kicking a ball again, it’s too hot now, impossible, dangerous.
‘If I show you, you have to believe me. I’ve got nothing to do with any of that shit.’
Behzad Karami in handcuffs in the back seat of the car. They’re on their way to the allotments in Johannelund, down by the river. That was where he wanted to take them, refusing to explain why.
‘Nothing to do with any of that shit.’
The words echo in Per’s head as they walk along the well-tended gravel path that weaves between the allotments. The water sprinklers are working overtime, trying to keep the grass lawns green, and save the currants and gooseberries as best they can. The allotment owners are hiding in the shade of parasols or under the porches of their colourful little cottages.
If you reduce murder and violence to shit you can handle it, and that means you can live with whatever you or someone else has done. Live with the fact that we human beings occasionally choose to treat our fellows in that way.
Waldemar calm.
Behzad Karami asked to be let out of the handcuffs up by the car, and Waldemar agreed to his request.
‘If you run, I’ll shoot you.’
His voice ice-cold, and Behzad Karami nodded.
‘Not that I have any idea what you want to show us here.’
Waldemar more sceptical with every step.
‘You’d better have something for us.’
‘I’ve got something for you,’ Behzad Karami says as he speeds up. ‘We’re heading to the last plot, down on the left.’
Hot, Per thinks as he treads along a sunny section of the path. Unhealthily hot, and Ekenberg is sweating alongside him, yet still largely unbothered by the heat.
An old man of steel.
Made by a dark, one-track steel that’s no longer manufactured.
Then Behzad Karami opens the gate to the last allotment on the left. The grass is less well-kept, the cottage an untouched white-painted shack, apparently uninhabited.
They go into the small plot and Per notices the pedantically well-kept flower beds, the bushes, they look like raspberry canes, and they’re planted in perfect rows, no mature fruit yet.
‘There.’
Behzad Karami points at the bushes.
‘What do you mean, there?’
Per wants to get his question in before Waldemar loses his grip.
‘I was here those nights when you wanted to know what I was doing.’
It’s going to blow, here it comes, Per thinks, Waldemar’s going to go mad. But instead he sighs, and there’s no violence.
‘These are my blackberry bushes. I grow blackberries, when I was little back in Tehran my grandfather used to take me to the souk with him and eat blackberries. I wanted to grow my own, it makes me feel better, sort of. A good feeling in my stomach. Like when I was little with Grandfather, just the two of us.’
‘So you were here watering them?’
Per sceptical.
‘No, guarding them.’
‘Guarding them?’
‘Yes, otherwise the deer eat the berries before they’re ripe. I was sitting in the cottage, on guard. They jump over the fence and eat the berries.’
‘You were on guard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you haven’t told anyone about this?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I bought the allotment with my own money.’
‘But why couldn’t you tell anyone?’
‘That I’m growing blackberries? My mates would think I’d gone mad, that I was queer or something.’
‘Queer?’
‘Everybody knows that only queers grow things.’
They watch Behzad Karami’s back as he disappears along the path up to the car park.
‘I believe him,’ Waldemar says.
‘But it still isn’t a proper alibi.’
Then they go from allotment to allotment, asking if anyone saw Behzad Karami in his shack, and several confirm that they’ve seen light from the cottage in recent nights, but they haven’t been able to tell if it was him inside.
Behzad Karami showed them the cottage before they let him go.
Hardly any furniture, just an Ikea bed in one corner, no mattress or sheets or pillow, just a grey blanket neatly folded at one end. The bare yellow floorboards covered in burn marks from cigarettes, the air inside as dense and suffocating as a freshly gutted elk’s stomach during the autumn hunt.
‘Blackberries,’ Per says as they get back to the car. ‘Can it really be that simple?’
‘Everyone knows that,’ Waldemar says. ‘Arabs are crazy about blackberries. It’s because they can’t drink and don’t get enough pussy.’
40
‘Mum?’
Tove’s voice from thousands of miles away, the sound like a mirage in Malin’s inner ear, loss that time and distance are making more like grief with each passing minute.
‘Mum, are you there?’
The living room closes around Malin, the weather forecast promising heat, heat, heat. Don’t want you to call, Tove, don’t want that, can’t you and Dad get it into your thick heads, into your wonderful, cherished hearts, I don’t want you to call several times a day?
‘I’m here, Tove. I’m here.’
And Malin slumps onto the sofa, turning down the volume of the television with her free hand.
‘Mum, is everything OK?’
I’m the one who’s supposed to ask that, Malin thinks.
‘Yes, everything’s fine, darling. How are things with you?’
Wants to say: You’re flying home tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up. But she lets Tove talk.
‘We went to an elephant farm today, outside a city in the middle of the jungle called Ubud.’
‘Did you have a ride?’
‘We both did, Dad and me.’
‘And you’re back at the hotel again now?’
‘Yes, we’ve just got back from a fish restaurant. It’s already one o’clock in the morning. We went swimming today as well. It wasn’t too windy, so the yellow flag was out. The undercurrents aren’t so dangerous then.’
Undercurrents.
Dangerous.
They’ve been in Bali for two weeks, but Tove is already talking as if she’s lived there half her life.
‘Take care when you go swimming.’
‘Of course I take care. What do you think?’
