Blackwater. Part 17

He soon realised he had waited far too long. He went out and sat down on the gra.s.s, unable to stand any longer. She didn't come.

He wondered what that last little scene had meant. Decency? Consideration? She would be far away now, smoking her d.a.m.ned cigarettes in the car. He was sure she hadn't run out of them. She never let things slip that far.

Anyhow, she was out of his life and that was what he had wanted. He was standing by a community centre in a village he knew nothing about, his sweats.h.i.+rt over his shoulders and the long walking stick with its bra.s.s k.n.o.b and leather loop to lean on, but he knew he would not be able to go much further.

Late in the afternoon, he got a lift on a lorry loaded with fibregla.s.s. The driver did not get much joy out of him, because he soon fell asleep. He was woken in Namsos. He knew where he was there. It was horribly, ordinarily and tangibly Namsos: the warehouses down by the harbour, the small side streets. He could just see Karoliussen's bookshop.

He limped across the street to where he had seen a sign for a guesthouse. It had a dining room and smelt of fish, a stale though not too greasy smell which also cling to the curtains and bedspread in the room the landlady gave him.

He tried to pull off his boot but couldn't, not just because it hurt, but it stuck over his ankle. He knew he would have to get the boot off and hopped out to the landlady again to ask for a pair of scissors. A large pair of kitchen scissors. She helped him cut through the thick rubber. His sock was soaked through and very tight.

When he at last got his foot out of it and saw the dark-blue, distended skin, he knew he couldn't go on. He asked if he could use the telephone.

Gudrun was at home. She was nearly always at home. She spoke terribly quietly and he could make nothing of what she was thinking or feeling. She just said she would come.

'Stay where you are. What's it called?'

'Lucullus. In Havngatan.'

'Stay where you are and wait. It'll probably take two or three hours. And don't phone anywhere.'

She repeated that before ringing off.

'Don't phone anyone else. Just stay in your room and wait.'

He couldn't do that because he had to get something to eat. It was too late for dinner and he couldn't go out. But the landlady took pity on him, heated up some fishcakes and fried large, floury pieces of potato in an overheated pan. He ate it all. While he was waiting for coffee, he limped over to a newspaper, a two-day-old copy. When she brought the coffee and saw it, she said she would fetch a more recent one.

'No,' he said. He just wanted to be left in peace to read. At the bottom of the front page was a big photograph of two women and a man by a road sign saying Blackwater.

What the signpost actually said was bla kw ter. He couldn't make out why on earth Blackwater should feature in this newspaper, an Oslo paper, and he was ashamed of the tatty signpost.

In a column on the centre spread was a photograph of a rather pretty, dark girl. It said Mountain River, but they must mean the Lobber, because there was a crudely drawn map with the Stromgren homestead and Starhill on it. A small tent had been drawn by the river. There was something about a road to a summer pasture. And a moped.

It was stale news and he couldn't make it out at all the big centre spread with photographs of tourists by the general store, by the homestead and by the Lobber was a follow-up. tourists in death village.

He found it at last in the caption below the picture of the girl: a young girl and an unknown man had been knifed to death in a tent on Midsummer night.

By the Lobber.

He had had the newspaper all that last night in the grouse shed. It had been on the floor, folded over double. He remembered the photograph of fis.h.i.+ng boats at the top of the front page. Ylja had read it.

She had read it that morning and then she hadn't wanted to have anything more to do with him.

Can you really live in the world without living off it? Unexpectedly enough, it was Brita who recognised the words.

'It's not a question,' she said. 'You've twisted the whole thing.'

She had been walking round heavily in the last weeks of her pregnancy, apparently not listening to all their chat. But she was the only one who knew where the words came from.

'It's St Paul, the First Epistle to the Corinthians. "And they that live in this world, not living off it: for the fas.h.i.+on of this world pa.s.seth away."'

Annie wanted to get hold of a Bible at once, but no one had one. Brita thought there had been one lying about in the rubbish they had taken over to the fis.h.i.+ng-club loft when they moved into the old house. Annie got up there by putting a ladder against the end gable and crawling through a hatch. It was full of timber and just by the hatch, lying in the sawdust, she saw a whole lot of papers, damaged by the damp. She opened a book with a stiff grey cover. Enrolment book. Someone had signed up for military service, his name Arne Jona.s.son, in the year 1951. At first she thought she had mistaken the year. The few pages in the book had yellowed and looked as if they were beginning to be eaten away. Inserted in the book was a black and white photograph of cows on a slope and a house at the top; six people were standing in front of a fence at the bottom. It was an ordinary thin, s.h.i.+ny print, otherwise she would have guessed it was a photograph from the previous century. But the women's skirts were short.

Her first impression that it was a photo of cows was somehow right. They hadn't just happened to be there. There were two children carrying long sticks up on the slope, and they were driving the cows on their way out of the photograph. The cows had no horns but curly foreheads and were spotted like a map of small islands.

There was a liquor ration book, the rations taken out regularly, a litre a month. In ostersund. Strange, if he had lived here. Perhaps the shopkeeper in Blackwater had done it for him. Had this man Erik Jona.s.son was his name gone once a month down to the village with his ration book? Why hadn't he taken it with him when he moved? Perhaps he had died? But then she remembered that liquor rationing had been abolished some time in the 1950s. The book hadn't been stamped all the way through. Perhaps they had gone on living here in the fifties. Twenty years ago. The papers looked as if they had been there for a century. But I was at school then, she thought. I lived in Enskede and in Gardet in Stockholm. With a fridge, telephone and trams. Erik Jona.s.son and his family had been tucked away in a pocket of time.

Someone had cut photographs of motorcars out of magazines and stuck them on to squared paper. That could hardly be Arne, because the cars were bulging fifties models. They were on double pages that must have been taken out of a school arithmetic book. Had the teacher noticed it had become thinner and thinner?

A cut-out advertis.e.m.e.nt 'technical articles. Private sender.' The little cutting lay together with a chemist's prescription in a cigar box of thin wood. Technical articles. d.i.l.d.os and leather items crossed her mind. He couldn't have trotted up to Starhill with such things.

They would have been condoms, of course. Why had people been so furtive about them? They weren't prohibited. Did people attract derision by sending off for contraceptives? She wasn't sure the cutting was only twenty years old. There were prescriptions going right back to the thirties in the box, some never used. No prescription had been used more than once, although most of them were valid for three doses. Had they recovered more quickly than the doctor had thought? Or had they been unable to afford more?

The thought dislodged the feeling she had had all the time she had looked at these mouldering papers. Compa.s.sion, albeit a feeble compa.s.sion mixed with shame, as if she would have preferred not to see or know. Yet she went on looking through the papers and found a 1937 school report, from the third year in the village school in Blackwater. A report with many reservations, the marks all very modest, but the girl, Astrid Jona.s.son, had the top mark for conduct. She must have been ten years old then. Born 1927. If still alive, she wouldn't be fifty yet.

Why shouldn't she still be alive? She must have gone to school in Blackwater and spent most of her school years in lodgings, As I did, Annie thought. And not really much further away from home than I was. Had she also had that feeling and still lived with it, a meagre normal life above dark waters? Solitude. Devotion. Profound loneliness. One more wild attempt. Dry, cold loneliness. Like me. Until now.

The girl and her parents had left their private papers to the damp and the mice. It was impossible to say whether it had been sheer carelessness with the memories of their lives. They might have fallen ill and died. Or had Astrid and Arne thought of coming to retrieve their mother's and father's belongings one day, and then it had never happened? It was too far away? Perhaps they lived in ostersund or even further south.

There were letters of condolence. White envelopes with black edges. She poked one out to see whether there was any Jona.s.son among the dead. Five printed letters of condolence with hymn verses and names of mourners. There was only one Jona.s.son. Arne, who had been drafted in 1951 and who according to his enrolment book had never returned for retraining in the reserve.

Had he died during his military service? Was it an accident? Or was his death connected with the big brown envelope from ostersen Sanatorium? She couldn't make out the date of the postmark. Had people died of tuberculosis in the fifties? The envelope was empty, but something must have been inside it. Perhaps Arne's army book and the s.h.i.+ny little photos of girls and boys in their twenties. They must have sent back things like that. There were letters, too, not many, but some of them had Arne's name on the back of the envelope. She opened one and saw a few words: ' . . . take them although they aren't mature . . .' Was he writing about trees? He was probably a forester. Perhaps he was in the sanatorium and worrying about the felling he could see from the window or the balcony?

It could be metaphorical. He himself was not mature. None of those twenty-year-olds in the photographs was. She didn't want to know what he meant. It could be cloudberries or spruce trees or people and she didn't want to read the letters. It was bad enough that they had been chucked in here in thin bundles, now falling apart.

She started gathering up the papers and shaking them clean of sawdust. Someone had drawn horses on school exercise-book paper, one horse after another carefully drawn with much too hard pencil. Shaded to show the curve of the huge hindquarters, hoofs filled in as darkly as possible with the faint pencil. Several of the horses had harness and bridles drawn in precise detail. She didn't know what the parts were called. They looked like small ears standing high up on the back, perhaps sticks. But whoever had drawn them knew what they were called. If still alive, he still knew every word for these complicated arrangements and knew the construction of the material of the straps and the harness down to the last detail.

There were several sheets of yellowish-brown tissue paper, apparently used, for they had once been folded in quite a different way. Creases had been smoothed out but not entirely eliminated. She had found no trace of the woman who had been the children's mother and the wife of Erik Jona.s.son. Perhaps the tissue paper was something she had saved. She could have made a pattern out of it by laying it over a dress, but who had a dress she wanted to copy? This wasn't the ghost of a dress but of a desire.

Annie found a notebook with songs in it. The first ones were written in very old-fas.h.i.+oned handwriting with an aniline pen the writer must have moistened now and again, for in some of the words, the violet colour was stronger. Verses about mountains and blue hills, about longing and all kinds of misery, among others that of the sanatorium. She felt an embarra.s.sed compa.s.sion again, but also uncertainty. Had they laughed or cried as they had sung these songs?

Further on in the notebook, another hand had written songs of the thirties and maybe the forties in pencil. 'It's the woman behind it all', 'Per Olsson, he had a goodly farm', 'The Old Bureau'. She recognised her father's repertoire. They were all there, the older sentimental ones and the modern jolly ones, all of them very proper. She suddenly remembered the song she had heard while waiting for Dan outside the store. 'Dad's c.o.c.k's in front'! He had actually sung 'c.o.c.k'. She noticed she had remembered it and decided to write it down. There must be an underworld treasure trove of songs that people did not write down but had no difficulty whatsoever in remembering.

There was indeed a Bible, and three bundles of diaries. They were tied together with string, ten to a bundle. She found six loose diaries down in the sawdust. She was now almost certain they had gone on living there until 1957. The series beginning in 1922 ended then, and all the slim volumes books were bound and bore the subt.i.tles 'For the Year after the Birth of Our Saviour Jesus Christ' and the name of the Lule local paper.

Had the family come to live here in modern times when electricity and cars had already come to the villages? Had Erik Jona.s.son been a Luddite? A dour Jamtland man with a taste for the life of a loner, forcing his family to live in the wilderness and relinquish company, light, oranges, cars and photographs of film stars? Or was the place inherited? Had Erik's family been the second and last generation up here?

The cellar dug out of the ground had been built in 1910. The date was carved on the crossbeam above the door. Had everything been over after two generations of frantic labour? They had carried up a grindstone and a sledgehammer, iron wheels, spades and a chaff cutter. She had seen them in the sheds and lying in the gra.s.s. There was an old Singer sewing machine at the back of the woodshed. Wooden lasts they made shoes on, several small children's feet of darkened wood. Rusty flat irons. Medicine gla.s.ses and cake tins. A bottle of tincture called Universal.

She had hoped to find notes in the diaries about their lives, but she was disappointed. Very sporadically, first the aniline pen and then the pencil had been used to write abbreviated entries. They were impossible to make out: 'HK. B Bt.' Sometimes there were a few words about the weather. 'Storm 3 days. Frost.' That was 3 July. She opened the diary of her own year of birth and leafed through it backwards. On 11 January it said '-52.' That frightened her. Oh, but that was during the war, she told herself. Though what had war to do with the cold? It could drop to fifty-two degrees below zero here. War or no war.

So it had been fifty-two below zero when she was conceived. Not much less, anyhow. How and where could people make love when it was so cold? Perhaps they had to?

The soldiers had been billeted in barns and empty dwellings during the war. In Blackwater, her father had lived in a cottage they had named the Sun Hut. They put attractive names on all the houses: the calm, the Bun House, Snowpeace and Soria Moria. He can't have had s.e.x with Henny in the billet. Had there been a guesthouse in those days? Was there a letter or any other record that would tell her where they had lived?

Henny was a great tidier and she would have thrown everything away if they hadn't stopped her. Perhaps you got like that if you had to keep a studio flat in Gardet in order? Before they moved house, Annie had also had to throw things away and she had lain in bed at night worrying about it and running her mind over the things she had left.

When Dan had told her that the commune lay above Blackwater, she had had a strong feeling of significance and destiny. She would be literally returning to her origins if she moved there. She wondered if the people who had left behind these tattered papers, incomprehensible in their incompleteness, had also suffered from a sense of destiny. Or had they looked on their lives, as the papers seemed to indicate, as something random and soon scattered?

Only a couple of hours ago she had been sitting at the table by the window in their room, writing in her notebook, expounding on living in the world. Now her words seemed embarra.s.sing. But she had found that dangerous ideas could come of thinking like that. In all likelihood she would never have noticed if it hadn't been written down.

However, she had never told Dan she had been conceived in Blackwater. That had been just as arbitrary as the fifty-two degrees below zero that winter of war. But why do we keep looking for meaning and connections? It's the way our minds work, seeking pattern and order. Yet we scatter our lives, helplessly and absently.

She gathered up the papers. When she first saw them, she had thought of showing them to the others, but now she decided to hide them. They should be preserved, not thumbed over, giggled at or have compa.s.sion poured over them. The interval since they had been written was too short, and they held the secrets of living people. Somewhere there was a woman called Astrid occasionally thinking about Starhill and life there as a summer paradise with warm milk and freshly baked thin-bread, perhaps? As an awful dump where she was thrashed? Or, as Annie thought about Enskede, alternately wine and water? But well meant.

She had the few papers illuminating her ident.i.ty and her past in her bag. Her mother was called Henny Raft and was born in 1905, a fact not recorded in the papers Annie had with her. Inquiries would have to be made to find that out. No one would even think of researching into Annie Raft's parents. Yes, if I had died, she thought. If it had been me. In the tent.

Mia? Did she know what her grandmother's name was? She had been an operetta singer, and Henny Raft was her stage name. Her real name was Helga, nee Gustafsson, and Annie was sure Mia didn't know that. Henny's father, Annie's grandfather and Mia's great-grandfather, was dead. His name had been Ruben Gustafsson and Annie had gone to his funeral when she was about ten, but she could no longer remember where he was buried. He had owned a small publis.h.i.+ng company, publis.h.i.+ng among other things song books, collections of folk remedies, gardeners' almanacs and books on the interpretation of dreams. Some of these could be found on the shelves at home, but no one else would be able to link them with the Raft family.

Henny, who for decades travelled up and down the country, had been born in a back-courtyard block in ostermalm in Stockholm. Annie had had it pointed out to her and they had gone into the courtyard to look up the steep stairway, but she could no longer remember whether it was in Skeppargatan or Grev Turegatan. ke Raft, her father, had originally been a Pettersson. He had been born in 1908, the third son of a pastry cook. Annie didn't know why he became a musician. He was primarily a pianist and had worked in theatre orchestras and as a repet.i.teur. He had married Henny Raft in 1939, when he was thirty-one and Henny thirty-four. Annie knew this by heart, because it formed part of the story of her birth, which Henny loved to tell. There had never been any talk of children. Henny's career as an operetta singer was at a sensitive stage.

They both legally took the name Raft when they married. Annie's grandfather had carted a large wedding cake by train all the way from Hudiksvall. The china bridal couple that had crowned it now lay in the top left-hand drawer of Henny's desk. The bride had a tiny veil of real tulle, and some caramel had remained on the plinth until Annie had sucked it all off.

Grandfather had died when she was small, but she couldn't remember the year. Grandmother had grown old enough for Annie to be able to sing at her funeral. Grandmother had wanted to have her favourite sentimental ditty in farewell, but naturally that had been impossible.

Annie felt ashamed when she thought about it. Why hadn't she done as Grandmother had wished? She had sat at Seraphina Hospital with that thin, yellowish hand in hers and promised. Now she could no longer remember her grandmother's maiden name and just hoped Henny had preserved it in some hiding place. Couldn't she have had her own way when her life was so soon to be scattered and forgotten?

Henny and ke married at Whitsun. That September, the war came and ke was called up, not into the forces' entertainment section as he had hoped, but into the infantry. He was sent to the Jamtland village of Blackwater on the Norwegian border. Henny went to see him there and became pregnant. Perhaps it was impossible to acquire condoms in Blackwater, something implicit in Erik Jona.s.son's papers. At that time, a lady presumably couldn't go into a chemist's even in Stockholm on such an errand. Annie was born in October. According to family legend, because of her pregnancy Henny lost the chance of playing the lead in Annie Get Your Gun, so instead she christened her baby girl Annie.

Annie was still quite young when she realised Henny would never have been given the lead. Dolly Tate was the best she could hope for. The aunt and uncle in Enskede had an old boxer called Dolly, so Annie had been quite content all her life with Henny's good-natured deception.

She ought to tell Mia that story. Thanks to the dog, it would probably register. She could tell her that the aunt and uncle she had lived with whenever her parents were touring the country were called Elna and Gote. But she realised she would never be able to show Mia their house, way out on Sockenvagen in Enskede, as it had looked then. And felt. It had been restored now and was presumably properly insulated. During the winters in the 1950s, it had been like living in a cardboard box.

She had shared a room with two cousins called Susanne and Vivianne, who were as soppy as their soppy names. She had felt guilty for even thinking like that. Mia was not yet much troubled by guilt. She wouldn't even speak to Pella because she found her name so hard to bear.

Two loud-voiced brothers called Nisse and Perra had occupied the former wash house in the bas.e.m.e.nt, which Uncle Gote had equipped. It struck her that it must have been cold and dark, but she hadn't thought about that at the time. She had just been pleased to have them at a distance. The whole family was noisy. But she hadn't been homesick, because their home in Gardet was just a one-room flat with a sleeping alcove.

It occurred to her that in the past people used to write down important family events on the flyleaf of the Bible. When she opened the Bible she had found in the sawdust, it seemed unread, the thin pages adhering to each other. Astrid Jona.s.son had received it from the congregation in 1942. 'In Memory of your Confirmation, Psalm 116:12.' Had Astrid ever looked it up? Annie did not do so. But she hunted out St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians and started reading it.

It was all about a small gathering of people exposed to contempt but in possession of something they called spiritual gifts. They were advised against s.e.xual intercourse and eating meat, but if necessary could do both. They were seriously warned against doubting that people could live after death. As they believed, so it would be.

The pa.s.sages on living in the world did not really sound the way Brita had quoted them, nor like the words that had preoccupied her. But she sensed the origins were right after all. It was clear St Paul believed that a disaster was imminent and it would put an end to any possibility of an earthly life. So now people could and ought to give up worrying about their nearest as well as their own feelings and affairs and the world in general. This was obviously the opposite of her own fumbling but basically sensible thoughts.

She had sat for a long time inside that hatch into the loft. Gertrud and Sigrid had walked past a couple of times and looked up at her, but they had said nothing. Sigrid had a worried old face for her nine years. She would probably make her way up there and rummage in the papers. Annie had better hide them. But where? There was no cupboard she could lock and she hadn't even a box for her things. Everything was common property. She decided to put the whole lot under her bed for the time being and think up somewhere to keep them so that they wouldn't be spoilt by damp or found and spread around. There were so many of them anyway, she had to make two journeys down the ladder.

As she stood on the ladder fetching the last lot, she stirred up the sawdust and caught sight of a cardboard box in one corner. It had damp patches and must have been there much longer than the rest. It had once been a blue chocolate box bearing the name Freia, and the gold lettering was in Norwegian.

When she opened it, small paper clothes welled out. Cut out, beautifully painted and quite undamaged, they rose out of the crush underneath the protective corrugated sheet of gold paper. Every flap to hook them on to the paper doll's body was intact. She couldn't see one that was ragged or had been torn off. They were all in the style of the forties the yokes, straight shoulders, pleated skirts, belts and hip draperies. There were clutch coats, topper coats and blazers. She remembered the terms Henny had laughingly used when she showed her old photographs. A m.u.f.f with flaps that had been folded over and over. The paper doll lying almost at the bottom resembled Ava Gardner or Joan Crawford and had her arms held away from her body. The m.u.f.f had to be fixed to the sleeve of her coat she was to make a gesture with it. As if meeting someone. In town. It was cold, the snow falling and perhaps Christmas Eve with bells ringing as in an American film from the days of the coat.

The doll of hard cardboard was home-made, as all the clothes were. You could tell the bright red lips had been coloured with a red crayon, the point of which had been moistened. The clothes were painted in paler watercolours, perhaps from a school paint-box. Flowers, squares, stripes and dots. Lace edges to collars. Sequin embroidery. Sewn-down pleats. St.i.tching and smocking. Everything was reproduced with loving care. Yes love. She felt it herself as she touched the paper clothes. Carefully she put them all back under the gold paper and put the lid back on the box.

ke Vemdal phoned. It was so unexpected, Birger could find nothing to say. But ke said: 'I can come now.'

'Come?'

'You invited me to dinner.'

Was he quite shameless? After all, he had refused the invitation without even thanking him. Birger was taken aback.

'Of course. Good to see you. When can you come?'

He was tense as he cut up the venison and prepared the ca.s.serole. ke must have been feeling the same, because when he arrived he didn't seem interested in the food. He sat sipping at his vodka as if it were some kind of liqueur, though it was ordinary Smirnoff. He was supposed to add caraway or St John's wort to it, but he forgot.

'I hear Barbro's gone away.'

Birger felt extreme annoyance. People talked, but no one said anything to him. No one had asked, not even Marta. ke Vemdal was the first person to mention that Barbro had gone away, and on top of that he was clumsy enough to try to console Birger.

'You'll see, she'll be back when she's calmed down after the hearings. They've questioned her over and over again. They've got about seven hours of tape.'

'They?' said Birger. 'Why do you say "they"? Haven't you been involved?'

ke drank his vodka back in one draught. These large gla.s.ses had never been used when Barbro was at home. Birger's father had been a qualified forester, employed at an estate in Gastrikland, and he had been presented with them on his fortieth birthday. They had flying ducks engraved on them and a huntsman and his dog on the decanter. Vemdal was now scrutinising the decoration on his gla.s.s as Birger told him about them. But he didn't seem to be listening.

'I've been taken off the case,' he said finally.

'Officially?'

Birger felt this was something similar to what Barbro's absence had been in the beginning. Something perhaps not definite or even quite real. But ke said that was so. Official. Stated outright.

'Why?'

'I'm considered too involved in it.'

'Was it because I spoke out of turn about that Three Towers boot print?'

'I haven't even heard about that. We can talk freely now, because, as I told you, I'm out of the picture. But I don't think they've got much further. It's come to a halt.'

'They were creating h.e.l.l around here,' said Birger. 'Do you want some whortleberry with it? There's some pickled gherkin here.'

But ke ate practically nothing. The colour in his face was unhealthy.

'I still get a h.e.l.l of a lot of anonymous letters. Telling me to do something about it. Get the man who did it so people can go out. So the tourists won't be frightened away. Though it's the other way round. Tourists descend like flies. Coachloads of them. I get letters to say I should stop snooping around, I should watch out, and some nasty, smelly things have been be sent to me. A soiled sanitary towel. I wanted to bring it into the investigation that little Dutch girl had her period when she died, and I thought perhaps someone had found it, someone who didn't want to admit having been up there. That was when I found out I had been taken off the case. When it was stated outright, I mean. And they said the sanitary towel was nothing but a comment on my involvement. Can you believe it? It's not impossible, for that matter.'

'In what way are you supposed to be involved?'

'I'm not involved.'

He sounded slightly irritable.

'Are you sleeping all right?'

'Oh, for Christ's sake, shut up! Don't you know what they call you?'

'Yes,' said Birger. 'I do. I think you should eat something. Then we'll go and listen to some music. Perhaps skip coffee. Nothing wrong with you taking a few sleeping tablets back with you. I'm no pill doctor. And nor are you what they say about you.'

He didn't really know what music to put on. He didn't think ke liked either Bach or Schubert. In among his first LPs, he had one called Down South, dance music of the very slow kind. He remembered that one of his s.e.xually more enterprising medical friends had borrowed it whenever he hoped to bring a girl back home with him. When the dark, hoa.r.s.e phrases came slowly welling out of the saxophones, filling the bright room, he felt like laughing and ke noticed.

'What is it?'