A crime scene might very well be compared to an archeological excavation. You want to know what has happened and who is involved. There are clues, suggestions, a sense that something lies hidden.
The world is a riddle to be solved. We all become more or less suspect. Guilt is a disease, contagious, transmittable. He who turns his face away, he who starts walking faster, she who laughs off the facts, uncomfortably.
Nils Forsberg finished his letter to Father Pietro: There is no longer any reason for me to not say exactly, and I mean exactly, what I think. And that way is, as everyone knows, a blind alley. We lie because we don’t have the energy to tell the truth! Truth does not make us free, it makes us lonely.
Of course, a social and ethical explanation can be found to interpret the reasons why a particular person commits a crime. There are also psychological models. For Nils Forsberg the answer to the “Why” has crystalized into a “Therefore”: greediness, terror—because it was possible, because you could.
January is a month when everything hangs in the balance, when quick or well-thought-out decisions take on unknown consequences. To allow yourself to let go, or to deny yourself the right to act out your dark side. To kick someone lying down one more time, or to let it be. To jump out into it, or not to. Violence vibrates in the air: repressed hatred is like a dense fog rolling through all the alleys and squares of the city.
Life is unfair and cruel, and so is time. Cities grow, cities disappear, children grow older, stars fall and incinerate. Everything is in movement, the only constant is the actual feeling of meaninglessness. That we are on our way somewhere and that we don’t know why.
Between us, the living, there is a transparent wall. Stay or leave. We never touch each other, we just turn our faces away, look down at the ground.
In the end, that’s what it’s all about. That some disappear, while others stay around. That we are weighted down to earth, as though we are carrying an invisible yoke. The dead can be whirled off into time, be recreated, placed into some context, delivered the justice they are thirsting for, and then even the memory of them will be gone.
The final problem is, of course, that any kind of fundamental justice is lacking. That we cannot see the whole picture, only parts of it. That we grope for each other in the dark. And the murderer remains alone, blood singing in his body, images haunting him. He is who he is, he owns this bottomless thirst and this voraciousness that fills him. He knows it should not be this way, he also knows he cannot stop himself. It’s like an invisible wound that can never be healed, an itch you must not touch, and yet you cannot help yourself.
Is this how we become what we’re supposed to be? Nils Forsberg is doubtful, he still believes there is a hope for mercy, for change, that life is not static.
Nils Forsberg had crossed several boundaries in the course of his life. It was not a conscious choice but the sum of a series of events taking place beyond himself. It was possible that he once had been free to choose, but no longer. He’d given up, been tossed here and there, taken paths he had previously not even known were there.
Nils Forsberg had chosen to remain in his job, long after he should have left. When he should have left the dead to bury their dead, and he should have stayed with the living—and lived. The very first time he’d had to deliver the news of a death, he should have refused to pass on the information. He should have said that he could not be the messenger of the underworld, that the living and the dead should take care of each other, and leave him out of it.
But then who the hell would do it?
That’s how it always went. It was the responsibility. His feeling that he was more capable of dealing with the world than his colleagues. It was better that he did it than to have Nils Larsson come stomping into the home of the victims saying, “Your boy is dead, he fell onto the tracks …”
It’s all still there, all the thoughts and actions are there, deep down in him, buried in sediment. And every time he takes action the dregs are stirred up, just like when you throw a stone into water and everything muddies.
Now he was in a gray zone, neither alive nor dead, and yet—a bit of both. He looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom and could hardly recognize the face looking back at him. At times he despised what he saw. New Year’s had passed, the nights were deep and dark, the days as short as a breath, gray and grainy. Nils Forsberg experienced a certain amount of pleasure in giving up, admitting defeat, with a tiny bit of self-pity mixed in. Tasting the whip of degradation! to quote his favorite author, Eric Hermelin, in one of his introductions to a book of Persian poetry. To summarize: in order to get back up you first must have fallen down. Forsberg had fallen down so many times by now, and he no longer had the strength to get back up. Nils Forsberg was a man who carried his story around with him, who was always telling and changing his life’s story. He was also a man whom no one wanted to listen to anymore.
The morning news in Malmø reports of break-ins in three nursery schools; four people are arrested in a stolen car; a twelve-year-old girl is chased out of her home by her own father—she runs crying around in the yard in front of the apartment building; a middle-aged man is found dead in a parked car on Östra Förstadsgatan. He sits with his head leaning against the steering wheel. The autopsy shows that he’s been dead for at least twelve hours before he was found, which means that he’s been sitting dead in his car during daylight hours on a busy street in the middle of Malmø. Everything is changing. Though we are as alike as only human beings can be, we are still strangers. The girl gets to sleep late in the afternoon, her father will stay away overnight, and the three break-ins at the nursery schools are never solved.
Death is waiting.
Death bides its time.
Everything is about waiting, about doors thrown wide open.
The only thing we can really know is that time measures us carefully, it waits until we have finished all we are here to do, all that is written with invisible letters in the book of life.
Time.
Drops of time, trickles of time. Time scratching, carving its deep lines in your face. Time for the poison to leave your body the same second it’s taken in. We’re like black flares in a world of sudden light. The soon to be dead get on the bus, log onto their online bank, wait for a traffic light to change. Everything continues as though nothing is going to happen. The soon to die take their stuff out from the pawnbroker, try to ameliorate a bad cold.
The police station down by Slussplan, right by the canal, lies mostly in darkness. It’s that time, right between night and morning, and slowly the city wakes up, revealing all the secrets of the night. Rain mixed with snow falls heavily. The water in the canal reflects the light, traffic lights blink yellow, again and again. Down by Midhem, at one of the many twenty-four hour gas stations, a small fire ignites and spreads quickly along the back wall—a neglected area where trash has accumulated for many years. Three or four homeless people who’ve been using the area as a shelter from the wind run off, leaving the fire behind. They stumble along Lundavägen like evil-smelling ghosts, on their way toward the dense bushes right opposite Hedberg’s car dealership. And then everything is recognizable yet again, from the acrid smell of burned plastic, damp leaves, scraps from a fast food place, a worthless windbreaker. The rancid smell of urine, alcohol, rotting food. Three of the four who run from the fire will not make it through February, the month of the death god. The youngest of them will be found dead in a gateway on Zenithgatan, right next to Rörsjöskolan. Life is in motion, it happens. We have so little to fight back with. We’ve created a world that turns its back on us.
Malmø is Sweden’s third largest city.
The city is growing, in constant motion. The boundaries between Copenhagen and Malmø are growing more and more diffuse with every year that passes. Transportation is fast now—and everything can be transported. Huge sums of money change hands every day. The economy, lust, and desire itself move freely, like underwater currents. You see the ripples o
n the surface but never the big currents, the big fish.
Stars can just be made out in the grayness; far away a siren is heard from an emergency vehicle. Everything is within everything. Even chaos creates its own pattern, like looking through a kaleidoscope. Down in Rosengård a basement fire starts up. In the last few weeks there have been several, almost always basement fires, lit with rubbing alcohol and matches. The rental agency has emptied all the storage rooms, nothing of value has been left behind, nothing that could be ignited. Which means that they drag the trash in there themselves and light it. Why? The answer is simple: because they can.
A security company makes rounds, drives slowly through the badly designed alleys. They’ve been ordered never to stop, never to leave their car, always to call, “Patrol in danger,” at the least sign of trouble. This of course contributes to aggravating the mood, to the feeling of being out on a dangerous assignment. The divisions become sharper and sharper. The difference between them and us more and more pronounced.
Windows in the stairwells are brightly lit. The city is besieged by its inhabitants, and a ghost walks through the city, a phantom.
Then the fire in the eastern parts of the city gets going. The night worker at Statoil strikes the alarm for the fire department and within a short time the gas station and the fast food restaurant have been shut down for customers. Someone also decides to block off the upper part of Lundavägen. Two big cranes block off the street. A lonely policeman is given the task of directing the scanty traffic. A rain storm is gathering, clouds quickly pile up above the city. This gray, miserable city of no mercy. On this day, in this city.
This morning finds Nils Forsberg sleeping at his kitchen table. A string of saliva has run down his chin. Forsberg doesn’t dream. He’s sunk into a deep black hole—the dreams are happening somewhere else. The alcohol rushes throughout his body, shakes and shivers in all his body’s nooks and crannies, searching for cells, thirsty cells wanting to be saturated again. Time will burn off the alcohol. Time is our only friend. It moves on, rushing like an ocean. Everything tears and jerks inside of him and he can’t see it or understand it. He’s like the living dead, what’s left over at the end. Finally, that’s what it’s all about: time. It changes us, it teaches us, if only we’ll listen.
In the end, it all comes down to one question: who is it you belong to?
Who do you belong to? Your car? Your job? The alcohol? The drugs? You allow yourself to be defeated, vanquished, conquered, beaten. Eventually, that’s the only thing Nils Forsberg can subscribe to: that he’s owned. To live becomes like being on fire for one moment. To flare up like a star in a black room, imploding, then disappearing with a faint hissing sound, like when you drop a burning match into a glass of water. One quick fizzle, then all is quiet.
“Even time is political,” Mats Granberg once said. Forsberg’s answer had been blunt, not to say aggressive. “Ah ha? And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” How do you answer something like that? Which of course only meant that Forsberg tried to make sense of it because he missed his friend. He also knew that he couldn’t admit it to himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be human. All his mistakes, his failures, his problems lived their own life in Forsberg’s consciousness, soaring and surging through his body like a separate ecosystem.
In the course of his career, Nils Forsberg had seen more dead people than he cared to think about. He had seen them in every condition, at all ages.
Children and adults, men and women. The dead all carried a common burden. Their spirits floated weightlessly, while the memory of them nailed them to this world. It was as though a special kind of energy had been released around the dead. A human being who disappears in a crime leaves a string of loose ends behind. Connections that are not cleared up, explained, will haunt the rest of us, force out an answer. Nils Forsberg lived in a dark maze, groping about and finding nothing, not even a flicker of light. Only the voices from the dead looking for answers, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, hesitantly reaching for him when he let his thoughts float. He knew he was not alone in this, that most police officers were haunted this way, yet it was rare that anyone said anything about it. As long as one didn’t speak of it, it didn’t exist, that particular problem.
A police report is at best a slow journey, two steps forward and one step back. At worst it’s a march in place. Most often it’s a balancing act between madness and discipline. This was a phrase Forsberg liked to repeat to anyone who cared to listen: “Madness and discipline! And all we have here is the discipline! Where’s the creativity! Where’s curiosity?”
The dead.
Some of these deaths he had shared with Gisela Eriksson. They had attempted to recreate times, places, and events to such an extent that the dead had become like distant friends, or relatives you haven’t seen for a long time. The dead. He knew Gisela Eriksson also walked around surrounded by the shadows. She’d been his closest friend, the only one whom he could share his thoughts with. And then he’d gone and ruined it all, pushed everything to its ultimate conclusion so that finally there wasn’t anything to be done but shut the door behind him. He’d always thought she’d be the one to take over after him. And that’s what happened, but not the way he’d wanted it. He hadn’t chosen to leave, he’d been kicked out. He had envisioned himself and Eriksson walking side by side through the city-jungle. Forsberg teaching what he knew, and Eriksson eagerly soaking it all up. Oh, what an idiot he was, what a naïve and narrow-minded view he’d had of himself, a complete idiot!
That’s what he was.
The dead. The missing.
You could say they were one and the same, that they all spoke the same language. There was nothing conciliatory about them, they just didn’t want to be forgotten, brushed aside. At night, and sometimes like a shadow in the middle of the day, Nils Forsberg could feel how they walked right next to him, whispering to him: You are one of us. On those days all he could do was drink, try to drown out the droning voices, just let them sink to the bottom, dragged down by alcohol, saturated. All those dead who sought to go back to their original context, who demanded justice, who wanted to be placed in a true context.
“And what about love?”
He’d never answered Granberg’s question, mostly because there was nothing to say. When everything turned bleak and black, Granberg used to remind him: “And what about love? Love can make the impossible happen!” There was nothing to say to that. Love is a flame that suddenly appears in a dark room—and then it disappears. He would never say that love could save us, it certainly couldn’t bring Mats Granberg back to life.
Death and time, love and the abyss.
Nils Forsberg had been a police officer his entire adult life. He’d never married nor become a father. He’d become a police officer, and he knew only two kinds of people: those who committed crimes and those who searched for the people who committed crimes. Obviously that’s a precarious situation—an unofficial health statistic published by the police authorities themselves states that more than 25 percent of police in active service find that they drink more than they should, while the average for the rest of the population is 4 percent. Also, suicides and divorces are overrepresented. To enter the abyss has its price, and it’s paid for in life, in time. To be the Virgil of our times, to step down into the inner circles of hell with only a lantern, very quickly takes its toll. It very soon grows lonely and dark.
Time is the master of death. Time is a flash of light in a dark forest. Time is kaleidoscopic: it’s what’s keeping you painfully awake locked in a cell with a hangover—it’s what’s whiled away during a conversation along Strandpromenaden in Malmø. Whoever owns time conquers death. Nils Forsberg often thought that it was a kind of irony of fate that the center of the city, the very inner kernel of Malmø, was occupied by a cemetery, a place where time is suspended and at the same time fixed. He frequently ended up in the cemetery on his walks. He would buy a cup of coffee at the newsstand café on Gustaf Adolf�
�s square and sit down among the other retirees, the ones who also lived in this no-man’s-land. He always mixed the hot coffee with the liquid from his hip flask. But it had been a long time since he last took a walk. A great exhaustion had besieged him.
Forsberg used to spend days and evenings on the benches in the cemetery. It was an absurd feeling sitting there, absorbed in rest, while buses and taxis passed by. He’d heard voices. Shouts. All the sounds of the city.
Here they all were, the dead he’d learned from when they were still alive, the ones who could no longer answer when he talked to them. He’d come to the cemetery when Granberg’s ashes were spread. Then he’d kept going back there for several days—probably not more than a week—until he could no longer do it, and the alcohol took over. He’d drowned himself from the inside out. The only people he was really able to talk to were the homeless whom he met on his random wanderings. They understood this particular condition, when you are suspended between life and death and lack any kind of anchor, when you are simultaneously hanging and falling, living at the outer edge of everything.
There are times when we want to escape, and times we want to hold on.
Greger’s Antiquarian Bookstore is just a short walk from the cemetery. Forsberg no longer goes there, nor to the Catholic church situated in the same area as the store. It feels like swimming against the current. Every thought and feeling contains endless resistance. Nils Forsberg spends his time in his own rooms, drinking, sleeping, dreaming, screaming, beating the walls. He writes a couple of lines in a notebook, draws what looks like a map, sorts papers and books. Again and again he arrives at one and the same name.
Nils Forsberg imagines that he’s following a trail, that he has an assignment. To anyone on the outside it’s obvious that we’re looking at a human being who’s lost all ability to act like a human being. He’s chasing the wind, a phantom. He sees a fundamental problem. It has to do with a pattern and intentions. It has to do with probabilities. The important question is: is it possible to see what’s going to happen? Yes, Nils Forsberg answers himself, if you can see what’s already happened.
Copenhagen Noir Page 15