The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (17 page)

Leo doesn’t turn round, the blade is too close. If he did, he wouldn’t escape the next thrust.

Then he hears them. So he knows.

Footsteps on the asphalt, barefoot footsteps.

Pappa’s footsteps.

And Pappa’s breath.

And Pappa’s voice.

‘Drop the knife, you little bastard!’

Kekkonen does. The knife falls to the ground, bounces. And they run. Hasse with his hands on his nose and Kekkonen with his square body hunched forward, they run across the car park and through the bushes, and the bell is ringing for the next period by the time they reach the other side of the road.

THEY STAND CLOSE
to each other, staring at a mirror covered with graffiti.

One is six foot five with dark hair combed back, the other is five foot with light, ruffled hair.

‘A knife.’

Pappa holds out his hand, palm up, and in it lies the paint-spattered Mora knife.

‘A knife, Leonard!’

The lift goes past the second floor, the third floor, and Leo tries to read the mirror image of his father. It’s shaking. Pappa usually does this before he starts drinking wine and melted sugar, or when he’s annoyed by tramps and parasites. But only on the outside. Not like this. Inside.

‘I’ve been teaching you how to fight. With your hands! And you … you take
my
knife!’

‘Not to fight with it.’

‘You don’t need a fucking knife!’

‘To
make
them fight. To get them here. So you could watch.’

Pappa squeezes the knife. He’s so angry he’s scared, so scared he’s angry.

‘Don’t you get that, damn it, that you … you …’

‘But you used it. You cut off—’

‘I learned how to fight with my hands first!’

Sixth floor. Seventh. They’ve arrived. But remain together in the cramped lift. As long as they don’t open the door, as long as they don’t stop looking at each other in the scribbled-on mirror – as long as they remain in this small world …

‘My damn boy.’

Pappa’s voice, it’s shaking too, and Leo looks at him in the gap near the top of the mirror, where the spray paint is a little thinner.

‘But I hit him, Pappa. On the nose. Right?’

And Pappa smiles. He laughs when he gets envelopes full of money and sometimes when he’s drinking black wine, but he rarely smiles. Now he does.

AND IT HAD
been raining every day for several weeks. Drops would be hollowing out a refilled hole in front of a grey concrete cube. Leo had decided not to think about it, but still the anxiety was always there.

He waited outside the Skogås shopping centre in the front seat of the car as the windscreen turned into a wet membrane, making it difficult to see out. The once open-air shopping centre had been transformed into an enclosed mall. The same shops in the same places. The supermarket stood next to the off-licence, and Mahmoud’s Pizzeria next to the entrance on the left-hand side – the red and white tablecloths probably had bigger stains and there were more kinds of beer on the shelf behind the bar than Leo remembered, but the owner was the same and always nodded in recognition. The bare sky had become a glazed ceiling, rough stone slabs had been replaced by plaster floor tiles, and the losers’ benches and railing were now doors that opened automatically when someone approached them, as Anneli was doing now.

She stopped after just a few steps and pulled the plastic from a pack of cigarettes, lit one under cover of the entrance, and inhaled deeply as she always did when she was excited. She was so beautiful. She was older than him, yet of the two of them, she was the one who always ended up digging around in her purse for ID to show bouncers. She didn’t walk, she strolled. They looked good when they strolled together, he often thought.

‘Are we going south?’ she asked him, climbing in.

‘You’ll see – there are houses for sale all over the place.’

He drove first towards Farsta, northwards, and Anneli looked out the side window hopefully, then towards Huddinge, in the west, and she pointed at some of the big houses, then towards Tumba, south, and she was just as expectant, her hand on top of his on the gear stick. The car moved slowly through a very familiar area of small houses, high-rises and factories, and then there were bigger houses again. Craftsmen city. The working-class and small business owners. The world on the fringes of Stockholm.

He belonged here, with the people who didn’t fit into what Anneli imagined as she boated along the coast of Drevviken looking out at rooftops visible among the trees along the shore – the kind of house she so clearly hoped they were heading for now.

Leo slowed, and she scrutinised a beautiful turn-of-the-century house with a large lawn and apple and pear trees, and clutched his hand more tightly. But he didn’t stop. He continued on to the property next door: a driveway with high iron gates, a garage big enough for five vehicles, and a little tiny house with a tired, grey stone facade.

‘Here?’

Her eyes roamed, trying to avoid the puddles on the uneven, paved yard wedged between two roads busy with traffic.

They’d traded an apartment on the second floor of a block of flats for an air-raid shelter on the bottom floor.

‘There’s no fence,’ she whispered in disappointment.

‘There’s a fence.’

Leo opened the car door and set off across the asphalt yard. She followed him as he zigzagged between the deep pools of water towards a three-metre-high security fence topped by barbed wire.

‘There used to be a car showroom here. Nobody could get in here.’

‘Are you saying that … this, this … is where we’re moving to? To build a life together?’

‘Anneli—’

‘A huge fucking garage? An awful asphalt yard? A fucking barbed wire fence? I don’t want to live like this! I want a white picket fence, I want real trees and flowerbeds and grass and rhubarb leaves and … Leo? Like that house! A wooden house with gravel paths and beautiful flagstones.’

She pointed to the fine, big house next door as the door to the small house opened behind them and a man in a grey striped suit, white shirt and spotted tie emerged.

‘You’ve made an appointment with an estate agent?’

‘Come on.’

She stood perfectly still, her hair dripping, her coat and trousers and shoes soaked through.

‘For several weeks you’ve been letting me imagine moving in to a real house? And then you drag me … here?’

He took her hand.

‘Since we’re already here.’

‘I don’t want to live like this. Do you not understand that?’

And her other hand.

‘Anneli, this will be good for us. Right now.’

‘I don’t want to live like this. I want—’

‘Was it you I spoke to on the phone?’ said the estate agent.

A suit, a tie and a practised smile. The kind who squeezes too hard when he shakes hands and thinks that’s the same as building trust. Leo smiled and Anneli looked at him,
did you decide to meet an estate agent without talking to me
, and he looked at her,
now that we’re here, let’s take a look
, and Leo took the glossy full-colour brochure from the estate agent, who seemed to perceive where the resistance lay and turned towards Anneli.

‘Maybe it’s no summer house in the country. Or turn-of-the-century villa.’

The estate agent pointed at their car and then at the building company logo on Leo’s jacket.

‘But this house is ideal if you want to have your business close to home – and at the right price.’

Leo nodded at the large blue building on the other side of the road.

‘We were the ones that renovated the Solbo Centre – the Blue House.’

The tyre company in the corner, the Indian restaurant, the flower shop, the tanning salon, Robban’s Pizzeria. And next to it, a locked box containing enough military equipment to supply two infantry companies. The estate agent could see it. Everyone who drove past could see it.

Without knowing.

‘So, my friends, you’re welcome here.’

The rain-soaked estate agent swept his arm across the asphalt yard.

‘At this eleven-hundred-square-metre property, with secondary areas totalling three hundred square metres, and a living area of ninety square metres.’

They left the puddles and the barbed wire fence and went into a kitchen on the ground floor, heard the estate agent talking about almost-new appliances and opportunities and potential and a great floor plan and cost-effective heating. They heard him, but they weren’t listening. Anneli didn’t want to listen, because she didn’t want to be there. Leo wasn’t listening, because he’d already made up his mind.

From the empty kitchen into the empty hallway – where stairs led to an empty upper floor and where there stood an empty room on the left with a closed door.

The estate agent opened it fully.

‘An extension. An extra room.’

And showed them the shabby walls and floor, maybe ten square metres.

‘It was used as an office.’

Leo knocked at several points on the plaster walls and stamped at several places on the plastic mat that covered the floor, but heard only Anneli’s heels on their way out. He excused himself and hurried after her. She stood in what was now a light drizzle, a cigarette in her hand, taking short, fierce drags, which was how she smoked when she was disappointed.

‘Anneli?’

She didn’t look at him.

‘Listen, Anneli, I was thinking about something. Your son … I mean … Sebastian doesn’t have to sleep on the sofa when he visits here, like in the apartment.’

‘But there’s no room.’

‘Yes, there is. I’ll show you. And out there, on the asphalt, it’s a perfect football pitch. And I’ll put up a basketball hoop on the garage door. When I was five, I would have loved it.’

‘Six. Sebastian’s six.’

‘You wanted him to visit more often – now he can.’

He held her.

‘In a year you can have any house you want, Anneli. Anywhere. At any price.’

His hand on her cheek.

‘But right now we need this. Do you understand? In order to get there, to that other house. This is perfect for the construction company. An office and a place to rehearse and a warehouse. In a residential area built on the bed of an old lake, houses with no basements. My Skull Cave.’

Her fringe, forehead and cheeks were wet, and he dried them carefully with his shirt sleeve.

One more cigarette.

‘A fucking leisure centre.’

Drags that were a little longer and slower.

‘Even more like a leisure centre than our current flat. Your brothers will be here all the time.’

He held her shoulders, they could both see into the house’s few rooms. And turned her around gently. Towards him.

‘I understand it wasn’t quite what you expected. Give me one year, Anneli.’

‘One year?’

‘One year.’

‘Anywhere? Anywhere at all?’

‘At any price.’

He took her hand and they walked back through the hall towards the room in the extension.

‘This room will be Sebastian’s when he’s here.’

‘So he can stay with us more often?’

‘Sebastian’s room up above. And my room underneath.’

The estate agent stood waiting on the stairs to the upper floor. They passed him on their way to what would be the bedroom and walked over to the window that looked out over the neighbouring house.

‘A year?’

He looked at her, held her.

‘A year, I promise. Then we’re done.’

LEO DROPPED
A
NNELI
off at Tumba station, then drove south for half an hour on minor roads through forests and farmland. He didn’t usually lie. Not to her, not to anyone. He’d had no choice but to lie so many times in his childhood because telling the truth would have been so much worse. But he’d lied to her this time. He had stood outside the home they’d just agreed to purchase, held her and said he couldn’t go to town because he had to go and see Gabbe. He’d lied because he didn’t understand the truth himself – that he was on his way to pay off a debt to someone he didn’t owe a thing to.

Four and a half years ago, when father and son still worked in the same construction company, he’d thrown down his tool belt and walked away.
Leo, you fucking got thirty-five thousand in advance. You have to earn that out – before you leave
. It hadn’t all been about money.
You owe me, Leo, you can’t go!
Not for him. Not for either of them. It was about getting out, away, breaking free.

He drove slowly through a tired landscape. The sheet of water on his left was Lake Malmsjön and a thin veil of fog hung over its still surface, meadows with black and white cows then four horses chasing each other; then a second lake, Lake Axaren, equally still.

You’ll come crawling back when you need money! You’re nothing without me, Leo, you’ll never make it!

There were only a few kilometres left when he stopped the car at an abandoned petrol station with a rust-coloured Caltex sign swinging in the wind and, in the middle of the yard, a pump with mechanical numbers that used to spin, but were stuck at 76.40 kronor.

He rolled down the window, breathed in damp air.

He’d left before but always returned. Even though he’d come to despise the feeling of being a tool, a prop in his old man’s picture of a family. That day he left for real. The following year, Felix had starting working with him. The following year Vincent dropped out of high school, and the three brothers started working together.

Family. Together.
You tried. I succeeded.

The last stretch, more fields, more water, narrow roads. A few barns, houses, a school, a few shops. Ösmo Square. Only half an hour from the heart of Stockholm, but another world all the same.

Leo rolled slowly closer.

A large brick house, a well-kept garden, with yesterday’s leaves in regular piles. He parked in front of the postbox and saw the windows were lit on the ground floor; his dad was usually at home at this time.