The Carrier

by Mattias Berg

  I watched as the pair of lovers, that is to say Zafirah and Kurt-or-John, first swept up Ingrid in what from a distance looked like an awkward embrace. And how something—or rather someone—then derailed their entire plan.

  The binding on one of Kurt-or-John’s skis released as Jesús María threw herself at him—and in so doing set Ingrid free to ski downhill at speed. Zafirah melted into the crowd as if her presence had been an illusion, the passing of a shadow, while the other one of Kurt-or-John let himself be carried within the shifting mass of people, beyond reach.

  Only Ingrid can have seen the rest of the events unfold, while the numbers approached zero and the volume of “The Final Countdown” continued to rise, drowning out the primal roar which must have followed.

  I was too far away to be able to get involved. Just watched, like Ingrid, who had swung in among the trees on the other side of the piste, as Jesús María grabbed the ski which Kurt-or-John had lost, and with it hit him across the face. He staggered, fell backward from the force of all the pent-up rage, while the blood started to gush from his forehead, nose and mouth, effectively blinding him.

  Jesús María raised the ski again. Held it like a giant scalpel, standing over Kurt-or-John’s prone figure.

  The steel edge of the ski was drawn straight across his abdomen, slicing it with as much fury as precision. Yet Kurt-or-John did not come apart—since there was still bone there, the skeleton itself.

  The rapidly growing pool of blood glistened, as it pumped out of the body rhythmically and the year’s last rays of sunshine was reflected in it, before it began to be absorbed into the snow. I gazed at the red on the white, that remarkably beautiful contrast. And the human remains lying there, Kurt-or-John like a slaughtered animal, steadily drained of blood, or a reindeer dragged down by a wolf on the hillside. Mused for a moment over the rate at which a human body can empty.

  The countdown was completed. As the crowd yelled “THREE . . . TWO . . . ONE . . . ZERO—goodbye, thank you for another year!” I had to turn around quickly to see the sun sink behind the hill and leave a thin yellow-red line on the horizon. I checked my wrist-watch: 11.45, just as the young man had said. Saw the crowd start skiing down to the base so as not to miss the start of Polar Night après-ski, still not noticing anything of what had happened right behind their backs.

  When the sight up the slope was clear, I stared at the last of the blood, not gushing but slowly seeping over the snow—before Jesús María dragged what was left of Kurt-or-John into the trees.

  3.09

  Back at the hotel, Ingrid took a quick shower while Jesús María disappeared off to the service area, down to the Girls. Probably to say her goodbyes. Bettan had laid out a magnificent farewell lunch, but had not herself appeared for it. None of us ate very much, either. Not even Ingrid.

  Jesús María eventually appeared at the table.

  “You were a godsend,” Ingrid said. “It seems they knew a bit too much about us: someone must have been indiscreet. That was a close call. Thank you.”

  “Igualmente,” was Jesús María’s answer.

  Before I had time to ask any questions, trying once again to understand the relationship between these women, not least that last reply, Bettan came into the dining room.

  “He’s here now,” she said.

  I noticed that Ingrid did not give Bettan a farewell hug before we vanished into the Kiruna afternoon, by now pitch-dark. Small snowflakes whirled in the air, stars could no longer be seen in the sky, the wind whistled through the low birches.

  The man in the snowmobile suit gave Ingrid a clumsy embrace, before reaching out his mighty right glove, first toward me and then to Jesús María.

  “Niklas. ‘The Magnificent’. Was it you who ordered the sightseeing?”

  “Yes, thank you, my love. I’m so grateful. Bob and Mercedes will love it,” Ingrid said, back to her playful self with incredible speed after the incident on the slope. Jesús María sat in complete silence. Did not react at all, seemed still to be up there on the mountain, with Kurt-or-John’s remains fresh in her mind. I held back too. Tried to work out what role I should be playing now.

  “No problem, Inko. But I have to admit I had no damned clue that you had cousins over there.”

  “I’m glad I’ve managed to keep some secrets from you. And I suddenly had the idea of showing my only American relatives our little world. Before it’s too late—and the whole lot sinks into the deep.”

  “Mmm, I know: like Atlantis.”

  As he steered his pick-up truck out of the neighborhood, surprisingly slowly, Ingrid turned to us in the back seat.

  “Niklas will always be very close to my heart. And not only because he was my first tragic love. He and I also took care of a large construction venture in the old days, massively complex, before I decided to try my luck in the U.S. using the project as an example of my work. That’s when we began to call him ‘The Magnificent’.”

  “I think you were probably alone in that, Inko. But thanks anyway.”

  I stole a glance at Jesús María, who even now made no effort to join in the banter. Sat there in a sulk while Ingrid played her charades. Niklas pointed at the analog thermometer on the Norrbottens-Kuriren newspaper building. Held the steering wheel in one hand, his giant glove still on.

  “At least minus 37 Celsius, isn’t it?”

  “36.8 at the most,” I said.

  He peered at me in the rearview mirror. It was always easy to win people’s confidence, to begin to build trust.

  “Wish I had your eyesight, Bob. But where should we start, Inko?”

  “Take the church. God’s work.”

  Once we were in the church, she began to explain. That the exterior had been painted in Falun red and the roof covered in shingle; that the influences from Sami cots could be seen in the construction of the roof beam; how the light fell.

  And it was so strange to hear Ingrid lecture again, the whole enchantment. Then we went out to the divine little park, with snow as thick as cream lying on the branches of the trees. That strange feeling of grace. At least there and then, in this particular moment.

  Ingrid also told us that Kiruna Church was voted the most popular twentieth-century Swedish building in a national poll. And that this particular masterpiece would be spared destruction, since a gigantically complicated process was planned to move it in its entirety to another site in town.

  “But Kiruna Town Hall is a tragedy. This will be the first and last time that you see it,” she said.

  While Niklas drove us there—it was a lot safer for us in the truck than out in the streets during business hours—I tried to understand why Ingrid let us do this in the first place. Whether our sight-seeing might have some specific purpose, some connection to our assignment. Or if it was just designed, on the spur of the moment, to break the torment of our inactivity while waiting for Sixten.

  But as soon as I stepped into the enormous entrance hall, feeling my eyes rise all the way up to the ceiling—I had to catch my breath at the sheer size of the space—I no longer cared which it was. I climbed reverentially up the broad stairs—and then stood there on the upper floor and slowly ran my hand over the por-phyry railings. A few feet away from me, Jesús María was doing the same. Closed her eyes, sighed, opened them again. Seemed, like me, hardly able to take in the idea. Of demolishing something like this, in peacetime, as if it had been an enemy military target.

  I then went down into the basement and tried to interpret the local authority’s sketches of what was called the “Kiruna City Transformation”. Nothing really seemed to hang together. Not the dimensions, nor the scale, the size of the vast area which was to be moved in comparison with the small new center being built.

  When we took the guided tour into the mine, just before it closed to the public for the day, I had the same feeling. At the Visitor Center a third of a mile down, we jostled with a group of American tourists, their cries of “Oh my God!”, “Unbelievable!”, “Fantastic!”, �
�Awesome!” ricocheted off the rock. I stood before the sketches in silence. Still trying to get my head around the “City Transformation”, until it was time for the tour bus to return to the surface. But despite the detailed diagrams showing how the vein ran—a one-mile tunnel of magnetite—and all these precise aerial photographs, I still did not understand why such a large part of town had to move.

  I could not help thinking of Edelweiss’ “scenarios”, his false trails, diversions. Or the model communities which we threw up somewhere in the desert, only then to be able to bomb the hell out of them.

  Back in Niklas’ truck we snaked our way up the mountain, increasingly on smaller tracks rather than roads, right into darkness. Until we saw the shining skulls in the trees. Heard—and felt—the music vibrating through the car.

  Niklas’ camp turned out to be a crackpot hippie collective with death metal as its distinguishing characteristic. Violent music pumped out over the mountain. End of days lurked everywhere. Skulls, bones, garish posters saying “The Town of Death” or “#kirunaisdyingfight” with English text draped over the Swedish original, maybe for our sake, grotesque plastic heads stuck on poles, maybe hinting at those at the Inner Station in “Apocalypse Now”. Ingrid whispered that they represented the members of the Kiruna local government council.

  We changed into jumpsuits like the one Niklas was wearing, before he led us out to the sleds. One could hardly hear the dogs’ furious barking over the music, their urge to start pulling. And soon the drift snow started whining across the camp. Through the combined din Niklas had to shout to us—even though we were standing next to him.

  Jesús María helped Niklas to harness the twelve dogs, before taking her place nearest to them. I myself sat immediately behind her as we wrestled my hybrid and her medical pack down between us. Finally Niklas climbed up onto the runners at the back with Ingrid, still wearing her pack, next to him.

  The dogs yelped madly before we got off to a start, uncontrolled, directionless. The back of my seat banged painfully against my vertebrae as the sled slid and bumped down the first steep hill below the camp. But after about a minute the barking had died away. The dogs forged ahead, twelve animals and one human conductor perfectly choreographed, each one with their exact place in the rigid hierarchy.

  We were moving much faster than I had expected, despite the thickening snowfall. I had no idea where we were heading, was also under no illusion that I would be told if I asked. But at least we would not make ourselves visible in this open mountain terrain. “The worse, the better,” Edelweiss used to say about the correlation between weather and combat: there was no better camouflage than a sandstorm, thick fog or heavy driving snow, and Ingrid had taken this into account.

  The snow lashed continuously against our covered faces, onto the balaclavas, goggles, headlamps. What little we could make out of the landscape was like sea bed rather than mountainside. The ice-tortured dwarf birches reminded me most of all of coral. Jesús María sat silently in front of me, observing the identical rhythm of the dogs, their co-ordinated instinct to run.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on trying to pick up some of Ingrid and Niklas’ conversation, in Swedish and through the howling wind. Wiggled my toes inside my boots to thaw out my right foot. Not even our winter equipment could deal with hours of sitting in what must have been negative twenty-two degrees, even though the temperature always rises when snow begins to fall.

  “And are you sure you want to go all the whole way out there, Inko, in this nightmarish weather?” Niklas said.

  “Absolutely. Now that we’ve come all the way across the Atlantic. It’s an adventure for us, after all, and we’re outdoors people just like you. It’s probably still your fault that I never choose the easiest way.”

  “Yup, we got around, were pretty off-piste. But that was prehistory, forty-five years ago in October. I’d never have recognized you if you hadn’t called first. But I recognized the voice, naturally, same as ever.”

  Niklas was quiet for only a moment. Then his curiosity got the better of him.

  “And that guy Sixten . . . still in touch with him?”

  “Not a peep since I left for the States. Ages ago.”

  “Well, you were as different from each other as could be, Yin and bloody Yang. It would never have lasted.”

  Suddenly the dogs turned in toward the edge of the trees and stopped at Niklas’ low command. The hut had appeared like a mirage out of the snow: even thirty feet away we had seen nothing of it.

  It was not much to look at, either. As I scoped the building, I saw that the roof had collapsed toward the northern gable, where plastic had been riveted—although that too had started to tear due to the weather conditions. Not one window retained both panes of glass. But the doors appeared to be largely intact, so it ought to be possible to shut out the worst of the cold by stuffing extra clothing from our packs into the gaps. When I returned to the group, Niklas glanced at our packs as Jesús María and I lifted them from the sled.

  “I assume I don’t need to ask if you’ve got proper gear with you. Bob’s pack is after all bloody gigantic. You can also keep the jumpsuits until you come back to the camp.”

  “Awesome, thank you. And so long as you come and get us again tomorrow morning, everything will be just fine,” Ingrid said.

  He turned the team of dogs around, said a coaxing “O.K.”, their simple command. A few seconds later they had vanished into the darkness and driving snow. Ingrid led the way to the hut, managed to open the warped door without too much of a problem. Let us go past her, closed the door again and stopped a few paces in, looking around dreamily.

  “We used to sit in here and kiss before we could even read. Niklas’ mother had been involved in ‘Operation Sepals’ during the war, one of the most important cogs in the wheel from what I understood: the Germans let the Sami roam free as reindeer over the border, perfect couriers. Then the Tourist Association never bothered to reclaim the hut. The mineral vein runs just under here, you see, so when the company stopped its open-cast work and went underground, there was probably nobody who wanted to sit here rattling as the whole of Mount Doom was blown apart. Except me and Niklas—and eventually just me. Here you can do whatever you want without being watched, in case you’re wondering.”

  Jesús María had not said a word. I waited for Ingrid to explain what we were doing out here in the wilderness. But she looked at her watch.

  “We certainly wouldn’t need to keep anything from Niklas. You’ve seen what the camp looks like, right? He would never report us to any authority, not a Swedish one and even less an American one, and absolutely no way to the military.”

  When Ingrid checked her watch again—no more than five minutes later, still standing over by the door—I did the same. 21.52, December 10. The beginning of the Polar Night and the date of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies: all this symbolism. And our crumbling little cottage would be a perfect hiding place when the police started questioning everybody in the immediate vicinity of the slope tomorrow morning, like Bettan for instance.

  “But by now Niklas will have stopped thinking about turning around and coming back to fetch us out of this rat-hole, he’ll have gone too far already. And once he’s back at camp, my informants tell me that nowadays it doesn’t take more than a thimbleful before he’s out for the night.”

  Then she turned and opened the door, letting in the ice-cold wind and driving snow.

  “So it’s time to get to the real meeting place.”

  3.10

  Ingrid led us, packs on our backs, headlamps lit, straight into the storm. We crouched before the wind, carefully balancing our weight so that we did not break through the snow crust. The cold stung in our nostrils with each breath. The snow kept falling—which should make it nearly impossible for anybody to spot us.

  The only thing I could make out was that we were surrounded by thick forest. The dog team must have turned off sharply and headed down the mountainside, before dropping us be
low the tree line again. Ingrid followed a trail further and further in among the trees. The heavy snow made the branches sag: if necessary we could use the space under them as escape tunnels.

  As the storm grew heavier and denser, Ingrid was several times forced to stop and retrace her steps. Counted her paces back and forth, double-checking, stopped by a tree and ran her hand up and down the bark, as if looking for some kind of markings. We kept close behind, so as not to lose sight of her.

  After a few minutes she signaled us to halt in what seemed to be a more open place. She wandered here and there with her eyes fixed on the snow—before suddenly sitting down and starting to dig vigorously with her hands, like a child. Jesús María and I did the same. Our winter gloves were clumsy, but there was no doubt a reason why Ingrid chose not to use the collapsible shovel in her combat pack.

  Under the snow there was at first nothing but pieces of granite, and then increasingly black composites, laden with magnetite. Only after removing the deep layer of stones on top of the bed-rock could we glimpse the control box in the light of our headlamps. That was why Ingrid had avoided using the shovel, preferred the sensitivity of her hands.

  With great concentration she then set about prising open the box with some sort of tool, laying bare the control buttons. The panel was large enough to allow one to key in the code—and, as ever, small enough that one’s hand would cover the movement of the fingers, making it impossible for someone else to read. A dark hole opened up in the snow.

  Against the howling wind, Ingrid had to gesture to us to lead the way down. I could see out of the corner of my eye how she erased our trail: stretching one hand up out of the hole to scrabble back in place as much as she could of the natural camouflage, small piles of gravel and diluted iron ore, while the entrance to the tunnel closed above us.