Blackwater (15 page)

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 mass 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 shore, 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 crashing 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 shore 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 glassed-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 glass in the veranda windows was flashing 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 glass 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 dick 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 dick 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 testicles, her middle finger far in, embarrassingly close to his arsehole. 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 shirt smelling of fish, a faded sweatshirt 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 dick 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 dick 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 coarseness 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 assured 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 god called?’

He didn’t understand the question and echoed:

‘God?’

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 God 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 god of your forefathers,’ she said, helping him, and at last he understood.

‘Peive, one of the Lapp gods,’ he said uncertainly.

That was school knowledge. His teacher’s enthusiam had made him feel just as embarrassed 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 god 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.

Did she think he should have knocked? Had yet another displacement taken place without his noticing?

‘This is my fault, too, Barbro,’ he said.

And realised at once what a bloody stupid thing it had been to say.

‘I mean, I know it’s my fault.’

She stared at him, her eyes quite black; the pupils must have been enormously enlarged. Her mouth was tightly shut and colourless. He realised he couldn’t tell her. What should he say? I was involved in a peculiar thing; it was at the Sulky, you know, that little hotel at the end of Rådhusgatan. It was the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me, and then things turned out this way. That’s why I seemed to sadden.

But he didn’t say it, for he already knew she wouldn’t ask what it was he had been through. She would just look. Her pupils were as large as crowberries now. He had to touch her instead and do it now, take her.

He really had thought he was going to do it. Then the moment when it was at least possible had gone. She twisted round, lay down with her back to him, her body quite still under the covers, her face invisible.

Then he did a hell of a stupid thing. He took hold of her when it was wrong, although he knew it. He sat heavily down on the bed and put his hands on her shoulders, pulling her up round towards him. Her body twisted unnaturally because she neither cooperated nor resisted. He ran his lips over her hair and forehead, felt the knitted eyebrows, sought her mouth, and at that moment her arms shot out and she pushed him away, making a sound like a groan or a grunt.

At first he thought it was because he smelt of whisky; then came the true, profound humiliation. He knew he had been frightened of this all his life. In one way or another. He got up and went over to the door. She didn’t move.

Talking crap about the forest and the river and the guilt of the west. I have a double chin and sandals. That’s all. Stomach, belly. That’s it.

But she was in a bad way. Perhaps worse than she realised. He stood for a moment with his hand on the doorhandle, looking at the hump under the duvet. Not a strand of hair was visible. He felt calmer now. It was as if he were looking at a patient.

‘Which one of you thought up that joke?’ he said.

‘What joke?’

‘That he was to pretend to be your son?’

‘I don’t know. He did, probably.’

He was lying on the bed with the star pattern of the net curtain on his bare brown skin. There was sun in the room, body heat and moisture. The scent of him that used to come to her in her sleep rose from the bed, although nothing there was moving. A new pattern appeared to prevail, the light picking out other strands of hair among the ash blond. A movement could endanger the equilibrium in the room. Nor did it seem a movement as she slid down and the moist skin on his upper lip met her tongue, but more like a displacement of time, a slow movement of a wave bringing them together after weeks of cold and haste and hours of terror.

She whispered, ‘Dan, Dan’, thinking, I oughtn’t to, anyhow not now, for the cottage is bright with sunlight and there are windows in all directions. Mia had spotted the Volkswagen Beetle when she woke. It had been driven down behind the barn on the opposite side of the road. They had rushed down from Aagot Fagerli’s house to see if he had come.

But Mia had immediately gone out again. Perhaps it was the memory of that time. She ought not to have such memories, let alone be given any more. It’s only natural, Dan said. Annie thought she could just see Mia’s face up on the slope, hidden by birch scrub, then appearing again. But thinking was not possible now, sorting out what was good or not good. ‘How did you find us?’ she whispered, and he said it was the rucksack they had left on the steps. He had recognised it. The striped woollen rucksack from Crete.

‘Why didn’t you want to open the door?’

She said it into his ear at the very moment he entered her and she felt her nerves tingle. A tree of light branched all over her body. She forgot the question, but repeated it when he let her rest in a moment of calmer breathing, in restraint, while he whispered: ‘Don’t move, don’t move.’ And then:

‘Open the door?’