Blackwater. Part 8

'I must get some sleep,' Birger said. 'I'll park somewhere. How are things with Mum?'

'All right.'

'What about you?'

'What d'you mean?'

'I thought perhaps you found it creepy up there.'

'Where?'

'Where it happened. You were quite close.'

There was silence at the other end.

'What?' said Tomas finally. 'I wasn't there. I was at home last night.'

It was past six by the time Birger got home. He had slept heavily and was aching from sitting leaning back against the headrest. Before driving the car into the yard, he stopped to look at the latticework above the veranda and on the balcony.

Behind the house was the hill with the dead aspens. Ten years ago the site had been a sea of wild chervil and summer flowers, a forested hill behind. Abandoned cars had been half-buried in the sea of flowers, as well as broken gla.s.s, old shoes and rotting timber. The ground had been waterlogged and heavily churned up. The madman they had bought it from had had dreams that had never materialised. But there had been red and black currant bushes, twenty-one of them. In amongst all that rubbish, the poor soil had been generous.

After he had driven in, he again stood for a while looking at the balcony latticework, letting his eyes wander down to the fine fretwork details round the veranda still not sc.r.a.ped and following them round a window. Too late, he discovered Barbro's face on other side of the pane. As he raised his hand, she vanished.

She was already on her way upstairs when he got in, and didn't stop when he hailed her. He felt bad about having failed to notice her at once in the window.

'I was looking at the white paintwork,' he said. 'It looks quite good on the balcony.'

He didn't hear her reply; the light steps continued up the stairs.

'I'll start on the veranda next weekend. I'll have to take a week of my holiday.'

She had disappeared into the bedroom. Something had changed again. He knew these imperceptible s.h.i.+fts of ground by now. At first he had perhaps not been sufficiently observant. Or sufficiently wary. But he remembered when she had begun to take to the roads.

That was two and half years ago. She had taken the kick-sled and gone out, instead of sitting at her loom. That was after the meeting with their neighbour and his brother in the forest. Karl-ke and his brother had marked the trees in the line along the neighbouring patch. They had sold their parcel of land to the Cellulose Company.

Barbro had gone out on the kick-sled in the twilight after lunch and stayed out as long as there was still a little red left in the sky. Then she had started doing the same thing in the dark. Birger had checked the sled and nailed on reflectors so that at least she would be visible.

'Grief grows like a foetus,' she said. 'What will come of it all?'

He thought her words were too grandiose. Especially for a parcel of forest. Perhaps also for a miscarriage in the ninth week. She should make pictures of it instead. But the threads were just hanging from the cloth. It used to look industrious with all those multicoloured threads of wool hanging from the tapestry. But now it looked dead. Day after day the same threads hanging in the same way.

At the end of February he had prescribed an antidepressant for her, but it made her feel bad and she soon stopped taking it. She also stopped going out on the kick-sled.

'They're going to clear-fell the whole lot,' she said. 'They're taking down our forest.'

'It isn't ours and you know it.'

'When Karl-ke is free he drives into town and goes dancing at the Winn or else he flies his seaplane. Britt has never set foot in these woods. And I bet Astrid ke hasn't been there for twenty or twenty-five years. She used to go there once in a while to pick berries. But Karl-ke and Britt take the caravan and go to Norway to pick them. On a grand scale. The home forest is just something to clear-fell. So that we can have more advertising b.u.mf from supermarkets to throw into the dustbin. So that Karl-ke can have a bigger Mercedes.'

'A concrete manure pit. That's what it's about. He wants a system for liquid manure. And the patch up here is actually ready for felling.'

'They used to coppice it. They just took what was mature.'

'That's not allowed any more. Now you get a felling plan from the Forestry Department and you have to follow it.'

He had thought they would begin to talk factually about forestry. He didn't approve of the clear-felling, either. But it could at least be discussed. Barbro was sitting with her head turned away.

'Grief is growing,' she said. 'I don't know what to do with it. I feel bitterness and hatred. Maybe that's good. Maybe not. Hatred can be a strength.'

'Psychobabble,' he said, smiling. Perhaps that was rather harsh, he could see from her face. But it had been meant as a joke. They used to be able to joke with each other.

'Up in Alved, they're prepared to freeze to death for their river. The police pulled down their tents. The company takes my forest and Karl-ke gets a bigger car.'

'You can't call the forest yours,' he said, so good-naturedly that she had to understand he thought she was partly right. She knew where the fox lairs were and where the mother elk used to stand with her calf when listening for their footsteps. She had taken him out with her when the Arctic raspberries were ripe and had gone straight to the plants down by the sh.o.r.e. She had made him drink water from the stream because it flowed northwards. Got him out one chilly June night which she said was Trinity Sunday. There had been veils of mist over the wetland meadow by the sh.o.r.e.

'You should weave it,' he said. 'You should weave mouse holes and fox lairs and Arctic raspberry plants. That'd be great.'

'It doesn't help. Tapestries can't stop other forests being felled. The stone where I usually sit and look at the lake has had moss on it as long as moss has existed. Until now. Now the moss will dry out and die. The aspens will die, too, although the company doesn't want them. They'll take them down and let them rot. They're going to fell timber across the stream. Pollute the water with engine oil.'

Later on, all that had taken place, and the aspens had died. Some remained, swaying over the felled area behind the house. But, of course, the autumn storms would bring them down, one by one. It was not good to see. It was d.a.m.ned bad luck and there was nothing they could have done about it. You don't expect people to cut down trees round dwellings. When Barbro and he bought the old house, there had been one owner in between; Karl-ke and Britt had built their villa fifteen years ago.

Towards that summer, two years ago, Barbro had fallen silent. That was long before they arrived with their machines. She would get on with her ch.o.r.es when he came home. Cooking, was.h.i.+ng up. Some tidying-up she hadn't had time to do during the day. But he didn't know what she did during the day. She didn't say much and sometimes just seemed morose, but occasionally she poured out wine for him. She didn't drink much, never had done. But she sat opposite him with her gla.s.s of wine and then she talked. Held him with the wine but not with her eyes.

'Soon time now,' she said.

At that stage, he always knew what she meant, but he skirted the issue.

'Time for what?'

'They've begun clearing the forest road for motor vehicles.'

'That can take years. This little bit is nothing to the company. They'll wait and do it together with something else. That might not be for ages.

'To think the alders are going to die,' she said. 'The alders and the birches and the big spruces and pines up by the ridge. The rowans by the sandpit, the willows, the heather, the whortleberry scrub, the bilberry scrub, the ferns and bracken, the wood sorrel, the little woodland mere, the great incredible swaying violet forest of Geranium silvatic.u.m, the horsetail, the wrinkled p.r.i.c.kly cap. All of them will dry out. Be burnt off. I was allowed to have it for ten years. Now it's finished.'

'You always say that you know what you're party to merely by living in a Western country,' he said.

'Maybe I don't want to be party to it any longer.'

That was the worst; he never knew whether she was declaiming or whether it was real pain. He could never decide. Previously he had believed her when she said things hurt. And were hurting now. But was she hurting in the way she said?

'They have the law on their side. They're even rewarded for it. Big Mercedes, house, seaplane.'

She refilled his wine gla.s.s and he grew sleepy. But she was cross if his eyelids began to droop. He tried to pull himself together.

'Do you remember what it was like when we came here?' he said. 'Remember the first redcurrants we had here among the garbage? Do you remember how churned up the ground was? Ripped to pieces.'

She was looking past him, somewhere above his ear. He could get cross, too.

'Those wounds are healed now,' he said. 'The cat's foot and the melancholy thistle have come back. You said so yourself the other day. The gra.s.s and trees are growing. It's healing. The clearing will, too. It takes a few years. Then it grows green again.'

'I remember what it was like when we came here,' she replied. 'Astrid wondered why on earth we had come. "What can a place like this be to people like you?"' she said. Both she and Karin Arvidsson phoned to ask if they could come and pick currants. Helga's old mother appeared on the steps one morning with two pails. 'They're too much for you,' they said. And we let them pick. We were full of how the soil just gave and gave. We wanted to be the same. But I got hardly any redcurrants for the freezer and I had to pick those from all twenty-one bushes, wherever they'd left some. Then we heard nothing from them. But Norrs almost broke Bonnie's back with a stake. And Wedin shot our cats. Picked them off one by one. And no one has ever said a word about us healing the wounds in this ground. Presumably they don't see it. But if I had gaudy petunias or evil-smelling marigolds in plastic pots or cartwheels painted pink and cream for nasturtiums to wind their way round then they would see it and I would be praised.'

There was hatred and contempt in her voice. Not only pain.

'I've made cakes for their parish evenings and taken English cla.s.ses and given books away as Christmas presents imagine! Books! But, of course, you reported Norrs for cruelty to animals when he left his sheep with no water. It makes me sick to walk along the road in case I meet that animal-tormentor or that cat-killer. And since the miscarriage, I've been afraid to meet anyone at all. Before, I thought I had life in me. Then they took it off me. Like the redcurrant bushes.'

'They?'

'I had a miscarriage after picking cranberries under the power lines.'

'This isn't sensible, Barbro.'

But she didn't hear him.

'I didn't dare use the road after the miscarriage because I didn't want to meet anyone. But I had the forest. Pretty soon I'll have no forest. It belongs to them, according to you. The forest is Karl-ke's. Geranium silvatic.u.m is the name of that mauve mist under the elders.'

She drank great gulps of the wine and he thought, What if she takes to drink?

'The midsummer flower. It has its image imprinted in its cell. But human beings don't carry their image within them.'

'Genetically I suppose we do . . .'

She went on without listening.

'A human being can become anything, can grow askew. But there is a template of the midsummer flower within the plant itself, a small clear image. The flower doesn't go beyond that. It can be cross-bred, s.h.i.+ft from deep purple to pale pink or pure white. It can be streaky or all one colour. But it doesn't go beyond its image which it has deeply imprinted inside the innermost nucleus of its cell.'

'That is an image,' he said. 'Weave it instead. Don't just talk. It's not good for you.'

He meant it seriously. There was something wrong with talking in that way, apart from what she said. Long periods of silence alternating with moments of chat. Talk. No healthy person talks like this, he thought. She sits brooding for days and thinks all this out. Then she talks. She doesn't weave. Doesn't design any pictures, no patterns. Talks. It's great sometimes, but not really healthy.

'No! I can't weave. You want me to replace the forest with images. The county council would put them up on hospital walls. But I want to have the forest. The sick want the forest. They want to live.'

That March, one of the saviours of the river had come from Stockholm to give a lecture in the parish hall. Birger didn't get there until it was all over because he had been out on call. The parish ladies were was.h.i.+ng up. In the main hall, all the lights were out except the one above the rostrum. In the semidarkness below the stage, Barbro was sitting with the river-saver at a hardboard table from which the ladies had removed the paper tablecloth. Barbro and he had their heads close together, a yellow light from the rostrum casting a halo round them. The environmentalist had dark-blond hair falling below his shoulders, parted in the middle. He was wearing a striped carpenter's s.h.i.+rt and Lapp boots. All those who had stayed to wash up were standing in the doorway watching when Birger caught sight of them.

'Was it him?' he asked her now. 'The river-saver? The one with the Jesus hair?'

And it was.

'But why in the name of heaven did you say he was your son?'

'It was a joke.'

She was in the bedroom putting rolled-up stockings and thick socks into a box. He didn't know whether she was packing or cleaning out drawers. She went on with a box of sweaters and jumpers. When she went to fetch another box from the wardrobe, he followed her. He knew he ought to say something that would stop her, if she was packing. But if she was just tidying up, it would be unnecessary and perhaps even risky to say anything.

'Shall we get a bottle of wine up?' he said. 'I think I've got a Moselle cooling.'

'No, thanks.'

That was when he had really understood that the therapeutic wine drinking was over.

'You must phone Vemdal,' Birger said.

'Oh, we weren't even anywhere near.'

'Where were you last night?'

'Up at Starhill. I didn't see anything.'

'You'd better phone him anyhow.'

'Why?'

'They're looking for him.'

She snorted. It couldn't be called a laugh.

'They'll have to sort that out themselves.'

He told her how he had found the eel. But before he talked, he was given something to eat at an inn in Steinmo. The woman ate a little, too, and drank yellowish wine, but most of all she kept looking at him. And she was amused.

He had salmon trout with cream sauce and morels and boiled potatoes, large and yellow, real pebble-shaped ones. When the proprietress had brought the menu in its plastic folder, the woman had waved it aside.

'The salmon trout,' she said. 'And wine.'

They hadn't exchanged many words in the car. He had been ashamed of his muddy jeans as well as his s.h.i.+rt, which he had dried above the stove in the cottage. It smelt of fish in the heat.

'It's the eel,' he said, so then he had to tell her. She kept calling him Johan every other sentence. He must have told her his name in the car. Although he was horribly embarra.s.sed, he asked her: 'What's your name?'

'Ylajali,' she said. 'Ylajali Happolati.'

He was sitting in a ray of sunlight from the window, hot and drunk from the food. There was a smell of gra.s.s and cattle dung coming through the open window, and below the hay meadows he could see the river, a sluggish ribbon of colourless, gleaming water. She poured more wine into his gla.s.s. He would have preferred milk, as he was still hungry. She must have understood, because she asked and a girl brought some in a gla.s.s jug. He was also given maize pudding with cloudberry preserve and thick yellow cream. The woman had no dessert.

When they had finished, he had to go to the toilet of course and he felt ashamed of that, too. But he said he had to change the water in the eel pail. In the car, he fell asleep at once and when he woke, his s.h.i.+rt stank so much, he noticed it himself. He pulled it off. It felt strange sitting there naked to the waist, but he couldn't very well put his thick sweats.h.i.+rt on in that heat.

They were driving westwards, so she must have been heading for the coast. They had not discussed how far he would go on with her. When he was awake, he thought he ought to say something, but he couldn't come up with anything except to ask whether Happolati was a Finnish name. No, it wasn't, she said, apparently making fun of him.

'I thought you had a Finnish accent.'

She burst out laughing.

'Never say that to a Swedish Finn! My name's not Happolati. I just said that because you were so hungry.'

He could make nothing of it all.

'What about your other name then? Ylja . . .'

'You can call me Ylja. That's good.'