Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

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, Bjorklund, showed up.

My brothers got to hear about it.

The Turk lived in Harna. 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.

73

It’s warm here. No one will find me.

The earth roof above me is a heavenly vault of its own. There are biscuit crumbs on the ground.

Is she hanging?

If not, I shall have to try again and again and again. Because if I get rid of the blood you’ll have to let me in. If I sacrifice it to you, you’ll let me in.

It was easier with him, Bengt. He was heavy, but not too heavy, and I drugged him by the car park up in Harna when he was walking past. I had my other car, the one I bought with a normal boot. Then the same as with her, brought out here by sledge.

But he died too soon.

The pulleys came from the factory. I’d disconnected the sensors in the server room before I cut a hole in the fence. Not easy. A coat on a hanger was me through the frosted glass when the guards walked past.

That night, in the forest, I took him. I drove out the blood, took away the blood, so you would let me in. I made it clean.