Until Thy Wrath Be Past (3 page)

THURSDAY, 16 APRIL

At 3.15 in the morning Östen Marjavaara opened his eyes in his cottage in Pirttilahti. The light woke him. In the middle of April it was never dark at night for more than an hour or so. The fact that the blinds were closed did not make much difference. The light forced its way in between the slats, trickled in via the cord holes, poured through the gap between the blind and the window frame. Even if he had boarded up the windows, even if he had slept in a windowless room, he would still have woken up. The light was out there. Prodding and tugging at him. Gently but persistently, like a lonely woman. He might as well get up and make a pot of coffee.

Climbing out of bed, he opened the blinds. The floor was freezing cold against his bare feet. The thermometer outside the window said minus 2. It had snowed during the night. The hard crust that had formed the previous week after some milder weather and a few days of sleet had become even firmer now – strong enough for him to ski along the bank of the River Torne towards Tervaskoski. There were bound to be grayling lurking behind stones in the rapids there.

When the fire had taken hold in the kitchen stove, Marjavaara took the red plastic bucket standing in the hall and went down to the river to fetch some water. It was only a few metres to the riverbank, but he made his way carefully: there were plenty of potentially treacherous ice patches beneath the fresh snow and you could easily injure yourself.

The sun was lying in wait just below the horizon, painting the cold, wintry sky with golden-red strokes. Soon it would peer over the spruce forest, setting the red wooden panels of the cottage aglow.

The snow lay over the river like a whisper of nature. Hush, it said, be quiet. There is only you and me now.

He did as he was told, stood still with the bucket in his hand, gazing out over the river. It was true. You never come closer to owning the whole world than when you wake up before everyone else. There were a few cottages dotted along both banks of the river, but his was the only chimney with smoke rising from it. Most likely the people were not even there. They were probably fast asleep in their town houses, poor fools.

At the far end of the jetty was the water hole Marjavaara had cut in the ice. He had covered it with a polystyrene lid to prevent it from freezing over. Brushing the snow off the lid, he lifted it up. When Barbro was with him at the cottage, they always brought tap water from the town – she refused to drink water from the river.

“Yuck!” she always said with a shudder, raising her shoulders almost to her ears. “All the shit from all the villages upstream!”

She used to go on about the hospital at Vittangi, how it was a good job they lived upstream from there. How there were no sewage-treatment works or anything. No doubt someone’s appendix would be floating down the river, and God only knew what else.

“Don’t talk such rubbish!” he would say, as he had done a hundred times before. “You’re talking nonsense, woman!”

He had been drinking that water since he was a child, and his health was better than hers.

He squatted down to dip the bucket into the water. There was a length of rope attached to the handle so that he could let it sink and fill before hauling it back up again.

But he could not get the bucket to sink. There was something in the way, just beneath the surface. Something big. Black.

Maybe a waterlogged tree trunk, he thought.

You did not often find tree trunks in the water nowadays. It had been more common when he was a child, when logs were still floated down to the sawmills at the mouth of the river.

Marjavaara dipped his hand in the freezing water in order to push the log out of the way. It seemed to have got wedged in the jetty. And it was not a log. It seemed to be made of rubber or something similar.

“What the hell . . .” he said, sliding the bucket to one side.

He took hold of it with both hands, tried to get a firm grip, but his hands would not function properly in the cold water. Then he managed to get hold of an arm. Pulled at it.

An arm, he thought impassively.

His mind was unwilling to understand.

An arm.

Then a battered face floated into view in the water hole.

Marjavaara cried out and leapt to his feet.

A raven answered from the forest. Its call sliced through the silence. Several crows joined in the chorus.

Marjavaara ran back to the cottage, slipping but regaining his balance.

He rang the emergency number. Then it occurred to him that he had drunk three glasses of water with his dinner yesterday. And coffee after the meal. He had fetched the water from the river. From the hole in the ice. And the dead body had been lying there. Right next to it, no doubt. That white, battered face. A gash where the nose had been. Teeth in a mouth with no lips.

Someone answered the phone, but he cut them off and vomited on the spot. His body spat out everything in it, kept on spitting long after there was nothing left.

Then he dialled the emergency number again.

Never again would he drink water from the river. And it would be years before he would even go for a swim after his sauna.

I’m looking at the man who found me. He’s throwing up. He rings the emergency number and vows never to drink water from the river again.

I’m thinking about the day I died.

We were dead, Simon and I. I was standing on the ice. It was evening. The sun was lower now. The door was smashed, floating in the hole in the ice. I could see that it was green on one side and black on the other.

On the riverbank, a man was rummaging in our rucksacks.

A raven flew past. It was calling in its characteristic way, sounding like a stick being hit against an empty oil drum. It landed on the ice, right next to me. Turned its head away and looked at me in the way birds do. From the side.

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 Måns Wenngren.

“Pouring with bloody rain in Stockholm,” it said. “Bed empty and lonely. Come back. Want to lick your breasts & hug you. Kiss all your lovely places.”

She felt a tingling sensation.

“Bloody 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 hello.

“Hello, 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 Fjällborg 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 Fjällborg 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 sparsely 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.

Fjällborg was standing by the hotplate, wearing an apron 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,” Fjällborg 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.

Fjällborg cut a dumpling into thick slices. He swirled a large knob of butter around the hot frying pan.

Martinsson’s mobile pinged again. Another text from Måns.

“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?” Fjällborg said.

“No, it’s from Måns,” 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 hell. Tell him that.”

“I will,” Martinsson said, and wrote: “Mmm . . . More.”