Until Thy Wrath Be Past Part 2

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 Mns Wenngren.

"Pouring with b.l.o.o.d.y rain in Stockholm," it said. "Bed empty and lonely. Come back. Want to lick your b.r.e.a.s.t.s & hug you. Kiss all your lovely places."

She felt a tingling sensation.

"b.l.o.o.d.y 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 h.e.l.lo.

"h.e.l.lo, 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.

But Bella had vanished into the snow.

"Huh, I expect she'll turn up when she's hungry," he said with a smile. "What about you? I'm going to make some dumplings. There'll be plenty for both of us."

Bella appeared just as they were about to go in, scampering down into the cellar ahead of them. Sivving Fjallborg had moved into his boiler room several years before.

"You can always find what you're looking for, and it's easy to keep tidy," he would say.

The house above was neat and tidy, but was only used when the children and grandchildren came to visit.

The boiler room was spa.r.s.ely furnished.

Nice and cosy, Martinsson thought as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the wooden bench next to the Formica table.

A table, a chair, a stool, a kitchen sofa what more could you want? There was a made-up bed in one corner. Rag rugs on the floor to prevent the chill seeping up.

Fjallborg was standing by the hotplate, wearing an ap.r.o.n that had once belonged to his wife tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His stomach was too big for him to knot it at his back.

Bella had lain down next to the boiler, in order to get dry. There was a smell of wet dog, wet wool, wet concrete.

"Why not have a little rest," Fjallborg said.

Martinsson lay down on the wooden sofa. It was short, but if you piled two cushions under your head and tucked up your knees it was comfortable enough.

Fjallborg cut a dumpling into thick slices. He swirled a large k.n.o.b of b.u.t.ter around the hot frying pan.

Martinsson's mobile pinged again. Another text from Mns.

"You can work some other time. I want to put my arms around your waist and kiss you, lift you up onto the kitchen table and hoist up your skirt."

"Is it from work?" Fjallborg said.

"No, it's from Mns," Martinsson said archly. "He's wondering when you're going to go down to Stockholm and build him a sauna."

"Huh, the idle fool. Tell him to come up here and do some shovelling. All this snow a bit of mild weather is all we need, and it'll be sheer h.e.l.l. Tell him that."

"I will," Martinsson said, and wrote: "Mmm . . . More."

Fjallborg tipped the sliced dumpling into the pan. The fat hissed and spat. Bella raised her head and sniffed happily.

"And me with my gammy arm," Fjallborg said. "Build a b.l.o.o.d.y sauna? You must be joking. No, we should all do what Arvid Backlund has done."

"What has he done?" Martinsson asked.

"If you can tear your eyes away from that thing for one second, I'll tell you."

Martinsson switched off her mobile. She spent far too little time with her neighbour. Now that she was here, the least she could do was give him her full attention.

"He lives on the other side of the creek. He turned eighty-two last week. He worked out how much firewood he was going to need for the rest of his life . . ."

"How can he do that when he doesn't know how much longer he's going to live?"

"Maybe you'd like me to give you a doggy bag so you can eat at home on your own? I'm trying to tell you a story."

"Sorry! Carry on!"

"Anyway, he ordered a load of wood and got them to tip it in through his living-room window. So it's nice and handy. Enough to keep him warm for the winters he has left to him."

"In the living room?"

"A b.l.o.o.d.y big pile in the middle of the floor."

"I bet he hasn't got a wife," Martinsson said.

They shared the joke for a while. Their laughter went some way towards salving Martinsson's guilty conscience over calling on Fjallborg so seldom and his resulting disappointment. Fjallborg's stomach wobbled beneath his ap.r.o.n. Martinsson had a coughing fit.

Then Fjallborg changed tack completely, becoming fretful.

"Not that there's anything wrong in that," he said in Arvid Backlund's defence.

Martinsson stopped laughing.

"At least he can manage at home on his own now," Fjallborg said vehemently. "Of course he could have his firewood in the woodshed like everyone else. Then go out there one morning, slip and break his leg. At his age. You never come home from hospital when you're that old. You just get shoved off into a nursing home. It's easy to laugh when you're young and healthy."

He slammed the cast-iron pan with the fried dumpling onto the table.

"Time to eat!"

They put lumps of b.u.t.ter and heaps of lingonberry preserve and fried pork on their plates. Piled the b.u.t.ter and preserve and meat onto the slices of dumpling. Ate without talking.

He's scared, Martinsson thought.

She would have liked to tell him. Explain that she was never going to move back to Stockholm. Promise to clear the snow from around his house and do his shopping for him when the time came.

I'll look after you, she thought, watching him as he drank from his gla.s.s of milk, taking big gulps.

Just like he looked after my farmor, she thought as she cut into her dumpling and the knife made squeaking noises against the plate. When I had moved away and left her. He shovelled snow for her and kept her company. Even though she grew anxious towards the end and nagged at him all the time. Even though she kept complaining about the way he cleared the snow. I want to be the kind of person who looks after someone else. That is who I want to be.

"I had a h.e.l.l of a case last Friday," she said.

Fjallborg didn't react. He ate his dumpling and drank his milk as if he had not heard, still in a bad mood.

"It was s.e.xual a.s.sault," she said, disregarding the lack of response. "The accused had rung two officials at the Employment Office and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed during the conversations. One of the ladies was fifty and the other over sixty, and they were terrified they might actually meet him. They thought that if he found out what they looked like, he would jump them and rape them if they happened to encounter him at the supermarket. So I asked for the ladies to be questioned without the accused being present."

"What does that mean?" Fjallborg said, annoyed that he needed to ask but too curious not to.

"He was put in a neighbouring room so that he could listen to what they said without being able to see them. My G.o.d, but those poor dears found it incredibly difficult to describe what had happened. I had to push them quite hard in order to clarify the s.e.xual nature of the complaint. Among other things I asked them what made them think that he was masturbating."

Martinsson paused to put a large piece of dumpling into her mouth. She chewed away at it, seemingly in no hurry. Fjallborg had stopped eating altogether and was waiting for her to go on.

"And?" he said impatiently.

"They said they had heard rhythmic slapping noises, and at the same time he was panting heavily. One of the old dears said he had e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, so then of course I had to ask her what had made her think so. She replied that he had started breathing even more heavily and that the rhythmic slapping noises had grown more and more intense, then he had groaned loudly and said, 'Yeesss, that's it!' Poor things. And all the while Ha.s.se Sternlund from the local paper was sitting there taking notes his pen was practically on fire. That didn't make matters any easier."

Fjallborg stopped being irritable and started chuckling.

"The accused was a shifty, greasy individual in his thirties," Martinsson said. "He already had several convictions for s.e.xual a.s.sault. But he always denied everything and claimed that he suffered from asthma what the ladies at the Employment Office had heard was him having an asthma attack, not masturbating. At that point the defence counsel asked the accused to demonstrate what it sounded like when he had an asthma attack. You should have seen the judge and the jury. Their faces were twitching, and the judge pretended to have a coughing fit. They were all desperately trying not to burst out laughing; the situation was utterly absurd. The man refused, thank goodness. The defence counsel told me afterwards that the only reason he asked his client to demonstrate an asthma attack was to see if he could knock me off balance. I had been so cold and clinical while interrogating both the plaintiffs and the accused. Whenever he rings me now about anything to do with work, he always starts breathing heavily and asks, 'Is that the Employment Office?'"

"Was he convicted, then, the slimy man?" Fjallborg said, deliberately dropping some pieces of meat on the floor. Bella slurped them up in a trice.

Martinsson laughed.

"Of course. I mean, who'd want a job like mine? Those poor women you try imitating the sound of someone having a w.a.n.k!"

"No fear! I'd rather be sent to prison."

Fjallborg laughed. Martinsson felt happier. At the same time she was thinking about the older of the two plaintiffs. She had screwed up her eyes and stared at Martinsson. They had been sitting in the prosecutor's office before the trial. The woman's voice was rough and shrill, tainted by smoking and alcohol. Her lipstick had bled into the wrinkles above her upper lip. A thick layer of powder covered her open pores, the colour quite lifeless. "This is all I need," she had said, pursing her lips. And she had told Martinsson how she was bullied at work. That one of her colleagues had invited everyone to a party everyone except her, that is. "They're whispering behind my back all the time, just because at last year's party I might have had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep on the terrace. They're still going on about that. And they lie about me to the boss. I hate the whole d.a.m.ned lot of them. I ought to take them to court."

Martinsson had felt completely exhausted after her meeting with the woman. Drained and depressed. Found herself thinking about her mother. If only she had not died so young. Would her voice have become like that woman's at the end?

Fjallborg interrupted her thoughts.

"You seem to have a pretty exciting job, at least."

"Oh, I don't know. There's nothing happening at the moment. Drink driving and domestic violence all day every day."

It is still snowing when she walks home. But it is calmer now. The flakes are not hurtling down like they were, but drifting, dancing attractively. The kind of snowfall that makes you feel happy. Big flakes melting on her cheeks.

Although it's quite late, it is not dark. The nights are getting lighter. The sky is grey, covered in snow clouds. Buildings and trees are blurred at the edges. As if they had been painted on wet water-colour paper.

She has reached the porch. She pauses, raises her hands, palms facing downwards. Snow stars land on her gloves and lie there, sparkling.

Without warning Martinsson is overcome by a feeling of pure, white happiness. It flows through her body like wind blowing down a mountain valley. Power surges up from the ground. Through her body and into her hands. She stands absolutely still. Dares not move for fear of frightening the moment away.

She is at one with it all. With the snow, with the sky. With the river as it flows along, hidden beneath the ice. With Sivving, with the villagers. With everything. Everyone.