The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [55]
Ymergatan—that was named after the giant Ymer of Norse mythology. He was killed and out of his flesh the world was made and out of his blood all the world’s water. The heavens were formed from his skull and a wall was constructed out of his eyebrows to help defend people against the giants. Midgard, the human realm. That’s where it started. Our history. I wonder if the people who walk up and down this street and who are descendants of Ask and Embla know this story. Probably not.
He couldn’t remember the legend in its entirety but enough to make him pause before crossing the street. A few other people were out walking around, a Volvo drove by, and Berglund had the distinct impression that it was a colleague in an undercover car.
He let his gaze wander down the length of Ymergatan. John’s little sister had died somewhere along this street. “What is it that makes the man?” Oskar Pettersson had asked. The Jonsson family had lived here in Almtuna. The disasters had come one after the other. Now three of them were dead: the little girl, Albin, and his son John. One accident, a possible suicide, and a homicide. As if the collective violence of the street, of the neighborhood, were concentrated upon one family.
Berglund had seen their kind before, the unfortunate ones who seemed to form their own group. Families who appeared destined to suffer accidents, heart attacks, lightning strikes, fires, and other violent deaths rather than draw their last breath peacefully between two sheets. As if they took upon themselves the quota for society as a whole, numerical abnormalities in the predictable world of statistical probability.
One accident led to another, Berglund believed. You could also find the accident-prone in books. Sometimes living, but dead more often than not, talked about, ill-fated, and pitied.
Ymergatan. For half a minute or so Berglund perceived the beauty of the late evening. The snow was blanketed in snow, disturbed only by a few bicycle tracks running down its length like tiny tracks in the land of the giants. Trees were weighed down, resting, waiting, the windows lit up by Christmas stars and candles. The big snowflakes whirled in the streetlights.
My town, Berglund thought. Even though he had grown up on the other side of the river, he knew these streets in Almtuna; they formed the basis for the ideal society that his father, the furnace keeper at Ekeby, had always dreamed of. Berglund was able to thrust the thoughts of John and his family out of his mind only by thinking that Christmas was soon approaching. He had always liked this holiday.
For a moment he wanted to say, I’m a criminal inspector in the middle of a murder investigation. But he would remember the sight of Ymergatan enveloped in snow for a long time.
His city. Oskar Pettersson had talked about skånkarna, an old slang word for university graduates. It had been a long time since Berglund had heard anyone use this word. But Berglund was certainly aware of the fact that there were two cities, two Uppsalas: Oskar’s and the skånkarna’s, with their academic degrees. You didn’t hear people talk about it much anymore, but you still felt the effects of this division. Even at the police station.
Would things have been better if Albin had fallen from any old roof and not one of the buildings of the university? Berglund knew what the old man had been talking about. It was about a class system, the fact that the underclass, Oskar and Albin, always slipped off the roofs of the rich folk. That had been Berglund’s father’s opinion and he had inherited it. He had always voted for the Social Democrats. You seldom heard political talk along party lines down at the station, but he knew he belonged to a minority there. Ottosson voted for the Folkpartiet, not out of a strong sense of political urgency but out of habit and a lack of imagination. They agreed