The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (2 page)

One hand on her neck and the other in her hair, he forces her to stand up even though she’s getting heavier, wants to stay down, lie down, protect herself. He holds her head down while he knees her,
feel me
, knees her again,
feel me
, knees her once more,
feel me.

Because Leo doesn’t understand the terrible silence.

That’s why it takes so long for Leo to react. Pappa’s knuckles hit Mamma’s face like a whip, but he takes his time and does it silently; you used to be able to hear it when Pappa threw a punch. He is both Pappa and someone else. And because Mamma doesn’t scream. And Vincent is hiding behind his brother’s back, and Felix is still standing by the front door.

They’re not yet the same height. If they had been, Leo wouldn’t have had to jump onto his back. That’s what he does when Pappa starts using his knees, when Leo realises that this time Pappa won’t stop until she’s dead. He hangs onto his back and clenches his arms around his father’s neck, until Pappa finally grabs hold and rips him off.

But at that point at least Pappa has to let go of her head.

Leo slips, falls to the floor, and his mother, confused, takes a couple of steps away, her arms protecting her heavily bleeding face, mostly from a gash on her cheekbone from Pappa’s knuckles. Pappa follows her, grabs her again, the same way as before – he wants her to look at him while he’s punching her.

One more punch. A fist to her nose and mouth.

But that’s the only one he gets in before Leo stands up and squeezes himself between them and raises his hands.

No, Pappa.

He’s standing in a void. Between a mother who is bleeding and a father who wants to hit her again, but can’t because there’s another face in the way.

And Leo grabs hold of him.

Not his neck, Pappa’s too tall for that, nor his arms, Leo can’t quite catch them. But his waist and a bit of his chest.

No, Pappa.

He tries to plant his feet on the kitchen floor. His socks slide, and he has to brace himself against the table legs, doing his best to hug his Pappa away. He can’t quite do it, but at least Pappa lets go of her hair.

Mamma runs out of the kitchen and into the hallway to the front door, which is standing wide open. She slips on the polished stone floor of the stairwell and her blood pours out, and she whimpers and moans on every step.

Only the two of them are left.

Leo keeps hold of him, his arms around his father’s waist, and leans into his body, as if he were still hugging him.

‘It’s your turn now, Leonard.’

The smell of food, spaghetti and meat sauce, and Mamma’s blood. They look at each other.

‘Do you understand? I won’t be around any more, not here. You’re responsible from now on.’

And now his pappa’s eyes are different – they don’t slip away, they stop, and even though his pappa doesn’t say anything else, his eyes do.

LEO HELD HIS
breath. The intense, white light of a torch swept over him, and he pressed his face against damp moss and straggling sprigs of bilberry, pushing his entire body harder against the ground. Lying there – just a few steps inside the woods – it was easy to follow the inspector’s routine.

First, he pointed the light at the lock on the security door, searching for signs of a break-in.

Then he walked around the cube-shaped building with his torchlight directed at the surface of the concrete walls.

Finally, he stood with his back to it and had a smoke, apparently taking a break until he was sure everything looked just as it had the night before.

Leo started breathing again. He’d been lying just like this at the same time for seven nights in a row, beside a large, square gravel yard surrounded by forest and with a small, grey concrete cube in the middle – the bunker. The night was motionless. Just the wind, and an owl hooting incessantly, and the occasional insect.

It was a peculiar feeling, lying a few metres away, watching every movement of a man convinced that he was completely alone – a man in uniform taking deep drags on a cigarette, responsible for all the military storage facilities in what was called Stockholm Defence Area 44.

Leo adjusted the microphone on his collar, raised his head above the bilberry bushes and whispered, ‘Cancerman is leaving the site.’

The ditch between the forest and the gravel yard was filled with water, and the coarse soles of Leo’s boots slid on the grass as he took a run up and jumped over it, a heavy bag in one hand and a square of hardboard in the other.

Jasper approached from the other direction, with moss and pine needles in his hair and an equally heavy bag in his arms.

They didn’t speak to each other. They didn’t need to.

Leo placed the sheet of hardboard – exactly 60 by 60 centimetres – on the ground in front of the bunker door.

He’d been pondering these walls for a long time. Blasting them would show up later in the beam of the inspector’s torch and would make too much noise.

Then he’d analysed the roof. It would have been easy to remove the metal sheet that protected the building against rain, penetrate the fifteen centimetres of concrete from above, and then put the metal back on again. A blasted roof wouldn’t show up in the inspector’s torchlight. But that too would be heard.

One way left: the floor. With the hard ground providing counter-pressure, the force of the explosion would be redirected upwards; fewer explosives could be used and less noise would result.

Leo lifted half a kilo of heavy plastic explosive out of the bag.

He sank to his knees and kneaded it, shaped twelve balls in the light from the lamps on their heads.

‘It’s not enough,’ said Jasper.

He placed them one at a time on the hardboard, like a clock fitted with forty grams of plastic explosive for each hour.

‘It’s enough.’

‘But according to the table—’

‘The army always uses too much. They’re trying to kill people in battle. I’ve halved it. We want to get in – not destroy what’s inside.’

Leo watched Jasper unfurl a folding shovel from his bag with a flick of the wrist and start digging. With each movement the hole in front of and below the safe-like door grew.

One piece of dough to mark each hour. A circle of time, linked by a length of brown, twine-like penthrite.

He knew it was silly, but he lived with the clock – Leo always knew what time it was, even when he wasn’t carrying a watch. Time ticked inside him, and always had.

‘Ready.’

Jasper was sweating, stooped over, kneeling with the shovel deep inside the hole under the door – and the floor of the bunker. Leo crept closer, their eager arms getting in each other’s way as he pulled out with cupped hands whatever the shovel couldn’t reach.

‘Now.’

They held onto either side of the hardboard and gently pressed it inside
bit by bit, making sure the twelve balls of plastic explosive didn’t get stuck to anything and that the fuse ended up exposed. When they were sure that the square had gone under the door, beneath the small, one-room building, they pressed gravel into the hole and around it until it was completely sealed.

‘Satisfied?’

‘Satisfied.’

Hours of calculations. Days spent obtaining the materials. Weeks spent in rubber boots, tramping through one forest after another, a mushroom-picking basket under his arm, surveying Swedish military storage facilities, and when he’d found this one, in an area called Getryggen about fifteen kilometres south of Stockholm, he’d known he could stop looking.

Now there were just a few minutes left.

He taped the short fuse to a detonator, which he then attached to the plus and minus on an electrical cable, before moving as far away as he could, across the gravel and the ditch and back into the woods. Then he connected a wire on the other end of the cable to the positive terminal on a motorcycle battery.

‘Felix? Vincent?’ Leo said into his microphone.

‘Yeah?’
replied Felix.

‘Have you got a clear view?’

‘Clear view.’

‘Ten seconds …’

Felix and Vincent lay next to each other under a tarpaulin covered with leaves and moss and grass, near a red and yellow barrier bearing a metal sign that said
NO ACCESS FOR UNAUTHORISED VEHICLES
.

‘… then I’ll let it rip.’

Vincent was holding tight a pair of bolt cutters nearly a metre and a half long.

Felix raised his upper body and checked his watch, rubbed his finger across the glass of the dial; the damp had turned to mist.

‘Nine.’

He rubbed it until he could see the second hand and then nodded towards Vincent, whose breathing was short, intense, brittle.

‘Eight.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘Seven.’

Vincent didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at his brother.

‘Six.’

Even the heavy tarp across their backs shook.

‘Five.’

‘No one’s coming, Vincent. We’re all alone out here.’

‘Four.’

He moved his arm from shaking shoulders to the hands clutching the bolt cutters.

‘Three.’

‘Vincent?’

‘Two.’

‘Leo’s up there. He has this all planned. It’ll go fine. And this is better, right?’

‘One.’

‘Vincent? It’s better to be involved than sitting at home on the sofa not knowing.’

The explosion roared, louder than Leo had expected. The bunker acted like the sound box of a guitar, a shell amplifying the sound of half a kilo of plastic explosive. And when the floor was blasted into the single room of the building, the sound box amplified the next sound, too – concrete chips being flung against a ceiling.

They’d agreed to wait for five minutes.