Handling the Undead (19 page)

Mahler glanced back again. Elias' dark green face with its black spots peeked out of the sheet; it made him look even more like a wrapped mummy.

'I don't want to give him up,' Anna said. 'That's all.'

The vegetation around the cottage was overgrown and dried up. The enormous honeysuckle vine around the porch had grown tremendously at the beginning of the summer, but was now a ropy tangle, as if the porch had been wrapped in packing materials.

Mahler stopped the car ten metres from the front door and turned off the engine.

'Well,' he said and looked out over the brown grass. 'Here we are at last.'

The cottage lay at the end of the loop that was Koholma vacation area. You had to walk a couple of hundred metres through the forest to get to the water, but when Mahler got out of the car he still felt the seaside quality in the air. He drew a deep breath and the promise of freedom filled his lungs.

Now he knew what he had been thinking.

The cottage felt more secure than the apartment. Of course it was the sea that gave you that feeling. The great blue out there. If they came, there was always the option of .. .leaving. Out to the islands.

The reason that he had even been able to afford the house fifteen years ago now announced itself: a dull thundering filtered through the forest, made the car body vibrate slightly. He sighed.

Five hundred metres to the south lay the Kapellskar Ferry Terminal. Since ferry traffic to Finland and Aland had increased fifteen or twenty years earlier and the ferries had grown and become a recreation for the masses, the real estate values in the adjacent areas had fallen by almost half. It was not quite as bad as living next to an airport, but almost. The ferries came and went around the clock and it would take almost a week to learn not to hear them.

They started to unpack.

Mahler lifted Elias from the backseat and carried him to the house, fishing the key out of the drainpipe and unlocking the door. The house smelled stale. Mahler carried Elias to his room where the treasures of past summers-feathers, stones and pieces of wood-lay scattered on window ledges and shelves.

He laid Elias on the bed and opened the window. The salty air whirled into the room, inviting a dance.

Yes. It had been the right thing to come here. Here there was space and time. Everything they needed.

Taby Municipality, 12.30

After Flora's late-night call, Elvy had trouble falling asleep. She would have to spend some more time with Grimberg. Fittingly-or not-she had just arrived at Gustav II Adolf's death. The description of the widowed Queen Maria Eleonora's bizarre relationship with his corpse kept her glued to the page.

Maria Eleonora had refused to let go. She visited the body again and again, keeping it company the entire length of the journey from Germany. When she was eventually pried away she had managed to acquire the heart (it irritated Elvy greatly that Grimberg never explained how she acquired it) and threatened them with it in order to gain access to the body once again ...

'Which she ponders, showers with marks of honour and caresses, with no regard for the fact that it blackens and decays, almost beyond the point of recognition,' as a Swedish diplomat wrote during the funereal journey.

Elvy had lowered the book and reflected on this. The difference of views. If the king had arisen from his coffin the jubilant queen would most likely have taken his rotting flesh into her arms. Why was it so different? Was it Elvy who was heartless?

A kind of explanation was to be found several pages on. Maria Eleanora had had a double coffin prepared, with spaces for the dead monarch and herself. Her motive for this was that she had 'so little enjoyed' the king during his life. Now that he was dead she wished to take full advantage.

This was a problem that Elvy did not share. She had been able to 'enjoy' Tore plenty during his life. This man ten years her senior who had been kind enough to take a hysterical woman in matrimony, to care for her and lead her through life without ever understanding her-she had simply seen enough of him by the time he gave up the ghost. She harboured little animosity-he had done the best he could-but she was done.

Calmed by this thought, she put the book down and tried to sleep, but it wouldn't come. At half past four she had to get up and sit on the toilet for

half an hour and when she lay down again the bedroom was getting light. She let the blinds down, took a couple of sleeping pills and finally managed to nod off. She floated in and out of sleep until it was past eleven, at which point she woke up properly, energetic and full of anticipation.

Until she looked at the news.

Hardly a word was said about anything of significance. It was as if it did not exist. From time to time, some minister or bishop was allowed to say a few words, and what did they speak about?

Anxious relatives, the church hotline, the anguish many people felt in this kind of situation, blah blah.

Elvy felt no anguish. She was furious.

Statistics, images of the night's exhumations. They had dug up almost all of the relevant graves by now, and some extras (people who had been dead longer than two months and had predictably remained dead); the number of reliving was close to two thousand.

The Prime Minister had landed a little while ago and was accosted immediately at Arlanda by the reporters. In order to stress the gravity of the situation, he removed his glasses, stared nakedly into the cameras and said:

'Our nation. Is in a state of shock. I hope that everyone. Will help. Not to make the situation. Worse than it already is. I. And my government. Will do everything. In our power. To give these people. The care. That they need.

'But let us not forget .. .'

His index finger went up and the Prime Minister looked around with an expression that approximated sorrow. Elvy tensed her entire body and leaned closer to the television. It was coming. Finally. The Prime Minister said, 'We shall all go down this road one day. Nothing separates these people. From us.'

He thanked everyone and a path was made for him to get to the waiting car. Elvy's jaw dropped.

Not even him ...

She knew that the Prime Minister knew his Bible, he liked to borrow sayings from it. So the disappointment that now, in this hour of need, he hadn't so much as nodded towards the Holy Book was all the worse. When it was actually appropriate.

We shall all follow this road one day ...

Elvy snapped off the TV and spoke out loud. 'What a damned ... clown!'

She paced through the house, so upset that she didn't know what to do with herself. In the guest room she took out the copied psalms, spotted with Tore's fluids, crumpled them up and threw them in the bin. Then she called Hagar.

Of all her friends from church, Hagar was most on the ball. Over the past twelve years the two of them, along with Agnes, had done the coffee for the Saturday meetings and taken turns providing the cake. Since Agnes had been stricken with sciatica and become less active, it had mainly been Elvy and Hagar who kept things going these last three years.

Hagar picked up on the second ring.

'612-1926!'

Elvy had to hold the receiver away from her ear since Hagar, who

was slightly deaf, was almost screaming into the telephone.

'It's me.'

'Elvy! There has been something wrong with your. . .'

'Yes, I know. Have you .. .'

'Tore! Has he .. .'

'Yes.'

'Come back. . .'

'Yes. Yes.'

There was silence for a moment. Then Hagar said, a little lower, 'I see. Home to you, then?'

'Yes. But they came for him. It's not that. Did you see the news?'

'Of course. All morning. It's completely incredible. Was it awful?'

'With Tore? Yes, a little in the beginning perhaps, but ... it went well. It's not that. Did you ... did you see the Prime Minister?'

'Yes,' Hagar said, sounding as if she had bitten into something sour. 'What about him?'

Elvy softly shook her head, forgetting that Hagar could not see her gesture. She stared at a little icon hanging in the hallway, and said slowly, 'Hagar. Are you thinking what I'm thinking about this?'

'About what?'

'About what's happening.'

'The Resurrection?'

Elvy smiled. She had known she could count on Hagar. She nodded at the icon-Jesus as the ruler of the world-and said, 'Yes, exactly. They aren't even talking about it.'

'No,' Hagar's volume went up again. 'It's despicable! To think it's come to this!'

They spoke for several minutes in complete accord and hung up with a vague promise to do something, without having discussed what that was.

Elvy felt a little better. She was not alone in what she was thinking. There were probably others. She walked up to the balcony window and looked out, as if searching for them, the others who realised what all this was about. She caught sight of something else, something she had not seen in several weeks: clouds.

These were not the fluffy summer clouds that serve only to emphasise the blueness of the sky. No, these were strong thunder clouds, gliding so slowly in dark banks that they appeared immobile. She felt a tingle in her stomach. Was this it? Was this how it was going to look?

She wandered around over the house for a while, yawning and trying to prepare herself. She did not know how to prepare.

Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

There was nothing to do. She sat down in the reading chair and looked up Matthew 24 since she had forgotten the rest of the passage. She became frightened by what she read.

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

She saw concentration camps, she saw Flora.

But for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

There was no mention of pain and suffering in a regular sense. Only tribulation greater than what has come before. A way of suffering that we have not yet experienced. But perhaps that was the Swedish translation. The original might speak unequivocally of purely physical, unbearable pangs. Elvy's lids grew heavy.

Perhaps in the original translation ... Septuagintan .. forty monks in forty rooms ... one hundred monkeys at one hundred typewriters for one hundred years ...

Elvy's thoughts drifted away in an unruly mishmash of images and she nodded off where she was sitting, her chin on her chest.

She was awakened by the television turning on.

The insides of her eyelids turned orange and when she opened her eyes the light from the TV screen was so blinding that she had to close them again. The television glowed like a small sun and she opened her eyes tentatively, squinting.

As she grew accustomed to the intense light she saw that there was a central figure around which the brightness billowed. Or else the rays were streaming out from the figure itself. The woman. Elvy recognised her immediately; trepidation welled up in her chest.

The woman wore a dark blue shawl over black hair, and in her eyes one could discern the grief of someone who had just seen her child die. Who had stood at the foot of the cross and seen them prise the nails from her son's hands with a crowbar. The curved, stiffened fingers that had once been small, and eager for her breast. The grinding of metal pressed through wood, the hands shredded. And everything lost.

Elvy whispered, 'Holy Virgin ... ' and did not dare to look. Because suddenly she understood what it meant,
tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world.
It was what could be read in Mary's eyes. The suffering of a mother confronted with her dead child-and that child the sum of all goodness. Not simply the pain of watching the child that you have nursed and cherished be tortured and executed, but the suffering, too, that there is a world in which such things happen.

From the corner of her eye Elvy saw Mary spread her arms in a gesture of welcome. Elvy was on her way up out of the chair in order to kneel on

the ground but Mary said, 'You can sit, Elvy.'

The voice was light, almost a whisper. No great thundering voice from beyond the heavens; rather a beggar girl's shy plea for a spare coin, something to eat.

'You can sit, Elvy.'

Mary knew her name, and in the words there was a hint of the knowledge that Elvy had been running and working all her life, that she now deserved to sit for a while. Elvy dared to glance quickly at the screen and saw that tiny stars glittered on the tips of Mary's fingers. Or drops of water, tears wiped from her eyes.

'Elvy,' Mary said. 'A task awaits you.'

'Yes,' Elvy whispered, without any sound being heard.

'They must come to me. Their only salvation is to come to me. You must make them understand.'

This had occurred to Elvy, and even in the gravity of the moment she saw her neighbours-people, hard eyes, her approaches rebuffed-and she asked, 'How? How will I get them to listen?'

For one second she stared straight into Mary's eyes and was filled with terror. For in them she saw the suffering that would befall mankind if it did not repent, seek redemption in her arms. Mary held out her hand, said, 'This shall be your sign.'

Something touched Elvy's forehead. The television went off. She fell sideways on the chair and her head exploded.

The edge of the glass table was pressed against her forehead when she opened her eyes. Her head hurt. Dizzy, she straightened up on the chair, looking at the table. There was a smear of red on the corner. Several drops of blood had fallen on the rug.