The Princess of Burundi

Thirty

He knew that in some way John’s death had something to do with him. It could not be mere coincidence that two tormentors had been punished. Justice was being served.

Vincent had only vague memories from his first five, six years of school, during which time he had managed pretty well. The problems had started in middle school. He didn’t know why he had started to feel like an outsider, but it often had physical manifestations. His classmates avoided touching him. He was left out of the boys’ jostling, often gravitating to the girls, but too odd to be accepted fully. After seventh grade his classmates left their childish games behind, the games where boys and girls could play together, in favor of trying out their new gender identities. And then Vincent stood out even more. He was neither cute nor charming, only silent, something the girls often appreciated in contrast to the other boys’ loud and noisy behavior, but in the long run he became more and more isolated.

He had tried to approach Gunilla. They sometimes met on their way to school. They weren’t friends but Vincent felt comfortable with her, she was someone he could talk to. Their paths diverged once they reached school. She increased her stride as soon as they rounded the corner by Tripolis and the iron fence of the school yard appeared.

One recess he finally told her about his father, about how his father beat him. The trigger had been a bruise on his neck, below his left ear. Someone said it was a hickey. Most of the others ignored him, but Gunilla had walked over and looked at him, not with the teasing, taunting attention he usually attracted but with genuine interest. She had placed her fingers carefully on the blue-red mark. A light touch, lasting a second.

That was when he said it.

“My dad hits me.”

She had pulled her hand back and looked at him with frightened eyes. For a moment he thought he saw something else, but then her expression changed.

“Vincent gets spanked!” she had shouted in the corridors before they gathered to file into the classroom. Everyone had looked at him.

“Vincent’s a bad boy!”

“Do you wet your bed?” one of the boys asked.

“Poor Vincent gets spanked on his bottom!”

Gunilla had been smirking, then the teacher had opened the door to the classroom. Vincent recalled they had learned about amoebas that day.

With John it had been different. He was in a different homeroom, but they had a few classes together. It had started in home economics. Neither John nor Vincent said much in this class, and the teachers had to work to get either one to say or try anything. They had been paired one day when the class was learning to bake pound cake. They had followed the instructions uncertainly and mixed the ingredients together. Unfortunately Vincent managed to tip the bowl when they were adding the flour and both boys had watched paralyzed while the gray-white mixture flowed out toward the edge of the table and down onto the floor.

The teacher rushed over and for some reason assumed that John was the one who had caused the accident. Neither boy said anything, least of all Vincent, who assumed he would be beaten for it.

John was assigned to clean it up, Vincent was sent over to work with another group. From that day John had hated Vincent. With his quiet diplomacy he had steered the class to outright bullying. Vincent’s status changed from awkward outsider to outright victim. After that the machine was in full swing. Once he had complained to the teacher, but that only escalated the terrorism. He knew that John was behind it, although they never talked to each other and John was never an active participant in the persecutions.

Now he was dead and Vincent was pleased. Gunilla was not dead, but she had been severely frightened and she wouldn’t be likely to forget him. The fear would stay with her.

The early-morning confusion gave way to a harmonious, dreamlike state. He knew he was on the right track. The phone cord around Vivan’s throat, the terror in her eyes, and that rattling sound had done him good. She had gone quiet so quickly. Her eyes, filled with suspicion and then panic-stricken, had made him laugh. That was the last image she had seen, his laughing, foul-smelling mouth. He had wanted to draw out this laugh. Disappointed, he had kicked her dead body, kicked her in under the bed.

John had been killed by a knife. “Stabbed repeatedly,” the paper had said. Vincent suspected that his eyes would have been as full of terror as Gunilla’s and Vivan’s. Did Vincent have a helper? A quiet avenging force that he was unaware of, or had he been there himself? He was becoming more unsure. He had suffered memory blanks before, especially when he was angry. Maybe he had been there, had stabbed John.

As usual he stopped on Nybro bridge and stared down into the river. Even though it was bitterly cold and in the middle of December, there was a sliver of open water in the middle. Vincent Hahn rested his eyes there for a moment before continuing over the bridge. Again the feeling that he was wandering in a foreign land came over him, a land where no one knew him, where the buildings had been erected by unknown hands, and where even the language had become foreign to him. He became more alert to the people around him, trying to read something in their eyes, but they looked away quickly, or never met his gaze.

He raised his hand and walked straight across the street without paying any attention to the fact that the road was slippery and the cars had trouble braking on the icy surface. Someone shouted at him, words he didn’t understand. He could see that they were angry at him. He took out the knife he had picked up at Vivan’s apartment. A few teenagers shouted something, turned around, and ran.

Vincent repeated the maneuver, stepping straight out into the road. A car had to slam on the brakes, skidded to the side, and almost crashed into a parked taxi. The taxi driver got out and shouted at him. Vincent waved back with his knife.

He walked toward St. Erik’s torg, where people were selling things from stands. An older couple were selling Christmas ornaments. He stopped and looked at all their colorful wares. There were few customers and the couple looked at him expectantly.

“I don’t have a real home,” he said.

“It doesn’t cost anything to have a look,” said the woman.

The man, who was wearing an enormous fur hat, pulled off a leather glove, picked up a bag of homemade candy, and held it out to him.

“I have no money,” Vincent said.

“Take it, you look like you need a sweet,” said the woman. “It’s our house blend.”

The man nodded. The hand holding the bag shook slightly. Vincent looked at it, at how the blue-black veins made a pattern on the broad back of the hand. The nails were thick, curved, and yellowed.

“He’s had a stroke,” the woman said. “He can’t talk.”

Vincent took the bag without saying anything.

“This is the most beautiful present anyone’s ever given me,” he said finally.

The woman nodded. She had green-blue eyes, with a faint grayish cast over the cornea. Apart from a few liver spots on her cheek her skin was smooth and youthful. Vincent thought she had probably laughed a lot in her life.

A younger couple came over, looking through the collection of wreaths.

“They have wonderful candy,” Vincent said.

The young woman glanced at him and smiled.

“We’ll take one of these,” she said, holding up a lingonberry wreath.

Vincent left the booth and wandered on aimlessly, with a hole inside that was only growing bigger. He had felt it many times before. It was a black hole, indescribably dark and deep, from which thoughts both emerged and were drowned. He felt as if he were caught in a maelstrom and was being sucked down into himself.

He tried to say something and heard an echo in his head. The dizziness came and went. He had another piece of candy and stopped outside a shop window where a tabloid headline promised tips for a better sex life. People walked in and out, relaxed, carrying colorful packages, looking at him briefly, smiling.

Where should he go? His legs could hardly hold him anymore. The candy had given him some energy, but wherever he went there were new challenges. The sidewalk was becoming more crowded. He kept bumping into people and their packages repeatedly, pushed hither and thither.

When he had decided to head to the east side again he was stopped by a man wearing a Santa outfit who tried to interest him in a sleigh ride through the old town. Two hundred and ninety kronor for an hour. Vincent accepted a flyer and walked on. The dizziness was getting worse. He leaned against a wall and anxiety charged over him like a battalion on horseback. He took cover, put his arm over his face, and cried out into the wind.

The police came an hour later. The owner of an art gallery had alerted them. He had observed Vincent for a while before he called, had watched the snow falling around him. It was a striking image, or composition, the dark-clad man, a cap pulled down over his forehead, crouched against the wall as if he was afraid that the people walking by with their Christmas purchases would hit him, the gently falling snow-all this created an image of tangible authenticity. It was happening here and now. The gallery owner stood there in the warmth, with the miniatures on the wall, people came and went, Christmas greetings were exchanged.

This image was also a reminder of the timelessness of need. Through the ages thousands of needy people had wandered past on this street. They had come through the city gates to the north, fleeing hunger and punitive overlords, looking for something better. In times of pestilence they had gone in the opposite direction, driven away from the overcrowded and stinking city.

This could be any city in the Northern Hemisphere. The gallery owner saw the homeless man as a reminder of the limits but also the possibilities of contemporary art. A classic motif of genre painting; a challenge for contemporary video artists.

But these aesthetic ruminations eventually gave way to compassion. The gallery owner called the police and they turned up thirty minutes later. When he saw them he stepped out into the street. The officers seemed oblivious of any aesthetic dimension, seeing this only as a routine task of picking up a drunk, perhaps mentally ill, vagrant.

The cold had penetrated Vincent’s clothes. He had tucked his bare hands into his coat and his head had fallen toward his knees. One of the officers shook his shoulder. Vincent woke up, opened his eyes, and saw the uniformed policeman. The other officer was talking to the gallery owner.

Vincent had dreamed that he was in a country where there was snow on the ground all year round. A land of eternal ice where the people couldn’t spit at each other and had to make do with stiff grimaces when they wanted to express their displeasure. He had been standing on a street corner, selling lottery tickets that no one wanted to buy. He had gestured in vain. It wasn’t possible to speak, then the cold threatened to pierce your heart, and that was the end.

“Hey, buddy, how’s it going?” the officer asked kindly. He didn’t smell the usual stink of alcohol on this man, he wan’t one of their regulars. In a half hour the officer was scheduled to finish his beat and start his holiday. He was going up north to Ångermanland with his family.

Vincent moved his head stiffly, trying to dispel the dream and focus on the officer. Slowly the present overtook his consciousness. He saw the uniformed legs, heard the voice, felt the hand, and with lightning speed he had taken out his knife and thrust it upward in a slicing motion. The bread knife sped toward the neck of Jan-Erik Hollman, born in Lund, christened in Gudmundrå church, where his funeral would be held in a week or so, hit the artery, pierced the neck, and went out the other side.

His colleague, Maria Svensson-Flygt, did all she could to stop the bleeding but it was no good. In a few minutes Jan-Erik Hollman had bled to death on the icy sidewalk of Svartbäcksgatan.

Vincent leaned back against the wall as if he was completely unaware of what had just happened. Maria looked at him. Passersby were standing around in a ring, in complete silence. Traffic had come to a stop. The bloodred puddle on the ground had stopped growing. One of Maria’s hands lay on her colleague’s chest, the other pulled out her cell phone. After a short call she grabbed the knife that Vincent had either thrown to the ground or simply dropped.

“Look, she has a gun!” a little boy shouted.

Vincent gave Maria a dull look and she saw the insanity in his eyes. Someone down the street laughed and a taxi cab honked, otherwise there was only silence, broken-after a few seconds-by the sound of approaching sirens.

Maria Svensson-Flygt had been very fond of her colleague. They had worked together for two years. She hated the man slumped against the wall and it struck her that if they had been alone, without staring witnesses, she would have shot his head off.

She sensed that the man in front of her was Vincent Hahn, who was wanted for the murder of a woman in Johannesbäck, although he did not really look like the picture she had seen.