Blackwater. Part 31

Then the questions started: 'Why do they have to learn the ikea sofas!'

'Backwards, for Christ's sake. Backwards!'

'What's all this b.l.o.o.d.y nonsense about the electricity being cut off?'

'Mats says he's got a room with five baby rats in a place and he's put the Bessemer process in there. Are you mad? How the h.e.l.l can you teach kids that kind of thing? Rats! And the Bessemer process.'

'Why do you say they've got a house inside their heads and that they have to learn all the rooms in the right order?'

I held up my hands and tried to quieten them.

'May I answer?'

'An amputated foot!' a woman cried out.

'Mats was to give a talk on the refining of iron,' I said. 'The house is an important part of the technique of memorising. That there are five baby rats in a place means that is the fifth place. So there he will presumably remember the Bessemer process.'

'Don't you know yourself what you're teaching?'

'They build their houses on their own. No one has any right to ask them what the buildings look like inside if they don't want to talk about it or draw it.'

'Skeletons! Rats! Blood on the floor. A white lady with no head. 'Tis pure madness. And palaces. Anna-Karin has had to learn a whole palace.'

'Sounds complicated,' said the plumber quietly. 'Isn't it easier to learn the ordinary way?'

That was a question I would have liked to answer, but I wasn't allowed to. And I had wanted to explain about the ikea sofas. But now they started on about the Starhill commune, the smell of goat in skirts, about marijuana and mate tea, about a dead foetus Petrus was supposed to have buried.

'Afterbirth,' I said. 'And I don't live like them nowadays. I have a flat here in Byvngen.'

'Though what sort of furniture d'you have?' cried a woman who had never been to my place. 'Cloths and wooden boxes! And a trestle table.'

The head had got up and kept opening his mouth without getting a word in, but his attempts were not really serious. They were doing his dirty work for him.

'D'you think everything's coming to an end?' cried a fat little woman whose whole figure I had rarely seen because she worked in the kiosk.

'Are you frightening the kids with that!'

'There's no need,' I replied. 'They're frightened enough already.'

They didn't want me as a teacher of their children. Some thought I was mad, and most thought I was a leftie, which was the same thing, though self-inflicted. They demanded that the cla.s.s should have another teacher.

The head came into the firing line now that it was serious, so he had to get to his feet and take the abuse. He stood there in a blazer with huge lapels, tight flared trousers and an open-necked s.h.i.+rt, the points of the collar spread out over his jacket, a silver pendant shaped like a fish dangling at his throat. His hair was brushed forward and grew just below the lobes of his ears, and the shoes he was wearing made him quite a bit taller than he was. I had been wrong to think they were afraid of him. He was one of them. Even though he'd been bright enough to become a head, he still had to remember that his salary was paid by the taxpayer.

No one had had any coffee yet. The thermoses stood untouched on the red paper tablecloths and the pastries still lay there under the clingfilm. Occasionally someone nudged a cup with an elbow or banged the table so hard the china rattled.

'This has got to stop!'

That meant: Annie Raft has to go.

'Otherwise we'll have to go further up.'

That meant the education authority.

Finally we were left alone, he and I. He said he at least partly understood that there was an educational idea behind my exercises with the pupils. But it was all far too original. And as the plumber had said, it seemed simpler to learn things the ordinary way.

'Cicero had that objection to this memorising technique,' I said. 'But he hadn't even a whiff of what frightened them here.'

'Yes, yes,' said the head. 'You're full of ideas and there's nothing wrong with that. But one mustn't frighten the children.'

'I haven't,' I said. 'I've frightened the parents.'

'We've talked enough now. You sleep badly and are rather wrought up. You behaved in a very unbalanced way in the staff room. You'd better take some sick leave and then we'll see.'

I really did feel ill. I was ready to throw up and I had a dreadful headache. It wasn't difficult to stay at home the next day. I had forty-five pastries in the larder.

Going back was more difficult. I decided to leave. After all, I had never meant to end up in Byvngen. I went to Stockholm, thinking of supply teaching until the autumn and seeing what cropped up.

But it didn't work. The city had changed. I remembered it as composed of artefacts, but it was becoming organic, with a substratum of sustenance. A green clump I had never seen before protruded out of the cliff above Slussen. Bad smells were coming from bas.e.m.e.nt windows. The ventilation systems were crawling. The city hadn't stayed in place. It was growing, and smelt of procreation.

In August, the air became difficult to breathe, heavy with humidity and invisible gases. Rats scuttled around in the creeper on the house in Strindbergsgatan where I was staying with Henny. I went back to Blackwater and moved into Aagot's little red cottage by the road. Mia was lodging in Byvngen and came back on the bus at weekends.

I had no idea what I was going to do. But then the teacher who lived in Lersjovik drove off the road on one of the first icy days and broke her arm. She became so scared of the daily drive to Blackwater that she resigned.

My headmaster was also the princ.i.p.al here. But he didn't turn me down. It was probably just as difficult to get teachers to come to this village as it was to get a pastor to stay in Roback. He gave me some fatherly advice. Stick to the curriculum. They'll keep their eye on you. That kind of thing gets around. And one mustn't frighten the children.

No, we mustn't frighten each other with the situation we already live in, which struggles and labours towards its fulfilment. It has neither invention nor direction, and yet it takes on innumerable forms, many of them so complex that some kind of fantasy seems to be indicated. And we mustn't try to predict the bizarre and cruel things that the end will produce before it reaches its own end.

I should have taken it more calmly. And yet the talk about radiation sickness and life without electricity was not that upsetting. For the parents, it was the memory lane that was the real stumbling block. The fact that the children had an inner room that was empty except for fear, they had already sensed. They had one themselves. What frightened them more than anything was that the children might gain access to a large and strange building with many rooms, the contents of which they didn't have to tell anyone at all.

'Mia's mother was a proud creature. She would never have tolerated this defence. No affection that was mixed with shame. And most of all no compa.s.sion.'

'But Mia was magnificent,' said Johan.

She's taken the lead, Birger thought. All his life he'll plod along behind her, looking like this.

'What are you two saying about me?'

Mia had got up.

'We're saying you were magnificent,' said Birger. 'Petrus has an inspiring effect on women. But now I'll have to give the minister some venison.'

'They were just going to use her for their own ends,' Mia said.

'When Annie created Memory Lane, she was surrounded by very p.r.o.nounced opponents,' Birger explained to Johan. 'Dark-blue, true-blue members of the Centre Party. Cautious bourgoisie in Byvngen, who looked on involvement as a sign of mental imbalance I was one of them and irresolute, politically ignorant women. Village women who one day want to live like their forefathers and the next day want to learn English and go to Rhodes with a woman friend. Away from their menfolk. But they leave food ready in the freezer: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 . . . That was their revolution, and it mostly didn't come off. Sometimes they come to life again. You saw them at the community centre. Their aims aren't really dubious.'

'But it was Petrus who took over,' said Mia.

'He has a strong personality.'

'He's an animal. And now he's become trendy as well. A cafe in a red and white cottage. Hand-painted notices. And money from the local authority for courses in ethics. But his breath still smells bad. And he's only interested in one thing: cheese and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g.'

'That's two,' said Birger.

'He was already a dirty old man up at Starhill. We kids thought he was disgusting. He climbed on the ladies. At any time of the day. Well, not on Mum. Don't go thinking that.'

Preferably not, Birger thought.

'Did you find it difficult up there?' Johan asked in a troubled voice.

'No, we had fun. Everyone was kind. To be fair, so was Petrus. They didn't squabble with each other.'

'Was Dan kind to you?'

Birger found it difficult to say the name and felt he had moved closer to the mora.s.s within him. He didn't want to start crying. He was ashamed of these attacks, which came without warning and which Mia regarded with rigid dislike.

'Dan was great. He was so lovely somehow. Though I went crazy when he was with Mum. I wanted him to be with me. She thought I was angry with him. Dan never rowed about anything. He sat there with his long golden hair and laughed at Petrus and the women. Yes he was angry once. Then he went quite crazy. That was all my fault.'

She fell silent.

'What happened?' said Birger.

'I'd found a pair of jeans in that old barn they didn't use. We were always looking everywhere for fun things and there were lots. People had lived there once. We were always digging around and searching, and I found those jeans stuffed under the feedstuffs table. I gave them to Mum because they were too big for me. They were too big for her, too, the legs miles too long. But she was frightfully pleased. She always wore them. Then Dan came home and they had a row about them. He yelled and shouted and I was frightened. That was the only time. But that was because it was my fault. Though he didn't know that.'

'Did Dan know anything about that business down by the Lobber?'

'He knew who the guy in the tent was. They all knew.'

'Annie too?'

'I think so.'

'She never said anything about it.'

'No, they didn't want to talk about it. I've no idea how it all hung together. Though I do know one thing. I had a Barbie boy doll called Ken originally. But we rechristened him, the other kids and I. He was called John Larue. I knew how it was spelt and how it was p.r.o.nounced. I was six. And in some way I have always known that it was the name of the guy in the tent. Us kids knew that.'

Johan hadn't often thought of Ylja. That memory was silent and cut off. A blind alley.

But he had thought about those forests. After almost two decades, he still remembered his dream of flying, without wings of any kind, above a sweet-smelling forest of deciduous trees; late-flowering limes, dark-leaved guelder-rose trees, oaks and chestnuts, each treetop a world of its own. Gigantic ashes, elms with stiff leaves, silvery grey willows by reflecting water. Hazel bushes in airy thickets, washed through with light.

He had thought out the names of the species of trees later. He had liked thinking about that twilight forest and the way he had slowly moved above its treetops in a gliding flight which hadn't surprised him in the slightest.

Gradually he had found out the truth about that roof of foliage, which had looked to him like a billowing floor. Ylja had been right. Europe really had been covered with forests. There had been huge marshland areas and mora.s.ses. Mountain ranges and wide rivers. But most of all forest. Far away beneath the Caucasus, trees had soughed, far out by the sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic.

He regarded his thoughts on forests as respectable, the kind you can dwell on occasionally. But her tall story about the Traveller and the women was not so good. He had never reflected much on it.

One winter afternoon, he had been in the county library in ostersund. He was waiting for Mia, who was out shopping, and he took the opportunity to look through what they had on Sami culture and religion. On a shelf labelled Religious Knowledge, General, his eye fell on a spine with the t.i.tle The Myth of the Traveller.

He could feel a movement in his chest. It was powerful and resembled the swift change of pressure in a bow when the arrow is released. He thought what he regarded as his ego was for ever changing, though the process was slow and with a great many retakes. The idea of an arrow that had been in the firing position for almost two decades amazed him.

The book had been rebound by the library; the paper was s.h.i.+ny and heavy. It had been printed in bo and had a very involved subt.i.tle inside. The author was a lecturer in folklore and religious knowledge called Doris Hofstaedter. It was impossible to get anything out of it by just leafing through and reading at random. When Mia arrived, he took it out on her library card. Laughing, she asked what he wanted that off-putting tome for. For the very first time, he lied to her. He said it dealt with a Sami fairy tale he had heard as a child.

It had happened so quickly that not until afterwards had he realised it was a double lie. He had never heard any Sami fairy tales as a child.

It was a terribly dull book and he never got right through it. It had a footnote system in small print which was the most comprehensive he had ever seen. He gathered that the myth of the Traveller was well known all over Europe. The author accounted for its spread and all the different variations in a thoroughly scholarly manner. There were no modern complications. The women who preserved the myth and who were spread all over the world had been invented by Ylja. He dismissed it as feminist blather, though that was not the way he ordinarily thought. He subst.i.tuted it with fantasies of the kind he had at p.u.b.erty. Ylja had known how to get the blood racing through his head and elsewhere.

She had not been a blatherer. More fervent and stern. Images came to him of her regular features, too boyish to be beautiful, of the coa.r.s.e blonde hair and her body, smelling of sun and dry forest slopes, stretched out on a foam mattress with a yellow and green striped cover. Suddenly they changed. He saw Ylja walking towards the dark house in the dusky night, unsteadily and swerving towards the river. All the time she was singing: 'Below the belly hangs his p.r.i.c.k like a little yellow tulip.'

'What are you thinking about?' said Mia.

Well, what was he thinking about? He wasn't thinking at all, just staring at images. One of them ought to have disappeared in the shedding of sh.e.l.ls and emptying of content he had thought was the process that const.i.tuted his ego. And the other was one he had never known he had. He was feeling like a very old person. He had heard that old people could haul up fresh memories from the well of the past.

At first he thought Ylja must have read the book. Then he saw that it had come out two years after their stay in Trollevolden. But what does a lecturer absorbed in a major work of learning on the myths of wandering do? Lectures about them, of course, runs seminars. Ylja must have been one of a group of young students at a seminar in bo. Future scholars of religion.

No that was too ridiculous. She had been studying another subject and had gone to the lectures out of curiosity. Only someone who approached the subject as pure entertainment could twist the myth of the Traveller round in the way she had done.

It then struck him that if Ylja had belonged to a seminar group, the lecturer would know her. If he described the fair, boyish, perhaps rather caustic girl student, it was possible her teacher might remember her.

He wasn't keen on the idea. He didn't want to go to the police. That was like putting your hand down into dark waters and fis.h.i.+ng up G.o.d knows what kind of trash. He wanted to know what would be brought to light before he went to the police with it.

Things were all right between him and Mia now. But fragile. It had been that way ever since he had understood she could make unpredictable decisions.

He telephoned bo Academy and asked for Doris Hofstaedter. She turned out to have become a professor and had moved to the University of Helsinki. The receptionist was willing to give him the university number, but he asked for her home number. She hadn't got it, and anyhow she wouldn't have given it to him just like that, she said ungraciously. She probably thought he was going to trouble the professor with rude words and heavy breathing.

It wasn't difficult to find her number and address through directory enquiries. Professor Hofstaedter did not suffer from female paranoia. He dialled the number, not expecting her to answer herself. It was summer and hot. Helsinki must be a desert. But Doris Hofstaedter was there and picked up the phone and answered absently and only barely politely.

He regretted it immediately, but had the presence of mind to speak in Norwegian. He asked her whether she was going to be at home over the next few days and would she be prepared to accept a large package of books from Oslo University. She was. What books were they?

'I can't say,' he said. 'They're all wrapped up.'

He noticed with some excitement that he was able to lie swiftly and not without ingenuity.

He had imagined flying to Helsinki, a quick interview with the professor, then a trip to bo in a hired car to check seminar lists of eighteen years ago. After that, the tracking-down would be trickier, he realised that. But he felt luck was on his side.

Birger Torbjornsson wanted to come along. That was inconvenient, but hard to refuse, considering the sorry state he was in, pacing round his untidy apartment like a large, sick bear.

He wanted to go to the police with the name John Larue. Mia didn't think they would attach any importance to the name of a doll. Only if a John Larue were missing would there be any action. And no missing person had been reported at the time of the event by the Lobber.

Johan did not tell Mia much about the woman who had given him a lift and might be presumed to have met Larue. It wasn't just because he felt sorry for him that Johan took Birger with him. He was afraid he might talk too much. Not without shame, Johan remembered that he had preached openness to Mia. But he drew the line at Ylja. He had no wish to appear as an ardent and gullible adolescent.

Birger turned their trip into a long-winded affair. He found out that a package including boat fare and hotel room would be cheapest. Johan had heard that Birger seldom went anywhere except Blackwater for his holidays. Now he turned up lugging a heavy old leather suitcase. He found it difficult to adapt to the rules of ma.s.s tourism. He tried to buy some liquor without queueing, and to joke with the exhausted Finnish cleaners. When they went into the dining room, he was drawn to the laden buffet table. He described how during his training he had cultivated bacteria in a nutrient jelly that looked exactly like the aspic from which the salmon now stared at them with white eyeb.a.l.l.s. He recounted this without lowering his voice, and aroused animosity.

They had shrimps, drank Finnish vodka and juice, and largely did what was expected on board s.h.i.+p. After coffee, Johan worked a one-armed bandit a few times and lost. Birger put some coins in and had a go. The apparatus gave a rattle and spewed a flood of silver coins into the cup. It kept on spitting them out, squealing and flas.h.i.+ng its lights. The cup overflowed and the coins streamed all over the carpet at their feet. People stopped and watched. Birger stood quite still while Johan tried to gather up the abundance.

Then Birger started to weep. He remained upright, but otherwise he wept in the same way as he had done when he had brought coffee to Johan in bed in his living room, his mouth gaping open, nose and eyes streaming. His regular, snuffling gasps for breath soon left him in a state of cramp that made his chest and gradually also his capacious stomach tremble and bounce.

People laughed and he was given encouraging cries. They thought he was weeping for joy. Johan wanted to take him away, but, unable to leave all those gapers the money, he knelt down and collected up every single coin, while Birger stood there exposed, sobbing loudly and dribbling mucus and tears.

When Johan piloted him into their cabin and was trying to get him into bed, Birger struck his head on the top bunk. The pain stopped the convulsive crying. Exhausted, he sat on the bunk, leaning forward. Johan put a wet towel across his forehead and placed Birger's hand on it to hold it there. Then Johan opened the whisky bottle he had bought and drank almost half a tooth-gla.s.s. He was not sure it was good for Birger to drink whisky after his attack of weeping, but compromised by just giving him a splash.