Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [54]
‘It came from Kexholm,’ she had said, letting him feel the fine fabric beneath his child’s fingers, and he had appreciated the power of the old country, Mother’s childhood home, and understood her terrible sense of loss.
He gave a snort. This was too difficult. However would he manage?
The task. He had not failed yet, and he wasn’t about to start now where his family was concerned. They were all he had left.
He turned his back on the student hostel, keeping the window in the corner of his eye as long as he could, letting it slide away. He would never see it again.
He took a few stumbling steps along Svartbäcksgatan. The noise subsided, and it became easier to breathe. Slowly everything around him settled down. He had no memories of this place being full of the commercialism of Christmas. It must have looked completely different at the end of the sixties. He straightened his back, letting the hand fall from his ear, allowing reality to wash over him. Half-naked and headless plastic mannequins begged and enticed from the shop windows, with noisy battery-driven toys made in China, flashing strings of lights running across dressing gowns and silk ties, cordless electric tools to charge and use, charge and use.
He raised his head to escape the windows and his eyes fixed on a green artificial pine garland stretched across the whole street. He turned off to the right, across the river, up to the university.
Stopping to catch his breath, he heard the howling monster of consumer society like a waterfall behind him.
The cold was particularly harsh today. He could hardly remember ground this frozen. He was amazed at how the stillness of air from the arctic could emphasize colours and light, sharpening and clarifying his perceptions. He stared up at the cathedral’s twin towers as they struggled, heavy and full of shadows, to reach the translucent sky. He closed his eyes, it was long ago, so long ago; he had almost forgotten what it felt like to breathe in the glass-clear air that could only be found in Uppsala. Now the cold was taking possession of his insides, freezing his airways and the soles of his feet. His teeth started to chatter unconsciously.
He struggled on and stopped outside the ornate main building of the university, brick and limestone, looking up the long flights of steps and studying the four statues above the entrance, the four faculties of the university when it was founded: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. His gaze wandered back to the first of these, the woman with the cross, his faculty.
You betrayed me, he thought. You should have been my life’s work, but you turned into a lifetime of denial.
He walked up the steps, his eyes fixed on the three heavy oak doors, the huge iron handles. Well-oiled hinges swung the door open surprisingly easily, and he walked cautiously into the entrance hall. The cathedrallike space opened up above him with its three enormous glass domes. His steps echoed against the mosaic floor and smooth granite pillars, the stucco detailing, the paintings on the ceiling, bouncing off the staircase up to the auditorium as it curved past the wise, gilded words of the great humanist, Thorild: To think freely is great, but to think correctly is greater.
Freedom, he thought, the tyranny of our age. The betrayal of our simple medieval way of life, where everyone knew their place in society. People who set the salvation of the soul above all else: economic gain, personal freedom, the questioning of social structures.
He turned his back on the room. The developments during the Renaissance made him want to weep with rage – Eve’s betrayal of Adam, the whore who tricked humanity into biting into the fruit of the tree of