Until Thy Wrath Be Past Read online

  Three.

  Has it come loose? But we tied it so securely.

  I haul away at it more and more quickly. Suddenly I have the other end in my hand. I look at it. Stare at it.

  My God, I must get up there and refasten it. When Simon emerges from the plane, we won’t have time to swim around under the ice, looking for the hole.

  I let a little air into my drysuit so that I move slowly upwards. Up out of the darkness, through the gloom: it’s getting lighter. I’m holding the line in my hand.

  I’m looking for the hole, a source of light through the ice, but I can’t see it.

  Instead I see a shadow. A black rectangle.

  There’s something covering the hole. I swim over to it. The wooden cross is no longer there. Instead there’s a door lying over the hole. It’s green. Made of simple planks with a slat running diagonally across them. A door from a shed, or a barn.

  For a moment I think it’s been lying around and the wind has blown it across the hole. I barely have time to register the thought before I realize how wrong it is. It’s a sunny day up there, not a breath of wind. If there’s a door lying across the hole in the ice it’s because someone’s put it there. What kind of joker would do that?

  I try to push the door to one side, using both hands. I’ve dropped the line and the torch; they’ve both sunk slowly to the bottom of the lake. I can’t shift the door. My heavy breathing echoes like thunder in my ears as I tug at the door in vain. It dawns on me that the joker is standing on top of it. Someone is standing on the door.

  Swimming away from the door, I take out my diving knife. Start hacking a hole in the ice. It’s hard. The water makes it difficult to move my hand quickly enough. There’s no strength in my thrusts. Twisting the knife, I stab at the ice. At last I break through. It’s easier now. I rotate the knife round the hole, scraping away at the sides. It’s getting bigger.

  Simon swims through the wreck as carefully as he can. He has passed the radio operator’s seat behind the cockpit and continued into the cabin. He thinks he feels a slight tug on the line. He wonders if it is Wilma signalling to him. But he had said two tugs to come up. What if her airline is blocked? Worried now, he decides to swim out of the wreck. It is impossible to see anything in any case. The air and his own movements have stirred up so much mud that if he holds out his arm and shines his torch on it, he cannot even see his hand. It is like swimming through green soup. They might as well go back up.

  He pulls at the line tied to his weight belt so it will tighten and allow him to follow it out. But it does not tighten. He hauls in more and more of the line, metre after metre. Eventually he is holding the end of the line in his hand. Wilma is supposed to be holding on to it. And the end is supposed to be fastened to the wooden cross over the hole in the ice.

  Fear hits Simon’s solar plexus like a snakebite. No line to follow. How is he going to find his way back to the cockpit window? He can’t see a bloody thing. How is he going to get out?

  He swims until he bumps into a wall. Groping around, he then starts swimming in the opposite direction, no longer knowing which is backwards, forwards, sideways.

  He bumps into something that is not fastened down. Something that floats off to one side. He shines his torch. Sees nothing. Gets it into his head that it is a body. Flounders around. Swims away. Quickly, quickly. Soon he will be swimming through masses of limbs floating about. Arms and legs that have come away from bodies. He must try to calm down, but where is he? How long has he been down here? How much longer will his air last?

  He has no concept of up or down, but does not realize this. Fumbles for one of the seats – if he can grab onto one, he will be able to work his way forward through the passenger cabin, but he is groping around on the ceiling, so he does not find a seat.

  He swims back and forth in an aimless panic. Up and down. He cannot see a thing. Nothing at all. The line attached to his belt keeps catching, on cargo hooks on the floor, on a seat that has been wrenched from its moorings, on a loose safety belt. Everywhere. Then he begins swimming into the line. Gets tangled up in it. It is all over the inside of the plane like a spider’s web. He cannot find his way out. He dies in there.

  I’ve managed to hack a hole in the ice with my diving knife. I’m battling to make it bigger. Stabbing away. Working the knife round the edge. When it’s as big as my hand, I check the pressure metre. Twenty bars left.

  I mustn’t breathe so rapidly. I must calm down. But I can’t get out. I’m trapped under the ice.

  I stick my hand up through the hole. I do it without thinking. My hand reaches out for help of its own accord.

  Someone up there grips my hand firmly. At first I’m relieved to know that someone is helping me. That someone is going to pull me out of the water. Save me.

  Then whoever it is really does start pulling on my hand. Bending it backwards and forwards. And then it dawns on me that I’m a prisoner. I’m not going anywhere. I try to jerk my hand free, but only succeed in banging my face against the ice. A pink veil spreads across the light blue.

  Eventually I realize what’s happening: I’m bleeding.

  The person up there changes his grip. Clasps hold of me as if we were shaking hands.

  I press my knees against the ice. My trapped hand between my legs. And then I push away. I’m free. My hand slides out of my diving glove. Cold water. Cold hand. Ouch!

  I swim away under the ice. Away. Away from whoever it was.

  Now I’m beneath the green door again. I thump it hard. Hammer on it. Scratch at it.

  There must be another way up. A place where the ice is thinner. Where I can break through it. I swim off again.

  But he runs after me. Or is it a he? I can see the person through the ice. Blurred. From underneath. Above me the whole time. Between breaths, when the air I’m exhaling isn’t thundering in my ears, I can hear footsteps on the ice.

  I can only see whoever it is for brief moments. The air I’m breathing out has nowhere to go. It forms a big, flat bubble like a mirror beneath the ice. I can see myself in it. Distorted. Like in the hall of mirrors at a fairground. Changing all the time. When I breathe in, I can see the person on the ice above me; when I breathe out, I can see myself.

  Then the regulator freezes. Air comes spurting out of my mouthpiece. I stop swimming. I have to devote all my strength to trying to breathe. A few minutes later the cylinder is empty.

  Then it’s over. My lungs heave and heave. I fight to the bitter end. Mustn’t inhale water. I’m about to burst.

  My arms are flailing. Banging in vain against the ice. The last thing I do in this life is tear off my regulator and my mask. Then I die. There’s no air now between me and the ice. No reflection of me. My eyes are open in the water. Now I can see the person up there.

  A face pressing against the ice, looking at me. But what I see doesn’t register. My consciousness ebbs away like a retreating wave.

  THURSDAY, 16 APRIL

  At 3.15 in the morning Östen Marjavaara opened his eyes in his cottage in Pirttilahti. The light woke him. In the middle of April it was never dark at night for more than an hour or so. The fact that the blinds were closed did not make much difference. The light forced its way in between the slats, trickled in via the cord holes, poured through the gap between the blind and the window frame. Even if he had boarded up the windows, even if he had slept in a windowless room, he would still have woken up. The light was out there. Prodding and tugging at him. Gently but persistently, like a lonely woman. He might as well get up and make a pot of coffee.

  Climbing out of bed, he opened the blinds. The floor was freezing cold against his bare feet. The thermometer outside the window said minus 2. It had snowed during the night. The hard crust that had formed the previous week after some milder weather and a few days of sleet had become even firmer now – strong enough for him to ski along the bank of the River Torne towards Tervaskoski. There were bound to be grayling lurking behind stones in the rapids there.

&n
bsp; When the fire had taken hold in the kitchen stove, Marjavaara took the red plastic bucket standing in the hall and went down to the river to fetch some water. It was only a few metres to the riverbank, but he made his way carefully: there were plenty of potentially treacherous ice patches beneath the fresh snow and you could easily injure yourself.

  The sun was lying in wait just below the horizon, painting the cold, wintry sky with golden-red strokes. Soon it would peer over the spruce forest, setting the red wooden panels of the cottage aglow.

  The snow lay over the river like a whisper of nature. Hush, it said, be quiet. There is only you and me now.

  He did as he was told, stood still with the bucket in his hand, gazing out over the river. It was true. You never come closer to owning the whole world than when you wake up before everyone else. There were a few cottages dotted along both banks of the river, but his was the only chimney with smoke rising from it. Most likely the people were not even there. They were probably fast asleep in their town houses, poor fools.

  At the far end of the jetty was the water hole Marjavaara had cut in the ice. He had covered it with a polystyrene lid to prevent it from freezing over. Brushing the snow off the lid, he lifted it up. When Barbro was with him at the cottage, they always brought tap water from the town – she refused to drink water from the river.

  “Yuck!” she always said with a shudder, raising her shoulders almost to her ears. “All the shit from all the villages upstream!”

  She used to go on about the hospital at Vittangi, how it was a good job they lived upstream from there. How there were no sewage-treatment works or anything. No doubt someone’s appendix would be floating down the river, and God only knew what else.

  “Don’t talk such rubbish!” he would say, as he had done a hundred times before. “You’re talking nonsense, woman!”

  He had been drinking that water since he was a child, and his health was better than hers.

  He squatted down to dip the bucket into the water. There was a length of rope attached to the handle so that he could let it sink and fill before hauling it back up again.

  But he could not get the bucket to sink. There was something in the way, just beneath the surface. Something big. Black.

  Maybe a waterlogged tree trunk, he thought.

  You did not often find tree trunks in the water nowadays. It had been more common when he was a child, when logs were still floated down to the sawmills at the mouth of the river.

  Marjavaara dipped his hand in the freezing water in order to push the log out of the way. It seemed to have got wedged in the jetty. And it was not a log. It seemed to be made of rubber or something similar.

  “What the hell . . .” he said, sliding the bucket to one side.

  He took hold of it with both hands, tried to get a firm grip, but his hands would not function properly in the cold water. Then he managed to get hold of an arm. Pulled at it.

  An arm, he thought impassively.

  His mind was unwilling to understand.

  An arm.

  Then a battered face floated into view in the water hole.

  Marjavaara cried out and leapt to his feet.

  A raven answered from the forest. Its call sliced through the silence. Several crows joined in the chorus.

  Marjavaara ran back to the cottage, slipping but regaining his balance.

  He rang the emergency number. Then it occurred to him that he had drunk three glasses of water with his dinner yesterday. And coffee after the meal. He had fetched the water from the river. From the hole in the ice. And the dead body had been lying there. Right next to it, no doubt. That white, battered face. A gash where the nose had been. Teeth in a mouth with no lips.

  Someone answered the phone, but he cut them off and vomited on the spot. His body spat out everything in it, kept on spitting long after there was nothing left.

  Then he dialled the emergency number again.

  Never again would he drink water from the river. And it would be years before he would even go for a swim after his sauna.

  I’m looking at the man who found me. He’s throwing up. He rings the emergency number and vows never to drink water from the river again.

  I’m thinking about the day I died.

  We were dead, Simon and I. I was standing on the ice. It was evening. The sun was lower now. The door was smashed, floating in the hole in the ice. I could see that it was green on one side and black on the other.

  On the riverbank, a man was rummaging in our rucksacks.

  A raven flew past. It was calling in its characteristic way, sounding like a stick being hit against an empty oil drum. It landed on the ice, right next to me. Turned its head away and looked at me in the way birds do. From the side.

  I must go home to Anni, I thought.

  And even before I’d finished thinking, I was back at Anni’s house.

  The transition made me dizzy. Like when you step off a carousel.

  I’ve got used to it now.

  Anni was whisking pancake batter. Sitting on a chair by the kitchen table, whisking.

  I like pancakes.

  She didn’t know I was dead. She was whisking away, thinking about me. She was looking forward to seeing me sitting at the table and tucking into the pancakes while she stood at the stove, cooking them. She placed a plate over the bowl containing the pancake mixture and put in to one side. But I never came. The bowl of batter went into the fridge. She couldn’t let it go to waste, so in the end she cooked the pancakes and froze them. They’re still in the freezer.

  Now they’ve found me. Now she can cry.

  Snow, thought District Prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson, shivering with pleasure as she got out of her car at the house in Kurravaara.

  It was 7.00 in the evening. Snow clouds enveloped the village in a pleasant, dusky haze. Martinsson could barely make out the lights from the neighbouring houses. And the snow was not just falling. Oh no, it was hurtling down. Cold, dry, fluffy flakes cascaded from the sky, as if someone up there were sweeping them down, doing the housework.

  Farmor, my grandmother, of course, Martinsson thought with a trace of a smile. She must always be on the go, scrubbing the good Lord’s floor, dusting, hard at work. I expect she’s sent Him out to stand in the porch.

  Her farmor’s house, faced with grey cement-fibre panels, known in this part of the world by their trade name, Eternit, seemed to be hiding itself in the gloom. It appeared to have taken the opportunity to have a nap. Only the outside light above the green-painted steps whispered quietly: Welcome home, my girl.

  Her mobile pinged. She took it out of her pocket. A text from Måns Wenngren.

  “Pouring with bloody rain in Stockholm,” it said. “Bed empty and lonely. Come back. Want to lick your breasts & hug you. Kiss all your lovely places.”

  She felt a tingling sensation.

  “Bloody man,” she keyed in. “I have to work tonight. Not think about you.”

  She smiled. He was great. She missed him, enjoyed his company. A few years ago she had been working for him at Meijer & Ditzinger in Stockholm. He thought she should move back there and start working as a solicitor again.

  “You’d earn three times as much as you’re getting now,” he would say.

  She looked over towards the river. Last summer he had knelt with her on the jetty, giving all of her farmor’s rag rugs a good scrubbing. They had sweated in the sunshine. Salty rivulets had trickled down their backs and from their brows into their eyes. When they had finished scrubbing they had dipped the rugs into the water to rinse them. Then they had stripped off and swum naked with the rugs, like excited dogs.

  She tried to explain to him that this was how she wanted to live.

  “I want to stand out here re-puttying the windows, glancing out over the river from time to time. I want to drink coffee on my porch before going to work on summer mornings. I want to dig my car out of the snow in winter. I want frost patterns on my kitchen windows.”

  “But you can have al
l that,” he tried to persuade her. “We can come up to Kiruna as often as you want.”

  But it would not be the same. She knew that. The house would never allow itself to be deceived. Nor would the river.

  I need all this, she thought. I am so many difficult people. The little three-year-old, starved of love; the ice-cold lawyer; the lone wolf; and the person who longs to do crazy things again, who longs to escape into craziness. It is good to feel small beneath the sparkling Northern Lights, small beside the mighty river. Nature and the universe are so close to us up here. My troubles and difficulties just shrivel up. I like being insignificant.

  I like living up here with lining paper on the shelves and spiders in the corners, and a besom to sweep the floor with, she thought. I don’t want to be a guest and a stranger. Never again.

  A German pointer came galloping along at full speed through the snow. Her ears were flapping at right angles to her head, and her mouth was open wide as if she were smiling. She slid along on the ice beneath the snow as she tried to stop and say hello.

  “Hello, Bella!” Martinsson said, her arms full of dog. “Where’s the boss?”

  Now she could hear furious shouting.

  “Heel, I said! Heel! Are you deaf?”

  “She’s here,” Martinsson shouted back.

  Sivving Fjällborg gradually materialized through the falling snow. He was jogging along tentatively, afraid of falling. His weaker side was lagging slightly, his arm hanging down. His curly white hair was hidden under a green-and-white knitted hat. The hat was wearing its own little cap of snow. Martinsson did her best to suppress a smile. He looked magnificent. He was big anyway, but he was wearing a red padded jacket that made him look enormous. And everything was crowned by that little cap of snow.

  “Where?” he puffed.

  But Bella had vanished into the snow.

  “Huh, I expect she’ll turn up when she’s hungry,” he said with a smile. “What about you? I’m going to make some dumplings. There’ll be plenty for both of us.”