Blackwater. Part 38

'What did he say?'

'I don't really remember. That he'd found your moped up where the path ended.'

'Up by the river?'

'Yes.'

'What a s.h.i.+t he is!'

'He's the only one of the brothers you've ever had anything in common with.'

'I had nothing in common with him. How could I have done?'

'He said you used to take turns in guarding the buzzard's nest. That you thought Lill-Ola had taken the chicks and was going to sell them. There'd been a Dutchman in the store that afternoon. And the chicks had gone. He thought you'd been . . . you'd just gone on stabbing. At the tent.'

She fell abruptly silent, her face floating out in the lamplight. She had bent back her head, with her mouth wide open. She looked as if she were in pain. He thought about birth pains. But she was quite quiet now.

'How could you have believed him?' he whispered. She didn't answer for a moment. Her lips looked stiff.

'We didn't talk about it all that much. No one at home wanted to say it straight out. We were trying to help you.'

For a moment they looked each other straight in the eye.

'Why didn't you tell us?' she cried. 'You seemed to be afraid of being caught. Why did you agree to move to Langva.s.slien if you hadn't done anything!'

'I thought Torsten was fed up with me. I'm not even his son.'

'What did you say?'

'I'm not his son. We'll have to talk about that some time or other.'

She snorted.

'Are you laughing?'

'Well, what else can I do? Are you saying you're not Torsten's son?'

'I'm Oula Laras's son. The man you were with before Torsten.'

She had clasped her hands and was moving her head, rocking it. Suddenly she reminded him of his grandmother, an old woman rocking her head.

'My dear child,' she said. 'I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Oula Laras! Of all people.'

'Am I wrong?'

'Yes. I've never had anyone except Torsten.'

She was looking at him as if she had never really seen him before. Her eyes slid over his pullover and tight leather trousers. She snorted again, almost imperceptibly this time. But it was ridicule. He could see every s.h.i.+ft in her expression.

'Antelope trousers,' she said. 'Aren't they? Leather trousers. Made of South American antelope skin. Cost four thousand kronor. Oh, so you thought you were Sami? Totally? I ought to have known. The way you carried on about our people's old sacrifical places and all that.'

She thrust her head forwards and stared at him.

'You've never been right down in the s.h.i.+t.'

He couldn't imagine her having been there, either. But he didn't dare say anything.

'We had to go into the privy to speak our own language. My teacher wasn't exactly on the right side. Not like yours, petting the dear little Lapp children. Telling them about the troll drums and all that stuff. When I went to school, they made you ashamed of being a Lapp, like having vermin or tuberculosis. And we didn't even own any reindeer. Dad was a drunk. Did you know that? Did you know your grandfather was a drunk? Well, now you know, anyhow. He sang and drank and talked s.h.i.+t. He wasn't violent. Only silly. I can't stand the way people are now collecting the Sami songs and all that. Singing and singing and singing. Do you know what it means to be poor, Johan? p.i.s.s-poor. 'Patch-pants Lapp, Lapps are c.r.a.p,' the kids used to say, turning their backsides on you. Oh, no, Johan. No ancient places of sacrifice. That isn't what we went around thinking about. But electricity! And patterned sweaters and a stainless-steel sink. Even your aunt Sakka dreamt Swedish dreams.'

Sakka had read the weekly magazines. And saved them all up. Taken them with her up to Langva.s.slien in bundles tied up with string. The Pergutt and Johan had found them in the attic and Sakka had laughed. She remembered how she had tried to forget she had short little legs, a round bottom and dead-straight hair.

'Sakka laughed at those magazine dreams,' said Johan. 'I know she did.'

'She did a complete about-turn as best she could when she married Per Dorj. Borrowed a silver collar for the wedding. Got herself a Sami costume, though it wasn't real wool. Now she's on every single committee there is and Per is chair of the Sami village. But that doesn't make the sun turn.'

'I think they do it well,' said Johan. 'All the same.'

'Sakka's southern Sami is spoken by a few hundred people. Did you know that? A few hundred!'

Yes, Sakka tried to get the sun to turn and the mountain birch to grow with its roots up in the air. She loved her language. But perhaps it had already been squeezed to death under the synthetic material. A stronger myth had swallowed hers. He had thought so himself, many a time. But living up there was so easy. For him it was a life of Sundays; winter life with the dogs, and branding the calves, fis.h.i.+ng and walking in the summer.

'I suppose they do the best they can,' he said. 'Hanging on. Like everyone living here. There's no difference between the Sami and the others in that respect. They make do somehow. It can't be all that grand. They try to live a life that somehow connects to the past. And most of them want to remember. Not everyone can build roads for the company. Not everyone is involved in turning this into the Area.'

'Yes, they are.'

The treetops. The sleeping birds. Sparks between the trees. No more memory here, but a tumour, growing as fast as the destruction.

The Area has no paths. Here are steep slopes and rubbish, stones, log stacks, scrub. A network of roads out on the Area. A system of road networks running out to the cleared areas. Rubble after dynamiting along the roadside slopes. Shattered stony gravel. Dry root systems. Oil drums. Torsten has built the network of roads. Do you hate him for that? Do you hide in the treetops, creep along paths under capercaillie spruces that are no longer there? Then you're lost in the cancer that is called longing.

Hate you. Know what you did, what you took part in. It was the haste, nothing else. The great haste. Everyone was in such a hurry, hurrying towards death.

Paths run and disappear like roads, like forests. But it was fatal that it all went so quickly. Now you have only the presence and a hole of hunger.

Hate you.

Bend over your reflection in the water and hate.

She said it so quietly, he had to lean over towards her.

'Yes, everyone. You, too. And Annie Raft. Though she thought she was so much better than the rest of us. But all the same, she was involved in it.'

'Did you hate her?'

What a word. She didn't reply.

But she does hate. I have never dared disturb my hatred. She touched on hers, and that was enough. It had been sleeping so lightly.

What shall we do with this hatred of ourselves of the devastation? What shall we do? It fills our mouths. Rotten. Bitter. A taste we don't recognise. An unfamiliar vomit.

I would like to glide above it all like Ylja, with ridicule, with sarcasm, with affection. Like gliding above the treetops, above forests on fire, like vapour. Or just work, eyes closed, work to heal, like Birger. Healing. a.s.suaging.

But what do you do with the weather? You make forecasts. You provide a service. Five days at a time. Small bursts of controlled future. An ingratiating magic.

'It's over, Johan. A few hundred people. The northern Sami language will probably remain for a while. Nostalgia, it's called, so I've learnt. That's all right for cultured people. Those who write and dance and carry on. But the reindeer owners drive their herds with scooters these days. That's not actually Sami culture. It's crude. It's Swedish. They search and drive with helicopters and move the creatures to summer grazing in long-distance trailers. They're living another life now. We're living another life. But we are alive.'

'You took part in rejecting the old life,' said Johan. 'At least Sakka didn't do that. Apart from daydreaming over weekly magazines for a while, as a teenager.'

'Yes, I took part. From shame. From compulsion. From a longing for something else as well. I was only human; perhaps human first and foremost. Even a Lapp can long for electricity. But you, you're a Sami. In antelope trousers.'

'You don't have to mock me,' he said. 'I believed it.'

'The time has come to stop now, then. Thank Torsten and the forest roads for the life you've been given. School and university and all. And that you were able to live with Sakka and Per. He has paid every day for you. I wasn't going to let one single insane event ruin your whole life. A sixteen-year-old. Who was frantic.'

'But it wasn't me!'

'And I wasn't going to let that teacher destroy your whole life, either. When everything had gone so well. Just as I'd thought it would. As long as you had the chance to get away from all that, to forget it as if it had never happened.'

'But you were wrong!'

She either didn't hear him or didn't want to listen any longer.

'She poked her nose into everything. Asking questions and digging up the past. You've no idea what she's been like here. How she's interfered in everything although she wasn't even born here. Out of curiosity, and because she thought she knew everything better than anyone else. When Magna Wilhelmsson told us at county fairs about Jonas in Brannberg, who was your great-grand-father, I'll have you know, she got up afterwards and said that Magna had forgotten to mention that he had had children with both the sisters up there. His wife and her sister. And she said you mustn't forget the near-starvation and the tuberculosis and the incest, when you talk about what it was like before. You couldn't just talk about what hard-working people they were, how fine Grandfather's stonemasonry was and the songs your auntie sang. Annie Raft poked and pried and interfered, and I don't think she ever grasped that these were the relatives of living people she was talking about. The truth must out, she said. We mustn't forget. And then she came and started digging into what had happened down at the Lobber!'

'She saw her daughter together with the person she thought had done it. She wanted to protect her child.'

But that didn't get through to her. She's the only one with a child, he thought.

'Mia and I are going to have a baby,' he said.

Then she really did look at him.

'That's impossible!'

Indeed, it was irretrievably difficult. Annie and Gudrun. The two grandmothers. Everything would come out over the years. It was too black. Too extreme. Condemning a child to such knowledge, even if it came trickling in late and perhaps diluted and falsified.

'It'll have to be possible,' he said. He felt he didn't want to talk to her about it. It simply had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Deliverance may come to the person who hates. Sakka's laughter. Her good-natured casualness. Johan seemed to see before him the piece of elastic that joined b.u.t.ton and b.u.t.tonhole in Mia's jeans. The way it stretched and bounced.

'Lie down on the sofa,' he said to Gudrun. 'Try to sleep for a while. It may be a long time before Birger Torbjornsson phones.'

She actually obeyed him. He drew the blanket over her, pulling it right up to her chin. When he brushed her hands, they were cold.

Things between Gudrun and him would be much as before, though he would be the one to go to see her occasionally. Torsten and she would probably have to move later, when she came back home. They would get older. Perhaps in a flat. Torsten would not live to old age there.

Torsten. He visualised him as he had seen him under the porch light beside the dark, s.h.a.ggy wall of hops. Thinner, more worn and greyer than he had thought it possible for him to become.

The person who hates may be delivered. In this incredibly untidy existence. And all the insanity we have been part of. To some, deliverance comes like a laugh. Well good heavens! We have to make our way somehow.

But why doesn't it come to us all? he thought childishly. My mother. There's a hole where she used to be. A hole that is now closing.

He went round feeling the radiators. Saddie was lying in the hallway, staring silently at the door, and he realised she hadn't been out since Birger and he set off that afternoon. He let her out and quickly locked the door again.

He was frightened of Bjorne. He had no difficulty imagining him down at the Lobber. He had seen him slaughtering beasts. He had always been the one to do it. Pigs. Ram lambs. He could see his face as he thrust in the knife. A rigidity, teeth. It was called an archaic smile. Most people saw it only in museums. But it was alive and ecstatic.

Johan stood holding the blind in the kitchen slightly away from the window, watching Saddie squat and urinate for a long time a little way out on the gra.s.s. She wanted to come in again immediately.

When he went into the living room, Gudrun was lying with her eyes closed. It was impossible to know whether she was asleep. The tension had gone from her thin face, now smoothed out and childish. He could well imagine the girl who had read magazines, studying the pink-complexioned women with their hair en bouffant and in rigid waves. Sakka had also told him how they had read about film stars and tried to resemble them. They had gone for Ava Gardner. That was who they wanted to look like. They had wet their hair with pilsner and rolled it tightly on to Grandmother's chamois-leather curlers. They had painted their mouths with a moistened red crayon.

Gudrun's narrow little mouth with its tightly closed lips.

Sakka had laughed at it all. She had laughed so that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s bounced when she told him about it. But the other girl, with her terrible gravity, was now lying on Annie Raft's sofa under a grey blanket, looking as if nothing had happened to her since then.

Solitude. The pattering of mice. Clicks in the stove. Showers of rain on the metal roof. The birches shuddering in the sharp wind from the high mountain. Yellow leaves tearing loose and sticking to the cottage windows.

No shooting for Birger; silent solitude instead. Colour prints of Jesus gave him meek and disturbed looks. He had leafed through Nostradamus, but had given up. Good grief! There was a pack of cards in the table drawer and he played the patiences he could remember: Round the Clock, Four Queens, Solitaire.

Now I am myself, he thought. Whatever is inside here, that is me.

The Kloppen was grey and rough, the waves white-capped. He could just see it when the tops of the birches swayed and formed a gap. Ravens seemed to detach themselves from the sky, shrieking and chattering.

He had quite a lot of food with him, a rucksack full, and he was determined to stay until Bjorne came back. His car had been found just outside the village. He couldn't get anywhere. But Birger didn't want him to be met by police when he came back to the cottage. Then things might go off the rails again.

The police didn't like Birger being there. But he never left the meadow and only seldom the cottage. He chopped a little firewood for himself and took it inside. Made kindling. Tore up birch bark. Went to the privy. Fetched two full buckets of water and heated a pan of water on the stove. Then he washed himself properly. He had put newspapers under the stool the washbasin was on. After that he made coffee.

He realised that this was how you did it. You divided up the day. The evening would come in the end. The radio worked faintly for the first two days, though the batteries were running out. Then it stopped. He was himself.

In the evening he could see the ridges beyond the Kloppen darkening in the autumn twilight. They still had some colour and there was a great deal of gold among it all, dark gold. The greenery was the colour of smoke and earth. There was a smell of smoke. The smoke from his own stove came down when the weather calmed and the landscape smelt like the colours. Twilight thickened more and more. Violet came into the earth and smoke. The clouds behind the ridges looked like gold that had been drawn out of the actual ground. The cookhouse windows glimmered.

He was reminded that there was supposed to be silver in the Kloppen. Down towards the church, just before the mouth of the Roback. A Lapp had seen the vein open one Christmas night. Good Lord!

Three panes were s.h.i.+ny in the cookhouse window, the fourth covered with a piece of cardboard. A crow circled above it all.

If he did not eat and divide the day up into ch.o.r.es, if he lay on the bed listening to what was not human the clicks in the timber walls, the hissing of the sedge then he would soon be on the borderline. But he didn't want that. He preferred to read Nostradamus. At least it had been written by a human being.

It was misty in the morning. He could see nothing, no ridges, none of the waters of the Kloppen, nothing. Out of the marsh rose two or three dense shapes, probably spruces. Anna Starr maintained she had seen Artur Fransa in the marsh water when there was a mist. That he showed himself there. Crazy old women, they must want to be able to see the dead. But why?

The wind got up and the mist vanished. The dense shapes as well. So they hadn't been spruces. Maybe elks.

He looked at the patient forest beneath the northwest wind. The ragged surface of the water. The weeping windows of the cottage.

Find a lair. Crouch down. Creep in. Sooner or later, he was bound to come.

It was night. Birger had been woken so many times by a rustling, thinking it was him. Now he rolled over and longed to return to his shallow, easily disturbed sleep.

The porch door creaked. Then he could faintly hear that he was standing there, sniffing the air. Yes, he could tell by the scent that someone was living here. Sausages had been fried, coffee brewed and the stove was still a bit warm.

'It's only me,' Birger said quietly.