Until Thy Wrath Be Past Read Free Page B

both banks of the river, but his was the only chimney with smoke rising from it. Most likely the people were not even there. They were probably fast asleep in their town houses, poor fools.
    At the far end of the jetty was the water hole Marjavaara had cut in the ice. He had covered it with a polystyrene lid to prevent it from freezing over. Brushing the snow off the lid, he lifted it up. When Barbro was with him at the cottage, they always brought tap water from the town – she refused to drink water from the river.
    “Yuck!” she always said with a shudder, raising her shoulders almost to her ears. “All the shit from all the villages upstream!”
    She used to go on about the hospital at Vittangi, how it was a good job they lived upstream from there. How there were no sewage-treatment works or anything. No doubt someone’s appendix would be floating down the river, and God only knew what else.
    “Don’t talk such rubbish!” he would say, as he had done a hundred times before. “You’re talking nonsense, woman!”
    He had been drinking that water since he was a child, and his health was better than hers.
    He squatted down to dip the bucket into the water. There was a length of rope attached to the handle so that he could let it sink and fill before hauling it back up again.
    But he could not get the bucket to sink. There was something in the way, just beneath the surface. Something big. Black.
    Maybe a waterlogged tree trunk, he thought.
    You did not often find tree trunks in the water nowadays. It had been more common when he was a child, when logs were still floated down to the sawmills at the mouth of the river.
    Marjavaara dipped his hand in the freezing water in order to push the log out of the way. It seemed to have got wedged in the jetty. And it was not a log. It seemed to be made of rubber or something similar.
    “What the hell . . .” he said, sliding the bucket to one side.
    He took hold of it with both hands, tried to get a firm grip, but his hands would not function properly in the cold water. Then he managed to get hold of an arm. Pulled at it.
    An arm, he thought impassively.
    His mind was unwilling to understand.
    An arm.
    Then a battered face floated into view in the water hole.
    Marjavaara cried out and leapt to his feet.
    A raven answered from the forest. Its call sliced through the silence. Several crows joined in the chorus.
    Marjavaara ran back to the cottage, slipping but regaining his balance.
    He rang the emergency number. Then it occurred to him that he had drunk three glasses of water with his dinner yesterday. And coffee after the meal. He had fetched the water from the river. From the hole in the ice. And the dead body had been lying there. Right next to it, no doubt. That white, battered face. A gash where the nose had been. Teeth in a mouth with no lips.
    Someone answered the phone, but he cut them off and vomited on the spot. His body spat out everything in it, kept on spitting long after there was nothing left.
    Then he dialled the emergency number again.
    Never again would he drink water from the river. And it would be years before he would even go for a swim after his sauna.

 
    I’m looking at the man who found me. He’s throwing up. He rings the emergency number and vows never to drink water from the river again.
    I’m thinking about the day I died.
    We were dead, Simon and I. I was standing on the ice. It was evening. The sun was lower now. The door was smashed, floating in the hole in the ice. I could see that it was green on one side and black on the other.
    On the riverbank, a man was rummaging in our rucksacks.
    A raven flew past. It was calling in its characteristic way, sounding like a stick being hit against an empty oil drum. It landed on the ice, right next to me. Turned its head away and looked at me in the way birds do. From the side.
    I must go home to Anni, I thought.
    And even before I’d finished thinking, I was back at Anni’s house.
    The transition made