Another Time, Another Life Read Online Free PDF

parliamentary committee. As so often in the past it was possible to show that this was pure nonsense, baseless idle speculation intended to damage the operation. Measures had been taken that there was reason to take, and for a few weeks, when the host of rumors was at its strongest, the West German embassy had been entered on the list of highly prioritized surveillance objects.
    The result of that measure had been unambiguous. No indications whatsoever had emerged that something was in progress, and the allocated extra surveillance had been withdrawn, which was a gift from above because the Russian squad suddenly had an unexpected need for extra personnel. The parliamentarians in the committee were completely satisfied with the report they received. The occupation of the West German embassy was an isolated incident, planned and executed by a faction within the West German terrorist underground that could best be described as a collection of fanatical loose cannons from the University of Heidelberg. According to information Stockholm authorities had received from their colleagues in the German secret police, many of the faction’s more established comrades—in the regrettably extensive circle of radical elements—had taken strong exception to what hadoccurred. The embassy occupation had not benefited the common struggle.
    Leading that struggle to a successful finish demanded better planning and more organization. The Swedish secret police, strangely enough, drew the same conclusion in the report that was submitted to their committee less than a year after the embassy drama. “For this reason, among others, the risk of another, similar event on Swedish territory, directed against German or Swedish interests and executed by German terrorists, is judged to be very small.” There were “other risks that [were] significantly more serious,” and regardless of whether this was true or false, it would have been bureaucratic suicide to maintain the opposite. And the secret police’s investigation of the embassy drama was thereby concluded.

IV
    What remained were the memories. Police memories.
    Jarnebring remembered the smell of burnt telephone, but because that was an extremely unusual smell even at his place of work, less common even than the odor of madeleines, that was not what would bring up the images in his head. Other things did, or nothing at all. Sometimes, most often in his dreams, the memories of those minutes in the stairwell of the embassy would come crowding in on him without his having the least idea how or why. It was no big deal, for fairly soon he stopped talking about what had happened, and not long after that he also stopped wondering about it. We human beings are fortunately constituted in that respect, he thought.
    His best friend and closest colleague, Lars Martin Johansson, a newly appointed detective inspector as of a month before the embassy occupation, also had his memories despite the fact that he had not even been in the vicinity of the West German embassy. On Thursday the twenty-fourth of April 1975 he had taken comp time to take care of his two small children who were too runny-nosed to go to day care. He had followed the embassy drama from the couch in front of the TV in his living room on Wollmar Yxkullsgatan on Söder. And he had definitely not phoned Jarnebring ten times, despite what Jarnebring’s wife at the time maintained. He had phoned three times, neither more nor less, and not to satisfy his curiosity either but to ease his worry about what might happen to his best friend.
    In a way he too had become a victim of what had happened. In his line of work there was no merit in sitting at home taking care of sick children while all of his comrades who were able to stand upright were in position with service revolvers covering the embassy. The gibes had come pouring in and had continued for quite some time. They reached their peak about a month after the embassy drama, when someone furnished