Chapter 34 Violence Against a Horse on Official Service #2
Vidar says nothing. When he was twelve or thirteen, just after Spider had fought for him in McDonald’s, Vidar asked, “Are we hooligans?” Spider shook his head seriously and replied, “No. We’re soldiers.
I stand up for you, and you stand up for me.
We haven’t got anything if we can’t trust each other a thousand percent.
Get it?” Vidar got it. The members of the Pack have held together all their lives, and you don’t build up that sort of friendship without complex sacrifices.
They have different reasons to hate Benji.
Some are disgusted, and some feel betrayed; some are just worried about what opposing fans are going to sing about them now.
Some have the bear tattooed on their necks, and how much do you have to love something to do that?
So Vidar says nothing. He’s just glad to be going home, that everything will be going back to normal.
And when Teemu leans forward and whispers, “The new coach is holding an open A-team tryout for you. If you’re good enough, you’ll be allowed to play!” Vidar’s joy sings so loudly inside his head that there’s no room for him to think about anything else.
It’s only sports.
The dogs at the kennels start to bark in the distance as the siblings approach, but Adri comes out blearily and quiet them down. Leo and Maya stop, alarmed.
“Is Jeanette here? Our teacher at school . . . she’s supposed to have a martial arts club . . . is it here?” Leo asks.
“ ‘Club’ might be a bit optimistic. But she’s in the barn.” Adri chuckles and yawns as she scratches her wire-wool hair.
Leo nods but doesn’t move, hands in pockets but staring with interest at the dogs. “What breed are they?”
Adri frowns, looks from Leo to Maya, tries to figure out what they’re doing here. Perhaps she realizes, because she, too, has sisters. So she asks, “Do you like dogs?”
Leo nods. “Yes. But Mom and Dad won’t let me have one.”
“Do you want to help me feed them?” Adri asks.
“Yes!” Leo exclaims, looking happier than a puppy with two tails.
Adri looks warmly at Maya. “Jeanette’s in the barn, you’ll find her there.”
So Maya walks into the barn alone. Jeanette is practicing with a sandbag and stops midmovement, trying to not to look surprised. Maya looks as though she’s already regretting her decision to come. Jeanette wipes the sweat from her brow and asks, “So you want to try martial arts?”
Maya rubs her palms together. “I don’t really know what’s involved. My brother kind of dragged me here.”
“Why?” Jeanette wonders.
“Because he’s worried I might hurt someone.”
“Who?”
Maya cracks as she admits, “Me.”
So where do you start? Jeanette looks at the girl and eventually chooses the easiest option: she sits down on the mat.
After an eternity Maya sits down opposite her, a foot away.
Jeanette moves closer, the girl flinches, so she stops.
She explains gently, “You’ll hear people say that martial arts is violent.
But to me it’s about love. Trust. Because if you and I are going to practice together, we have to trust each other. Because we borrow each other’s bodies.”
When Jeanette reaches out her hand and touches her, it’s the first time since Kevin that Maya has been touched by anyone except Ana without flinching.
When Jeanette shows her how to wrestle, how to take a grip and how to get out of it, Maya has to learn to be held without panicking.
On one occasion she does panic, throws her head back, and hits Jeanette in the face.
“It’s okay,” Jeanette says, not bothered by the blood on her lip and chin.
Maya looks at the clock on the wall. They’ve been wrestling for an hour, free from thought, and she’s sweating so much that if her eyes are streaming she doesn’t even know it herself.
“I’m just . . . I’m so fucking terrified sometimes that it’s never going to be okay,” she pants.
Jeanette doesn’t know how to reply, either as a teacher or as a human being, so she says the only thing she can think to say as a coach: “Are you tired?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go again!”
Maya doesn’t heal inside that barn. She doesn’t build a time machine, she doesn’t change the past, she isn’t blessed with memory loss.
But she will come back here every day and learn martial arts, and one day soon she will be standing in the line at the supermarket when a stranger accidentally brushes past her.
And she won’t flinch. It’s the greatest of all small events, and no one understands.
But she will walk home from the store that day as if she were on her way somewhere.
That evening she will come back to train some more. And the next day.
It’s only sports.
Ana is sitting high up in a tree, not far from the kennels. She sees Maya and Leo walk home through the forest. She’s been following them, she doesn’t know why, just wants to be close to Maya somehow. Everything feels far too cold without her.
They’re only a few feet apart when Maya passes beneath her on the ground. Ana could have called something, climbed down and begged and pleaded with her best friend to forgive her. But this isn’t that sort of story. So Ana sits where she is, high above, and watches her friend walk off.
The next day Vidar takes the bus to school. Plenty of people know who he is, so no one dares to sit next to him. Not until a girl a few years younger gets on at a stop on the outskirts of the Heights. She has scruffy hair and sad eyes, and her name is Ana.
The first thing Vidar notices is how beautiful her ankles are, as if they weren’t meant for floors but for running through forests and over rocks. The first thing Ana notices is Vidar’s black hair, so thin that it hangs over the skin of his face like raindrops on a windowpane.
In many years’ time we might say this was a story about violence. But that won’t be true, at least not entirely.
It’s also a love story.