I remember my voice when I was a child. It was strong, but not shrill. The muteness had come later. After I saw all the blood, and my mother when she almost died. I didn’t scream that time. I hid in my own silence. There I could make myself invisible.
That’s when it happened. When my mother lay on a table and, sobbing and bleeding, robbed me of the sister I had always waited for.
She looked at the clock. They would be here soon. It was Wednesday, time for their meeting. If she had her preference, it would always be on Wednesdays, that would create regularity. But her work schedule didn’t permit it, and she had no control over that schedule.
She set out five chairs. She didn’t want any more people than that to visit her at once. The intimacy might be lost. It was hard enough as it was to create sufficient trust that these silent women would dare to speak. She went into the bedroom and took off her uniform. For each article of clothing she removed, she muttered a prayer. And she remembered.
It was my mother who told me about Antonio. The man she had met in her youth, long before the Second World War, on a train between Cologne and Munich. They couldn’t find seats, so they ended up squeezed close together in the smoky corridor. The lights from the boats on the Rhine had glimmered outside the dirty windows, and Antonio told her that he was going to be a Catholic priest. He said that the mass started as soon as the priest changed his clothes. As a prelude to the holy ritual, the priests had to undergo a cleansing procedure. For each garment they took off or put on they had a prayer. Each garment brought them a step closer to their sacred task.
She had never forgotten her mother’s recollection of the meeting with Antonio in the train. And since she had realised that she was a priestess, dedicated to the sacred task of proclaiming that justice was holy, she too had begun to view her change of clothes as something more than simply exchanging one set of garments for another. But the prayers she offered up were not part of a conversation with God. In a chaotic and absurd world, God was the ultimate absurdity. The mark of the world was an absent God. She directed her prayers to the child she had been, before everything fell apart. Before her mother robbed her of what she wanted most of all. Before the sinister men had towered up before her with eyes like writhing, menacing snakes.
She changed her clothes and prayed herself back to her childhood. She laid her uniform on the bed. Then she dressed in soft fabrics with gentle colours. Something happened inside her. It was as if her skin altered, as if it too was shifting back to its infant state. Last, she put on a wig and glasses. The final prayer faded inside her. Ride, ride a cock-horse. .
She looked at her face in the big mirror. It wasn’t Sleeping Beauty that awoke from her nightmare. It was Cinderella.
She heard the first car pull into the courtyard. She was ready, she was somebody else. She folded her uniform, smoothed out the bedspread, and left the room. Athough no-one would go in there, she locked the door and then tested the handle.
They gathered just before 6 p.m., but one of the women was missing. She had been taken to the hospital the night before with contractions. It was two weeks early, but the baby might already have been born.
She decided at once to visit her at the hospital the next day. She wanted to see her. She wanted to see her face after all she had gone through. Then she listened to their stories. Now and then she pretended to write something in her notebook, but she wrote only numbers. She was making timetables. Figures, times, distances. It was an obsessive game, a game that had increasingly become an incantation. She didn’t need to write anything down to remember it. All the words spoken in those frightened voices, all the pain that they dared express, remained etched in her consciousness. She could see the way something loosened in each of them, if only for a moment. But what was life except a series of moments?
The timetable again. Times that coincide, one taking over from the other. Life is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth between pain and relief, endless, ceaseless.
She was sitting so that she could see the big oven behind the women. The light was turned down and muted. The room was bathed in a gentle light, which she imagined as being feminine. The oven was a boulder, immovable, mute, in the middle of an empty sea.
They talked for a couple of hours, and then drank tea in her kitchen. They all knew when they would meet next. No-one questioned the times she gave them.
It was 8.30 p.m. when she showed them out. She shook their hands, accepted their gratitude. When the last car was gone she went back inside the house, changed her clothes and took off the wig and glasses. She took her uniform and left the room. She washed the teacups, then turned out all the lights and picked up her handbag.
For a moment she stood still in the dark beside the oven. Everything was very quiet.
Then she left the house. It was drizzling. She got into her car and drove towards Ystad. She was in her bed asleep before midnight.
CHAPTER 5
When Wallander woke on Thursday morning he felt better. He got up just after 6 a.m. and checked the thermometer outside the kitchen window. It was 5 °C. Heavy clouds covered the sky, and the streets were wet, but the rain had stopped.
He arrived at the police station just after 7 a.m. As he walked down the hall to his office he wondered whether they had found Holger Eriksson. He hung up his jacket and sat down. There were a few telephone messages on his desk. Ebba reminded him that he had an appointment at the optician later in the day. He needed reading glasses. If he sat for too long leaning over his paperwork, he got a headache. He was going to be 47 soon. His age was catching up with him.
One message was from Per Akeson. Wallander phoned him at the prosecutor’s office, but was told that Akeson would be in Malmo all day. He went to get a cup of coffee, then he leaned back in his chair and tried to devise a new strategy for the car-smuggling investigation. In almost all organised crime there was some weak point, a link that could be broken if leaned on hard enough.
His thoughts were interrupted by the telephone. It was Lisa Holgersson, their new chief, welcoming him home.
“How was the holiday?” she asked.
“Very successful.”
“You rediscover your parents by doing these things,” she said.
“And they might acquire a different view of their children,” Wallander said.
She excused herself abruptly. Wallander heard someone come into her office and say something. Bjork would never have asked him about his holiday. She came back on the line.
“I’ve been in Stockholm for a few days,” she said. “It wasn’t much fun.”
“What are they up to now?”
“I’m thinking about the Estonia. All of our colleagues who died.”
Wallander sat in silence. He should have thought about that himself.
“I think you can imagine the mood,” she went on. “How could we just sit there, discussing organisational problems between the national police and the districts all over the country?”
“We’re probably just as helpless in the face of death as everyone else,” Wallander said. “Even though we shouldn’t be, since we’ve seen so much of it. We think we’re used to it, but we aren’t.”