We Know You Remember (23)

“I’m afraid I can’t say.”

Karin Backe dug out a photograph of her old odd-job lover, from the racetrack five years earlier. Sven Hagstr?m had a dogged look on his face, yet he seemed more alive than in his seven-year-old driver’s license picture.

She had taken the photo one day when she joined him at the racetrack, thinking they could have a nice dinner together.

“But he was only interested in the races. Wanted to stand down by the track with all the other old blokes; you get a better view from there, and you can really feel the speed, the thud of the hooves.”

They hadn’t stayed in touch, though of course they ran into each other from time to time. She saw him not long before, in fact, in late spring, once the last few stubborn ice floes had finally drifted off towards the sea. Sven Hagstr?m was walking Rabble, and Karin spotted him through the window, decided to go out.

“Is that its name, the dog?”

She laughed. “Sven thought it suited it. He got it from the pound, it had a terrible background, but he was good with dogs. They don’t ask you to spill your heart and all that.”

The strange thing about that final meeting had been that he had cried. They stood out on the jetty, down by the water’s edge. From there, you could see right up to Hagstr?m’s house, clinging to the slope on the other side of the bay like a lonely nesting box in the middle of the forest. Maybe it was the distance, or the fact that, for a brief moment, he had really understood his place on earth. What it had become.

It wasn’t just that the earth was turning, he said; that wasn’t the only reason they had brought him before the Inquisition.

Karin had realized he was talking about Galileo. They had watched a documentary about him together. Sven was interested in the history of science and often said that everything we really know is ancient knowledge, that most of what has come since is a false doctrine. Not that Karin agreed, but she knew what he was talking about.

“It was the whole idea that two truths can exist in parallel,” she remembered he went on. “That was what they couldn’t tolerate, the church and the Inquisition. When Galileo discovered that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, the thing the sun and the stars revolved around, they finally reached their limit. They could only handle one truth: the Bible’s. They couldn’t allow him to nudge them into uncertainty. It was the confusion that terrified them.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“I asked if he was OK, of course.”

“And?”

Karin Backe shook her head. A lock of silver hair came loose, falling over her forehead, and she pushed it back into the clip. It was decorated with a small feather.

“He just called for the dog.”





Chapter 12





He waited until as late in the day as possible to go down to the river and wash, once the sun took its own dip below the treetops and the chatter of the birds was the only sound he could hear. The dog swam in circles, paddling frantically as though it were afraid of drowning.

Beads of water flew from its coat as it shook itself off. On the way back it leapt a few meters away, panting like the air was something fun. Jumping and snapping at blackflies.

Suddenly it stopped, sniffing the air. Olof noticed movement on the other side of the house. The car that had been parked there during the day was gone, and now there were other people peering through the trees. He saw a bicycle catch the light.

“What do you want?”

Olof took a few steps towards them, making sounds that would frighten them away. He heard rustling among the trees, scrambling up ahead.

His heart was racing, his body temperature rising.

“Get out of here!” He raised his arms and took another couple of steps. You had to show you were willing to fight, that was what he had learned in the place he was sent, you had to get bigger and heavier if you wanted to be left in peace. His body had grown and grown until he filled every room, until the others no longer dared enter.

The staff at the juvenile detention centers were bound by confidentiality, but that didn’t help him. The other boys always knew he had killed. He told them himself, whenever anyone messed with him. It had been a long time since he was last beaten up.

As the little brats scrambled out of the forest with their bikes, he saw there were three of them. Small and scrawny, barely even teenagers, they disappeared in a flash.

Olof headed inside and locked the door behind him. Heard a screech from the gulls on the roof. He had discovered that they had a nest in the chimney, and for a while he had considered lighting a fire. Not because he needed the heat, but to get rid of the birds—it was a pain if they returned year after year, he remembered his father saying that—but he didn’t have the energy. A memory of him secretly, without his father’s knowledge, balling up sheets of newspaper between the firewood, in order to start a fire. A grown man didn’t need any paper to help him.

He didn’t turn on any of the lights in the house. Had drawn the curtains on the ground floor where he was sitting, eating straight from a plastic tub of meatballs and mash. There was no silence in this house. Branches hitting it, something creaking. Maybe the wind had picked up outside. A mouse scrambled inside the walls, scurrying away. A man could die, but his voice remained. Footsteps stomping across the floor upstairs. Thud, thud on the ceiling above.