by Mattias Berg
Our youngest, Trinity, so cheeky from birth, insisting on sleeping in her own bed even as a toddler. Duality, our middle child, a gifted boy, anxious and a little lost: a copy of his father. Had never been able to fall asleep before I had read three stories to him or precisely fourteen pages of his book, always so deliberate. And then our daughter Unity, the oldest, first born and cherished, who in typical big sister fashion demonstratively blocked her ears as the stories were being told over and over again to her small brother in the same room.
Amba too flashed through in my consciousness, forcing herself up through layers of suppressed memories. Of her standing there in the doorway—invisible to the children—and later just shaking her head at my concessions to them, how I pandered to their every whim. And how she herself then, on some other evening, could do exactly the same thing while I stood there invisible to her. Engrossed in her own very special way.
With an effort I managed to close down each of the images again, almost one by one, calling on all my willpower. As I had trained myself to do before leaving, before my escape, after I realized that there would be no possibility for me to bring along Amba and the children. I extinguished the recollections as I rushed through the woodland—until my mind was black and nothing was left but flight, the smell of the fire behind us somewhere, the very intense present. Which was still much easier to bear than the buried images which had seeped up.
Then Ingrid picked up the path to Stockholms Centralstation. Since she no longer knew if the tunnel system was safe or accessible, we had to take the external route, above ground, under the cover of the dense trees next to the motorway. For once, Jesús María was last in our column. But in spite of her heavy medical pack, and the fact that according to Ingrid she had been largely inactive for more than a month, she had no difficulty in keeping up with us.
I knew nothing of Sixten and Aina’s fate. I tried to picture in my mind’s eye whether or not they had got to their feet again on the lawn, like two burning torches, but had no memory of it.
I lifted the blind again, made a note of the temperature on some advertising display alongside the tracks. Seven degrees, and it was only the end of October—and as far south as this, relatively speaking. Ingrid had said that there were record low temperatures this fall and that it was certain to become worse further north. As the train sped on, I kept writing in my notebook: described all of these events, from when we emerged through the hatch to celebrate Aina’s birthday.
My pen made a soft scraping noise in the notebook, Ingrid sat and clicked away at her computer in the top couchette. In the mirror I could see her face in the bluish light from the screen: that new look I still could not get used to. Jesús María, unhappy with the middle couchette between Ingrid and me, was somewhere in the corridor, outside our locked door. The conductor had already passed by—clipped our tickets, looked at the false passports which Sixten had organized through some acquaintance at the relevant authority, without passing any comment—and would probably not return during the night.
To judge from the silence, there were not many others in our carriage. I turned off the light and paused until Ingrid too had switched off her computer, lying there under the matted gray woollen blanket: waited for the false sense of familiarity that darkness brings. Then I started to ask my questions, my voice low enough not to be heard beyond the door.
“Was it Sixten that gave us away? Offered up both himself and Aina, so that we would burn in hell?”
“Is that a serious question, my treasure?”
The silence that followed, Ingrid’s surprise, felt genuine.
“Sixten was devastated when he rang. As usual he was mostly worrying about us, about others,” she said.
“So he survived, miraculously?”
“Sixten has at least nine lives. Aina made it, according to the message he sent, also with quite bad burns.”
The corridor outside was quiet. No sign that Jesús María might be trying to hear what was being said, not the least movement beyond the door.
“I saw him with another woman when I was out running the other evening,” I said.
“Sixten?”
An exhalation in the dark.
“Let me guess: tall, blond pageboy cut, very fit. Figure to die for. At least twenty years younger than him.”
“I wasn’t looking that carefully.”
“It was his daughter, Lisa.”
“Daughter?”
“She should of course have been at Aina’s party—had apparently come home for the first time in a long while—but that’s where I drew the line. I’ve after all only seen a picture of her, didn’t dare to allow any more people into our circle.”
I lay quietly, calculating.
“O.K. . . . so that leaves Jesús María. Who was still in the bathroom when the attack came.”
“She’s my blood sister, Erasmus. Besides, she’ll never betray us. She hates Kurt and John more than she hates you.”
I tried to imagine the Team’s bodyguards in front of me. So very distant and yet at the same time imprinted in our minds for ever.
“Kurt and John . . . they’re animals, in every way. But why does she hate them more than me—even though I used her as a sledgehammer when we were escaping?”
“Because they did things to her that she will never forget.”
Ingrid’s voice floated through the sleeper compartment. Melodious even at low volume.
“Then she did things to them, in turn. So that they shouldn’t forget her either. And since both Kurt and John were equally guilty, identical in their rotten souls, she made them identical on the outside too. A grim and bitter-sweet little joke. Very much in Jesús María’s spirit.”
I heard coughing in the corridor outside. Maybe the smoke from the roll-up, the drug, had caught in her throat. Ingrid lowered her voice once more.
“This was long before you yourself got so deeply involved, Erasmus. Actually a routine although relatively comprehensive piece of surgery, advanced camouflage in preparation for a major covert operation. One of our two guards—I can no longer remember which—was dark and good-looking, brown eyes, and the other blond and with a much slimmer face, without that dimple in his chin. I think five or six interventions were needed before Jesús María was satisfied. Edelweiss let her have her way. Since then she has just reinforced the likeness with each new surgery, down to the smallest birth mark, until no-one can distinguish them any longer. I wonder if even Jesús María knows. Certainly not Kurt or John themselves.”
Another cough outside the door. In my mind’s eye I could see the conductor doing his night rounds, smelling Jesús María’s cigarette, making a quick call. How the police would then board the train before it had left the platform and arrest us all. There were mass murderers who had been caught because they happened to drop a piece of chewing gum in the street—but that woman in the corridor simply had to test all boundaries.
“So it was Aina who reported us?”
“Mmmm. Or why not you, my treasure?”
The yellow station light leaked in over Ingrid’s duvet cover. But her face was still in darkness: there was no way of seeing her expression.
“Me?” I said.
Once Ingrid had fallen asleep, I took the hybrid and opened the sliding door to the compartment as carefully as possible. Had to make what Edelweiss called an “Unreality Check”: even in surreal situations some things are still more real than others. Jesús María was sitting pressed against the window, her eyes closed to the beautiful dawn, hardly seeming to notice me—until she took a powerful grip on my arm.
“Got tired of the Witch’s tales, Erasmo?”
“She said it was you who turned Kurt and John into twins.”
“And you trust any shit she comes out with?”
Jesús María took a last drag on her cigarette and quickly squeezed it out, between finger and thumb, showing no sign of pain. Then she started writing with her sooty finger in the condensation on the train window.
&nbs
p; It took me only a few seconds to decipher the sequence D19 N19 15R 212 319 N5N 316 121 NG, with the help of my key sentence. The one which for most of my life I was convinced nobody else knew about—apart from me and my mother. Before first Ingrid and now Jesús María proved me wrong.
Clearly it said: “DO NOT RELY ON ANYTHING.”
3.02
The sun is the strongest thing we know. The warmth which brings life to earth through constant nuclear explosions, fusions. Here even the sun had no chance.
As we slid into Kiruna station, the thermometer showed negative 26.7 at 11.00 a.m. when the sun should have taken the edge off the worst of the cold. There was still some time to go before it disappeared completely below the horizon. A month and a half, according to the calendar.
Ingrid led us alongside the railway tracks, in the direction the train had been traveling in, and then turned off onto a road. There were no people walking in front of us or behind, even though there seemed to be no other way into town. It felt as if the temporary station—more like a barracks building—had been lowered into the wrong place by a crane, left in the middle of nowhere.
Since we all needed to get some fresh air, we decided not to take the bus downtown. The snow creaked under our boots, the cold made the balaclavas from our combat packs stick to our mouths. The road was so narrow, without any sidewalk, that it required full concentration to keep out of the way of the traffic. When the biggest trucks drove by, we had to press ourselves against the snow walls.
“The mine,” Ingrid said, continuing enigmatically, “it giveth and it taketh away.”
Neither Jesús María nor I said anything in reply, we just walked on through the razor-sharp cold. It was almost a quarter of an hour before we approached something approximating a town center. I mouthed my way silently through the names on the direction signs, memorizing them for a possible exit route. Ingrid gestured toward the enormous square, containing more parked cars than people. The only movement came from the occasional solitary businessman on his way into or out of the Hotell Ferrum.
“O.K., co-ordinates . . . 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The world’s largest town measured by surface area, at least on the basis of the old municipal system. And beneath us is the abyss. We’re moving on the thinnest of ice—central Kiruna is cracking up, bit by bit, being swallowed whole by the mine. The treasure chest of iron ore which financed our great leap, from primitive farming economy to leading industrial and welfare nation. Most of the Swedish social and economic model.”
Ingrid pointed toward the mighty black silhouette, covering most of the horizon.
“I’ve called it Mount Doom ever since I first read Lord of the Rings.”
I squinted into the sun, tried to grasp the scale of the mine: the monster which Ingrid said was consuming itself. In the other direction lay the idyllic old parts of town, which were soon going to be torn down—like a movie set—when the town center would be forced to move a mile east. Demolished, I thought, like the fake towns which we had put up in inaccessible places. For the sole purpose of bombing the hell out of them during our nuclear weapons tests.
Ingrid turned toward me. You could see the breath from her mouth, even though it was covered by her balaclava, seeping out like gas.
“Do you recognize where you are, Erasmus?”
I shook my head.
“Look over toward the mountain, beyond the mine. You’ve been there a number of times. Been flown in at night to train, clearing up operations after a simulated drone attack at N.E.A.T., the ‘North European Aerospace Test Range’, by far the largest aboveground military training terrain in Europe. Nine thousand two hundred fifty square miles, as big as Belgium, just sixty-two miles straight out into the countryside from here. Belongs to Kiruna Municipality, technically speaking. But is nowadays managed by the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration and Swedish Space Corporation together.”
Suddenly I could see everything. The constant darkness, the same above ground as below, crawling and slithering through inhumanly narrow tunnels, occasional glowing points, winter warfare. How we had been kept in the dark about the co-ordinates, had no clue as to our whereabouts, training to operate in this ignorance. We called it “No-Man’s-Land”.
Now we left the square behind us, kept to the edge of the soon-to-be former town center, passed charming wooden houses from the early twentieth century, which according to Ingrid—doubling as guide—dated from when the town was founded. The engineer’s dream which led to the pioneer town being established so far from everything other than the raw material itself. Then we came into a residential area which seemed already to have been abandoned, with boards as makeshift cover for broken windows. Continued onward to the destination which was still a mystery to me. I had no idea what we were going to do here in Kiruna, had not asked: was trained not to do so.
So I kept on memorizing street names, Lars Janssonsgatan, Konduktörsgatan, Gruvvägen, noted every last detail. After some steep downhill stretches with snow packed hard underfoot, Ingrid pointed up to the left, in the direction of the hill: the area showed bare white among the low trees.
“Luossa Ski Hill. Created when the mine on this side of the mountain began to peter out, just a few years ago. So I’ve never actually skied there,” she said.
After a brief pause, while Ingrid gazed up at the pistes, mesmerized, we kept moving forward for several hundred feet until we stopped in front of the substantial wooden building on the final slope down toward the mine.
Even here the windows had been boarded up, the facade had peeled making the plain wood visible in places, icicles three feet in length hung from the roof like needle-sharp weapons. You could only just make out the text on the frosty signboard: HOTELL SNÖFLINGA.
“Hotel Snowflake. The perfect hiding place. Officially closed many years back, already sacrificed to the powers of the underworld,” Ingrid said—before the barred door suddenly opened.
“Inko, my dearest friend . . . you seem hardly a day older than when we finished secondary school, even with your new look. Come in so I can lock up behind you!”
Ingrid and the large woman, probably of the same age as her, but youthful and cool, with shocking pink hair and tattoos over her bare arms, gave each other a warm embrace. Then the woman solemnly turned her attention to the rest of us, switching into English, somewhere between Sixten’s and Aina’s.
“Erasmus . . . Jesús María . . . wonderful to meet you. But you’re several weeks earlier than I was expecting, Inko.”
“Yes, well, it was hard to be more precise.”
“And I guess you still don’t want to say what you’re up to here.”
“No, I’m sorry, Bettan. But as I told you, it’s an extremely good cause.”
“I like those, Inko. You know that.”
I looked around the eerie darkness inside: not one sliver of light found its way through the blocked-up windows. From the crystal chandelier in the lobby one could tell that this must once have been a fine hotel. With the help of the man-high, cracked rococo mirror I started to map out escape routes, hiding places, the likelihood of a surprise attack from various directions.
Bettan laid three heavy metal knobs on the counter. A big key for the room and two smaller ones for the padlocks on the front door.
“I should say that it’s pretty much safe for you to move around in this neighborhood, even in daylight. And nobody will recognize you anyway, Inko.”
Although the whole hotel seemed to have been abandoned, I noticed that there were no other sets of keys on the hooks.
“In here it’s probably mostly the ghosts you’ll notice. There’s sometimes a hell of a lot of squeaking at nights, as if furniture were being moved around up on the old conference floor, or somewhere in the middle of the sauna. Even though it’s nearly three years since we had our last group booking.”
“And the Girls?”
“Oh, they’re used to keeping out of the way. It’s doubtful you’ll see any sign of them.”
“By the way, there’s blasting in the mine every night. At exactly 1.30 a.m.—to give time for the gas to disperse before the morning shift clocks on. It makes the beds shake, trust me. Pretty much all of the town trembles like my old grandmother’s aspic.”
It was hard to climb the creaking stairs without making a sound. Not even I—with all my practice, even as a child—managed it. Just above the staircase was a faded lounge. Worn-out Chester-field armchairs in oxblood leather, heavy red curtains in front of the high, boarded-up windows, a bulky old T.V. on a rickety stand by the southern wall. Above the seemingly preserved bar—which still had an impressive range of alcohol—hung a yellowing sign which I had no problem in understanding. “The Ice Queen. Always open, honor system in operation.”
We followed Ingrid into her room, which she said had the best view. She pulled open the curtains and removed one of the boards from the window.
Then we just stood there in silence, observing the remarkable organism of the mine. It seemed to be breathing, hissing and belching smoke, coloring the snow at the top a threatening iron-ore black. From there on down to the very bottom, the rock sides had been layered like farming terraces. At ground level, the mine then continued on down in a confusion of railway tracks, overhead wires, lamps, winches, relays.
After a certain time—maybe five minutes? ten?—Ingrid replaced the board with care, closed the window and pulled the curtains shut again.
“Not that it’s necessary. But belt and suspenders, as they say.”
On our way from the station, Ingrid had insisted that we would be safest here, nearest to the mine. Locally, the area was only ever known as the “Valley of Death”. The hotel and surrounding buildings would be the first to be dragged down into the depths: so they had been declared uninhabitable some years ago, sealed up, and had become an excellent haunt for people who, for different reasons, wanted to go underground. Here, nobody would ask—and absolutely no-one would answer.