Copenhagen Noir - Bo Tao Michaelis [66]
That’s what he was.
The dead. The missing.
You could say they were one and the same, that they all spoke the same language. There was nothing conciliatory about them, they just didn’t want to be forgotten, brushed aside. At night, and sometimes like a shadow in the middle of the day, Nils Forsberg could feel how they walked right next to him, whispering to him: You are one of us. On those days all he could do was drink, try to drown out the droning voices, just let them sink to the bottom, dragged down by alcohol, saturated. All those dead who sought to go back to their original context, who demanded justice, who wanted to be placed in a true context.
“And what about love?”
He’d never answered Granberg’s question, mostly because there was nothing to say. When everything turned bleak and black, Granberg used to remind him: “And what about love? Love can make the impossible happen!” There was nothing to say to that. Love is a flame that suddenly appears in a dark room—and then it disappears. He would never say that love could save us, it certainly couldn’t bring Mats Granberg back to life.
Death and time, love and the abyss.
Nils Forsberg had been a police officer his entire adult life. He’d never married nor become a father. He’d become a police officer, and he knew only two kinds of people: those who committed crimes and those who searched for the people who committed crimes. Obviously that’s a precarious situation—an unofficial health statistic published by the police authorities themselves states that more than 25 percent of police in active service find that they drink more than they should, while the average for the rest of the population is 4 percent. Also, suicides and divorces are overrepresented. To enter the abyss has its price, and it’s paid for in life, in time. To be the Virgil of our times, to step down into the inner circles of hell with only a lantern, very quickly takes its toll. It very soon grows lonely and dark.
Time is the master of death. Time is a flash of light in a dark forest. Time is kaleidoscopic: it’s what’s keeping you painfully awake locked in a cell with a hangover—it’s what’s whiled away during a conversation along Strandpromenaden in Malmø. Whoever owns time conquers death. Nils Forsberg often thought that it was a kind of irony of fate that the center of the city, the very inner kernel of Malmø, was occupied by a cemetery, a place where time is suspended and at the same time fixed. He frequently ended up in the cemetery on his walks. He would buy a cup of coffee at the newsstand café on Gustaf Adolf’s square and sit down among the other retirees, the ones who also lived in this no-man’s-land. He always mixed the hot coffee with the liquid from his hip flask. But it had been a long time since he last took a walk. A great exhaustion had besieged him.
Forsberg used to spend days and evenings on the benches in the cemetery. It was an absurd feeling sitting there, absorbed in rest, while buses and taxis passed by. He’d heard voices. Shouts. All the sounds of the city.
Here they all were, the dead he’d learned from when they were still alive, the ones who could no longer answer when he talked to them. He’d come to the cemetery when Granberg’s ashes were spread. Then he’d kept going back there for several days—probably not more than a week—until he could no longer do it, and the alcohol took over. He’d drowned himself from the inside out. The only people he was really able to talk to were the homeless whom he met on his random wanderings. They understood this particular condition, when you are suspended between life and death and lack any kind of anchor, when you are simultaneously hanging and falling, living at the outer edge of everything.
There are