At 3.15 in the morning Östen Marjavaara opened his eyes in his cottage in Pirttilahti. The light woke him. In the middle of April it was never dark at night for more than an hour or so. The fact that the blinds were closed did not make much difference. The light forced its way in between the slats, trickled in via the cord holes, poured through the gap between the blind and the window frame. Even if he had boarded up the windows, even if he had slept in a windowless room, he would still have woken up. The light was out there. Prodding and tugging at him. Gently but persistently, like a lonely woman. He might as well get up and make a pot of coffee.
Climbing out of bed, he opened the blinds. The floor was freezing cold against his bare feet. The thermometer outside the window said minus 2. It had snowed during the night. The hard crust that had formed the previous week after some milder weather and a few days of sleet had become even firmer now – strong enough for him to ski along the bank of the River Torne towards Tervaskoski. There were bound to be grayling lurking behind stones in the rapids there.
When the fire had taken hold in the kitchen stove, Marjavaara took the red plastic bucket standing in the hall and went down to the river to fetch some water. It was only a few metres to the riverbank, but he made his way carefully: there were plenty of potentially treacherous ice patches beneath the fresh snow and you could easily injure yourself.
The sun was lying in wait just below the horizon, painting the cold, wintry sky with golden-red strokes. Soon it would peer over the spruce forest, setting the red wooden panels of the cottage aglow.
The snow lay over the river like a whisper of nature. Hush, it said, be quiet. There is only you and me now.
He did as he was told, stood still with the bucket in his hand, gazing out over the river. It was true. You never come closer to owning the whole world than when you wake up before everyone else. There were a few cottages dotted along both banks of the river, but his was the only chimney with smoke rising from it. Most likely the people were not even there. They were probably fast asleep in their town houses, poor fools.
At the far end of the jetty was the water hole Marjavaara had cut in the ice. He had covered it with a polystyrene lid to prevent it from freezing over. Brushing the snow off the lid, he lifted it up. When Barbro was with him at the cottage, they always brought tap water from the town – she refused to drink water from the river.
“Yuck!” she always said with a shudder, raising her shoulders almost to her ears. “All the shit from all the villages upstream!”
She used to go on about the hospital at Vittangi, how it was a good job they lived upstream from there. How there were no sewage-treatment works or anything. No doubt someone’s appendix would be floating down the river, and God only knew what else.
“Don’t talk such rubbish!” he would say, as he had done a hundred times before. “You’re talking nonsense, woman!”
He had been drinking that water since he was a child, and his health was better than hers.
He squatted down to dip the bucket into the water. There was a length of rope attached to the handle so that he could let it sink and fill before hauling it back up again.
But he could not get the bucket to sink. There was something in the way, just beneath the surface. Something big. Black.
Maybe a waterlogged tree trunk, he thought.
You did not often find tree trunks in the water nowadays. It had been more common when he was a child, when logs were still floated down to the sawmills at the mouth of the river.
Marjavaara dipped his hand in the freezing water in order to push the log out of the way. It seemed to have got wedged in the jetty. And it was not a log. It seemed to be made of rubber or something similar.
“What the hell…” he said, sliding the bucket to one side.
He took hold of it with both hands, tried to get a firm grip, but his hands would not function properly in the cold water. Then he managed to get hold of an arm. Pulled at it.
An arm, he thought impassively.
His mind was unwilling to understand.
An arm.
Then a battered face floated into view in the water hole.
Marjavaara cried out and leapt to his feet.
A raven answered from the forest. Its call sliced through the silence. Several crows joined in the chorus.
Marjavaara ran back to the cottage, slipping but regaining his balance.
He rang the emergency number. Then it occurred to him that he had drunk three glasses of water with his dinner yesterday. And coffee after the meal. He had fetched the water from the river. From the hole in the ice. And the dead body had been lying there. Right next to it, no doubt. That white, battered face. A gash where the nose had been. Teeth in a mouth with no lips.
Someone answered the phone, but he cut them off and vomited on the spot. His body spat out everything in it, kept on spitting long after there was nothing left.
Then he dialled the emergency number again.
Never again would he drink water from the river. And it would be years before he would even go for a swim after his sauna.
I’m looking at the man who found me. He’s throwing up. He rings the emergency number and vows never to drink water from the river again.
I’m thinking about the day I died.
We were dead, Simon and I. I was standing on the ice. It was evening. The sun was lower now. The door was smashed, floating in the hole in the ice. I could see that it was green on one side and black on the other.
On the riverbank, a man was rummaging in our rucksacks.
A raven flew past. It was calling in its characteristic way, sounding like a stick being hit against an empty oil drum. It landed on the ice, right next to me. Turned its head away and looked at me in the way birds do. From the side.
I must go home to Anni, I thought.
And even before I’d finished thinking, I was back at Anni’s house.
The transition made me dizzy. Like when you step off a carousel.
I’ve got used to it now.
Anni was whisking pancake batter. Sitting on a chair by the kitchen table, whisking.
I like pancakes.
She didn’t know I was dead. She was whisking away, thinking about me. She was looking forward to seeing me sitting at the table and tucking into the pancakes while she stood at the stove, cooking them. She placed a plate over the bowl containing the pancake mixture and put in to one side. But I never came. The bowl of batter went into the fridge. She couldn’t let it go to waste, so in the end she cooked the pancakes and froze them. They’re still in the freezer.
Now they’ve found me. Now she can cry.
Snow, thought District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, shivering with pleasure as she got out of her car at the house in Kurravaara.
It was 7.00 in the evening. Snow clouds enveloped the village in a pleasant, dusky haze. Martinsson could barely make out the lights from the neighbouring houses. And the snow was not just falling. Oh no, it was hurtling down. Cold, dry, fluffy flakes cascaded from the sky, as if someone up there were sweeping them down, doing the housework.
Farmor, my grandmother, of course, Martinsson thought with a trace of a smile. She must always be on the go, scrubbing the good Lord’s floor, dusting, hard at work. I expect she’s sent Him out to stand in the porch.
Her farmor’s house, faced with grey cement-fibre panels, known in this part of the world by their trade name, Eternit, seemed to be hiding itself in the gloom. It appeared to have taken the opportunity to have a nap. Only the outside light above the green-painted steps whispered quietly: Welcome home, my girl.
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.
“Time to eat!”
They put lumps of butter and heaps of lingonberry preserve and fried pork on their plates. Piled the butter and preserve and meat onto the slices of dumpling. Ate without talking.
He’s scared, Martinsson thought.
She would have liked to tell him. Explain that she was never going to move back to Stockholm. Promise to clear the snow from around his house and do his shopping for him when the time came.
I’ll look after you, she thought, watching him as he drank from his glass of milk, taking big gulps.
Just like he looked after my farmor, she thought as she cut into her dumpling and the knife made squeaking noises against the plate. When I had moved away and left her. He shovelled snow for her and kept her company. Even though she grew anxious towards the end and nagged at him all the time. Even though she kept complaining about the way he cleared the snow. I want to be the kind of person who looks after someone else. That is who I want to be.
“I had a hell of a case last Friday,” she said.
Fjällborg didn’t react. He ate his dumpling and drank his milk as if he had not heard, still in a bad mood.
“It was sexual assault,” she said, disregarding the lack of response. “The accused had rung two officials at the Employment Office and masturbated during the conversations. One of the ladies was fifty and the other over sixty, and they were terrified they might actually meet him. They thought that if he found out what they looked like, he would jump them and rape them if they happened to encounter him at the supermarket. So I asked for the ladies to be questioned without the accused being present.”
“What does that mean?” Fjällborg said, annoyed that he needed to ask but too curious not to.
“He was put in a neighbouring room so that he could listen to what they said without being able to see them. My God, but those poor dears found it incredibly difficult to describe what had happened. I had to push them quite hard in order to clarify the sexual nature of the complaint. Among other things I asked them what made them think that he was masturbating.”
Martinsson paused to put a large piece of dumpling into her mouth. She chewed away at it, seemingly in no hurry. Fjällborg had stopped eating altogether and was waiting for her to go on.
“And?” he said impatiently.
“They said they had heard rhythmic slapping noises, and at the same time he was panting heavily. One of the old dears said he had ejaculated, so then of course I had to ask her what had made her think so. She replied that he had started breathing even more heavily and that the rhythmic slapping noises had grown more and more intense, then he had groaned loudly and said, ‘Yeesss, that’s it!’ Poor things. And all the while Hasse Sternlund from the local paper was sitting there taking notes – his pen was practically on fire. That didn’t make matters any easier.”
Fjällborg stopped being irritable and started chuckling.
“The accused was a shifty, greasy individual in his thirties,” Martinsson said. “He already had several convictions for sexual assault. But he always denied everything and claimed that he suffered from asthma – what the ladies at the Employment Office had heard was him having an asthma attack, not masturbating. At that point the defence counsel asked the accused to demonstrate what it sounded like when he had an asthma attack. You should have seen the judge and the jury. Their faces were twitching, and the judge pretended to have a coughing fit. They were all desperately trying not to burst out laughing; the situation was utterly absurd. The man refused, thank goodness. The defence counsel told me afterwards that the only reason he asked his client to demonstrate an asthma attack was to see if he could knock me off balance. I had been so cold and clinical while interrogating both the plaintiffs and the accused. Whenever he rings me now about anything to do with work, he always starts breathing heavily and asks, ‘Is that the Employment Office?’”
“Was he convicted, then, the slimy man?” Fjällborg said, deliberately dropping some pieces of meat on the floor. Bella slurped them up in a trice.
Martinsson laughed.
“Of course. I mean, who’d want a job like mine? Those poor women – you try imitating the sound of someone having a wank!”
“No fear! I’d rather be sent to prison.”
Fjällborg laughed. Martinsson felt happier. At the same time she was thinking about the older of the two plaintiffs. She had screwed up her eyes and stared at Martinsson. They had been sitting in the prosecutor’s office before the trial. The woman’s voice was rough and shrill, tainted by smoking and alcohol. Her lipstick had bled into the wrinkles above her upper lip. A thick layer of powder covered her open pores, the colour quite lifeless. “This is all I need,” she had said, pursing her lips. And she had told Martinsson how she was bullied at work. That one of her colleagues had invited everyone to a party – everyone except her, that is. “They’re whispering behind my back all the time, just because at last year’s party I might have had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep on the terrace. They’re still going on about that. And they lie about me to the boss. I hate the whole damned lot of them. I ought to take them to court.”
Martinsson had felt completely exhausted after her meeting with the woman. Drained and depressed. Found herself thinking about her mother. If only she had not died so young. Would her voice have become like that woman’s at the end?
Fjällborg interrupted her thoughts.
“You seem to have a pretty exciting job, at least.”
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s nothing happening at the moment. Drink driving and domestic violence all day every day.”
It is still snowing when she walks home. But it is calmer now. The flakes are not hurtling down like they were, but drifting, dancing attractively. The kind of snowfall that makes you feel happy. Big flakes melting on her cheeks.
Although it’s quite late, it is not dark. The nights are getting lighter. The sky is grey, covered in snow clouds. Buildings and trees are blurred at the edges. As if they had been painted on wet water-colour paper.
She has reached the porch. She pauses, raises her hands, palms facing downwards. Snow stars land on her gloves and lie there, sparkling.
Without warning Martinsson is overcome by a feeling of pure, white happiness. It flows through her body like wind blowing down a mountain valley. Power surges up from the ground. Through her body and into her hands. She stands absolutely still. Dares not move for fear of frightening the moment away.
She is at one with it all. With the snow, with the sky. With the river as it flows along, hidden beneath the ice. With Sivving, with the villagers. With everything. Everyone.
I belong here, she thinks. Perhaps I do belong, irrespective of what I want or feel.
Unlocking the door, she goes up the stairs.
The feeling of reverence remains with her. Brushing her teeth and washing her face are a sacred ritual. Her thoughts remain still; nothing is bustling inside her head, just the sound of the toothbrush scrubbing and water running from the tap. She puts on her pyjamas like a christening suit. Takes the time to put clean sheets on the bed. The television and radio remain blind and silent. Måns calls her mobile, but she doesn’t answer.
She lies down between the sheets, which have that unused, slightly crisp feel: they smell clean.
Thank you, she thinks.
Her hands are tingling; they are as hot as the stones in a sauna. But it is not an unpleasant feeling.
She falls asleep.
She wakes up at about 4.00 in the morning. It is light outside; the snow must have moved on. A young girl is sitting on her bed. She is naked. She has two rings in one eyebrow. Freckles. Her red hair is wet. Water is running from her hair down her spine, like a little stream. When she speaks, water dribbles constantly from her mouth and nose.
It wasn’t an accident, she tells Martinsson.
No, Martinsson says, sitting up in bed. I know.
He moved me. I didn’t die in the river. Look at my hand.
She holds up a hand to show Martinsson. The skin has been torn away. The knuckles are sticking out through the grey flesh. The little finger and thumb are missing.
The girl looks sorrowfully at her hand.
I broke my nails on the ice when I was trying to scratch my way out, she says.
Martinsson gets the feeling that she is about to disappear.
Wait, she says.
She goes after the girl, who is running among the pine trees in a forest. Martinsson tries to follow her, but in the forest the snow is deep and wet, and she sinks up to her knees.
Then Martinsson is standing at the side of her bed. She hears her mother’s voice in her head: That’s enough now, Rebecka. Relax.
It was just a dream, Martinsson tells herself. She gets back into bed and drifts off into different dreams. Open sky above her head. Black birds flying up from the tops of the pine trees.
I go to visit the prosecutor. She’s the first person to see me since I died. She’s wide awake. Sees me clearly when I sit down on her bed. Her farmor is standing in the bedroom as well. She is the first dead person I’ve seen since I died myself. The first dead person I’ve ever seen, in fact. The grandmother eyes me up and down. You can’t just come and go as you like here, stirring up trouble. The prosecutor has a stern protector. I ask permission to speak to her granddaughter.
I’ve no desire to frighten or upset anybody. All I want is for them to find Simon. I don’t know where to turn. I can’t bear to see them. Anni is at home in her house with the pink Eternit cladding, gazing out of the window in the direction of the road. She sometimes goes for days without speaking. Occasionally she takes her kick-sledge and wanders through the village. Now and then she struggles up the stairs to my room and looks at my bed.
Simon’s mother stares at his father with hatred in her eyes as he wolfs down his food and then rushes out of the house. Their relationship is sterile; they have nothing to say to each other. He can’t stand the sight of her. She tried to talk when it first happened. Wept and woke him in the night. But she’s stopped now. He’d simply take his pillow and go to sleep on the sofa in the living room. When she begged him to say something, he merely said he had to get up and go to work the next day. She has run out of accusations and pleas. She needs to be able to bury her son.
She tells the other women that her husband doesn’t seem to be bothered. But I can see him when he’s driving, overtaking in the most dangerous circumstances imaginable. Last winter long-distance lorry drivers kept sounding their horns at him as he overtook them when it was impossible to see anything through the swirling snow. He’ll soon kill himself, driving like that.
I pass over the village. It’s night, but as light as day. Fresh snow has covered the thick blanket of old snow that had become dirty, as it does at this time of year, stained brown by soil and grit.
Hjalmar Krekula is awake. He’s standing outside his house like a bear, fat after a summer spent feeding. Wearing only a T-shirt and long johns. Two ravens have landed on his roof, making their grating calls. Hjalmar tries to chase them away. He fetches some firewood from the shed and throws it at them. He doesn’t dare to shout and bawl at them; the village is asleep after all. He can’t sleep, but in his mind he blames the black birds and the light night, and perhaps something he’s eaten.
The ravens fly off and perch in a tall pine tree instead.
He’s not going to get rid of them. And my body was discovered last night. Maybe people will start talking in the village. At last.