting. And when Pappa takes the next step, he turns his face away and holds up his arms.
‘No!’
He just stands there.
‘We won’t … we’ll never sit there again, we—’
‘Sit down. Here.’
Pappa pulls out the chair that he’s just been sitting in. And the men who were standing outside, on their way inside, are leaving now, running away.
‘Right here. But on the floor. Next to my son. And on your knees.’
The blond hesitates.
‘Sit!’
Then he sinks down onto his knees. And right behind him – the bartender, Mahmoud – seems to be in a hurry.
‘Ivan?’
‘I’m almost done.’
Mahmoud puts a hand on Pappa’s shoulder.
‘Ivan, for God’s sake, you can’t—’
‘I’ll pay for the damage. Just calm down. I can pay. OK?’
Pappa shows him the envelope, they look at each other for a moment until Mahmoud nods, lets go of Pappa’s shoulder, and Pappa turns to the man on his knees.
‘You’re no leader.’
The Mora knife. Pappa is holding it in his hand in front of the leader’s face.
‘A real leader doesn’t send his favourite loser to dip his hair into my beer.’
Moves it closer.
‘A real leader doesn’t send his lackeys. He goes first. He leads.’
The knife touches his mouth and nose, and the blond man starts to cry. Not much, but clearly enough.
‘Did you hear that, Leo?’
Pappa is holding the knife against the blond man’s face, but he’s looking at his son.
‘What?’
‘Listen!’
‘What, Pappa?’
‘A real leader leads.’
The blond man moves his head a little away from the knife, which still has flecks of white paint on its blade.
‘Stay on your knees! Next to my son!’
Pappa’s hand clutches the curly hair, baring a sweaty neck.
‘Leo?’
‘Yes?’
‘You see that? Always the first blow right in the nose. Always your whole body behind it.’
‘I saw.’
Pappa pulls on the curly hair until his knuckles whiten.
‘A good leader hits hard. Is fair. Never lets his brothers get hit. He takes responsibility and leads them. This loser parasite sent someone else! He doesn’t understand that a leader always goes first.’
The beer glass is still standing there, half full. Pappa nods towards the other glass, which is orange and about as full.
‘Drink up. We’re leaving now.’
Leo shakes his head. The place between his chest and stomach is like a messy knot, as if someone had pulled his throat apart and then tried to fix it.
‘You stay there!’
When they stood up from the table, the blond had also tried to rise.
‘You stay where I told you! The whole damn time! Until my son and I go through that door and you can’t see us any longer!’
It’s warmer outside. Or at least it feels like that.
The entrance to the Skogås shopping centre is still there. But the benches and railings are empty and the green beer cans are rolling around on the ground in the breeze, several cigarettes still burning.
Leo breathes in, breathes out, it’s easier now.
15
THEY’RE WALKING ALONG the asphalt path that cuts through the high-rises, past a closed school and a deserted car park. There’s just one last hill left until home, when Pappa stops, turns around.
‘Do you hear that, Leo?’
The wind. Only the wind.
‘What?’
‘Don’t you hear it?’
‘No.’
‘Silence.’
Pappa nods towards the shopping centre.
‘The benches, Leo. The railings. Only half an hour ago the parasites were sitting there gaping. Now they’re gone. Because I decided they should be.’
They’re standing at a place similar to the one where Leo lay a few days earlier. The bushes, the lamp posts, the asphalt path towards the stairwell. He wonders if Pappa knows that, or if it just happened that way.
‘Willpower, Leo, you understand that? That’s what matters. If you have enough willpower you can change anything you want. You’re the one who decides. Nobody else! You decide, then you follow through.’
He runs up seven flights of stairs while Pappa takes the lift, racing him. If he takes two steps at a time, he’ll open their brown front door just before Pappa opens the lift. He passes the kitchen where his mother is standing with her back towards him at the aluminium worktop, her hands deep in a stainless steel bowl: meatballs, or steak. He passes Vincent’s room, where his younger brothers sit on the carpet in a city of cloth, with exactly seventy-seven soldiers, painstakingly placing the British commandos opposite the US marines, and Leo whispers that it’s all wrong, that they didn’t fight each other, and Felix whispers back that he knows that, but that’s how Vincent wants it.
Then he senses his father walking up behind him, quickly, straight into the workroom where the mattress is leaning against a wall. He jumps up on the stool with the mattress in one hand, and lifts it up, while taking down the lamp with his other hand.
‘Ivan?’
Mamma stands in the doorway.
‘I’ve already explained. I don’t want a mattress hanging there.’
‘It’s not a fucking mattress – it’s a punchbag. And it’s hanging there now. And it will continue to hang there until our son is ready.’
She wipes a hand across her forehead, doesn’t notice the streak of hamburger.
‘Hans Åkerberg. Jari Kekk
onen. Those are their names. They’re in year seven, at Skogås secondary school. We’ll talk to their parents. Talk, Ivan. Solve this.’
‘Talk? We’re not talking to their damn parents.’
‘Why shouldn’t we?’
‘Because that won’t stop this bullshit! Those kind don’t stop until you make them stop by yourself. That’s how it works. But you don’t understand that, Britt-Marie.’
Mamma rubs her hand against her forehead again. Even more stripes. She’s aware of it, Leo can see that she is, but she doesn’t care right now.
‘You have no idea what I know about how a child confronts another child. You’ve never been interested, Ivan. You never wanted to listen to anyone who is associated with me. My mother and father. Erik and Anita. My friends. You’re only interested in creating conflict! You want to isolate us. As a family. Just this bloody family!’
‘They attacked my son.’
‘Just us. Against the whole world.’
‘They knocked him down from behind, kicked him, and you want me to talk to his father! Should we invite him over for dinner, too?’
Pappa punches the mattress, which starts dancing between them.
‘It’s better that they stop this by themselves. Without us getting involved.’
Leo is waiting to go inside. He glances towards Vincent’s room instead, at the seventy-seven soldiers, who are actually on the same side, shooting at each other and falling down, until they all fall down, and can all be set up again.
Pappa is still standing there. Mamma is in the kitchen.
Leo walks towards the punchbag, takes off his shirt and stands in position with his weight on his left leg, strikes the first blow.
‘Right hand protects the right cheek.’
He doesn’t hold his right hand high enough, and Pappa takes a panther-like step forward and strikes his face gently with the palm of his hand.
‘Right hand protects the right cheek, Leo.’
Leo watches Pappa, clenches his right hand and hits with his left, and Pappa puts out his palm again. This time his chin stings a little – he’s still keeping his right hand too low.
He gets into position again.
16
LEO SITS ON the edge of his bed in his thin underwear, yawning, his bare feet on the cold floor. Behind him is his shelf of precious things: Felix’s red VW Beetle, still in its original packaging, a silver trophy from the school championship, and his noisy New York Rangers alarm clock, with hands that look like hockey sticks and that read quarter to five. The morning is still dark behind the flimsy blinds.
Every day this week he’s been practising several times by himself, then once with Pappa in the evening, then having got up early in the morning.
This is the very last time.
He goes to the workroom, hits at nose and chin. Today. He feels it from his arm to his chest and stomach, all the way to his groin.
He rests on the balcony for a while afterwards, looking out over the roof of the school in the distance, washes up standing over the sink, and puts out food for breakfast. Felix gets up, rouses Vincent.
‘Leo – what is it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It is something.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘You seem weird. You’re not like usual. You don’t even talk like you usually do.’
Felix digs his spoon into the yogurt.
‘It’s as if … you’re sitting here, but not with me. You’re sitting here with you.’
‘I’m gonna take them today.’
‘Take them?’
‘Hasse. And Kekkonen.’
Felix stirs and stirs his damn yogurt, he doesn’t care about it, doesn’t want it.
‘Leo?’
He follows Leo out into the hall, where he’s standing in front of the mirror, putting his weight on his left leg and punching with his right hand.
‘Leo?’
Then Leo turns to the hat rack and carefully grabs hold of Pappa’s work clothes. The ones that Pappa usually wears – they’ve hardly ever seen him in anything else except when they’ve visited him in prison after he’s hit someone too hard.
‘Leo?’
They both know where the knife is. In an elongated pocket on one of the trouser legs. And that’s what Leo is unbuttoning.
‘What are you doing?’
Leo has crept inside himself to a place that is unreachable.
‘I told you. Today. I’m gonna take them.’
They walk next to each other down the same path one of them has been taking for almost four years and the other for almost a year. It’s not even a few hundred metres if they cut across the car park, go through the bushes, then cross the street to the school playground.
They don’t speak to each other at all. They just stand there in the playground and wait. Even after the bell has rung. Eventually, Felix can’t stand it any more.
‘Leo. The knife. You—’
‘The bell’s ringing.’
‘—don’t—’
‘And in exactly forty minutes it will ring again. Then you should run home. Get Pappa and stand on the balcony with him.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Home. Pappa. Balcony. When it rings again. OK?’
Leo looks at his little brother who doesn’t want to leave.
‘OK?’
And who nods, reluctantly.
‘When it rings like it is now. But for leaving.’
A long, ugly, annoying ring. Leo looks around. The junior school and secondary school playground, so lively a minute ago, is now dead. The children who ran and jumped and screamed and shoved and laughed and ran even more are no longer there. Six entrances to six classrooms have sucked them inside, like a vacuum cleaner, just to spit them back out in forty minutes.
He positions himself next to a brick wall and watches the secondary school playground, at the bottom of the hill. It’s not empty, not yet. Down there they take more time getting to their classrooms. The two slowest are on their way to year seven, one in a denim jacket and one in a blue puffa jacket: Hasse and Kekkonen. Leo starts to tremble so much that the brick wall scrapes against his back – in fear, in expectation. Hasse and Kekkonen are standing in the middle of the playground inside the painted white lines near the flagpole, they smoke and yell at the others who are on their way inside, punch the ones who go past in the back. They’re big, even from a distance. But this time Leo knows exactly what to do. This time he’s the one waiting for them.
He stays close to the secondary school building, pressed against the wall until they make their way inside. He calculates the time. They should be in their classroom by now. He doesn’t need a watch, he knows when five minutes have gone by. And then he hurries down the hill, across the playground, and into the secondary school building, where he’s been a few times before.
He walks along a row of student lockers, his hand around the knife in the inner pocket of his jacket. It fits perfectly in the palm of his hand and the wooden shaft is smooth, as if it’s been polished by Pappa’s hand, day in and day out.
He walks down the first corridor, past the closed doors and hanging jackets, past someone who is playing an instrument in the first classroom; someone else wolf whistles in the second. The next corridor, and more doors. He’s walking down the fifth corridor when he sees what he’s looking for. The door to the physics room. The coats on the hooks next to the door. He stops in front of the puffa jacket, which has an oil stain on the chest and a cigarette burn on one sleeve, and a denim jacket with a patch on it of a tongue sticking out of a mouth.
He’s not trembling any more. He’s completely calm.
The knife is so smooth in his hand as he slashes it through the backs of the two coats, several times, in almost straight lines.
He then moves away twenty paces. That’s enough. He sits down and waits.
A class lasts forty minutes. And he guesses there are about twenty-five minutes left. He starts counting. One second at a time
. To sixty. And then starts again. He has managed to get to sixty nearly twenty-five times when the long, ugly, irritating ring drenches the entire corridor. He stands up, feet wide apart on the floor, facing the shredded jackets.
Soon. Soon.
The door opens.
The first students leave. His knees quake. One by one they walk by. His upper body is bent slightly forward.
They come out last. At the same time, through the narrow door. Hasse. Kekkonen.
And they see their jackets.
And they see the slashed backs.
And they see him.
Leo raises his hand, waves. They start running. He starts running. Corridor, student lockers, entrance, playground.
He looks behind him. They’re getting closer.
Up the hill. Secondary school playground. Junior school playground. Across the road and the stones, through the bushes and the car park.
He can hear them shouting behind him.
Felix’s legs move faster than he ever knew they could. Up the stairs and all the way to the seventh floor instead of taking the lift that never comes.
When it rings again.
Into the flat, down the hall to the kitchen, and there’s Pappa sitting at the table.
In exactly forty minutes.
Pappa looks tired, a pot of coffee in his hand as he fills up one of the china cups.
Then you have to run home. Get Pappa. And stand on the balcony with him.
‘What … are you doing here, boy? Now?’
Felix doesn’t answer. He doesn’t hear the question. He runs to the balcony door, which won’t open, turn, turn, the damn … then it slides open and he stands on tiptoe to see over the railing.
They’re screaming behind him.
But the sound of running drowns it out.
Leo’s breathing starts from his stomach and fills his lungs and expands. He never knew this was what it was like to fly. Across the car park and the asphalt path towards the entrance to the building.
He stops and glances up.
There, he’s sure of it, Felix’s head sticking up over the balcony railing.
He turns around and waits for his pursuers. His knees sway, sink slightly.
He brings his arms up, right hand protecting the right cheek.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 10