Åsa Larsson: Until Thy Wrath Be Past

Her mobile pinged. She took it out of her pocket. A text from Måns Wenngren.

“Pouring with bloody rain in Stockholm,” it said. “Bed empty and lonely. Come back. Want to lick your breasts & hug you. Kiss all your lovely places.”

She felt a tingling sensation.

“Bloody man,” she keyed in. “I have to work tonight. Not think about you.”

She smiled. He was great. She missed him, enjoyed his company. A few years ago she had been working for him at Meijer & Ditzinger in Stockholm. He thought she should move back there and start working as a solicitor again.

“You’d earn three times as much as you’re getting now,” he would say.

She looked over towards the river. Last summer he had knelt with her on the jetty, giving all of her farmor ’s rag rugs a good scrubbing. They had sweated in the sunshine. Salty rivulets had trickled down their backs and from their brows into their eyes. When they had finished scrubbing they had dipped the rugs into the water to rinse them. Then they had stripped off and swum naked with the rugs, like excited dogs.

She tried to explain to him that this was how she wanted to live.

“I want to stand out here re-puttying the windows, glancing out over the river from time to time. I want to drink coffee on my porch before going to work on summer mornings. I want to dig my car out of the snow in winter. I want frost patterns on my kitchen windows.”

“But you can have all that,” he tried to persuade her. “We can come up to Kiruna as often as you want.”

But it would not be the same. She knew that. The house would never allow itself to be deceived. Nor would the river.

I need all this, she thought. I am so many difficult people. The little three-year-old, starved of love; the ice-cold lawyer; the lone wolf; and the person who longs to do crazy things again, who longs to escape into craziness. It is good to feel small beneath the sparkling Northern Lights, small beside the mighty river. Nature and the universe are so close to us up here. My troubles and difficulties just shrivel up. I like being insignificant.

I like living up here with lining paper on the shelves and spiders in the corners, and a besom to sweep the floor with, she thought. I don’t want to be a guest and a stranger. Never again.

A German pointer came galloping along at full speed through the snow. Her ears were flapping at right angles to her head, and her mouth was open wide as if she were smiling. She slid along on the ice beneath the snow as she tried to stop and say hello.

“Hello, Bella!” Martinsson said, her arms full of dog. “Where’s the boss?”

Now she could hear furious shouting.

“Heel, I said! Heel! Are you deaf?”

“She’s here,” Martinsson shouted back.

Sivving Fjällborg gradually materialized through the falling snow. He was jogging along tentatively, afraid of falling. His weaker side was lagging slightly, his arm hanging down. His curly white hair was hidden under a green-and-white knitted hat. The hat was wearing its own little cap of snow. Martinsson did her best to suppress a smile. He looked magnificent. He was big anyway, but he was wearing a red padded jacket that made him look enormous. And everything was crowned by that little cap of snow.

“Where?” he puffed.

But Bella had vanished into the snow.

“Huh, I expect she’ll turn up when she’s hungry,” he said with a smile. “What about you? I’m going to make some dumplings. There’ll be plenty for both of us.”

Bella appeared just as they were about to go in, scampering down into the cellar ahead of them. Sivving Fjällborg had moved into his boiler room several years before.

“You can always find what you’re looking for, and it’s easy to keep tidy,” he would say.

The house above was neat and tidy, but was only used when the children and grandchildren came to visit.

The boiler room was sparsely furnished.

Nice and cosy, Martinsson thought as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the wooden bench next to the Formica table.

A table, a chair, a stool, a kitchen sofa – what more could you want? There was a made-up bed in one corner. Rag rugs on the floor to prevent the chill seeping up.

Fjällborg was standing by the hotplate, wearing an apron that had once belonged to his wife tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His stomach was too big for him to knot it at his back.

Bella had lain down next to the boiler, in order to get dry. There was a smell of wet dog, wet wool, wet concrete.

“Why not have a little rest,” Fjällborg said.

Martinsson lay down on the wooden sofa. It was short, but if you piled two cushions under your head and tucked up your knees it was comfortable enough.

Fjällborg cut a dumpling into thick slices. He swirled a large knob of butter around the hot frying pan.

Martinsson’s mobile pinged again. Another text from Måns.

“You can work some other time. I want to put my arms around your waist and kiss you, lift you up onto the kitchen table and hoist up your skirt.”

“Is it from work?” Fjällborg said.

“No, it’s from Måns,” Martinsson said archly. “He’s wondering when you’re going to go down to Stockholm and build him a sauna.”

“Huh, the idle fool. Tell him to come up here and do some shovelling. All this snow – a bit of mild weather is all we need, and it’ll be sheer hell. Tell him that.”

“I will,” Martinsson said, and wrote: “Mmm… More.”

Fjällborg tipped the sliced dumpling into the pan. The fat hissed and spat. Bella raised her head and sniffed happily.

“And me with my gammy arm,” Fjällborg said. “Build a bloody sauna? You must be joking. No, we should all do what Arvid Backlund has done.”

“What has he done?” Martinsson asked.

“If you can tear your eyes away from that thing for one second, I’ll tell you.”

Martinsson switched off her mobile. She spent far too little time with her neighbour. Now that she was here, the least she could do was give him her full attention.

“He lives on the other side of the creek. He turned eighty-two last week. He worked out how much firewood he was going to need for the rest of his life…”

“How can he do that when he doesn’t know how much longer he’s going to live?”

“Maybe you’d like me to give you a doggy bag so you can eat at home on your own? I’m trying to tell you a story.”

“Sorry! Carry on!”

“Anyway, he ordered a load of wood and got them to tip it in through his living-room window. So it’s nice and handy. Enough to keep him warm for the winters he has left to him.”

“In the living room?”

“A bloody big pile in the middle of the floor.”

“I bet he hasn’t got a wife,” Martinsson said.

They shared the joke for a while. Their laughter went some way towards salving Martinsson’s guilty conscience over calling on Fjällborg so seldom and his resulting disappointment. Fjällborg’s stomach wobbled beneath his apron. Martinsson had a coughing fit.

Then Fjällborg changed tack completely, becoming fretful.

“Not that there’s anything wrong in that,” he said in Arvid Backlund’s defence.

Martinsson stopped laughing.

“At least he can manage at home on his own now,” Fjällborg said vehemently. “Of course he could have his firewood in the woodshed like everyone else. Then go out there one morning, slip and break his leg. At his age. You never come home from hospital when you’re that old. You just get shoved off into a nursing home. It’s easy to laugh when you’re young and healthy.”

He slammed the cast-iron pan with the fried dumpling onto the table.