Janne, someone shouts. Tove? Malin? Melinda? Per?
Get this . . .
Someone cuts the leg off someone who’s still alive, throws it in a pot of boiling water and then eats first, before someone else lets their children share the rest. No one cares, but if you stole milk from anyone still fully alive the punishment is death.
Don’t shoot him, I say. Don’t shoot.
He’s hungry, he’s ten, his eyes are large and yellowish white; the pupils expand in time with the realisation that this ends here, now.
Then you shoot.
Dog, dog, dog, Hutu, Hutu, Hutu, your cries echo, and your greed, your fucking bastard humanity makes me want to drown you all in the latrines we came here to build for your sake, so that typhoid and cholera and other shit wouldn’t kill you in numbers that even the Hutus couldn’t match.
Janne. Dad. Come home.
Has the rain-sheet broken?
It’s so fucking wet. How do the millipedes cope with all these drops?
Fuck, it stings, fucking savages, fucking things up for themselves.
Don’t raise that machete against me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, no no no and the scream is in the room outside the dream now, outside sleep, in the wakefulness of his room, in his loneliness and the dream-soaked sheets.
He sits up in bed.
The screams echo round the walls.
His hand on the fabric.
Soaking wet. No matter how cold it gets out there, it still seems to be warm enough in here for him to break into a full sweat.
Something crawls over his leg.
The last remnant of the dream, Jan-Erik Fors thinks, before he gets up to fetch a new sheet from the linen cupboard in the hall. The cupboard is an heirloom. He and Malin bought the house, in its isolated forest setting a couple of kilometres north of Linkoping, not far from Malmslatt, just after Tove was born.
The floorboards creak as he moves, alone, from the bedroom and out into the rest of the house.
The dogs are barking round Borje Svard’s legs.
For the Alsatians there is no such thing as morning cold, not even at five o’clock in the morning; they’re just happy to see him, excited about being able to run around in the garden, chasing the sticks he throws in different directions for them.
Entirely unconcerned.
Unaware of naked beaten dead men in trees. Every conversation with people in the area yesterday was fruitless. Silence and blindness. As if people were ungrateful at having senses that functioned.
Valla.
The district of detached houses built in the forties and fifties, wooden boxes with assorted extensions illustrating the way life just kept getting better and better and better; when this city still worked for ordinary people, before a factory worker was forced to get a university education to look after a robot.
But some things work.
Inside the house they’re busy with her right now, the carers. They come once late at night to turn her, then they’re there, in Borje and Anna’s house, their home, all day and long into the evening, simultaneously more and less natural than the furniture, the wallpaper and the carpets.
MS. Multiple sclerosis. A few years after they got married Anna started to slur her speech. It progressed quickly after that. And now? The disease-modifying treatments came too late for her. Not a single muscle obeys her now, and Borje is the only person who can understand what she’s trying to say.
Darling Anna.
This business of the dogs is crazy, really. But there has to be some sort of breathing hole, something that is his own, uncomplicated, full of happiness. Pure. The neighbours have complained about the kennels, the barking.
Let them complain.
And the children? Mikael moved to Australia about ten years ago. Karin moved to Germany. To escape? Almost certainly. Who could bear to see their mother like that? How do I bear it?
But you do bear it.
Love.
They may well have said that she can have a place in a home whenever you want it.
When
Dogs, pistols. Concentrating on the target. The firing range acts as purification.
But Anna, for me you are still you. And as long as you are still that for me, maybe you can bear to be the same for yourself.
