‘Well,’ Sophia said, ‘if there wasn’t anything else…’
‘My surname’s Grenborg too,’ Annika said. ‘Do you think we could be related?’
The laughter was less hearty this time. ‘Hmm, what did you say your name was?’
‘Sara,’ Annika said. ‘Sara Grenborg.’
‘Which branch of the family?’
Was she imagining things, or had Sophia’s accent got a bit posher?
‘Sodermanland,’ Annika said.
‘We’re from Osterbotten, from the Vase manor-house. Are you descended from Carl-Johan?’
‘No,’ Annika said. ‘From Sofia Katarina.’
All of a sudden she could no longer be bothered to listen to Sophia La-di-da bloody Grenborg, and she hung up in the middle of a word.
She sat in silence and waited for her pulse to stop racing, resting a hand against Sophia Grenborg’s front door, gradually absorbing the woman into her bloodstream.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the cold staircase, listened to her voice, saw her sitting doing her lovely work in her lovely Federation, just loving the articles in
She left the building without looking back.
37
The man woke up with the pink duvet cover tickling his nose. He snorted, then groaned as the pain from his stomach reached his head. The wooden panels in the ceiling swayed slowly to and fro, he looked away and stared into the boarded walls, shocked at how bad his breath smelled. The smell was taking him over.
He could see the doctor’s face floating above him, as it had the day he woke up from the anaesthetic, his friend’s clenched jaw and evasive gaze; he had already been informed about the consequences and alternatives and understood immediately.
Inoperable, untreatable. Three to six months from the diagnosis. The remaining time would entail a lot of pain, sickness, digestive trouble, weight loss, severe nausea, extreme tiredness, low blood pressure. Treatment consisted of anti-sickness medicine, painkillers and nutritional supplements.
He knew he would fade, almost rot, away. The smell would become more intrusive, his friend the doctor had advised him not to try to hide it with scent or aftershave. It wouldn’t help.
He gazed around the room, looking over the kitchen area in the corner and the panels on the walls and the colourful rugs on the plastic floor, trying to find something that wasn’t moving. He stopped at the window. Through the gap in the heavy curtains he could see blue daylight, cold, crisp. Gradually the world stopped swaying and he was able to breathe more easily, sliding into his dreamlike state where the limitations of reality were gradually wiped away.
‘I’m from Bojen Sailing Club; I’d like to book a seminar room from seven p.m. on Tuesday,’ he heard himself say with a peculiar echo in the background. In front of him the librarian had big books open on the desk. He knew she no longer believed him, because he couldn’t possibly be a sailor and a fly-fisherman, a butterfly collector and a genealogist.
Everyone who came to the meeting had a codename, regular names like Greger or Torsten or Mats. His choice of Ragnwald was met with frowns. You shouldn’t give yourself airs; but he was better than them and they knew that.
He laughed quietly in his in-between-world, returned to the old works that fever-hot night in early summer 1969 when the world was on the brink of the great revolution and they were ready. They had prepared for armed struggle and had guards patrolling the camp day and night. The company carved cudgels by the campfire, they discussed guerrilla warfare and practised self-defence.
In Norway the antagonism between left-wing activists and the others had been much greater than in Sweden. A radical bookshop had been bombed. They were convinced that it would soon be their turn, and they weren’t about to let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.
The fact that they were doing their training in Melderstein was particularly amusing, because the regime at the old works was religious. But because he had booked it as a parish assistant in Lulea no one had questioned his motives, and they had held thundering Maoist meetings in the little works church.
He was filled with the complete sense of harmony he had experienced in those few days, reliving once again how his capacity to remember all the quotations had given him a central position in the leadership, even though the delegates had come from all over the country. They practised battle skills and survival through the night, and it was there that he met Red Wolf.
He smiled at the ceiling, drifting off on the waves, seeing before him her soft face and thin little body. She was so young and so wide-eyed and she saw him as a Master. No one else had his experience of the Rebel movement and the Student Union occupation. He was secure on his throne, and even though little Red Wolf had only come to keep her friend company at the summer camp without realizing what it was about, she was swept up in it. She became a Servant of the Revolution quicker than he had dared hope, and she did it for his sake.
Karina who kissed him behind Melderstein church. He could still recall the taste of her chewing-gum.
He turned over in the bed.
In Bojen Sailing Club they had formed cells where they decided where people would live and work: a flat in Ornnaset and the nightshift at the ironworks; a small cottage in Svartostaden and work with the local council. They had organized strikes, worked through tenants’ associations, unions, according to Mao’s political theory about the people’s front, the people’s movements, but it was all going too slowly. They spent too long discussing things; the Fly-fishing Club was full of false authorities who loved the sound of their own voices. The movement’s popularity brought with it a load of pretend revolutionaries who only came for the girls and the beer. After Melderstein the mood became rancorous. Two comrades challenged him for the leadership, with the support of others, so he took his family and left. He left bourgeois, small-town communism to die its slow, natural death, and formed his own group to plan how to get hold of real power.
The knife in his stomach twisted again. Ventricular cancer, stomach cancer, apparently rare in Europe these days, strikes without warning. Operation to see if it’s treatable or not. Symptoms similar to those of a gastric ulcer, and a gastroscopy discovers an ugly running sore and a suspected tumour, later identified under a microscope. And the patient is opened up, the surrounding organs are found to be full of cancer, and they close up the stomach again. Tumours in the lungs, bones and brain, gradual death from general organ failure caused by too great a burden of tumours.
Three to six months.
Suddenly his father was standing beside his bed and he was panting hard, bouncing off the walls. I accuse you. I hold you responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve.
And the whip was raised and hit him in the diaphragm, a violent convulsion that made him throw up the nutritional powder onto his pillow. His father’s voice grew louder, filling the room like a symphony of dissonance.
‘You must start your life again, devilish child. Evil art thou, mean and filled with Satan.’
He tried to protest, to beg for mercy, the same song he had sung throughout his childhood: Father, please Father, have mercy; but the whip fell, striking him on the mouth. The pain made him stop breathing for a moment.
‘The Devil shall be driven from thy heart and thy eternal soul shall be saved for the Kingdom of Heaven.’
The whip was raised yet again and he looked up at the man who floated beneath the ceiling in his threadbare preacher’s outfit, and he knew that his salvation would soon be over.
‘Father,’ he whispered, feeling the vomit and blood running through his nose. ‘Mother never had any more children. Do you know why?’
