Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [59]
The chairman nodded: “Naturally.”
Again she stood in the airport. Had just checked in her luggage, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and looked into a puffy, yeasty face with pores like craters.
“Bonnie!”
“You won’t forget us, right?”
“Of course not. You know me! But things need to settle down a bit. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
They waved for as long as they could see each other.
PART III
CORPSES
SAVAGE CITY, CRUEL CITY
BY KRISTIAN LUNDBERG
Malmø
Translated from Swedish by Lone Thygesen Blecher
We must start at the very beginning.
Our story is simple. Just like life itself, it has no beginning and no end. We’re in Malmø, one of the larger suburbs of Copenhagen. Our story is about death. Death is at the core of everything. All stories about life and love contain a kernel of death.
Those who must die are getting ready. Those who must die prepare themselves. They read and write, breathe and watch. Those who must die set out on a journey. One showers to be clean, cleaning especially well to smell fresh. Another writes his will and testament—he has already made up his mind, days and weeks ago. A third measures out precisely as much of the drug necessary to make him disappear. The vein responds, his eyes cloud over, and in a matter of seconds the world is dark, black. Everything hangs in the balance for a moment, the living and the dead. We who are still here, and those who have given up.
From Västra Hamnen, this community within a community, one can see Copenhagen glitter like a string of diamonds in the night. The neighborhoods Nils Forsberg loved were the ones close to the discontinued ferry port, Nyhavn, home of the shabby beer taverns where a Swedish policeman was allowed to be exactly as intoxicated as he wanted to be.
We are all in the same space. All the invisible people. Everything that creates a city, with sounds and echoes, time passed and time to come, dreams and hopes, the unborn and those who are vanishing. We are all here. This is a story of guilt and redemption, of hope and despair.
We are human beings. We live, breathe, love. We are the ones who are going to die. You are the ones who are going to die. We are each others’ mirror images.
Those who are going to die look around the room, brush their hair, kiss their children, flush the toilet. They are the ones who know they are going to die, who long for death, for the great, soft darkness, the final hot flash, and then that final, last silence. And those who want to live, and who do all they can to stay here, who are frightened of the great darkness surrounding us. We are like each other, like day and night in the same city, alike as only human beings can be. Our story must start right there: in the city, with a description of death—the savage city, if you will. From a distance, and from far above, we might seem like insects, cockroaches, reptiles. We live off of each other. Out in the suburbs lights are coming on, slowly, one window at a time. It is morning, the first day for some, the last day for some, and in between we meet up. The commuter train shoots out between Malmø and Copenhagen, penetrating the morning like a flaming arrow.
Life.
All these breaths creating a chain of life, of time. We know we are being eaten by a hunger we can never escape, and yet we pretend we are not touched by it. That everything is as it should be. That time doesn’t count us in, that we are not worried by time. For every breath, for every day that lights up, we move closer and closer, and one day, just like this one, we stand face-to-face with our own destruction. Then what is it all worth? Nothing.
Death is no stranger who suddenly appears in your room. Death does not pull the curtains aside, revealing an empty backyard. Death does not appear like a shadow that grows darker and then black, like a bruise that deepens in color.