Midwinter Sacrifice

64

Ramshäll.

The very brightest side of Linköping.

Perhaps the very finest part of the city, to which the door is closed to most people, where the most remarkable people live.

Maybe it’s the case, Malin thinks, that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, assumes the guise of importance if the opportunity arises, whether large- or small-scale.

Look, we live here!

We can afford it, we’re the kings of the 013 area-code.

Markus’s parents’ house is in Ramshäll, among houses owned by Saab directors, successful entrepreneurs, well-heeled doctors and successful small businessmen.

The villas are almost in the middle of the city, clambering up a slope with a view of the Folkungavallen Stadium and Tinnis, a large communal outdoor swimming pool whose site every property developer in the country covets greedily. At the end of the slope the settlement disappears into the forest or rolls away in narrow streets down towards Tinnerbäcken pond where the dirty-yellow boxlike hospital buildings take over. Best of all is living on the slope, with a view, closest to the city, and that’s where Markus’s parents live.

Malin and Tove are walking side by side in the glow of the streetlamps, and their bodies cast long shadows along the well-gritted pavements. The residents would probably like to put up a fence around the whole area, or an electric fence with barbed wire and a security guard on the gate. Ideas of gated communities aren’t entirely alien to certain right-wing politicians on the city council. So a fence around Ramshäll isn’t perhaps as unthinkable as it might seem.

Stop. Thus far but no further. Us and them. Us against them. Us.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes to walk from the flat to Ramshäll, so Malin decided to brave the cold, in spite of Tove’s protests: ‘Look, I’m coming with you. So you can walk with me.’

‘I thought you said it was going to be fun?’

‘It will be fun, Tove.’

On the way they walk past Karin Johannison’s villa. A yellow-painted house from the thirties with a wooden façade and a veranda.

‘It’s cold, Mum,’ Tove says.

‘It’s healthy,’ Malin says, and with every step she feels her restlessness subsiding, how she is preparing herself to get through the dinner.

‘You’re nervous, Mum,’ Tove suddenly says.

‘Nervous?’

‘Yes, about this.’

‘No, why would I be nervous?’

‘This sort of thing always makes you nervous. Going to someone’s house. And they are doctors.’

‘As if that makes any difference.’

‘Over there,’ Tove says, pointing along the street. ‘Third house on the left.’

Malin sees the villa, a two-storey building of white brick, surrounded by a low fence and with clipped shrubs in the garden.

Inside her the house expands. It becomes a fortified Tuscan hill-town, impossible for a lone foot-soldier to capture.

Inside the house there is a smell of warmth and bay leaves and the cleanliness that only a hard-working Polish cleaner can conjure forth.

The Stenvinkels are standing in the hall, they have shaken Malin by the hand and she is swaying, unprepared for the unrelenting friendliness.

Mum, Birgitta, is a senior physician at the Ear Clinic, and wants to be called Biggan, and it’s sooo lovely to meet Malin at laaast, when they’ve read so much about her in the Correspondent. Dad, Hans, a surgeon, wants to be called Hasse, hopes they like pheasant, because he got hold of a couple of lovely ones down at Lucullus. Stockholmers, upper middle class, brought to the back of beyond by their careers, Malin thinks.

‘Am I wrong,’ she asks, ‘but can I hear that you’re both from Stockholm?’

‘Stockholm? Does it really sound like it? No, I’m from Borås,’ Biggan says. ‘And Hasse’s from Enköping. We met when we were studying in Lund.’

I know their life history, Malin thinks, and we haven’t got further than the hall.

Markus and Tove have disappeared into the house, and now Hasse is leading Malin into the kitchen. On a sparkling stainless-steel worktop sits a misted cocktail shaker and Malin capitulates, doesn’t even contemplate trying to resist.

‘A martini?’ Hasse asks.

Biggan adds, ‘Watch out, though. He makes them very dry.’

‘Tanqueray?’ Hasse says.

‘Please,’ Malin replies, and minutes later she is standing with a drink in her hand and they say a toast, and the alcohol is clean and pure and she thinks that at least he knows his drink, Hasse.

‘We usually have an aperitif in the kitchen,’ Biggan says. ‘It livens up the atmosphere so.’

Hasse is standing by the cooker. With one hand he waves Malin over to him as his other hand opens the lid of a blackened, well-used cast-iron casserole.

The smell hits Malin as she approaches.

‘Take a look,’ Hasse says. ‘Have you ever seen such lovelies?’

Two pheasants swimming in a puttering yellow sauce and Malin feels hunger grip her stomach.

‘Well?’

‘That looks wonderful.’

‘Oops, that disappeared quickly,’ Biggan says, and at first Malin doesn’t understand what she means, then she sees the empty glass in her hand.

‘I’ll mix you another,’ Hasse says.

And as he is shaking the cocktail in the air Malin asks, ‘Does Markus have any brothers and sisters?’

Hasse stops shaking abruptly.

Biggan smiles before saying, ‘No. We tried for a long time. But then we had to give up.’

Then the ice rattles in the cocktail shaker again.