Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [107]
For his sake.
Karina who kissed him behind Melderstein church. He could still recall the taste of her chewing-gum.
He turned over in the bed.
In Bojen Sailing Club they had formed cells where they decided where people would live and work: a flat in Örnnäset and the nightshift at the ironworks; a small cottage in Svartöstaden and work with the local council. They had organized strikes, worked through tenants’ associations, unions, according to Mao’s political theory about the people’s front, the people’s movements, but it was all going too slowly. They spent too long discussing things; the Fly-fishing Club was full of false authorities who loved the sound of their own voices. The movement’s popularity brought with it a load of pretend revolutionaries who only came for the girls and the beer. After Melderstein the mood became rancorous. Two comrades challenged him for the leadership, with the support of others, so he took his family and left. He left bourgeois, small-town communism to die its slow, natural death, and formed his own group to plan how to get hold of real power.
The knife in his stomach twisted again. Ventricular cancer, stomach cancer, apparently rare in Europe these days, strikes without warning. Operation to see if it’s treatable or not. Symptoms similar to those of a gastric ulcer, and a gastroscopy discovers an ugly running sore and a suspected tumour, later identified under a microscope. And the patient is opened up, the surrounding organs are found to be full of cancer, and they close up the stomach again. Tumours in the lungs, bones and brain, gradual death from general organ failure caused by too great a burden of tumours.
Three to six months.
Suddenly his father was standing beside his bed and he was panting hard, bouncing off the walls. I accuse you. I hold you responsible for the fall of Adam and Eve.
And the whip was raised and hit him in the diaphragm, a violent convulsion that made him throw up the nutritional powder onto his pillow. His father’s voice grew louder, filling the room like a symphony of dissonance.
‘You must start your life again, devilish child. Evil art thou, mean and filled with Satan.’
He tried to protest, to beg for mercy, the same song he had sung throughout his childhood: Father, please Father, have mercy; but the whip fell, striking him on the mouth. The pain made him stop breathing for a moment.
‘The Devil shall be driven from thy heart and thy eternal soul shall be saved for the Kingdom of Heaven.’
The whip was raised yet again and he looked up at the man who floated beneath the ceiling in his threadbare preacher’s outfit, and he knew that his salvation would soon be over.
‘Father,’ he whispered, feeling the vomit and blood running through his nose. ‘Mother never had any more children. Do you know why?’
The noise in the room died away as his father fell silent, the fevered look in his eyes vanished and the whip stopped.
‘I remained alone,’ he whispered to his father, ‘and you never knew why. God knows that you did your duty to populate the earth, but there were never any more children. And you never realized why?’
His father floated hesitantly under the roof with bloodless lips.
‘She aborted them with the Sami woman in Vittangi,’ he panted, ‘my brothers and sisters. She got the Sami woman to take them out of her belly rather than let you get your hands on them and beat the sin out of them.’
And the whip came to life again and hit him in the head and the world was empty.
38
Annika threw her outdoor clothes in a heap on the floor in the