‘I . . . I might have touched her, maybe. But it didn’t mean anything.’
‘No?’ Lea sniffed, and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. ‘Maybe it’s for the best, Ulf. I couldn’t have gone anywhere with you anyway, but now at least I won’t have to wonder about what might have been.’
She lowered her head, turned and walked towards the sacristy. No long-winded farewell.
I wanted to run after her. Stop her. Explain. Plead. Force her. But it was as if all my energy, all my willpower had drained away.
And as the sound of the door slamming behind her echoed around the rafters, I knew that was the last time I would see Lea.
I tumbled out into the daylight. Stood there on the church steps, staring out with stinging eyes at the serried ranks of gravestones.
The darkness came. I fell. The hole sucked me in, down, and not even all the drink in the world would stop it.
But of course even if it doesn’t do anything to help, drink is still drink. And when I knocked on Mattis’s door and went in, he had already put two bottles on the kitchen worktop.
‘I thought you’d come back,’ he grinned.
I took the bottles and left without a word.
CHAPTER 15
HOW DOES A story end?
My grandfather was an architect. He said that a line – and a story – ends where it began. And vice versa.
He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.
‘I ought to design hospitals in Uganda,’ he said. ‘It could be planned in five days, and built in ten, and it would save lives. Instead I sit for months designing monuments for a superstition that doesn’t save anyone.’
Places of refuge, that’s what he called his churches. Places of refuge from anxiety about death. Places of refuge for people’s incurable hope of eternal life.
‘It would have been cheaper to give people a security blanket and a teddy bear to comfort them,’ he said. ‘But it’s probably better that I design churches that people can bear to look at, rather than let any of the other idiots get the job. They’re littering the country with those monstrosities they call churches these days.’
We were sitting in the stench of the old people’s home, my rich uncle, my cousin and me, but neither of the other two was listening. Basse was just repeating things he’d said a hundred times before. They nodded, murmured in agreement, and kept glancing at the time. Before we went in, my uncle had said that half an hour was enough. I wanted to stay longer, but my uncle was driving. Basse had started to get a bit confused, but I enjoyed listening to him repeat what he thought about life. Possibly because it gave me a sense that some things were fixed, in spite of everything. ‘You’re going to die, take it like a man, lad!’ The only thing I was worried about was that one of the senior nurses with a crucifix round their neck would persuade him to surrender his soul to their god when the end was near. I suppose I thought that would be traumatic for a boy who had grown up with his grandfather’s atheism. I didn’t believe in life after death, but I did believe in death after life.
At any rate, that was now my innermost hope and desire.
Two days had passed since the door had slammed behind Lea.
Two days in bed in the cabin, two days in free fall down the hole, while I emptied one of the bottles of drink.
So how do we finish this story?
Dehydrated, I tumbled out of bed and staggered to the stream. I knelt down in the water and drank. Afterwards I just sat looking at my own reflection in an eddy behind some rocks.
And then I knew.
You’re going to shoot the reflection.
Hell, why not? They weren’t going to get me. I was going to get me. The line stops here. And what the hell would be so awful about that? Son cuatro días, as Basse used to say. Life lasts four days.
Almost ecstatic at my decision, I rushed back to the cabin.
The rifle was leaning against the wall.
It was a good decision, a decision with no consequences for the rest of the world. No one would cry for me, miss me, suffer any hardship. It was actually hard to think of anyone who was more dispensable than me. In short, it was a decision that would benefit everyone. So now all I had to do was put it into practice before I became too cowardly, before my sneaky, unreliable brain managed to come up with some desperate argument in favour of continuing this wretched existence.
I rested the butt of the rifle on the floor and put my mouth over the barrel. The steel tasted bitter and salty from the powder. To reach the trigger I had to stick the barrel so far into my throat that I almost hurt myself. I could just reach the trigger with my index finger. Come on, then. Suicide. The first time is always worst.
I twisted my shoulder and pulled the trigger.
There was a dry click.
Fuck.
I’d forgotten that the bullets were in the reindeer.
But I had more. Somewhere.
I searched through the cupboards and shelves. There weren’t many places I could have put the box of cartridges. In the end I got down on my knees and looked under the bed, and there it was. I inserted the cartridges into the magazine. Yes, I know one bullet in your brain is enough, but it felt somehow safer knowing there was more ammunition in case anything went wrong. And yes, my fingers were trembling, so it took a while. But eventually I clicked the magazine into the rifle and loaded it the way Lea had taught me.
I put my mouth over the barrel again. It was wet with saliva and drool. I reached for the trigger. But the rifle seemed to have got longer. Or me shorter. Was I backing out?
No, I finally managed to put my finger on the trigger. And now I knew it was going to happen, that my brain wasn’t going to stop me. That not even my brain could come up with good enough counter-arguments, it too was longing for a rest, didn’t want to fall, wanted a darkness that wasn’t this darkness.
I took a deep breath and started to squeeze the trigger. The rushing sound in my ears took on a tinny note. Hang on, that wasn’t coming from inside my head, it was outside. Bells ringing. The wind must have changed. And I couldn’t deny that the sound of church bells felt fitting. I squeezed the trigger a little more, but it was still a millimetre or so off firing. I bent my knees, had to swallow more of the barrel, my thighs aching.
Church bells.
Now?
I’d noticed that weddings and funerals took place at one o’clock. Christenings and services on Sundays. And there were no religious holidays in August, as far as I was aware.
The barrel slid deeper into my throat. There. Now.
The Germans.
Lea had told me that they rang the church bells so the members of the resistance would know when the Germans were coming for them.
I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Pulled the rifle out of my mouth. Stood up. I put it by the door and went over to the window facing the village. I couldn’t see anyone. I picked up the binoculars. Nothing.
To be on the safe side I checked the other direction as well, towards the woods. Nothing. I raised the binoculars to check the ridge beyond the trees. And there they were.
There were four of them. Still so far away that it was impossible to see who they might be. Apart from one. And it wasn’t too hard to guess who the other three were.
Mattis’s body was rocking from side to side. Evidently the money I had given him wasn’t enough, so he had laid claim to the other offer as well. Presumably he had charged them extra to show them the back way, so they could creep up on me with the best chance of not being seen.
They were too late. I was going to do the job for them. I had no desire to be tortured before I died. Not just because it hurt so much, but also because it wouldn’t take long before I was yelling that I’d hidden the money in the wall of the cabin, and the dope under the floorboard
s in an empty flat. It was empty because people seemed to have reservations about moving into flats in which people had killed themselves. From that perspective, Toralf had made a financial miscalculation by shooting himself in his own flat. He should have picked somewhere where his heirs wouldn’t suffer from the fall in value. A hunting cabin in the back of beyond, for instance.
I looked at the rifle leaning up against the wall. But I didn’t touch it. I had plenty of time, they had to get through the trees and wouldn’t be here for at least ten minutes, fifteen maybe. But that wasn’t why.
The church bells. They were ringing. They were ringing for me. And she was the one pulling the ropes. My beloved was ignoring church customs, didn’t care what the priest and the villagers would say, didn’t care about her own life, because of course Mattis would have worked out what she was doing. She only had one thing in her mind: to warn the guy she didn’t want to see again that Johnny was on his way to the cabin.
And that changed things.
Quite a lot of things.
They were approaching the trees now, and through the binoculars I could see the outlines of the other three. There was something birdlike about one of them, a thin neck sticking out of a jacket that was too big for him. Johnny. I could see something sticking up from the shoulders of the other two. Rifles. Automatic rifles, probably. The Fisherman had a container full of them down in his warehouse at the harbour.
I evaluated my chances. I could take them one at a time if they tried to storm the cabin. But they wouldn’t do that. Mattis would help them to exploit the terrain, they’d creep down the stream to get close enough to the cabin to shoot it to pieces. I looked round. The only things I had to hide behind were made of wood, so I might as well stand in front of the cabin, waving. My only chance, in other words, was to shoot them before they shot me. And they’d have to come closer for me to do that. I’d have to look them in the face.
Three of them disappeared in amongst the trees. The fourth, one of the suits with a rifle, stayed behind and shouted something, I didn’t hear what.
They wouldn’t be able to see me from inside the forest for the next few minutes. This was my chance to escape. I could run to the village, take the Volkswagen. If I was going to do that, I had to do it now. Grab the money belt and . . .
Two dots.
They looked as though they were flying across the heather, down towards the trees.
Now I realised what the guy had shouted. And that they had thought of everything. Dogs. Two of them. Silent. It struck me that dogs that didn’t bark when they were out running must be bloody well trained. I wouldn’t stand a chance, no matter how fast I ran.
This was starting to look bad. Maybe not quite as bad as three minutes ago, when I was standing there with a rifle barrel in my mouth, but the situation was completely different now. The distant, thin sound of church bells not only told me that some shady characters were on their way, but also that I now had something to lose. It was like getting stabbed with two knives at the same time, one hot, one cold, one happiness, one fear of dying. Hope is a real bastard.
I looked round.
My gaze fell on Knut’s knife.
Happiness and fear of dying. Hope.
I waited until I saw the fourth man and the dogs disappear into the woods, then I grabbed the money belt from the wall, opened the door and ran outside.
The swarm of flies rose up from the buck as I knelt down beside it. I saw that the ants were at it as well now, it was as if the pelt of the bloated cadaver was alive. I glanced over my shoulder. The cabin was between me and the trees, so I’d be hidden until they reached it. But I didn’t have long.
I closed my eyes and stuck the knife into the reindeer’s stomach.
There was a long groan as the gas inside escaped.
Then I drew the knife down its belly. I held my breath as the guts spilled out. There was less blood than I expected. It had probably gathered at the bottom of the corpse. Or had coagulated, maybe. Or been eaten up. Because now I could see that it wasn’t just the outside that was crawling with life. The flesh squirmed as yellowish white maggots ate, crawled and multiplied. Fucking hell.
I inhaled deeply. Closed my eyes, swallowed the vomit that rose in my throat, and pulled the silk scarf up over my mouth and nose. Then I stuck both hands inside the carcass and pulled out a huge slimy sack that I assumed was the stomach. I had to use the knife here and there to cut it loose. It sort of rolled out across the heather.
I stared into the darkness of the carcass. I didn’t want to get inside. In just a few minutes, seconds, maybe, they would be here, but there still was no way I was getting inside that stinking soupy corpse. My body refused.
I heard one of the dogs bark once. Shit.
I thought of Lea, of her eyes, her lips as a smile slowly spread across her face, and her deep, warm voice saying: ‘You did it, Ulf.’
I gulped. Then I held the flaps of skin open and forced my way inside the carcass.
Even if it was a big buck, and a good deal of the innards had been removed, there wasn’t much room. I needed to be completely hidden. And I had to try and seal it round me. I was sticky with various fluids, and it was so hot from the gases, the energy released by decomposition, and the collected heat of the mass of tiny insects moving about, the way it’s always hot inside an anthill. I couldn’t hold back the vomit any longer, and threw up time after time.
I gradually began to feel a bit better. But I was still visible from outside. How was I going to seal the opening in the gut? I tried grabbing hold of the two sides of the gap and holding the edges together, but they were so slimy they kept slipping out of my grasp.
I had bigger problems. Over the heather, bounding towards me, came two huge, black dogs.
They threw themselves at the reindeer, and one stuck its head inside the carcass and barked at me. I jabbed the knife at it and the head disappeared. Then the barking started. I had to get the carcass sealed before the men arrived. The barking was getting louder, and then I heard voices as well.
‘The cabin’s empty!’
‘There’s an animal down there!’
I stuck the knife through the reindeer skin at the bottom of the opening, pulled in the skin at the top, and managed to stick the knife through that as well before I lost my grip.
I used the knife as a bobbin, two twists were enough, then the gap was sealed. Now I just had to wait and hope no one had taught the dogs to talk.
I heard steps approaching.
‘Get the dogs away, Styrker. I thought you could control them.’
I felt a chill run through me. Yep, that was the voice of the man who had come to my flat to kill me. Johnny was back.
‘It must be the carcass,’ Styrker said. ‘It’s not easy when you’ve got a tiny brain and plenty of instincts.’
‘Are you talking about the dogs or yourself?’
‘Christ, what a stink,’ a third voice groaned. I recognised it at once: Brynhildsen from the back room, the one who was always cheating. ‘What’s that caught on its horns? And why are the guts out here on the ground? Shouldn’t we check . . .?’
‘The wolves have been at it,’ Mattis said. ‘Forgive me saying, but don’t breathe in too much of the stench, it’s poisonous.’
‘Really?’ Johnny’s quiet voice.
‘Botulism,’ Mattis said. ‘The spores fly through the air. One spore is enough to kill a person.’
Bloody hell! After all this am I going to die like that, in here, from some fucking bacteria?
‘The symptoms are an unpleasant tiredness in the eyes,’ Mattis went on. ‘And your ability to express yourself vanishes. That’s why we burn dead reindeer straight away. So that we can still see each other and make sensible conversation.’
There was a pause, during which I could imagine Johnny staring at Mattis and trying to interpret his inscrutable half-grin.
‘Styrker and Brynhildsen,’ Johnny said. ‘Turn the cabin inside out. And take those bloody dogs with yo
u.’
‘He’s not in there, there’s no way he could be,’ Brynhildsen insisted.
‘I know that. But if we can find the money and dope, we know he’s still in the area.’
I heard the dogs bark frantically as they were dragged away.
‘Forgive me asking, but what happens if you don’t find anything?’
‘Then you might have been right after all,’ Johnny said.
‘I know he was the one sailing that boat,’ Mattis said. ‘It was only fifty metres from shore, and he’s an ugly southerner, we don’t have people like that up here. With a decent boat and a good wind behind him, he could cover quite some distance in a day.’
‘And you were lying on the seashore in the middle of the night?’
‘Best place to sleep in the summer.’
I felt something crawling at the bottom of my shin. Too big to be a maggot or ant. I was breathing through my mouth, not my nose. Snake or mouse? Please, let it be a mouse. A sweet, furry little mouse, even a hungry one, but not a . . .
‘Really?’ Johnny’s voice was even lower now. ‘And the quickest way from the village and up to the forest is to go round the whole ridge? It took us over an hour. When I came up here on my own the last time I was here, it barely took me half an hour.’
‘Yes, but you’d have been shot if he’d been at home.’
The animal – or whatever it was – was moving over my foot. I felt an almost irresistible urge to kick it off, but I knew that the slightest movement or sound would be detected.
‘You know what?’ Johnny sneered. ‘That’s what I can’t help wondering about.’
‘Oh? You might be a narrow-shouldered target, southerner, but your head’s big enough.’
‘It’s not that Jon Hansen can’t shoot, it’s that he hasn’t got the guts to.’
‘Really? Well, I could have shown you a quicker route if you’d mentioned that before—’
‘I did mention it, you Sámi bastard!’
‘In north Norwegian.’
The creature had reached my knee and was moving onto my thigh. It suddenly dawned on me that it was inside my trousers.