The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read Online Free PDF

activities, to make decisions and stick to them, as I said before – otherwise everything can go to pot. When everything, every step and every action and every undertaking has no broader significance, when you might just as well be doing something else rather than what you are actually doing at the moment, and when you can’t help but think about that – and when the only thing that might possibly have some point seems to be linked with the mistakes and misdeeds one was guilty of in the past – well, then madness is lying in wait just round the corner.
    Living on the moor involves an attractive but dangerous freedom, I’m beginning to understand that already. I stopped in a lay-by and let Castor move from the poky back seat to the front passenger seat. He loves being there, puts his nose over the air intake and thus creates for himself an ethereal range of scents.
    Or he pokes his whole head out through the side window, like dogs do in the countryside. There is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.
    I’ll say that again: there is nobody in the whole world who knows that we are here.

4
     
    Early in the morning of the tenth of April my husband raped a young woman in a hotel in Gothenburg. Her name was Magdalena Svensson, twenty-three years old, and she had been working at the hotel as a waitress since the beginning of the year. She reported the incident to the police after about three weeks mulling it over, on the second of May.
    Or perhaps he didn’t actually rape her. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t there.
    Martin was interrogated, spent a night and a day in police custody and was then released on bail.
    Just over two weeks later, on the eighteenth of May, a tabloid newspaper became aware of the situation – the fact that the well-known polemicist, author and professor of literature, Martin Holinek, had been charged with rape – and by the following week the whole of Sweden knew about it. Magdalena Svensson talked about what had happened that night to a large number of media outlets, and for five days running it made the headlines in the evening tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet . My husband refused to comment and was given sick leave by the university; but it was widely discussed on the radio and television and in the press. But above all it was a hot topic on social media: in one blog, for instance, another woman claimed she had also been raped by ‘that sleazy professor’ – in a hotel in Umeå almost a year ago. He was alleged to have been ‘as randy as a bloody chimpanzee’ – an expression she had obviously borrowed from an earlier case involving a French banker and politician – but she had not got round to reporting the incident because she was afraid. Two other women wrote in their blogs that they had also been raped by different professors, and comments were as numerous as grasshoppers in Egypt.
    To crown it all one of the commercial television channels offered me and Martin 50,000 kronor if all three of us would agree to take part in one of their evening discussion programmes. By ‘all three’ they meant the rape victim, the rapist and the rapist’s wife. They considered it to be a matter of considerable public interest. We declined the offer. We never discovered whether or not Magdalena Svensson accepted. Or at least, I didn’t.
    On the tenth of June Miss Svensson withdrew her rape accusation, and for a few days the incident had new wind in its sails in the media. There was speculation about her having been threatened, about the rapist having bought himself free in accordance with time-honoured practice, and various other theories similar in nature. A demonstration against men who hate women attracted two thousand people to Sergels Torg in Stockholm. Somebody posted a condom full of shit through our letter box.
    To be fair, a handful of voices made themselves heard in Martin’s defence – the usual ones. But he held fast to his decision to make no comment. So did