Blackwater (2 page)

And she had done so. When she tried to wind the crank of the taxi telephone, the handle came off in her hand. She might have thought that a bad start. But she didn’t. The song inside her was too powerful.

She got hold of a taxi in the street and they spent a long time walking round Östersund. In the afternoon, they sat on a park bench and ate some kind of junk food. For the last time, she probably thought. They boarded the bus with all their luggage from the train and the goods shed. Mia began feeling sick at Gravliden. A horrid name, burial grove, so she remembered that it started there. An old man smelling of goat had got on. The heat rose in the packed bus and the air grew oppressive. The smell of filth and goat hung all round the old man, spreading in irregular waves, perhaps from the movements on the bus. People got on and off with carrier bags. They had been shopping in Östersund. It occurred to her that she would not be able to shop like that any more.

She had a paper bag ready, because Mia kept feeling sick all the way. They got out for a while at every stop to give her some fresh air, but it was suffocatingly hot that afternoon. An hour later, the old man got off and things were better. Hot and exhausted, Mia fell asleep on her lap.

‘It’ll be better now,’ said the driver.

‘How much further is it?’

‘Going to Blackwater, are you? You one of them Starhill people?’

‘No.’

That had nothing to do with him.

‘On holiday then?’

She thought that a silly question. But he couldn’t know she was going to live a new life. To escape any more questions, she agreed she was on holiday. Mia was asleep so couldn’t contradict her. She never found out how much further it was. He did not speak to her again.

Then the forests began, and the major areas of felling. The bus no longer stopped so often. At every village, crates of milk and other perishables were set down on the stand by the store. The post-women came out and opened the door for the driver and he carried in the mailbags. People were waiting in their cars for letters and the evening papers, many of them beery, hullooing at the driver and each other.

‘What are they saying?’ Mia whispered.

But Annie didn’t understand what they were saying either.

They were travelling in a foreign country. When a large, cold lake was glimpsed between the trees, that was only a break in the monotony that would soon disappear and be replaced by another. She didn’t know they were travelling upwards along a system of lakes extending right up to the high mountains in Norway, where it ran out of marshlands and mountain streams. In the felled clearings the great network of water had been cut off and the ground had dried to dead flesh in the body of the landscape. Nor did she know that the felled clearings they could see from the road were only the small ones, that larger and larger areas had been cut off from their links with the clouds, making them incapable of giving anything back when the acid rain trickled through them.

They didn’t reach Röbäck, where the church was, until evening. They were to register in the parish there, but the rural district was large. She had no idea how far it extended. They got off and looked at the church while the driver unloaded at the store. The church walls were dazzling in the strong evening sunlight. The church stood on a tongue of land stretching out into Lake Rösjön, a white fence running out towards the water like the railing on a boat. The whole church on its spit out into the great mountain lake resembled a ship. Perhaps the idea had been that on the Day of Judgement it would move out from the shore with all its dead.

The water looked cold. The shores were covered with dark spruce forest, with no greenery nearest to the water. Rocks and bare, smooth stones ran down into the lake. She knew it was cold. Twelve or thirteen degrees, Dan had written.

‘Look at those funny kids,’ said Mia.

A small column of children appeared by the bus. Only four of them, but they were walking in a line, three girls in long skirts and plaits, carrying bark baskets, and a boy in a knitted cap, the ear-flaps dangling as he walked. They stood talking to the driver for a moment. Then the whole troop set off slowly down the road. They appeared to her as a projection, an extract from an old film or from a different age as the milk crates thumped on to the stand outside the store. Or weren’t they children?

‘Maybe they were the little people, the wee folk?’ she said to Mia, immediately regretting it, for with great seriousness Mia watched the little troop disappearing round the bend of the road.

The driver waved. Time to leave.

Blackwater was the last stop. The lake was bright that evening, the shores below the mountain reflected in the water, blue-black, every detail of the jagged contour of firs as clear as the original. It no longer looked like a reflection in the water, but like another atmosphere, with depths continuing downwards in long wooded slopes towards a bottom they could not see.

They were stiff-legged when they got off. Mia’s lips were dry and cracked, all her fruit drink long since gone. Annie looked round for Dan, so that he could stay with Mia while she went into the store to buy her something to drink. It was half past seven and the store was closed, but the storekeeper was there while the goods were being unloaded. Cars were coming and going all the time, people fetching their mail and newspapers just as they had in the other villages.

She could see neither the VW Beetle nor Dan. Mia was unwilling to wait alone outside the store and grabbed Annie’s hand, her small triangular face pale and grey under the freckles, her hair plastered at her temples and forehead as the sweat dried. She needed to pee, and something to drink, then perhaps something to eat, but Annie could do little for her until Dan came. She had to make sure the driver included everything that was theirs as he unloaded. He was a quarter of an hour early, he said, and she presumed that was why Dan had not yet put in an appearance.

After all the cars had driven away and the storekeeper had locked up and gone down to his house on the headland beyond the store, they were left alone on the gravelled patch with their suitcases and cardboard boxes. The silence was violent after the noise of the cars. It was strange to experience the stillness she had longed for and feel uneasy at the same time. Dan ought to be there by now.

On Midsummer Eve, Johan Brandberg was sitting at his desk in his room. It was afternoon and it had grown very hot. He was reading about the Antarctic expedition with the
Maud
in the 1950s. He was free. Since the end of term, he had been working with his father, clearing in the forest. There had been no talk of any other job. Later on in the summer, Väine and he were to plant. He wondered what it would be like to be out all day with Väine. His half-brother was scarcely a year older than he was, but he was stronger, and not just physically. Johan thought about the Lajka dog, and that disgusted him so much he began to feel sick in the stuffy room.

He leant over the desk and opened the window. Down there he could see the yard and the barn, the enclosure and some of Vidart’s goats. They had grazed it bare inside, but on the other side of the fence the grass was thick and full of flowers. He recognised the globeflowers.

During the October elk shoot, the Lajka had come back twice and sat on the steps. On the Saturday, the day before the share-out of the meat, Torsten shot her. The body lay in the woodshed over the weekend, then he had told Väine to bury it.

Johan remembered the sound of Väine hacking into the grass behind the barn with the spade. The ground was already frozen hard. He had been at his desk, as now, but with a social-studies textbook in front of him. Suppose he’d asked me, he had thought. Suppose I’d vomited into the hole.

On the Monday he had been on the school bus again, leaving it all behind him. Now he had to stay. All week. All the weeks up to 22 August. He was to clear eight hectares of pine forest and then they were to plant contorta pines in the clearing above Alda’s.

But now he was free and was sitting there with a book, free thanks to Gudrun. He might become a vet, or a surveyor. There were books and books. Not everything was the same muck, not even for Torsten. Per-Ola worked in Åre as a crane driver. Björne felled for the Cellulose Company and Pekka had as well this last year. But now he was talking about the mines in Spitsbergen. Or an oil rig. But that was probably just talk. Or dreams.

Pekka had dreams in that mess called brain tissue. And what had he got in his testicles? Mine look the same, he thought. And I have the same kind of matter in my brain.

But not the same genes.

Those thoughts were coming again. He kept having them, and wanting to have them, but he would never have dared ask Gudrun. Not straight out.

He had had those thoughts once when he was out skiing with her, when he was about eleven or twelve, old enough anyhow to manage Bear Mountain. They were on their way up the last steep slope when they heard a scooter. At first they couldn’t make out where the sound was coming from and then it was suddenly deathly quiet again. But they zigzagged up a bit further and had just taken off their skis to climb the last bit on the ice crust, when they saw the man on the scooter outlined against the sky.

Johan was able to call up that sight at any given moment. A tall man. Orange sweatshirt and worn black leather trousers. Belt with silver studs and a knife in a horn sheath, bigger than any knife he had ever seen before and fiercely curved towards the tip. The man had taken his cap off and put it on the scooter seat. His hair was black with streaks at the temple that looked silvery. Narrow slits of eyes in the strong light, black inside. And behind him all the spiky white Norwegian mountains.

‘He’s looking for his reindeer,’ said Gudrun. And when they got up there, he cried out, ‘Bouregh!’ and then they had gone on talking to each other in their Sami. Johan understood no more than every tenth word and was deeply embarrassed when the tall man said something to him and he couldn’t answer. The man ruffled his hair and touched him.

He could visualise the scene at any time. But he was thrifty about doing so. It must never get worn out, nor must the sight up there against the sky of the tall man who was his father.

That was it. There was no other explanation.

Then he heard Vidart’s car, a Duett with a faulty silencer. The dogs had heard it long before he did and were already barking.

Vidart repaired and sometimes bought and sold used cars. He only used the Duett to carry the milk churns in. His wife always used to drive it across Torsten Brandberg’s yard up to the enclosure. But a stop had been put to that now.

Gypsy bastard, Torsten said. That cripple who can’t work. Assessed disabled at fifty thousand. Of course he’s stealing.

Torsten had himself bought four brand-new Hakkapeliitta tyres from Vidart. Given eleven hundred for them. And don’t think he kept quiet about it, either. He had told them all over the kitchen table that Vidart had simply phoned the insurance company and said, ‘I had four new Hakkapeliitta tyres stolen last night. And what’s worse, I’ve promised them to someone who’s driving down to work today. So you must get a move on over settling that claim.’

‘Is Vidart a gypsy?’ Johan had asked Gudrun afterwards, but she didn’t know. Torsten said that people called that were that. ‘Why does he hate him?’ Johan asked. What a word! But she had let the needle stop in the cloth, as if testing out the word on Torsten and Vidart. ‘He’s always disliked Vidart,’ she said in the end. ‘Probably because he’s new here.’

Vidart had lived in Blackwater for only seventeen years. That was longer than Johan’s lifetime. The goats in the enclosure were Harry Vidart’s. They leapt about between the wrecks of cars and had gnawed all the tree trunks clean. Torsten had told him to remove a rusted-up Volvo PV and shift the electric fence further in. The bit of the enclosure facing the road was the Brandbergs’.

Torsten had told him long ago. Vidart had bought the property from the widow of old man Enoksson and she didn’t know about the enclosure situation. Most people said the road up there was public, but Torsten said the bit from the barn was his, as was the bit of the enclosure where the Volvo was. It glowed fox-red with rust and the goats clambered on it to get at a willow that still had some leaves on it. Apart from that the enclosure looked as if it had been sprayed with defoliant.

In the presence of witnesses, Torsten had told Vidart for the last time to move the wreck and the fence. It was to be done by Monday at the latest, he had said. That was the same week as Johan’s end of term.

Vidart had moved the fence a bit further in and removed everything loose from the wreck. He was going take the rest in the front-loader, but there was something wrong with the hydraulics. So that week went by.

On Tuesday morning, when Vidart’s wife came with the Duett loaded with churns for milking, there was a gate right across the road. She got out and saw it was just fastened with a twisted wire. She didn’t dare open it, but turned round and drove away. After that, Vidart took the tractor across the hay meadows up to the enclosure and the goat shed every morning and evening.

Naturally all this could not go on in the long run. He couldn’t do the milking twice a day when he had his workshop to run, and his wife couldn’t drive the tractor. He was clearly fed up now. He didn’t send his wife in the Duett, but came himself.

He left the engine running as he got out and opened the gate, fiddling for a long time with the wire. As he drove through and the car disappeared behind the barn, Johan’s heart began to thump. He knew his father and brothers must have long since seen Vidart. It had gone quiet downstairs. The radio had been on in the kitchen before. The dogs were quiet, too, once the Duett had disappeared.

Then Per-Ola came out. Johan saw him as he strode out of the shade of the porch. He had already changed and was wearing white trousers and a white shirt. The others were obviously still indoors and it was still absolutely quiet.

Per-Ola crossed over to the carpentry shed and came out with a chain and a padlock, then went across and padlocked the gate to the gatepost. The timber in it gleamed yellow in the sun.