God’s will be done.’
We separate before the ferry docks. I’m already on my way out, full of doubt. Behind me, I leave the promise of death.
I don’t care about evasive maneuvers as I walk down Strandvägen toward the US embassy. They are welcome to follow me now. A locally employed woman named Louise is waiting for me at her desk in the little office she shares with another local staff member. We seem to be the only ones left in the building.
‘You’re late,’ she says and brushes the long, blond hair out of her face.
She’s around thirty years old, not beautiful, but there’s something about her seriousness that’s appealing. Her English is American, but with the singsong accent that I know all too well.
‘I have to pick up my kids.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say and mean it.
Obviously stressed, she puts a few documents down on the table in front of me.
‘Here’s the woman you were looking for,’ she says. ‘This is her death certificate. You were correct that she worked as a diplomat with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and that she seems to have died in an explosion in Damascus in 1980.’
I nod quietly and fiddle with the page, which is written in a language I don’t understand.
‘I found some articles about it in the Swedish newspapers. It seems to have been a pretty big deal here. I remember it myself, actually. It’s not often that Swedish diplomats are killed abroad. I made copies of a couple of the articles. It seems to have been an accident, a car bomb intended for someone else. They got the wrong car.’
I sit down on the pale wooden chair next to her desk. My legs suddenly feel unreliable.
‘She had a daughter,’ I say, and I can hear how empty, how flat, my voice is.
Louise nods.
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘She had a daughter who survived, she was a few months old. It’s a strange story. Very, very strange. In all the media coverage, it states that the daughter died along with her mother in the car, but if you dig a little deeper…’
She pushes the hair away from her forehead and glances impatiently at the small watch on her slender wrist.
‘If you dig a little deeper, you find her in the public records. Klara Walldéen. I have a friend at the Foreign Ministry, who did a quick check.’
She flips impatiently through her papers.
‘There’s no record, oddly enough. But, according to rumor, if you’d believe in rumors, she was found wrapped in a blanket at the Swedish embassy in Damascus on the day the bomb exploded. The whole thing was hushed up, of course. After the bomb and everything. I guess they were afraid that something would happen to her.’
Electricity jolts through me, through my bloodstream.
‘What happened to her?’ I say.
‘She lives with her grandparents in the Östergötland archipelago on… Let me see… Yes, here it is. On a little island called Aspöja.’
12
December 19, 2013
Brussels, Belgium
Klara took a deep breath and turned her face toward the blue floral wallpaper, fighting the temptation to bury her nose into the fold of Cyril’s neck as he lay in her bed just a few inches away, naked and drowsy. Despite their nudity, despite having explored every inch of his body with her mouth and her hands over the last few months, such a gesture would be disconcertingly intimate, surprisingly tender.
Their relationship was not tender. Passionate, absolutely. She felt a spark when Cyril came within a certain radius of her, a world-shattering sexual charge that she had never felt before, but suspected, without wanting to explore any further, that it had something to do with his inaccessibility. How many times in the last few months had she woken at dawn to see Cyril half-dressed and halfway out the door of her bedroom? How many times had she woken up from the creaking of the stairs down to the living room? How many times had Cyril cancelled their meetings, which were already too few and far between, because he was stuck in an airport, a
We separate before the ferry docks. I’m already on my way out, full of doubt. Behind me, I leave the promise of death.
I don’t care about evasive maneuvers as I walk down Strandvägen toward the US embassy. They are welcome to follow me now. A locally employed woman named Louise is waiting for me at her desk in the little office she shares with another local staff member. We seem to be the only ones left in the building.
‘You’re late,’ she says and brushes the long, blond hair out of her face.
She’s around thirty years old, not beautiful, but there’s something about her seriousness that’s appealing. Her English is American, but with the singsong accent that I know all too well.
‘I have to pick up my kids.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say and mean it.
Obviously stressed, she puts a few documents down on the table in front of me.
‘Here’s the woman you were looking for,’ she says. ‘This is her death certificate. You were correct that she worked as a diplomat with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and that she seems to have died in an explosion in Damascus in 1980.’
I nod quietly and fiddle with the page, which is written in a language I don’t understand.
‘I found some articles about it in the Swedish newspapers. It seems to have been a pretty big deal here. I remember it myself, actually. It’s not often that Swedish diplomats are killed abroad. I made copies of a couple of the articles. It seems to have been an accident, a car bomb intended for someone else. They got the wrong car.’
I sit down on the pale wooden chair next to her desk. My legs suddenly feel unreliable.
‘She had a daughter,’ I say, and I can hear how empty, how flat, my voice is.
Louise nods.
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘She had a daughter who survived, she was a few months old. It’s a strange story. Very, very strange. In all the media coverage, it states that the daughter died along with her mother in the car, but if you dig a little deeper…’
She pushes the hair away from her forehead and glances impatiently at the small watch on her slender wrist.
‘If you dig a little deeper, you find her in the public records. Klara Walldéen. I have a friend at the Foreign Ministry, who did a quick check.’
She flips impatiently through her papers.
‘There’s no record, oddly enough. But, according to rumor, if you’d believe in rumors, she was found wrapped in a blanket at the Swedish embassy in Damascus on the day the bomb exploded. The whole thing was hushed up, of course. After the bomb and everything. I guess they were afraid that something would happen to her.’
Electricity jolts through me, through my bloodstream.
‘What happened to her?’ I say.
‘She lives with her grandparents in the Östergötland archipelago on… Let me see… Yes, here it is. On a little island called Aspöja.’
12
December 19, 2013
Brussels, Belgium
Klara took a deep breath and turned her face toward the blue floral wallpaper, fighting the temptation to bury her nose into the fold of Cyril’s neck as he lay in her bed just a few inches away, naked and drowsy. Despite their nudity, despite having explored every inch of his body with her mouth and her hands over the last few months, such a gesture would be disconcertingly intimate, surprisingly tender.
Their relationship was not tender. Passionate, absolutely. She felt a spark when Cyril came within a certain radius of her, a world-shattering sexual charge that she had never felt before, but suspected, without wanting to explore any further, that it had something to do with his inaccessibility. How many times in the last few months had she woken at dawn to see Cyril half-dressed and halfway out the door of her bedroom? How many times had she woken up from the creaking of the stairs down to the living room? How many times had Cyril cancelled their meetings, which were already too few and far between, because he was stuck in an airport, a
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