Hjalmar Krekula takes a sip of coffee. Holds the mug with both hands. Vera scratches demonstratively at his leg: he is not allowed to stop stroking her.
“I didn’t realize that it was her,” he says to Martinsson. “I just didn’t have the strength to think about it. She died there. I stood there.”
“But you’ve thought about her since?”
“Yes,” he says. “A lot.”
“How did she get into the river?”
“Mother said we ought to move her. She didn’t want Wilma’s body to be found there. The aeroplane, you know. People shouldn’t know about that. We pulled her out. We waited for him, but he never came up to the surface.”
Hjalmar closes his eyes. He relives the way they smashed up the door and threw the bits into the hole in the ice.
And we forgot the rucksacks, he thinks. You’re convinced you’re keeping a cool head, but in fact you’re not.
Wiping his face with his hand, he goes on.
“We took the four-wheel-drive into the forest. I was holding her in my lap. That’s when it started to feel unbearable. And that feeling never went away. If only I hadn’t held her in my lap. Then, maybe… I don’t know, I might have been able to forget. We put her in their car, where they’d left it near the track. I drove the car to Tervaskoski. The river still hadn’t frozen there. There was only just enough petrol. Tore drove our mother home. Then he drove our car out to where I was. We carried her as far as the rapids, then threw her in. Hid the car keys in the wheel arch.”
“Your mother,” Martinsson says to Hjalmar. “I believe she sold information to the Germans during the war.”
Hjalmar nods.
That could well be, he thinks. He recalls a dance he and his brother went to when they were teenagers. He remembers a lad about their own age giving them a scornful Hitler salute. The lad’s dad was a Communist. It ended up in one hell of a brawl. They did not stop fighting until someone yelled that the police were on their way.
He remembers his mother shouting from the bedroom when his brother lost his way in the forest: “This is the punishment.”
He remembers his father in the sauna. That was not all that long ago. After Johannes Svarvare had told them he had spoken to Wilma about the aeroplane. After Isak’s heart attack. After the killing.
The mood at home was troubled and the atmosphere heavy with everything that could not be said or referred to. Kerttu was wracked with pain. Worse than ever. She complained loudly about how difficult it was to look after her husband. Even so, he was better then. Last winter. One morning at the beginning of March, he was unable to get out of bed. The doctors said he probably had had a series of small heart attacks during the night. He had to stay in bed. But it was better last winter.
“He smells,” Kerttu says to Hjalmar.
She is sitting at the kitchen table wearing her best coat and shoes and with her handbag on her lap, waiting for Tore’s wife Laura to collect her and drive her into town. Kerttu has a doctor’s appointment. Such occasions are the only times she ever leaves the village, when she has to go to the doctors’s, as she puts it. With an extra
It is clear why she has become aware that her husband smells. She herself has just had a shower and sprayed herself with deodorant and is wearing clean underclothes.
Isak Krekula is out in the village. Walking around despite the serious heart attack he had last autumn. This is something the villagers do now and again – make the rounds. You pay a call on a few other residents, sit in their kitchens, drink coffee and exchange information about the latest goings-on. There are a few other villagers Isak can still visit. Johannes Svarvare, and one or two more. But he no longer talks to most of them. You can fall out with a lot of people during your life. A lot of people no longer want to see him. Business is business, Isak has always said, and there are folk who get angry and feel they have been cheated.
“I can tell you, he’s not easy to get on with, in case you two thought otherwise,” Kerttu says, including the absent Tore in the conversation.
Her voice sounds hard, flat.
“I can handle him, but you’ll have to make sure he cleans himself up. I’ve had more than enough.”
Tore’s wife arrives and sounds the car horn.
Hjalmar sighs. Is he meant to pick a quarrel with his father over this? What is he supposed to do? Tie his father up and hold him under the shower? Go over him with a scrubbing brush?
An hour and a half later, Isak Krekula returns from his rounds. Hjalmar is sitting at the kitchen table.
“I’ve started heating up the sauna,” he says. “Do you want to join me?”
On the table is a six-pack of strong beer.
Isak has no desire to take a sauna. He has been visiting someone who has served up something stronger than coffee, that much is obvious to his son. But Isak eyes the beer with interest.
Hjalmar handles his father skilfully. He does not nag him. Does not ask the same question twice. Gives the impression that it is all the same to him – in no circumstances must Isak catch on to the fact that Hjalmar has been set the task of making sure his father has a bath. Isak stands in the doorway and says nothing. Hjalmar picks up the beer and a towel – only one. Isak lets him pass. Hjalmar makes his way down to the sauna.
He puts the beers in a bucket full of snow, to keep them cold. He gives himself a good wash, then sits down in the sauna and pours water over the hot stones. There is a hissing and a spluttering, and the hot steam rises to the top bench, where he is sitting. His skin feels burning hot. He tries to ignore the fact that his stomach is resting on his thighs – it is disturbing to realize how fat he has become.
Instead, he thinks about how it has become obvious that the house is now the home of two elderly people. In the old days, whenever you started up the sauna there was always a dry smell of pine wood, Russian soap and the fire in the stove. Now when he pours water onto the stones, there is a smell of ingrained dirt – it is a long time since the benches were last given a good scrubbing.
He has almost forgotten his father when he hears the outside door slam. Bending over, he fishes a beer out of the bucket.
Isak comes in and clambers up to the top bench. Hjalmar hands his father a beer, which he swigs rapidly. Then takes another swallow.
There is not much of him left, Hjalmar thinks. A frail old body, thinning hair that is far too long, coarse skin covered in the pock-marks and blotches typical of old age. It does not seem very long since muscles rippled when Isak rolled up his sleeves, or since he could lift the tailboard on one of his lorries without assistance.
Wrath, Hjalmar thinks. Isak’s anger is just as strong as it ever was. It provides the backbone that keeps him upright. The anger he feels, knowing that the other villagers are whispering behind his back, the bastards, half of whom would’ve been unemployed if it hadn’t been for his haulage business; the anger directed at the tax authorities, those damned bloodsuckers, desk-bound wimps who have no idea what life is all about; the anger directed at local politicians, at insurance companies, at company directors, at the jerks in Stockholm, at the evening tabloids, at celebs (junkies, the lot of ’em), at the unemployed and shirkers on benefits – idle swine who malinger and cheat and live off the hard work of others; at everything he sees on the television – news bulletins, game shows, docu-soaps, why the hell should he pay for a licence to watch shit like that?; at whoever is responsible for the fruit in the supermarket at Skaulo, a pile of rotting crap surrounded by swarms of fucking fruit flies; at immigrants and gypsies; at academics – a gang of presumptuous poseurs with ramrods shoved up their arseholes.
At Hjalmar. When Hjalmar passed his thirteenth birthday, his father stopped
