Blackwater. Part 20

It sounded as if Lotta thought Dan had been playing Tarzan and although she didn't really want to ask about Dan, she said: 'What do you mean hung out?'

'His self-criticism. They had a rope with them and had tied it to a pine tree and made a noose. He was to hang himself, because his life was, like, pointless. He was rotten. Poisoned from the start.'

'What by?'

'By being bourgeois.'

'How could he be that? He would never agree to anything so stupid.'

'He didn't, either. Though it was a close thing. Then he ran off into town, and that was when I met him. He used to smoke hash and then started on junk. Well, guys of his background usually have a safety net, and he ended up in the bin. His dad fixed that. Then he went to college. And now he doesn't want to hear anything about politics. Nor about the general.'

'What general?'

'His dad.'

Lotta had been trapped for a whole night in a metro lift with a heroin addict who had a razor in his hand. Dan had told her that. Now Lotta was telling her, turbulence in her head and stories arising from it. Annie had to remind herself that they were called c.o.c.k-and-bull stories.

She went out without saying anything to Lotta about what she was going to do. She knew that she was leaving her to endlessly picking over the contents of those two blue canvas bags.

The house was on a slope covered with willows and birches. Above it stood Mount Langva.s.s, but the birch woods rose so steeply that the peak couldn't be seen from the yard. The road wound its way up from Langva.s.slien village down by the lake.

One of the people who had owned the house before Per had covered it with asbestos sheeting the same colour as watery milk. It was a two-storey house and from the green-painted metal roof protruded a disproportionately large attic room, with a balcony with rusty iron railings.

Below the steps was a drying stand with broken plastic lines and two red plastic wash bowls. Gra.s.s and wild chervil shot straight up through a scooter sled. There were empty beer crates at one end of the house and a piece of bent piping propped against the wall. Flakes of green had snowed down from the roof into the gra.s.s and the bowls. When they got right up to the house, Johan could see a rat-gnawed elk antler and a rolled-up plastic mat below the kitchen window.

Gudrun had changed her shoes and was making her way through the gra.s.s on narrow heels. Per had come out on the steps, Sakka behind him, her hands dripping wet. She was alternately greeting them and apologising: she had been doing the dishes and couldn't shake hands. But she put her own hands together and shook them in front of her chest. Johan thought with astonishment that it was just as if she were delighted. Their son, the same age as Johan, also came out to greet them, but he was shyer and stayed on the porch. He was mostly called Pergutt or the Pergutt Per's boy and the Brandberg boys had always thought he was a twerp.

All three had round faces and he recognised his own eyes, nose and cheeks in them in a way he had never done before. Gudrun and he had been to see them only when they were slaughtering or marking the calves up in Tjrn Valley. Johan had never seen the house down here in Langva.s.slien before. On Gudrun's behalf, he was embarra.s.sed by the mess in the yard and in front of the steps. Gudrun was very particular. Sakka wasn't. Perhaps that had something to do with what Gudrun had said about Sakka's appearance and age: 'She's letting herself go.'

Per was small and rather bandy-legged. Johan thought about Oula Laras, whose legs were slim and unusually long for a Sami, and about how the Pergutt was the very image of Per.

He would be able to see Oula Laras now, might run into him any day. He thought it just like Gudrun to say nothing, but to let him live so close to him. Otherwise it would have been simply banishment to dump him in this mess, especially if you looked at it her way, he knew that. She couldn't stand disorder.

The Dorjs wanted to offer them food although they themselves had just eaten. They wanted to talk and have coffee, and Sakka took out thin pancakes, spread b.u.t.ter on them and sprinkled them with sugar. They wanted to know how Johan had hurt his foot and what the doctor had said and when he had to go back for a check-up. They were so kind, it embarra.s.sed him. Even Per was sympathetic about the foot. Yet Johan knew he was a tough man. Two winters ago, he had driven the scooter over a precipice up in Tjrnfjell and had got stuck on a ledge with a broken leg. He had slithered down to the scooter, but hadn't been able to get it started again, so he'd had to make his way down the slopes in deep snow, dragging his leg behind him. He had been away for two days and everyone had thought that was the end of him. But here he was, eating sweet pancakes with the Pergutt, Sakka and Johan. Gudrun ate nothing, but she smoked another cigarette, which surprised Johan. He had never seen her smoke so much before.

They said nothing about what had happened by the Lobber. Johan had the impression Gudrun had banned the subject over the phone. Nor did they ask why he had left home. The fact that he was to stay with them and start school down in Steinkjer seemed to have already been agreed on. Gudrun must have had long telephone calls with Sakka the night before.

He thought the Pergutt would talk about the murder by the Lobber when they were alone together, but he didn't. He was rather shy and simply asked Johan if he'd like to see the pups. They went out to the dog run and the Pergutt tied up the b.i.t.c.h so that Johan could go in to the pups. There were three of them and they looked about a couple of months old.

'Them's one part Lajka and two parts Lapphound, then there's a bit of Siberian, too,' he said. 'Them's b.i.t.c.hes. Then we've the dog she mated with, he's half Swedish hound. So there's five sorts. Aren't they great?'

One of them had light-blue eyes and Johan liked that one in particular. He said it must be the Siberian that had come through.

'If you'd like a dog you can have it,' said the Pergutt.

By then Johan was thinking everything had become so unreal he must be dreaming and that he had been dreaming for a long time. When he thought about Ylja, he could no longer see her face in front of him, only a blurred, s.h.i.+fting surface. And he thought about the well, and for a brief moment, he thought he had injured his foot when he fell into it.

But that was not how it happened. He had jumped from a first-floor window of a house in roadless country. Where? He had told Gudrun a Finn had given him a lift. The Finn seemed almost real to him. Then he realised it was the Silver Fox. He stared at the Pergutt and tried to think what to say to sound natural, what to reply. Pergutt had asked him something and his round open face was glowing with eagerness for a reply.

Sakka called out to them and when they went in, Gudrun was all ready to leave and Per was putting some money into his wallet. Johan flushed when he saw it. He hadn't considered that Gudrun and Torsten would have to pay for him. He was to board with them. It was amazing that Torsten had agreed to pay money for him, surely a lot of money. Gudrun had none of her own, he knew that. She was talking to Per about the money, but they were speaking the Sami language; Johan couldn't understand and realised he wasn't meant to.

He was feeling peculiar. His foot ached and he was feeling rather sick after the pancakes and weak coffee. Gudrun was in such a hurry to leave, he could hardly believe it. Wasn't she going to stay until evening, or even stop overnight, now that they wouldn't be seeing each other for several days? He wanted to ask her lots of things. About money, for one. Was he going to have any of his own?

But she thanked Per and Sakka, shook hands and, as soon as she had painted her lips at the mirror in the hall, she was ready to go.

'Come out with me,' she said quietly.

She changed her shoes by the car and then told him to get in the front.

'That person you got a lift with? What was his name?'

'I don't know,' said Johan truthfully.

'You said he was a Finn. Does he otherwise live in Finland?'

'Yes.'

'There are lots of interrogations going on,' she said. 'The police are questioning people about where they were that night when it happened. We told them you had already left in the evening. At roughly seven o'clock, on Midsummer Eve. We told them you were angry because Torsten thought you had reported him. That you took the moped and set off down to the village. We haven't let on you went up to Alda's and the pathway there. So now you know that.'

'Am I to say that, too?' he said.

'I think you should. If they come asking questions. Unless that Finn can put in an appearance and say otherwise, of course.'

'I don't think that'll happen,' said Johan.

'Goodbye, then.'

He reckoned that was the first time all that day she had looked at him. But not for long. She started the car. He got out and reached out for the crutches he had left leaning against the car, but she drove off too quickly. They fell into the gra.s.s as the car moved off.

He was eventually to share a room with the Pergutt, but as long as he found it difficult to get upstairs with his plastered leg, he was to sleep in the living room. Per and Sakka went to bed early. The sofa was already made up for him, but once he was alone in there, he was sure he wouldn't be able to sleep. It was too early, only half past ten, and the sun was pouring a reddish light over the hay meadows down towards the lake. They hadn't been cut for several years. There was no wind, but the tufted hair gra.s.s had gone to seed and looked like silvery blue waves petrified in the sea of gra.s.s. Through the mosquito window he could hear a song thrush in the birch woods, its persuasive, yearning note reminding him of Trollvolden, where the song thrushes had gone on and on and on singing at night. But it had been meaningless singing. Or false. No yearning.

The television screen was grey and slightly dusty, the light falling on it so strong that there were no reflections in it. Nor were there any blinds. He recognised the table as having been his grandmother's. It was round and s.h.i.+ny with a pedestal base, and a lace cloth lay in the centre. Gudrun had one just like it; his grandmother had made them. A fruit bowl made from a knot of wood stood on the cloth. He had always thought such knots looked diseased, and so they were diseased, malformed birch. Tumours.

The sofa cus.h.i.+ons were stacked up by the wall, including three ornamental cus.h.i.+ons with cross-st.i.tch pictures of dogs' heads on them. There was another dog in a picture, a kind of spitz, he supposed, large and yellowish brown. Another picture showed a herd of reindeer on a slope of bluish, snow-covered mountain. A third depicted a lake with an old man in a boat, holding a fis.h.i.+ng rod. The whole picture was done in silhouette and you could even see the fis.h.i.+ng line outlined in black or dark purple. There was also an enlarged colour photograph of Pergutt at his confirmation, in Sami costume, a hymn book in his hand. Johan was reminded of his grandmother, Gudrun's mother, at her funeral. Someone had put a hymn book between her dead hands. They were rigid, not holding on to it.

Gudrun hadn't wanted him to go with her to look at Grandmother, but he had insisted although he thought it horrible. Then he had told Vaine what she had looked like, and he had had to tell all the brothers. He was the only one of them who had ever seen a dead person.

He wasn't feeling well. His foot was aching even more now he was alone, although he had taken some of the painkillers he had been given in Steinkjer. He was feeling slightly sick and his hands were cold. He reckoned he had been as good as driven away from home, though of course it was he who had left initially.

And Torsten was prepared to pay to be rid of him, just like Ylja. She had wanted nothing to do with him after she had read that in the paper. She had seen him coming out on to the main road early that morning, in just that area. She must have seen that from the map in the paper. What had she thought?

Anyhow, Gudrun thought he would be in trouble if the police found out he had been up at Alda's with the moped. They said there were tracks of a moped that had gone all the way up the pathway. And then back. As if whoever had done it had gone on a moped.

They're trying to protect me. They want to help me so that I don't get into trouble.

Gudrun had said that Bjorne had already helped him. But how? Did they really want to help him or just be rid of him? The most unbelievable thing of all was that Torsten was willing to pay for his lodgings.

It struck him that perhaps it hadn't been Torsten. It could have been Oula Laras. Suppose Gudrun had phoned him in the end. Asking for help.

Torsten would probably have preferred to tell the police that Johan had gone up to Alda's and the pathway. In revenge. Why should he want to protect Johan, who wasn't even his son? Perhaps Torsten didn't even know for certain what the situation was. But he could guess.

He's only got to look at me, Johan thought. My eyes. My hair. The shape of my face. That's why he's never been able to stand me.

That was perhaps how Bjorne helped me. He was probably the one who said, 'Let the boy go to Langva.s.slien where he belongs.'

It was like trying to run on on a soggy, swaying marsh. He had to think quickly if he was not to sink. He felt sick and his foot hurt. The television screen was grey and the light outside sharp.

Someone knocked, or was fumbling at the door, loosely as if the person standing there was afraid he was asleep. It was the Pergutt. When Johan opened the door, he said: 'Would you like to play Monopoly?'

Johan said nothing but the Pergutt must have thought he had nodded. He got the board and the box of notes and cards out of the sideboard. It was a Norwegian version and so he changed to speaking Norwegian. Johan said the Pergutt could be the banker, but then almost regretted it because it wasn't easy to know the value of streets and squares without seeing the cards in front of him.

'I've never been to Oslo,' he said when things began to go badly, which they did almost at once.

'Nor have I,' said the Pergutt. But he already had Parliament Square and Princes Street. It was horribly expensive to land on them and Johan soon did. He was unlucky, too, for his next turn he got the Go to Jail card.

'h.e.l.l,' he said. 'Lucky it's only a game.'

The Pergutt agreed and they played another game, which he won easily. Then he fetched some Pepsi Cola and potato crisps, by which time it was half past one. He asked whether they should go on and Johan said yes. He took another painkiller and then it was his turn to be the banker. They both sat on the sofa so that whoever was waiting for his turn could lie back and rest. Johan was woken at about five by the Pergutt's snores. He was lying at the other end of the sofa with his head on a cross-st.i.tch cus.h.i.+on, Ullevl Hageby, Princes Street, Parliament Square and Trondheim Road spread out on his chest. The sun was falling dazzlingly in through the other window and the fieldfares were chattering away at the tops of their voices in the birch woods behind the house.

The rain was cold, drenching her head and shoulders. As she walked, she felt the material of her blouse soaking through and the hem of her skirt trailed wetly in the gra.s.s. The sheep were huddled together under a large birch, their backs a dark dirty grey in the wet.

She searched in the cookhouse and the goat shed, certain he was alone somewhere. In the little cowshed they couldn't use because the mangers were insufficient for all the goats, the light was a dim brown, apparently still full of breathing, as if the strong smell of cows now long dead had darkened and was hanging beneath the roof trusses. The layers of cobwebs were lifeless and fluffy with dust. She went over to the steep stairs and listened, but could hear nothing, though she thought she could sense his presence. He did not reply when she called.

When her head emerged at the top of the stairs, at first she could see nothing except the bright grey daylight trickling through the cracks. Then the shadow in the hay thickened into his body and she saw he was lying as before in the house, quite still on his back.

'What is it, Dan?'

She didn't expect an answer. She knew they had a ritual to come, silences, sorties, ripostes, paralysis; silence and a new start. Taking turns, she thought with a weariness she had never felt before. Fear was what she usually felt.

Then at last they got started, his voice grating at first and hers warm, only tepid really, like meat or pudding. He always heard false tones of voice, and he went for her.

'Can't you hear yourself?' he said. And she could.

'How the h.e.l.l do you think you can come up here and sound like that? What sort of b.l.o.o.d.y kindness is that? Who do you really think you are? Do you think the rest of us are a school cla.s.s you have to question and reprimand?'

She saw herself, heard herself distorted, but unfortunately not beyond recognition, and she lost all desire to defend herself. Soaking wet, she just sat glumly in the dry hay and for the first time during a quarrel for she supposed it was a quarrel thought about something else. She simply thought about the hay, how old it must be, how dry and ancient and quite without strength. Nineteen-fifties hay. Then, when he had finally got it off his chest, she said she was miserable because he hadn't met her and Mia when they had come on the bus to Blackwater, but had just sent the children.

'You didn't at all think I was coming on the old Midsummer Eve. You knew exactly when I was coming, and you had made sure I would be met in Roback. I was the one to say that about the old Midsummer Eve, and you agreed because that was easiest. But I don't mind that you let me think that, and I don't mind about her, Barbro what's-her-name. The name was on a jar here in the hay, by the way, you know that. I don't mind. Really.'

He must have heard that her voice grated now, too, but this time he said nothing. She thought wearily, He knows we can't afford any amount of honesty. The rain had lightened, only rustling on the roof now, and she could hear the monotonous, harsh whistling of the bird she and Mia had not yet seen. She crawled over and lay down beside him in the hay. She saw that he still had his eyes closed.

'Is your father a general?' she said.

'No.'

'What is he then?'

'A lieutenant-colonel.'

She had no need to ask any more. She could look him up in the telephone directory. Djursholm or Ostermalm, or any expensive residential area. But it was a long way to the Stockholm directory.

'You said you had grown up in a poor home. Terribly poor.'

'I did. Poorer than you could possibly imagine.'

'Can't we be honest with each other?'

'Go ahead.'

Yes, what had she herself led him to believe? Almost nothing about Mia's origin. He had once wanted to know who the man was, asked if he'd been at college with her. She had said yes. A lie in a way, but not in another way. Like that poor-home story.

We can't go on like this, she thought. We've been through the stage when lovers tell each other their life histories and it is self-illuminating and intense when they summon it up for each other. What we have chosen to tell is now a kind of reality. It is the one we've got.

'Where was Petrus on Midsummer Eve?'

'Here. You must have b.l.o.o.d.y well worked that out by now. You don't like Petrus.'

'I never said that. I just think it's strange that he lies about where he was on Midsummer Eve and that night.'

'All of us are lying. There's nothing strange about it.'

'That's what I don't understand. Why do you help him lie?'

'We don't help Petrus. We were all here.'

'Weren't you in Roback?'

'No, we were here. I drove the kids down, that's all. Then I came back with Barbro Torbjornsson. I fetched her from Byvngen. She was going to the demonstration at Bjornstubacken and I had told her to come up to Starhill and spend the night with us. I thought I'd be able to persuade her to have a go at moving up here. It was so important to us, I thought you'd cope that evening. You could have stayed with Mia at Yvonne's. It was all arranged.'

So he hadn't been alone with her! Although the idea was Annie's and she thought it had stayed inside her, it made Dan move violently in the hay and lie on top of her. He touched her face with the tips of his fingers. He wanted to see her and feel her. He knows what I'm thinking. He likes it. We are intimate again, intensely intimate. We charge the s.p.a.ce around us for each other, we can feel each other as you can smell thunder, electricity.

'You're soaking wet!'

He was lively again and before she could stop him, he had pulled off his s.h.i.+rt and spread it out on the hay. He started undressing her, exposing cold skin, which he licked and said it felt like reptile skin; she was a frog from a well, with wrinkled skin and warts, though only two, and he would make her human and hot in the rain and cold.

'The diaphragm,' she said.

'I'll get it. I'll go and get some clothes for you. For Christ's sake, Annie, you never forget anything. You're a born teacher.'

He was right. She had been on the verge of saying that frogs weren't reptiles. While he was gone, she lay naked on her back, his s.h.i.+rt under her, hugging herself with her arms against the cold. When he came back, he pulled a jersey over her head, but nothing below, and he put the blanket he had with him underneath her.

'Tell me how you could be here at Starhill on Midsummer Eve,' she said. 'Everyone except you and Barbro Torbjornsson came up from Roback on Midsummer Day and stayed the night here. They were all questioned. Petrus, too.'

He lay over her and told her; now it was his skin that was wet and grainy from the cold outside, so she had to rub him. He told her they had started walking down after the morning milking on Midsummer Day. She couldn't hear everything because occasionally his tongue was in her mouth, and it rustled when she rubbed his back dry with the s.h.i.+rt. She couldn't understand why they had not gone across the bridge. That was the quickest way to Bjornstubacken. Had they really gone across the ford? In that case they would have seen the tent.

They had taken that way because Petrus considered that the other way belonged to the Enemy. The road was the timber company's and they shouldn't use it. He had principles they didn't always take into consideration when they had to carry up packs. But when he was with them, they had to walk on the proper, old path. Dan had gone ahead with Barbro Torbjornsson and they were still quite high up when they saw something moving down by the river. They were on the exposed rock where the pine forest started and they had a free view down towards the Lobber. He had seen through the binoculars that it was the police overalls, blue caps, shoulder harness he could see it all and the stretchers they were carrying, two of them, covered.

'No faces. You see? When they cover the faces they're dead. We stood up there and saw it all, though we didn't know what it meant, and we turned back. We hid a little further up, where the view was blocked, and we waited for the others there. That took some time, since Brita is so heavy now and onis has sores. But they came and we let them go up between the trees and look through the binoculars, so they all saw the police and the stretchers. We could watch them for a long way on the marshland, where it was open. Then we didn't know what to do go back or take the route over the bridge to Bjornstubacken. We didn't want to go down from Starhill and land up among the police.'