Blackwater. Part 9

Good? He didn't have to call her anything. She kept using his name. 'Are you hot, Johan?' Silly, really. Ordering without looking at the menu, and wine and two desserts, then eating only a little of the salmon trout, that was upper-cla.s.s. 'Let the seat back if you like, Johan. Did you sleep well, Johan?'

They got out when they had reached the high peak and walked down across the marshland to look at the river running below the steep precipice, a hundred or two hundred metres down to the water. The small falls in the perpendicular cliff on the other side looked immobile at a distance. White clouds, stiff water spraying from the foam of greenery on the mountainsides.

She had changed into boots and was standing on the crowberry scrub at the edge, just in front of him. He didn't know if he would dare stand like that with someone behind him. With Gudrun perhaps. But the woman stood there in her jeans and a smart but shabby jersey, practically leaning over to look down into the depths, where the water rushed out with no sound audible to them up there.

He had put on his sweats.h.i.+rt, for the wind from the mountain heath was cold, but when they got back into the car, he had to take it off again. She looked at him once or twice.

She's old, he thought. Her fair hair was coa.r.s.e. Up on the mountain she had fastened it into a short ponytail with a rubber band at the back of her neck. She had a straight nose and a clean-cut chin, her lips pale, with no lipstick. She had painted her eyes. He felt peculiar when she looked at his naked chest.

'Do you want a s.h.i.+rt?' she said.

He didn't know what to answer. He couldn't have got his shoulders and neck into any s.h.i.+rt of hers. She said nothing more and he fell asleep again.

When they had got down level with the river and started along the winding roads north, she stopped by a building with the co-op sign on it. It was closed but she managed to get a man to come and open up the petrol pump. After filling up, she went inside with him and came back with a s.h.i.+rt, toothbrush, a cake of soap and a towel with Betty Boop on it.

'I haven't any money,' he said, and he heard himself sounding angry. Nonetheless, he went down to the river and washed. The s.h.i.+rt was ordinary, brown-and-white striped flannel, and he felt at home in it. She had also guessed his size right. He checked that the eel was still alive and changed the water in the pail again.

He now realised he was running away but he didn't know where they were going. She seemed able to be silent for any length of time without being embarra.s.sed.

'You've been up to some mischief,' she said abruptly, after he had been half-asleep for a long stretch.

Mischief was a silly word. But it meant she didn't believe him. He had told her about the well.

'You didn't want to be seen in the villages,' she said. 'But you're beginning to feel safer now.'

He didn't reply.

'If you want to think things over, you can stay with us for a while.'

Who were 'we'? Had she got a husband? They drove all that evening and finally he dared ask: 'Have you got a cabin up here somewhere?'

'My family have a place.'

She drove fast and quite fiercely up all the hills, taking them up into the mountains. He looked at the dashboard to see if the engine was about to boil. She was sure not to have thought about that. But the Saab kept an even temperature. The car was fairly new, the seats already shabby. Everything she was wearing and the stuff flung in the back seemed to be the kind of thing you paid an unnecessarily high price for. She was wearing shoes with straps round the back of her foot and leather heels scuffed at the back. Gudrun would never have worn shoes like that when driving. Nor would she have smoked. She knew that made him feel sick in a car.

Annie had locked the door, having no intention of going out any more. But they had to fetch water. There was a well in among the trees diagonally behind the house. The privy was directly across the road in an old barn, but they didn't have to go over there because there was a chamber pot in the cupboard under the sink. They brought back great bunches of flowers when they went for water. She had found jam jars in the attic and in them they put wild chervil, red campion and b.u.t.tercups. Mia worked with her lips pressed tight together. She was pale.

How much did she know? That there had been an accident. That was what Annie had said. Two people had been killed in an accident and they didn't know how it had happened.

She thought Mia would ask after Dan, but she didn't, just asked what they were going to have for breakfast. They had neither bread nor milk, and the store was closed.

They found some groceries left behind or forgotten in a cupboard by the stove, including a packet of waffle mix, so Annie said she would make pancakes for breakfast. And rosehip tea. Now they would have some cold macaroni, then go to bed.

'It's not night yet,' said Mia.

'Yes, it is. But it's light like this up here.'

'The sun's s.h.i.+ning over there.'

On the slope where the houses above Fiskebuan were, the gra.s.s was gleaming in the sun.

They dragged the iron bed into the bedroom and put it next to the other bed. There was also a rickety bedside table. Annie draped her Palestine shawl over it and put a jar of flowers beside the alarm clock. They both liked having the sound of the radio once she got it going. Then they crept into bed.

Mia lay with cold little paws on the covers. Annie rubbed them and tucked them in. The electric radiator ticked. It would soon get warmer.

The child fell asleep, pale even in her sleep. Evensong came over the radio. A clergyman said you should deliver yourself unto the night. G.o.d was in the night. In the daytime we have problems to solve, he said. At night we deliver ourselves unto G.o.d. She thought about the two young people who had gone to bed in the tent and delivered themselves unto the bright night and its G.o.d.

Then came the weather forecast and she could relax a little, it was so ordinary. The whole of this long, wet, windy country with its mountain regions and coastal areas, its lighthouses and headlands, its thousands of islands and great lakes, was now having a few hot days and mild nights. The forecast slowly ascended to the spot where they were now and went on past them to the northernmost point, to the light that never went out.

She couldn't sleep. There were no blinds to pull down and it was still daylight inside. If she fell asleep, someone might come to the bedroom window and stand there looking in at their faces. She had drawn the cotton lace curtains across but they were no protection, the pattern too open. She got up and hung the bedspread over one window and the Palestine shawl over the other. It wasn't long enough. The beds could also be seen from the kitchen window.

She thought about Dan not knowing anything about what had happened. They were looking for him. They were also looking for a woman called Barbro Torbjornsson, the doctor's wife. When they found Dan, he would come to her.

Then she noticed everything was quiet within her. She had always talked to him. That had gone on ever since they had been together.

At first, when they had not yet exchanged a single personal word, he had often said things that made her feel uncertain. She had been unable to answer, but afterwards she had thought up a continuation. She found ingenious replies and it became a conversation. A kind of conversation.

That didn't stop when they really started talking to each other. Not even when they became lovers. On the contrary. Nor when he distrusted her. He occasionally said she was playing with him, like a mother playing forbidden games with a son. But she never showed him it was serious.

When they decided to go to Jamtland, he ought to have believed her. But the letters and telephone calls were sometimes so strange. She could hear the chill in his voice and she wept and carried on to find out what it was. Then the coins ran out at the other end.

Sometimes she thought she had had some kind of fever. She was hot and heavy from going around carrying him inside her. Whenever they met, the fierce tensions in her slackened. That was happiness. Or anyhow freedom from torment.

That was now silent. She hadn't turned to him for over twenty-four hours. She hadn't even noticed that the state she had lived in was over. She couldn't believe there was any other explanation than that he was no longer out there. Was not alive.

Nerves and muscles hurt. Turning over in bed gave her a few moments' relief, but after a while it was just as bad again. Her ear started aching if she lay on her side. She dozed off and woke thinking someone was standing over her. She screamed and Mia woke. There was no one else in the room.

'You were dreaming, Mum,' Mia said.

Annie could still see a blurred grey face leaning over her own. A lined, wooden face. It took a long time for her to realise it didn't exist. She tried to think about other things; her cases of books that would come later, the big suitcase containing her linen, and the crate of china. Dan would think she had brought too much with her, and maybe the wrong things. But there was a great deal she had not been able to throw away.

She tried to think through the contents of her crates and cardboard boxes, thinking about them piece by piece and picturing them in front of her. That gradually made her doze off again. But she woke once more, her mouth dry and her head aching fiercely.

All she could see was fractured images from the night and the day that had pa.s.sed. They were meaningless, yet seared behind her eyes. The police officers' boots with reflector bands on them. White sleeping-bag feathers. Oriana Stromgren's egg timer a chicken made of white and yellow plastic. The face lay in wait for her all the time, that lined, wooden, primaeval face. She woke Mia and put a blanket round her.

'We must get out of here. We'll go to the lady up there.'

She put the other blanket round herself and they went out into the night of the birdsong they had heard through the rough window gla.s.s in which the light trembled. The sounds were loud now, pressing in on her, and she could no longer defend herself against either sounds or light.

The slope was very steep and the house up there had blank, empty windows. Mia banged on the door, thumping with her little fist. Aagot f.a.gerli stood there with a jersey over her nightdress, at first without her teeth in. She let them in and went ahead of them into the bedroom. Once there, she turned her back on them and took something out of a gla.s.s of water on the chair by the bed. Then her face looked filled out again. Mia looked on very carefully and asked about it afterwards. Annie would never even have noticed, had she been alone.

She was cold. Great shudderings ran through body. She seemed to be seeing details sharply, as if she had the vision of a bird of prey. But she could no longer find any order in why she was there. Why had she come to all this light. Mia's face was so small.

'Lie down, now,' said the old lady to her. 'Darn it, girl, how spr you are.' Annie would become familiar with Aagot's voice, with its half-Norwegian speech and fairly innocuous American oaths. And the smell of spices in her privy. Spices and mustiness. A blanket and a sofa in k.n.o.bbly check material, yellow and brown. A small ornamental lamp. There was a faint smell of paraffin. She switched on nothing electric. That would have been pointless in this room flooded with light. She pulled down the dark-blue blinds and let Annie lie on the sofa with the little orange dome to stare at. Aagot gave her some hot milk with some kind of liquor in it. She had sweetened it with brown honey.

Spr. She thought that meant frail. Inside she was like the gla.s.s in a thermos.

She could hear the stiff rustle as Mia and the old woman turned the pages of a big picture book on the kitchen table, then she dozed off.

There was a rumble as the car crossed a bridge. She stopped, opened the door and he could hear a waterfall. The sun was low, swollen and red, almost hidden by a mountain ridge. They must be very high up. Down below the road was a forest of birches with moisture-filled black and green lichens. Birds were busy everywhere, thousands of them. Their calls soared below and above the small waterfalls of the rapids and the murmur from the great metal pipe running under the bridge.

He felt afraid. It must be because he had woken so abruptly and didn't know where they were. The road appeared to continue on up towards the high mountain. Worried that his voice might sound childish and angry, he didn't say anything. Foolishly enough, he could feel his throat thickening. He had to wake up properly.

She had a rucksack with a frame in the boot. She took it out and started stuffing into it everything lying about in the car, putting the soap and toothbrush wrapped in the Betty Boop towel on top.

He took the rucksack and heaved it on. They climbed down the steep slope to the rapids and started following a path along the river.

'Is it far?' he said.

'Fifty-five minutes.'

Idiotically exact. She might just as well have said an hour. He imagined she always wanted to appear certain.

'Then I can't carry the pail in my hand,' he said, stopping to tie it on to the rucksack.

They left the river and came out into rocky terrain where there were parched old spruces that were barely alive, some of them with sickly witch's broom growing wildly in them. The path sometimes ran across bog channels smelling fermented from the springy ma.s.s beneath them. She walked ahead of him and they rested only twice the whole way. Then she smoked. The last bit sloped downwards. He saw a dull surface of water through the trees, clouds of mist swirling above it, reddish in the morning light. The lake lay in a round bowl of mountains. The water was utterly still.

'We're there,' she whispered, though he could see no house. She seemed to him to be slinking like a lynx the last bit down to the sh.o.r.e, where she sank to her knees and scooped up some water in her hands. She rinsed her face and sat for a long while with her head down.

After a while, she seemed to rouse herself and signed to him to come after her. If she had resembled a lynx, he felt like an elk, a clumsy yearling cras.h.i.+ng down and breaking dead branches. A diver was making its way across the lake with a silvery red plough of water behind it. Johan frightened it and it started rising, its wings flapping and feet kicking and tearing the water.

'You can let the eel go now,' she said.

He shook his head.

'But what are you going to do with it?'

He didn't know. They started walking again. The path along the sh.o.r.e branched off and ran up through the forest where the sowthistle had starting appearing. It was very light now and the heat rose as they moved away from the mere and the raw mist. He caught a glimpse of a house between the birches, a large brown timbered building with a gla.s.sed-in veranda. He was amazed to find a house like that here. No car could get along the path, though possibly a tractor could.

The gla.s.s in the veranda windows was flas.h.i.+ng orange lightning in the morning sun. The roof ridges had black wooden bird silhouettes on them and the whole house had tarred weather-boarding all over it. Then he realised it was a shooting lodge, the kind bigwigs had had built at the beginning of the century.

She didn't take him up to the big house, but went on into the birchwoods to a wooden outbuilding beside a riverbank.

'You can sleep in the grouse shed.' That wasn't as bad as it sounded, for when they went in, he saw it was equipped with bunks and a table in front of the one window. It smelt of foam rubber. The mattresses had begun to smell in the heat still shut in the closed cottage.

She vanished without a word, but he knew she would come back. His towel, toothbrush and soap lay on the table. A mosquito window was propped against the table and he started putting it up. When she returned with a gla.s.s of milk and two sandwiches, cool air was pouring in through the netting. He sat down on the bed, leaning forward because of the upper bunk, and ate the food. She stood smoking by the window, looking out. When he had finished, he kicked off his boots, crawled into bed and pulled the quilt up over him. Then she turned round. He couldn't see her face, it was almost black against the light behind.

'You and I have something to do,' she said. 'Then you can sleep.'

She came over and pulled the quilt off him. Leaning over she put her hand on the front of his jeans. She gave a little laugh, like a snort. She must have felt his d.i.c.k throbbing.

When she pulled down the zip of his flies, he was scared. He felt she was handling him carelessly and he was afraid his foreskin would get caught in the zip. But of course the trousers were tight and she had to make an effort to get them open. Anyhow he had nothing there when she got it out, only a soft handful of skin and slack muscles.

'So soft,' she said, and now she sounded like ptarmigan calling far away in the birch woods. His d.i.c.k started rising again. Her breath smelt of spirits. She had gone straight to the duty-free liquor up there. Not that surprising. She had driven a long way and was perhaps not feeling too good. But she hadn't brought the bottle with her to offer him some, and that angered him. The anger, small as it was, did him good. For a moment he had been really frightened, not just anxious but really frightened. Her mouth was slightly open, her tongue playing in the corner of it. She kept fondling him all the time.

He had given quite a lot of thought to an occasion like this. That it would come. But he had thought about a girl, a faceless girl, yes, but soft. He was the one who was going to do all sorts of things. He had worried about not finding the way, not really knowing, or being clumsy and hurting her. But not like this.

She was holding his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, her middle finger far in, embarra.s.singly close to his a.r.s.ehole. He wriggled a little, but the fingers were firm in their grip, a strong hand, short and broad.

Then she rose slowly and he followed, not really knowing if that was from her hold on him. She fumbled at the bunk above, pulled, the foam-rubber mattress came tumbling down and she flung it on to the floor. Then she turned him with his back to the mattress and the next moment he was sitting on it. She stayed where she was, undressing.

That went quickly. She had nothing on but jersey and trousers and a pair of rustling pale-blue panties. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his hands clasped over them. He couldn't make up his mind to do anything. His ears were ringing and the light was getting stronger and stronger. He could hear the water in the river and the birds.

She pulled off his trousers and underpants, now so filthy he was ashamed. The slimy mud from the well had penetrated through the material of his trousers. He had stood by the road in a s.h.i.+rt smelling of fish, a faded sweats.h.i.+rt under his arm. She could think what she liked.

Once he was naked, she stood astride him and he had her bush of curly hair right at eye level. But he closed his eyes. He had a hard-on now and it was throbbing.

He sat leaning slightly back, propping himself on his hands, and he didn't have to do anything. She parted her legs and threaded herself on to him. It was a little awkward, his d.i.c.k grubbing about in the small lips and flaps. But it was moist and he slid in and she sank down, heavily, far too heavily on to him. For although the pleasure made his nerves tingle, it hurt. She twisted his d.i.c.k back as she leant away from him and he came with a pain that made his upper lip curl back from his teeth.

Then he recovered, grimacing and leaning back. She slid off him and he felt it run and run. But she ignored it, took the quilt off the lower bunk and drew it over them.

They hadn't kissed. My fault, he thought. I did nothing. It just came for me.

He leant over her and with his lips explored the now pale face. He felt the coa.r.s.eness of her hair, but everything else was very soft. Her lips were quite small, like the lips down there. And her tongue had a lively little point. She was like sand, soft and harsh and pale. As he lay leaning over her, he felt how very much stronger he was, that she was not a large woman. Small and fair.

After a while, she began to finger him again and when there was a response, she pulled. This was not as he had imagined. He had thought all this kind of thing went like a dream, almost imperceptibly. Not purposefully like this.

Then she did it again. Though this time he lay on his back as she sat astride him. He was more a.s.sured now. He had put his hands on her thighs below her hips. If she bent too far back, he would pull her towards him. This time it was good in a dreamy way, almost as if in his sleep. She closed her eyes and he saw her teeth gleaming with saliva as she drew up her upper lip. He could see the thin skin of her eyelids quivering and her jaw muscles tightening. She's enjoying it, he thought, and I am the one doing it. Move slowly. He gathered strength in his strange torpid state in order to raise his back and turn them both over. But then she opened her eyes and said: 'What's your G.o.d called?'

He didn't understand the question and echoed: 'G.o.d?'

He wasn't even sure he had heard right. Perhaps he was making a fool of himself by asking like that. But that was the word. She repeated it and it was there, like a stone in your mouth.

'You're sensitive to disturbances,' she said quietly, and slid away. Everything about him had softened. But she was still expecting him to answer. She lay on her side, propped on one elbow, looking at him, quizzically. His head was empty. Called? he was about to echo, but didn't. What is G.o.d called?

He remembered a preacher with a voice that had sunk from the first syllable so that it sounded like singing: 'Jeesus is waiting for you! Jeesus!' And his grandmother beginning to tremble. He had felt her body shaking inside her coat, and he had withdrawn from her, ashamed and wanting to pee.

'The G.o.d of your forefathers,' she said, helping him, and at last he understood.

'Peive, one of the Lapp G.o.ds,' he said uncertainly.

That was school knowledge. His teacher's enthusiam had made him feel just as embarra.s.sed as he was now.

'I thought Tjas Olmai was your man, otherwise.'

She could see from his face that he knew nothing and she laughed.

'The water man,' she said. 'The G.o.d of the fish.'

'A fleeting moment stole my life away.' It was a popular song. Or a poem.

Birger didn't really read poetry, but he might have heard it on the radio. Anyhow, it fitted. More than a moment, of course. Twenty, twenty-five minutes. Or beyond time. It had probably been happiness. Or in any case the most powerful thing he had ever experienced. He ought to tell her about it. But he couldn't. He should have done it straight away.

Or now?

He slowly drained the last of his drink. The liquor was very diluted, the ice melted. Then he went up to the bedroom and stood outside the door, actually fearful. He thought about how much had happened in a year, eighteen months. Slid away and been displaced.

Then he opened the door and she sat up suddenly in bed as if she, too, were frightened. Her face was pale in the night light, her dark hair in a thick plait tied with a ribbon.