Blackwater (23 page)

Väine had shot birds of prey, sometimes just for fun. And yet he had joined in when they beat up the German. That time they almost went too far. The brothers had caught the German by the Röbäck and when they opened the boot of his car, they had found three frozen birds. Two buzzards and one short-eared owl. Someone must have got them for him, but they never found out who. They kept knocking the German down until he lay there on the ground.

The pastor found him in the covert down by the stream. The pastor, of all people. Väine laughed at that along with the others, though he was only fifteen when it happened and couldn’t have had much to do with it. The angry little pastor, they called him. But of course, the German hadn’t reported them. He had that much sense. He stayed at the parsonage for several days.

The previous pastor had never bothered about fishing. In his day, anyone could fish in the church’s waters and put out nets where no one was looking. Then the new one came and started fishing and spending his time out of doors. He acquired a boat and kept it up at Whitewater. Pekka and Väine were fishing with a long line there one evening and the damned pastor had appeared and started gabbling away in his reedy voice.

He had begun something he called ‘forest services’ and had invited guest speakers to talk about the company’s spraying and clear-felling policies. No one had reckoned on his being out and about all the time. Everything that wasn’t town or indoors he called ‘nature’.

Him runs round t’marshes, the old men said. He had learnt to make his way through the downy willow and leap between the beaver holes without breaking his leg.

But no one had reckoned on his beginning to make a fuss about fishing, and that’s why the boat disappeared. He put notices up in three villages: ‘
boat
stolen from Whitewater, colour green.’ Then people knew, and they also realised who’d done it. Gudrun hummed and hawed, but Torsten had no objection because the damned pastor had once come chugging up in that silly little car of his, walked straight into the kitchen and told him that he knew the Brandbergs dumped waste oil into the Blackreed River. That made the shit hit the fan, but luckily for the pastor the kitchen had been full of people.

That was the kind of thing Johan told Ylja. He had not intended to at all, but once he was confined indoors with his foot, his thoughts kept going to Gudrun, Torsten and the brothers.

He was miserable stuck indoors, peeing into a coffee tin, the other, too, then having to heave it out of the window into the river. He couldn’t expect her to run about with a pot for him. But on the second day, he went out. She gave him an old carved walking stick for support and it felt better peeing out of doors. He could wash in the river, too. She told him he needn’t be afraid of being seen any longer. The Silver Fox had also left.

They were alone, yet there was no mention of Johan moving up to the house. She seemed to have grown tired of him, at any rate in the daytime. She was doing something up there, writing and reading. He had been stupid to talk about Gudrun and Torsten. All that sounded so ordinary. He realised she liked his being a Sami. She said Lapp, of course. He had said he was a full-blooded Sami and told her about the man with the scooter. But now she appeared to have lost interest.

He found it very dull in the daytime and slept a great deal. He was tired, too. She liked to keep going at night. He was given as much food as he liked and he wondered just how much they had carried up there. She slept with him at night, but no longer told him about the great forests and the Traveller and the women. Maybe it was childish, but he wished she would have continued. It made her different. He found it easier to like her when she talked about the forests and the fires glowing in the clearings at night. Dark nights they were, warm. The women hid from the Traveller, the dark deciduous forest full of laughter like birdsong. Though the birds had long since gone to sleep in the dark summer night that was Europe, that was not yet called Europe, but was just greenery and fast streams and wooded mountains.

Instead she got him to tell her about Torsten and Gudrun. She never really asked him anything, but she listened.

‘You’ve got an Oedipus complex,’ she said one evening. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘It’s when you don’t like your dad.’

‘You want to kill Father Torsten and sleep with Mother Gudrun,’ she said. At that he hit her, slapped her in the face. He felt the palm of his hand against her soft face and her cheekbone.

Afterwards he found it incomprehensible and had no idea what to do to have it undone. It was as if it hadn’t happened, as if it had been nothing but a nightmare.

The atmosphere between them had been troubled. They had been tired and not sober. She was very pale, and then she had said that. It was too crude, as if she’d told a dirty joke. But as soon as he had hit out, a split second afterwards, as she sat there with her head down and her cheek at first flared, then showed marks from the blow, he realised she had only been talking the way she usually did. Ironically. Outspokenly, but not seriously. She hadn’t meant he wanted to sleep with Gudrun and fantasised about it. She had meant something else, something foolish which had no significance at all. And he had hit her. Like a machine. A piston firing. No – he was dreaming.

‘You’re that sort after all.’

Her mouth was open, her eyes still fixed on him. She had the same expression as when she was astride him.

‘Torsten’s son,’ she said.

Then he knew that at all costs he had to get away.

On Tuesday morning, Vemdal phoned before eight to say he was sending a man to fetch Birger’s boots. In fact two police officers were already there, which Åke clearly didn’t know. They wanted much more than boots. They rummaged in the dirty-laundry basket, holding up Barbro’s white bra and examining panties and towels. When they had finished, they put the heap of clothes on the kitchen table. Birger considered that not only wrong but also disgusting. They included filthy fishing clothes he had thrown into the basket on Midsummer Day, the underpants stained from the accident that had almost happened to him at the approach to Blackwater. They went through the pockets of his green trousers and found a whole lot of mint-toffee papers. Violent rage raced through him, like congestion of blood in the head and a moment of severe pain. An attack of migraine that didn’t come off.

One of the officers opened the washing machine and fumbled round inside the cylinder; the other hooked up the grid over the drain, using a small, pointed spade. Turning the spade over, he started scooping the sludge from the drain into a plastic box.

They wanted his knife, which was still hanging from his belt. It was a childish knife, the first one Barbro had ever had. But she had never been very keen on fishing. The knife had deep grooves along the top, perhaps for scaling perch.

They asked him if he had any more knives. He said, ‘What the hell do you think?’, opened drawers and took out knives; heavy Mora knives in black plastic sheaths, some with paint on them and ruined cutting edges; and Tomas’s Japanese fishing knife encased in wood, which had swollen so they couldn’t get the narrow blade out. There was a little lady’s knife Tomas called the Lapp knife, a souvenir from the south with reindeer skin on the sheath.

‘And then we need the boots.’

‘I haven’t got any Three Towers boots,’ he said. ‘So there can hardly be any confusion.’

They asked about other boots, and furiously, he fetched several pairs from the garage and the shed. Tattered, patched boots, plastic boots that had cracked in the cold, alternately Tomas’s and his own, because they took the same size. The police made no comment, but simply took them and numbered them. He had to go upstairs for his hunting knives and they went with him, their eyes roaming, taking in the gun rack and the stand of old weapons. They took all his knives away with them.

He was forty minutes late getting to the surgery. Märta was not pleased. He didn’t want to tell her the police had been. He thought he would go out and buy some buns for coffee in the afternoon to appease her. If he had time.

Sister Märta ran the surgery. Everyone knew she decided who would see the doctor before whom and who needed to go to emergency. When Birger had started his practice in Byvången, he had been afraid of her.

At three o’clock, she came in and said he was to go to the police station, managing to make it sound as if she had decided that herself.

Åke wasn’t there. A total stranger was sitting at his desk, older than Vemdal, his greying hair brushed forward. A uniformed constable was in charge of the tape recorder at a side table.

Afterwards, Birger could remember nothing of the questioning except odd sentences. He didn’t get home until after six. It had lasted almost three hours.

He ate nothing that evening. He was too tired to prepare anything and he was feeling sick. They had gone on and on about Dan Ulander. About the staying overnight. About the tent. They knew perfectly well Barbro had not camped out.

‘But you thought she had, didn’t you?’

He didn’t know what he had thought. It was hardly possible to camp that high up at midsummer when the spring floods were still under way. He said he hadn’t known and still didn’t know who Dan Ulander was. The greying policeman said that wasn’t true. They had met. And in a way he was right, since Ulander was one of those environmentalists.

Much had been made of the fact that Birger had gone to Blackwater, that he had been so near and yet had not sought out his wife. How the hell could I have done that? Gone haring up the high mountain?

Hadn’t he been worried about her? He remembered the question but not what he had answered. During the whole interrogation he was thinking that Barbro was in a bad situation. She had lied and said that Ulander was her son. Birger had tried to explain that it was only a joke. She was so much older than Ulander.

How did he know that?

Well, how did he? It showed. Or had she said it? It was that kind of joke . . . between people who . . .

Made love together?

The bastard. What a way to put it. Like a soap opera. Fucking bastard.

Nor had the grey man taken it back. On the contrary – he had asked painful, intrusive, offensive questions. And Birger had replied, all courage and authority apparently drained out of him. From exhaustion. From weariness after all the repetitions and questions he had already heard before. Until the last round. He remembered that, for then it had been easy to answer.

Had he left the fishing place by the river at any time during Midsummer Night?

No, he hadn’t. He’d been with Åke Vemdal all the time.

He woke in the middle of the night. The window panes were wet. He didn’t give it a thought until later, after he had long since given up any attempt to go back to sleep – rain was coming at last.

Barbro had said she didn’t want to take anything from the house as long as Tomas was living there. He had a right to live in his environment. She didn’t say his home. Perhaps she sounded artificial only when she was talking to Birger, or perhaps it wasn’t the words but the metallic reproduction – membranes vibrating, electrically charged materials. Since Midsummer, they had talked to each other only on the telephone.

He took on the responsibility of keeping Tomas’s home as it had been before she left. Cleaning on Saturday mornings. Buying flowers. He wouldn’t go out and pick any; it took up so much time and would have looked just too pathetic.

Only white flowers were supposed to be in the living room, or green leaves and grasses in glass vases. He bought a white cyclamen, but it died. Overwatering, said the cleaner who came in nowadays. In the long run, he hadn’t time to clean the house and Tomas always found some excuse to get out of having to help. Birger had to try to get the painting of the woodwork finished before the autumn rains came, and he realised he couldn’t run the house on his own. Though he resisted. He had resisted all the time, but had never mentioned it, nor even given it much thought when Barbro had found a cleaner.

It was really so simple. He wanted to be left in peace. He wanted a place where he could be absolutely on his own. Not have any comments. No one looking in. No talk about what it looked like at the doctor’s.

But he had to accept the cleaner, though the result was not what he had hoped for. She changed something as she chased round with the vacuum cleaner and various cloths. Perhaps the smell? She drenched the cloths in chemicals, presumably not the same things Barbro had used. And some materials didn’t like water, even he realised that. He looked at the delicate, silky surfaces of birchwood and wondered whether they had dulled. He wanted to keep the beauty of the rooms, at least the rare, pale, almost transparent beauty of the living room. The glass birds in the window, their slight hovering movements when he walked across the floorboards, now a hundred and fifty years old but fresh and polished to a dull sheen.

He found out that glass was difficult to keep clean. Water-spotted Finnish littala vases with yellowish chalky rings on them appeared. The cleaner broke one of the glasses with spiral stems. She had put the pieces on a newspaper together with an explanation, improbably spelt. She must have realised they were expensive, because the next time they met she said, ‘No one could drink out of them, anyhow.’

It did not escape him that she sounded downright hostile. The seven glasses were twisted like flowers reaching out for the light.

‘No, you can’t drink out of them,’ was all he said, and he found he was afraid of her.

No one came to the house any longer. He didn’t invite people home, nor did anyone drop in. He was pleased to be left in peace because he had become obsessed with the sandpapering and painting of the elaborate latticework he thought gave the big house its character.

Maybe he had thought someone would ring up and ask him out for a meal. But they were Barbro’s friends, though he had never considered that before. He hadn’t had time to acquire any of his own. None of them phoned to find out how he was. Had they taken sides? If so, why against him? He did feel some guilt, but they wouldn’t know anything about that.