8. Are the paintings still around?
He’s writing these questions randomly, because his lack of sleep the past few days won’t let his pupils focus. But this Ten Questions on the Text technique he’d learned from his brother and it is a good one; sometimes it works on your subconscious. You just write down all the questions that come to mind, no matter how easy or inconsequential they seem. And after eight and a half pages, one more question appears:
* * *
9. Was J never angry?
He has difficulty believing this. The only children who are never angry are those who are undernourished or in deep depressions. Pernilla must have suppressed all memories of an angry Julia. Perhaps those memories would lead them to the answer. Instead of thinking of a tenth question, he sends a text to Pernilla: Keep writing!
* * *
Kouplan brushes his teeth and his tired eyes ache.
Thor brushes his teeth and gargles with mouthwash.
* * *
When Kouplan spits, he thinks about Pernilla’s light blue bathroom.
When Thor spits, he thinks of caring for a soul and what it means to be a priest.
* * *
Kouplan thinks about the child’s toothbrush in Pernilla’s bathroom.
Thor thinks about the moment he finally completely understood what Pernilla was saying to him.
* * *
Kouplan already imagines the relief his body will feel as soon as it knows it will be allowed to fall asleep. He sets his alarm clock so that he won’t sleep for days and he crawls under his blanket full of love for his wooden bed frame and foam rubber mattress.
* * *
Thor checks the front door and looks out at the dark November night for a few minutes. He has done what he could, he thinks, as he walks back to his bedroom. He’s listened to a soul—one that had been difficult to understand. He crawls beneath his down comforter and believes that God forgives those who try their best to do the right thing.
* * *
They turn off their lights at the same time.
CHAPTER 31
It’s time to research Morgan Björk. Kouplan gets off at Maria Square along with hundreds of other people. At least half of them must be police officers, but at eight in the morning, they’re too busy rubbing sleep out of their eyes, like everyone else, while clutching their warm coffee cups.
Morgan Björk. Maybe it’s just an unfortunate coincidence that this man has the same initials. Maybe he has nothing to do with Julia, Chavez, or selling women. Kouplan is not sure whether Morgan Björk lives on the top floor where the Sohrabi family identified “bad people.” But in his notebook, he has the boss, the bad people, and Chavez visits all in the same place.
On the other hand, maybe nothing of this entire story makes sense.
* * *
One thing he has no intention of doing is to ring the doorbell. Not the top floor apartment and not anywhere else in the building. He has no intention of standing outside and waiting and no intention of entering either the drug store or the art gallery.
As he turns into that street, he realizes that he has no idea what he’s going to do. He only knows what he’s not going to do. A man in a beret and a woolen jacket comes walking toward him. He can’t just stand here. The man in the beret could be one of M.B.’s henchmen, one of his business partners or some kind of customer. Perhaps he put on this beret so he would look as little like a criminal as possible. He could also be a border policeman. Think quickly, Kouplan, think in a millisecond! He chooses the apothecary and pulls at the door without result. Tries again. The man in the beret glances at him, informing him in a dry voice:
“They don’t open until nine.”
The man opens the entrance door to the apartment building next door to the apothecary.
Kouplan slips in behind him before the door shuts.
* * *
There’s no scent of fesenjan in the stairwell of the beret man’s apartment building, but Kouplan can smell lemon-scented cleaning liquid and the stone staircase. On the ground floor, the apartments belong to Larsdotter and Kleve. Kouplan walks up to the second floor and shivers when he thinks that police officers could be living in this very building, so close to the police station. He tries to look like an average citizen and thinks he should be carrying a bundle of newspapers instead of Pernilla’s eight and a half pages. Nobody is ever suspicious of a newspaper delivery boy heading up the stairs. There’s no sound from Larsdotter or Kleve. They’re not opening their doors and they might well be already at work.
On the fourth floor, Kouplan finds a window. It’s small, rectangular, and facing the street. He wonders what you call this kind of window in Swedish. Every single corner has been cleaned.
On the other side of the street, the sun is finally reaching the roof of the apartment building where the Sohrabis live. Nobody is moving behind the windows. He thinks of their daughter and a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. She’s going to be a handful, he thinks. He wonders about the kinds of trouble he must have caused his parents at that age. He dismisses the thought as quickly as he can.
Behind another window, there appears the body of a young man shaking in a strange way, but after a few seconds, Kouplan realizes that this man is practicing a dance by Michael Jackson.
The apartment directly above that one has blue striped curtains and blinds. There’s a gap of a few inches. Yellow light shines from behind them. And there’s a head. He squints to sharpen his view; yes, that’s not a flowerpot. Kouplan’s heart begins an irregular beat and he’s breathless, but not from climbing the stairs. There’s a small head behind the windowsill and beneath the curtains, a face with an empty gaze looking at the street.
Look at me, Kouplan prays with his entire soul. He peers to see her better; it’s her, isn’t it? Look at me! Even if it’s a taller person sitting down, he’s pretty sure this isn’t an adult but a child’s face. An adult would not be staring out the window like that.
Kouplan tries to attract the child by waving his arms behind this rectangular window, although he realizes there might not be enough contrast from the other side of the street. He uses Pernilla’s papers. They’d be white against the background. He puts them against the windowpane, white on black, and pulls them up and down until she catches sight of them. There’s the width of a whole street between them, but he can tell the exact moment her gaze is caught by the dance of the paper. He hurries to put his face against the window, waves so as not to lose her attention. Julia?
* * *
There’s a man waving to her from the building across the street. He has dark hair and he might be dangerous, but he’s really thin. It’s the first time anyone has waved at her, especially from the house across the street. She’s afraid if she blinks, he’ll disappear. He’s making signs with his hands. He’s pulling up and down, as with a rope. Finally, she understands what he means. Without losing his gaze, she pulls at the blinds—they first go down and then they go up. He gives her a thumbs-up and smiles and he doesn’t look dangerous at all … even if she now knows that looks aren’t everything. We’re like two angels, she thinks. Two angels across from each other, high above the other people. She can see him take a picture with his phone. Deep inside, she knows he’s not with the other men.
* * *
How can you send a signal across a street to a six-year-old through two windows? He could write on the window or on a piece of poster board if he had one, and she could nod or shake her head. Pernilla had told him that Julia knows how to read. But he doesn’t have a marker or any poster board and even if he did, the letters would have to be enormous for her to read them. That’s why he decides to take out his phone. If Julia can’t say who she is, maybe Pernilla can. He takes two pictures. The first one is extremely blurry and the second one less so. He chooses the one more focused and pulls up Pernilla’s number. He wishes he could be at her side when she gets it, and then he clicks send.
* * *
Is this Julia? Pernilla reads the message many times and
feels her pulse increase. She was on the toilet when the phone vibrated in her pants pocket and she doesn’t move for five minutes. The picture is terrible, but she still thinks she recognizes Julia. Her hair seems brown, though, but that may be due to the darkness in the room. The face … at first, she’s absolutely sure it’s not Julia; then she’s sure it is. She closes her eyes as she holds the phone with trembling hands. She opens her eyes and recognizes her child. And then she doesn’t.
* * *
It takes an eternity before he gets a reply from Pernilla. A timeless eternity on the third floor, with the sound of movement from an apartment below and a dust-free window nook made of stone. Out on the street, the sun has finally reached the windows of the uppermost apartments. A woman in a woolen coat is walking past on the street below. A man in a red jacket is entering a building. When his phone finally buzzes, it’s not the answer he was waiting for. Pernilla asks: Can you take another picture? But he can’t. Someone has closed the curtains of the child’s room.
CHAPTER 32
Someone has left a half a cup of coffee at the back table in Fåtöljen Café. Whenever one of the employees walks past, he sips from it as if he were a paying customer. The coffee is cold, but it still gives him energy.
He takes out his folder with Pernilla’s eight and a half pages. He’s decided to read through them again in the light of day.
Can you take another picture? Is that a true reaction from a mother who sees her child? He takes out his phone and looks at the picture again to determine how blurry it really is. You can tell it’s a child, but he has to admit that his Ericsson T610 hardly measures its picture quality in megapixels. He opens the folder.
The rain was so strange the day they took Julia. Tiny drops, a heavy mist almost, but slowly and imperceptibly, you still got soaking wet. Julia noticed it, too:
“Look at the rain, Mamma! It’s not really falling. It’s like those tiny mosquitos, what are they called, Mamma?”
She turned her face up to me, her tiny nose damp, and her hood fell off her head for the fifteenth time in a row.
Kouplan tries to see the child in the apartment as the one who is turning up her face with a wet nose. The face on his phone is somewhat in shadow and rather thin. His logical side tells him that you can’t tell from anyone’s writing if you’ve taken a picture of the right child. At least, he can’t tell from Pernilla’s writing.
There is one large and one enormous Dala horse at the center of Skansen. When we went to Skansen, Julia and I, she was not impressed by the bears or the moose, but always wanted to go to the Dala horses. We’d go there starting in March. I’d bring cheese sandwiches and we’d climb onto their broad wooden backs. They gave us a sense of security with the log cabins around us and then the whole fence surrounding all of Skansen itself. We were sitting on the enormous horse with Julia and me carrying on a conversation.
“There’s a daddy,” Julia said.
We looked at the daddy walking past pushing a baby carriage.
“Yes, there’s one,” I said. “Look over there—there’s another one.”
From our positions on the enormous horse, we watched daddies go past.
“I don’t have a daddy,” Julia said.
I remember the taste of cheese and bread crumbling in my saliva. With one hand, I held onto Julia and with the other, I unscrewed the top of the Thermos.
He has trouble making sense of this text. It’s probably that Pernilla’s faded memory messes up her text, but were they each sitting on one of the horses or were they both sitting on the same horse? Their wide wooden backs. He’d searched for those horses online and he now knows just how enormous they are. Surely a three-year-old would not be sitting alone on one? Probably not, since Julia was holding on to her with one hand. And she’s unscrewing the top of the Thermos with the other. And eating a sandwich. All at the same time. Five feet above the ground.
Her description of Skansen reminds him that memories can be unreliable. They’re modified truths, which makes Pernilla’s entire production a precarious basis for his analysis. He’d once talked about this subject with his mother. There were studies about unreliable witnesses, she’d read, and she taught him that his memory could deceive him. But you can also see the gaps, and the jumps in memory tell as much about the truth as correct memories. It all depends on the truth you’re really looking for. Those were the kinds of things she’d talked to him about, as if he would understand them even though he was still young.
I still can see her enraptured face, her light freckles, the way she couldn’t take her eyes from Janus. Even though the dog was still called Challe then. But on the way home, you could see the change in him, how his posture straightened and how calm his curly coat became. He left the shelter as Challe, an ownerless mixed-breed dog, but he got off the bus as Janus, the dog belonging to the Svensson family.
“Why Janus?” I asked as we rode up the elevator.
Julia grimaced in the way she had, as she does when she’s trying to pull something over on you. She peers through one eye and pulls in her mouth; something is going on inside her original, very own mind.
“Because we were in a shelter and Jesus took shelter in a manger, but we can’t really call him Jesus, can we?”
It’s the only time Pernilla mentions freckles. Probably because they adopted Janus in August and the sun had had time to speckle their faces. Julia was able to enjoy her dog for two months. The dog that was to give them a sense of security.
The motivation for giving the dog that name is odd. It’s weird enough that a child thinks that Janus sounds like Jesus and even weirder that a child connects the concepts of a doghouse and the manger Jesus was laid in. But Janus is the name of a completely different god, one that would be unlikely to appear in Julia’s thoughts. Kouplan is better at his Persian mythology than his Greek and Roman ones, so he notes down Google Janus.
“Can I take this for you?” asks the waitress as she gestures at the cup and saucer next to Kouplan’s papers.
Do you know anything about Greek mythology? Kouplan wants to ask her. That would be more like the real Kouplan, if he accurately remembers who he’d been before. But asking that would make him easier to remember. He nods as anonymously as he can and says, “Sure, that’s fine.” His stomach growls.
* * *
Before he leaves Maria Square, he takes another walk by the house. He breathes deeply as two police cars drive past him just inches away as he looks up at the window with its curtains drawn. If he didn’t have the photo, he’d wonder if he’d really seen anyone up there.
Without Pernilla’s corroboration, he can’t just storm into the apartment on the top floor. The child could be a completely normal child, about to have breakfast with her family, reaching for some toast, and then there’d be a phone call to the police. There are children in every apartment building in this city.
Plus, people who are involved in criminal activity are very observant, to say the least. What if he appears in the building for a third time, going up the same stairs past the Sohrabis and Björk’s apartment? And if M.B. himself is using his apartment for criminal activity?
The door to the stone staircase across the street is shut. He doesn’t even look up. He walks past the building like any person at all walking past and he’s thinking that Pernilla ought to recognize her own child and whether or not it really was Julia in the picture. And there’s one more thing that comes to mind: Julia’s shoes.
CHAPTER 33
The girl stares at the man’s red jacket. He hung it on the chair when he came in, but it’s upside down so the arms are dangling toward the floor. He was just suddenly there, her visitor, and his hands were big and as angry as hungry wolves. Fear is screaming in her ears: be nice.
CHAPTER 34
He’s thinking of the shoes the whole way home. His mind makes connections via the gaps and patches of memory: repairing clothing, shoes wearing out. He realizes he’s thinking two different thoughts about those shoes: they�
�d have to be either completely new or fairly old. He’s going to check this when he gets home.
He puts rice to boil on Regina’s stove and then walks over to the children’s shoes and inspects them. Liam’s are small and Ida’s are even smaller. Liam has dark green rubber boots and Ida’s are red with pink roses. Kid sizes thirteen and eight and a half. The lock over Kouplan’s head rattles and he’s so frightened he starts to cough. Regina opens the door and stares at him. Kouplan blushes and keeps coughing as he drops Liam’s boot as if it were his secret lover.
“I was just checking the size,” he says once he’s able to speak.
“Okay, but may I come in?”
Kouplan would like nothing more than to go hide in his room, but his rice isn’t finished yet. And Regina is looking at him with such amusement that he has to say something.
“What size shoes would a kid have at six?”
“That’s what you want to know?”
She laughs and he feels himself blush again. This is not really his thing.
“Well, no, but … can a six-year-old wear size eight and a half?”
“Probably, but it would have to be a tiny six-year-old.”
That’s it. Julia was supposed to look almost seven.
* * *
He wonders what he’s really trying to find out. It would be easier if he were looking for a specific lie, but all he has is things not fitting properly. Not just the shoes. Also the jacket.
Once he gets to his room, he Googles the Roman god Janus. His search comes up with: Janus opens and shuts the portals of heaven and is therefore shown as having two faces: One that looks backward in time and one that looks forward. The picture shown does not really look like Pernilla’s fluffy mutt. But it does resemble a sculpture decorating a hallway in upper Sundbyberg.
The Truth Behind the Lie Page 15