The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [113]
She ran over to the car with Erik whimpering in the stroller. There was a parking ticket on her windshield. She tossed it into the backseat.
Her parents would be arriving in a few hours. I’ll have to buy a new ham, she thought and turned onto Vaksalagatan. At the same time the cell phone rang. She picked it up, convinced that it would be Ola.
“I know, I know,” she said, “but the ham is going to be ruined.”
“Hi,” said a familiar voice, and she almost rammed the car in front of her as she braked for a red light at the intersection of highway E4.
Thirty-seven
Justus knew where to go. There was a hole in the fence. The construction site nearby made it even easier since the scaffolding shielded him from the street.
A feeling of power surged through him. No one saw him, no one heard him, no one knew what he was about to do. He stopped by a puddle of oil that shone with metallic darkness against the white ground, and looked back. He had left tracks in the snow but he didn’t care. He was planning to take the same route back and he could erase his tracks then.
A piece of sheet metal sticking out of a container vibrated in the wind and the sound made him stop one more time. He looked up at the familiar building but it was only now that he saw how worn down the place was. When he was little, this had been a palace and John had been king. This was the place of the good sounds and smells. This was where his father grew to a giant in the shower of sparks, handling the black, heavy steel plate with ease. When struck, the metal resonated at a deep pitch and left a distinct smell that stayed on your fingers for days, just like the stainless steel burnished as fine as a mirror and that reflected light all over the blackened shop ceiling.
When John and the other workers took a break in the back room, the shop seemed to rest. Justus would walk around in the silence and touch the welded seams that ran like scars across the metal. He heard voices and laughter from the back room. Often they called his name and he would sample the hawthorn juice from the Finnish archipelago and eat sandwiches with black fingerprints on the cheese.
A car drove by on the street and Justus sneaked in behind the container, continuing on to the back of the building where there were a few windows closer to the ground. He smashed one of these with an iron pipe. He wasn’t particularly afraid of being discovered because a high fence ran along the back of the property and no one was working on the construction site.
He cleared glass and debris from the window and hoisted himself up with the help of a pile of crates. The back room looked like it always did. There was a newspaper on the table where John usually sat. He pushed it to the ground. Where Erki sat there was a book of matches, which he picked up. Now there was no hesitation in his movements. It was as if the sight of the old lunchroom strengthened his resolve. He opened the makeshift plywood door of a storage area and dragged out a few containers of gasoline and oil. There were also jars and bottles filled with various chemicals. He carried the containers to assorted places in the shop. In Sagander’s office he poured out five liters of ligroin.
He did a final walk-through of the shop floor, looking around John’s old workplace. He was getting dizzy from all the smells. He poured out a whole container of gasoline in and all around the lunchroom, squirting some on the table and chairs, and then crawling out the back window.
The wind was picking up. He waited outside the window for a while before he took out the matches. The first match went out immediately, as did the second. He counted the ones that were left and worried that there wouldn’t be enough. He crawled in again and grabbed some newspaper, soaking a corner in the gasoline