They were on the road again.
This is what I like best of all, she thought. Being on the road.
Just think if we could live our lives like this. Always on the road.
He was in a good mood too, she could tell. There was something about his posture, the rhythm his fingers drummed on the steering wheel, and the way he was keeping watch on her from the corner of his eye. He had been terribly worried after what happened to her yesterday in the hotel room. She could remember nothing about it at all, and she tried to convince him it was just a dream. She had dreamt something and fallen out of bed, what was so strange about that?
But it wasn’t a dream, she knew that. She slept for the rest of the day, more or less. She did not venture out of the room, and her arm was as numb as ever. Her headache came and went, but he went out to get her some new painkillers. She had taken three of them this morning before they set off and they were helping a bit. They seemed to work better than the old Swedish Treo, which she must have taken by the hundred.
There was something about her thoughts, too, though that had been the case all along, ever since they set off. They fluttered like butterflies, coming and going, their content changing faster than a pig can blink. Where did that expression come from? Faster than a pig can blink? Something she had read long ago, wasn’t it? She decided to ask him, in case he knew.
‘Faster than a pig can blink, where does that come from, Valdemar? I like that expression, don’t you?’
‘Yes I do,’ he said, scratching his chin and pondering. ‘I think it’s Astrid Lindgren, you know. Emil in Lönneberga or something like that.’
‘Can you tell me a story, Valdemar?’ she asked. ‘We can pretend you’re Astrid Lindgren and I’m a child who’s keen to hear something exciting.’
‘Astrid Lindgren?’ he said, and laughed. ‘I can’t measure up to her. You’re asking too much there. But maybe I could tell you some other kind of story.’
‘Oh please do, Valdemar.’
‘What would you like it to be about?’
‘You decide, Valdemar.’
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a few moments. ‘I could tell you about Signe Hitler. What do you reckon?’
‘Signe Hitler?’
‘Yes. Would you like to hear that?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Although it’s a bit gruesome.’
‘That doesn’t matter, Valdemar.’
‘Or perhaps not gruesome. Cruel would be a better word.’
‘I see. Well, you start telling it and maybe I can decide if it’s gruesome or cruel.’
He cleared his throat and launched into it. ‘I don’t think I’ve told anyone about this before. And there are reasons for that, as you’ll find out. Signe Hitler was a teacher of mine at elementary school. Her real name was Hiller, but we called her Hitler because she was so utterly horrible to us.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really,’ said Valdemar. ‘It’s not often you come across people who are out-and-out malicious, or not in my experience, anyway. But Signe Hitler was one of those, I think I can fairly say. A devil, she was. And above all she hated children and everything they like doing – running, laughing, squabbling, playing rounders – though when I think back on it, I reckon she loathed adults just as much.’
‘She doesn’t sound much fun,’ said Anna.
‘No, she wasn’t. She was single, of course, a real old maid, though she can’t have been more than forty-five when we got her as our form teacher. And my God we were scared of her. From first thing in the morning, when we were singing our hymn, she would fix her yellow look on us, her gimlet eyes would scan each and every one of us, and we would know we were goners. We didn’t stand a chance. If you looked away, it meant you felt guilty about something, but if you held her gaze it meant you were obstinate. There was this boy Bengt, and initial eye contact with her used to make him wet himself, so then we had the smell of urine in the classroom all day, but for some reason it didn’t bother her. Maybe she wanted us all to be so scared of her that we wet ourselves, too.’
‘Obstinate?’ Anna put in. ‘Did that mean, like, cheeky, or what?’
‘I think so,’ said Valdemar. ‘Anyway, it was a complete reign of terror she imposed on the class. She never hit us, but she would poke her sharp nails into the back of your neck and twist them until you cried, or into the very top of your ear – it’s extra sensitive there, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed. And she never had a kind word for any of us. If you got full marks for an arithmetic test or your spelling there was never any praise. She kept you back after school just for getting hiccups or giving the wrong answer to a question, and she once sent a girl home and banned her from school for three days because her neck wasn’t clean.’
‘But you can’t just . . .’ protested Anna.
‘Not these days, no,’ said Valdemar. ‘But back then, in the 1950s, or it could have been the early 60s, it was acceptable. Parents never interfered in what happened at school, as long as everything was kept in good order. And there was never any goddamn shortage of good order with Signe Hitler at the helm. Eventually we just couldn’t take it any more.’
He inserted a dramatic pause and Anna filled it, realizing this was expected of her.
‘You couldn’t take it any more? So what did you do?’
‘We decided to kill her,’ said Valdemar.
‘Kill her?’ said Anna. ‘You don’t really mean that?’
‘Oh yes I do,’ said Valdemar, straightening his back and pulling out into the outside lane. ‘We thought it was the only way out, and I think the same today. Hitler had been terrorizing kids for twenty years, and if we didn’t do something about it, she’d go on for twenty more.’
‘How old were you?’ asked Anna.
‘Ten or eleven, or thereabouts,’ said Valdemar rather vaguely. ‘Old enough to be able to plan a murder, but not old enough to go to prison. What did we have to lose?’
‘But still,’ said Anna. ‘So what happened?’
Valdemar scratched the back of his neck and thought for a moment. Not because he had to dredge his memory, she felt, but because he wanted to get the words right.
‘We had a club,’ he said. ‘The Secret Six. We were four boys and two girls, and we offered to take – what’s it called? – collective responsibility. But the whole class was in on it, you have to understand that Anna.’
‘I understand,’ she said.
‘Good. Well, one of the boys in the club – his name was Henry – had a dad who stored lots of dynamite in their basement. I don’t know where it came from and you’re not supposed to leave dynamite lying about in your basement, but there it was. I think he was a former rock-blaster or something. It was a simple plan: we, the Secret Six, drew lots for who was going to do the deed, and it fell to me and Henry. That was practical, as it happened, seeing as he was the one who had to get us the dynamite anyway.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Anna. ‘Astrid Lindgren would never tell this kind of story.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Valdemar. ‘But this is all true, that’s the great thing about it, the beauty of it, you might say.’
‘Well, not beauty exactly,’ said Anna.
‘I suppose you’re right. But in any case, we made our move one dark and rainy evening in November. Henry and I headed off to Trumpetgatan on the north side of town, where Signe Hitler lived on the top floor of a three-storey block. We’d convinced ourselves it was an advantage she was on the top floor, because the force of the explosion would travel upwards and nobody else would get hurt. We went in through the front entrance and up the stairs. Outside her door, Henry got out the sticks of dynamite he’d hidden under his jacket, I lit the fuses and he pushed the sticks through the letterbox. Then we rang the doorbell and ran like hell down the stairs, out of the block and away. We hadn’t gone more than a few metres when we heard a hell of a bang.’
‘You’re crazy, Valdemar. Do you mean you kids really did that?’
‘You bet we did,’ said Valdemar. ‘But you’re virtually the first person to know the details . . . apart from the rest of the Secret Six, of course. There was a police investigation and all that sort of stuff, but nobody ever found out how it had happened. Well, they worked out the mechanics, but not who was behind it.’
‘And how did things turn out for . . . for Hitler?’
Valdemar cleared his throat and hunted for words again.
‘They turned out well,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, that’s how you have to see it, nothing to do with regret or exoneration or anything like that.’
‘I don’t really understand,’ said Anna.
‘Well this was how it went,’ said Valdemar. ‘The blast didn’t kill her, but it did leave her blind and deaf, or almost deaf, anyway, and afterwards it was as if she’d become an entirely different person. When she got out of hospital she was the gentlest, kindest individual you can imagine. She couldn’t carry on as a teacher, of course. She started work for the Salvation Army instead, looking after poor children and homeless cats and God knows what. She stood in the square every Saturday, sang uplifting songs and collected money for the needy in less developed countries. It was a kind of miracle; the doctors couldn’t explain what had happened to her and nor could anybody else. She died two days before her eightieth birthday, got run over by the snow plough because she couldn’t see or hear. The funeral was so packed that people had to stand.’
‘Valdemar,’ said Anna, ‘do you expect me to believe this? How could she sing if she was deaf?’
‘Almost deaf, I said,’ replied Valdemar a little truculently. ‘There’s a long newspaper article about her in the library in Kramfors. Of course it says nothing about what a terrible old witch she was before the explosion, or who was behind it, but I promise every single word is true. Why would I lie to you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anna. ‘You’ve . . . you’ve always said your life was so dull. But the things you’re telling me don’t seem dull at all. What happened to your life?’
‘What happened?’ answered Valdemar pensively. ‘I only wish I knew.’
Then he was silent for a long time. She started to feel drowsy and realized she would soon be asleep. I’ve got to talk to him about Steffo this time, she thought. I really must.
But I don’t know if he’ll want to hear it. We’ve barely exchanged a word about what happened at Lograna, at the end. I’ve simply got to.
But she didn’t this time, either.
Maybe it was for the best, she thought. He had asked her just once who that Steffo was, and she had told him the truth. That she’d been with him for a few months before she was admitted to Elvafors, and that she was scared stiff of him.
With him, he’d asked.
Yes, she’d replied.
Scared stiff?
Yes.
Was that why he had told her that peculiar story about Signe Hitler? So she would understand you had the right to kill wicked people? Or that he thought so, at least? Try to kill them.
He’s strange, she thought. I ought to find a way of . . .
This can’t go on any longer, I’ve simply got to . . .
But her thoughts could find nothing to hold them in place. What could she do on her own? In her state? Before she took any decisions about determining her own fate, she would at least have to get well. Her right arm felt completely lifeless now and her headache was back. She looked at him cautiously; he had gone quiet and was slumped slightly over the wheel, as if the storytelling had taken it out of him. Has this morning’s hopefulness already evaporated? Or is it just me who feels that way? she thought. Am I trying to transmit my own hopelessness to him? What am I doing here? Why . . . why am I sharing a car across Europe with this old man? I’ll never be able to explain it to myself afterwards. No, not ever.
If there is an afterwards.
Why should we always imagine an afterwards?
There was a ticking in her head and her thoughts kept slipping off course. He said something, but she couldn’t hear what. Signe Hitler? she thought, closed her eyes and fell asleep.
Around six in the evening they reached another hotel in another town. He claimed it was called Emden. It was raining and the grubby twilight erased all the colours; they had to walk several blocks from the car park to the hotel, and as they stood in the lift on their way up to the room, she suddenly felt she was about to faint. Her field of vision shrank to a narrow tunnel, a dull, rhythmic throbbing seemed to engulf her, she could barely breathe and then everything went white.
She woke up to find herself lying in a bed. She realized she must have been sick; there was a nasty taste in her mouth. He was sitting on a chair beside the bed and holding her hand in his.
She couldn’t feel it, because it was her right hand, but she saw it when she turned her head a little. She saw, too, that he was horror-stricken. He was not immediately aware that she had opened her eyes, and there were a few seconds in which she could study his face before he had time to adjust it. There could be no doubt that it mirrored a deep sense of despair within.
He looked like someone sitting at his own deathbed.
Initially that was all she could see and take in. She did not know who he was. She did not know where she was. She was in a bed in an unfamiliar room, and there was a desperate old man beside her, holding her hand.
Perhaps I’m actually dead, she thought. Perhaps this old guy is God himself and perhaps this is how it feels. I shall never have the strength to move again.
But why would God be frightened? Why would God look so desperate?
Then he registered that she was awake.
Anna? he whispered.
Hitler? she thought. No, that wasn’t right either.
Valdemar? Of course, that was his name. And he was neither God nor Hitler.