Riding the Blue Wind

Excerpts:

Excerpt from page 1 :

The slam of the front door caused the old family clock to stop striking between the fifth and sixth stroke. Mikael Hildonen felt his father’s heavy hand come down on his shoulder, and the intrusion jolted him into an impulse to shake himself free.

“Wait Mikael, not now, don’t make things even worse,” said his father.

Down in the courtyard Daniela tried to tear herself loose from the woman who was holding her, and turned to face the living room window with a movement that showed more defiance than helplessness. For a moment Mikael thought his niece might manage to run back into the house, but then the driver came over, and together they managed to force the girl into the backseat of the car.

Mikael took a step back from the window, and his father’s hand squeezed his shoulder hard. A smell of mothballs flew up from the tweed of his best jacket.

The car door slammed shut, and a flap of the driver’s jacket was left hanging on the outside like a broken bird’s wing. As the Volvo spun away over the gravel, Mikael hoped that the material would get caught on something, so that the driver’s head would be thrown against the windscreen with the same noise as when a rock hits the first ice of autumn.

But the car just continued straight ahead, past his mother’s freshly turned vegetable garden, past the old dog kennel and out through the gate. Mikael couldn’t bear to look directly at the car; he couldn’t cope with the sight of Daniela’s shoulders and head framed in the back window. Instead, he found a patch of the evening sky, reddening over the birches in the driveway. The branches were almost naked of leaves and the trees had something strangely shipwrecked about them. Mikael closed his eyes and stood motionless until the sound of the engine died away somewhere on the slopes down towards the village.

Translator: Deborah Dawkin