The woman who’d spoken to Sven-Erik answered.
“Yes, the tall man wanted the wolf foundation’s accounts.”
Stefan went rigid.
“But you didn’t give them to him? They’ve no right to…”
“Of course I did! There’s nothing secret in them, is there?”
She looked at him sharply. He could feel the others’ eyes on him as well. He turned on his heel and went quickly back into his room.
The parish priest could say what he liked. Stefan needed to speak to him now. He rang Bertil on his cell phone.
Bertil was in his car. His voice broke up from time to time.
Stefan told him the police had been there. And that they’d taken the foundation’s accounts away with them.
Bertil didn’t seem particularly bothered. Stefan said that as they were both on the board of the foundation, nothing that was actually illegal had taken place, but even so.
“If this gets out you know how it’ll sound. They’ll have us down as embezzlers.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said the parish priest calmly. “Look, I’ve got to park, talk to you later.”
From his calm tone, Stefan understood that Bertil wouldn’t stand by him if the trip to the USA came out. He would never admit that they’d both talked it over and agreed. “There’s plenty of money just lying there in the foundation’s account,” Bertil himself had said. And they’d discussed some kind of developmental trip. They were on the board of a nature conservancy foundation, but knew nothing about wolves. And so it had been decided that Stefan would take a trip to Yellowstone. And somehow Kristin and the younger boys had ended up going too, that’s how he’d got them back from Katrineholm.
It was understood that neither of them was going to tell Mildred that the money came from the foundation. But of course somebody in the office had to go running to her with the story.
She’d confronted him when he got back from the trip. He’d calmly explained the necessity of having someone on the board with some degree of knowledge. He was the most appropriate person, as a hunter and somebody who knew the ways of the forest. He could gain a respect and understanding that Mildred would never achieve if she tried for a thousand years.
He’d been expecting an outburst of rage. Some small hidden part of him was almost looking forward to it. Anticipating with pleasure the red evidence of her loss of control against the deep blue background of his own assured calm.
Instead she had leaned against his desk. Heavily, in a way that made him think for a moment that she might have some secret illness, something to do with her kidneys or her heart. She’d turned her face toward him. White beneath the early spring suntan. The eyes two black circles. An absurd cuddly toy with button eyes that’s come alive and begun to speak, and is suddenly very frightening.
“When I speak to the church council about the hunting permit at the end of the year, you’re to lie low, do you understand?” she said. “Otherwise we’ll let the police sort out whether this was right or wrong.”
He’d tried to say that she was making herself look ridiculous.
“Your choice,” she said. “I’ve no intention of pandering to you forever.”
He’d gazed at her in amazement. When had she pandered to him? She was like a bundle of nettles.
Stefan thought about the parish priest. He thought about his wife. He thought about Mildred. He thought about the looks the office staff had given him. Suddenly it felt as if he’d lost control of his breathing. He was panting like a dog in a car. He must try to calm down.
I can get out of this, he thought. What’s the matter with me?
Even when he was a boy he’d gravitated toward companions who oppressed and exploited him. He had to run errands and give them his sweets. Later on he had to slash tires and throw stones to prove the priest’s son wasn’t a coward. And now he’s an adult seeking out people and situations where he ends up being treated like dirt.
He reached for the telephone. Just one call.
Lisa Stockel is sitting on the steps of her gingerbread house. The drugged-up pastry-chef’s tour de force, as Mimmi calls it. She’ll be going down to the bar soon. She eats there every day now. Mimmi doesn’t seem to think it’s strange. In her kitchen Lisa now has only a bowl, a spoon and a tin opener for the dog food. The dogs are wandering about outside by the fence. Sniffing and pissing on the currant bushes. She almost thinks they look slightly quizzical when she doesn’t shout at them.
Piss wherever you want, she thinks with a half-smile.
The hardness of the human heart is a remarkable thing. It’s like the soles of your feet in summer. You can walk on pinecones and on gravel. But if the heel cracks, it goes deep.
Hardness has always been her strength. Now it’s her weakness. She tries to find the words to say to Mimmi, but it’s hopeless. Everything that needs saying should have been said long ago, and now it’s too late.
And what would she have said then? The truth? Hardly. She remembers when Mimmi was sixteen. She and Tommy had already been divorced for many years. He drank his way through the weekends. It was lucky he was such a good tiler. As long as he had a job, he stuck to beer from Monday to Thursday. Mimmi was worried. Obviously. Thought Lisa ought to talk to him. Asked: “Don’t you care about Daddy?” Lisa had answered yes. It was a lie. And she was the one who’d decided there was to be no more lying. But Mimmi was Mimmi. Lisa didn’t give a shit about Tommy. Another time, Mimmi had asked: “Why did you actually marry Daddy?” Lisa had realized she didn’t have a clue. It was a staggering discovery. She hadn’t managed to remember what she’d thought or felt during the time when they started going out, went to bed together, got engaged, when he put his ring on her finger. And then Mimmi came along. She’d been such a wonderful child. And at the same time the bond that would always link Lisa with Tommy. She’d worried about her maternal instinct. How is a mother supposed to feel about her child? She didn’t know. “I could die for her,” she’d sometimes thought as she stood watching Mimmi sleep. But it meant nothing. It was like promising people trips abroad if you won millions on the lottery. Easier to die for your child in theory than to sit and read to them for quarter of an hour. The sleeping child made her feel sick with longing and pangs of conscience. But when Mimmi was awake, with her small hands grabbing at Lisa’s face and up her sleeves searching for skin and closeness, it made Lisa’s flesh crawl.
Getting out of the marriage had felt like an impossible task. And when she finally did it, she was surprised at how easy it was. All she had to do was pack and move out. The tears and the screaming were like oil on water.
Things are never complicated with the dogs. They don’t care about her awkwardness. They are totally honest and relentlessly cheerful.
Like Nalle. Lisa has to smile when she thinks of him. She can see it in his new friend Rebecka Martinsson. When Lisa saw her for the first time last Tuesday evening, she was wearing that calf-length coat and the shiny scarf, definitely real silk. A stuck-up top-notch secretary, or whatever she was. And there was something about her, a microsecond’s hesitation perhaps. As if she always had to think before she spoke, made a gesture or even smiled. Nalle doesn’t bother about things like that. He goes marching into people’s hearts without taking his shoes off. One day with Nalle, and Rebecka Martinsson was walking around in an anorak from the seventies, her hair tied back with a rubber band, the sort that pulls out half your hair when you take it off.
And he doesn’t know how to lie. Every other Thursday Mimmi serves afternoon tea at the bar. It’s become one of those events that the ladies from town travel out to Poikkijarvi for. Freshly baked scones with jam, a wide variety of cakes. The previous Thursday Mimmi had shouted angrily: “Who’s taken a bite out of my cakes?” Nalle, who’d been sitting there having a snack of a sandwich and a glass of milk, had immediately shot his hand up in the air and confessed: “Me!”
Blessed Nalle, thinks Lisa.
The very words Mildred used a thousand times.
Mildred. When Lisa’s hardness cracked, Mildred poured in. Lisa was totally contaminated.
It’s only three months since they lay on the kitchen sofa. They often ended up there, because the dogs had taken over the beds, and Mildred used to beg “don’t push them off, can’t you see how cozy they are?”
Mildred is always really busy at the beginning of June. End of term services in schools, confirmations, playgroups breaking up for the summer, church youth groups finishing off and lots of weddings. Lisa is lying on her left side, leaning on her elbow. She is holding a cigarette in her right hand. Mildred is asleep, or she might be awake, or more likely somewhere in between the two. Her back is covered in hairs, a soft down all along the length
