Midwinter Sacrifice

vent, just like the one they put in the box when they kidnapped Lindbergh’s son; you probably saw the report in the Weekly News.

I am quiet around him, but still, somehow, words find their way into his head.

Mummy, Mummy

Mummy

Mummy

and those noises disgust me, they’re like damp snakes on a wet forest floor.

Sometimes I see Kalle. I named him after Kalle.

He looks at me.

He looks all wrong on his bicycle, and he’s given in to the bottle now, and the woman, the fair one, has borne him a son. What does he want that for? Does he imagine he can get any order to that bloodline? I’ve seen the boy. Blown up like a balloon, he is.

The secret is my revenge, a kiss blown through the air.

Don’t think you can get at me, Kalle. That you did get at me. No one gets at Rakel.

No one, no one, no one.

Then I open the wardrobe.

And he smiles.

The fucking little brat.

And I hit him to wipe the smile from his face.

72

I glide through the cold, the day as chalky-white as the fields below me. The tower of Vreta Kloster is a sharpened point on my way out to Blasvadret and the Hultsjon forest.

The voices are everywhere. All the words they have spoken over the years twisted around each other to form a terrifying and beautiful web.

I have learned to distinguish the voices I want to hear, and I understand them all, even far beyond the apparent meaning of the words.

So who do I hear?

I hear the brothers’ voices: Elias, Jakob and Adam. How they resist, but still want to talk. I start with Elias, listen to what you have to say.

You must never show you’re weak.

Never, ever.

Like he did, the illegitimate one. He was older than me, Jakob and Adam, but he still blubbed in the snow, like a woman, like a weakling. If you show you’re weak, they’ll take you.

Which they?

The bastards. Everyone out there.

Sometimes, but I never say this to Mother or my brothers, I wonder what harm he really did. Why Mother hated him, why we had to hit him. I look at my own children and wonder what harm they could do, what harm Karl could really have done? What did Mother turn us into? Maybe you make children commit whatever cruelties you like.

But no, mustn’t think like that.

I know that I am not weak. I am nine, and I am standing at the entrance to the newly built, white-plastered building of Ljungsbro school, it’s early September and the sun is shining and the woodwork teacher, Broman, is standing outside smoking. The bell has gone and all the children rush to the entrance, me first, but just as I’m about to open the door Broman holds up first one arm, then the other, in the air and he shouts, STOP, NO FILTHY LITTLE BRATS IN HERE. And he shouts louder and louder and his words make the whole crowd of children stop, their little muscles frozen. He grins, grins, and everyone thinks they’re the little brats, and then he shouts, IT SMELLS FILTHY HERE, ELIAS MURVALL, IT SMELLS FILTHY, and that’s when the giggling starts, then laughter, and Broman’s cigarette-hoarse shouting, LITTLE BRAT. He shoves me to one side, holds me hard against the glass of one door with his hairy arm as he opens the other door and lets in the rest of the children and they laugh and go past and whisper, Little brat, shit, it smells of shit here, and I won’t put up with it. I make sure I explode, I open my mouth, and I bite, I dig my eye-teeth deep into Broman’s arm. I feel the flesh give way and just as he starts to scream I feel the taste of iron in my mouth and who’s crying now, you bastard, who’s crying now?

I let go.

They wanted Mother to come to the school and talk about what had happened.

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.