The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [1]
He had grown more quiet after he was fired. John had never been one to talk much, of course—Berit was the one who supplied the conversation—but he became even less talkative after he was let go.
He had cheered up only this fall. Berit was convinced that it had to do with the fish, the new aquarium he had been talking about for years and that had become a reality at last.
He had needed all that work with the fish tank, had spent a couple of weeks in September on it. Harry had given him a hand with the final assembly. He and Gunilla had come to the grand opening. Berit had thought it silly to inaugurate a fish tank but the party had been a success.
Their closest neighbor, Stellan, had looked in, as had John’s mom, and Lennart had been sober and cheerful. Stellan, who was normally quite reserved, had put an arm around Berit and said something about how cute she looked. John had just smiled, though he usually was sensitive about things like this, especially when he had had a drink or two. But there was no reason to be jealous of Stellan.
Harry had finished clearing the parking lot. The flashing orange signal flung new cascades of light across the path to the laundry facilities and communal rooms. Snow removal. Berit had only a vague idea of what this task involved. Did they still climb up on the roof like in the old days? She could remember the bundled-up men from her childhood with their big shovels and ropes slung in great loops over their shoulders. She could even recall the warning signs they posted in the courtyard and on the street.
Was he over at Lennart’s? Brother Tuck, as John called him. She didn’t like it. It reminded her of the bad old days. She never knew what to make of it: Lennart’s loquacious self-assurance and John’s pressed silence.
Berit was only sixteen when the three of them met. First she got to know John, then Lennart. The brothers appeared inseparable. Lennart, tossing his long black hair off his face, unpredictable in his movements, always on the go, picking nervously, chattering. John, blond, thin-lipped, and with a gentleness about him that had immediately appealed to her. A scar across his left eye created an unexpected contrast with the pale skin in his slightly androgynous face. The scar was from a motorcycle accident. Lennart had been driving.
Berit had been unable to understand how John and Lennart could be brothers. They were so different, both in appearance and in manner. Once she had gone so far as to ask Aina, their mother, about it. It had been toward the end of the crayfish party, but she had only smiled and joked about it.
It didn’t take long for Berit to figure out that the brothers didn’t always make their money in traditional ways. John worked at the workshop off and on, but it seemed to Berit that this was more to keep up appearances, especially with regard to Albin, his father.
John had a criminal bent. Not because he was evil or greedy, but simply because a conventional lifestyle didn’t seem to be quite enough for him. It was something he had in common with many of the people around him, teenagers who appeared well adjusted on the surface but who drifted around the eastern parts of Uppsala most evenings and nights in anxious herds. They picked pockets, snatched purses, stole mopeds and cars, broke into basements, and smashed shopwindows as the spirit moved them.
A few, like John and Lennart, were permanent fixtures. Others came and went, most of them dropping out after six months or a year.
Some took classes at the Boland School in order to become painters, concrete workers, mechanics, or whatever other professions were open to working-class youths in the early seventies. Others took jobs straight out of middle school. None of them continued with more formal academic subjects at the high school level. They had neither the will nor the grades for that.
Most of them lived