Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

Annika was panting slightly through her half-open mouth.

‘I think I’m coming down with something,’ she whispered.

‘Right, let’s get you home and tucked up properly in bed; isn’t that right, kids?’

She turned round and saw the children sitting on their booster seats in the back seat. She smiled weakly.

‘Hello, darlings. I love you.’

The man walked with floating steps past the campsite reception, his body fluid, his mind razor-sharp. He felt sturdy, strong. His legs had the spring he remembered, muscles tensing and relaxing. He filled his lungs, hardly noticing the stab in his stomach as his diaphragm expanded. The air was so strangely and distantly familiar up here, like a song you used to sing as a child and had forgotten, then suddenly hear again from a distance on a crackling radio.

Sharp , he thought, and stopped. Cold and watchful .

He turned his gaze upwards and squinted at the sky, one or two battered snowflakes were struggling to reach the ground, jerkily sailing through the layers of air.

He had come here in order to come home, to be reunited with his family. He hadn’t had any expectations of the country or the landscape, all too aware of how the mills of capitalism ground down culture and infrastructure. So his joy at seeing it all again was so unexpected, the huddled houses and snow-covered roads, the closeness of the sky and the desolate, closed pine trees. Even the changes felt safe; he had known that the occupation would make progress during his absence.

He walked towards the road where the girl had once lived, the ramshackle row of workers’ houses with single cold taps and outdoor toilets. He wondered if he was in the right place. It was hard to tell. Karlsvik had changed in the way he had feared but couldn’t imagine. On the heath outside the town, where the blueberries had grown in thick carpets in the summer of 1969, where he had rolled around with Karina until they bumped into an anthill, there was a striped, panelled monstrosity in white and pale blue boasting that it was the largest indoor arena in northern Europe. He didn’t need convincing.

By the river, where they had chased each other round the ruins of the old harbour and timber-yard, there now stood a four-star campsite with a collection of little wooden cabins: he had booked into one of them.

In the harsh winter air he could suddenly smell bubbling water on its way out to the Gulf of Bothnia, and could see the city in front of him on the far shore, remembering all the old remnants of the sawmill days, the fragments of wood and other rubbish that had lined the edge of the river. He wondered if there was anything left, if the pines had finally fallen into the water from the steep sandbanks by the shore.

He walked straight on, light and steady, along carefully scraped winter streets covered with a thin layer of ice, gravel and pine needles. The paths left by the snowploughs were straight and regular, the surrounding houses unrecognizable to him.

The area had been renovated, with the picturesque ambition reserved for the cultural elite and senior civil servants. The many rows of workers’ houses had had their rust-red or ochre-yellow colour restored, but in a shiny plastic version. Wooden carvings shone white in the lead-grey twilight; ramrod-straight window-frames spoke of expensive replacements made with the best timber. With its playground’s colourful swings, the recycling bins’ neat lids and the carefully swept front steps, the place presented a dishonest and decadent excess.

It was empty and dead. He could hear a dog bark, a cat jumped up onto a heap of snow in the distance, but Karlsvik was not alive, it was merely a mirror, intended to reflect the people who lived there and perceived themselves to be happy.

He stopped in the middle of that thought, remembering that the lives of common people rested in the hands of the great capitalists, then as now.

He came out onto Disponentvägen and immediately recognized her house, the façade red and enticing like the moist lips of a whore, his gaze drawn automatically to her window on the second floor. Green window bars, an aerial on the roof like a giant insect.

His girl, his own Red Wolf.

Women had always thought him shy and reserved, a gentle and careful lover. Only with Karina had he been truly great. Only with her had love-making taken him beyond eroticism, and made love appear as the miracle it actually was. With her and her friends he had created his own family, and all through the racing years and seconds they had always been with him.

She hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

When he looked her up she had rejected him. The betrayal burned in his face, she had been their glittering star. She had been given her proud name because they wanted to stress the group’s Nordic background; they were communists from the Realm of the Wolf. Even if they believed themselves to be part of the Chinese people, there was nothing to stop them stressing the transgression of national boundaries in the fight for freedom.

But she had allowed herself to be intoxicated by the terrible sweetness of power, had turned her back on him. Now he turned his back on her childhood home and left the houses behind him; walked jauntily on towards the heritage trail alongside the campsite, and stopped by a heap of ploughed snow. He looked into the thin pine trees.

The remains of Norrbotten’s first ironworks could just about be glimpsed as grey foundations. He saw the spiky fragments sticking out of the snow, twisted wreckage from mankind’s vain desire to govern its own fate.

The history of the ironworks was short and violent. Several hundred people worked here just before the turn of the last century, working to purify the iron ore found in the area. Southern Swedish ironmasters bought the factory after the First World War, stripped it of its machines and equipment, sold the workers’ housing and quite literally blew the ironworks up.

Some people are allowed to blow things up. Not everyone, though.

There was another jolt of pain in his diaphragm, and he realized he was freezing. The medicine was wearing off; he ought to get back to the cabin. He was suddenly aware of his smell again; it had got much worse in recent days. His mood sank when he thought about the dry nutritional powder he was forced to live off. This was no life.

Today was exactly three months since the diagnosis.

He shook off the thought and carried on walking, towards the pulp mill.

All that was left today was the warehouses, the shameful great buildings that were lent to the Germans during the war to store munitions and supplies. Weapons, grain, tins of food: the Nazis could stash them here and collect them for their troops in Norway or the Soviet Union. Thirty men from the town had worked here, Karina’s father among them. She had always claimed that it was working for the Germans that drove her father to drink.

Excuses , he thought. Man has his own free will. He can choose to do or not do anything, except death .

And he had chosen, and his choice was to fight against imperialism with death as his means of expression, death as a tool against people who in turn had chosen to impose oppression and captivity upon his brothers and sisters.

Brothers and sisters , he thought.

He grew up a single child, but eventually he acquired a family anyway. Created his own flock, the only one he had ever taken responsibility for, and the only one he had betrayed.

The pain settled into his stomach; his lack of responsibility afflicted his body and made it heavy. He turned back towards the campsite, walking with painful steps back to reception.

What sort of father was he? He had left his flock to fend for themselves, had fled as soon as things started to heat up around him.