The Crow Girl (70 page)

But if she’s going to be able to smile she needs wine, she thinks, and takes a swig from the bottle.

She can feel herself crying, but it’s only wetness on her cheek and she carefully wipes it away with the ball of her thumb. Mustn’t damage the surface.

Suddenly the phone rings from her jacket pocket, and she weaves out into the hall.

She sees it’s Jeanette, presses reject and then switches the phone off. She goes into the living room and sits down heavily on the sofa. She starts reading a magazine she finds on the table, and leafs through to the centrefold.

So much time has passed, and still the same life, the same necessity.

A colourful picture of an octagonal tower.

She squints through the drink, focuses her gaze and sees that it’s a pagoda next to a Buddhist temple. The article is about a guided tour to Wuhan, provincial capital of Hubei, on the eastern side of the Yangtze River.

Wuhan.

Alongside is an article about Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize winner, and a big picture of his novel
One Man’s Bible
.

Gao.

She puts the magazine down and goes over to the bookcase. Carefully she pulls out a book with a worn leather binding.

Eight Treatises on the Nurturing of Life
, from 1591, by Gao Lian.

She sees the catch holding the bookcase in place.

Gao Lian.

Gao Lian from Wuhan.

First she hesitates, then slowly lifts the catch, and with a tiny, scarcely audible creak the door slides open.

BELLA VITA. GOOD
life.

It could have been different. It could have been fine.

Could have been good.

If only he’d been different. If only he’d been good.

Just been good.

Drawings everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of childish, naive drawings scattered across the floor or stuck to the walls.

All of them very detailed, but done by a child.

She sees the house in Grisslinge, before and after the fire, and there’s the cottage in Dala-Floda.

A bird in a nest with its chicks, before and after Victoria attacked it with a stick.

A little girl by a lighthouse. Madeleine, her little girl, taken from her.

She remembers the afternoon she told Bengt she was pregnant.

Bengt had flown up from his armchair, with a look of terror. He had rushed over to her and screamed, ‘Get up!’

He had grabbed her arms and dragged her from the sofa.

‘Jump, for God’s sake!’

They had stood facing each other, with him panting in her face. The smell of garlic.

‘Jump!’ he had repeated. She recalls shaking her head. Never, she had thought. You can’t make me.

She remembers him crying after he sat down in his armchair again and turned his back on her.

She looks around the room she has used as a place of refuge. Among all the drawings and scraps of paper on the walls she sees a newspaper article about Chinese refugee children arriving at Arlanda with fake passports, a mobile phone and fifty American dollars. And how they then go missing. Hundreds of them, every year.

A sidebar of facts about the
hukou
system.

In one corner the exercise bike she’s been using. Cycling for hours, then anointing herself with fragrant oils.

She remembers how Bengt had grabbed her hand and squeezed it. ‘Up onto the table!’ he had sobbed, without looking at her. ‘Up onto the table, for God’s sake!’

It had felt like she was inside a different body as she finally climbed onto the table and turned to face him.

‘Jump …’

She had jumped. Climbed up onto the table and jumped again. And again. And again.

She had carried on jumping until the African girl had come down the stairs. She was wearing the mask. Her face was cold and expressionless. Empty, black eye sockets with nothing behind them.

It didn’t die, Sofia thinks.

Madeleine is alive.

THE NEXT MORNING
Jeanette drives straight to Midsommarkransen to visit the older Sofia Zetterlund. She eventually finds a free parking space close to the metro station and switches off the engine of her old Audi.

The nursing home that is Sofia Zetterlund’s registered address is located in one of the yellow modernist blocks near Svandammsparken.

Jeanette has always liked the districts of Aspudden and Midsommarkransen, built in the 1930s as small towns within the city. Not a bad place to spend your final years, she thinks.

But she also knows that there are cracks below the idyllic surface. Until just a few years ago the Bandidos motorcycle gang was based just a few blocks away.

She smokes a cigarette before she goes in, thinking about Sofia Zetterlund the younger.

Is it because of Sofia that she’s started smoking so much? She’s now up to something like a pack a day, and has caught herself trying to conceal the fact from Johan on several occasions, like a naughty teenager. But the nicotine makes her think better. Freer, faster. And now she’s thinking about Sofia Zetterlund, the Sofia she might be falling in love with.

Or is it just a temporary feeling, no more than a childish infatuation after a kiss? A passing fancy?

Anyway, what does being in love really mean?

She once discussed the subject with Sofia, and was confronted with an entirely new way of looking at it. For Sofia, being in love wasn’t something mysterious or pleasant. She said it was the same as being psychotic. The object of love is just an idealised image that doesn’t match reality, and the person in love is merely infatuated with the feeling of being in love. Sofia had compared it to the way a child might ascribe feelings to a pet that it couldn’t really have.

She stubs out the cigarette and rings the bell of the Sunflower Nursing Home.

Now for Sofia the elder.

After a short conversation with the manager she is shown to the dayroom.

At the far end of the room, by the balcony door, sits a woman in a wheelchair, staring out through the window.

She’s very thin, and dressed in a long blue dress that reaches all the way to the tips of her toes. Her hair is completely white, and reaches to her waist. She’s wearing garish make-up, blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick.

‘Sofia?’ The manager goes over to the woman in the wheelchair and puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ve got a visitor. It’s a Jeanette Kihlberg from the Stockholm police, and she’d like to talk to you about one of your old patients.’

‘They’re clients.’ The old woman’s reply is rapid, and not without a hint of contempt.

Jeanette pulls up a chair and sits down beside Sofia Zetterlund.

She introduces herself and explains why she’s come, but the old woman doesn’t deign to look at her.

‘Well, as you know, I’m here to ask a few questions about one of your old clients,’ Jeanette says. ‘A young woman you saw twenty years ago.’

No response.

The old woman is still staring at something outside. Her eyes look clouded. Cataracts, Jeanette thinks. Could she be blind?

‘The girl was seventeen years old when you treated her,’ Jeanette goes on. ‘Her name is Victoria Bergman. Does that name mean anything to you?’

The woman finally turns her head, and Jeanette can see a trace of a smile on the old face. It seems to soften.

‘Victoria,’ Sofia the elder says. ‘Of course I remember her.’

Jeanette breathes out. She decides to get straight to the point and moves her chair a bit closer. ‘I’ve got a picture of Victoria with me. I don’t know how good your eyesight is, but do you think you might be able to identify her?’

Sofia smiles broadly. ‘Oh, no. I’ve been blind for the past two years. But I can describe what she looked like back then. Blonde hair, blue eyes. She had a wry smile and the look in her eyes was always intense, focused.’

Jeanette studies the picture of the serious young girl in the school yearbook. Her appearance matches the old woman’s description. ‘What happened to her after you stopped treating her?’

Sofia laughs again. ‘Who?’ she asks.

Jeanette starts to get suspicious. ‘Victoria Bergman.’

The distant look in Sofia’s face returns, and after a couple of seconds Jeanette repeats her question.

Sofia’s face breaks into a smile again. ‘Victoria? Yes, I remember her.’ Then the smile fades, and the woman rubs her cheek with her hand. ‘Does my lipstick look all right? Is it messy?’

‘No, it looks fine,’ Jeanette replies. She’s starting to worry that Sofia Zetterlund has problems with her short-term memory. Alzheimer’s, probably.

‘Victoria Bergman,’ Sofia repeats. ‘A peculiar story. By the way, you smell of smoke … Are you offering?’

Jeanette finds the abrupt twists in the conversation bewildering. It’s clear that Sofia Zetterlund has problems keeping hold of the threads in conversation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that her long-term memory is damaged.

‘Smoking isn’t allowed in here, I’m afraid,’ Jeanette says.

Sofia’s response is probably less than entirely truthful. ‘I know that, but it is in my room. Push me back in there and we can have a smoke.’

Jeanette pushes her own chair back, gets up and carefully turns Sofia’s wheelchair. ‘OK, let’s go and sit in your room instead. Where is it?’

‘Last door on the right at the end of the corridor.’

Jeanette gestures to the manager that they’re leaving the day room for a while.

Once they’re in her room, Sofia insists on sitting in the armchair and Jeanette helps the old woman to get comfortable. Then she sits down at the little table by the window.

‘Now, let’s have a smoke.’

Jeanette hands her the lighter and cigarettes, and Sofia lights up. ‘There’s an ashtray on the chest of drawers, next to Freud.’

Freud? Jeanette turns round.

Sure enough, there’s an ashtray behind her, a large one made of crystal, and next to it is a snow globe.

Usually the image inside the globe is children playing, or snowmen, or some other winter scene. But Sofia’s snow globe contains an image of a very sombre-looking Sigmund Freud.

Jeanette stands up to reach the ashtray. Once she’s there she can’t resist shaking the globe.

Freud’s snowed in, she thinks. At least Sofia Zetterlund has a sense of humour. Then she repeats her question. ‘Did you ever meet Victoria Bergman again after she was granted a protected identity?’

The old woman seems more alert now that she’s got a cigarette in her hand. ‘No, never. There was a new law about secret personal details, so no one knows what her name is now.’

Nothing new so far, although at least Jeanette has confirmation that there’s nothing wrong with the old woman’s long-term memory.

‘Did she have any distinguishing features? You seem to remember her appearance very well.’

‘She was a very intelligent girl. She was probably too intelligent for her own good, if you know what I mean.’

‘No. What do you mean?’

Sofia’s reply has little to do with Jeanette’s question. ‘I haven’t seen her since the autumn of 1988. But ten years later I got a letter from her.’

‘Do you remember what she wrote?’

‘Yes, but not word for word, obviously. It was mainly about her daughter.’

‘Her daughter?’ Jeanette’s curiosity is aroused.

‘Yes. She was pregnant, and put her child up for adoption. She didn’t say much about it, but I know she went off to look for the child in the early summer of 1988. She was living with me at the time. For almost two months.’

‘She lived with you?’

The old woman suddenly looks very serious. It’s as if her skin tenses up and the wrinkles become smoother. ‘Yes. She was having suicidal thoughts and it was my duty to look after her. I would never have let Victoria go if I hadn’t realised that it was absolutely vital for her to see the child again.’

‘Where did she go?’

Sofia Zetterlund shakes her head. ‘She refused to say. But when she came back she was stronger.’

‘Stronger?’

‘Yes. As if she’d put something very difficult behind her. But what they did to her in Copenhagen was wrong. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.’

JUST BEEN GOOD.

‘You’re dead to me!’ Victoria writes at the bottom of the postcard, then posts it at Central Station in Stockholm. The picture on the front shows King Gustav XIV Adolf sitting in a gilded chair with the queen standing beside him, smiling and showing that she’s proud of her husband and that she’s the subordinate partner, ever obedient.

Just like Mum, she thinks as she walks down into the metro.

Victoria thinks Queen Sylvia’s smile looks like the Joker’s huge red ear-to-ear lips, and she recalls hearing that someone had said that the king was a real pig in private, and that when he wasn’t confusing people from Arboga with those from Örebro, he would flick matchsticks at the queen just to humiliate her.

It’s Midsummer’s Eve, and therefore a Friday. Victoria wonders how a holiday that was originally a celebration of the summer solstice could now always take place on the third Friday in June, regardless of where the sun is.

You’re slaves, she thinks, looking derisively at the drunk people getting into the cool metro carriages with their bags full of food. Obedient lackeys. Sleepwalkers. She doesn’t think she’s got anything to celebrate, and is just heading back to Sofia’s house in Tyresö.

It was good that she returned to Copenhagen, because now she knows that she doesn’t care.

The child might as well have died, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

But it didn’t die when she dropped it on the floor.

She doesn’t remember much of what happened after the ambulance came, but the baby didn’t die, she knows that much.

The egg was cracked but not ruined, and nothing was ever reported to the police.

They let her go.

And she knows why.