And added: I cannot feel that thy yoke is gentle, thy burden light.
They’ve arrived, and get out of the car. He is given the chain to carry. Lars-Gunnar tells him to walk in front.
He sets off along the path in the moonlight.
Mildred is walking behind him. He can feel it. He’s reached the lake. Drops the chain on the ground. Looks at it.
Mildred climbs into his ear.
Run! she says inside his head. Run!
But he can’t run. He just stands there waiting. Hears Lars-Gunnar coming. Slowly he takes shape in the moonlight. And yes, he is carrying his gun.
Lars-Gunnar looks down at Rebecka Martinsson. After the trip down the stairs she’s stopped shaking. But she’s still conscious. Staring at him all the time.
Rebecka Martinsson looks up at the man. She’s seen this image before. The man who is an eclipse of the sun. The face in shadow. The sun coming in through the kitchen window. Like a corona around his head. It’s Pastor Thomas Soderberg. He is saying: I loved you like my own daughter. Soon she will smash his head.
When the man bends down over her she grabs hold of him. Well, grabs hold is putting it a bit strongly; the forefinger and middle finger of her right hand creep in under the neck band of his sweater. Only the weight of the hand itself draws him closer.
“How can a person live with that?”
He detaches her fingers from his sweater.
Live with what? he wonders. Stefan Wikstrom? He felt a greater sorrow that time when he shot a female elk over in Paksuniemi. That was over twenty years ago. The second after she fell, two calves emerged from the trees. Then they disappeared into the forest. He thought about his mistake for a long time. First the female. And then the fact that he hadn’t reacted in time and shot the calves as well. They must have faced an agonizing death.
He opens the trapdoor in the kitchen that leads down to the cellar. Grabs hold of her and drags her toward the hole.
Nalle’s hand is knocking on the kitchen window. His uncomprehending gaze between the plastic pelargoniums.
And now the woman comes to life. When she sees the hole in the floor. She begins to wriggle in his grasp. Grabs the leg of the kitchen table, the whole table is dragged along with her.
“Let go,” he says, unclasping her fingers.
She scratches his face. Writhing and lashing out. A silent, jerky struggle.
He lifts her by the collar. Her feet leave the floor. Not a word comes out of her mouth. The scream is in her eyes: No! No!
He hurls her down like a bag of garbage. She falls backwards. A thud and a bang, then silence. He lets the trapdoor fall shut. Then he gets hold of the cupboard that stands over by the southern wall and drags it over the trapdoor with both hands. It weighs a ton, but he has the strength.
She opens her eyes. It takes a while for her to realize that she’d lost consciousness for a little while. But she can’t have been out for long. A few seconds. She can hear Lars-Gunnar dragging something heavy over the trapdoor.
Her eyes are wide open, and she can’t see a thing. Pitch dark. She can hear the footsteps and the dragging noise up above. Up onto her knees. Her right arm is dangling uselessly. Instinctively she places her left hand over her right arm at shoulder level and pulls the arm back into joint. It makes a crunching sound. A bolt of pain shoots from her shoulder down her arm and her back. Everything hurts. Apart from her face. She can’t feel anything there at all. She touches it with her hand. It’s somehow numb. And something is hanging off, loose and wet. Is it her lip? When she swallows she can taste blood.
Down on all fours. Earth beneath her hands. The dampness soaks through the knees of her jeans. It stinks of rat shit.
If she dies here. Then the rats will eat her.
She begins to crawl. Gropes ahead of her with her hand, looking for the staircase. Sticky cobwebs everywhere, winding themselves around the hand as it fumbles its way. Something rustles in the corner. There’s the staircase. She’s on her knees, with her hands resting on a step a bit higher up. Like a dog, up on its hind legs. She listens. And waits.
Lars-Gunnar has dragged the cupboard into place. He wipes his brow with the back of his hand.
Nalle’s “What?” has stopped. Lars-Gunnar looks out of the window. Nalle is out in the yard, walking round in a circle. Lars-Gunnar recognizes the signs. Whenever Nalle is unhappy and afraid, he starts walking around like that. It can take half an hour to calm him down. It’s as if he loses the ability to hear. The first time it happened, Lars- Gunnar felt so frustrated and powerless that he hit him in the end. The blow still burns inside him. He remembers looking at his hand, the one that had delivered the blow, and thinking about his own father. And it didn’t make Nalle any better. Just worse. Now he knows you have to have patience. And time.
If only there were time.
He goes out into the yard. Tries, although he knows it won’t work:
“Nalle!”
But Nalle doesn’t hear anything. Round and round he goes.
Lars-Gunnar has thought about this moment a thousand times. But in his thoughts Nalle has been sleeping peacefully. He and Lars-Gunnar have had a wonderful day. Maybe they’ve been in the forest. Or been on the river on the snow scooter. Lars-Gunnar has sat by Nalle’s bed for a while. Nalle has fallen asleep, and then…
This is too much. It couldn’t be any bloody worse than this. He runs his hand over his cheek. It seems as if he’s crying.
And he sees Mildred in front of him. He’s been on his way to this point ever since then. He realizes that now. The first blow. At the time he was full of rage toward her. But afterward. Afterward it was his own life he smashed to bits. Hung it up for everyone to see.
To the car. The rifle is there. It’s loaded. It has been all summer. He releases the safety catch.
“Nalle,” he says thickly.
He still wants to say good-bye. He would have liked to have done that.
“Nalle,” he says to his big lad.
Now. Before it gets to the point where he can’t hold the gun. He can’t be sitting here when they arrive. Can’t let them take Nalle away.
He raises the gun to his shoulder. Takes aim. Fires. The first bullet in the back. Nalle falls forward. The second bullet in the head.
Then he goes in.
What he’d like to do most of all is to open the trapdoor and kill her. What is she? Nothing.
But the way he feels at the moment, he hasn’t the strength to shift the cupboard.
He slumps down on the kitchen sofa.
Then he gets up. Opens the door of the wall clock and stops the pendulum with his hand.
Sits down again.
The barrel in his mouth. It’s been torture for as long as he can remember. This will be a relief. It will be over at
