And then Tove is standing there by her bed, holding her arms out to her, and Malin is going to embrace her but then Tove is almost gone again, her gangly body is transparent now, like a scarcely visible hologram, something vague for her memory and sense of loss to cling onto.
Come home, darling.
Don’t disappear from me. Promise me that.
11
It must be some homeless badger moving about at the dark edge of the forest.
The pines and birches are swaying, on parade, as a faint nocturnal wind sweeps in from the Baltic, across the skerries and rocks of the archipelago.
What are you digging for?
Is there something buried under the ground? Or are you just trying to find your way back to your sett, to the meandering tunnels you call home?
A black and white striped back. A scrabbling sound. What is it, hiding in the forest?
Karim Akbar is sitting on the porch steps of the cottage his family is renting for three weeks. St Anna’s archipelago, Kobbholmen, your own rowing boat out here from the jetty in Tatto, and then the great Swedish stillness. Hotter than ever this year.
Seven thousand kronor a week.
Swedish, more Swedish, most Swedish. The charcoal is still glowing after the evening’s barbecue. A jetty of their own, with a view from the wooden planks out across the narrow channel that leads to open sea. Inside the cottage his family, wife and eight-year-old son, is sleeping. This is paradise for him, and he ought to be sleeping by her side now, but does she want him there?
Sometimes he wonders. It’s as if their life, and he himself, isn’t enough for her. As if she wants something else. She doesn’t say so in words, but with distance, or perhaps merely an absence of presence whenever he approaches her.
But I shan’t get any physical peace now, Karim thinks. I want to bring order to what’s happening in the city.
The girls.
One disappeared. One lost.
And then Sven Sjoman’s face on the television screen. His brow wet with sweat, his hair a mess.
Daniel Hogfeldt’s voice: ‘Do you think Theresa Eckeved is still alive?’
And the way Sven’s opinion on the matter was clear from the look in his eyes, not the same as the opinion his words expressed.
‘We are taking it for granted that she isn’t dead.’
For God’s sake, Sven, ‘We are taking it for granted that she’s alive’!
News.
Cameras.
This is a good profile-building opportunity, Karim thinks. But the house out here is nice, restful, and maybe I’m tired of all the pictures, the words?
When did that happen?
Hasn’t even started writing his book.
Can’t be bothered to be politically correct, and in that case it’s better to let the pen lie.
The badger shuffles through the forest.
I want to get to the girls. Something’s underway. Something dark. And I want to be there when it emerges into the light.
The kebab is rumbling around his stomach, the charred edges of the lamb trying to find a way back up.
Janne woke up early when he had to dash to the toilet.
That evening’s restaurant had been the worst so far.
Greasy rice, bad meat, but Tove seemed to like her calamari. She’s sleeping now, they each have their own narrow bed on a white stone floor. The aluminium railing of the balcony is still warm from the day’s sun, and the sea is a hundred metres away, along a road lined with pubs, restaurants, souvenir shops and temples. The Balinese in their colourful fabrics seem unconcerned at the exploitation, the air thick with incense as they march past in their religious processions about which he doesn’t understand the first thing.
But that’s what civilisation looks like here, and the early Balinese morning is mild. The wine he drank with dinner has made his system unsettled, and he can’t get back to sleep.
The hotel restaurant is dark.
The pool too.
Faint music from a bar that’s still open, but not so loud that he can’t hear Tove’s breathing, and he thinks that she breathes just like Malin in her sleep, slow and steady, but every now and then the rhythm is broken by something like a whimper, not anxious or troubled, but relieved, as if something within them was finding its natural tone.
The nocturnal heat quite different from Africa.
Tropical night in the rainy season. There’s nothing like it.
When the rain crashes down and you can feel the fungus growing on your skin, the way the splashing of the raindrops can’t hide the evil that’s after you, moving through the leaves, the insects, the trees.
There’s always something that comes between people.
Religion.
Like in Bosnia.
Tribal loyalty.
Like in Rwanda.
And always politics, money, ambition and game-playing.
And often people like me. The willing cleaners. The ones who show up in the immediate wake of the catastrophe.
Things that have happened, recently and long ago. They collide, one way or another, in a moment of history, and then everything changes direction. An explosion of violence and you just have to deal with it.
A warm wind on his face.
Africa.
Cold wind.
Balkans.
A raw, damp cold that he will always carry with him.
Her voice on the phone just now, the poor, crackling line. The same tired performance as so many times before, their words, the things they say without saying anything at all.
What have I done?
Malin.
What the hell have we done? What are we doing?
It’s time to stop messing about and to start playing the game seriously.
Janne goes in from the balcony. Lies down on his bed next to his daughter. Listens to her breathing.
Malin is dreaming of a cold wind whistling through tightly packed ground. Of a tiny little creature whimpering and trying to find its way into her hands.
She dreams of an open field made of sky and fluffy clouds.
She dreams that she’s swimming in the sea with Tove and Janne, and alongside them swims a fourth person, faceless but not frightening, more like the incarnation of everything good that a person can be, if only in a warm summer’s dream.
