Blackwater. Part 28

'What are we going to do about it, then?' said Birger.

'Why did you come here?' said Mia quite sharply.

'You know why. I promised to look after Saddie.'

She had started sieving flour into a bowl.

'Are you going do some baking?' he said stupidly.

'I'm sieving this to see if there are any weevils.'

He was suddenly unreasonably angry with her. Out with it all, he thought. Everything you've thought, all the criticism you've had to hold back for you did respect her, after all you can release by doing things now, cleaning and tidying up. Eliminating. You say it's going to be a summer place. But it won't be for long. I think you'll sell it, he said silently behind her back. And once you've sold it you'll soon have forgotten.

Christ, how unpleasant the young can be! Christ, how unpleasant and vile everything is! Living and struggling and then falling apart because of an anomaly in cell formation, or a bunch of bacteria, or shotgun pellets or water!

Enjoined through water. Why had she said that? 'I am enjoined through water.'

Living and talking including a whole lot of quasi-religious c.r.a.p and trying to hold on although all the time you know you're going under no, being dissolved. Truly enjoined. That's loathsome. That's unendurably loathsome. But all the same, the worst of all is the vile way young people pretend not to notice. No, they simply don't know anything about it. They have everything in their grasp. They plan! And some never grow up.

Johan was looking at him and Birger sensed he had noticed his anger. He turned round and went out. Saddie stayed where she was under the table. The gateau was melting and there were flies on it. Unplanned, he thought maliciously. Something not going the way it was supposed to after all.

'I'm a useless person,' Annie used to say. Her words were as clear in his head as if he had just heard her voice. In this warm air, heavy with scents, in the rustle of the aspens. Those sober words: 'I'm a useless person.

'I can't see any particular point in my life. I read a lot and I like being alone. I like being with you, too. And I like the birds and the sound of rain.'

The rustle of the aspens, he thought. And the dry clicks in the autumn when their leaves fell to the frosty ground. She used to stand here on the steps and listen to them.

Slowly his anger and loathing dispersed, but he was very tired now, almost exhausted. He took the gateau with him and went back into the kitchen.

'I'll take Saddie and go home,' he said. 'That's best. But you two must think this over.'

'There's nothing to think over,' said Mia.

Birger didn't reply. He went over to the cupboard under the sink and opened it.

'What do you want?'

She sounded sharp.

'Saddie's food bowl. I want her lead, too. And that old sheepskin. Then I'll go.'

Johan was the one to go out with him, his hands still thrust into his pockets. He was looking rather stiff. He delayed their leavetaking down by the car, as if afraid of returning to the kitchen and Mia. Things are going off the rails for them, thought Birger. Perhaps quite unnecessarily. He had that helpless feeling he had had ever since they had started looking for Annie. The feeling of complicity and impotence.

The village had never had so many cows as during the war, and full-cream milk could be bought well into the 1950s. Later the hay meadows had grown meagre and matted, the grazing lands were overgrown, and the birch shoots had moved in, as did the ineradicable willow.

Then finally the tourists came. They wanted to see the river Lobber. A society that absorbs its life force out of fatal violence has to pay tribute to the village and its mystery because it is unsolved. There the force is unfettered.

That had been Annie's belief. That was the way she used to talk.

If you solve the mystery, the force runs out and the village becomes a dying village among many others. A place no one sees and no one knows about. The force goes over to the man who did it and you never solve his mystery. Yet it is just as attractive as the smell of well-hung meat. His dark destiny is transferred to you in swift electronic flashes. But the village dies.

And she had been consistent, he thought bitterly. Never a single contribution towards weakening the enigmatic force of the village.

After saying goodbye to Birger, Johan Brandberg walked back up the steep slope to the house and found he was out of breath. That annoyed him, since he considered himself fit and athletic, but the air was very heavy and humid, a spicy, cloyingly sweet scent coming from the roses. They were an old-fas.h.i.+oned kind which could be found in several places in the village, a multi-petalled, deep-purple rose. It flowered in abundance and the heavy heads hung over the stone wall terracing the slope in front of the shed. Many of the blooms had faded now, displaying interiors of decay and dissolution. They looked shameless at this stage and those still flowering were full of hover flies and b.u.mblebees. Such an abundant species should be checked before it got to the obscene stage. He wondered whether Annie used to deadhead them. He didn't know much about her. Anyhow, Mia hadn't done it.

He was annoyed with Mia. And worse. But he had said nothing until his thoughts had turned to the odd demand that she ought to have thought about deadheading the roses.

She had been clearing out and cleaning for three days now. It was hard, dirty work, and painful for her. She was trying to keep the shock and the draining grief at bay. Maybe she was just postponing them, but he couldn't reproach her for trying to do so by hard work and an effort of will. She was pregnant and wanted to be happy. She had used that word. He sensed that she meant something more modest, simply a state that was good for the baby. She was using the word baby, now.

He had realised she was protecting him and had expected her to talk to him about it. But she hadn't. He had never imagined living with Mia in an atmosphere in which it was so difficult to breathe. Nor did he understand how he had accepted it for over a month. Maybe that was because he wasn't sure what she meant by protecting him. Whether she really meant to.

It was all very confusing and burdensome. He sat down at the garden table, knowing she could see him from the kitchen. The police had asked her whether she knew who it was Annie might have seen. Had Annie said anything when they were having tea together that morning? No, she hadn't. What about when Mia had come that night? No, she hadn't woken then.

'Then your fiance didn't drive the car right up?'

'No, he didn't.'

Just as simply and clearly as when she had replied to Birger.

'Yes he did.'

He had probably pushed it aside, but he could no longer do that. If she was protecting him, then that was because she thought there was something from which he needed protecting. Didn't she realise that it made it worse? That was what made breathing so difficult.

He got up and went inside. She had her back to him, still busy taking things out of the larder.

'Has he gone?'

'Yes. He was miserable.'

'I couldn't stand him any longer,' she said. 'I'm sorry. He's like a wet old sponge.'

'You don't want him to tell the police that I was the person your mother saw?'

'That's unimportant. Nothing but unpleasantness would come of it. The fact that she saw you and you look like that guy means he's right. She saw someone. She was frightened. That's why she took the gun with her.'

'I was that guy.'

It looked extremely peculiar, but she actually went on pouring rice out of one carton into another which wasn't quite full.

'It was me running up the path that night,' said Johan. 'I was on my way to Nirsbuan. I don't even know if I was on my way there. I just ran. But then I got there and slept for an hour or two. In the morning I paddled down to the Raback and got a lift. Your mother meant me when she phoned Birger.'

'A foreigner?'

'A Lapp.'

He said the word with an unpleasant sting he himself thought sounded childish.

'She'd only just come here. I probably looked like a foreigner to her. Asian, she thought. Mongoloid, some would say. I had long hair at the time. It was darker than it is now.'

'So what?' said Mia.

What he was afraid of had already occurred.

'Mia, you didn't tell the police the truth. You told them I didn't drive you right up to the house.'

'Did I?'

That made him angry.

'You're not being honest now,' he said. 'What are you afraid of? At least admit it to yourself. I did not stab two people to death in a tent later on that night. I did not go after her with her own shotgun and shoot her. You know that perfectly well. I was with you in ostersund.'

'When I woke up in the night you weren't there.'

'I'd gone out to phone Gudrun.'

'You went out to phone?'

This should never have been said. It should never have been thought. It was only some kind of delirium of words.

'Mia, you wouldn't even dream of protecting me if you really thought so badly of me. But if you go on being devious, you'll get into a bad mood and start thinking ill of me.'

'Being devious? Am I the one being devious?'

She had said so much that afternoon. Once he found himself on his own on a forest road just north of Lersjovik he realised he had gone straight into the kitchen and caused the row himself. He had intended to be open with her and force her to be open and to stop deceiving herself. He wanted to live in clarity with Mia. In dry air. He still found it difficult to see what was wrong with such a project. He had told her he had grown up in an atmosphere of silences and concealment, but had managed to get out of it.

'I ran away from it. I know quite a lot about the hatred generated in that kind of sludge of silences and suspicions. When my mother was twenty-one, she became pregnant. I've no idea what her hopes or plans were. I only know that the father of the child my father, I mean was married. He was a Sami like her. She started housekeeping for Torsten Brandberg, who had lost his wife and had been left on his own with three boys and a baby. I don't know whether Gudrun decided to acquire a father for her child or whether it just happened. Anyhow, Torsten probably thought he was the father when he married her. But he must have gradually realised he had been deceived. Look at me. I don't look particularly Swedish. I looked even less so when I was a child. I don't think anything has ever been said. I'm convinced they just went on and on saying nothing. But I grew up in that mess of suspicion and humiliation and minor racist outbursts, protected by a powerful force. Mother-love, Mia! Watch out for that.'

'You're mad,' she said, quietly and bitingly.

'Yes! Mother-love has thick, thick blood. It has substances you find in mares and female rats. It's good for eighteen months. Fitting and necessary. After twenty-four months it has to become human. Humanistic. Even dry and matter-of-fact. It has to acquire an element of indifference. Of consideration for other things. I ran away from it. I don't want my child to grow up in that thick, murky soup. I want you and I to know exactly where we stand.'

'Then why didn't you say you were the person Mum saw?'

'I'm saying it now.'

'You never said a word about it until you had to. I could have lived my whole life with you without knowing you were by the Lobber that night.'

'But it had nothing to do with you. It was long before your time.'

'I was there.'

'You were six.'

'Is everything that happened to you before I grew up to be discounted? Is that not part of you?'

He remembered the conversation, or the quarrel, or the confessions, as nothing but retakes. Sometimes an outburst became something to hold on to in the flood of repet.i.tions, in the increasing disintegration.

'I think you're horrible!'

He tried to remember that soberly as well. That meant, You frighten me. Everything you've been involved in frightens me. But it made no difference. He remembered the feeling even better, the fierce jab that had caught him unawares. Yes, he was also frightened, though he had expressed it more soberly than she had.

'Now you're being illogical, Mia.'

They were both on holiday and had been going to put Annie's house in order, then go home to Langva.s.slien to fish and walk in the mountains. Now she said she was going to Stockholm, because she was feeling sorry for her grandmother and would like to go and look after her. She could go to land with her.

He couldn't imagine Henny Raft wanting to leave her little flat and walk on her swollen feet up the land-ferry gangway. She would rather stay at home and feed her gulls and crows and squabble with the neighbours and the public-health authority about the matter. She was considered a character (by those who did not consider her a dotty old bat who let crows and gulls s.h.i.+t all over the balconies) and she lived up to the image with determined dignity.

He ought to have pretended that it was good, or at least reasonable, for Mia and her grandmother to go to land. But he was caught in the process of grinding disintegration, and tried to convince her it was something else she wanted, not just to look after her grandmother.

It was all fairly simple, he realised that afterwards. She wanted to be left in peace for a while. But he couldn't leave her in peace. He wanted everything to be all right. They would sleep together, talk about the child, walk in the mountains, go fis.h.i.+ng, take photographs he wanted it all to be normal again now, once and for all.

Just because of that, he made her say things that should never have been said. He wanted to talk about the baby and she didn't. She said it wasn't certain there would be a baby. He ought to have left it at that, but he was scared and blurted out: 'You won't have a miscarriage now, that's not likely, so what do you mean?'

She never said it. But her tone of voice was cold and conclusive when she told him that she had no intention of making the same mistake her mother had made.

'I know what I'm doing. I wanted to be pregnant and I became pregnant. But I've no intention of raising a child on my own. That's a wretched existence.'

That could have been an a.s.surance that they would stay together. But he wasn't sure. She packed her belongings and emptied the fridge. They hadn't eaten and she did not ask him whether he wanted anything. They had arrived in separate cars, meaning to take a whole lot of Annie's things to ostersund. Now Mia left the cardboard boxes in the kitchen and maintained that she was going to see her grandmother.

He drove ahead of her towards town. He thought they had agreed to stop and rest at her usual places, but as he turned off into a forest track north of Lersjovik, she drove past him and disappeared round the bend. It was absurd, so childish, he found it hard to grasp that it was also serious and alarming. That his only hope now was that thick, thick blood. The mother substances. A soup that eventually would be sufficiently strong and murky to stop her putting a clinical end to everything.

He had seen a great many dead people over the years. And he had also seen relatives beside their dead. Some caressed them, but most observed a rigid decorum, sitting upright on a chair, waiting out the minutes seldom a matter of more than minutes. A wake was just as unthinkable as breast-feeding a child for years.

Someone collapsing and weeping or screaming was unusual. Most people knew themselves, and if they sensed that they would not be able to bear it, they declined.

Annie had sat with two fingers on the dead baby's cold skin. She had put the tips of her fingers where the chest sloped down towards the armpit. He had not understood why.

She had driven in her own car from Blackwater. Mia had had to stay behind with Aagot. Annie's suitcase had been packed and ready for a week or two, and she had intended to go to ostersund maternity hospital. At Offerberg she was taken by surprise when the waters broke. She had had no idea the course of events could be so much swifter the second time she gave birth.

She drove from Offerberg to Byvngen, stopping each time a pain overcame her. In Tuvallen she had to take a taxi. She arrived in Byvngen pale, angry and already becoming exhausted. It was a quick delivery. After all these years, Birger could still remember his encouraging cries to her. But memory had distorted them, at first they had been hearty, then gradually cynical and inappropriate. The ironic twist had of course been totally impersonal inhuman. He was not cynical. He had wished her well and had thought everything would be all right.

The baby was not born, it came out. The umbilical cord had twisted tightly round its throat and strangled it.

He couldn't remember if he had tried to comfort her at the delivery table. He must have done. However wretched he had felt, there were words and sentences he always used. On the other hand, he remembered going in to see her an hour or so later. That was when she had asked to see the baby.

He had been very uneasy, not least because she had shown no emotion. She was pale and not really communicating, just making sure she had her own way. He hadn't been able to think of any way of refusing.

The baby was female, a large well-formed foetus. She had never opened her eyes. Her skin was bluish and covered with glistening foetal fat. He had wiped her as clean as he could and wrapped her in a large white towel without covering her. He left the door of the treatment room open and in person went to fetch Annie Raft, manoeuvering the bed with some difficulty; he was not used to the task. But he hadn't wanted the a.s.sistants to have anything to do with it and had waited until the evening when only the receptionist on duty and the night nurse were in the building.

His idea had been that she could glimpse the child through the door and decline in time if she felt she couldn't bear it. But she had him push the bed right in and asked him to move it closer. Finally, she had put the forefinger and middle finger of her right hand on the cold, blue skin and held them there for a long spell. It looked like when two fingers are laid on the Bible to take an oath. In his mind, he always thought about this incident, which he didn't understand, as the time when he saw her swearing on the child.

He himself could not have borne to see Annie. But he had had to. And, he thought afterwards, 'bear' is an empty word. Just a kind of exclamation. You bear it. You put two fingers on what has happened and feel it.

Birger Torbjornsson lived in a yellow brick building in the square in Byvngen. The police station and the chemist's were next door with the venetian blinds down. It was Sunday and the supermarket across the square was closed. Birger was so pleased to see him when he arrived, Johan was ashamed.

The flat had three rooms. The living room was overfurnished. Johan recognised the pale grey-blue sofa from the old house, and the tapestries on the wall behind it. But there were bizarre elements in the subdued decor. He remembered Birger had lived with a woman who was a vet. She had probably rebelled. But Barbro Lund's sobriety still dominated, although transferred to a rented apartment, dusty and broken up by colourful cretonne. He had a feeling Birger seldom used the living room. It smelt unaired.

A half-open door in the hall led into a room where he kept his skis, hunting rifle, boots and fis.h.i.+ng rods, as well as the winter tyres for his car. Presumably anything of value got stolen from the bas.e.m.e.nt storerooms. He had a desk in his bedroom, overflowing with papers and files, a locked medicine cupboard on the wall and his medical bag jammed on the bookshelf. Johan wondered why he kept a stethoscope and stainless-steel bowls on the shelves. Did he have private patients? The room was rather grubby for a surgery, but the medical utensils and the carelessly made bed reminded Johan of the vets' surgery in the community centre in Langva.s.slien. Saddie was lying on her sheepskin in the middle of the floor. She raised her head and wagged her tail a couple of times.