Then Elsa was there, standing between them.
– Leave him alone!
It wasn’t clear which one of them she meant.
– Fucking Paki bastard, Tord raged.
Khalid took a step towards him. – If you touch her once more, I’ll kill you, he said quietly.
Tord spat on the floor, turned and walked out.
– Tell your father, Khalid exclaimed. – He should know what kind of a man your sister has for a boyfriend.
Elsa shook her head.
For the next few days, Khalid made sure to accompany Elsa when she was in the stables, and Tord had sense enough to stay away. Elsa said he wouldn’t try it again, but Khalid wanted to make quite sure. And Elsa obviously liked looking after the horses with him; they both had the same way with animals. She was close to each one of them, talked to them for a long time, soon noticed if there was anything wrong.
One morning as Khalid was feeding the horses, the door opened behind him. He jumped and dropped what he was holding in his hands, and turned, ready to face Tord. But it was Elsa in the semi-darkness, with a harness and a brush.
– Aren’t you at school? he exclaimed.
She shrugged her shoulders. – I’m not well today.
– What’s the matter with you?
Without replying, she started to groom one of the mares, the one that was pregnant and about to foal any day now.
He finished what he was doing, made ready to leave. He had been alone with her before, but on those occasions one of her parents had always known about it. This time he didn’t even think they were at home.
– Come here, Khalid, she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl ten years younger than him to stand in a stable and tell him what to do.
He strolled over to the pregnant mare, stroked her neck.
– Feel here.
Elsa took his hand and placed it under the horse’s belly.
– Can you feel that?
There was movement in there.
– How many do you think there are?
He let his hand glide back and forth, keeping an eye on the mare’s head.
– Two, he said. – I think there are two.
– I agree, she said, standing right next to him. – As many children as this mare gives birth to this spring, that’s how many I’ll have.
He had to smile. She could say things like that. She dreamed something or other and was convinced it was a sign that something was about to happen. She had premonitions and visions, she had confided in him; she could see things that were invisible to other people. Where he came from, it wasn’t unusual for people to possess powers like that. In the village, there was a holy man they could take their troubles to, and he could read their kismet, their fate. Khalid had no reason to doubt that this young woman, if it be God’s will, had powers like those of the old man.
When he lifted his hand, it brushed against a lock of hair that had fallen across her face. He put the lock back in place, and what happened after that was kismet. That was the thought he clung on to as he stood there in the dark stables. Ordained by fate, just as this journey to the land in the north had been, and that he should have come to this farm and been welcomed with a warmth he had not experienced anywhere else on his journey here.
He said that to her. That it was fate she was standing there so close beside him that he could feel her breath against his neck. And when she nodded, fate grabbed hold of him and did what it wanted.
They went riding together many times that spring. They walked the horses along the beds of streams where the water had risen up and flowed over the banks, galloped them along paths where the patches of grass and moss grew larger by the day. They stopped by a tarn up in the woods. She had a blanket that they could spread on the hard ground. And while he lay there looking on, she stood up in the bright sunlight and undressed.
– We can move to the country you come from, she suggested one day as she lay beside him.
– That would be wonderful, he smiled, without mentioning a single one of the obstacles that made such a thing impossible.
– I would love to live on your farm and ride the horses. I could help out in the fields. Or maybe be a schoolteacher in the village school.
– You would be very good at that, he nodded. – But you would have to be a Muslim, have you thought about that?
– It can’t be that difficult to be a Muslim.
– No, not difficult. But you would have to take a new name.
– Could I choose it myself?
He thought about that. – It would have to be a Muslim name, completely Pakistani.
– I would call myself Yasmin, she said. – I love that smell. Would that be allowed?
He didn’t know anyone called that. – I don’t know.
The spring in this country was even more perplexing than the winter. Now it seemed as though the sun shone all the time, so that he awoke restless, tossing and turning in the grey light that forced its way through the curtains. The kammi told him it would get stronger and stronger, until it lit up the whole of the night.
On one such night towards the end of May, he was woken by Elsa standing beside his bed. It seemed to him that she was a djinn, a spirit come to tell him something. He was afraid but didn’t show it. Only when she touched him did he feel calm.
– Did I frighten you?
He shook his head firmly, didn’t want her to come to his room, but it was too late now to stop her.
– I have to talk to you, she whispered, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
This was different from going riding together, different from caresses in the hayloft behind the stables, or hands that slipped beneath clothes, hidden from sight behind the bodies of the horses. This was his bedroom; she had no business being there, and no one must know what they did together: not Tord, who had made him an object of hatred and spat each time he saw him, not Gunnhild, not her parents, not the kammi he shared the outhouse with. Above all not him, because if he found out, the rumours would spread through the Punjabi community in no time, and would not stop until they reached Khalid’s own village.
– You can’t be here, he said in a low voice.
She remained sitting. – I’ll go, she murmured finally. – But I have to tell you something first.
That morning he stayed in bed, couldn’t manage to get up. As if a huge hand had laid itself across his chest and was pressing him down. The husband came in, asked if he needed a doctor. He said no thanks, and could hardly raise his head from the pillow. He felt completely wiped out, he explained, an expression he had picked up after arriving in this new country.
In the grey light that seeped into everything, he lay and thought over what Elsa had said. She had decided that they would live together for the rest of their lives. She was certain that her parents would accept it. They would be angry, tell her off, threaten all sorts of things, but in the end it would blow over and they would calm down. If not, she was prepared to go back with him to the country he came from. He had told her stories about it and, she said, she had thought a lot about these. Several of them were about the way the love between a man and a woman reflected God’s love for human beings, and how it conquered all, even death. She was sixteen, and in this country it meant she was still regarded as almost a child. And still thought like a child. She had even decided the Muslim name she would choose. Yasmin was originally from Persia, she had discovered, so that would probably do.
He lay the whole day, sweating and afraid, turning this way and that. In the course of the afternoon, he became genuinely ill.
If this were his story, then a great deal more would be told about Khalid Chadar: how they came down on him, threatened him with prison, with being thrown out of the country, threatened to destroy his life. But the family on the farm at Stornes couldn’t do anything to him; he hadn’t broken any of the laws of this country. And it emerged that they were as keen as he was to make sure that nothing be said about what h
ad happened. But he had broken some of the laws that governed his own life, and for this he turned to his God and let Him be the judge. He prayed more often now, observed the stipulated hours for praying, and promised that one day he would make a trip to the holiest of all places. And his prayers must have been heard, because after a few months he realised that no one would ever know anything about it, excepting those few who had very good reason for wanting to keep it to themselves.
This story is going to be about events that led to the deaths of many people. I knew several of them personally. I shall let it start with Khalid, with the black-and-white photo of his brother and himself with his arm around a water buffalo, beneath their father’s gaze. I found this picture after it had become clear to me how the things I am about to describe happened. When I was still trying to understand why.
Part I
April 2003
1
An ember can glow and expire. It can glow and flare up. The time when it can still go either way is the best. You have set things up and withdrawn. Consigned everything to circumstances beyond your control: the combustibility of the material, moisture content, availability of oxygen.
This particular glow, which is not yet fire, is located at the tip of a half-cigarette. It smoulders for a minute, maybe longer. It is possible to work out the likelihood of its not dying out but spreading to the other end of the unfiltered cigarette. There it may well light one of the three matches attached to it by a rubber band. This is the second of the critical points: the question of whether the ember has enough energy to transfer to the paper the matches are made of. If it has, the ember will become a tiny flame, and the flame will creep like a blind worm in the direction of the head of the match. The journey will take less than twenty seconds, and if it reaches this point, a small, spluttering explosion will follow. The flame is now at the threshold dividing what is possible from what is inevitable. If it crosses the threshold – and the likelihood is now high – the fire will catch and begin to eat its way through the cotton strip soaked in lighter fuel intended for use when barbecuing meat and fish outdoors in the summer.
It is not summer; it is the first night of April. The horses have known for some time now that something is about to happen. They stand, hooves scraping on the stone floor; some toss their heads, some lower their necks as a warning to the others. We must stay together now is perhaps what it means; no one must leave the herd.
Certain people react in the same way when sensing danger. Squeeze up against other bodies, trying to protect themselves by huddling together as close as possible. Others will break out and make a run for it, and a few will turn to face the threat. This interests him. The way animals behave when in danger, and the way danger makes people behave like animals. Horses don’t think, he has concluded, and this unthinking life fills him with a wonder that is not far off anger. This animal, which so many people find beautiful, and which has been credited with qualities it cannot possibly possess, is in reality extremely primitive, with its remarkably simple brain. He seems to remember reading somewhere that, of all animals, the horse is the one most susceptible to panic. This explains the cruelty it can arouse in some – well, in everybody. No other animal can lead a person to take cruelty to such lengths, he thinks as he climbs on to a rock between the pine trunks.
Through a gap between the trees he can look down at the farm. Four minutes have passed since he left the stable, pulled shut the door with its broken catch and slipped round the corner, heading in the opposite direction from the farmhouse. He visited this farm a couple of times a few months ago. Not to learn to ride. And not because he felt drawn to the unthinkingness of these animals or the large, muscular bodies, the stallions’ enormous penises pressing out from the sheaths beneath their bellies, the motion of their buttocks as they trotted down the track and across the field. Not because he was interested in those who swarmed about the place, the girls thirteen and fourteen years old, young women, older women, even if their relationship to the horses had to have a bitter darkness in it. The little girls who could spend hours in the stables, stroking and grooming, mucking out, or just being close to the animal bodies. As though seeking protection. Incomprehensible, the way these unthinking and panic-driven creatures could arouse such feelings.
It was not until his third visit that he realised this fascination angered him. On one occasion he lost control and struck one of the horses across its soft muzzle, not particularly hard, but enough to make it rear up and its eyes turn white. He thought he was alone in there, but one of the girls had just entered without his noticing it, and when he turned, he saw in her eyes that she would tell on him. He took a step towards her; she held on tight to the mane of the horse she had come to groom, and he pulled himself together and left the stable.
He had not been back again until last week. They had an open day, and he wandered about there in a group of people, mostly parents with little children in tow. The kiddies were lifted and held up in front of the horses’ faces. It made him feel ill, as though he were about to puke at any moment, but he forced himself to stay, to listen to those babbling mothers, watch the childish fingers pawing at the damp muzzles. It was then that the thought that had been smouldering inside him took shape and became a decision.
He looks at his watch. Six minutes. The critical moment has passed. The horses sensed something was wrong as soon as he began feeling his way about inside the stables; they started to move, a harbinger of the panic that might break out. The waiting feels good. Everything uncertain. It can still be prevented. If nothing happens, the horses will calm down again, and the sleep of the humans continue undisturbed.
Seven minutes. He still doesn’t know for sure. Or does he? Can’t he hear the restlessness behind the walls of the stables, more than a hundred metres away? The tramping of more and more hooves, even a whinny? He can’t keep still himself. The waiting time, the uncertainty. The fact that it could go one way or the other; one way and everything will be different and mean that he will never again be part of the herd. Not of any herd.
Another whinny. And then he knows. The ignition device has worked. This is no longer about a likelihood. That which is critical cannot be measured; forces that surge towards each other, invisible, inaudible. That’s how Elsa would put it. Will and reluctance that are not noticed because they are everywhere, in everything. What he has done is to ask a question, compel an answer. He has facilitated things, bundled hay up against a wall, sprayed lighter fuel on that too. He notices that he is stamping with one foot, and the grin this realisation evokes catches fire, as it were, and becomes laughter. He needs to piss, jumps down from the rock, opens his flies and empties his bladder on to the frozen moss. Steam rises from the ground below him, and when he clambers back up on to the rock, he sees a thin braid of smoke seeping from the roof and up into the dark, clear night sky. He pulls out his mobile phone and begins filming. They might still wake up in the house. Tumble out to see what is happening. Some people, such as Elsa, believe that humans who work with horses become alert to the faintest of signals. She says that being around these animals can bring out hidden powers. He doesn’t know if he believes stuff like that, but he takes due note of everything she says.
Eight minutes. The racket from the stables is now considerably more distressed. Sloppy of the owners not to wake up. Maybe they are on sleeping pills. So much for supernatural sensitivity. And there is a smell now, of scorched tar, that filters across the field and reaches him there at the edge of the wood. He has to jump down from the rock again, walk around a bit between the trees, slapping himself with his arms, even though he isn’t cold. It makes him laugh, laugh at himself, laugh at what is happening. Because by the time he is back up on the rock again, he can see a glow through one of the openings halfway up the stable wall.
Nine minutes have passed since he set things in motion, and now that it is decided, nothing can turn it back, not even if he called the owners and told them to get up. Thick black smoke begins billowing out from t
he wall openings, and the whinnying from more than thirty horses rises into the darkness, cutting and slicing through the cold air. He can imagine them in there, gathering close to one another, pressing those huge smooth bodies together. There are foals in there too – he noticed them during his visit – and now they force their way in under their mothers’ bellies, their whinnying much thinner; it seems to him he can distinguish the sounds. Suddenly he is furious with the owners for lying there in their beds. Fucking hell, he shouts, wake up, you fucking morons, and as he does so, a light goes on in one of the rooms. Immediately afterwards: the sound of a door opening, and a woman’s voice screaming.
2
For once Karsten had overslept. Less than fifteen minutes, but enough to disrupt his regular morning routine. One thing was that he had to wait for Synne to be finished in the upstairs bathroom. He wouldn’t have time to read the newspaper, that was the other, maybe just the sport. He could make up lost time by driving to school, but if he asked to borrow the Volvo, he would have to put up with a lecture about CO2 emissions. The truth was more that his father was so worried about his XC90 getting scratched that he hardly dared use it. He couldn’t ask his mother; she’d already left in the Golf. That was what had woken him up, the bang of the door downstairs as she left.
Fireraiser Page 2