“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.
Rebecka 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.