The Second Deadly Sin Page 12

  On her second day in Kiruna, Elina Pettersson puts on her best blouse and tries to convince herself that it is because this is her first day at her new school. She is going to meet her pupils, and the two other teachers.

  But she thinks about herr Lundbohm as she pinches her cheeks to give them a rosy glow, and bites her lips to make them really red.

  There is no sign of him, not at school during the day nor at home in the evening when she thought he might turn up to inspect the rest of her books wrapped up in brown paper.

  Not the following day either. Nor the day after that.

  Almost two weeks pass.

  Elina cannot stop thinking about him. She tells herself to stop being so silly, but it does not help.

  *

  She thinks about him when she reads aloud for the children from Huckleberry Finn, making them laugh out loud, and when they sit there open-mouthed, enchanted by the account of Engineer Andrée’s hot-air balloon expedition and its mysterious disappearance. This would be a good time for him to march into the classroom and say, “No, no, don’t let me disturb you,” tell her to continue reading about Andrée and sit there with the children for a while.

  She thinks about him when the sun shines over the snow and she is being followed by a gang of handsome young workmen who are keen to invite her to a cup of coffee and offer to carry her books. If only he were to come walking towards her and see that she was never in danger of sitting around all by herself – if that’s what he thought!

  She thinks about him when she and Lizzie switch off the electric lights in the evening, and she feels a pang of pain in the region of her heart. She and Lizzie have so much fun together, but it is a strain to have to share a bed with her. Elina lies there awake, throbbing with emotion and longing as she feels Lizzie’s warm breath on her skin as a sort of reminder, a knocking on the door of her desire. For him.

  She tries to concentrate on her work. The pupils are pretty awful up here as well.

  Ellen, Ellen: Elina prays to her Ellen Key. When will all these young children see an improvement in their living conditions?

  But at least in Kiruna they have shoes to wear so that they can walk to school; the poor relief authorities see to that. Needless to say the classroom smells of dirt and wet wool and soaked reindeer-skin shoes, but at least it doesn’t smell of the cowshed. And the windows can be opened. When the sun is shining, it’s possible to have fresh air in the classroom.

  She and Lizzie attract four lodgers. And they start baking bread in the mornings to sell to the miners. Lizzie never seems to feel tired. She is the one who wakes Elina up in the mornings with a wooden mug of coffee, by which time she has already made the dough.

  “It’s not even five o’clock yet, and we’re already ten kronor richer,” she says, and they sit for a while on the edge of the bed, dunking yesterday’s bread in the hot coffee.

  Elina makes an effort not to seem all that interested in what Lizzie has been doing at work. Nevertheless, she is informed about what Lundbohm has had for dinner every day – and thank goodness, it seems that his guests are usually men.

  Didn’t he feel anything? she wonders. When their hands touched.

  Was she the only one who felt a warm, throbbing stream flowing through her veins?

  Love is like a noose. At first it hangs slack around her neck. But then, the further away he goes, the tighter it becomes.

  If only he had fallen for her like a ton of bricks. If only he had courted her assiduously. Then she might not have felt the need to think about him every minute of every day.

  Men! she thought angrily. There are thirteen of them to the dozen.

  Then, almost a fortnight after their evening with the books, he suddenly appears in the doorway of her classroom. The pupils have all gone home, and she is genuinely surprised to see him.

  “Good Lord, it’s the managing director!” she exclaims, and a hint of a smile appears on her lips.

  A smile that is exactly right for a senior teacher, a chairman of the school governors, a headmaster or a managing director of a mine.

  But then she falls silent because her heart is bouncing around inside her chest, despite her strict orders for it to be still. He is carrying an oblong-shaped parcel wrapped in brown paper under his arm.

  “I’ve got a present for you,” he says, and hands over the parcel.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  Then she abandons her feigned indifference, sets her heart free and allows it to scamper around wherever it likes. She looks him shamelessly in the eye.

  “Would it be safe to open it here and now?”

  “I would advise strongly against it,” he says, and smiles at her like a little boy. “But perhaps you might like to consider drinking a glass of port wine at the house, and opening it in peace and quiet?”

  She says amen to that, and they walk side by side to the mine’s administrative area. Every time they happen to touch one another, she starts trembling. It’s almost unbearable.

  *

  The managing director’s residence is a simple blockhouse with a fairly recent extension.

  “It was a bit on the modest side to start with,” he says, “but that’s the way I wanted it. It should blend in with the countryside around here. And with the workers’ houses.”

  Yes, that is something she knows about him already. His modesty. She has heard it being discussed in Kiruna. How Lundbohm goes around wearing a red working-man’s shirt, and is mistaken for a nobody when high-ranking gentlemen come to visit the town. And how he mixes with the Lapps, and sits in coffee bars chatting to people. And she has heard that he has a big heart. But she also knows that the residence is reminiscent of Anders Zorn’s country house and Carl Larsson’s Sundborn, since both those artists were consulted and gave advice to the builders.

  So much for modesty, then, she thinks.

  He is in fact a snob, although he tries hard to give the impression that he does not care about outward appearances. But that is just how she wants him to be. This character weakness simply makes him more human, and fills her with tenderness. Who can love perfection? No, love requires solicitude, and solicitude requires the loved one to have faults, requires wounds, frailty. Love wants to heal. Perfection has no need of healing. Perfection cannot be loved, merely worshipped.

  He invites her into his study. An open fire is crackling away in the hearth, and there is a tray with cold cuts – smoked reindeer meat and ptarmigan breast. Goodies that Lizzie or one of the maids will have prepared and carried in.

  They eat, and he asks her about how she is settling in, and her first impressions of the remote far north.

  Then it is time to open the parcel. She fiddles with the ribbons, unwraps the brown paper, and finds herself holding Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung.

  She has heard about that. About the interpretation of dreams. Our dreams are not in fact messages from our forefathers or from the gods, but they reveal our forbidden desires.

  Freud has many disciples, she knows that. But no doubt most people still dismiss him as a dirty-minded Jew.

  The forbidden desires are to do with sex. She doesn’t dare open the book with him standing by her side.

  “Thank you,” she says. “How did you know that I can read German?”

  “You had Goethe in your trunk.”

  Ah, yes: of course she did. She feels so warm. Perhaps it’s the open fire, she thinks. And the wine.

  She starts laughing. Says thank you again. And on the spur of the moment she kisses the book’s front cover.

  “There you are, you see. A forbidden desire,” he mutters, and looks at her from behind his half-closed, dreamy eyelids.

  Then she puts the book down on his desk.

  I must make the move, she thinks.

  I’m too young, too pretty. He would never dare.

  She puts her arms around his neck, kisses him, presses herself up against him.

  For a whole second he does nothing, and she just has time to think: oh m
y God, I’ve got it wrong, he doesn’t want me at all.

  Then he puts his arms around her body. His tongue finds its way into her mouth. They are breathing hard, sweating already.

  And she feels so happy. She has to hold him off for a moment so that she can laugh. And as she laughs she feels she could just as well cry. Because he does in fact want her. Because they both want the same thing. And everything is so lovely and so right.

  They undress each other – or at least, open up. So that what is going to happen can happen. They unfasten buttons and belts. Up with skirts and down with trousers.

  His fingers are exploring her already. She is sitting on the edge of his desk, and thinking in some far distant part of her brain that she mustn’t get ink stains on her skirt as she couldn’t afford to deal with that.

  But then she stops thinking, and he penetrates her. He has more staying power than she had thought.

  He looks her in the eye all the time, never looks away, his feelings are genuine. This really is love.

  And he is skilful. So much so that afterwards, when he leans his forehead gratefully on her shoulder, she has to try not to think about where he has learnt such skills, who has taught him.

  “So you’re not going to work tomorrow, then?”

  Sivving spread out a newspaper – an old issue of Norrländska Socialdemokraten – on the table and handed over a tin of boot-leather wax and a nylon stocking to Martinsson. When she came with the food provisions he had ordered, he had instructed her to go back home immediately and fetch her winter boots.

  “If you didn’t wax them last spring, you really must do so without delay,” he had said when she protested. “It’ll start snowing any day now. Maybe tomorrow! There’s no time to lose!”

  And so she had trudged back home and fetched her winter shoes and Prada boots. She would have preferred to lounge in front of the television in splendid isolation … But instead, they were sitting on either side of the Perstorp-laminated table in Sivving’s boiler room, waxing boots.

  “No,” she said, buffing up the leather with the nylon stocking, “they’ll have to get by without me. Björnfot or von Post will have to take over my cases.”

  Bella was lying on her back on the sofa beside her, fast asleep with her back legs outstretched and her ears inside out.

  The Brat had been allowed to borrow Bella’s elk horn, and was lying at Martinsson’s feet, chewing away at it. A crackling, scraping sound. It was hard. But tasty. Occasionally he paused, his head leaning on the bowl-shaped horn, as if it were a pillow.

  “Good,” Sivving said, heaving himself to his feet in order to fetch some glue he thought would be just the thing to stick down a sole that had come loose from the shoe he had just been waxing. The front of the shoe looked like an open mouth.

  “In that case you can help me to carry in firewood.”

  She nodded. Last spring they had piled up some newly chopped wood in a neat circular heap with the bark pointing upwards, so that it would dry out in the sun. There must be at least three cubic metres to carry into the woodshed, but that was O.K.: she was looking forward to the effort involved. Then going to bed with aching muscles and a tired back.

  “Have you eaten?” he said.

  “I had a meal at Krister’s.”

  Sivving looked extremely pleased, though he did his best to disguise the fact.

  “Maybe he can help us with the wood as well,” he said offhandedly.

  No doubt he would love to, Martinsson thought.

  Eriksson and Sivving liked to pretend that all three of them were part of the same family. Sivving needed help with various things. Eriksson often called on him to replace a broken kitchen tap, or to shovel snow, or to fix his computer. Then they would invite Martinsson round for a meal. Or ask her to look after the dogs while they drove into Kiruna to buy some valves or some superglue, or God only knows what. As if Sivving was her aged dad.

  She did not worry about it. They were welcome to get on with it, if it kept them happy. Måns didn’t like it at all, of course. If Krister and Sivving were around when Måns rang, she would move to another room. Sometimes she would say: Sivving and I are doing this or that – without mentioning Eriksson. But Måns was suspicious and would ask: “What about that policeman from outer space – is he there as well?”

  She didn’t know why it had to be like that – she had nothing to hide.

  Well, not all that much, in any case. She sometimes thought about his hands. And the fact that he was in such good physical shape. She sometimes thought about how he made her happy.

  It occurred to her that she had left her mobile in the car. Maybe Måns had tried to ring her. She ought to go and fetch it. But decided not to. She never used to leave it lying around. Always had it with her, even when she was in the bathroom. She was always expecting him to phone her.

  “How’s Marcus?” Sivving wondered.

  “I don’t know. He was pretending to be a dog all the time he was with Krister. He seems to be somehow oblivious.”

  “Poika riepu,” Sivving said with a sigh. “Poor boy. Both his dad and his grandma dead. He has nobody left. They really are an accident-prone family.”

  “They certainly are,” Martinsson said, feeling something stirring deep down inside her.

  Like a grass snake swimming in still waters.

  “And then there’s Sol-Britt’s dad,” she said. “He was devoured by a bear.”

  “By Jove yes, those hunters must have had a shock when they found the remains of Frans Uusitalo in the bear’s stomach. Did you hear, the bear was so big they had to call in Patrik Mäkitalo from Luleå. And that dog of his.”

  I hate coincidence, Martinsson thought.

  While she was an articled law clerk in Stockholm, she had met a police officer who used to say that as a sort of mantra. He was dead now. But the mantra had stuck with her. I hate coincidence.

  If the whole family is wiped out …

  But then, the old man was devoured by a bear, she thought. Not murdered.

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. There had been too many deaths in that family.

  Sivving contemplated his shiny winter boots with the feeling of satisfaction that only genuine shoe care can endow.

  “My mum used to say that Hjalmar Lundbohm was Frans Uusitalo’s father,” he said.

  Martinsson sat up and paid attention.

  “What? The managing director of the mine? With that teacher who was also murdered?”

  “Yes,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I recall my mum saying that a lot of people thought he ought to have settled down when he’d fallen in love. But nothing came of it.”

  “Because she was murdered.”

  “Yes. Or maybe they split up before that. I don’t know. Nobody said anything about it afterwards. I know my mum sort of bit her tongue after she’d told me about it. Sol-Britt knew, but she never spoke about it either. She told me once when she was – well, let’s say, not completely sober, and on a war footing with men in general and with one of hers in particular. But you had to turn a blind eye to it. Pretend that you weren’t even born when it happened.”

  Martinsson could see Hjalmar Lundbohm before her very eyes. A portrait of the man who built up Kiruna and was managing director of the mining company from 1900 to 1920: he always seemed to be overweight with heavy, drooping eyelids. Not a good-looking man.

  “I gather he never married?” she asked.

  “That wasn’t because he had anything against women – according to what I’ve heard, in any case.”

  Sivving looked hard at her.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Shall we have a little nightcap? And then it’s time for you to go to bed. You have to be up early tomorrow in order to carry wood for me. Don’t forget that.”

  Martinsson promised.

  Winter is beating a retreat. Hjalmar Lundbohm and the schoolteacher Elina Pettersson fall madly in love.

  The late winter snow is sighing and dripping tears. Icicles as lon
g as church steeples. The streets are covered in mud and slush. Trees are trembling as they long for spring. The snow is still a metre or more deep in the forest, but the sun is warming everything up. Nobody needs to feel cold for a while, at least: spring is on its way, God bless it!

  They make love with wild abandon. Tell each other that they have never felt like this before. Think that nobody could ever have felt like this. Believe that they were made for each other. Compare their hands and find that they are almost identical.

  “Like brother and sister,” they say, placing the palms of their hands together, and feeling that they want to remain in Lundbohm’s bedroom for evermore.

  “I’ll lock the door and swallow the key,” he says when she gets up in the early morning so she can slink away without being seen.

  But like everybody who is madly in love, they are careless.

  Lundbohm sends a messenger boy to the school. He knocks on the classroom door and hands over an envelope.

  Elina can’t wait to open it, and reads it to herself in front of the class as her cheeks become bright red.

  “Dear Schoolma’am,” it reads, “on the advice of my doctor I have stuffed my underpants full of snow. It doesn’t help.”

  She writes a reply while the boy waits.

  “Herr Lundbohm,” she writes, “I’m standing in front of a class of children. This must stop.”

  If anybody else reads this, they’ll think we’re short of chairs, she thinks.

  In May the nights start to become light. They lie awake, talking. Making love and talking. Making love again. She can talk to him about anything at all. He is interested in everything. He is curious and educated.

  “Tell me something,” she sometimes says. “Anything at all.”

  Outside in the light of the night male ptarmigans are running around over the snow, laughing away in ghostly fashion. Pygmy owls and hawk owls are hooting. Arctic foxes sob like babies as they listen for field mice beneath the covering of frozen snow.

  They sometimes tiptoe down into the kitchen. Eat leftovers of ptarmigan breast, artic char, reindeer fillet with cold sauce and jelly, jam, white bread. They drink full-cream cow’s milk or beer. Making love makes you hungry.