Authors: Åsa Larsson
“But what has that got to do with…” Bertil begins.
“Let me finish! True, anybody can join the club, but it’s the board and the elite hunting team who actually make use of the leased land. And since the number in the elite team is set in the statutes at twenty, no new members are allowed in. In practice it’s only when somebody dies that the board elects a new member. And every single person on the board is a member of the team. So it’s the same bunch of old men there as well. In the last thirteen years, not one new member has joined.”
She breaks off and looks Stefan straight in the eye.
“Except for you, of course. When Elis Wiss left the team voluntarily, you were elected—that must have been six years ago?”
Stefan doesn’t reply, it’s the way she says “voluntarily.” On the inside he’s white with rage. Mildred goes on:
“According to the statutes, only the hunting team is allowed to hunt with shotguns, so therefore the team has commandeered all elk hunting. As far as other hunting is concerned, suitable members can buy a one day license, but the kill must be divided up between active members of the club, and surprise surprise, it’s the board members who make the decision as to how that division takes place. But this is what I’m thinking. Both the mining company, LKAB, and Yngve Bergqvist are interested in the lease, LKAB for its employees and Yngve for tourists. That would mean we could increase the fee significantly. And I’m talking about big money here; it would allow us to look at a sensible approach to forestry. I mean, seriously, what does Torbjörn Ylitalo actually do? Runs errands for the team! We’re even providing that bunch of old farts with a free employee.”
Torbjörn Ylitalo is the forestry officer in the church. He’s one of the twenty members of the elite team, and the chairman of the hunting club. Stefan is conscious of the fact that much of Torbjörn’s working day is spent planning hunts with Lars-Gunnar who is the team leader, maintaining the church’s hunting lodges and watchtowers and clearing tracks.
“So,” Mildred concludes. “We’ll have money to manage the forest properly, but above all money to protect the wolf. The church can donate the lease to the foundation. The Nature Conservancy Foundation has tagged her, but we need more money to monitor her.”
“I can’t see why you’re taking this up with me and Stefan,” Bertil breaks in, his voice very calm; “Surely any changes to the lease are a matter for the church council?”
“You know what,” says Mildred, “I think this is a matter for the whole church community.”
The room falls silent. Bertil nods once. Stefan becomes aware of an ache in his left shoulder, pain working its way up the back of his neck.
They understand precisely what she means. They can see exactly how this discussion will look if it’s carried out within the whole community and, of course, in the press. The bunch of old men hunting for free on church land, and on top of that claiming the animals they haven’t even killed themselves.
Stefan is a member of the hunting team, he won’t escape.
But the parish priest has his own reasons for keeping well in with the hunting team. They keep his freezer well filled. Bertil can always show off, offering his guests elk steak and game birds. And there’s no doubt the team members have done other things to compensate the priest for his silent approval of their empire. Bertil’s log cabin, for example. The team built it and they maintain it.
Stefan thinks about his place on the team. No, he feels it. As if it were a warm, smooth pebble in his pocket. That’s what it is, his secret mascot. He can still remember when he got the place. Bertil’s arm around his shoulders as he was introduced to Torbjörn Ylitalo. “Stefan hunts,” the priest had said, “he’d be really pleased if he got a place on the team.” And Torbjörn, the feudal lord in the church’s forest kingdom, nodded, not allowing even a hint of displeasure to cross his face. Two months later Elis Wiss had given up his place on the team. After forty-three years. Stefan was elected as one of the twenty.
“It isn’t fair,” says Mildred.
The priest gets up from Stefan’s armchair.
“I’m prepared to discuss this when you’re somewhat calmer,” he says to Mildred.
And he leaves. Leaves Stefan with her.
“How’s that supposed to work?” Mildred says to Stefan. “As soon as I start thinking about this I’m anything but calm.”
Then she gives him a big smile.
Stefan looks at her in surprise. What’s she grinning at? Doesn’t she understand that she’s just made her position completely and totally impossible? That she’s just delivered an unequivocal declaration of war? It’s as if inside this extremely intelligent woman (and he has to admit that she is), there lives a retarded babbling idiot. What’s he supposed to do now? He can’t rush out of the room, it’s his room. He stays in his seat, irresolute.
Then suddenly she looks at him with a serious expression, opens her handbag and takes out three envelopes, which she holds out to him. It’s his wife’s handwriting.
He stands up and takes the letters. He has stomach cramps. Kristin. Kristin! He knows what kind of letters they are without reading them. He slumps back onto his chair.
“The tone of two of them is quite unpleasant,” says Mildred.
Yes, he can imagine. It isn’t the first time. This is what Kristin usually does. With slight variations, it’s always the same. He’s been through this twice already. They move to somewhere new. Kristin runs the children’s choir and Sunday school, a sweet little songbird singing the praises of the new place to the skies. But when the first flush of love, that’s the only thing he can call it, has passed, her discontent begins to show. Real and imagined injustices which she collects like bookmarks in an album. A period of headaches, visits to the doctor and accusations hurled at Stefan, who doesn’t take her concerns seriously. Then something goes seriously wrong between her and some employee or member of the church community. And soon she’s off on a crusade all over the district. In the last place it turned into a real circus in the end, with the union dragged in and an employee in the parish offices who wanted their nervous breakdown classified as a work-related injury. And Kristin, who just felt that she’d been unjustly accused. And finally the unavoidable move. The first time it was with one child, the second time with three. The eldest boy is at high school now, it’s a critical time.
“I’ve got two more in the same vein,” says Mildred.
When she’s gone, Stefan sits there with the letters in his right hand.
She’s snared him like a ptarmigan, he thinks, and he doesn’t even know whether he means Mildred or his wife.
R
ebecka Martinsson’s boss Måns Wenngren was sitting on his office chair, creaking. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it made a really irritating grating noise when you raised or lowered it. He thought about Rebecka Martinsson. Then he stopped thinking about her.
He actually had loads to do. Calls to make, e-mails to answer. Customers and clients to entertain. His junior associates had begun placing papers and yellow Post-it notes on his chair so that he’d see them. But it was only an hour until lunch, so he might as well put everything off for a bit longer.
He always said he was a restless soul. He could almost hear his ex-wife Madelene saying: “Well, it sounds better than moody, unfaithful and running away from yourself.” But restless was true as well. A sense of unease had already got its claws into him in the cradle. His mother used to tell people how he’d screamed all night for the first year. “He calmed down a bit when he learned to walk. For a while.”
His brother, three years older than Måns, never tired of telling the story of how they’d sold Christmas trees one year. One of the family’s tenants had offered Måns and his brother a part-time job selling the trees. They were only kids, Måns had only just started school. But he could already count and add up, his brother said. Especially when it came to money.
And so they’d sold trees. Two little lads, seven and ten. “And Måns earned loads more money than the rest of us,” his brother would say. “We just couldn’t understand it, he was only getting four kronor per tree in commission, the same as everybody else. But while the rest of us were just standing around shivering and waiting for five o’clock to come, Måns was running about chatting to everybody as they looked at the trees. And if somebody thought a tree was too tall, he offered to chop the top off then and there. Nobody could resist, a nipper with a saw nearly as tall as he was. And this is the best bit: he took the top part that he’d sawed off, chopped off the branches and bound them together into big bundles, then sold them for five kronor apiece! And those five kronor went straight into his own pocket. The tenant—what the hell was his name, was it Mårtensson—was absolutely livid. But what could he do?”
His brother would pause at this point in the story and raise his eyebrows in a gesture that said all there was to say about the tenant’s powerlessness in the face of the landowner’s crafty son. “A businessman,” he would conclude, “always a businessman.”
Even when he was middle-aged, Måns was still defending himself against the label. “The law isn’t the same thing as business,” he said.
“Of course it bloody is,” his brother used to reply. “Of course it is.”
His brother had spent his early adult life abroad doing God knows what, and in the end he’d come back to Sweden, done a degree in social sciences, and was now in charge of the benefits office in Kalmar.
Anyway, Måns had gradually stopped defending himself. And why did you always have to apologize for success?
“That’s right,” he’d reply nowadays, “business and money in the bank.” And then he’d tell him about the latest car he’d bought, or some smart deal on the stock market, or just about his new cell phone.
Måns could read all about his brother’s hatred in his sister-in-law’s eyes.
Måns just didn’t get it. His brother had kept his marriage together. The children came to visit.
No, he thought, getting up from the creaky chair, I’m going to do it now.
* * *
Maria Taube chirruped a “bye then” into the telephone and hung up. Bloody clients, ringing up and churning out questions that were so vague and general it was impossible to answer them. It took half an hour just to try and work out what they wanted.
There was a knock on her door, and before she had time to answer Måns appeared.
Didn’t you learn anything at Lundsberg? she thought crossly. Like waiting for “come in,” for example?
As if he’d read the thought behind her smile, he said:
“Have you got a minute?”
When did anybody last say no to that question? thought Maria, waving at the chair and switching off her incoming calls.
He closed the door behind him. A bad sign. She tried desperately to think of something she’d overlooked or forgotten, some client who had a reason to be dissatisfied. She couldn’t come up with anything. That was the worst thing about this job. She could cope with the stress and the hierarchy and the overtime, but there was that black abyss that sometimes opened up right beneath your feet. Like the mistake Rebecka had made. So damned easy, to lose a few million.
Måns sat down and looked around, his fingers beating a tattoo on his thigh.
“Nice view,” he said with a grin.
Outside the window loomed the grubby brown facade of the building next door. Maria laughed politely, but didn’t speak.
Come on, out with it, she thought.
“How’s…”
Måns finished off the question with a vague gesture in the direction of the piles of paper on her desk.
“Fine,” she replied, and stopped herself from launching into details of something she was working on.
He doesn’t want to know, she told herself.
“So… have you heard anything from Rebecka?”
Maria Taube’s shoulders dropped a centimeter.
“Yes.”
“I heard from Torsten that she was staying up there for a bit.”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
Maria hesitated.
“I don’t really know.”
“Don’t be so bloody difficult, Taube. I know it was your idea for her to go up there. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it was such a brilliant idea. And now I want to know how she’s doing.”
He paused.
“She does work here after all,” he said in the end.
“You ask her then,” said Maria.
“It’s not that easy. The last time I tried she made a hell of a scene, if you remember.”
Maria thought about Rebecka, rowing away from the firm’s party. She was crazy.
“I can’t talk to you about Rebecka, you know that. She’d be bloody livid.”
“And what about me?” asked Måns.
Maria Taube smiled sweetly.
“You’re always bloody livid anyway,” she said.
Måns grinned, perked up by the insult.
“I remember when you started working for me,” he said. “Nice and sweet. Did as you were told.”
“I know,” she said. “What this place does to people…”
R
ebecka Martinsson and Nalle turned up outside Sivving Fjällborg’s door like two casual laborers. He greeted them as if he’d been expecting them and invited them down to the boiler room. Bella was lying in a wooden box on a bed of rag rugs, sleeping with the puppies in a heap under her stomach. She just opened one eye and thumped her tail in greeting when the visitors came in.
At around one o’clock she’d called at Nalle’s house and rung the doorbell. Nalle’s father Lars-Gunnar had opened the door. A big man, filling the doorway. She’d stood out on the porch feeling like a five-year-old asking her friend’s parents if her friend can come out to play.
Sivving put the coffee on and got out thick mugs with a pattern of big flowers in yellow, orange and brown. He put some bread in a basket and took margarine and sausage out of the refrigerator.
It was cool down in the cellar. The smell of dog and fresh coffee blended with faint traces of earth and concrete. The autumn sun shone down through the narrow window below the ceiling.
Sivving looked at Rebecka. She must have found some clothes stored at her grandmother’s. He recognized the black anorak with the white snowflakes on it. He wondered if she knew it had belonged to her mother. Probably not.