“‘Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.’ Are you fond of the Psalms?”
“Not really, but I read them sometimes. The Bible’s the only book I have out here.”
Martinsson picks it up and thumbs through it. It is small and black, its delicate pages gilded along the edges. The print is so small that it is almost illegible.
“I know,” he says, as if he has read her thoughts. “I use a magnifying glass.”
The Bible feels pleasant and used in her hand. She admires the quality of the paper. Printed in 1928, and it has not even begun to turn yellow. She sniffs it. It smells good. Church, Farmor, another age.
“Do you read it?” he says.
“Sometimes,” she says. “I have nothing against the Bible. It’s the church that…”
“What do you read?”
“Oh, it depends. I like the Prophets. They are so sharp. I like the language they use. And they are so human. Jonah, for instance. He’s such a whinger. And unreliable. God says, ‘Go to Nineveh and preach the word.’ And Jonah prances off in the opposite direction. And in the end, when he’s been in the whale’s belly for three days, he prophesies the destruction of Nineveh. But then, when the people of Nineveh do penance, God changes his mind and decides not to destroy them after all. Huh, then Jonah is miserable as sin because he’d prophesied death and destruction, and thinks he has lost face when his prophesy turns out to be wrong.”
“The belly of a whale.”
“Yes, it’s interesting that he has to die before he can change. And even then he’s not a good, enlightened man, not a man changed for the rest of time, you could say. It’s just a journey he’s barely set out on. What do you read?”
She opens the Bible to the place marked by the lilac-coloured ribbon.
“Job,” she says, and checks the underlined extract. “‘O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past’.”
“Yes.”
Hjalmar nods like a Laestadian in a church pew.
A troubled man reading about a troubled man, Martinsson thinks.
“God seems to be just like my father – as angry as they bloody well come,” Hjalmar says, tickling Vera’s stomach.
He smiles to indicate that he is joking. Martinsson does not smile back.
Vera sighs with contentment. Tintin responds with a sigh from in front of the fire. This is how a dog’s life ought to be.
Martinsson continues reading to herself. “And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is moved out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man.”
She looks around the room. Hanging somewhat haphazardly on the walls, framed in yellowed pine boards, are all kinds of decorations. An unsigned oil painting of a windmill in an inlet at sunset; a Lappish knife and a badly carved wooden spoon; a faded stuffed squirrel on a tree branch; a clock made out of a copper frying pan, with the hands attached to the bottom. A vase on a window ledge contains a bunch of artificial flowers. And there are a few photographs pinned up as well.
“Let me show you my secret,” Hjalmar says without warning, and stands up. Vera jumps reluctantly onto the floor.
Pulling the rag mat to one side, Hjalmar removes a rectangular piece of linoleum. There is a loose floorboard underneath: lifting it up, he produces a packet. Three maths books are wrapped in a piece of red-and-white-striped oilcloth. There is also a plastic folder. Opening the packet, he places everything on the countertop in front of Martinsson.
She reads the titles out loud: Multi-dimensional Analysis, Discrete Mathematics, Mathematics Handbook.
“The same books as they read at the university,” Hjalmar says, not without pride.
Then he adds angrily, “I’m not an idiot, if that’s what you thought. Look in the folder; the proof’s all there.”
“I didn’t think anything in particular. Why have you hidden all this away under the floorboards?”
She leafs through the books.
“My father and my brother,” he says, with sorrow in his voice. “And Mother as well, come to that. There’d just be a bust-up.”
Martinsson opens the folder. It contains an Advanced Level Certificate of Education, from Hermod’s Correspondence College.
“I spent all my free time sitting here. At this very table. I struggled and studied. With the other subjects – I’ve always found maths very easy. I don’t have a problem with maths. The mark I got would have been good enough to get me into university, but…”
He remembers the summer of 1972. He was twenty-five years old. He spent the entire summer thinking seriously about telling his father and brother that he was going to stop working for the haulage business. He would apply for a study grant, go to university. He lay awake at night, rehearsing what he was going to say. Sometimes he would tell them that it was just a temporary thing, that he would return to the firm once he had got his degree. But sometimes he would tell them they could go to hell, that he would rather sleep rough than go back into the family firm. But in the end he said nothing at all.
“Ah well, it just didn’t come off,” he says to Martinsson.
She looks at him again. He is in pain. Something is breaking inside him. He has to sit down. The chair by the kitchen table is nearest.
The dogs are there like a shot. Both of them. They lick his hands.
“Bloody hell,” he says. “My life. Bloody hell. I’ve grown fat and I’ve worked. That has been my only…”
He nods in the direction of the maths books.
He presses his hand over his mouth, but he cannot prevent it – he starts sobbing loudly.
“Have you brought a tape recorder?” he says. “Is that why you’re here?”
“No,” she says.
And she looks, looks, looks. A witness to his sorrow. As it comes cascading out of him. She does not touch him. Vera places a paw on his knee. Tintin lies down at his feet.
Then she looks away. Hjalmar stands up and puts the books back under the floorboard. Martinsson notices a black-and-white photograph of a man and woman sitting outside a front door, at the top of some steps. Two boys are sitting on the bottom step. It must be Hjalmar and Tore Krekula and their parents. Isak and – what’s their mother’s name? Kerttu. There is something familiar about her, Martinsson thinks. She tries to remember if she had seen the same photograph when she had visited Anni Autio. Or when she was at Johannes Svarvare’s. No.
Then she remembers. It was in the album in Karl-Åke Pantzare’s room. She is the girl who was standing between Pantzare and his friend Viebke. Yes, it must be her.
Kerttu, she thinks.
And then it strikes her that Hjalmar and Tore Krekula are white-haired in the way that red-headed people become. Now she thinks about it, it is clear that they must have been red-haired, and they have very light-coloured skin.
The fox, Martinsson thinks. Didn’t Pantzare say that the British called the Germans’ informer the Fox? The Finnish for “fox” is kettu. Kettu. Kerttu.
I hover above Anni’s head as she makes her way to her sister’s with the aid of her kick-sledge. There’s a delay of at least five minutes before Kerttu opens the door. About two centimetres.
“What do you want?” she says in annoyance when she sees it’s Anni standing there.
“Was it you?” Anni says.
“What do you mean?”
“Come off it,” Anni says, her voice trembling with rage. “Hjalmar came to see me. He was on his way to his cottage. He told me that he… You put them up to it, didn’t you?”