The Crow Girl

Her chest feels tight, a painful throbbing. Then the cough again. A dry, sharp cough that tastes of dust. ‘Konets,’ she mutters. It will soon be over. The cancer has spread and she knows that there’s nothing more that can be done.

The thickset man in the driver’s seat starts the car and pulls out of the car park. To the driver and the estate agent, Gilah Berkowitz is just an upper-class Swedish-Ukrainian lady interested in icons. She’s paying seventy euros a day for a five-room apartment on Michailovska, close to Maidan Square, and the price includes the use of a four-wheel-drive SUV, the sort of vehicle that never gets stopped by the local police. Not even if you drive the wrong way down a one-way street right in front of their eyes.

She knows how things work here. Everything works. As long as you’ve got money.

People will do anything to make a living, and the situation is particularly favourable right now, since the country has been hit hard by the financial crisis. The problems in Western Europe are nothing in comparison. Here you can find your salary cut by thirty per cent from one day to the next.

As the car leaves the airport she thinks about what she’s seen over the years on the streets of this country. A hotbed of economic creativity that never ceases to amaze her. Almost ten years ago she tested the hypothesis that a person in dire straits would do whatever they were told and not question their orders, as long as the reward was big enough.

The subject of the experiment was a young, single woman who already had two jobs but still had trouble making ends meet. She had contacted the woman and offered her barely two euros an hour to stand at a particular street crossing every morning and count the number of children who went past without an adult accompanying them.

The first week she had gone to check that the woman was actually there at the allotted time, which she was, without fail. Then she did spot checks, and the woman was always there with her black notebook, even if there was heavy rain or snow.

After testing the hypothesis that hopelessness was for sale, she had applied it to people whose consciences were blacker and whose desperation was greater. It had worked satisfactorily every time.

She looked thoughtfully out of the car window. Her contact in Kiev is no exception. His name is Nikolai Tymoschuk. Kolya. A desperate person who knows that money is the only language that doesn’t lie.

As they head towards the city, she gets her mobile phone from her bag and calls Kolya’s number. The trust between them is based on their mutual conviction that the financial rewards balance the risks. Or, as she prefers to put it: the rewards are so generous that the risks are always of subordinate interest.

The conversation lasts barely ten seconds, because Kolya knows exactly what preparations he needs to make for the following day. He doesn’t have any questions.

When the car pulls up outside the apartment she tells the driver that she won’t need him again. A couple of crumpled notes are exchanged, and they shake hands.

She unlocks the door to the apartment, and exhaustion finally catches up with her. She’s anticipating another attack of dizziness and puts her hand to her heart before the pain starts.

Her face contorts against the cramps, her eyes flare, and she feels several of her false nails break as she clutches her chest.

A minute later the attack passes and she goes into the living room and puts her case down on the sofa. It smells musty, like inside a person, and as she unpacks she lights one of the strong Woodbines she bought at the airport from the woman with the veiny hands. She smokes out the stuffy smell of whoever was staying there before her.

Five minutes later she’s standing by the open living-room window looking down on the narrow, potholed and winding Michailovska three floors below.

She pulls the curtain aside and peers up between the rooftops. The cloud-free night sky is high and cold. Autumns are short here, and the smell of winter is already in the air.

So this is the end, she thinks. Back where it all started.

She can hardly remember the names of the places here, but she remembers Thorildsplan, Danvikstull and Svartsj?landet. She can still recall the taste of the last boy. The slippery taste of rapeseed oil.

And before them the children who haven’t been found yet. M?ja, Ingar?, the Norrt?lje channel, the forests of Tyresta.

There were girls as well. Buried in the woods on F?rings?, at the bottom of Malmsj?n, in a reedbed at Dyviksudd. All in all, more than fifty children.

Most of them from Ukraine, but some from Belarus and Moldova.

She had learned to be a man. A dead Danish soldier and some male hormones had assisted the transformation that had begun when she left her father and brothers.

And in the end she had been stronger than her father.

She is deep in thought and the phone on the coffee table rings several times before she hears it. But she knows what the call is about, and does not hurry to answer it or finish her cigarette.

The man at the other end says exactly what is expected of him. One single word.

‘Konets …’ says a dark, rasping voice before the line goes dead, and Gilah Berkowitz knows that Rodya has done his job with the Wendin girl.

The only thing she regrets is that she was forced to break off her experiment on the girl’s body.

She goes over to the window again and opens it, letting the cold into the room as her thoughts turn to the next day.

Konets … she thinks, and coughs drily. The end is getting close for me too.

The conclusion to everything.

Kolya will make sure there’s no one in the vicinity of the Babi Yar monument between one and three o’clock the following night.

After almost seventy years, the promise she made will be fulfilled. It’s taken her twenty years to raise the person who’s going to help her.





Nowhere


HER HEAD IS banging against the wall, the nylon cord is pressing into her throat, and something large inside her mouth presses against her soft palate.

But she can’t hear or sense anything. She just drifts away and doesn’t even notice her hand suddenly feeling its way over the concrete floor and grabbing hold of something warm.

She watches everything from where she’s resting in the air, just beneath the ceiling, and sees herself close her hand around the handle of the hammer drill, which hasn’t yet cooled down after the thickset man made the hole in the ceiling.

The drill starts with a howl that gets muffled slightly as the drill bit eats its way into the man’s stomach, and that’s when she realises that her strength really does come from below, from the earth itself.

Erik Axl Sund, Neil Smith's books