Midwinter Sacrifice

16

The plot where the house, the cornerhouse, once stood.

The atmosphere now: middle-class pomp, a perfectly average, dull house. When could this pink-painted wooden villa with its factory-produced playful carvings have been built? 1984? 1990? Something like that. Whoever bought the house from Ball-Bengt knew what they were doing; presumably they bought cheap, sat out the recession, tore the house down, built a new bog-standard villa and sold up.

Did you build someone’s life away?

No.

Because what is a house, other than property, and what does property do other than impose responsibility? Rent your house, own nothing. The mantra of the poor, the broad-minded.

Malin has got out of the car, letting air into its suffocating staleness. Behind the stiff crowns of the birch trees she can make out the pedestrian tunnel under the Linköping road. A black hole where the hill on the far side becomes an impenetrable wall.

The house opposite is a much extended 1950s villa, as is the neighbouring house to the left. Who lives here now? No Cornerhouse-Kalle. No drunks. Any womanisers? Any abandoned fatties whose souls were never allowed to grow?

Hardly.

Salesmen, doctors, architects, people like that.

Malin walks up and down beside the car.

Gottfrid Karlsson’s voice: ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle beat up a man at the People’s Park. He did that a lot. Fighting was a way of life for him. But this time the other man lost an eye. He got six years for that.’

Malin walks over to the tunnel and the road and clambers up a slope via an unploughed cycle path. The aqueduct in the distance didn’t exist back then. Cars disappear and reappear through the fog. Malin can see the greenery, the summer glory, the canal boats gliding on the water over the road in the summer. There comes the world! And it isn’t yours, it isn’t yours. Your world will still be this little community, your loneliness, the laughter of the others as you chase errant balls.

‘Elisabeth made ends meet by sewing. She did adjustments for Slott’s ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Vasagatan. She took the bus every morning with Bengt on her arm and went to fetch the garments, then took them back on the bus in the evening. The drivers let her travel without paying. Then the boy got fat, and people said she used to let him eat butter and sugar just to keep him quiet while she was sewing.’

Malin stands at the railing above the pedestrian tunnel, looking down at the house, at the red cottage that once stood there. So small, but, for a boy, a whole universe, the stars in the night sky reminders of how transitory our lives are.

‘When Kalle got out Elisabeth was pregnant within a week or so. He was permanently intoxicated, old before his time. It was said that he was beaten by the other prisoners in the jail for something he had done in Stockholm. They said he had once grassed on someone to the police. But women were still just as crazy about him. He would spend Saturdays in the park. Skirts or fighting.’

Black tiles. Smoke from the chimney. Probably from an open fire.

‘Then Bengt’s sister Lotta was born. And it went on from there. Kalle drank and fought, he hit his wife and the boy, and the girl when she wouldn’t stop crying, but somehow they managed. Somehow. Kalle used to stand outside the bakery roaring at people as they walked past. The police let him be. He had got old.’

Malin goes back to the house, hesitating before she steps on to the driveway. There’s an ancient oak tree in the far corner of the plot. That oak must have been there in your time, Ball-Bengt, mustn’t it?

It was there in my time.

I used to run round that oak with my sister. We played there to keep Dad away, to force him to stay away with our laughter, our yelling, our childish shrieks.

Oh, how I ate.

As long as I ate there was hope; as long as there was food there was faith; as long as I ate there was no other reality but food; as long as I ate, my grief at what never was stayed in its dark hole.

But what good did all the running and eating do?

Instead it was Mum who disappeared. First the cancer took her liver, she spilled away from us within a month or so, and then, yes, what happened then . . . that was when the never-ending night began.

‘Social services should have taken the children away then, Miss Fors, when Elisabeth died. But they couldn’t do anything. Kalle wanted to keep them and that was the law. Bengt was perhaps twelve years old, the little girl, Lotta, six. As far as Bengt was concerned, it was probably already over by then. Damaged goods, fit only for throwing away. He was the loneliest of the lonely, the corner kid, a monster to stay away from. How do you talk to people who look at you like you’re a monster? I watched it happen from a distance, and if I have committed any sin, it was that I passed him by then, when he was somehow still there for real, if you understand my meaning, Miss Fors. When he needed me and the rest of us here.’

But the mother? Elisabeth. When is a raised hand to fend off a blow the only power you have left? When your hands are so badly beaten that you can no longer sew?

Malin walks round the house.

She feels eyes watching her from within. How they stare at her, wondering who she is. Fine, you carry on staring. Newly planted apple trees, an idyll of scented flowers: do you know how easy it is for that to fall apart and vanish, never to reappear?

Mum, even if you haven’t got the strength, come back.

Was that your prayer, Bengt?

I can’t say anything more now.

Even we, I, have limits.

I want to drift now.

Drift and burn.

But I missed her, and I was worried about my sister; maybe that was why I fought back, I don’t know, to hold it together somehow. You can see the houses that surrounded ours. I could see how it was supposed to be, how it could be.

I loved him, my dad, that’s why I raised the axe that evening.

Piss kids, dirt kids. Scared kids, teased kids. Never-go-to-school kids. Alcoholic’s kids.

A girl, a little Lotta who has stopped talking, who smells of wee, who stinks of a misery that has no place in the newly polished Social-Democrats’ ‘people’s home’.

Two Caterpillar boots breaking the hard crust of the snow in the back garden of a dream villa, a door opening, a suspicious male voice: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

The young police officer, expecting the question, holds up her ID. ‘Police. I’m just taking a look at the plot. Someone who lived here a long time ago is under investigation.’

‘When? We’ve lived here since 1999.’

‘Don’t worry. It was a long time ago, before this house was even built.’

‘Do you mind if I go in? I’m letting in so much cold air.’

The salesman variety. Highlights in his hair even though he’s almost forty.

‘Go ahead. I’m almost done.’

A mother vaporised by cancer, a father who destroys anything that comes within arm’s length. A howl full of longing echoing from the history of this place, these forests and fields.

Gottfrid’s voice: ‘He took the axe, Miss Fors. He wasn’t even fifteen at the time. He waited in the house for Cornerhouse-Kalle to come home from one of his drunken fights. Then, when the old man opened the door, he hit him. The boy had sharpened the axe, but the blow wasn’t clean. The blade hit him on the ear, almost severing it from the head in one clean cut. They say it was dangling like a flap from just a few sinews. And Kalle ran out of the cottage, blood pouring down his neck, down his body. His screams echoed right across town that night.’

The snow is white, but Malin can sense the smell of Cornerhouse-Kalle’s alcohol-diluted blood. Can sense the smell of Ball-Bengt’s fourteen-year-old despair, his little sister Lotta in the bed she has wet herself in, her mouth open, eyes full of a terror that will probably never fade.

‘He never touched her. Even if there was talk of that as well.’

‘Who never touched her?’

‘Neither the old man, nor Bengt. I’m sure of that, even if neither of them escaped suspicion.’

Traces of blood running through history.

The girl was adopted. Bengt spent a year or so in a foster home, then was sent back to Kalle. His father was earless, with a bandage round his head and a white patch over the hole where his ear should have been.

Then the old man died early one spring. After a few furious years when they spent most of their time watching each other, him and Bengt. His heart gave out in the end. They found Ball-Bengt, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen at the time. ‘He’d been living with the corpse for more than a month. Only going out to buy bread, apparently.’

‘And then?’

‘Social services organised the sale of the house. It was torn down, Miss Fors. And they put Bengt in a flat in Härna. Trying to draw a veil of forgetfulness over the whole affair.’

‘How do you know all this, Gottfrid?’

‘I don’t know much, Miss Fors. Everyone round here knew what I have just told you. But most of us are dead now, or have forgotten. Who wants to remember such terrible people? Remember the madmen?’

‘And after that, once they’d installed him in the flat?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve kept to myself these last ten years or so. He fetched balls. But he was clean and tidy the few times I saw him, so someone must have cared.’

Malin gets back in the car and turns the ignition.

In the rear-view mirror the tunnel quickly becomes a shrinking black hole. She breathes in, breathes out.

Someone may have cared, but who?

I close my eyes and feel Mum’s warm hands on my three-year-old body, how she nips my bulges, how she burrows her nose into my round belly and how it tickles and feels warm and I never want her to stop.

Carry on looking, Malin, carry on looking.