A Darker Shade of Sweden Read online

  Perhaps that was what he could do?

  Switch off?

  After all, he had the box in his pocket.

  He turned to the container near him, having seen a movement, a woman alone pulling herself up to drop an unmarked plastic bag into the container. He watched her tired body and wondered what was in the bag. Perhaps a black wig and a tube of lip gloss? He watched her disappear in the darkness and remained standing. There were nights when he followed people walking alone, often on the opposite side of the street, followed until they disappeared into a doorway or a bar. He conceived of it as having company.

  Tonight he wanted to be alone.

  He twisted around.

  The dogs were whistling down by the bus stop.

  Sometimes he imagined that, that the dogs were whistling, late at night when shadows were his only company. The dogs nobody knew about, long, crooked, narrow bodies suddenly just there, out of nowhere, crossing a darkened street to disappear, then suddenly breathe right next to him and disappear again.

  He heard them whistling to each other, the dogs, and he knew what it was all about.

  Him.

  It was connected to the third puppy, the drowned one. The one he pushed into the bucket many years ago and that fought for its life under the sole of his boot. A life it had just been given and that would be taken away from it, because it was the third and was deformed, lacking a fully developed spine. Sometimes he thought about it, being deformed. The animal was deformed and would have died anyway. He just did what the dog owners ought to have done; he took care of it. But the way the animal struggled under his boot left its trace in him. He had thought it would be quick.

  It wasn’t.

  And while the animal fought and twisted under the sole of his boot there was time for him to start thinking. That wasn’t a good thing. Suddenly he was thinking about what he was doing and about what moved under his foot. What had been only a quick decision to rid the world of pointless suffering turned into something else. The deformed animal refused to give up and forced him to make an entirely different decision.

  He had to kill a puppy.

  He might have lifted his foot and said that it didn’t work, the pup didn’t die, then give it back to its owners. But he didn’t. That was what he considered now, in the soft rain. Himself as hostage to a situation he had created and that forced him to kill. Or confess that he was unable to do it.

  He killed the pup.

  That’s why the dogs whistled to each other those special nights when he walked in the company of shadows and knew that he was a hostage again. And had to kill.

  Or confess.

  He waited until the lights went out in the stairwell and all sounds ceased. Then he pulled on his rubber gloves. In darkness he climbed one floor up and rang the bell by the door of the one he had chosen. It took the old woman a while to open.

  “Yes,” she said. “What’s it about?”

  “I’m looking for Ester.”

  “Yes, that’s me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Later, when he sat on the kitchen chair watching the thin, white cotton thread hanging from her mouth, he wondered about that. About why he had said, “I’m sorry.” It was nothing he had planned, it just came to him spontaneously at the doorway. As if he apologized for what would happen.

  It confused him.

  The duct tape was the first thing he pulled out in the foyer. Putting it over the thin woman’s mouth made quick work. When he lifted her into the kitchen he noticed how slight she was. Almost like a scarecrow he’d built once, just as fragile and wiry.

  If he were to build a new scarecrow now he would name it Ester.

  With a few blue cable ties he fastened her thin feet and arms to a kitchen chair. In the cupboard above the stove he found a glass. He filled it with water from the faucet next to the stove. He saw the woman’s eyes follow his every movement and wondered what she was thinking about. Who he was? Probably, or perhaps more about what he intended to do. He put the glass down on the table in the middle of the kitchen and took out the blue-and-white box. A second before he would open it he hesitated and looked up at the old cobbler’s lamp hanging from the ceiling. The light from the filament was soft. He watched the lamp. It was the kind of light he could stand, artificial light you could turn off at will.

  He opened the box and pulled out a tampon. He put the thin plastic wrapping in his pocket; he disliked untidiness. With his left hand he pulled the tape from the woman’s mouth. She opened it wide to scream, he had no idea for whom. He pushed the tampon down her air pipe to drown her yelling. Now she was silent. He grabbed her jaws with one hand and poured half a glass of water into her mouth before closing it.

  Now he was done.

  He pulled up another kitchen chair and sat down, almost directly opposite the old woman. He knew that the tampon was swelling inside her throat now, and there was nothing for him to do but to wait. He glanced down at the chair he was sitting on, an unpainted wooden chair. He liked wooden chairs, simple, functional furniture without any frills. His mother had five chairs around their kitchen table, all wooden and all unpainted. For a while they were four in the family, but never five. He never wondered about the fifth chair.

  Then.

  Now he did. For whom was it intended? He looked at the bound woman in front of him. Her knees were shaking, she no longer could breathe, her eyes bulged a bit. Was the fifth chair intended for visitors? But they never had any visitors. He supposed it was one of his mother’s secrets, an extra chair for something unexpected. He smiled slightly. Now the woman’s head sank down to her chest, she had stopped shaking. He bent forward and saw the thin white cotton thread hanging down from the corner of her mouth. It would soon be still. He wondered what was flashing through her mind right now. Where was she going?

  We know so little about those things, he thought.

  Soon he would leave.

  He was on his way back, on foot, to his carefully measured surface. The streets were empty, his steps followed the edge of the gutter; he never needed to raise his eyes. At this time there were no movements in this part of town. A couple of hours ago homeless people had shambled past, carrying sacks full of empty cans; drunken teenagers had hunted for cabs or drugs; lonely hookers had tried enticing customers by lowering prices—everything had been drawing to an end. He had seen it a thousand times and another thousand.

  Now it was all empty.

  Now there were only gulls picking at the pools of vomit and the echo of distant sirens. Nobody saw him. Or perhaps at a distance? Perhaps a sleepless elderly man stood in a costly window a block away looking down at him? Perhaps the man wore a dark green smoking jacket and held a black cheroot in his hand? Perhaps he was listening to the Vienna Boys’ Choir? The man who had come to his mother one night and tied a purple bow around her neck had done so. She didn’t know that he was sick; she listened to “O Tannenbaum” and let the man stitch a veil of rapture to cover her eyes.

  Then the man waved at the young boy.

  He raised his head to glance up at the well-to-do building fronts. Perhaps he might glimpse the man?

  The faucet water was freezing. He always washed his hands when he got back, held them under the running water until they grew numb, disappeared, until he could bite them without feeling anything. It made him calm. The day before he put a picture up on the wall above his bed. It was the only picture in the room. It pictured a young boy pushing a strange metal funnel under the skirt of a kneeling woman. Both wore medieval clothes. In the background two liveried men were sharing a melon. The picture was in color. He liked falling asleep to the picture and waking up to it. The only thing he lacked in the picture was sound. It looked as if the two men in the background were talking to each other; he would like to know what they said. Was it about the melon? Or about the strange funnel?

  Now he lay in bed watching the picture. He was lowered in darkness and knew that he would be able to fall asleep. All he had to do was to ponder the
question to which he always fell asleep; why didn’t anyone ask for help? He often wondered about that. He could stand in a park, perhaps hidden by a maple, and watch faces walk by, silent, expressionless, as if nothing had happened.

  It was very strange.

  People ought to be more careful. Once he had stretched out a hand to a young boy walking past. He had wanted the boy to feel the pain in time. The boy had run away.

  Since then he had never tried contacting anyone.

  Now he was on the verge of slipping away. His eyes let go of the picture on the wall; he hoped he was slipping in the right direction, not towards the interface. He hoped to be here still when he woke up.

  He is dreaming.

  In his dream he is walking as if he really existed, walks across low, warm heather, through a sparse fir wood, towards dunes of sand; he wants to reach the sea. He has heard that it’s supposed to be calm today. He is just a young boy and has never seen total calm, never seen the sea all shiny and smooth. He never gets there. A large, dark bus pulls up in front of him, blocking his way. The door to the bus opens and the shape behind the wheel waves to him. He doesn’t want to enter the bus, but there is nobody close he could call out to. He opens his hand. Only moments ago he caught a ladybug; he blows at the red-and-black insect until the ladybug flies away. He doesn’t want it to come along into the bus. When the door closes behind him he runs to the seat at the very back of the bus, hoping that he’ll be able to hide. The bus lifts from the ground and soars above the fir wood; he glances out and sees a small house far below. In a hammock behind the house a woman is lying; she waves to him. He presses a hand against the window. When the bus stops it is dark outside, green neon light pulses in through the windows. He sees darkened houses on both sides, houses of stone. It has taken him to a city. The figure behind the wheel turns around towards the back seat and brings out a microphone. He can hear the figure start singing.

  He knows the song.

  He was still there when he woke up.

  He lay in bed for a very long time, trying to decide how he felt. Sometimes he didn’t know if he was still inside his dreams; sometimes that’s what he believed, that he was still in another world. That he was someone else.

  But not this time.

  He raised his hands and pushed them through his brown, curly hair. Even his hair was still there.

  That made him feel calm.

  Two nights in a row he stayed in his room. He didn’t open the window, didn’t touch any of the pills on his table, fell asleep without pacing his surface. He didn’t know what this meant. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to go out any more? In that way? That would be a relief. He didn’t like the fact that it had dragged on the way it had.

  That wasn’t how he had first meant it to be.

  At first it had just been a woman. Anyone of the right age.

  And just one.

  But it wasn’t enough. He had thought that one would be enough, a single one, to lower him into darkness once and for all.

  It wasn’t that simple.

  The light caught up with him again.

  Now he didn’t know when it would stop. That worried him; he already felt a tinge of weariness. The first time there had been a streak of excitement. Not because of what he would do, or did, but because of the chance of reaching the darkness. The second time the excitement had gone, it was more like a preliminary to what he really wanted; to what enveloped him when he saw the white cotton thread grow still in the corners of their mouths and it was done with.

  Then he wished for the darkness never to end.

  But it did.

  He went over and opened the window. It was still night outside and the window ledge was empty, no charred hands, no singing blackbird.

  There was no reason to go outside.

  He sat down by his wooden model and thought about people in other places. I’ll never meet them, he thought. Sometimes he gave them names, taken from plants or animals. On his wall he drew kings with saucer heads and completely ordinary people with long, extended noses, noses like slim roots, three feet long. You could see that they were prying into things they shouldn’t. It was dangerous. Already in the sandbox there were children prying, small, round children with noses already long. He learned to recognize their kind.

  He went up to his long coat and pulled out a slim brown leather glove from one of its pockets. It had probably belonged to a woman. He had found it on his way to Ester. It happened fairly often that he found lost gloves on his nightly walks. If they were made of leather he brought them back with him and boiled them in a steel pot, for a long time, until they had shrunk. He hung them on a clothesline stretched across the kitchen. Almost a hundred shrunken gloves hung there now, fastened by small wooden clips. He viewed it as a row of pennants.

  He let the glove fall into an empty pot.

  In good time he would boil it.

  He glanced at the door to his apartment. Sooner or later there would be a knock on it, he knew that, if he still remained in who he was. It was a wooden door and there was no doorbell; someone would knock on the timber. He tried to imagine the sound and the hand that made it. Whose hand was it? At best it would be himself knocking, at worst someone who wished him ill. Someone whose long nose had discovered him.

  He wouldn’t open at once. First he would remove the picture of the funnel from the wall and hide it under his pillow; then he would hold his hands under the freezing faucet water until they were numb.

  There would be another knock.

  Then he would say something through the door, explain that he couldn’t open it since he had no hands. What would happen after that he didn’t quite know; perhaps they would fetch someone who could pick the lock or perhaps they would just break down the door.

  He would have to be prepared for the worst.

  He went over and took his long coat from the hanger. Soon it would become light and he wasn’t tired; soon the light would come. He felt that it came too fast. He had paced his room for many hours and still wasn’t tired. He ought to be.

  He ought to sleep.

  He ought to be more careful.

  He went out.

  Gunvor Larsson was seventy-eight years old and lived alone. Her husband had died from an intracranial hemorrhage four years ago. She missed him, on one level, as a life partner should, but at the same time she was relieved. Their last years had been marked by the immense bitterness her husband felt about his life, a life he viewed as ruined by many different things. Those few times Gunvor had carefully tried to suggest that, after all, they had loved each other and stayed together for all of their lives, he had started to weep.

  That was almost the worst of it.

  But now he was gone and Gunvor was in good health, given her age. Her only problem appeared at night; she always woke up after only a couple of hours and found it difficult to relax again. She had tried almost everything, from medications with strange names to books on tape with just as strange tales. One of her grandchildren had tried to get her to start meditating and made her make up a mantra, a special word which after being repeated interminably would make her relax and be able to go back to sleep. She had chosen the word “ocean.” On the first few nights she had mumbled “ocean” for ten or twenty minutes and then brewed a cup of tea to pass the time.

  Tonight was the same again.

  Shortly after two she woke and got out of bed, wrapped in her worn, pale blue dressing gown. She put some water for tea to boil and sat down by the kitchen table. During the last few nights she had taken out some of her old photo albums—she had quite a few—and looked through them, image by image, to pass the time. Pictures of children and grandchildren, of trips abroad and summer houses and pets and people whose names she had forgotten. Now she held the last of her albums on her knee, the one from last year. Another of her grandchildren had printed out a number of digital pictures on paper and gifted her the album.

  She had reached a photo of her single great-grandchild when the doorbell rang.


  “Tonight you will dance.”

  The phrase from the lovely song floated to the surface of his mind. “Tonight you will dance.” People sang it on bright midsummer nights when he was tied inside the greenhouse. He heard them trying to sing in parts, heard their wobbly voices searching for each other. Everyone was in high spirits, many were children. Later they would come in to weep in front of him and feel bad. When they loosened the harness it was almost dawn; his mother had put sour milk out on the steps. He never knew if it was intended for him or for the hedgehog.

  He had time to think all that before the door in front of him opened. An elderly woman peered at him through the crack.

  “Yes?”

  “Is it Gunvor?”

  “Well? I don’t want to buy anything.”

  “Neither do I.”

  He looked at the photo album on the kitchen table. It was spread open. He stretched his hands out and took it. The two open pages were crammed with pictures of children. He let his eyes move across the images until they stopped on a small boy down by the corner of the page. He looked at the boy for several minutes, his brown, curly hair, his tight mouth. Finally he held the album out to the woman bound opposite him and pointed at the little boy.

  “Is that your grandchild?”

  The woman’s face was dark blue, her eyes wide, her head shaking violently. He couldn’t make out if she said yes. He turned the album back towards him and opened the next spread. It too was full of pictures of children; children hugging adults and children holding flowers. All of them looked cheerful and happy; none of them were harnessed. His mouth narrowed to a bitter streak; he knew that in time those children would grow very long noses. He turned the pages back to the picture of the little boy down by the corner; that boy’s eyes were searching for his, he thought, perhaps as if he wanted to appeal to him. He felt something wet rise under his eyelids.