Midwinter Sacrifice

‘Then I should keep quiet,’ Hermansson says, and returns to her diagrams.

Down in the entrance the old men in the wheelchairs have gone.

When Malin emerges out of the revolving door and the cold hits her, Gottfrid Karlsson’s final words come back to her, as she knows they will do, over and over again.

She was on her way out when he put his hand on her arm.

‘Be careful now, Miss Fors.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Just remember one thing, Miss Fors. It is always desire that kills.’

16

The plot where the house, the cornerhouse, once stood.

The atmosphere now: middle-class pomp, a perfectly average, dull house. When could this pink-painted wooden villa with its factory-produced playful carvings have been built? 1984? 1990? Something like that. Whoever bought the house from Ball-Bengt knew what they were doing; presumably they bought cheap, sat out the recession, tore the house down, built a new bog-standard villa and sold up.

Did you build someone’s life away?

No.

Because what is a house, other than property, and what does property do other than impose responsibility? Rent your house, own nothing. The mantra of the poor, the broad-minded.

Malin has got out of the car, letting air into its suffocating staleness. Behind the stiff crowns of the birch trees she can make out the pedestrian tunnel under the Linkoping road. A black hole where the hill on the far side becomes an impenetrable wall.

The house opposite is a much extended 1950s villa, as is the neighbouring house to the left. Who lives here now? No Cornerhouse-Kalle. No drunks. Any womanisers? Any abandoned fatties whose souls were never allowed to grow?

Hardly.

Salesmen, doctors, architects, people like that.

Malin walks up and down beside the car.

Gottfrid Karlsson’s voice: ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle beat up a man at the People’s Park. He did that a lot. Fighting was a way of life for him. But this time the other man lost an eye. He got six years for that.’

Malin walks over to the tunnel and the road and clambers up a slope via an unploughed cycle path. The aqueduct in the distance didn’t exist back then. Cars disappear and reappear through the fog. Malin can see the greenery, the summer glory, the canal boats gliding on the water over the road in the summer. There comes the world! And it isn’t yours, it isn’t yours. Your world will still be this little community, your loneliness, the laughter of the others as you chase errant balls.

‘Elisabeth made ends meet by sewing. She did adjustments for Slott’s ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Vasagatan. She took the bus every morning with Bengt on her arm and went to fetch the garments, then took them back on the bus in the evening. The drivers let her travel without paying. Then the boy got fat, and people said she used to let him eat butter and sugar just to keep him quiet while she was sewing.’

Malin stands at the railing above the pedestrian tunnel, looking down at the house, at the red cottage that once stood there. So small, but, for a boy, a whole universe, the stars in the night sky reminders of how transitory our lives are.

‘When Kalle got out Elisabeth was pregnant within a week or so. He was permanently intoxicated, old before his time. It was said that he was beaten by the other prisoners in the jail for something he had done in Stockholm. They said he had once grassed on someone to the police. But women were still just as crazy about him. He would spend Saturdays in the park. Skirts or fighting.’

Black tiles. Smoke from the chimney. Probably from an open fire.

‘Then Bengt’s sister Lotta was born. And it went on from there. Kalle drank and fought, he hit his wife and the boy, and the girl when she wouldn’t stop crying, but somehow they managed. Somehow. Kalle used to stand outside the bakery roaring at people as they walked past. The police let him be. He had got old.’

Malin goes back to the house, hesitating before she steps on to the driveway. There’s an ancient oak tree in the far corner of the plot. That oak must have been there in your time, Ball-Bengt, mustn’t it?

It was there in my time.

I used to run round that oak with my sister. We played there to keep Dad away, to force him to stay away with our laughter, our yelling, our childish shrieks.

Oh, how I ate.

As long as I ate there was hope; as long as there was food there was faith; as long as I ate there was no other reality but food; as long as I ate, my grief at what never was stayed in its dark hole.

But what good did all the running and eating do?

Instead it was Mum who disappeared. First the cancer took her liver, she spilled away from us within a month or so, and then, yes, what happened then . . . that was when the never-ending night began.

‘Social services should have taken the children away then, Miss Fors, when Elisabeth died. But they couldn’t do anything. Kalle wanted to keep them and that was the law. Bengt was perhaps twelve years old, the little girl,