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.