Malin is woken by Tove’s voice.
‘Mum? Mum, I’m home. Don’t you think you should go to bed instead?’
‘Oh yes, of course.’
Malin wakes slowly, grows doubtful. Whenever she had done anything silly, she always woke Dad to say that everything was all right. But before Malin has time to doubt Tove, her daughter says, ‘Have you been drinking, Mum?’
Malin rubs her eyes. ‘No, just a bit of tequila.’
The bottle in front of her, the half-bottle of cask-aged tequila, bought on the way home from the station, a third empty.
‘Okay, Mum,’ Tove says. ‘Shall I help you into bed?’
Malin shakes her head. ‘That only happened once, Tove. You only had to do that once. ONCE.’
‘Twice.’
Malin nods. ‘Twice.’
‘Well, goodnight, then,’ Tove says.
‘Sleep well,’ Malin says.
The clock on the sideboard says quarter to twelve. From behind Malin can see that Tove’s hair is now loose, and she looks like the little girl again.
A bit of tequila left in the glass. A lot more in the bottle. Another little one? No. No need. Malin gets up with an effort and stumbles towards the bedroom.
She can’t be bothered to get undressed and falls on to her bed.
And dreams dreams that might have been best undreamed.
7
The jungle is at its most dense at night.
The damp, the insects, the damn wildlife, leaves, snakes, spiders, millipedes and mould growing in the sleeping-bag at night.
Then they land at the airport, endless masses of tiny lights, a starry sky on the ground and the Russian Tupolev plane plummeting straight down like a helicopter, the wings tear and he flaps with his soul in the cramped space, child and mother standing there, Tove, only little then, now: What are you doing here, Dad? You ought to be at home with me. I’m coming, I’m coming, and then they unload, break out of the plane’s innards: food, plumbing pipes, and they come towards them in the darkness; you can only see their eyes, thousands of eyes in the darkness, eyes to trust in, and the hungry scared muttering and the salvos from the automatic rifles. Back off or we’ll finish what the Hutus started. Back away and a millipede crawls over my leg, the mould grows, Kigali, Kigali, Kigali, the inescapable mantras of dream.
Get this fucking millipede away from me.
Janne, someone shouts. Tove? Malin? Melinda? Per?
Get this…
Someone cuts the leg off someone who’s still alive, throws it in a pot of boiling water and then eats first, before someone else lets their children share the rest. No one cares, but if you stole milk from anyone still fully alive the punishment is death.
Don’t shoot him, I say. Don’t shoot.
He’s hungry, he’s ten, his eyes are large and yellowish white; the pupils expand in time with the realisation that this ends here, now.
Then you shoot.
Dog, dog, dog, Hutu, Hutu, Hutu, your cries echo, and your greed, your fucking bastard humanity makes me want to drown you all in the latrines we came here to build for your sake, so that typhoid and cholera and other shit wouldn’t kill you in numbers that even the Hutus couldn’t match.
Janne. Dad. Come home.
Has the rain-sheet broken?
It’s so fucking wet. How do the millipedes cope with all these drops?
Fuck, it stings, fucking savages, fucking things up for themselves.
Don’t raise that machete against me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, no no no and the scream is in the room outside the dream now, outside sleep, in the wakefulness of his room, in his loneliness and the dream-soaked sheets.
He sits up in bed.
The screams echo round the walls.
His hand on the fabric.
Soaking wet. No matter how cold it gets out there, it still seems to be warm enough in here for him to break into a full sweat.
Something crawls over his leg.
The last remnant of the dream, Jan-Erik Fors thinks, before he gets up to fetch a new sheet from the linen cupboard in the hall. The cupboard is an heirloom. He and Malin bought the house, in its isolated forest setting a couple of kilometres north of Linkoping, not far from Malmslatt, just after Tove was born.
The floorboards creak as he moves, alone, from the bedroom and out into the rest of the house.
The dogs are barking round Borje Svard’s legs.
For the Alsatians there is no such thing as morning cold, not even at five o’clock in the morning; they’re just happy to see him, excited about being able to run around in the garden, chasing the sticks he throws in different directions for them.
Entirely unconcerned.
Unaware of naked beaten dead men in trees. Every conversation with people in the area yesterday was fruitless. Silence and blindness. As if people were ungrateful at having senses that functioned.
Valla.
The district of detached houses built in the forties and fifties, wooden boxes with assorted extensions illustrating the way life just kept getting better and better and better; when this city still worked for ordinary people, before a factory worker was forced to get a university education to look after a robot.
But some things work.
Inside the house they’re busy with her right now, the carers. They come once late at night to turn her, then they’re there, in Borje and Anna’s house, their home, all day and long into the evening, simultaneously more and less natural than the furniture, the wallpaper and the carpets.
MS. Multiple sclerosis. A few years after they got married Anna started to slur her speech. It progressed quickly after that. And now? The disease-modifying treatments came too late for her. Not a single muscle obeys her now, and Borje is the only person who can understand what she’s trying to say.
Darling Anna.
This business of the dogs is crazy, really. But there has to be some sort of breathing hole, something that is his own, uncomplicated, full of happiness. Pure. The neighbours have complained about the kennels, the barking.
Let them complain.
And the children? Mikael moved to Australia about ten years ago. Karin moved to Germany. To escape? Almost certainly. Who could bear to see their mother like that? How do I bear it?
But you do bear it.
