The diary was a war journal. As Wallander read it, he learned the names of the other two men in the photograph. But when he had read to the end, he still couldn’t tell which man was which. The photograph was of Harald Berggren flanked by an Irishman, Terry O’Banion, and a Frenchman, Simon Marchand. It was taken by a man named Raul. They had been mercenaries in a war in Africa for more than a year. Early on, Berggren described how in Stockholm he had heard about a cafe in Brussels where contacts could be made with the secret world of mercenaries. He’d first heard of it around New Year, 1958. He didn’t explain what drove him to go there a few years later. Berggren stepped into his own diary out of nowhere: no parents, no background. The only sure things were that he was 23 years old and desperate at Hitler’s defeat in the war that had ended 15 years earlier.
Wallander stopped at this point. That was Berggren’s exact word: desperate. Wallander read the passage again: the desperate defeat that Hitler was subjected to by his treacherous generals. The word desperate said something crucial about Berggren. Was he expressing a political conviction? Or were these the writings of a madman? Wallander found no clues to indicate whether either of these things were correct. Nor did Berggren mention Hitler again.
In June 1960 he had left Sweden by train and stayed a day in Copenhagen so he could go to Tivoli. There he danced in the warm summer night with a girl named Irene. He wrote that she was sweet but much too tall. The next day he was in Hamburg. The day after that — 12 June 1960 — he arrived in Brussels. After about a month he achieved his goaclass="underline" a contract as a mercenary. He noted proudly that now he was drawing a salary and would be going off to war. He wrote all this down much later, under the date 20 November 1960. By now he was in Africa. In this first entry in the diary, which was also the longest, he summarised the events that had led him to the place where he now found himself. Wallander dug out his old school atlas and looked up the place Berggren described, Omerutu. It wasn’t on the map, but he left it open on the kitchen table as he continued reading the diary.
Together with Terry O’Banion and Simon Marchand, Berggren joined a fighting company that consisted solely of mercenaries. Their leader, about whom Berggren was quite reticent, was a Canadian only referred to as Sam. Berggren didn’t seem to concern himself with what the war was over. Wallander was extremely hazy himself about the conflict in what was then the Belgian Congo. Berggren didn’t try to justify his presence as a hired soldier. He merely noted that they were fighting for freedom. Whose was never made clear. In more than one entry he wrote that he would not hesitate to use his gun if he found himself in a combat situation with Swedish UN soldiers.
Berggren also made a careful note of each time he received his pay. He did a simple accounting on the last day of each month: how much he was paid, how much he spent, and how much he saved. He also listed every item of booty that he took. In a particularly unpleasant passage, he described how the mercenaries arrived at an abandoned, burnt-out plantation, and found the rotting corpses of the Belgian plantation owner and his wife, swarming with flies. They lay in their beds with their arms and legs hacked off. The stench was unbelievable, but the mercenaries had still searched the house and found diamonds and gold jewellery, which a Lebanese jeweller later valued at more than 20,000 Swedish kronor.
Berggren wrote that the war was justified because the profits were good. In a more personal reflection not repeated elsewhere in the diary, he’d asked himself whether he could have achieved the same wealth if he had stayed in Sweden working as a car mechanic. His conclusion was that he couldn’t. Living that sort of life, he never would have advanced his prospects. With great zeal he continued to participate in his war.
Apart from his obsession with keeping accounts, Berggren was also meticulous in his other entries. He killed people. He wrote down the dates and the body count. He noted whether they were men or women or children, and if he’d managed to examine their bodies, he coolly recorded where the shots he’d fired had struck. Wallander read these passages with growing distaste and anger. Berggren had nothing to do with this war. He was paid to kill, by whom was unclear. The people he killed were seldom in uniform. The mercenaries raided villages that were thought to oppose the freedom they were fighting to preserve. They murdered and plundered and then withdrew. They were a death squad, all Europeans, and they didn’t regard the people they killed as equals. Berggren didn’t hide his contempt for the blacks. He wrote that they ran like bewildered goats when we approached. But bullets fly faster than people can jump or run.
Wallander almost threw the book across the room at those lines. But he forced himself to read on, after taking a break and washing his tired eyes. More than ever he regretted having missed his appointment with the optician.
Berggren killed roughly ten people a month, assuming he wasn’t exaggerating. After seven months of war he fell ill and was transported by plane to a hospital in Leopoldville. He had contracted amoebic dysentery and was sick for several weeks. The diary entries stopped during this period. By then he had killed more than 50 people in this war he was fighting instead of becoming a mechanic in Sweden.
When Berggren recovered, he returned to his company. A month later they were back in Omerutu. They posed in front of a big boulder, which was not a rock but a termite mound, and the unknown Raul took a picture of Berggren, O’Banion and Marchand. Wallander went over to the kitchen window with the photograph. He had never seen a termite mound before, but he could tell that the diary described that very picture.
Three weeks later they got caught in an ambush and O’Banion was killed. They were forced to retreat, and it turned into a panicked rout. Wallander tried to sense the fear in Berggren. He was convinced it was there, but Berggren concealed it. He wrote only that they had buried their dead in the bush and marked their graves with wooden crosses. The war went on. On one occasion they used a group of apes for target practice. Another time they gathered crocodile eggs on the bank of a river. Berggren’s savings were now close to 30,000 kronor.
But then, in the summer of 1961, everything was over. The diary ended suddenly. Wallander thought it must have been as abrupt for Harald Berggren. He must have imagined that this peculiar jungle war would go on forever. In his last entries he described how they fled the country at night, in a cargo plane with no lights. One of its engines started shuddering as they lifted off from the runway they had made by clearing the jungle. The diary ended there, as though Berggren had grown tired of it, or else no longer had anything to say. Wallander didn’t even discover where the plane was headed. Berggren was flying through the African night, the engine noise died away, and he no longer existed.
Wallander stretched and went out onto the balcony. It was now 5 p.m. A cloud front was on its way in from the sea. Why was the diary kept in Eriksson’s safe along with a shrunken head? If Berggren was still alive, he would be at least 50. Wallander felt cold standing out on the balcony. He went inside and sat down on the sofa. His eyes hurt. Who was Berggren writing the diary for? Himself or someone else?
A young man keeps a diary of a war in Africa. Often what he describes is rich in detail, but it is also constrained in some way. Something was missing, something that Wallander couldn’t read even between the lines.
Not until Hoglund rang the bell did it dawn on him what it was. He saw her in the door and suddenly he knew. The diary described a world dominated by men. The women Berggren wrote about were either dead or fleeing in panic. Except for Irene, who’d been sweet but too tall. Otherwise he didn’t mention women. He wrote about furloughs in various cities in the Congo, about how he got drunk and got into fights. But there were no women. Wallander couldn’t help thinking that this was significant. Berggren was a young man when he went off to Africa. The war was an adventure. In a young man’s world, women are an important part of the adventure. He was starting to wonder. But for the time being he kept his thoughts to himself.