Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [60]
It happens that Nils Forsberg thinks this way. That on the other side of this light there may be another kind of light, a darker light which your eyes need time to get used to. On other days, most days, he doesn’t think at all, just wants to disappear, thinks that all that is left for him is to drink himself to death. At the center of the city the day deepens, the morning sings its city song. Everything we have will be taken from us, death can come like a thief in the night, he can come like an arrow shot from a distance.
Life.
Fragile as the delicate veins in fall leaves, strong as the stubborn pulse, strong as hope, stronger than love.
The water in the canal is still, translucent, and bottle-green. Every section of town seems to be linked by a bridge. Malmø is a town surrounded by water. The streetlights. Central Station. The taxi lines. The empty moments. Bicycle messengers steal a moment’s rest, between hope and despair. Everything is in movement, the city is breathing and living.
And here we all are, spinning, hopeless.
She who has to die this early morning is getting ready, planning the next few hours, trying to remember names, people, and places. She knows the time has come, that it has been here a long time. She quickly brushes her hair, removes a speck of food from between her front teeth. She knows how much she owes, knows she must pay. She cannot free herself of it. Her debt grows with every breath she takes, and yet there’s nothing new in this, she’s used to being hunted, she is prey. She no longer knows what it feels like not to be hunted.
The withdrawal distorts her thoughts. She’s not able to follow a straight line of thinking. There’s no beaten path she can follow along, or leave behind.
Debt.
It’s all about that.
The debt.
That she has to pay and cannot do so. She who has to die has tried in vain to settle her debt by offering herself as mule. She said: “I can fix it, I can take it. You know I can handle the pressure.”
It would be so simple, just a transport through Copenhagen to Hässleholm, but that prospect turned out to be futile as well.
She had been hoping for it, it had been a straw to cling to, that she could put her debt aside by carrying a kilo of amphetamines from the head supplier.
She has offered to transport goods from Poland to Sweden—but that’s just as futile. She has, to put it mildly, no credit left in her “trust account.” Istvan is many things, but generous and forgiving he is not. She’s still short four thousand kroner. A piddling amount, really. But every time she’s managed to save up something, it disappears just as fast. There are always new needs. The big problem is that the money runs right through her fingers, that she needs the drugs to be able to work and save up more money, and to do that she needs to use more and more.
It’s an evil cycle. She’s in the rat race, but unlike the rat, she knows she’s doing it—which of course makes everything worse. She knows there’s neither beginning nor end. She just runs.
She who must die gets dressed. Thinks of her mother who is still asleep, sees her in her mind’s eye as she lies in her bed, breathing. She who must die cannot this morning help thinking about how much she loves her mother, how she wishes she could give her what she dreams of. A daughter. That she would come back, return from this shadow world. Become alive again. Be a human being, at least for a little while. That’s by now the only wish the aging mother has—to get her daughter back.
Traffic is still almost nonexistent, but the city keeps changing. Roadwork is going to detour traffic from Exercisgatan during the early-morning hours. According to a report from the traffic department it has something to do with a minor gas repair job. These things happen all the time, everything changes.
She who must die thinks about yesterday when what she has feared for so long finally happened—a friend from her school years picked her up in the street. She didn’t notice until it was too late.
Rickard is his name. She remembers him. He always