Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

A flock of ravens lands in the parking area at the front of Hjalmar’s house. Their beaks and feathers glisten in the sun.

My God, how big they are, Hjalmar thinks as he watches them through his window.

He has the feeling that they are staring straight at him. When he opens the front door, they shuffle to one side, but none of them flies away. They caw and croak quietly. He is not sure if he should think this is creepy or captivating. They stare at him.

I’ll pay a visit to Wilma’s grave, he thinks. Nobody could possibly think there was anything odd about that. I live in the village, after all.

Snow covers Kiruna cemetery. High drifts between the cleared graves and paths. It is almost like walking through a maze. Martinsson looks around. It takes her some time to get her bearings. The snow makes everything look different. Hardly anybody has had the time to clear the graves since this morning’s storm. They lie hidden beneath the snow. The sun is glistening on all the whiteness. The beech trees form imposing portals with their hanging branches, heavy with wet snow.

Martinsson usually reads the inscriptions on all the gravestones as she passes by them. She loves all the old-fashioned titles: small-holder, certificated forester, parish treasurer. And all the old names: Gideon, Eufemia, Lorentz.

The grave of her grandparents is hidden under the snow. It was buried even before the latest storm. Her conscience pricks as she goes to fetch a spade.

She starts digging. The newly fallen snow is light and easy to shift, but the snow underneath is wet, icy and as heavy as lead. The sun hurts her eyes but warms her back. It occurs to her that she never gets the feeling that her farmor is present when she comes here. No, she meets her farmor in other places. Without warning in the forest, or sometimes in her house. When she goes to the grave it’s more of an act of will, an attempt to make her thoughts and feelings home in on her farmor .

But I know you’d want me to keep things neat and tidy here, she thinks to her grandmother, and vows to become a better grave-keeper.

Now memories of her farmor start to surface. Martinsson is fifteen years old and riding her moped the 13 kilometres from Kiruna to Kurravaara, chugging up to the house on her Puch Dakota with her satchel over her shoulder. It’s almost the end of term, and in the autumn she’ll be starting grammar school. It’s 6.00 in the evening. Farmor is in the cowshed. Martinsson throws her jacket over the big cast-iron cauldron built into the wall. There is a grate underneath it. Farmor uses it to heat up water for the cows in winter. She sometimes uses the warm water to soften up dried birch sprigs so that the cows have birch leaves to eat together with soaked oats: Martinsson often helps her farmor tear the sodden leaves from the twigs. Farmor ’s hands are always rough and covered in wounds. When Martinsson was a little girl she used to bathe in the cowshed cauldron every other Saturday. Short wooden planks were placed at the bottom so that she didn’t burn herself on the hot iron.

All those noises, Martinsson thinks as she stands by the grave. All those calming noises that I shall never hear again – cows chewing, milk spurting onto the sides of the pail as Farmor does the milking, chains rattling as the cows stretch to reach more hay, the buzzing of flies and the chattering of barn swallows. Farmor giving me strict instructions to go and change – you can’t mess around in the cowshed wearing your elegant school uniform. Me saying: “Who cares?” and turning my attention to brushing down Daisy.

Farmor never argued. Her strictness was only in her voice. My life with her was one of freedom.

Then she died alone. While I was in Uppsala, studying for my exams. But I’m not ready to think about that yet. There are so many things for which I can never forgive myself. And that is the worst one.

Martinsson is sweating, digging into the heavy snow with the spade, when a shadow falls over her. Someone is standing behind her. She turns round.

It’s Hjalmar.

He looks like a man on the run. A man who has been sleeping in his clothes in stairwells, a man who has been searching through rubbish bins and wastepaper baskets for bottles and tins with a deposit he can collect.

Martinsson is frightened at first. But then her heart becomes heavy and she feels sorry for him. He looks really awful. He’s going rapidly downhill.

She says nothing.

Hjalmar looks at Martinsson. He hadn’t expected to see that prosecutor here. He passed through the new part of the cemetery on his way to Wilma’s grave. All the new graves were free of snow, neat and tidy. The relatives must have been here the moment the sun came out. They had certainly spent their lunch breaks making sure everything looked presentable. Much loved and missed , it said on nearly all the stones. Hjalmar wondered vaguely what it would say on his own stone. Whether Tore’s wife Laura would look after the grave. She might well do, simply to stop people talking in the village. He paused for a few moments in front of a child’s grave. Calculated quickly on the basis of the inscribed dates how old Samuel had been when he died. Two years, three months and five days. There was an image of the boy on the top left-hand corner of the stone. Hjalmar had never seen anything like that before. Not that he visited the cemetery all that often. There was a wreath with a teddy bear in it, flowers and a lantern.

“Poor little lad,” he said, feeling a tug at his heart-strings. “Poor little lad.”

Then he couldn’t bring himself to stop at Wilma’s grave. Just walked past the temporary plastic nameplate on an aluminium peg: “Persson Wilma”. Gifts, flowers, a few flickering candles. He walked back through the old part of the cemetery wondering why the hell he had come, and then caught sight of the prosecutor.

He recognized her by her overcoat and long, dark hair. He didn’t know why he decided to walk towards her. He stopped a few metres short. She was frightened when she turned round. He could tell.

He wants to tell her she has nothing to be afraid of, but can’t produce a sound. Just stands there like an idiot. But that is what he’s been all his life. An idiot people are afraid of.

She says nothing. The fear disappears from her eyes and is replaced by something else. Something he finds it difficult to cope with. He’s not used to it. He’s not used to people being quiet. He’s usually the one who says nothing and lets the others do the talking, lets the others decide what to do.

“They can scatter my ashes to the winds,” he says eventually.

She nods.

“Have you come to visit the people you killed?” he asks after another pause.

He knows about that, of course. He’s read about her in the evening papers. And people talk.

“No,” she says. “I’ve come to visit my grandmother. And my grandfather.”

She nods towards the grave she is clearing.

Then it dawns on her what his question sounded like. There was an “also” there that he didn’t actually say. But it was there. Have you also come to visit the people you killed?

She turns her head and points. Adds in a calm voice: “The ones I killed are over there. And there. But Thomas Söderberg isn’t buried here.”

“You were acquitted,” he says.

“Yes,” she says. “They said it was self-defence.”

“How did you feel?”

He stresses the “you”. Looks her in the eye. Then looks down at the snow as if he were standing in front of the altar at church, showing due deference.

What does he want? Martinsson wonders.