Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

“That’s how it went, more or less,” said Johansson, nodding.

“May I say something now?” asked Helena Stein, but without looking at Johansson.

“Sure,” said Johansson. “Just think about what you’re saying.”

“So why would I have done that?” she asked.

“You had run into him earlier in the day. You probably hadn’t even seen him since the embassy takeover almost fifteen years earlier, but suddenly he was simply sitting there in the audience listening to your lecture. And when you saw him it was like seeing an evil apparition from another time. You were already nervous. East Germany had just fallen apart, and you were constantly worried about what people like me might find in the Stasi files when we finally had the chance to snoop through them. And when Eriksson came up to you after your lecture he didn’t exactly do anything to calm your fears on that score. More likely he tried to get you to think that your whole life was now in his hands. And maybe he also said something to the effect that he was the only one who would get off on the strength of his contacts, once the police finally came knocking on your doors.”

“That’s what he said to Theo — long before,” said Stein.

“Careful now,” Johansson warned.

“So what did I do afterward?” asked Helena Stein. “Yes, I promise to be careful,” she said, and now suddenly she looked at him again.

“You tried to collect yourself as best you could, cleaned up as well as you could, went through his desk and took a binder with you that he probably had been boasting about earlier in the evening — and that mostly contained a lot of nonsense and his own notes, if you want to know what I think personally — because unlike you I’ve never seen all that shit he had locked up in his safe-deposit box, mostly for his own sake, so that he could convince you what a remarkable person he was. The following months you weren’t doing so well yourself... You told Theo what had happened, naturally — if he hadn’t already figured it out on his own — and obviously he promised that regardless of anything else he would see to it that nothing bad happened to you and that in the worst case you would simply disappear to some tropical island as far away as you could get. But apart from that, well, you were desperate, probably thought about committing suicide. On several occasions I’m convinced you stood with phone in hand and were about to call the police so that it would finally be over, but then time passed, and nothing happened, and now we’re sitting here,” said Johansson, sighing.

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Helena Stein.

“For several reasons,” said Johansson. “Because I think that if someone offered you a new job within the government, you should be given the chance right now to avoid the risk by choosing to do something else. I brought these with me, by the way,” said Johansson, taking out the bag with two CD-ROMs containing extracts from Mattei’s research that he had carefully edited himself.

“What’s that?” said Stein.

“Scenes from your life,” said Johansson. “When I look at them, I get the distinct impression that you don’t lack alternatives. If you were to decide to live a different life now, of course,” said Johansson, looking steadily at her.

“What I don’t really understand,” said Stein, “is why you’re telling me this. Why are you doing this?”

“Oh well,” said Johansson. “If I don’t remember wrong, it was actually you who asked me.”

“You came here to tell me,” she said. “I’m quite sure of that, and I’ve listened to you. I haven’t said anything about what you’ve said that can cause you any problems.”

“I’m not the one who has problems,” said Johansson, “and I didn’t come here to play God.”

“Why did you come here then?” she asked.

“Two reasons, as I see it,” said Johansson. “It has happened that I’ve been wrong, and I guess I wanted to assure myself that this time I wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” said Stein. “I haven’t said a word about what I think about your story.”

“No,” said Johansson, “and I was actually the one who asked you not to. Let me put it like this: I guess I’ve figured it out anyway. Maybe I saw it in your eyes?”

“The other reason then,” said Stein without looking at him.

“Justice,” said Johansson. “I think what has already happened is good enough. What happens now, you decide yourself.”

“Do you want me to thank you?” said Helena Stein, and the bitterness in her voice suddenly came through.

“Why should you thank me?” said Johansson. “If the prosecutor had decided to report you on reasonable grounds for suspicion, we would have turned the case back over to the Stockholm police and let them take care of the formalities. And I’m convinced they wouldn’t have gotten very far. Just as I’m convinced that you would have had to run the media gauntlet anyway. So it was solely for that reason I did it this way. How could we have done anything else? The prosecutor chose to write off your case, and with that it’s closed for me and my colleagues too. We’re not the ones you need to be worried about now; there are completely different interests and different individuals. And if anyone asks me, you and I have never met. For the one simple reason that that’s the way I’m expected to answer such a question, and, if I may be personal now, I don’t have the slightest problem with that.”

“I understand what you mean,” said Helena Stein.

“I’m convinced of that,” said Johansson. “And for me it’s only about justice.”

And then he left, walked to Östermalm subway station, and took the subway home to Söder. To another, and better, life, thought Johansson as he strode into the hall to his and Pia’s apartment. A new time, and a better life.

On April 24, Easter Monday, the media made note of the fact that twenty-five years to the day had passed since six young German terrorists occupied the West German embassy in Stockholm, murdered two people in cold blood, and carelessly or intentionally blew up the embassy building.

The occupation was described as one among a well-known series of events from a different time, and the anniversary provided an opportunity to show the classic images of a now legendary TV reporter screaming at his technicians to start filming him live. He crouches with microphone raised while in the background the embassy building shakes and there are shock waves and flames from the explosions. He too was interviewed on this anniversary, of course, and everything he had to say showed clearly that nowadays he was living a different life and that the exuberant interest of his younger colleagues mostly just made him feel tired.

The legal consequences of the twenty-fifth anniversary were for the most part not touched on. Only in passing was the fact mentioned that in a legal sense, right before midnight the statute of limitations would run out on the legal case based on the occupation of the embassy, and from now on the event would live on only in history. Of the intimation of Swedish involvement in the drama, there was not a peep.

At the beginning of May, Undersecretary Helena Stein left her position at the Ministry of Defense, and according to the briefly worded press release — for the most part passed over in silence by the media — the reason she did so was that she had decided to return to private legal practice. She did, however, intend to retain some of her political involvement on the local level, and she also expressed a hope that the change in her work situation would give her more time for such involvement.