Blackwater. Part 25

'Do you think I'm too fat?'

'I think you're nice and plump.'

Because of that they fell into bed laughing, she dressed and he naked. It was much less long-winded than his peculiar turns with the ostersund ladies whom he had had to give expensive perfumes or even worse take out to starchy dinners at the Winn Hotel.

He was fascinated by the red hair on the mound between her thighs, not stiff and curly but as soft as silk. She was worried it was thinning out. He examined her everywhere with fingers she maintained were short and stubby. He asked her about a scar on her s.h.i.+n and looked carefully at the white streaks on her belly. He wanted to know whether she had had an easy delivery when she gave birth to Mia, and he confessed there were a whole lot of questions he had wanted to ask her at the time, when she had come to see him. But he hadn't dared, for they were things that had nothing to do with him. Not at that time.

'Now we're going to do this,' he said, very gently parting her legs. 'In a moment, you'll be as good as engaged to me.'

He realised she hadn't done it for a very long time and that she was slightly scared, physically scared that he would go too far in and be too rough. But he had no desire to be rough. She was small inside and only slowly became moist.

Yes, there was fear in her. A flash of furious rage went through him as he thought about Dubois and Fjellstrom and that incredible s.h.i.+t Ulander. But he realised he should put aside all such thoughts, all thinking for that matter, to make it good for them both.

Then she seemed to melt inside and start flowing. They kissed hazily and moistly and he forgot to be careful, forgot everything he had thought out for her sake. He stopped thinking, and so did she. She whimpered occasionally and he turned her quickly, pleased that he was strong, and it was all so intensely b.l.o.o.d.y wonderful, he was just about to come. But then he heard their breathing, out of step, and thought about his haunches going up and down, and she noticed he was thinking about something and asked what it was. All he said was what a peculiar activity it really was.

'I'm chief medical officer of the District Health Authority, did you know that? Here's you, lying whimpering under me, and I'm doing everything I can to make you whimper and gasp and the best I can do about it is this . . . and this . . . and this . . .'

Then it was all over but she just laughed.

'I think I'm dreaming,' he said as he lay on his back.

'Never mind. You'll still be chief medical officer of the District Health Authority when you wake up.'

There was a s.p.a.ce between the bed and the wall and he was lying with his arm out, wondering why she had arranged the furniture so oddly. He felt with his hand and found something cold and metallic. Then wood. Fine, dense wood. A b.u.t.t. He had to look.

'Do you keep a shotgun here?'

'Always,' she said.

'A fine ole gun,' he said when he hauled it out. 'Real nice, little ole lady's gun. What do you shoot with it? Hares?'

They fell asleep, forgetting to put more wood on the fire. When they woke he said 'h.e.l.l!', because he had only just remembered Bonnie. The car would be cold by now, so he had to bring Bonnie in and they both hoped it would be all right. But the two dogs immediately started fighting. He tried to separate them by pulling Bonnie's hind legs, but almost got bitten by the other dog. Annie filled a pan with water to pour over them, but he took it away from her. In the turmoil of growls, sharp barks and threatening snarls, he pulled her back into the bedroom again and closed the door.

'To h.e.l.l with them,' he said. 'They can't kill each other. Bonnie's stronger, but the other one's more aggressive. They'll give up when they find that out.'

'I think Saddie would fight to the death,' said Annie. But it was already calmer beyond the closed door and they lay down on the bed again. It was just as he had said; the dogs would have to get used to this.

He liked remembering that evening, the whole of that winter evening and night, and when he recounted it to himself in his mind, he browsed through it in images. Images of chocolates on the coffee table, the roses of warmth on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the ambulance jammed in the snowdrift as if trying to hide, the tense abdomen under a grey-striped nights.h.i.+rt, the stars, the notice board beside the general store with its schedule of evening cla.s.ses and advertis.e.m.e.nts for bingo in Norway. But he realised he had amalgamated images from a great many journeys in the winter darkness on the Blackreed road, the abdomen one of dozens, perhaps one of hundreds of sore and distended abdomens he had palpated in musty bedrooms. He couldn't be sure he remembered correctly even when it came to the house and the woman and the cloudberry preserve. It had all happened. But it had happened all too many times. Image had been superimposed upon image; the memories of that evening were precious, and he had amalgamated them with care. Perhaps he had taken some of them from elsewhere, from other long journeys and other dark, glimmering, somnolent and dying villages beside ice-covered or jet-black water.

And what did she remember? A face she had only glimpsed before it vanished in the uncertain night light. A boy. A dark head of hair and an expression. Of what? Agitation perhaps. Or excitement? Birger couldn't remember exactly what she had said. And she could see nothing but a blurred patch in her memory where that face was supposed to be. Someone had filled it in for her. Wishful thinking?

The summer day was hot now, the light drab as he drove along the gravelly, frost-damaged Blackreed road. He was driving too fast, not a habit of his. He was annoyed with health freaks who disapproved of plaque and obesity, but tolerated twenty dead in the weekend war on the roads. At Offerberg a pothole made him hit the roof and there was a bang from the cha.s.sis. Again and again he dialled Annie's number. Still no reply.

When he got to Blackwater, there were a lot of cars and people by the store, which was just closing. Norwegians had been shopping for the weekend and were coming out with sausage rings, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of snuff. He drove through the village looking straight ahead to escape being stopped. He could see the little white house on its ledge below the ridge. As usual, nothing was moving up there. That was normal.

He drove up to the house and sat waiting for a few seconds. The kitchen window gleamed. From the doorhandle hung a plastic bag with something inside it. He saw a thermos and a plastic box as he went up the steps. The door was locked.

He knocked a few times. Although she was rather deaf, Saddie ought to have heard him by now, and he was somehow cheered by the fact that she had Saddie with her. That seemed normal. He reckoned he must have gone over the top when he rushed away from Life Core like that. He had also acquired a headache.

He had no keys with him. They were still at his apartment, but he knew she kept a key hanging in the woodshed. He fetched it and went in.

There was a strong smell of flowers in the kitchen, mostly lily-of-the-valley. Fat little bunches of them from the end-of-term ceremonies stood on the table, the worktop and in both windows.

There were two used mugs on the table, a sugar bowl and a bread basket. No jam. The cheese was in its plastic bag on the worktop. There were crumbs on the tablecloth. It looked as if she had just been clearing away.

She had had tea with someone, then gone out. He felt the teapot. It was cold, no tea in it, only a thick layer of used tea leaves at the bottom.

In the living room, he saw that Saddie had rucked up the rug under the coffee table and lain on it. There were more flowers in there. Annie's bed had been made. For a moment, he sensed her loneliness just as strongly as when he had gone there for the first time.

We d.a.m.n well ought to be married!

That suddenly broke through, and it was true. Though he had always agreed with her that things were best this way.

But he hadn't wanted it like this. Perhaps it was right for her, but he wanted to be married to her, to live with her, and he had wanted that all the time. To have her. He oughtn't to have left her alone in a house with no neighbours. With that d.a.m.ned Sabela she maintained she could load in twenty-two seconds.

It was panic. He recognised it. He suddenly remembered squatting down above Westlund's and s.h.i.+tting his guts out. Out of pure terror.

That was long ago now, almost twenty years. That affair up by the Lobber, although half-forgotten and wiped out of their conscious minds, still had power over them. Annie's whispering voice had sounded frightened. And now she had infected him.

He felt calmer once he had realised that. He went out into the shower room and found some Disprin. As it fizzed in the tooth mug, he put water for coffee on the electric plate. It was too hot to light the stove. It looked as if it had rained on her newly sown bit of land, but the moisture had long since evaporated from the gra.s.s. No midges yet, no stingers and hardly any mosquitoes. She was spending her first free day doing what she had longed to do. She was walking. Not far, presumably, because Saddie was with her. The dog had bad hip joints and could no longer go uphill. Annie had taken the car and perhaps driven up. But she had forgotten the thermos of coffee she had prepared.

She wasn't far away and he would wait for her. It looked like being a fine, warm evening. He opened a window in the living room. The smell of decaying lilies-of-the-valley bothered him.

A man and a woman were skiing east down the mountainside and it was raining. The snow was transparent and crackled round their skis; the rain was light, whipping in squalls on the wind. Their faces were wet, the rain not pouring down but flying towards them.

The snow was shrinking. The streams, silent all winter, were now rippling loudly. They had to walk long stretches over the mountain heath, carrying their skis on their shoulders. They came down to the river and crossed it on an arched bridge of ice and packed snow. He held his breath as he heard the water rus.h.i.+ng below.

She was pregnant and he was so delighted he had shouted aloud as they raced downhill. They had been moving with the patches of sun all morning, chasing them over the mountain but never really catching up with them. He had shown her an old place of sacrifice. He wanted to show her everything. That was why they were back home. When she had unhesitatingly taken a steep downhill run, he had sounded like his grandfather: 'Now, now . . .'

He was careful with her. All kinds of things he had never thought of before now occurred to him, as well as a great deal he had only heard talked about. The darkness of Sami tents, warning yelps from dogs, and bear spears. He wanted to protect her with dog, spear and bearskins, and he laughed out loud at himself from sheer exhilaration.

To him, this was home. He realised that it always had been. It was a place he could describe only in this way. It had no name and roamed like a patch of sun between shadows of clouds when he started thinking about it. But they were racing round in it now. He wanted her to be in it.

He thought about the baby that was not yet a baby. She didn't even want him to say 'the baby'. Not yet. 'The foetus' sounded too clinical, but he hadn't had to say that either. She had understood his half-question and a.s.sured him it wasn't harmful to move, to go skiing. Despite obvious discomforts, she was secure in her early motherhood. But as she skied across the bridge of hard-packed snow and hollowed ice, she had no inkling of the power of the water beneath her, the cold or the savage force of the current below.

Naturally the water had a name. The river was called something it hadn't always been called. He didn't feel like saying it. It had its name in the other language, too, older but not as old as the water.

The sound of the water between the stones had existed and still existed, with not a single night's interruption, as long as could be imagined: always. The cold could force it down to a noise under the ice, the cold which felled birds in flight, which killed an old man and his old dog in a badly insulated cottage down by the rivermouth. He had told her about it, a story so old that the cold was the central character, not the old man. Even beavers had probably died then. That was long ago, so far away. New ones had come shuffling along, burying their noses into the muddy tussocks and beginning to dig. But their territory was still as much as half a metre beneath the two of them. Across the snow they traversed the animals' pa.s.sages and holes.

'This place really belongs to the beavers,' he said.

But it wasn't a place. It was events. She had been part of some of them, as a child. He would tell her others. There were things to keep silent about, too. They were not going to pa.s.s the spot where the Dutch had had their tent. Did she know about it?

They had fastened their skis to their boots, Johan's own old wooden ones, and Vaine's. He had found them in the cookhouse and managed to round up three ski sticks for them. They had made their way up, but for long stretches they had slithered on the scrub and moss. The night was light and there was snow up towards Bear Mountain. The river waters roared beneath the bridge of ice.

They came back to Nirsbuan. At first he had thought of stopping overnight there and getting up in the morning blinded by the light as green buds on the birches burst out. But a musty puff of air had hit them as the door opened and they realised it wasn't possible. A blanket on the bed lay entangled with some grubby sheets. He ripped them off so that Mia shouldn't see them, revealing a foam-rubber mattress yellowish brown with age and full of peculiar holes. Maybe mice had taken bits of it down into their nests. A filthy towel hung on a nail by the stove, the name Hotel Winn unfortunately still visible. What kind of people will she think we are? he thought. That was the first time in eighteen years he had thought of the Brandbergs as 'we'.

He had got the stove going but realised they couldn't lie on that damp, evil-smelling mattress. But someone had. Someone had been living there, he could tell from the packets in the cupboard, the new battery radio, the dates on the newspapers. Someone who wasn't there at the moment, but who had recently fried pork in the cast-iron pan and left a layer of fat on the bottom.

The raw cold had driven Mia out of the cottage. She was sitting on the steps, her legs apart, her face raised to the sun and the moist wind. Sounds began to rise from the marshland below, an exhilarated babble rising and falling. Maybe it was the last of the late-night and early-morning delirium; the sound rose now as if trying to stop the light putting an end to the intoxication of the spring night.

She said she had been six when she had heard it for the first time. She hadn't understood what it was at the time. She still thought it sounded feverish, inhuman. And yet like singing or cries.

'The marsh is rutting,' he said.

They listened for a while over their coffee and then walked across the river and the marshes towards the place where they slaughtered reindeer, their faces turned up to the mild drizzle. They could still hear the blackc.o.c.ks when they got to the parking lot.

He had tried once before. That attempt had also been unpremeditated. He had been in ostersund, had three days free and was going to go home to Langva.s.slien. In the evening, he had felt like driving across the border to Blackwater. It was a long way round, and he might have had the notion of staying the night.

He regretted it as soon as he got to Tuvallen, but by then it was too late. The road was deserted, it was January and very cold. The forest was nothing but white wall with black streaks on either side, the road a tunnel in the beam of his headlights. He had met no one since leaving Laxkroken. If his engine packed in, he would freeze to death.

It didn't, of course. He got to Blackwater and parked the car a little way away from the store, leaving the engine running as he went to look at the notice board. These days it was illuminated, otherwise just the same. The thermometer on the wall by the postbox said almost thirty degrees below zero. It was half past eleven at night, not a light in a single window and nothing moving on the road. Of course not.

As he got back into the car, he noticed a light on the other side of the lake. Not still. An uneasy light up on the Brandberg slope. Must be a strong light to be visible across the lake. It seemed to him to be crawling.

Then he remembered Gudrun had told him that Torsten and Per-Ola had bought processors and together they had formed a company. She had been defiantly proud of that development and things had gone well for them. Per-Ola was go-ahead and not afraid of large loans, and Vaine was to work for them as well. But he wasn't a partner in the company.

'Don't you go thinking I won't make sure of your rights,' she had said, touching in her determined eagerness. She always ensured his rights. She explained that he would inherit from Torsten and with that a share in the company. He needn't be afraid of losing anything by the formation of the company.

No, he wasn't afraid. He didn't think he had any right to inherit from Torsten. But he didn't say so. The processor hadn't become real to him until he found himself sitting in the car watching the play of that crawling light far up on the mountainside.

That must be it. Per-Ola and Vaine working despite the cold night, presumably working in s.h.i.+fts. If they let it stand still, they couldn't pay the interest.

Twenty-seven degrees below zero. The white light crept along the mountain slope, playing jerkily across the falling trees. The machine up there must be roaring and creaking, but nothing could be heard across the silent white lake.

Crawling light. Crawling over all that sleeping life. All that s.h.i.+tty life that didn't deserve the warmth. Didn't deserve the song, the playing and the water. Not even leaves.

It's the hatred in me that crawls in the forest, he thought. I am a part-owner of a processor. It has to be worked day and night, winter and summer. It costs money, it costs lives. The hero in the driver's seat with his head beneath the stars is working harder than I have ever worked. I'm nothing but a part-owner. It's the hatred in me crawling along up there.

He had driven away from the streetlights that had appeared since he was a boy, and on into the darkness on the Norwegian side. He had been afraid of the cold, afraid of his engine failing. But he got away from there.

This time he had made another attempt and it had gone well. Quite well, for he had avoided the house. It worried him that Gudrun might hear on the grapevine that he had been in the village with Mia Raft. He thought of phoning and explaining as soon as he got back to ostersund. That it was an experiment, and had been done on an impulse. More or less.

Two or three times a year, Gudrun travelled to Trondheim to see him, usually dressed in her best and fairly wrought up. Each time he saw her, she had aged a little. She had some kind of trembling in her hands. She was fifty-six now and dyed her hair black. Johan no longer knew much about her troubles and nothing at all about her everyday life. He had to a.s.sume that much was the same as before, though things had gone well for Torsten. He had several diggers now, a crusher on the other side of the lake and a new gravel pit up by Torsberget. Gudrun's clothes were not cheap and she still drove an Audi. It was new and it was obvious it was her own.

As Johan was sitting in the car waiting for Mia, he looked up towards the house. He could see the kitchen window, the curtains drawn so far across, it must have been almost impossible to look out. Or look in, so perhaps that was the intention. He presumed she was in there moving between stove, refrigerator and sink. The treadmill. Though he knew she had a dishwasher.

He was waiting for Mia. It had gone well. If it hadn't been so filthy and cold at Nirsbuan, and so little wood, he could have stayed another day. Mia had suggested he should go on up to Gudrun and Torsten to get a few hours' sleep. But he drew the line at that. He had driven her up to her mother's cottage, which he still thought of as Aagot f.a.gerli's, and he had slept in the car.

She was asleep, her cheek rounded and s.h.i.+ny with cream, her eyelashes faintly reddish without mascara. He thought his own thoughts when she was asleep.

She was very sleepy in the evenings now she was pregnant. It didn't matter to her if he kept the light on and lay reading. She slept like a child. When she was awake she was very sensible. He reckoned she felt very much at home in the world, that she understood it.

Alone with the lamp lighting up her slightly curly, auburn hair, he felt for the threads that bound her so profoundly to him. Previously he had been turned on like lightning and lived in a state of mild intoxication for a few weeks, particularly in the summer. But since he had grown up, his relations with women had been sensible, at heart perhaps amused. Both ways.

Mia was sensible, and they took it light-heartedly even when desire made them dizzy. She rapidly sobered up again. It amused him that she was always planning outings, maternity leave, work projects. But he liked it. He liked her strong will, as fresh as a clean nut in a young, green but already hardening sh.e.l.l.

There were other things. Finer threads down among the feelings he found difficult to put into words. Then again, it could be expressed brutally simply: when he met Mia it had seemed to him that she had come to take him home.

That was an unattractive thought, but it was there and it worked. Telling her about it, even implying it, would be injudicious. He didn't want Mia to feel like a tool. Nor was she. She was a prerequisite.

When she was asleep, the room turned slightly alien. She had a poster on the wall above the bed with a face and a name on it he didn't recognise, a black singer in mirrored sungla.s.ses. A hat hung over the reading lamp as an extra shade, black and decorated with large cloth poppies. He had never seen her in a hat and couldn't imagine it on her head. He wondered why she had bought it.

She had been disappointed when he had wanted to drive straight back to ostersund. Eventually she would like to visit Torsten and Gudrun. He could foresee it and knew it would happen. But not yet.

She was disappointed but not cross as they drove away. Mia never sulked. Usually she got her own way, and instinctively knew when she should give in. It had been a lovely day despite the rain in the morning and naturally it was not tempting to go back to ostersund. He tried to compensate by taking her out to dinner. She said the salmon tasted musty.

It wasn't off, he would have noticed that. When they got home to her place she vomited. She came out of the bathroom looking determined. She was having some troubles but said they would pa.s.s.

She fell asleep early, presumably because she hadn't felt well. At about nine, he went out and phoned Gudrun. He didn't want Mia to wake and listen to their conversation.

He felt miserable afterwards. Gudrun had never suggested he should come home to Blackwater to see them. This time she had made no comment on their visit. He hadn't thought much about these things before. He looked on the Dorjs as his nearest kin. But since he had met Mia he had started thinking that unnatural.

Basically he knew this had nothing to do with naturalness or nature, but with conventions. But it was all part of Mia's worldly wisdom that she had some respect for them. Reasonable respect.

Several of the humorous, sensible and unconventional women he had taken back home to Langva.s.slien and given a ride behind his sled dogs had balanced along very narrow planks over rus.h.i.+ng water. Over pure chaos.

When he got back, he went to bed and read, but lay there for long spells, looking at her. She was sleeping soundly when the telephone rang. When he woke her and handed her the receiver, she found it difficult to understand what it was all about. It was almost one in the morning. He went out and put on water for tea and made some toast. She usually felt sick when she woke and her stomach was empty. When he brought the tea in, she was still talking, not really saying much, but calming someone. Perhaps succeeding, because in the end she put back the receiver and curled up again.

'Mum's bloke,' she said. 'Torbjornsson. She's gone off somewhere without telling him. Now he's half crazy.'

She fell asleep again without touching the tea. He lay there wondering how he could get her to move in with him in Trondheim. Strong feelings make us mobile. But he still hadn't dared ask her.

In the middle of the night, Birger discovered the shotgun had gone. It was light indoors and he was lying on his back on her bed, still dressed, his head aching fiercely. He had talked to Mia. It was she who had had tea with Annie in the morning. She hadn't been worried. All she said was that her mother had probably taken it into her head to go somewhere.

Mia didn't know what the situation between them was. She had no idea about the telephone calls that morning and evening. She probably thought what was between them was quite practical, an arrangement that secured company for them at weekends and s.e.x without either of them becoming too involved. He had never considered that it might seem like that. It was an unpleasant thought.

For a moment, he had considered phoning the police. Then he had stopped thinking about anything for a long time and just waited. He hadn't really been able to eat anything all day. But he kept spreading b.u.t.ter on pieces of thin crispbread and eating them one after the other. The hours went by slowly. Outside the birds had gone insane. He couldn't understand how she ever got any sleep at all at this time of year.

The kitchen and the living room were still full of fat bunches of flowers the schoolchildren had brought; cowslips, globe flowers and red campion, forget-me-nots with tiny flowers, lilies-of-the-valley, their bells turning brown at the edges. They had plundered the flowerbeds. Even the boys used to bring flowers. They had found wood anemones that had been grotesquely enlarged but still hadn't faded, and they had picked them as if they had a price per kilo on them. And they'd sung to her, sure to have.

They are small religious creatures with no theology, she had once said. They repeat actions without asking themselves what they mean.

But reluctantly, she had been moved and had taken the flowers home. He wanted to throw them out but was afraid that would upset her. They had handed over these fragrances as if apologising for all the musty odours from their clothes, hair and mouths throughout a whole winter.

We are releasing you. Be someone else now. Alone and free.

Her happiness, if it existed, was perhaps linked with solitude. He didn't want to know that. But she had never been inconsiderate towards him. Never gone out without telling him where.

Why had he reached down into the s.p.a.ce between the bed and the wall? He had had no suspicion, because the discovery sent a physical spasm through him, as if he had walked into an electric fence.

Then he leapt up and started searching everywhere for the gun.

The search party for Mia's mother started up at the Stromgren homestead where she had left her car. They had found out that her mother really was missing when Birger had phoned in the morning.

They got into the car as soon as they had had some coffee and when they got to Blackwater several cars were already on their way up. Then everything became slightly more real for Johan. Nonetheless it mostly seemed very strange to be walking with twenty-metre gaps between them from the road across this half-forgotten but familiar territory, his legs apparently remembering on their own all its hollows and mounds. Advancing inwards and upwards, calling out the name of a person he had never met and who was going to be his mother-in-law. Grandmother to his child.

'Ann-iiee!' he called out with the others. 'Ann-iiee!'