It happens very quickly, all done within three minutes, and then it’s time to run.
“Come on,” Tore shouts, already on his moped, having driven some way off.
Hjalmar’s arms ache, and he feels sweaty. He’s calm now. He’ll never cry again.
Opening the car door, he searches through the briefcase on the front passenger seat. Tore is shouting away, worried in case some adult should turn up at the scene. There is no wallet, just three maths textbooks – Tekno’s Giant Arithmetic Book, Practical Arithmetic, Geometry Manual – and a paperback entitled Turning Points in Physics – A Series of Lectures Given at Oxford University. Hjalmar tucks them all inside his jacket – apart from the Giant Arithmetic Book, which is simply too big: he has to carry that under his arm.
I leave them to it. Soar up with the thermals. Up, up.
I shall start things moving with regard to Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson and Hjalmar Krekula.
Martinsson is sitting in her office after the morning’s proceedings. They comprised cases of dangerous driving, G.B.H. and fraud. The documentation needs putting in order, and decisions must be made. She knows that if she knuckles down, it will take half an hour, no more. But she doesn’t feel like it; she is finding it hard to concentrate.
The snowy weather has passed over. Quickly. As it tends to do in the mountains. Just when it felt as if it would never cease. When the wind was raging and howling, and the sticky April snow was forcing its way inside people’s upturned collars, wet and icy. Suddenly, everything died down. The clouds blew away. The sky became light blue and cloudless.
Martinsson checks her mobile. Hopes her man will ring or text her. Outside the sun is shining down on the facades and roofs of buildings, onto all the newly fallen snow.
Two crows are sitting in the tree outside her window. They are calling to her, enticing her out. Although she has no awareness of that.
People don’t think about birds. Birds inspire them with big, ambitious thoughts, but people never ask themselves why this is the case. Never wonder how it is that twenty little birds in a birch tree at winter’s end, chirping and warbling, can open up people’s hearts and let happiness come flowing in. The barking of a dog doesn’t awaken such feelings.
Then Martinsson looks up into the sky and sees a skein of migrating birds: all those massive emotions take possession of her. Just as when a hundred crows gather to form a croaking choir on a summer’s evening. Or an owl cries dolefully, or a great northern diver appears on a summer’s night. Or a swallow arrives with a clatter to feed its squeaking fledglings in their nest under the eaves.
Nor do people ask themselves why it is that their interest in birds increases the older they get, the closer they come to death.
Ah well, people don’t know very much until they die.
The crows are cawing loudly, and Martinsson feels that she really must go out for a walk and make the most of the lovely weather. It occurs to her that it is a long time since she visited her grandmother’s grave. Good. She stands up.
A flock of ravens lands in the parking area at the front of Hjalmar’s house. Their beaks and feathers glisten in the sun.
My God, how big they are, Hjalmar thinks as he watches them through his window.
He has the feeling that they are staring straight at him. When he opens the front door, they shuffle to one side, but none of them flies away. They caw and croak quietly. He is not sure if he should think this is creepy or captivating. They stare at him.
I’ll pay a visit to Wilma’s grave, he thinks. Nobody could possibly think there was anything odd about that. I live in the village, after all.
Snow covers Kiruna cemetery. High drifts between the cleared graves and paths. It is almost like walking through a maze. Martinsson looks around. It takes her some time to get her bearings. The snow makes everything look different. Hardly anybody has had the time to clear the graves since this morning’s storm. They lie hidden beneath the snow. The sun is glistening on all the whiteness. The beech trees form imposing portals with their hanging branches, heavy with wet snow.
Martinsson usually reads the inscriptions on all the gravestones as she passes by them. She loves all the old-fashioned titles: small-holder, certificated forester, parish treasurer. And all the old names: Gideon, Eufemia, Lorentz.
The grave of her grandparents is hidden under the snow. It was buried even before the latest storm. Her conscience pricks as she goes to fetch a spade.
She starts digging. The newly fallen snow is light and easy to shift, but the snow underneath is wet, icy and as heavy as lead. The sun hurts her eyes but warms her back. It occurs to her that she never gets the feeling that her farmor is present when she comes here. No, she meets her farmor in other places. Without warning in the forest, or sometimes in her house. When she goes to the grave it’s more of an act of will, an attempt to make her thoughts and feelings home in on her farmor.
But I know you’d want me to keep things neat and tidy here, she thinks to her grandmother, and vows to become a better grave-keeper.
Now memories of her farmor start to surface. Martinsson is fifteen years old and riding her moped the 13 kilometres from Kiruna to Kurravaara, chugging up to the house on her Puch Dakota with her satchel over her shoulder. It’s almost the end of term, and in the autumn she’ll be starting grammar school. It’s 6.00 in the evening. Farmor is in the cowshed. Martinsson throws her jacket over the big cast-iron cauldron built into the wall. There is a grate underneath it. Farmor uses it to heat up water for the cows in winter. She sometimes uses the warm water to soften up dried birch sprigs so that the cows have birch leaves to eat together with soaked oats: Martinsson often helps her farmor tear the sodden leaves from the twigs. Farmor’s hands are always rough and covered in wounds. When Martinsson was a little girl she used to bathe in the cowshed cauldron every other Saturday. Short wooden planks were placed at the bottom so that she didn’t burn herself on the hot iron.
All those noises, Martinsson thinks as she stands by the grave. All those calming noises that I shall never hear again – cows chewing, milk spurting onto the sides of the pail as Farmor does the milking, chains rattling as the cows stretch to reach more hay, the buzzing of flies and the chattering of barn swallows. Farmor giving me strict instructions to go and change – you can’t mess around in the cowshed wearing your elegant school uniform. Me saying: “Who cares?” and turning my attention to brushing down Daisy.
Farmor never argued. Her strictness was only in her voice. My life with her was one of freedom.
Then she died alone. While I was in Uppsala, studying for my exams. But I’m not ready to think about that yet. There are so many things for which I can never forgive myself. And that is the worst one.
Martinsson is sweating, digging into the heavy snow with the spade, when a shadow falls over her. Someone is standing behind her. She turns round.
It’s Hjalmar.
He looks like a man on the run. A man who has been sleeping in his clothes in stairwells, a man who has been searching through rubbish bins and wastepaper baskets for bottles and tins with a deposit he can collect.
Martinsson is frightened at first. But then her heart becomes heavy and she feels sorry for him. He looks really awful. He’s going rapidly downhill.