Midwinter Sacrifice

70

Zeke on his way to Ikea, Malin on her way up the stairs of number 3, Drottninggatan, million-year-old fossils embedded in the stone of the steps. Viveka Crafoord’s clinic is on the third floor of four.

No lift in the building.

Crafoord Psychotherapy: a brass sign with curling letters, in the middle of a brown-lacquered door. Malin tries the handle. The door is locked.

She rings the bell.

Once, then twice, then a third time.

The door opens and a woman in her forties looks out. Frizzy black hair and a face that is round and sharp at the same time. Her brown eyes sparkle with intelligence even though they are half covered by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Viveka Crafoord?’

‘You’re an hour late.’

She opens the door a little more and Malin can see how she is dressed. A suede waistcoat over a puffy lilac-blue blouse, which in turn hangs over an ankle-length, green-checked, velvet skirt.

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

‘You said—’

‘I’m seeing a client at the moment. Go down to McDonald’s and I’ll call you in half an hour.’

‘Can’t I wait here?’

‘I don’t want anyone to see you.’

‘Have you got . . .’

The door to the clinic closes.

‘. . . my mobile number?’

Malin lets the question hang in the air, thinks that it’s about time for lunch, and she now has the perfect excuse to partake of the American fast-food Satan.

She really doesn’t like McDonald’s. Has stuck absolutely to her decision never to take Tove there.

Baby carrots and juice.

We’re taking our responsibility seriously and helping to combat childhood obesity.

So stop selling fries, then. Fizzy drinks. Half a responsibility: how much is that worth?

Sugar and fat.

Malin opens the door reluctantly.

Behind her a bus drives into Trädgårdstorget.

One Big Mac and one cheeseburger later she feels ready to throw up. The restaurant’s garish colours and almost tangible smell of frying make her feel even worse.

Call now.

Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty.

Her mobile rings.

Answer quickly.

‘Malin?’

Dad? Not now, not now.

‘Dad, I’m busy.’

‘We’ve been thinking about the matter.’

‘Dad—’

‘Of course Tove is welcome to come down with her boyfriend.’

‘What? I told you, I’m—’

‘. . . so can you see if they still want to . . .’

Call waiting.

Malin clicks away from the call from Tenerife, takes the new one.

‘Yes?’

‘You can come up now.’

Viveka Crafoord’s consulting room is furnished like the library of an upper-class home at the turn of the last century. Books, Freud, metre after metre of shiny new leather book-spines. A black and white portrait of Jung in a heavy gold frame, thick rugs, a mahogany desk and a paisley-patterned armchair beside a chaise longue covered in leather the colour of oxblood.

Malin sits down on the chaise longue, turning down the invitation to stretch out and thinking how much Tove would like this room, its updated Jane Austen feeling.

Viveka is sitting in the armchair with her legs crossed.

‘What I’m about to tell you stays between us,’ she says. ‘You can never mention it to anyone. It must never find its way into a police report or any other form of documentation. This meeting never took place. Is that okay?’

Malin nods.

‘We’re both risking our professional reputations if this ever gets out. Or if anyone knows it came from me.’

‘If I act upon anything you tell me, I’ll just have to say it was my intuition.’

Viveka Crafoord smiles. But only reluctantly.

Then she is serious again and starts to talk.

‘Eight years ago I was contacted by a man, he was thirty-seven then, who said he wanted to get to grips with his childhood. Nothing unusual in that, but what was unusual about this case was that he made no progress at all for the first five years. He came once a week, he had a comfortable life, a good job. He wanted to talk, he said, about how things had been when he was little, but instead I got to hear about pretty much anything else. Computer programs, skiing, apple trees, various forms of faith. Everything apart from what he originally said he wanted to talk about.’

‘What was his name?’

‘I’m coming to that. Or I will, if it proves necessary.’

‘I think it might.’

‘Then something happened, three years ago. He refused to say what, but I think someone in his family was the victim of a violent crime, she was raped, and in some way it was as if this event had made him let go.’

‘Let go?’

‘Yes, and start talking. To begin with I didn’t believe him, but afterwards . . . It could have been something else as well.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘When he persisted.’

Viveka Crafoord shakes her head. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you wonder why some people have children.’

‘I’ve thought the same thing.’

‘His father had been a sailor who died when he was still in his mother’s womb.’

That’s wrong, Malin thinks. His father was someone else . . .

But she lets Viveka Crafoord go on.

‘His earliest memory, the first thing we could reach together, was how his mother locked him in a wardrobe when he must have been about two. She didn’t want to be seen out with a child. Then his mother remarried, a violent man, and they had children. Three brothers and a sister. The new husband and the sons saw it as their duty to torment him, and the mother seems to have cheered them on. In the winter they locked him outside in the snow, naked, so he had to stand in the cold while they were all sitting eating in the kitchen. If he protested he was beaten, even more than usual. They beat him, cut him with knives, poured hot water over him, threw crumbs at him. The brothers seem to have crossed the boundary, encouraged by their father; children can be incredibly cruel if cruelty is encouraged. They don’t know it’s wrong. A selective sort of violence. Almost like a sect in the end. He was the eldest brother, but what use was that? Adults and children against a lone child. The brothers must have been damaged by the situation as well, become confused, hard, insecure, yet simultaneously determined, bound together in something that we all know deep down is wrong.’

You believe in goodness, Malin thinks, and asks, ‘How did he survive?’

‘Fantasy worlds. His own universe. Some hole in a forest, he never said where. Computer programs. Different faiths. Everything that we human beings clutch at to get a grip on life. Education. And by getting away from them. He managed it. He must have had immense internal strength. And a sister who seems to have cared about him. Even if she couldn’t do anything on her own. He talked about her, albeit fairly incoherently, about something that had happened in the forest. It was like he lived in parallel worlds, and had learned to distinguish between them. But then it was as if every time we met the horrors of his childhood took over more and more. He was quick to lose his temper.’

‘Violent?’

‘Never in here. But possibly elsewhere. They burned him with candles. He described a cabin in the forest where they tied him to a tree and burned him, then threw hot water over him.’

‘How could they?’

‘People can do anything to another human being when they somehow stop seeing them as a human being. History is full of examples. It’s nothing particularly unusual.’

‘And how does it start?’

‘I don’t know.’ Viveka Crafoord sighs. ‘In this case with the mother. Or even further back. I think it was her refusal to love him, combined with the fact that she needed him. I don’t know why she never had him adopted. Maybe his mother needed something to hate? Something to channel her fury at? Her hatred must also have been what fuelled the contempt of her husband and sons.’

‘Why didn’t she want to love him?’

‘I don’t know. Something must have happened.’

Viveka pauses.

‘During that last year he would lie on that chaise longue where you’re sitting now, crying and raging in turn. He would often whisper, “Let me in, let me in, I’m freezing.”’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I tried to comfort him.’

‘And now?’

‘He stopped seeing me about a year ago. The last time we met he stormed out. Lost his temper again. Yelled that no words could ever help, that only action could put everything right, and now he knew, he’d found out something, he yelled, said he knew what needed to be done.’

‘And you didn’t contact him again?’

Viveka Crafoord looks surprised. ‘All my treatments are voluntary,’ she says. ‘My patients have to come to me. But I thought you might be interested in this.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘His cup has overflowed. All his worlds have merged together. Anything could happen.’

‘Thank you,’ Malin says.

‘Do you want to know his name?’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I thought as much,’ Viveka Crafoord says, and turns towards the window.

Malin gets up to leave.

Without looking at Malin, Viveka Crafoord asks, ‘What about you, how are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s written all over you. You don’t often see it so clearly, but it’s like you’re carrying a sorrow, a loss, that you haven’t come to terms with.’

‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

Outside great snowflakes are sailing to the ground; Malin thinks that they look like the remnants of beautiful stars that were pulverised far out in space, billions of years ago.