Translated from Swedish by Lone Thygesen Blecher
We must start at the very beginning.
Our story is simple. Just like life itself, it has no beginning and no end. We’re in Malmø, one of the larger suburbs of Copenhagen. Our story is about death. Death is at the core of everything. All stories about life and love contain a kernel of death.
Those who must die are getting ready. Those who must die prepare themselves. They read and write, breathe and watch. Those who must die set out on a journey. One showers to be clean, cleaning especially well to smell fresh. Another writes his will and testament-he has already made up his mind, days and weeks ago. A third measures out precisely as much of the drug necessary to make him disappear. The vein responds, his eyes cloud over, and in a matter of seconds the world is dark, black. Everything hangs in the balance for a moment, the living and the dead. We who are still here, and those who have given up.
From Västra Hamnen, this community within a community, one can see Copenhagen glitter like a string of diamonds in the night. The neighborhoods Nils Forsberg loved were the ones close to the discontinued ferry port, Nyhavn, home of the shabby beer taverns where a Swedish policeman was allowed to be exactly as intoxicated as he wanted to be.
We are all in the same space. All the invisible people. Everything that creates a city, with sounds and echoes, time passed and time to come, dreams and hopes, the unborn and those who are vanishing. We are all here. This is a story of guilt and redemption, of hope and despair.
We are human beings. We live, breathe, love. We are the ones who are going to die. You are the ones who are going to die. We are each others’ mirror images.
Those who are going to die look around the room, brush their hair, kiss their children, flush the toilet. They are the ones who know they are going to die, who long for death, for the great, soft darkness, the final hot flash, and then that final, last silence. And those who want to live, and who do all they can to stay here, who are frightened of the great darkness surrounding us. We are like each other, like day and night in the same city, alike as only human beings can be. Our story must start right there: in the city, with a description of death-the savage city, if you will. From a distance, and from far above, we might seem like insects, cockroaches, reptiles. We live off of each other. Out in the suburbs lights are coming on, slowly, one window at a time. It is morning, the first day for some, the last day for some, and in between we meet up. The commuter train shoots out between Malmø and Copenhagen, penetrating the morning like a flaming arrow.
Life.
All these breaths creating a chain of life, of time. We know we are being eaten by a hunger we can never escape, and yet we pretend we are not touched by it. That everything is as it should be. That time doesn’t count us in, that we are not worried by time. For every breath, for every day that lights up, we move closer and closer, and one day, just like this one, we stand face-to-face with our own destruction. Then what is it all worth? Nothing.
Death is no stranger who suddenly appears in your room. Death does not pull the curtains aside, revealing an empty backyard. Death does not appear like a shadow that grows darker and then black, like a bruise that deepens in color. Death is just another kind of light.
It happens that Nils Forsberg thinks this way. That on the other side of this light there may be another kind of light, a darker light which your eyes need time to get used to. On other days, most days, he doesn’t think at all, just wants to disappear, thinks that all that is left for him is to drink himself to death. At the center of the city the day deepens, the morning sings its city song. Everything we have will be taken from us, death can come like a thief in the night, he can come like an arrow shot from a distance.
Life.
Fragile as the delicate veins in fall leaves, strong as the stubborn pulse, strong as hope, stronger than love.
The water in the canal is still, translucent, and bottle-green. Every section of town seems to be linked by a bridge. Malmø is a town surrounded by water. The streetlights. Central Station. The taxi lines. The empty moments. Bicycle messengers steal a moment’s rest, between hope and despair. Everything is in movement, the city is breathing and living.
And here we all are, spinning, hopeless.
She who has to die this early morning is getting ready, planning the next few hours, trying to remember names, people, and places. She knows the time has come, that it has been here a long time. She quickly brushes her hair, removes a speck of food from between her front teeth. She knows how much she owes, knows she must pay. She cannot free herself of it. Her debt grows with every breath she takes, and yet there’s nothing new in this, she’s used to being hunted, she is prey. She no longer knows what it feels like not to be hunted.
The withdrawal distorts her thoughts. She’s not able to follow a straight line of thinking. There’s no beaten path she can follow along, or leave behind.
Debt.
It’s all about that.
The debt.
That she has to pay and cannot do so. She who has to die has tried in vain to settle her debt by offering herself as mule. She said: “I can fix it, I can take it. You know I can handle the pressure.”
It would be so simple, just a transport through Copenhagen to Hässleholm, but that prospect turned out to be futile as well.
She had been hoping for it, it had been a straw to cling to, that she could put her debt aside by carrying a kilo of amphetamines from the head supplier.
She has offered to transport goods from Poland to Sweden-but that’s just as futile. She has, to put it mildly, no credit left in her “trust account.” Istvan is many things, but generous and forgiving he is not. She’s still short four thousand kroner. A piddling amount, really. But every time she’s managed to save up something, it disappears just as fast. There are always new needs. The big problem is that the money runs right through her fingers, that she needs the drugs to be able to work and save up more money, and to do that she needs to use more and more.
It’s an evil cycle. She’s in the rat race, but unlike the rat, she knows she’s doing it-which of course makes everything worse. She knows there’s neither beginning nor end. She just runs.
She who must die gets dressed. Thinks of her mother who is still asleep, sees her in her mind’s eye as she lies in her bed, breathing. She who must die cannot this morning help thinking about how much she loves her mother, how she wishes she could give her what she dreams of. A daughter. That she would come back, return from this shadow world. Become alive again. Be a human being, at least for a little while. That’s by now the only wish the aging mother has-to get her daughter back.
Traffic is still almost nonexistent, but the city keeps changing. Roadwork is going to detour traffic from Exercisgatan during the early-morning hours. According to a report from the traffic department it has something to do with a minor gas repair job. These things happen all the time, everything changes.
She who must die thinks about yesterday when what she has feared for so long finally happened-a friend from her school years picked her up in the street. She didn’t notice until it was too late.
Rickard is his name. She remembers him. He always sat at the front of the class raising his hand and sucking up to the teacher. Even then he was an ass, a pig. Rickard. He didn’t recognize her, paid up front for a blowjob without a rubber. She’s almost the only one on Exercisgatan who does it.
Everyone knows about it. She doesn’t need to advertise her special products. For her it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It isn’t true that there are levels in hell. Everything is equally black and hopeless. After she threw up Richard’s sperm by the cemetery fence, she thought, for the umpteenth time, that it had to stop now. No more! she’d thought. Her eyes had teared and she still felt sick from the stale taste.
She who must die knows that it’s inescapable, that it must come to an end. Death from her own hand or an accident-it makes no difference, not any longer, she is tired, tired to the core. She looked into the mirror this morning and saw a ghost looking back at her: a skull with a thin film of skin stretched over the bones. She saw the badly healed scars all the way down from her upper arms. She saw the badly healed veins winding across her underarms. She is no longer a human being, she just doesn’t know what she has become. A reptile.
A cockroach.
She assumed that’s what she’d become.
He who this morning will do the work of death is calm and methodical. He doesn’t hurry, his hand never hesitates. He strangles her completely, without effort. He’s not a passionate man, he is calm and calculating. He knows what to do.
However, it takes longer than he’d expected. She resists-a kind of passive, hopeless resistance. It’s unbearably exciting, and he can’t help letting go of his grip a tiny bit, just so she can take a quick breath, just enough so she cannot scream, but enough oxygen to draw it out for a few more seconds. His pulse speeds up a touch, not much, but enough so that he’s irritated by his own weakness. He finishes his job, his assignment. He’s annoyed about his sudden weakness-that he couldn’t resist the impulse. It all takes just a few minutes. He wishes he could have dragged it out longer.
The murderer covers up her body with a blanket, not from caring, not because the exposed body tells of the unspeakable-he throws the blanket over her from mere habit. The dead body is then rolled into the backseat of the car; the blanket has a small checkered pattern. He’s reckless. It’s a preposterous thought that he should ever have to succumb to letting his car undergo a criminal technical examination. Although the woman’s body is covered with an abundance of DNA traces, he knows that there are neither trails nor suspicions anywhere, that he’s a free man. He eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty. Now he’s excited in this undefinable way that makes his body shake from inside out. To be like a god! Freedom is pleasurable. He sits still for a few seconds in the car, breathes deeply, thinks of the dead body in back, thinks that he must stay present now, that he can feel the whole world breathe against him, intensely and burning. He’s beginning to change, growing harder, more like an animal. This is what he’s been striving for, to become true to his instinct.
It takes time before one begins to see the pattern. The various parts do not make a whole, they’re not noticeable, though it’s so obvious-and perhaps it’s for just this reason that the simple becomes the difficult. The solution is so obvious that it becomes banal. We search for more depth, a more complex solution. But it doesn’t exist. Everything has to do with desires, with needs.
It’s like emerging from a dark basement and being surprised by the bright summer light. You know what you’re going to see, maybe you even feel it, but in the moment itself-just when the world is going to appear-you see nothing. You’re blinded, thrown to the ground, covering your eyes with your hand to protect against the sharp light. This is what truth is like.
This is the merciless light biblical texts speak of, a truth so penetrating that it’s almost impossible to survive. You must die in order to take part in eternal life. Therefore: better to squint than be blinded, better to be chosen, to be inside, than to be excluded.
Nils Forsberg wrote in one of his few letters to his former friend Father Pietro, as an answer to why he can no longer believe: I think it has to do with a kind of stinginess, your faith, your feeling of presumptuousness-that there should be an answer, incomprehensible for those of us still living in this world. Yes, you are right, I am a coward. My way is the coward’s way, but this way I only have myself to depend on. He knew he would never send the letter, that it didn’t really matter, and that the most important thing was to put his thoughts down on paper-that writing was a kind of mirror.
That’s how it was. It was in the writing that he was able to see himself. You think you have a mandate on truth, and through your very faith you make everyone else an exception. I spit on that!
Father Pietro had for a short time been Nils Forsberg’s father confessor. The aging priest, who’d been exiled to the edge of the world, had been Forsberg’s path into the church, into what he imagined was the world. And then the real world came along and changed everything. The world where death attacked like a splash of ink on a white sheet of paper. Between the inner and the outer world, boundaries were no longer possible.
Body and spirit.
The city is Malmø.
The year is 2008.
The old year left only senseless tragedies behind, incidents that could just as well have been stopped in time before the wheel of death started rolling.
Now it’s January. The month when everything stands in the balance. When everything is both too late and too early.
A series of deaths occur within a very limited time, and within a very limited geographical area.
Everyone is dumbfounded.
The general public. The police. The media.
The cruelty. The meaningless violence. The ominous sense of aggression. It has become like an itch that can never be stilled.
The press is full of meaningless speculations, not the least of which are supported by Alexander Hofman’s inflammatory editorials. There’s a rising sense of anxiety that always sets in when weaker groups become even weaker. Everything rolls along, takes on a life of its own. There’s a small part of the larger picture which at first you cannot see, a pattern not decodable at first. The light of truth is blinding, impossible to grasp.
A crime scene might very well be compared to an archeological excavation. You want to know what has happened and who is involved. There are clues, suggestions, a sense that something lies hidden.
The world is a riddle to be solved. We all become more or less suspect. Guilt is a disease, contagious, transmittable. He who turns his face away, he who starts walking faster, she who laughs off the facts, uncomfortably.
Nils Forsberg finished his letter to Father Pietro: There is no longer any reason for me to not say exactly, and I mean exactly, what I think. And that way is, as everyone knows, a blind alley. We lie because we don’t have the energy to tell the truth! Truth does not make us free, it makes us lonely.
Of course, a social and ethical explanation can be found to interpret the reasons why a particular person commits a crime. There are also psychological models. For Nils Forsberg the answer to the “Why” has crystalized into a “Therefore”: greediness, terror-because it was possible, because you could.
January is a month when everything hangs in the balance, when quick or well-thought-out decisions take on unknown consequences. To allow yourself to let go, or to deny yourself the right to act out your dark side. To kick someone lying down one more time, or to let it be. To jump out into it, or not to. Violence vibrates in the air: repressed hatred is like a dense fog rolling through all the alleys and squares of the city.
Life is unfair and cruel, and so is time. Cities grow, cities disappear, children grow older, stars fall and incinerate. Everything is in movement, the only constant is the actual feeling of meaninglessness. That we are on our way somewhere and that we don’t know why.
Between us, the living, there is a transparent wall. Stay or leave. We never touch each other, we just turn our faces away, look down at the ground.
In the end, that’s what it’s all about. That some disappear, while others stay around. That we are weighted down to earth, as though we are carrying an invisible yoke. The dead can be whirled off into time, be recreated, placed into some context, delivered the justice they are thirsting for, and then even the memory of them will be gone.
The final problem is, of course, that any kind of fundamental justice is lacking. That we cannot see the whole picture, only parts of it. That we grope for each other in the dark. And the murderer remains alone, blood singing in his body, images haunting him. He is who he is, he owns this bottomless thirst and this voraciousness that fills him. He knows it should not be this way, he also knows he cannot stop himself. It’s like an invisible wound that can never be healed, an itch you must not touch, and yet you cannot help yourself.
Is this how we become what we’re supposed to be? Nils Forsberg is doubtful, he still believes there is a hope for mercy, for change, that life is not static.
Nils Forsberg had crossed several boundaries in the course of his life. It was not a conscious choice but the sum of a series of events taking place beyond himself. It was possible that he once had been free to choose, but no longer. He’d given up, been tossed here and there, taken paths he had previously not even known were there.
Nils Forsberg had chosen to remain in his job, long after he should have left. When he should have left the dead to bury their dead, and he should have stayed with the living-and lived. The very first time he’d had to deliver the news of a death, he should have refused to pass on the information. He should have said that he could not be the messenger of the underworld, that the living and the dead should take care of each other, and leave him out of it.
But then who the hell would do it?
That’s how it always went. It was the responsibility. His feeling that he was more capable of dealing with the world than his colleagues. It was better that he did it than to have Nils Larsson come stomping into the home of the victims saying, “Your boy is dead, he fell onto the tracks…”
It’s all still there, all the thoughts and actions are there, deep down in him, buried in sediment. And every time he takes action the dregs are stirred up, just like when you throw a stone into water and everything muddies.
Now he was in a gray zone, neither alive nor dead, and yet-a bit of both. He looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom and could hardly recognize the face looking back at him. At times he despised what he saw. New Year’s had passed, the nights were deep and dark, the days as short as a breath, gray and grainy. Nils Forsberg experienced a certain amount of pleasure in giving up, admitting defeat, with a tiny bit of self-pity mixed in. Tasting the whip of degradation! to quote his favorite author, Eric Hermelin, in one of his introductions to a book of Persian poetry. To summarize: in order to get back up you first must have fallen down. Forsberg had fallen down so many times by now, and he no longer had the strength to get back up. Nils Forsberg was a man who carried his story around with him, who was always telling and changing his life’s story. He was also a man whom no one wanted to listen to anymore.
The morning news in Malmø reports of break-ins in three nursery schools; four people are arrested in a stolen car; a twelve-year-old girl is chased out of her home by her own father-she runs crying around in the yard in front of the apartment building; a middle-aged man is found dead in a parked car on Östra Förstadsgatan. He sits with his head leaning against the steering wheel. The autopsy shows that he’s been dead for at least twelve hours before he was found, which means that he’s been sitting dead in his car during daylight hours on a busy street in the middle of Malmø. Everything is changing. Though we are as alike as only human beings can be, we are still strangers. The girl gets to sleep late in the afternoon, her father will stay away overnight, and the three break-ins at the nursery schools are never solved.
Death is waiting.
Death bides its time.
Everything is about waiting, about doors thrown wide open.
The only thing we can really know is that time measures us carefully, it waits until we have finished all we are here to do, all that is written with invisible letters in the book of life.
Time.
Drops of time, trickles of time. Time scratching, carving its deep lines in your face. Time for the poison to leave your body the same second it’s taken in. We’re like black flares in a world of sudden light. The soon to be dead get on the bus, log onto their online bank, wait for a traffic light to change. Everything continues as though nothing is going to happen. The soon to die take their stuff out from the pawnbroker, try to ameliorate a bad cold.
The police station down by Slussplan, right by the canal, lies mostly in darkness. It’s that time, right between night and morning, and slowly the city wakes up, revealing all the secrets of the night. Rain mixed with snow falls heavily. The water in the canal reflects the light, traffic lights blink yellow, again and again. Down by Midhem, at one of the many twenty-four hour gas stations, a small fire ignites and spreads quickly along the back wall-a neglected area where trash has accumulated for many years. Three or four homeless people who’ve been using the area as a shelter from the wind run off, leaving the fire behind. They stumble along Lundavägen like evil-smelling ghosts, on their way toward the dense bushes right opposite Hedberg’s car dealership. And then everything is recognizable yet again, from the acrid smell of burned plastic, damp leaves, scraps from a fast food place, a worthless windbreaker. The rancid smell of urine, alcohol, rotting food. Three of the four who run from the fire will not make it through February, the month of the death god. The youngest of them will be found dead in a gateway on Zenithgatan, right next to Rörsjöskolan. Life is in motion, it happens. We have so little to fight back with. We’ve created a world that turns its back on us.
Malmø is Sweden’s third largest city.
The city is growing, in constant motion. The boundaries between Copenhagen and Malmø are growing more and more diffuse with every year that passes. Transportation is fast now-and everything can be transported. Huge sums of money change hands every day. The economy, lust, and desire itself move freely, like underwater currents. You see the ripples on the surface but never the big currents, the big fish.
Stars can just be made out in the grayness; far away a siren is heard from an emergency vehicle. Everything is within everything. Even chaos creates its own pattern, like looking through a kaleidoscope. Down in Rosengård a basement fire starts up. In the last few weeks there have been several, almost always basement fires, lit with rubbing alcohol and matches. The rental agency has emptied all the storage rooms, nothing of value has been left behind, nothing that could be ignited. Which means that they drag the trash in there themselves and light it. Why? The answer is simple: because they can.
A security company makes rounds, drives slowly through the badly designed alleys. They’ve been ordered never to stop, never to leave their car, always to call, “Patrol in danger,” at the least sign of trouble. This of course contributes to aggravating the mood, to the feeling of being out on a dangerous assignment. The divisions become sharper and sharper. The difference between them and us more and more pronounced.
Windows in the stairwells are brightly lit. The city is besieged by its inhabitants, and a ghost walks through the city, a phantom.
Then the fire in the eastern parts of the city gets going. The night worker at Statoil strikes the alarm for the fire department and within a short time the gas station and the fast food restaurant have been shut down for customers. Someone also decides to block off the upper part of Lundavägen. Two big cranes block off the street. A lonely policeman is given the task of directing the scanty traffic. A rain storm is gathering, clouds quickly pile up above the city. This gray, miserable city of no mercy. On this day, in this city.
This morning finds Nils Forsberg sleeping at his kitchen table. A string of saliva has run down his chin. Forsberg doesn’t dream. He’s sunk into a deep black hole-the dreams are happening somewhere else. The alcohol rushes throughout his body, shakes and shivers in all his body’s nooks and crannies, searching for cells, thirsty cells wanting to be saturated again. Time will burn off the alcohol. Time is our only friend. It moves on, rushing like an ocean. Everything tears and jerks inside of him and he can’t see it or understand it. He’s like the living dead, what’s left over at the end. Finally, that’s what it’s all about: time. It changes us, it teaches us, if only we’ll listen.
In the end, it all comes down to one question: who is it you belong to?
Who do you belong to? Your car? Your job? The alcohol? The drugs? You allow yourself to be defeated, vanquished, conquered, beaten. Eventually, that’s the only thing Nils Forsberg can subscribe to: that he’s owned. To live becomes like being on fire for one moment. To flare up like a star in a black room, imploding, then disappearing with a faint hissing sound, like when you drop a burning match into a glass of water. One quick fizzle, then all is quiet.
“Even time is political,” Mats Granberg once said. Forsberg’s answer had been blunt, not to say aggressive. “Ah ha? And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” How do you answer something like that? Which of course only meant that Forsberg tried to make sense of it because he missed his friend. He also knew that he couldn’t admit it to himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be human. All his mistakes, his failures, his problems lived their own life in Forsberg’s consciousness, soaring and surging through his body like a separate ecosystem.
In the course of his career, Nils Forsberg had seen more dead people than he cared to think about. He had seen them in every condition, at all ages.
Children and adults, men and women. The dead all carried a common burden. Their spirits floated weightlessly, while the memory of them nailed them to this world. It was as though a special kind of energy had been released around the dead. A human being who disappears in a crime leaves a string of loose ends behind. Connections that are not cleared up, explained, will haunt the rest of us, force out an answer. Nils Forsberg lived in a dark maze, groping about and finding nothing, not even a flicker of light. Only the voices from the dead looking for answers, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, hesitantly reaching for him when he let his thoughts float. He knew he was not alone in this, that most police officers were haunted this way, yet it was rare that anyone said anything about it. As long as one didn’t speak of it, it didn’t exist, that particular problem.
A police report is at best a slow journey, two steps forward and one step back. At worst it’s a march in place. Most often it’s a balancing act between madness and discipline. This was a phrase Forsberg liked to repeat to anyone who cared to listen: “Madness and discipline! And all we have here is the discipline! Where’s the creativity! Where’s curiosity?”
The dead.
Some of these deaths he had shared with Gisela Eriksson. They had attempted to recreate times, places, and events to such an extent that the dead had become like distant friends, or relatives you haven’t seen for a long time. The dead. He knew Gisela Eriksson also walked around surrounded by the shadows. She’d been his closest friend, the only one whom he could share his thoughts with. And then he’d gone and ruined it all, pushed everything to its ultimate conclusion so that finally there wasn’t anything to be done but shut the door behind him. He’d always thought she’d be the one to take over after him. And that’s what happened, but not the way he’d wanted it. He hadn’t chosen to leave, he’d been kicked out. He had envisioned himself and Eriksson walking side by side through the city-jungle. Forsberg teaching what he knew, and Eriksson eagerly soaking it all up. Oh, what an idiot he was, what a naïve and narrow-minded view he’d had of himself, a complete idiot!
That’s what he was.
The dead. The missing.
You could say they were one and the same, that they all spoke the same language. There was nothing conciliatory about them, they just didn’t want to be forgotten, brushed aside. At night, and sometimes like a shadow in the middle of the day, Nils Forsberg could feel how they walked right next to him, whispering to him: You are one of us. On those days all he could do was drink, try to drown out the droning voices, just let them sink to the bottom, dragged down by alcohol, saturated. All those dead who sought to go back to their original context, who demanded justice, who wanted to be placed in a true context.
“And what about love?”
He’d never answered Granberg’s question, mostly because there was nothing to say. When everything turned bleak and black, Granberg used to remind him: “And what about love? Love can make the impossible happen!” There was nothing to say to that. Love is a flame that suddenly appears in a dark room-and then it disappears. He would never say that love could save us, it certainly couldn’t bring Mats Granberg back to life.
Death and time, love and the abyss.
Nils Forsberg had been a police officer his entire adult life. He’d never married nor become a father. He’d become a police officer, and he knew only two kinds of people: those who committed crimes and those who searched for the people who committed crimes. Obviously that’s a precarious situation-an unofficial health statistic published by the police authorities themselves states that more than 25 percent of police in active service find that they drink more than they should, while the average for the rest of the population is 4 percent. Also, suicides and divorces are overrepresented. To enter the abyss has its price, and it’s paid for in life, in time. To be the Virgil of our times, to step down into the inner circles of hell with only a lantern, very quickly takes its toll. It very soon grows lonely and dark.
Time is the master of death. Time is a flash of light in a dark forest. Time is kaleidoscopic: it’s what’s keeping you painfully awake locked in a cell with a hangover-it’s what’s whiled away during a conversation along Strandpromenaden in Malmø. Whoever owns time conquers death. Nils Forsberg often thought that it was a kind of irony of fate that the center of the city, the very inner kernel of Malmø, was occupied by a cemetery, a place where time is suspended and at the same time fixed. He frequently ended up in the cemetery on his walks. He would buy a cup of coffee at the newsstand café on Gustaf Adolf’s square and sit down among the other retirees, the ones who also lived in this no-man’s-land. He always mixed the hot coffee with the liquid from his hip flask. But it had been a long time since he last took a walk. A great exhaustion had besieged him.
Forsberg used to spend days and evenings on the benches in the cemetery. It was an absurd feeling sitting there, absorbed in rest, while buses and taxis passed by. He’d heard voices. Shouts. All the sounds of the city.
Here they all were, the dead he’d learned from when they were still alive, the ones who could no longer answer when he talked to them. He’d come to the cemetery when Granberg’s ashes were spread. Then he’d kept going back there for several days-probably not more than a week-until he could no longer do it, and the alcohol took over. He’d drowned himself from the inside out. The only people he was really able to talk to were the homeless whom he met on his random wanderings. They understood this particular condition, when you are suspended between life and death and lack any kind of anchor, when you are simultaneously hanging and falling, living at the outer edge of everything.
There are times when we want to escape, and times we want to hold on.
Greger’s Antiquarian Bookstore is just a short walk from the cemetery. Forsberg no longer goes there, nor to the Catholic church situated in the same area as the store. It feels like swimming against the current. Every thought and feeling contains endless resistance. Nils Forsberg spends his time in his own rooms, drinking, sleeping, dreaming, screaming, beating the walls. He writes a couple of lines in a notebook, draws what looks like a map, sorts papers and books. Again and again he arrives at one and the same name.
Nils Forsberg imagines that he’s following a trail, that he has an assignment. To anyone on the outside it’s obvious that we’re looking at a human being who’s lost all ability to act like a human being. He’s chasing the wind, a phantom. He sees a fundamental problem. It has to do with a pattern and intentions. It has to do with probabilities. The important question is: is it possible to see what’s going to happen? Yes, Nils Forsberg answers himself, if you can see what’s already happened.
Forsberg had thought a lot about Greger lately. In between the alcohol attacks, and during moments of clarity, it occurred to him that he should have gone there, that he ought to have visited Greger in his bookshop in the basement, at least shown him that he too was struggling. But he’d just not had the energy. Nils Forsberg simply sank. Of course, he also should have settled all his small debts. He didn’t do it. Sometimes he had the same dream, a recurring dream he’d had this past year: He was by a lake, the water was still, lake water, black water. The forest surrounded him, sighing, alive. In the middle of the lake floated a naked body, facedown. It was important, he had to get there, into the middle of the lake-but he couldn’t move. He saw the body, how it tipped downward, more and more until it completely disappeared-and then he screamed out into the silent forest. The dream kept coming back to him. It wouldn’t leave him alone. There was something that should have been said. He never got there in the dream. The naked body floated on in the black water.
The wind grew stronger, heavy rain-wet snowflakes spun through space and immediately melted away when they touched the ground. Nothing lasts forever.
Even when there were memorial services for people completely unknown to him, Forsberg still sat there. It was as though all the dead belonged to him, as though he carried so much grief that he was forced to unload it onto other people as well.
It’s January, and the rain comes sliding in over town, then blows off again. The homeless people look for refuge, in gateways, public shelters, bicycle storage rooms, huddled together in small camps, seeking protection from the violence, the gangs who come at them with bicycle chains and sticks. House façades are deteriorating, tree trunks are rotting. Forsberg has expanded his two earlier categories-those who commit crimes and those who have to prevent crimes-with those who long to get away and those who long to go home.
We want to be everywhere we’re not. That’s one of the reasons Malmø forces itself into a state of anonymity, of having no history. The new city has no room for the ugly, the limited, that which reminds us of the passing of time, of work and death. That which makes us what we are: live human beings.
We do not want to be broken, changed. It makes Nils Forsberg think of a flickering flame in a dark room. Life is like that.
Violence. Cruelty.
Faceless, meaningless, cruel violence runs through the city like quicksilver, pulsating, forcing out opinions, points of view. All the places Nils Forsberg loved had in some way been left to themselves: churches, libraries, parks, antiquarian bookstores. They were places that were in some ways open, in other ways-finished. They were places where there was room for the abandoned, the leftovers. Of all these places, it was especially the antiquarian bookstore that attracted Nils Forsberg. That’s where he felt at home, and often he thought about what this might mean. Why just antiquarian bookstores? Perhaps it had to do with the curious fact that time became a paradox within these rooms. It was both past and present, one layer on top of another, and unlike at a museum, it was possible to touch and smell everything. Every book carried an impression of its readers, but also carried a hope of being rediscovered.
Such light, happy days, and some darker, more profound days. Life could slide right along while he browsed his way through it, and love would suddenly be present, be real.
The city grows smaller and smaller, while at the same time it’s bursting its own embankments and boundaries. Everything is in flux. Of course, it’s all controlled by economic interests. Everything originates in greed. You eat sugar and fat and what you want is more sugar and fat. The changes in the city are also controlled by the economy, and eventually what will remain are only vapid cafés and anonymous shops.
Malmø’s oldest porn shop, The Cave, will finally be crowded out of the Herman neighborhood, along with a small furniture store, a hat shop, a photo shop, and a knick-knack boutique.
Because Värnhemstorget, this complete social and architectural mistake, is about to be restructured. A new area, Gateway to Malmø, will be built up right along the approach to the city. The homeless people have been forced into Rörsjöparken, near the city center. They too want to be near where the money is, it’s that simple, whether you’re a bicycle messenger or a CEO. The easternmost parts of the city are moving further and further in toward the canals. The boundaries are being erased.
All the falafel stands have had their rental agreements canceled. The only constant in the area are the junkies who circle back and forth. The address Hermansgatan number 8 has been junkie central ever since the square was built. If you’ve lost your bicycle or your stereo, you can be certain that’s where you can find it, number 8, third floor-the only apartment in the area with a glass-enclosed balcony.
Every evening and morning security guards patrol the area. Along the back of supermarket parking lots and construction sites found all over the area, the streets are filthy with construction dust and refuse. Everything with any kind of scrap value has already been stolen or carted away. The copper thieves come out at night, digging and drilling like moles for anything that can be melted down and transformed. Even here in the underground, everything is a constant hunt for money.
“It looks like a warzone…” the security guard Jan Brandberg thinks when he walks his nightly round, shining a beam behind the scaffolding with his powerful flashlight. The dog pulls at the leash, searching and straining-but no one’s out there, all is empty, the world is on standby. As usual, Brandberg turns at the end of Hermansgatan and walks back toward the park again. He usually stops by the tent camp to make sure no one’s about to freeze to death. He was taught to show this consideration by an older colleague: “It has to do with finding a balance…” He couldn’t help asking: “Which balance?” “You must try to be careful with human life.” And since then he’s made sure to check in on the rag piles-made sure there was life, that they moved when he poked them with the tip of his foot. “Even they are human beings, in a way…”
During the last few days the water in the canals has risen. Cans, twigs, and plastic float about on the surface. The water slowly rises toward the edges of the canal. Everything’s in movement. The public shelter has just opened its doors, and the first guests take off, always junkies first, the mentally ill last. It’s all driven by hunger, by need. The mornings are always chaotic, and everything’s again pushed to the extreme.
To live. To survive.
Rörsjöparken is empty. The pond in the middle of the park is filled with rainwater and garbage. The benches were moved inside the municipal storage buildings at the beginning of September. A siren cuts through the morning as the fog comes rolling in from Öresund. In the last few years the population has grown more and more quickly. At the same time, organized violent crime has become rampant in the city. We cluster together. Everything’s about ownership. The alternative being: to be owned. Between these poles we are tossed about, like balls in a pinball game, more or less out of control, at the mercy of the times we live in, of our desires.
Morning arrives. Pale gray, it comes like a swollen wave, at first silently, then with all its violent power. So much happens when a town wakes up, so much it’s not possible to catch, to describe, no matter how hard you try. Birds take off into the sky, light flickers on the water in the canal, traffic becomes heavier. All these sounds, all the sudden feelings. Life is suddenly in the balance: to jump or not, shoot up or not, sleep in or not. The big and the small, it’s all caught in a whirl of hope and despair.
There’s light and there’s darkness, the dry and that which is still damp. On this day, Christian Westin sits in the basement storage room belonging to his mother’s apartment at Allhemsgatan number 7. Westin has now been awake for seven days straight and the demons are getting closer and closer. They breathe and hiss in the dark basement. Westin’s mother usually comes down to check on him at some point during the day. There’s very little left of what was once the man Christian Westin. He’s quickly transforming into a chemical monster. Today he’s going to collapse in epileptic spasms and repeatedly beat his head against the cold basement floor. That’s to be expected, nothing out of the ordinary. At the edge of one of the larger and more spectacular investigations in Sweden, his name is going to appear momentarily in public when one of his knives is found near a crime scene and it is thought, or rather hoped, that Westin might be involved. It would have been the easiest explanation. But this is not to be. Nothing is as simple as you hope. The morning is like an arrow, shot into space at random.
And death, too, might seem this way.
On this early morning, while the sky slowly deepens and brightens, the gray growing slightly grayer, a woman will be murdered. She will be thrown into the backseat of a large sedan and transported to a place she hasn’t visited for quite a while-the outer edges of the housing ghetto Västra Hamnen. The last time here, she was in a professional capacity. And one might say that now she’s also here acting that role. She plays her part, even in death. She died somewhere else and the murderer has brought her to a one-way street out here in Kirseberg where he parks next to Sven-Olle’s car service. Alongside the construction sites, there are trailers where the company houses their employees: Poles, Latvians, Germans. The illegal workforce imported from surrounding countries is big business, worth millions. But as with everything else-it’s within the pyramid where power figurings and transformation take place, where undeclared, almost invisible money is laundered.
It was all about time.
Fragments of time, dark oceans of time. Time by the drop, time like water-filled underground cavities. Time that curses and time that liberates, that heals and tears apart. All that must be changed, all that holds the eternal.
There’s a time to love. A time to die.
Everything existed side by side, shoulder to shoulder.
The housing areas in and near the center of the city were being pushed further and further out toward the suburbs, while the inner core of the city was becoming populated by the wealthy and the homeless, all those who were free to move across boundaries. Everything was a question of time. He who owned his time, also owned his life-Gisela Eriksson often thought that what she really had to offer the anonymous police authorities in Malmø was her pound of flesh. She gave them her time, a part of her life, the only thing she could never get back. Within her, like rings in a tree, was all the time she’d experienced in her childhood, her youth, her early middle age. All time was in motion, sloshing back and forth. Whatever she’d experienced, whatever she’d thought or done, could all be used. There was a creative element to the job that she could not deny, and it was probably what made her stay. She was able to come up with solutions, not merely formulate problems.
Eriksson stood in the stairwell and watched as the aging mother slowly shut the door to her apartment, to “the crypt in which she would mummify herself.” The civilian car she was driving was parked halfway on top of the sidewalk downstairs, and traffic was increasing as the day went on. Exercisgatan functioned as a kind of thoroughfare, connecting various streets of the city, and when Eriksson stood outside the apartment house gate, she could glimpse the square by the Jewish synagogue, surrounded by tall walls.
The morning had slipped through her fingers. Her thoughts came and went, rattling like train cars on a rusty track. She didn’t know what to think, what she believed. Josman was still being processed. Her body, Eriksson had been informed, had been taken to the forensic department in Lund. There was always a rush, even with the dead. She reminded herself to call Hofman and Nordgren later today-always easier to pose the questions directly to them.
On the morning of the fourth of January rain was moving across Öresund, and you could see heavy clouds passing back and forth across the open expanse. Wind tore at the sea, throwing up water along the rock walls protecting walkways and lawns around the swimming area. Nature, yet again victorious. It was not possible to imagine nature’s power. It conquered all obstacles. The sea will still be around when we’re no more than a memory.
Time.
The time to leave, the time to come back.
Time to open one door, time to close another.
The wind increased in strength. There were places in Malmø that were in constant movement, where the wind always got in. The entire town was one big construction error from the beginning. There were no natural breaks, no given boundaries. Everything had been made by man. Time had changed the town, its inhabitants, its language. It was neither good nor bad, it was just the way it was.
Cruelty alongside consideration, life alongside death, love alongside hate. One thing depended on the other. In another part of town, on Fågelvägen, just a few hundred meters from Exercisgatan, was where Nils Forsberg stayed, more or less busy scrutinizing himself-always arriving at the same dreary conclusion.
That it was too late, that he had already lost, that now he had to listen completely to the inner voice telling him that the only thing he needed to do right now was to remain sufficiently drunk around the clock, then everything would take care of itself. If he’d counted right, then this was day sixteen. He had trouble in between rounds, telling where one day ended and the next began-so, for simplicity’s sake, he’d drawn a thick line on the refrigerator door with a black marker. He counted sixteen lines now. And he knew that Mats Granberg had been dead longer than that. Those days, the ones without Granberg when he was still sober, were white, frozen, inhuman. We’re not created to lose, nor for defeat-we’re made to win! he thought, and at that moment it seemed obvious to him that he’d committed his whole life to failures, to losses. He was his own loss, had created his own degradation. He knew that he was beyond human help, that he was like a stone, sinking deeper and deeper down into the water. “Oh, damn it all!” he wailed his mantra, over and over again.
Nils Forsberg had lived very close to his own edges. In one moment everything could be changed. He shifted his inner positions as regularly as the tides. A more psychologically astute staff manager might have demanded an explanation about him from the social insurance office a long time ago. It was not difficult to discover that Nils Forsberg was a bipolar personality type with autistic traits, a diagnosis he could be proud of, by the way, not least because Robert Johnson gave Einstein the same diagnosis in a biography of him.
It was all a question of circumstances and chance. In truth he was really just odd. That’s where his thoughts mostly went, deep down, to a feeling of embarrassment, about who he was-who he’d become. The difference between what played out in his mind and what took place in the real world was enormous. His main purpose, at least that’s how he saw it himself, was to create as much trouble as he possibly could. He’d made a final decision when he first met the personnel consultant, a woman who it appeared didn’t have all her marbles, but who made decisions about the world around her in the way she herself saw fit-if the shoe didn’t fit, then the world around her would just have to change. He’d almost succeeded in driving Annelie Bertilsson out of police headquarters. But in the end he’d had to admit defeat. Bertilsson was the new order and Forsberg was the time that had passed. Like blowing out a candle-right now. And then everything goes quiet and dark.