The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  * * *

  “Help her?” Spinning threads of thought from their hour-long conversation twist through Kouplan’s mind as he heads off down the gravel path and through the wrought-iron gate. He thinks about each one, stops at any that seem odd; tries to see what it means to trust Thor versus not to trust him. “How do you turn yourself into not being a suspect?” he thinks as he walks past Thor’s neighbors, turns right, and turns right again. “You tell the detective to help the victim, you take his hands in yours and offer a tour of the house. You blame professional confidentiality,” Kouplan thinks as he wriggles his thin body back through rose bushes and a loose board.

  The house is lit, not upstairs where the children’s bedrooms are, but on the ground floor. This means the darkness is darker for those peering out than for those outside. Kouplan creeps among the rose bushes, tries not to think about floodlights and alarm systems and calms himself by thinking that Thor hasn’t put in a security door.

  When he’s crawled to the basement window, his body is full of adrenaline. His knock at the pane seems to be so loud to him that he’s sure the sound could reach any priest at all, but Kouplan keeps his eyes on the darkness on the other side of the dirty glass. If a girl’s white face looks back at him, if she starts to scream, what will he do?

  No girl’s face looks up at him. He’s a guy in dirty jeans in another man’s garden, a misplaced guy lying glued to the ground and staring at paint cans and broken chairs, and then he sees them. He wriggles backward, more embarrassed than frightened now. Once he’s back on the sidewalk, he brushes the dirt off his clothes as best he can.

  When he’s on the bus, the bus driver stares at him and adrenaline shoots through him again. What’s he looking at? Are there immigration police on the buses these days? Is the bus driver a policeman in disguise? Only when half the ride is over does he discover that he has two dry, brown leaves in his hair.

  * * *

  It’s been evening for a long time when the phone rings. Kouplan has eaten couscous with chicken nuggets, ten crowns a bag at Willy’s. He’s Googled M.B. and kept scanning buying sex, prostitutes, children, women, cheap. He thinks, That disgusting excuse for a human being is out there somewhere. He thinks about Pernilla, about Thor, about what they’re not saying, what kind of food he could be making if he didn’t have to share the fridge with Regina and the children. And that’s when the phone rings, and it’s someone named Melinda.

  “Kalle said you’d been looking for me,” she says.

  Kouplan is silent, racking his brain trying to remember when he’d been looking for someone named Melinda or been talking to someone named Kalle.

  “I work at the subway booth. Hello?”

  Melinda. The name sounds like angel chimes to his ears. Thank you Melinda, for giving me those extra seconds to think. Thank you for taking Kalle’s wrinkled note with my number on it and calling me. Thank you that you remember when a large man carried a small girl through the gate over a week ago.

  And especially thank you for remembering where he was going.

  CHAPTER 17

  The large man, probably with a large nose, who carried a girl was supposed to go to Hökarängen. If he wasn’t that guy, then it was the one carrying a cello, but one of the two was going to Hökarängen and Melinda was pretty sure it was the man with the girl. The girl was crying and the father seemed to have a hard time calming her down, paying for his ticket, and getting the two of them through the barrier at the same time. Like he wasn’t used to it, Kouplan thinks, as he inspects Hökarängen’s subway station.

  Hundreds of Hökarängen residents are going to work, and Kouplan puts on a sufficiently harried expression to blend in. On the platform, there are at least five men who have enough volume to be considered large. All of them are alone.

  As he exits the station, he thinks he wouldn’t take the subway if he had a little girl he didn’t know. He’d make sure he had a car in the vicinity. On the other hand, Kouplan doesn’t have a car and maybe M.B. doesn’t have one either, even if he pulls in a great deal of money as a swine in the sex trade.

  However, if he got Julia to come with him of her own volition, it wouldn’t be so strange to take the subway. Though why would she follow this man of her own volition?

  Next to the subway station, there’s a newsstand and a mailbox.

  The newsstand guy glares at him with a look Kouplan is starting to get used to. The look that says, What kind of an idiot are you anyway?

  “Nah…” he says. “Or, like, I know hundreds of people who come through here with kids every day. Then I forget them when the next customer comes in.”

  “But maybe you’ll remember this guy. He probably looks a little shady, a little fishy. Big guy, big nose … usually doesn’t have kids with him. But that day he did.”

  The newsstand guy gives him that look again, now mixed with mistrust.

  “Why do you want to find him?”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No clue.”

  * * *

  At the local grocery, there’s not a lot of space between the rows of shelves, even though not many people are shopping there in the morning. A sign announces that they’ve expanded, so it’s easy to imagine how crowded it was before. A kid around high school age is stocking the shelves with cans of crushed tomatoes.

  “So, shady like a wino?”

  “Well, more like a gangster, mafia-type.”

  “Has tattoos?”

  “No,” Kouplan says without knowing whether M.B. has tattoos or not. “Just the kind of big guy you’d be a little scared of, like, you wouldn’t want to hang out with him.”

  “Kind of a fat guy?”

  “Don’t know. Just that he’s a big guy.”

  The young man looks at him skeptically.

  “Maybe you should start by knowing who you’re looking for.”

  The kid has a point, but Kouplan decides he’ll talk to the girl at the cash register anyway.

  “Seriously, everybody has kids here,” she tells him. “Absolutely everybody.”

  “But this is a man who didn’t have a kid before and suddenly has one.”

  “Okay,” the girl says. “Okay, no, I don’t know. But if I see someone like that, I can tell him you’re looking for him.”

  Kouplan feels the chill of ice. Only after he gets the two at the grocery store to promise, on their honor, to never say a word to the big, but not necessarily fat, man who probably does not have a tattoo but definitely has a large nose, does he feel he can breathe again and continue his questioning at Hökarängen’s center. At the pharmacy, nobody has sold a suspicious amount of children’s medicine to shady guys with frightened daughters approximately six years old. At the clothing store, nobody has sold children’s jackets. In the hardware store, the owner has extensive knowledge on the qualities of sixteen different light bulbs, but nobody has noticed anyone who has bought things in order to build, for instance, a secret basement room. There’s not a trace of the man who went to Hökarängen in Hökarängen itself.

  * * *

  In the cold outside, on a bench by the subway, two grizzled men are holding cans of extra strong beer. When Kouplan asks, they rattle off the names of big men: Lasse, Tompa, Kjelle, and Berra, adding, “But he’s great, a really nice guy.”

  “Is it something you bought?” one of them asks curiously.

  Kouplan doesn’t get it at first.

  “Bought?”

  “Or were you selling? Someone stiffed you?”

  He gets it now and shakes his head.

  The other alcoholic glares at him.

  “You Kurdish?”

  “No.”

  “My sister married a Kurd.”

  “I see.”

  “He thinks he’s so special. He should be grateful we took him in. Our taxes pay for guys like you, have you thought about that? Now I’m not allowed to see my own nieces and nephews!”

  Kouplan doesn’t ask how much in taxes the men in front of him have p
aid compared to the amount of money they’re now consuming from the state. Detectives and journalists don’t rile up people unless they absolutely have to. He gives them his number in case they hear anything. Then he leaves Hökarängen.

  * * *

  Detectives and journalists know you have to dig hard where it’s most uncomfortable. And the most uncomfortable thing he can think of right now is interrogating Pernilla some more. Really interrogate her. He even writes down his questions according to importance. Then he doesn’t get to ask them, because Pernilla is crying.

  “She’s dead,” she says between sobs as she lets him into her apartment.

  Pernilla’s cheeks are shining red and damp and at first Kouplan believes that Julia’s body has been found. But how would Pernilla know that, if she hadn’t been … Kouplan gives her a hug and she sinks into him, her soft body against his thin one, her snot dripping on his neck.

  “She’s dead,” Pernilla says again. “I can feel it.”

  Mothers can feel those things. He knows this, he believes this, or he hopes this. His own mother had long felt that his brother was alive. Pernilla keeps sobbing, more strongly than ever, and then she’s hyperventilating. So he leads her to the sofa and has her sit down. If he knew her better, he would have slapped her, but in this country you can be reported for that.

  So he says, “Hey. Hey, Pernilla. Hey.”

  She stiffens as if she’s seeing him for the first time.

  “Breathe!” he commands. “In, out, yes, like that. Look at me. Why do you think this?”

  Pernilla starts to relax and soon she’s caught her breath and breathes more easily. “I feel it,” she says. “Two weeks have gone by. It’s Friday and we usually watch Gladiators together. And that … two weeks are … that two weeks…”

  Kouplan swallows. He’s already realized two weeks have gone by. When he’d sat her on the sofa, he’d released her hug, and it would be imprudent to give her another one. Instead, he pats her shoulder and feels how paltry his comfort is compared to everything.

  “Nobody has found a child,” he says. “If they had, it would be on the news.”

  Pernilla is silent.

  “You’ve been brooding too much over possibilities,” he continues. He doesn’t know if he should give her hope.

  But how can you not give hope to another human being?

  “Are you just worried?” he asks. “Or do you actually feel deep down that she’s truly dead?”

  Pernilla shivers and Kouplan can feel the trembling beneath his hand.

  “No,” she says after some hesitation. “At first, I didn’t feel that she was dead, exactly. The word dead didn’t come into my mind. Something was just telling me that I had to let her go.”

  Kouplan studies her—that soft woman sitting against her mocha sofa cushions. He can’t ask questions one and two, not while tears are still trembling on her eyelashes. But the third question is one he can ask, one he ought to ask.

  “When you were a child, did anything bad happen to you?”

  She doesn’t answer at first. Just looks at the walls and the TV, which isn’t on, as if they could help her find the words. He waits. Finally, she nods and looks at him.

  “Yeah, something did.”

  * * *

  Pernilla says nothing about what happened when she was young, but it’s almost as if she had. Her manner changes, is less heavy, as if with one question Kouplan had touched the heart of the matter. She feels her expression is as open as a newborn.

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Kouplan says. “But my mother is.”

  It’s the first time Kouplan has mentioned his family. Did she begin to think he didn’t have one? A crazy idea, of course.

  “She says that if you give up, it’s as if you believe you deserve nothing better. And if you believe that, it’s because something happened to you earlier in your life.”

  She looks at him and he looks back, meeting her gaze. He has long, curved eyelashes, almost feminine. No blond Swede has eyelashes like that. No one has ever looked into her eyes like this for so long.

  “So I could feel I don’t deserve Julia?” she says, her words burning in her throat. “My own daughter?”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” Kouplan replies.

  Pernilla stares at him and inwardly feels rage; not a single fiber of her being is ready to let Julia go.

  “Obviously not,” she says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Saying sorry means admitting you’re wrong; he loses and she wins. She remains in that triumphant feeling for a moment, staring at the young man sitting on her sofa instead of looking for her daughter.

  “You’re not much of a detective, either.”

  She feels the unkind words echo in her mind. He looks at her for a long time. What is he thinking behind those dark eyes? Is he angry? Probably. But his expression does not change.

  “Still, I have some questions that will help me become a better detective,” he says.

  He pulls out his childish notebook from his bag.

  “First question,” he says. “What was going on during the year before you had Julia?”

  In his notebook, he has not written the question in those words. Instead it reads:

  “Who is the child’s father?” But even Kouplan knows you have to ask that kind of question with finesse. He makes his voice as kind as possible.

  “I need to know who you were meeting. Those who were friends and those who weren’t.”

  “Why do you need to know that?”

  “It’s needed for background. You told me you weren’t feeling well when you were pregnant. How did you feel before then?”

  Her reaction is immediate. Her entire face closes off, her entire body. Wrong question. Or, perhaps, the question was exactly right.

  “I thought you were going to look for Julia, not terrorize me in my own living room.”

  She leaps up from the sofa, knocking over her water glass. There’s a Swedish expression: Stepping on sore toes. It fits this moment. The point is not to keep stepping on a painful spot, but he follows Pernilla into the kitchen anyway.

  “I am trying to find Julia, do you hear me? But you need to answer my questions! I’m not going to report you! Look at me!”

  He keeps saying this until she does.

  “Look at me, I’m a nobody.”

  His own words hurt him, because they are true. Even though he almost feels like a somebody at Pernilla’s house.

  She leans against the fridge with a grimace.

  “I felt fine. I wasn’t in the psych ward, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’m not making a judgment one way or the other. Did you go to church?”

  “Julia and me?”

  “No, you and Patrick, before Julia came. Did you attend Sofia Church?”

  She shakes her head so slightly it’s hard to notice.

  “Not Patrick.”

  That’s what he’d suspected. You should always keep your mind open.

  “Did you go other places on your own? Did you meet someone else, I mean, someone other than Patrick?”

  Pernilla is about to say something, but she interrupts herself and glares at Kouplan.

  “You mean, did I sleep with someone else? Right? Is that what you’re implying?”

  He sighs and can hear Patrick’s words: that psycho. Thinks Pernilla would start arguing. So he makes his voice as gentle as possible. Hopefully calming.

  “I’m just trying to get to the truth.”

  Pernilla leans her head against the door. He can feel her exhaustion across two meters of air. She takes a few deep breaths, then pushes it all away with a gesture of her hands, and gives herself enough energy to take the three steps to the pantry.

  “I’m so worn out,” she says. “Do you drink wine?”

  * * *

  The gladiators wear war paint and are oiled up. The moderator introduces them: They have names like Wolf, Hero, Bullet. Kouplan lets two mouthfuls of wine run down his gul
let. He’d also chosen his own name a while back. Perhaps he should have chosen a much tougher name: Zap, Fire, or something Swedish like Håg. Does Håg sound cool in Swedish? He’s not the right person to know.

  “Could a gladiator have a name like Håg?” he asks Pernilla. Her glance back at him is amused, the first pleased look of the evening.

  “Håg?”

  “Yes, Håg.”

  He swallows another mouthful, then tenses up like a gladiator and says in his deepest voice:

  “HÅÅÅÅG.”

  Pernilla almost giggles aloud. He can imagine what her giggle would sound like. She’s had her first glass and has moved on to her second. She pours from a bottle, not a box.

  “I have no idea what the word håg even means,” she says. “Just that it’s used in old expressions.”

  * * *

  Pernilla reflects on Kouplan’s questions. She wishes she could answer them better, but something is blocked. Like when someone is kind, but also not kind. Like forgetting the bad things so you can see them clearly. It’s blocked like that: Her whole body tells her she doesn’t want to know. On the television, Toro tosses a rose to the crowd.

  * * *

  Kouplan thinks about everything Pernilla has told him about Julia, as the wine opens up new tracks in his mind. Like Julia not being registered—what if she really is? What if he’s really looking for a child who belongs to someone else? Because there’s truth and then again there is truth behind the lie. If this is the case, then Pernilla might have kidnapped Julia as a baby, because he’s seen the bibs and pacifiers. Or perhaps she didn’t register Julia because she didn’t want the real father to know about the birth. He catches his breath and scratches down this thought in his notebook before he looks again at the television program. A rather lightly clad Lynx is wrestling with her somewhat tawnier opponent on a hanging platform.

  “It’s amazing how they keep their clothes on,” Pernilla says.