An ambulance parked in a small sidetrack, two firemen standing beside it, inhaling what must be oxygen from large yellow canisters.
And this is the inferno you can’t wait to get back to, Janne.
People with blankets in their hands. Beating them on the ground where the smoke is rising. Further ahead they can make out flames through the trees.
‘There’ve never been fires like this in Ostergotland before,’ Zeke says. ‘They’re battling to stop it coming back to life again. Did you know, a fire blazing at its worst can jump more than fifty metres from treetop to treetop? Almost like an explosion, and that’s when it gets really dangerous. That’s when firemen get trapped, circled by the fire.’
So far no one has been killed, no firemen, and no volunteers.
Just let it stay that way, with only the creatures of the forest losing their lives.
They meet a fire engine, one of the smaller ones, and Malin recognises two of Janne’s colleagues in the front seat but can’t remember their names. They recognise her and nod.
‘Tough guys,’ Zeke says.
‘I guess so,’ Malin says.
The line of parked cars breaks up, fewer volunteers here, firemen from five districts running to and fro in the forest, moving in and out of the burned vegetation. And then they see it, the white Fiat.
‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says.
‘The number matches,’ Malin says.
And they park close to the Fiat, open the doors of the Volvo and the roar and the heat from the inferno, almost invisible ahead of them in the forest, hits them, the air full of a prickling smell of sulphur and burned meat, the noise of the fire a dark whistling, as if God himself were trying to sound the alarm.
The heat almost unbearable.
Summer plus fire equals sauna.
‘Not even a Finn could put up with this,’ Zeke says, as if he could read Malin’s mind.
‘Fuck, no. It must be at least forty-five degrees up here.’
Cries and shouting from the fire, two low banks of smoke separating, and a woman, the same height as Malin, with soot-blackened clothes and a filthy smeared face emerges between two charred maples.
‘Slavenca Visnic, I presume,’ Zeke says.
‘At your disposal, I guess,’ the woman says.
36
They rarely come at night, the explosions, but occasionally they do, ripping the children from sleep, and I have to hold Miro’s little three-year-old body close to mine, Kranska in her dad’s arms, her frightened eyes staring at me, as if I could save her if the will of God directed the Serbs’ grenades at our flat, our house.
Distant explosions, getting closer.
Making the floorboards creak.
My son’s warm skin against mine under the blanket, I can feel it though his pyjamas, just like I can hear his heart racing, and the rhythm reminds me of my own inadequacy, because he knows that not even his mum can cure real fear. All four of us are sitting in bed together, sleep is impossible, but we’re breathing together, our breath mingling and becoming one, and even though the war raging out there is merciless, elevated to the status of a religion, we still believe that nothing can touch us, that we’re safe in our cocoon, spun of love and dreams, our home.
One day at the market.
The rifles on Snipers Alley missed me on the way home.
But an incendiary grenade had struck the roof of the building, burrowing down two floors and exploding in the flat below ours, and the flames must have consumed you quickly from beneath and the whole building was a blazing torch when I returned. People held me, their hot hands hard against my body and I wanted to go in, in to you, because I knew you were burning in there, and I wanted to burn with you.
Not even the slightest trace of you was left.
Nothing.
The phosphorous fire of an incendiary grenade really is that mercilessly hot. I slept on the charred remains of our love and our dreams, I slept there one night, trying to remember your smells, your sounds, faces and voices, the way your skin felt, but all I could feel was the stinging smell of fire and ash, all I could hear was the sound of rifle fire and howitzers as they continued their mournful song.
I woke the next morning with cold rain beating against my bare neck. I walked right into the forest, not caring if I got shot or caught up in the front line, and the clouds hung over the hills and they captured me after a few kilometres.
Their touch, the men’s touch, didn’t exist, no matter what they did to me, and what they planted inside me was a monster, nothing more.
I lay on a floor and everything that wasn’t light was dark, the world yellow-black, yet still completely colourless.
I wanted them to kill me.
But how could they do that? I was already dead. And in my dreams your faces, your voices would come.
Go, Mum, go. Your path isn’t finished yet. And I loved and hated you because I was alive, because you came from your new place just to tell me that.
I wanted to be with you, weave a new cocoon of impenetrable, everlasting love. I wanted to weave warm threads of love around your three hearts, to bring them back, to make them beat for ever.
37
‘Who’d live in a fucking dump like this?’
As Waldemar Ekenberg says this he yanks open the door of a block of flats in Ekholmen.
In the car on the way there: ‘So how are we going to play this?’
Per Sundsten can hear the influence of English on his Swedish, hates the way his language is tainted by American cop shows.
Waldemar’s voice smoother now, focused.
‘There’s no point pussyfooting around with Pakis like them. They’ve got a low pain threshold, so we just apply pressure.’
‘Apply pressure?’
‘Yeah, you know.’
Per knew. His older colleague’s racist vocabulary, his generalisations about the people they were on their way to see, all of this upset him, but he said nothing, this wasn’t the time to worry about that sort of thing, the crimes so serious that everything else could wait, and sometimes they were obliged to step onto the wrong side of the law to uphold it, it’s been like that in every culture, in all ages, ever since Hammurabi inscribed his eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
I’m not naive, Per thinks, just not as cynical as the man he had realised that Waldemar was during the course of the day.
In itself, there was nothing wrong with cynicism.
But the prejudices. You could get by fine without them. Everybody has a dirty streak, as Per likes to put it, no one’s entirely blameless, no matter what their background or skin colour.
The block of flats in Ekholmen where Behzad Karami’s parents live.
Graffiti on the walls, badly sprayed tags on peeling paint.
And this was where Behzad Karami is supposed to have been at a party on the night that Josefin Davidsson was attacked. His parents live on the first floor, no lift.
Sundsten and Ekenberg ring the doorbell.
