Until Thy Wrath Be Past

not function properly in the cold water. Then he managed to get hold of an arm. Pulled at it.

An arm, he thought impassively.

His mind was unwilling to understand.

An arm.

Then a battered face floated into view in the water hole.

Marjavaara cried out and leapt to his feet.

A raven answered from the forest. Its call sliced through the silence. Several crows joined in the chorus.

Marjavaara ran back to the cottage, slipping but regaining his balance.

He rang the emergency number. Then it occurred to him that he had drunk three glasses of water with his dinner yesterday. And coffee after the meal. He had fetched the water from the river. From the hole in the ice. And the dead body had been lying there. Right next to it, no doubt. That white, battered face. A gash where the nose had been. Teeth in a mouth with no lips.

Someone answered the phone, but he cut them off and vomited on the spot. His body spat out everything in it, kept on spitting long after there was nothing left.

Then he dialled the emergency number again.

Never again would he drink water from the river. And it would be years before he would even go for a swim after his sauna.

I’m looking at the man who found me. He’s throwing up. He rings the emergency number and vows never to drink water from the river again.

I’m thinking about the day I died.

We were dead, Simon and I. I was standing on the ice. It was evening. The sun was lower now. The door was smashed, floating in the hole in the ice. I could see that it was green on one side and black on the other.

On the riverbank, a man was rummaging in our rucksacks.

A raven flew past. It was calling in its characteristic way, sounding like a stick being hit against an empty oil drum. It landed on the ice, right next to me. Turned its head away and looked at me in the way birds do. From the side.

I must go home to Anni, I thought.

And even before I’d finished thinking, I was back at Anni’s house.

The transition made me dizzy. Like when you step off a carousel.

I’ve got used to it now.

Anni was whisking pancake batter. Sitting on a chair by the kitchen table, whisking.

I like pancakes.

She didn’t know I was dead. She was whisking away, thinking about me. She was looking forward to seeing me sitting at the table and tucking into the pancakes while she stood at the stove, cooking them. She placed a plate over the bowl containing the pancake mixture and put in to one side. But I never came. The bowl of batter went into the fridge. She couldn’t let it go to waste, so in the end she cooked the pancakes and froze them. They’re still in the freezer.

Now they’ve found me. Now she can cry.

Snow, thought District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, shivering with pleasure as she got out of her car at the house in Kurravaara.

It was 7.00 in the evening. Snow clouds enveloped the village in a pleasant, dusky haze. Martinsson could barely make out the lights from the neighbouring houses. And the snow was not just falling. Oh no, it was hurtling down. Cold, dry, fluffy flakes cascaded from the sky, as if someone up there were sweeping them down, doing the housework.

Farmor, my grandmother, of course, Martinsson thought with a trace of a smile. She must always be on the go, scrubbing the good Lord’s floor, dusting, hard at work. I expect she’s sent Him out to stand in the porch.

Her farmor’s house, faced with grey cement-fibre panels, known in this part of the world by their trade name, Eternit, seemed to be hiding itself in the gloom. It appeared to have taken the opportunity to have a nap. Only the outside light above the green-painted steps whispered quietly: Welcome home, my girl.

Her mobile pinged. She took it out of her pocket. A text from Mans Wenngren.

“Pouring with bloody rain in Stockholm,” it said. “Bed empty and lonely. Come back. Want to lick your breasts & hug you. Kiss all your lovely places.”

She felt a tingling sensation.

“Bloody man,” she keyed in. “I have to work tonight. Not think about you.”

She smiled. He was great. She missed him, enjoyed his company. A few years ago she had been working for him at Meijer & Ditzinger in Stockholm. He thought she should move back there and start working as a solicitor again.

“You’d earn three times as much as you’re getting now,” he would say.

She looked over towards the river. Last summer he had knelt with her on the jetty, giving all of her farmor’s rag rugs a good scrubbing. They had sweated in the sunshine. Salty rivulets had trickled down their backs and from their brows into their eyes. When they had finished scrubbing they had dipped the rugs into the water to rinse them. Then they had stripped off and swum naked with the rugs, like excited dogs.

She tried to explain to him that this was how she wanted to live.

“I want to stand out here re-puttying the windows, glancing out over the river from time to time. I want to drink coffee on my porch before going to work on summer mornings. I want to dig my car out of the snow in winter. I want frost patterns on my kitchen windows.”

“But you can have all that,” he tried to persuade her. “We can come up to Kiruna as often as you want.”

But it would not be the same. She knew that. The house would never allow itself to be deceived. Nor would the river.

I need all this, she thought. I am so many difficult people. The little three-year- old, starved of love; the ice-cold lawyer; the lone wolf; and the person who longs to do crazy things again, who longs to escape into craziness. It is good to feel small beneath the sparkling Northern Lights, small beside the mighty river. Nature and the universe are so close to us up here. My troubles and difficulties just shrivel up. I like being insignificant.

I like living up here with lining paper on the shelves and spiders in the corners, and a besom to sweep the floor with, she thought. I don’t want to be a guest and a stranger. Never again.

A German pointer came galloping along at full speed through the snow. Her ears were flapping at right angles to her head, and her mouth was open wide as if she were smiling. She slid along on the ice beneath the snow as she tried to stop and say hello.

“Hello, Bella!” Martinsson said, her arms full of dog. “Where’s the boss?”

Now she could hear furious shouting.

“Heel, I said! Heel! Are you deaf?”

“She’s here,” Martinsson shouted back.

Sivving Fjallborg gradually materialized through the falling snow. He was jogging along tentatively, afraid of falling. His weaker side was lagging slightly, his arm hanging down. His curly white hair was hidden under a green-and-white knitted hat. The hat was wearing its own little cap of snow. Martinsson did her best to suppress a smile. He looked magnificent. He was big anyway, but he was wearing a red padded jacket that made him look enormous. And everything was crowned by that little cap of snow.

“Where?” he puffed.