Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [106]
She sat in silence and waited for her pulse to stop racing, resting a hand against Sophia Grenborg’s front door, gradually absorbing the woman into her bloodstream.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the cold staircase, listened to her voice, saw her sitting doing her lovely work in her lovely Federation, just loving the articles in County Council World. A woman so cold and well-behaved and appreciated that her own husband had chosen to kiss her outside NK, a woman who was everything she would never be.
She left the building without looking back.
37
The man woke up with the pink duvet cover tickling his nose. He snorted, then groaned as the pain from his stomach reached his head. The wooden panels in the ceiling swayed slowly to and fro, he looked away and stared into the boarded walls, shocked at how bad his breath smelled. The smell was taking him over.
La mort est dans cette ville, he thought, panting for breath.
He could see the doctor’s face floating above him, as it had the day he woke up from the anaesthetic, his friend’s clenched jaw and evasive gaze; he had already been informed about the consequences and alternatives and understood immediately.
Inoperable, untreatable. Three to six months from the diagnosis. The remaining time would entail a lot of pain, sickness, digestive trouble, weight loss, severe nausea, extreme tiredness, low blood pressure. Treatment consisted of anti-sickness medicine, painkillers and nutritional supplements.
He knew he would fade, almost rot, away. The smell would become more intrusive, his friend the doctor had advised him not to try to hide it with scent or aftershave. It wouldn’t help.
He gazed around the room, looking over the kitchen area in the corner and the panels on the walls and the colourful rugs on the plastic floor, trying to find something that wasn’t moving. He stopped at the window. Through the gap in the heavy curtains he could see blue daylight, cold, crisp. Gradually the world stopped swaying and he was able to breathe more easily, sliding into his dreamlike state where the limitations of reality were gradually wiped away.
‘I’m from Bojen Sailing Club; I’d like to book a seminar room from seven p.m. on Tuesday,’ he heard himself say with a peculiar echo in the background. In front of him the librarian had big books open on the desk. He knew she no longer believed him, because he couldn’t possibly be a sailor and a fly-fisherman, a butterfly collector and a genealogist.
Everyone who came to the meeting had a codename, regular names like Greger or Torsten or Mats. His choice of Ragnwald was met with frowns. You shouldn’t give yourself airs; but he was better than them and they knew that.
He laughed quietly in his in-between-world, returned to the old works that fever-hot night in early summer 1969 when the world was on the brink of the great revolution and they were ready. They had prepared for armed struggle and had guards patrolling the camp day and night. The company carved cudgels by the campfire, they discussed guerrilla warfare and practised self-defence.
In Norway the antagonism between left-wing activists and the others had been much greater than in Sweden. A radical bookshop had been bombed. They were convinced that it would soon be their turn, and they weren’t about to let themselves be led like lambs to the slaughter.
The fact that they were doing their training in Melderstein was particularly amusing, because the regime at the old works was religious. But because he had booked it as a parish assistant in Luleå no one had questioned his motives, and they had held thundering Maoist meetings in the little works church.
He was filled with the complete sense of harmony he had experienced in those few days, reliving once again how his capacity to remember all the quotations had given him a central position in the leadership, even though the delegates had come from all over the country. They practised battle skills and survival through the night, and it was there that he met Red Wolf.
He smiled at the