Midwinter Sacrifice

72

I glide through the cold, the day as chalky-white as the fields below me. The tower of Vreta Kloster is a sharpened point on my way out to Blåsvädret and the Hultsjön forest.

The voices are everywhere. All the words they have spoken over the years twisted around each other to form a terrifying and beautiful web.

I have learned to distinguish the voices I want to hear, and I understand them all, even far beyond the apparent meaning of the words.

So who do I hear?

I hear the brothers’ voices: Elias, Jakob and Adam. How they resist, but still want to talk. I start with Elias, listen to what you have to say.

You must never show you’re weak.

Never, ever.

Like he did, the illegitimate one. He was older than me, Jakob and Adam, but he still blubbed in the snow, like a woman, like a weakling. If you show you’re weak, they’ll take you.

Which they?

The bastards. Everyone out there.

Sometimes, but I never say this to Mother or my brothers, I wonder what harm he really did. Why Mother hated him, why we had to hit him. I look at my own children and wonder what harm they could do, what harm Karl could really have done? What did Mother turn us into? Maybe you make children commit whatever cruelties you like.

But no, mustn’t think like that.

I know that I am not weak. I am nine, and I am standing at the entrance to the newly built, white-plastered building of Ljungsbro school, it’s early September and the sun is shining and the woodwork teacher, Broman, is standing outside smoking. The bell has gone and all the children rush to the entrance, me first, but just as I’m about to open the door Broman holds up first one arm, then the other, in the air and he shouts, STOP, NO FILTHY LITTLE BRATS IN HERE. And he shouts louder and louder and his words make the whole crowd of children stop, their little muscles frozen. He grins, grins, and everyone thinks they’re the little brats, and then he shouts, IT SMELLS FILTHY HERE, ELIAS MURVALL, IT SMELLS FILTHY, and that’s when the giggling starts, then laughter, and Broman’s cigarette-hoarse shouting, LITTLE BRAT. He shoves me to one side, holds me hard against the glass of one door with his hairy arm as he opens the other door and lets in the rest of the children and they laugh and go past and whisper, Little brat, shit, it smells of shit here, and I won’t put up with it. I make sure I explode, I open my mouth, and I bite, I dig my eye-teeth deep into Broman’s arm. I feel the flesh give way and just as he starts to scream I feel the taste of iron in my mouth and who’s crying now, you bastard, who’s crying now?

I let go.

They wanted Mother to come to the school and talk about what had happened.

That’s shit, she said, as she held me tight in the kitchen, we don’t do that sort of shit, Elias.

I am still drifting and listening. I’m high up now, where the air is too thin for human beings, and the cold is quick to destroy, but your voice is clear here, Jakob, so pure and radiantly clear, transparent like a window frame without glass.

Hit the bastard, Jakob, Dad yelled.

Hit him.

He’s not one of us, no matter what he might like to think.

He was skinny and thin and although he was twice my height I kicked him right in the stomach while Adam held him. Adam four years younger, but still stronger, run wild.

Dad in his wheelchair on the porch.

How it happened?

I don’t know.

They found him in the park one night. His back broken, his jaw too. Mother said he must have run into a real man there in the park and that it’s all over for Blackie now, and then she passed him another drink, let him drink himself to death, it’s high time, and oh how he drank. We would push him round the houses and he would rave in his drunkenness and try to stand up.

I was the one who found him when he fell downstairs. I was thirteen then. I came in from the garden where I’d been pulling unripe apples off the trees to throw at cars driving past on the road.

The eyes.

They were staring at me, white and dead, and his skin was grey instead of the usual red.

I was scared. Wanted to scream.

But instead I closed his eyes.

Mother came down the stairs, just out of the bath.

She stepped over the body, reached out to me and her hair was wet but still warm, and it smelled of flowers and leaves and she murmured in my ear, Jakob. My Jakob.

Then she whispered, If you have to do something, you don’t hesitate, do you? You know what has to be done, don’t you? And she hugged me tight, tight, and then I remember the church bells and the black-clad people on the patch of gravel in front of the church in Vreta Kloster.

The patch of gravel.

Edged with walls and remains from the twelfth century.

I’ve landed there now and I can see what you must have seen, Jakob. What did the sight do to you? But everything had already happened long, long before then, hadn’t it? And I think you’re doing what has to be done, just as I’m doing now.

But it isn’t your voice that’s strongest here. That’s Adam’s, and what he says sounds sensible and mad at the same time, as despairing and obvious as the winter cold.

What’s ours is ours, and no one can take it from us, Adam.

Mother’s voice with no space for me.

I was probably two the first time I realised that Dad hit him, that there was someone who was always there, but who was only there to be hit.

There is an obvious quality to violence that doesn’t exist in anything else. Drink your skull to pieces, smash a skull to pieces, smash to pieces, smash apart.

That’s how it is.

I smash things apart.

Mother.

She also likes things to be obvious.

Doubt, she says, isn’t for us.

It was different with the new kid.

He didn’t know.

Turkish. Came to our class in year five. From Stockholm. His mum and dad had got jobs in chocolate heaven. He must have thought he could mess me about. I was the little one, after all, the one on the edge, with all the stains on his clothes, the one you could, well, do what you liked with, just to prove you were someone in the new place.

So he hit me.

Or tried to.

He used some fucking judo technique and got me down, then he punched me until my nose started to bleed, and then, just when I was about to fly at him again, the teacher and the caretaker and the PE teacher, Björklund, showed up.

My brothers got to hear about it.

The Turk lived in Härna. We waited for him by the canal, under the birches by the water, hidden down the slope behind the tree trunks. The fool used to go home that way.

And he came, just as my brothers had planned.

They leapt up and knocked him off his bike and he was lying there in the gravel by the side of the canal, screaming and pointing at the tears in his jeans.

Jakob stared at him, Elias stared, and I stood by a birch tree and I remember wondering what was going to happen now, but I knew.

Elias started kicking the Turk’s bike, and when he tried to get up Jakob kicked him, first in the stomach and then in the mouth, and the Turk started whimpering and blood was coming out of the corners of his mouth.

And then I bent the bike frame and heaved the bike right out into the canal. And I ran up and kicked the Turk.

And I kicked.

Kicked.

Kicked.

His parents didn’t even report it to the cops.

They moved just a few weeks after that. At school they said they’d gone back to Turkey, but I don’t believe that. They were that other sort, Kurds. Like fuck would they have gone back.

On the way home from the canal I was sitting behind Elias on his Puch Dakota. I was holding on to his waist and the whole of his big body was vibrating, and Jakob was riding his moped next to us.

He smiled at me. I could feel warmth from Elias.

We were, we are, brothers.

One and the same.

Nothing odd about that.