Copenhagen Noir

“Even time is political,” Mats Granberg once said. Forsberg’s answer had been blunt, not to say aggressive. “Ah ha? And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” How do you answer something like that? Which of course only meant that Forsberg tried to make sense of it because he missed his friend. He also knew that he couldn’t admit it to himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be human. All his mistakes, his failures, his problems lived their own life in Forsberg’s consciousness, soaring and surging through his body like a separate ecosystem.

In the course of his career, Nils Forsberg had seen more dead people than he cared to think about. He had seen them in every condition, at all ages.

Children and adults, men and women. The dead all carried a common burden. Their spirits floated weightlessly, while the memory of them nailed them to this world. It was as though a special kind of energy had been released around the dead. A human being who disappears in a crime leaves a string of loose ends behind. Connections that are not cleared up, explained, will haunt the rest of us, force out an answer. Nils Forsberg lived in a dark maze, groping about and finding nothing, not even a flicker of light. Only the voices from the dead looking for answers, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, hesitantly reaching for him when he let his thoughts float. He knew he was not alone in this, that most police officers were haunted this way, yet it was rare that anyone said anything about it. As long as one didn’t speak of it, it didn’t exist, that particular problem.

A police report is at best a slow journey, two steps forward and one step back. At worst it’s a march in place. Most often it’s a balancing act between madness and discipline. This was a phrase Forsberg liked to repeat to anyone who cared to listen: “Madness and discipline! And all we have here is the discipline! Where’s the creativity! Where’s curiosity?”

The dead.

Some of these deaths he had shared with Gisela Eriksson. They had attempted to recreate times, places, and events to such an extent that the dead had become like distant friends, or relatives you haven’t seen for a long time. The dead. He knew Gisela Eriksson also walked around surrounded by the shadows. She’d been his closest friend, the only one whom he could share his thoughts with. And then he’d gone and ruined it all, pushed everything to its ultimate conclusion so that finally there wasn’t anything to be done but shut the door behind him. He’d always thought she’d be the one to take over after him. And that’s what happened, but not the way he’d wanted it. He hadn’t chosen to leave, he’d been kicked out. He had envisioned himself and Eriksson walking side by side through the city-jungle. Forsberg teaching what he knew, and Eriksson eagerly soaking it all up. Oh, what an idiot he was, what a naïve and narrow-minded view he’d had of himself, a complete idiot!

That’s what he was.

The dead. The missing.

You could say they were one and the same, that they all spoke the same language. There was nothing conciliatory about them, they just didn’t want to be forgotten, brushed aside. At night, and sometimes like a shadow in the middle of the day, Nils Forsberg could feel how they walked right next to him, whispering to him: You are one of us. On those days all he could do was drink, try to drown out the droning voices, just let them sink to the bottom, dragged down by alcohol, saturated. All those dead who sought to go back to their original context, who demanded justice, who wanted to be placed in a true context.

“And what about love?”

He’d never answered Granberg’s question, mostly because there was nothing to say. When everything turned bleak and black, Granberg used to remind him: “And what about love? Love can make the impossible happen!” There was nothing to say to that. Love is a flame that suddenly appears in a dark room-and then it disappears. He would never say that love could save us, it certainly couldn’t bring Mats Granberg back to life.

Death and time, love and the abyss.

Nils Forsberg had been a police officer his entire adult life. He’d never married nor become a father. He’d become a police officer, and he knew only two kinds of people: those who committed crimes and those who searched for the people who committed crimes. Obviously that’s a precarious situation-an unofficial health statistic published by the police authorities themselves states that more than 25 percent of police in active service find that they drink more than they should, while the average for the rest of the population is 4 percent. Also, suicides and divorces are overrepresented. To enter the abyss has its price, and it’s paid for in life, in time. To be the Virgil of our times, to step down into the inner circles of hell with only a lantern, very quickly takes its toll. It very soon grows lonely and dark.