She goes back to the van and sits in the driver’s seat. She can’t be bothered to start the engine, and just sits there for a while. The snow is falling gently on the windscreen, and her thoughts drift off, back in time. She ran along this road so many times to get to the cottage Martin’s parents were renting. The house isn’t visible from here, and perhaps that’s why she can’t summon up the energy to start the van and drive on. She’s afraid of her memories.
I have to go down to the lake, she thinks, finally starting the van and continuing along the road. The cottage is visible from a bend and she casts a quick glance at it, enough to see that it too has been extended and adorned with a large terrace. It’s just as deserted as the rest of the village. From here the road slopes down, and now she can just make out the lake a short distance ahead. The road is like glass, and she has to drive with two wheels on the edge of the snowdrift to get any sort of grip. One final bend and she passes between two wooden posts and a sign indicating that this is a designated swimming beach.
She gets out and opens the back doors of the van.
Twelve bags containing fragments of her life, millions of words and thousands of pictures that all, somehow, lead back to her.
Getting to know yourself can be like trying to decipher a cryptogram.
Twenty minutes later she has unloaded all the plastic bags onto the snow-covered beach.
The ice hasn’t yet formed, and she crouches down by the water’s edge and runs her fingers through the ice-cold water.
Her eyes are used to the darkness now and the white snow gives enough light for her to be able to see a fair way out across the lake. The snow is still falling gently and somewhere out there, beyond the speckled white pattern overlaying the lake, she knows that there’s a large rock.
When she used to swim here as a little girl, the dark water would close around her and protect her from the world outside. There was security under the water, and she used to swim four lengths between the jetty and the diving rock, four times fifty metres, then lie on the beach to sunbathe. It had been on one of those occasions that she had first met Martin.
He had been just three years old then, and she had been his Pippi throughout that long, light summer. A Pippi Longstocking, a child yet somehow a grown-up, someone who had been forced to look after themselves.
With Martin she had learned to take care of others, but everything fell apart six years later when she left him alone by the Fyris River in Uppsala.
She had been gone five minutes. But that was enough.
Maybe it had been an accident, maybe not.
Either way, it was down by the river that Crow Girl got her name. She had been inside Victoria before that, but more as a nameless shadow.
Now she’s sure that Crow Girl isn’t one of her personalities.
The flickering she had felt under her eyelids, and the blind spots in her vision suggest that she was something else entirely.
Crow Girl is an immediate stress reaction to trauma. An epileptic disturbance of the brain, which when she was younger she had mistakenly interpreted as having an alien being inside her.
She walks back to the van and gets a towel out of her bag. Then she returns to the shore, takes her shoes off and rolls her trousers up over her knees.
Even after the first cautious step out into the water she feels numb. As if the lake itself had hands, gripping her ankles and squeezing them tight.
She stands there for a while. The numbness is replaced by a strong stinging sensation that almost feels like heat, and when it starts to feel pleasant she goes back up to the beach to get the first bag.
She pulls it behind her, letting it float on the surface. Once she’s ten metres out and the water reaches up to her thighs, she carefully empties the bag into the water.
Words and pictures drift slowly out across the black water, like little ice floes, and she wades back to the beach to get the second bag.
She works hard, bag after bag. After a while she forgets the burning sensation and takes off her trousers, jacket and top. In just her vest and pants she wades further out. The water soon reaches her chest, and she doesn’t notice that she’s forgetting to breathe. The lake’s cold embrace is contracting her muscles, and she can’t feel the bottom beneath her feet. The water around her is white with paper, and it sticks to her arms and hair. The feeling is indescribable. Euphoric, perfect. And somewhere beneath the elation she’s in control.
She isn’t scared. If she gets a cramp she can touch the bottom.
Everything will fade, she thinks. All these papers will lose their ink and print, the words will dissolve into the water and become one with it.
The light breeze is carrying the contents of the bags out into the middle of the lake. Little sinking icebergs, disintegrating as they disappear from view further out in the water.
Once the last bag is empty she swims back to shore, but before she climbs out she lies on her back for a little while, looking up at the falling snow. The cold is warmth and she feels an intense sense of freedom.
Kiev – Babi Yar
BABI YAR. THE women’s ravine. This was where the city boundary once ran, and it was an inhospitable place, so the guards livened things up by asking their wives and lovers to come out.
The women’s ravine used to be a symbol of love. But she remembers the place the way it looked that autumn day almost seventy years ago, and can almost hear the ground moaning.
In less than forty-eight hours the Nazis exterminated the Jewish population of Kiev, more than thirty-three thousand people, and turned the ravine into a mass grave that was covered with earth and is today an attractive, verdant park. The truth, as always, is relative. It hides as a deep evil in the ground, under the beautiful surface.
A tiny wooden vice. A thumbscrew. One more turn. Then another.
It needs to be felt. The pain must be physical. It must spread from the thumb to the heart, carried in the blood. The thumbscrew controls pain, which becomes meditation.
Her finger is starting to turn blue. One turn, then another, then another. The screams of the dead pulse in her finger.
Viggo Dürer, born Gilah Berkowitz, has ten minutes left to live, and she falls to her knees in front of the memorial, a menorah, a seven-armed candelabra. Someone has hung a garland of flowers on one of its sturdy arms.
Her body is old, her hands gnarled, her face pale and watery.
She is wearing a grey coat with a white cross on the back.
The cross is the sign for a liberated prisoner from the concentration camp in Dachau, but the coat isn’t her own. It was meant for a young Dane whose name was Viggo Dürer. In other words, her freedom is false. She has never been a free person, neither before nor after Dachau. She has been in chains for over seventy years, and that’s why she has come back here.
Her agreement with Madeleine will be concluded.
At the bottom of the ravine she will finally find peace together with those she once sent to their deaths.
She turns the thumbscrew once more. The pain in her finger is almost mute now, and tears are clouding her eyes. She has seven minutes left to live.