Done.
He leaves the stone where it fell and rejoins the group. They are all there, and he notices that Leo is still smiling and looking pleased with himself.
After almost an hour in the forest they make their way home, back across the bridge and along the fence.
When the children are all indoors and have taken off their coats, they are sent to wash their hands, and then it’s time for Jan to accompany Katinka to the lift. She goes up to see her mother by herself.
Then it’s story time. Jan chooses to read about one of the adventures of Pippi Longstocking, which includes her assertion that a person who is really big must also be really kind.
Afterwards he asks Natalie, Josefine, Leo and Hugo to stay behind in the playroom. He gets them to sit down on the floor in front of him.
‘I saw you playing in the forest today,’ he says.
The children smile up at him shyly.
‘And you left something behind on the path... A little mouse.’
Suddenly they seem to understand what he’s talking about, what he wants. Josefine points and says, ‘It was Leo — he stamped on it!’
‘It was poorly!’ counters Leo. ‘It was just lying there on the ground.’
‘No it wasn’t, it was moving! It was crawling!’
Jan lets them bicker for a little while, then he says, ‘But now the mouse is dead. It’s not crawling any more.’
The children fall silent, staring at him.
He speaks slowly: ‘How do you think the mouse must have felt, before it died?’
No one answers.
Jan looks them in the eye, one by one. ‘Did anyone feel sorry for the mouse?’
Still no reply. Leo stares back at him with a defiant expression; the others gaze at the floor.
‘You poked that little wood mouse with your sticks until it bled,’ Jan says quietly. ‘Did anyone feel sorry for the mouse when that happened?’
Eventually the smallest child nods hesitantly.
‘OK, Hugo, good boy. Anyone else?’
After a moment Natalie and Josefine also nod, one after the other. Only Leo refuses to meet Jan’s eye now. He looks at the floor, muttering something about ‘Daddy’ and ‘Mummy’.
Jan leans forward. ‘What did you say, Leo?’
But Leo doesn’t answer. Jan could press him, perhaps even make him cry.
That’s what Daddy did to Mummy.
Is that really what Leo said? Jan thinks he might have misheard, and would like to ask the boy again. But instead he simply says, ‘I’m glad we’ve talked about this.’
The children realize they are free to go; they leap up from the floor and race out.
He watches them go — did they understand his point? He can still remember the telling-off he got from his teacher when he was eight years old; he was playing Nazis with his friend Hans and the other boys in his class. They had marched across the playground in straight lines, shouting ‘Heil Hitler!’ and feeling tough and powerful — they were actually marching in step! — until a teacher came over and stopped them. Then he had mentioned a place they had never even heard of.
‘Auschwitz!’ he had yelled. ‘Do you know what happened there? Do you know what the Nazis did to adults and children in Auschwitz?’
None of the boys knew, so the teacher had told them about the terrible journeys by cattle wagon and the gas ovens and the mountains of shoes and clothes. And that was the end of their Nazi games.
Jan follows the children out of the room; it will soon be sing-along time. Routines — he assumes there are just as many routines over at St Patricia’s. Day after day, the same thing. Fixed times, well-worn tracks.
The children were not being evil when they tortured the mouse. Jan refuses to believe that children can be evil, even if he himself used to feel like a little mouse sometimes when he was at school and came across older boys in the corridor; he never expected any mercy, nor did he receive any.
The week after Jan found the bunker in the forest he started to clean and prepare it.
He was very careful, and always waited until the sun had gone down before he left his apartment and strolled up to the hillside in the forest where the bunker was located. During the course of two weeks he went there three times with some rubbish sacks and a stiff brush concealed in a bag. He clambered up the slope, crawled into the bunker and swept the floor clean. He wanted everything out: dust, cobwebs, leaves, beer cans, newspapers.
Eventually there was nothing left inside but clear surfaces. He aired the bunker by leaving the metal door open, then took along a couple of air fresheners which he placed in the two far corners; they spread an artificial smell of roses throughout the place.
It was October now, and each time Jan went to the bunker there were more dead leaves on the ground. Slowly they piled up, making the concrete structure look even more like part of the hillside. When the door was closed and the old iron bolts had been pushed across, the bunker was very difficult to spot.
The trickiest part was trying to get the new stuff in without anyone seeing him, but he did it under cover of darkness, late at night, just as with the cleaning. He had learned to find his way through the trees to the hillside by now, and he didn’t need any light.
He had found the mattress in a skip, but it didn’t smell unpleasant, and when he got it into the forest he gave it a thorough beating to get rid of all the dust. The blankets and pillows came from a big store outside Nordbro; he had removed all the labels and washed them twice before arranging them on the mattress in the bunker.
The half-dozen toys he carried up in his rucksack came from a couple of other large stores. They were the kind of anonymous goods that were produced in factories in the Far East, and there had to be thousands and thousands of them around: a couple of cars, a cuddly lion, a few picture books.
The last item he acquired was large and quite heavy. ROBOMAN, it said on the box up on the top shelf among the fire engines, spaceships and ray guns. Remote controlled! Voice activated! Record your own messages and watch ROBOMAN move and talk!
The plastic robot could stand erect on a level floor and move its arms. Jan looked at it and tried to think his way back fifteen years to the time when he was only five — he would have thought Roboman was the best thing he’d ever set eyes on, wouldn’t he? Better than a cuddly toy, almost better than a real dog or cat?
He stole Roboman. It was a bold move, but the aisle was empty and he quickly removed the robot and the remote control from the box and dropped them into a big carrier bag from another shop. Then he walked straight out. The girl on the checkout didn’t even look at him. There was no sign of the security guard.
The robot cost almost six hundred kronor, but it wasn’t the price that made him steal it. It was the risk that the checkout girl might remember the slightly unusual purchase if the police started asking questions.
Roboman? Yes, a young man bought it. He looked nice, trustworthy, a bit like a teacher. Yes, I think I could identify him...
10
Sometimes Jan thinks the pre-school is like a zoo.
It always starts late in the day, when everyone is tired: one of the children kicks off, and the others get dragged in. It’s usually one of the boys who has some kind of manic outburst, suddenly becoming hyperactive and hurtling around the rooms, perhaps knocking down someone’s carefully constructed tower of building blocks or trampling all over someone else’s Lego house.
That’s what happens at the Dell on Friday afternoon, when Leo suddenly decides to hit Felix in the face with a cushion. Felix hits him back, roaring at the top of his voice and with tears pouring down his face. Leo starts yelling too, and all at once the entire group is filled with fresh energy; the other boys start wrestling or fighting with cushions, the girls start screaming or sobbing hysterically.