He had received no answer. The hands had no body, no ears, no mouth. Finally he had yelled and screamed in utter despair. But there was no reaction at all in the hands. Only the straw in his mouth. And a trace of perfume.
He foresaw his own end. The only thing that kept him going was his chewing. After roughly a week, he had barely gnawed through the hard surface of the rope. Yet this was the only way he could imagine his salvation. He survived because of it.
In another week he was supposed to return from the journey he would have been on if he hadn’t gone to his shop to sell a bouquet of roses. Right now he would have been deep inside an orchid jungle in Kenya, and his mind would have been filled with the most wondrous of fragrances. When he didn’t arrive home, Vanja Andersson would start to worry. Or perhaps she had already. That was one possibility he couldn’t ignore. The travel agency should be keeping track of its clients. He had paid for his ticket but never showed up at the airport. Surely someone must be missing him. Vanja and the travel agency were his only hope of being rescued. Sometimes he gnawed on the rope just to keep from losing his mind — what was left of it. He knew he was in hell. But he didn’t know why. The terror was in his teeth as they worked at the tough rope. The terror was his only possible way out. He kept on gnawing. Once in a while he would cry, overcome by cramps. But then he would go back to gnawing.
She had arranged the room as a place of sacrifice. No-one could guess her secret. She alone carried that knowledge. Once, the space had consisted of many small rooms with low ceilings and dark walls, illuminated only by the dim light that filtered through small basement windows set deep in the thick walls. She could still recall that summer. It was the last time she had seen her grandmother. By early autumn her grandmother was gone, but that summer she had sat in the shade of the apple trees, slowly turning into a shadow herself. She was almost 90 and had cancer. She’d sat motionless all summer long, inaccessible to the world; and her grandchildren had been told not to bother her, not to shout when they were near her, and to approach her only if she called them.
Once Grandmother had raised her hand and waved her over. She approached with trepidation. Old age was dangerous; it meant diseases and death, dark graves and fear. But her grandmother had looked at her with her kind smile, which the cancer could never corrode. Maybe she’d said something, she couldn’t remember what. But her grandmother had been alive and it was a happy summer. It must have been 1952 or 1953. An infinitely long time ago. The catastrophes were still far off.
It wasn’t until she took over the house herself in the late 1960s that she began the great remodelling. She hadn’t done the work alone, knocking down all the internal walls that could be spared without risking collapse. She had had help from some of her cousins, young men who wanted to show off their strength. But she had also wielded a sledgehammer herself, and the whole house shook as the mortar crumbled. Then from the dust this gigantic room had grown, and the only thing she had left was the big baking oven that towered like a strange boulder in the middle. Everyone who came to see her back then, after the building work, was amazed at how beautiful it had become. It was the same old house, and yet completely different. Light flooded in from the new windows. If she wanted it dark, she could close the massive oak shutters on the outside of the house. She had exposed the roof beams and ripped up the old floors. Someone told her it looked like a church nave.
After that she had begun to regard the room as her sanctuary. When she was there alone she was in the centre of the world. She could feel completely calm, far from the dangers that threatened her.
There had been times when she rarely visited her cathedral. The routine of her life always fluctuated. On occasion she had asked herself whether she shouldn’t get rid of the house. There were far too many memories that the sledge-hammers could never demolish. But she couldn’t leave the room with the huge, looming baking oven, the white boulder she had kept. It had become a part of her. Sometimes she saw it as the last bastion she had left to defend in her life.
Then the letter had arrived from Africa.
After that, everything changed.
She never again considered abandoning her house.
On Wednesday, 28 September, she arrived in Vollsjo just after 3 p.m. She had driven from Hassleholm, and before she drove to her house on the outskirts of town, she stopped and bought supplies. She knew what she needed. To be on the safe side, she had bought an extra package of straws. The shopkeeper nodded to her. She smiled back and they exchanged a few words about the weather, and about the terrible ferry accident. She paid and drove off.
Her closest neighbours weren’t there. They were German, lived in Hamburg, and only came up to Skane for the month of July. When they were there they greeted one another, but had no other contact.
She unlocked the front door, and stood quite still in the hall, listening. Then she went into the big room and stood motionless next to the baking oven. Everything was quiet. As quiet as she wanted the world to be.
The man lying down there inside the oven couldn’t hear her. She knew he was alive, but she had no wish to be bothered by the sound of his breathing. Or sobbing.
She thought of the impulse that had led her to this unexpected conclusion. It began when she had decided to keep the house. And it was there when she decided to leave the oven untouched. Only later, when the letter from Africa came and she realised what she had to do, had the oven revealed its true purpose.
She was interrupted by the alarm on her watch. In an hour her guests would arrive. Before then she would have to give the man in the oven his food. He had been there for five days. Soon he would be so weak that he wouldn’t be able to put up any resistance. She took her schedule from her handbag and saw that she had time off from next Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. That’s when it would be. She would take him out and tell him what had happened.
She had not yet decided how she was going to kill him. There were several possibilities, but she still had plenty of time. She would think about what he had done and then resolve how he was supposed to die.
She went into the kitchen and heated the soup. Because she was careful about hygiene, she washed the plastic cup and lid that she used when she fed him. She poured water into another cup. Each day she reduced the amount she gave him. He would get no more than was necessary to keep him alive. When she finished preparing the meal, she pulled on a pair of latex gloves, splashed a few drops of perfume behind her ears, and went to the oven. At its back was a hole, hidden behind some loose stones. It was like a tunnel, almost a metre long, that she could carefully pull out. Before she’d put him in there, she had installed a powerful loudspeaker and then filled in the hole. When she played music at full volume, no sound seeped out.
She leaned forwards so she could see him. When she put her hand on one of his legs he didn’t move. For a moment she was afraid that he was dead, but then she heard him gasping.
He’s weak, she thought. Soon the waiting will be over.
After she had given him his food, and let him use the hole, she pulled him back to his place again, and filled in the hole. When she had washed the dishes and tidied up the kitchen, she sat down at the table and had a cup of coffee. From her handbag she took out her personnel newsletter and leafed through it. According to the new salary table, she would be getting 174 kroner more each month, backdated from the first of July. She looked at the clock again. She seldom went ten minutes without checking it. It was part of her identity. Her life and her work were held together by precise timetables. And nothing bothered her more than not being able to meet schedules. Excuses were unacceptable. She always regarded it as a personal responsibility. She knew that many of her colleagues laughed at her behind her back. That hurt her, but she never said a word. The silence was a part of her too. But it hadn’t always been that way.