The Winners, page 57
“I hear you! And I promise that all the other politicians soon will as well! They want one team, one town, in the end just one party as well. They want everyone to think the same about everything. But I support your demand for two hockey clubs in two towns, not because I love hockey, but because I love democracy. It’s a human right to be able to choose who you love, but it’s also a human right to choose who you hate! People can be browbeaten and cowed and even imprisoned, but no one can ever force us to love something. We have the right to our hatred of people who aren’t like us. We have the right to define ourselves. So our feelings and our boundaries are not for sale. These are our towns, and this is our way of life. And these are… our hockey clubs.”
He says these last words slowly, as if he has just thought of them. When he says “hockey clubs,” a lone voice calls out from a long way back in the Beartown ranks, it’s too dark for anyone to see who it is, but it shouts:
“DO YOU WANT US? COME AND GET US!”
Soon even the Hed crowd are shouting the same thing. It’s a classic war cry between the towns, but it’s being aimed in another direction now. Because people can only cope with one enemy at a time. Naturally, the rest of the council has belatedly realized the seriousness of the torch-lit procession, but it’s too late now, some of them haven’t even shown up, and some have made the mistake of mixing with people in the crowd in an attempt to look like ordinary people. Instead it makes them look like nobodies. This is the end of their power and the beginning of Richard Theo’s. He has the whole of his speech written on a sheet of paper in his pocket, and now he crumples it up, he didn’t even need the whole thing. He was planning to say that each hockey club was like a ship of Theseus, from the Greek myth, where each plank was replaced when it rotted, until in the end nothing remained of the original, prompting philosophers to ask: “Is it still the same ship?” Ice rinks are also replaced, plank by plank, until everything is new, sponsors disappear, coaches get fired, all the players grow older and are replaced by younger names. Everything changes. The only thing that really is unchanging in a hockey club is its supporters. “You’re the ship,” Richard Theo had been thinking of ending his speech, but then someone started shouting “Do you want us?,” and of course that was much better. Much, much better. In the end two towns are standing there in two torch-lit processions, chanting the same thing about how much they hate each other, demonstrating complete unanimity for the right to complete fragmentation. Not even a politician could have conjured up that solution.
* * *
In the newsroom of the local paper the editor in chief and her dad are drinking beer. They’re planning to publish their revelations about corruption between the politicians and businessmen in the council district in a couple of days. About the leader of the largest party, who happens to be Richard Theo’s biggest opponent, and how both her husband and brother work for a construction company that’s engaged in dodgy practices. The paper will write about suspicions of widespread corruption in connection to the application to host the skiing world championship, and the proposed construction of a conference hotel that has been under discussion for years. But not a word will be mentioned about the training facility. Powerful people will suddenly find themselves powerless, some will end up in prison, just not the people the editor in chief originally had in mind.
But the whole series of articles will be delayed. Neither she nor her father nor anyone else knows that yet. There will be other news to write about first.
* * *
A cell phone buzzes somewhere in the forest near the campervan.
“Is that yours?” Maya wonders.
“I shut it off when you and Ana got here,” Benji says, because who the hell was he going get a message from who was more fun than them?
It buzzes again and Maya laughs:
“Well it isn’t mine! Everyone I know is here!”
“A ‘torch-lit procession’?” they hear Bobo exclaim a short distance away.
Ana leans over to look at his phone, then bursts out laughing:
“Have any of you heard anything about a fucking torch-lit procession? I mean, you get out of town for ONE night and suddenly something HAPPENS?”
Amat’s phone buzzes too, a text from his mother. Then Maya’s, from Leo: Mom’s lost her mind and pretty much organized a huge demonstration out here. Everyone’s got, like, torches? Come home??
So Maya and Ana set off in Ana’s dad’s pickup. Maya has to hold his rifle. Bobo follows, with Benji, Amat, Big City, and Mumble squeezed in around him. Beartown is empty when they arrive, but they reach Hed just in time to join the procession. At first they don’t understand a thing about what’s going on, but then they see, in the light of hundreds of torches, banners with the hastily written slogans: “Two towns, two teams!” They see green jerseys everywhere, then they see the red procession in the distance. Maya walks among her childhood friends and it feels like not having to be grown-up for a little while longer. A few last minutes. For a single night she feels completely at home again. She knows that hardly any of her classmates at music college would understand this, but for the people in this procession, a town isn’t just a place where you live, it’s a place where you belong. A hockey club isn’t a hockey club, it’s everyone you know. It’s your grandparents’ club, your mom and dad’s club, there’s a pub in town that used to be owned by a crazy old woman and a nice old man and it was their club too. It belongs to your neighbors and friends and the girl at the supermarket checkout and the mechanic who mends your car and the teacher who educates your children. It belongs to lawyers and general managers and firemen and midwives. A hockey club is the girl you played with in the forest and slept back-to-back with throughout your childhood, even though she doesn’t even like hockey. It’s the most handsome, wildest boy with a smile that’s big enough for him to be able to contain all that is darkest and most beautiful inside him. The hockey club doesn’t play for itself, it plays for us. If you come here and play against Beartown, you won’t be facing a goalkeeper and five players out on the ice, you’ll be facing the entire town. That’s why there are so many torches. Everyone is here.
When they reach the council building some old politician gives a loud speech about the right to hate each other, but toward the end of the night the atmosphere is almost jolly instead. Ana finds some beer somewhere so Amat has to drive her dad’s pickup so she can drink in peace and quiet. When he tries to explain that he doesn’t have a driver’s license she snaps: “So do you need a damn police badge to eat soured milk too? There are three pedals and one steering wheel! I know you’re a GUY but how hard can it be?” Beer doesn’t bring out her most diplomatic side, it really doesn’t, but Amat does as he’s told. Bobo follows them with the rest of the gang, they drop Mumble off outside his house and almost yell “BEARTOWN FOREVER!” across the entire neighborhood just for the hell of it, but Maya manages to stop them. She’s had stones thrown through her bedroom window too, she knows what that does to a person. Mumble gets out onto the pavement and looks at her and his eyes are suddenly full of a sorrow she doesn’t understand, it might even have been shame.
“Are you okay?” Maya asks him.
Mumble nods shyly down into the snow. Maya has her dad’s green woolly hat pulled down over her ears, her eyes are sparkling as she holds her hand out through the window.
“Don’t let any goals in tomorrow, okay? Not a single one, you got that?”
He nods again. She smiles. Then the cars turn and drive home and Mumble stands and watches, without saying a single word of all the things he wants to say.
* * *
When all the cars are driving back to Beartown after the procession Kira turns to Peter in the passenger seat and says:
“You should open the Bearskin tonight, you and Teemu. Open it up for everyone. People need it.”
So they do. A long queue snakes out along the pavement. Even Kira turns up to have a beer, just one, next to Tails. Peter drinks scorched coffee and Teemu dances on the table with his shirt off, a green scarf tied around his head. The Ovich siblings are all behind the bar. Benji washes glasses and passes them back to his sister Katia, who’s spent so many years working in the Barn in Hed that she’s been serving drunks since she was barely old enough to get drunk herself. Their sister Gaby takes the money while her little children play games on her phone on the floor, and Adri walks around the pub doing what she does best: telling men to shut their mouths before she does it for them.
Toward the end of the night Tails is sitting alone at the end of the bar. He has one promise left to keep, the one he gave Teemu. Kira has given him the documents he needs, and he’s sold all his expensive wristwatches and has the money in an envelope. He waits until all the others have gone home and Benji has finished the dishes and has gone outside to smoke, before he goes over to the three sisters and says:
“I have a business proposal for you.”
* * *
The scrapyard in Hed may be isolated, but it has plenty of eyes and ears. Faint light is shining behind the curtains of some of the trailers, and a solitary black-and-white dog pads from the gate toward the little house a short distance away, but it’s so old that it seems to get lost halfway and has to pad back and start again. A car stops outside the house and Adri gets out and knocks on the door until Lev opens it.
“Yes?”
“Are you Lev?”
He’s wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt that’s buttoned wrong. He looks like he’s just woken up, but is curious nonetheless.
“Yes?”
“I’m here to pay Ramona’s debt,” Adri says, handing him the envelope of cash that Tails gave her.
Never would she have believed that she would end up being the business partner of that snob in a suit, or that she would be buying the scruffiest pub south of the North Pole with him, but life never stops being a surprise. Ramona left no will, but with Kira’s help Tails has managed to sort out all the legal issues surrounding her estate, with her landlord as well as the bank. The only thing they need now is an agreement with Lev. Unfortunately he isn’t interested.
“I don’t want money, yes? I want a pub.”
Adri looks him in the eye. She looks crazy. Lev likes that a lot, she reminds him of his nieces, they’re also psychopaths, every last one of them.
“If you want our pub, you don’t actually want a pub, you just want problems,” she says.
The tip of Lev’s chin moves thoughtfully from side to side like an old metronome. He appears to consider her threat very carefully before he hoists his sweatpants a little higher up his stomach and says:
“Drink, yes?”
She holds his gaze for several long, wary moments. She’s unarmed, and she knows that he isn’t. But she still goes into the house with him. He pours drinks from bottles with no labels. She looks at him and asks:
“You haven’t got any bigger glasses?”
He likes her at once. A lot, an awful lot. Crazy women.
“Coffee cups, yes?”
“Sure. Anything apart from these egg cups,” Adri mutters toward the shot glasses.
They drink. They drink a lot. Exchange small talk, tiptoeing around the real topic of conversation, like two champion fighters testing each other’s limits. Lev asks about the forest and about the town and Adri asks about the scrapyard and about the machinery in it. They talk about the criminal gangs that pass through here at regular intervals, stealing everything from fuel and tools to entire work sheds that they ship out on trucks in the middle of the night. They have a lot in common, they both hate thieves but have been called that plenty of times themselves. They aren’t black-and-white people, everything is gray to them, they’ve accepted their nature. Lev asks if she hunts, and Adri looks like he asked “Do you eat food?”. Of course she hunts. Lev laughs and says he’s hunted all over the world except in this country.
“Only rules here, yes? Can only hunt at these times, only these animals, only this gun, rules, rules, rules…”
Adri laughs bitterly. The bureaucracy surrounding gun licenses is enough to drive anyone crazy, but crazy it the last thing you should be, because then you won’t get a gun license.
“You know how it is. Every time the gangs in the big cities shoot each other some politician decides it’s time to ban hunting rifles. As if those gangs are running around with our rifles. They use smuggled pistols, for God’s sake…,” she sighs.
The man on the other side of the table smiles indulgently at this.
“The hunter is the most dangerous gangster in this country, yes?”
He pours more drink. She leans back in her chair.
“If you ask the authorities, it looks that way. They complain that the police don’t have the resources when seventeen-years-olds are playing at war in their own cities, but when people up here go out in their free time and leave salt licks for the elk, armed police storm our hunting cabins just to make sure we haven’t left a gun cabinet unlocked, or, God forbid, have infringed a wolf’s rights…”
He laughs hoarsely. She stops talking and empties her glass, putting it down with a bang and a look that indicates that the small talk is over. He accepts that. And says:
“Ramona owed me. This is my debt, yes? I want the pub.”
Adri looks down into her empty glass, balancing between diplomacy and an angry outburst. Closer to the latter. But just as she looks up the black-and-white dog comes in through the terrace door, creeps over and lays its head in Lev’s lap. He pats it tenderly. Adri has heard all the rumors about him, about the drugs and guns that are supposed to be hidden in the scrapyard, but the man is now treating the dog as if it were the last lily of the valley on the planet.
“What sort is she?” she wonders.
“She’s a, how do you say? A ‘pure-breed mongrel’!” Lev chuckles.
The dog appears to fall asleep with its head in his palms.
“Do you treat it well?” Adri asks.
“Better than people. You’re the same, yes?”
“Yes.”
He pats the dog gently.
“She was a good watchdog. In her youth. But now? Almost blind. Almost deaf. Just kind. But what can you do? Never had a friend so good. You understand?”
Adri nods. She understands.
“I have a good watchdog. The best you’ll find. She’s just had puppies. I’ll bring two of them over here. I can train them for you too. But you take the money and leave our pub the hell alone, and then we’re even. Understood?”
Lev smiles as he contemplates this for a long time.
“And Teemu?” he eventually asks.
“Teemu won’t do a thing against you if I tell him not to,” she replies.
Lev laughs. They drink some more. Shake hands. Then the Bearskin pub belongs to the Ovich sisters, and the first thing Adri does is go over there and raise the price of beer. If Ramona is watching her from Heaven, the old bag will be up on her feet dancing.
97 Perpetrators
The stories of Beartown and Hed could have ended here, but stories about towns never really end. The only stories that end are the ones about people.
Two and a half years have passed since Maya was raped by Kevin. Two years since she left Beartown. It was her story that started all this, which changed the hockey clubs and influenced politics and shook a whole town and half a forest to its very foundations. Maya had no butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, but she could just as well have, because she could just as easily have been Ruth. They were so alike, in so many ways.
* * *
The only thing that separated them was everything.
* * *
Ruth is dead, Maya is alive. Ruth left Beartown six months before Maya did. Ruth fled, Maya moved away. Ruth will never play guitar in front of thousands of people or sleep back-to-back with her best friend in a campervan or laugh so it echoes through the trees at dawn on one of the first winter days of the year. Ruth is forgotten, as if she never existed, as if what she was subjected to doesn’t matter.
“There are always two of everything, one we see and one we don’t see,” Ramona used to say. She never knew who Ruth was, hardly anyone did. Her story wasn’t the start of anything. But it will be the end of something.
Because one of the very worst things we will ever do in this forest is to try to tell our daughters that girls like Ruth are the exception. That isn’t true, of course. It’s Maya who is the exception. That’s why those who do that, those who get the slightest bit of retribution or an ounce of justice, call themselves “survivors.” Because they know the truth about all the girls like Ruth.
* * *
Many years ago two little boys grew up in Hed, they became each other’s only friend, because they never had anything else to compare with. One was fairly big and the other rather small, one wasn’t scared of anything and the other was scared of everything. The smaller one was bullied by other boys on his street because he was the last to learn to ride a bicycle, the last one to learn to skate. The big one chased them away, not because he was strongest or most dangerous, but because he was unpredictable. The boys in the street called the small one “mongo,” but they called the big one “psycho.” He had no limits, everyone knew that even then.
The boys started playing in the forest together during the day, and in the evenings they would watch films in the smaller boy’s home. He lived alone with his mother and the bigger boy liked that, because he had four brothers and two angry parents, so in his house you could never hear the television. The smaller boy wished he had four brothers and two parents. Envy is the lot of almost every child.
The first time they met, the bigger boy held out his hand and said: “My name’s Rodri.” The smaller one took his hand but didn’t know what else was expected of him, because no other child had ever asked what his name was. Rodri grinned: “I’m going to call you Mumble, because you always mumble! That doesn’t matter! I like talking!”
