Åsa Larsson - Until Thy Wrath Be Past

“I don’t know,” she says hesitantly. “At first I didn’t feel anything much. I didn’t remember much either. But then things got worse. I couldn’t work. I tried to get a grip, but in the end I made a mistake that cost my firm lots of money and prestige – they had a good insurance policy, but still… Then I went on sick leave. I hung around the flat. Didn’t want to go out. Slept badly. Ate badly. The flat was in a terrible mess.”

“Yes,” he says.

They fall silent as someone else approaches. She nods as she walks past. Martinsson nods back. Hjalmar doesn’t seem to have noticed.

It occurs to Martinsson that he might be going to confess. What the hell should she do if that happens? Ask him to accompany her to the police station, of course. But what if he refuses? What if he confesses and then regrets having done so and kills her instead?

She looks him in the eye for a while. And she recalls one of Meijer & Ditzinger’s clients, a prostitute who owned a number of flats. She made no attempt to hide her profession, having commissioned the law firm to sort out a tax problem. Måns Wenngren had been drunk on one occasion when they had gone out for an afternoon drink, and quite irresponsibly had started asking her if she was ever afraid of her clients. He had been flirtatious, flattering, fascinated. Martinsson had been embarrassed, had looked down at the table. The woman had remained friendly but never wavered in her integrity – it was obvious that she was used to this kind of curiosity. She said no, she wasn’t afraid. She always looked new clients in the eye long and hard. “That way you know,” she had said, “if you need to be frightened or not. Everything you need to know about a person can be seen in his eyes.”

Martinsson looks Hjalmar in the eye long and hard. No, she doesn’t need to be afraid of him.

“You ended up in a psychiatric ward,” he says.

“Yes, in the end I did. I went out of my mind. It was when Lars-Gunnar Vinsa shot himself and his boy. I couldn’t cope with another death. It sort of opened all the doors I was trying to keep closed.”

Hjalmar finds it almost impossible to breathe. That’s exactly what it’s like, he wants to say. First Wilma and Simon. That had been bad enough, although he managed to cope. But then there was Hjörleifur Arnarson…

“Did you sink all the way down?” he says. “Did you hit rock bottom?”

“I suppose I did, yes. Although I don’t remember much of the worst part. I was so poorly.”

They gave me electric-shock treatment, she thinks. And they kept me under close supervision. I don’t want to talk about this.

They stand there, Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula. For him it is so difficult to ask questions. For her it is so difficult to answer. They battle their way forward through the conversation like two hikers in a blizzard. Heads bowed, struggling with the wind.

“I don’t remember,” she says. “I sometimes think that if you recall a situation in which you were really depressed, you feel all the sorrow flooding back when you think about it. And if you recall a situation in which you were really happy, the happiness comes back to you. But if your memory of a situation fills you with anxiety, the feelings you had don’t come back, no matter what. It’s as if your brain simply goes on strike. It’s not going to go back there. You can only remember what it was like. You can’t experience how it felt.”

Depressed? Hjalmar thinks. Sorrow? Happiness?

Neither of them speaks.

“What about you?” Rebecka says eventually. “Whom have you come to visit?”

“I thought I’d come and say hello to her.”

She realizes that it’s Wilma he’s talking about.

“Did you know her?” she says.

Yes, his mouth says, although no sound is produced. But he nods.

“What was she like?”

“She was O.K.,” he says, and adds with a wry smile: “She wasn’t very good at maths.”

Wilma is sitting at Anni’s kitchen table with her maths textbook open in front of her, tearing her hair in desperation. She has to read up on maths and Swedish in order to be able to apply to grammar school. Anni is at the sink washing up, watching Hjalmar Krekula through the window as he clears away the snow from the parking area in front of the house with his tractor. Anni is his aunt, after all.

The air turns blue as Wilma curses and swears over her maths book. God’s angels come out in goose pimples when they hear her.

“Hell, damnation, shit, fuck, cunt,” she says, snarling.

“Hey, calm down now,” Anni says disapprovingly.

“But I don’t want to,” Wilma says. “I’m thick, I can’t understand a thing. Bloody algebra shit-talk. ‘When we multiply a conjugate pair, the radical vanishes and we are left with a rational number.’ I’ve had enough of this crap. I’m going to ring Simon, and we can go out on the snow scooter.”

“Do that.”

“Aaaargh! But I really have to learn this stuff!”

“Don’t ring him, then.”

Anni sees that Hjalmar has almost finished. She puts the coffee pan on the stove. Five minutes later he sticks his head round the door and announces that it is all done. Anni will not let him go. She tells him she has only just put the coffee on. She and Wilma will not be able to drink it all themselves. And she has thawed out some buns as well.

He allows himself to be persuaded and sits down at the kitchen table. Keeps his jacket on, only unzipping it halfway as a sign that he does not intend to stay long.

He says nothing. He hardly ever does; people are used to it. Anni and Wilma take care of the talking, know better than to try to include him by asking lots of questions.

“I’m going to ring Simon,” Wilma says in the end, and goes out into the hall where the telephone stands on a little teak table with a stool beside it and a mirror behind.

Anni gets up to fetch a 50-krona note from an old cocoa tin standing on the edge of the cooker hood. It is part of the ritual: she will try to persuade Hjalmar to accept the money for clearing the snow. He always refuses, but in the end he usually takes a bag of buns, or some beef stew in a plastic jar. Or something of the sort. While Anni fumbles around in the cocoa tin, Hjalmar pulls over Wilma’s maths book. He glances quickly through the text, then in about a minute flat he solves nine algebraic equations, one after the other.

“Wow,” Anni says. “Fancy that, I’d almost forgotten. You were very good at maths when you were at school. Maybe you could help Wilma? Her maths is driving her up the wall.”

But Hjalmar has to leave. He zips up his jacket, grunts a thank you for the coffee and grabs the 50-krona note in order to avoid arguing.

That evening Wilma turns up at Hjalmar Krekula’s house. She has her maths book in her hand.

“You’re good at this stuff!” she says without preamble, marches into his kitchen and sits down at the table. “You’re a genius, after all.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” Hjalmar says, but is interrupted.

“You must teach me. I can’t understand a damned thing.”

“No, I can’t,” he says, and starts struggling for breath, but Wilma has already wriggled out of her jacket.

“Oh yes!” she says. “Yes you can!”

“Alright,” he says. “But I’m no schoolmistress.”

She looks at him entreatingly. She positively pleads with him. So he feels obliged to sit down beside her.

They slog away together for more than two hours. She shouts and moans as she usually does when things are not going well for her. To her surprise, he shouts as well. He slams his fist down on the table and says that for God’s sake she must stop gaping out of the window and concentrate on her maths book. Is she meditating? What the hell is she doing? And when she starts crying, worn out by second-order polynomials, he taps her awkwardly on the head and asks if she would like a soda. And so they drink Coca-Cola together.