Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

All those threads between the sisters. Anni is over eighty, the age Kerttu soon will be. But they’re unable to say a word to each other about what they think and know. Eventually, Anni says she’s going back indoors. Whereupon Kerttu heaves her kick-sledge around and heads off home.

Anni stays put for a while, watching the mist. Then, suddenly, she senses my presence.

“Wilma,” she says.

I wish I were able to touch her. Instead, I remind her of when we went swimming in the lake. She even swam underwater. Came up snorting.

“I didn’t know I was still capable of that!” she gasped in jubilation. “Why do we stop doing things simply because we grow old?”

I shouted back to her,“I’m not going to stop. I’ll carry on swimming until I’m ninety!”

Later, in the kitchen, when we were both sitting in front of the stove with fluffy towels wrapped around us, Anni grinned and said, “So you’ll stop swimming when you’re ninety, will you? Why?”

Now she starts crying as she turns round and trudges back to her house.

I move on.

I’m sitting on the edge of the autopsy bench, observing myself.

The pathologist has been in a continuous bad mood. Angry because he’s been forced to do his post-mortem examination again. A week ago my body looked quite decent. But now, after being exposed to the air, I’m bluish and swollen. My flesh is distintegrating.

Now he’s cutting up my right hand, and suddenly his bad mood seems to have blown away. He starts humming. Is it a song? What a voice he has! It sounds like two stones being rubbed together.

He takes off his gloves and makes a phone call. Asks to speak to Anna-Maria Mella. He starts by complaining about what a hell of a nuisance it is, having to repeat the post-mortem, and how he’d be grateful if in future he’d be informed when there’s suspicion that a death has been anything other than accidental, so he knows what to look for. I can hear that the woman at the other end of the line is being very patient with him. He grumbles and groans, but in the end can’t contain himself any longer. He simply has to tell her about the hand.

“I thought you might be interested in something,” he says, and when he hears her tense, expectant silence, he pauses dramatically, coughing and clearing his throat, and almost succeeds in driving her mad.

“ Khrush … khrush …” he croaks before continuing. “She has a fracture in her fifth metacarpal… that is, you know, the bone in the hand behind the little finger on the way to the wrist. A common injury caused when defending oneself… It could very well have been caused by her… by her hitting her hand against a door, for instance…”

I must get away from here. I can’t bear to look at this body any more. Not long ago the skin was tight and alive. I had fantastic breasts. I think about how Simon used to hug me. I remember how he would stand behind me, kiss my ears and my neck, and put his hands inside my clothes. The soft, sweet noises he would make which meant that he wanted to make love to me. Saying “Mmm” to each other, we knew exactly what we meant.

Now I have no body. That blue, swollen, disintegrating lump of flesh on the steel bench beneath the fluorescent lamps isn’t really my body.

I am so terribly lonely.

Hjörleifur Arnarson is also lonely. I’m standing outside his house. His dog can sense my presence. She’s staring in my direction. The fur on her back bristles, and she whimpers restlessly.

Several weeks can pass between occasions when Hjörleifur talks to other human beings. Not that he misses the contact. He thinks a lot about women, of course, but it’s more than thirty years since he had a relationship with one. He dreams about a woman’s soft skin and rounded body. He leads his own eccentric, wild existence out there in the forest. In summer he wanders around naked and sleeps outdoors. Every day, summer and winter, he bathes in Lake Vittangijärvi.

He didn’t see us when we were there, diving. When he arrived at the lake we had already been dead for two hours. I wasn’t even in the lake any more. He wondered about that hole in the ice, too big to be used just for fishing. He thought perhaps there was someone enjoying a wintry bath in the lake, just like him. But why in the middle of the lake? And the remains of the door were floating around in the hole, lots of bits of wood; he couldn’t fit them together.

Then he saw our rucksacks in the lay-by. Assumed they belonged to people who would be returning shortly. He hung around for a while. Investigated the contents of the rucksacks, but didn’t take anything. He was curious, hoping for an opportunity to chat. But nobody turned up, of course.

When he came back for his dip the next day, the rucksacks were still there. And the following day. It started snowing the day after that. The rucksacks were covered in snow. So he took them home.

Now he goes upstairs and takes the rucksacks out of a cupboard. He has shut them away very carefully, so that mice and rats couldn’t get at them and poke around and crap all over them.

No doubt the rucksacks belonged to the kids that policewoman was asking about, he thinks. He’ll hand them over when she comes back tomorrow, tell her exactly where he found them and about the bits of wood floating around in the hole – which doubtless came from the door she was also asking about.

But before he does that, there are one or two things he wants to remove. There’s a first-rate, brand-new Trangia stove in one of the rucksacks, and a big merino wool pullover with a windproof lining in the other one. Hjörleifur has never owned such a splendid pullover. And the kids no longer need the stuff, so there’s no reason why he shouldn’t keep it.

He carries the rucksacks downstairs. It’s so cold upstairs. Much nicer in the kitchen, where the wood-burning stove is crackling and spitting away, warming the place up with its living heat.

He is so busy unpacking the rucksacks and sifting through the contents, picking out what he wants to keep and what he’ll put back, that he doesn’t hear the snow scooter pull up not far from his house.

It doesn’t worry him that the dog starts barking – she does that sometimes. For all sorts of reasons. A squirrel, perhaps. Or a fox. Or snow tumbling down from the trees. She’s such an old softie.

It’s only when he hears the front door closing and footsteps approaching down the hall that he realizes he has visitors. Two men appear in his kitchen.

“Now then, Hjörleifur,” one of them says. “We hear you’ve had a visit from the police.”

He looks at them. His instinct tells him to run. But there’s nowhere to run to.

Only one of them does the talking. The other one, who’s big and fat, stands leaning against the door frame.

“What have you told the police, Hjörleifur? What did they ask you about? Come on, let’s hear it!

Hjörleifur clears his throat

“They were asking about a couple of kids who disappeared. If they’d been to the lake. If I’d seen them.”

“Well, did you? What did you tell them?”

Hjörleifur doesn’t answer. Remains kneeling by the rucksacks.

It’s only now that Tore notices them. Two top-class rucksacks made from posh nylon material. Not the kind of thing Hjörleifur would normally have. He uses army surplus and home-made stuff he nails together or sews by hand from animal skins he’s tanned himself.

“So you found the rucksacks by the lake,” Tore says, feasting his eyes on them. “That’s right, isn’t it, you thieving bastard?”

“I didn’t think about it,” Hjörleifur says. “There was nobody who…”

That’s as far as he gets. Tore takes a lump of wood from the pile beside the stove, holds it with both hands like a baseball bat and uses all his strength to bash it against the back of Hjörleifur’s head.