knives in the butter before they put it on the table, one for them and one for Sanna.
Each slice was a work of art for Sanna that was not finished until the bread was covered in an even, smooth layer of butter. Without any bumps or marks.
‘So, do you think it was a good party?’ Mike asked.
Sanna nodded without lifting her eyes from the bread.
This fixation with spreading the butter was a running joke for Mike and Ylva. They wondered what it might indicate, speculated where she might have got it from and what other things in life would be given such time and care.
At times, Ylva worried that Sanna might have some kind of disorder, a touch of autism or some condition known by an acronym. But that wasn’t the case. Mike guessed that spreading butter was a form of meditation. And there was absolutely no point in analysing to death something that worked. A lot simpler to put an extra knife in the butter. Live and let live. With all our individual peculiarities.
‘What was most fun?’ Mike wondered.
‘Mummy’s not coming home, is she?’
The question was like a slap in the face. Mike had thought a great deal about his mother’s misguided decision, keeping his father’s suicide secret from him and talking evasively of a car crash. He recalled how the feeling of hopelessness and guilt had floored him when the truth finally came out. Mike had decided not to embellish or protect his daughter from the truth.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t look like it.’
Sanna looked at him.
‘Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mike replied. ‘I don’t know anything.’
Sanna put the knife back in the butter and started to eat. She glanced quickly down at the table before looking out the window to the world beyond: light green leaves, flowering lilac, it would be the summer holidays soon.
Mike’s eyes filled and his nose got blocked, forcing him to breathe through his mouth.
31
Friendliness, privileges
When the victim has been sufficiently broken in, the manipulation becomes even more devious. The perpetrator, who has hitherto physically abused and mocked the victim, is suddenly kind and generous. The victim becomes confused and starts to reassess the perpetrator, to the point of denying earlier assaults. The perpetrator was only doing what he had to. The victim understands him. The victim starts to experience her situation as normal and self-inflicted.
‘Close your eyes.’
Ylva looked at him warily. She was standing with her hands on her head, as she’d been instructed to do. He had opened the door just enough to peer round it.
‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes.’
She obeyed, her eyelids quivering uneasily. She heard him come in through the door and walk towards her. She opened her eyes. He was holding a floor lamp in one hand and a heavy paper bag in the other.
‘Something to read,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to have something to pass the time. Do you use glasses?’
She shook her head. The man smiled at her.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
Ylva did as she was told. The man put the bag and the lamp on the floor, and sat beside her on the bed.
‘You’re here now,’ he said. ‘I know that it’s hard to accept. You want to think that it’s temporary, that you’ll be able to get away. Even though you know that will never happen. And the sooner you stop thinking that, the sooner you’ll settle down. Believe me, in a year’s time you won’t want to leave. In a year’s time, you’ll stay, even though I open the door.’
He stroked her hair. As if she was a child and he was comforting her, the wise adult.
‘And it’s not a bad life, the one we can give you,’ he said.
He put his finger under her chin and turned her face gently towards him.
‘Violence isn’t really my thing,’ he said. ‘I only hit you because I have to, to make you obey. It’s effective, but doesn’t help build strong bonds. I prefer the carrot to the whip, praise to censure …’
‘But what do you want us to do?’
Like most men, Karlsson was in fact soft. The unshaven and red-eyed husband of a missing wife was more than he could cope with. If Karlsson hadn’t been convinced that Mike’s tears were due to guilt rather than grief, he could have got him to do anything.
‘I want you to find her,’ Mike said.
‘How?’ Karlsson asked.
Mike didn’t know.
‘Either she doesn’t want to be found, or …’
Karlsson stopped himself, but it was too late. Mike was crying again.
Good God, what a pansy, Karlsson thought. If he doesn’t stop the waterworks soon, he’ll get me started too.
‘Sorry,’ Mike sobbed.
‘Not at all,’ Karlsson said. ‘Perfectly understandable.’
He opened his drawer and found a packet of tissues that he pushed across the table.
‘Thank you,’ Mike said.
Rusty knife, Karlsson thought.
Crime of passion, rusty knife, guilt.
32
A foreign country was always a good place to hide your alcoholism. The man assumed that was why all Western men living in exile were so confusingly alike.
Johan Lind was, to be fair, married to an African woman and the proud father of two small children, but the whites of his eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced, his cheeks were puffy and his stomach was tight as a beer barrel, like most white men in the Third World.
Johan Lind started to drink at lunchtime and often stopped by a bar on his way home from work. The bar was a corrugated-iron shack that offered only the local beer and a handful of young women who sat on men’s knees and laughed at their jokes, in return for drinks and tips.
The man guessed that this was how Johan Lind would justify his wayward life. Something evasive like them being poor in Africa, but at least they know how to have fun. Everything wasn’t so damn serious. People had forgotten how to laugh in Sweden.
Something along those lines.
The man couldn’t be certain that Johan Lind was actually of that opinion, as he kept his distance and made
