Blackwater (41 page)

The sound of the water between the stones had existed and still existed, with not a single night’s interruption, as long as could be imagined: always. The cold could force it down to a noise under the ice, the cold which felled birds in flight, which killed an old man and his old dog in a badly insulated cottage down by the rivermouth. He had told her about it, a story so old that the cold was the central character, not the old man. Even beavers had probably died then. That was long ago, so far away. New ones had come shuffling along, burying their noses into the muddy tussocks and beginning to dig. But their territory was still as much as half a metre beneath the two of them. Across the snow they traversed the animals’ passages and holes.

‘This place really belongs to the beavers,’ he said.

But it wasn’t a place. It was events. She had been part of some of them, as a child. He would tell her others. There were things to keep silent about, too. They were not going to pass the spot where the Dutch had had their tent. Did she know about it?

They had fastened their skis to their boots, Johan’s own old wooden ones, and Väine’s. He had found them in the cookhouse and managed to round up three ski sticks for them. They had made their way up, but for long stretches they had slithered on the scrub and moss. The night was light and there was snow up towards Bear Mountain. The river waters roared beneath the bridge of ice.

They came back to Nirsbuan. At first he had thought of stopping overnight there and getting up in the morning blinded by the light as green buds on the birches burst out. But a musty puff of air had hit them as the door opened and they realised it wasn’t possible. A blanket on the bed lay entangled with some grubby sheets. He ripped them off so that Mia shouldn’t see them, revealing a foam-rubber mattress yellowish brown with age and full of peculiar holes. Maybe mice had taken bits of it down into their nests. A filthy towel hung on a nail by the stove, the name Hotel Winn unfortunately still visible. What kind of people will she think we are? he thought. That was the first time in eighteen years he had thought of the Brandbergs as ‘we’.

He had got the stove going but realised they couldn’t lie on that damp, evil-smelling mattress. But someone had. Someone had been living there, he could tell from the packets in the cupboard, the new battery radio, the dates on the newspapers. Someone who wasn’t there at the moment, but who had recently fried pork in the cast-iron pan and left a layer of fat on the bottom.

The raw cold had driven Mia out of the cottage. She was sitting on the steps, her legs apart, her face raised to the sun and the moist wind. Sounds began to rise from the marshland below, an exhilarated babble rising and falling. Maybe it was the last of the late-night and early-morning delirium; the sound rose now as if trying to stop the light putting an end to the intoxication of the spring night.

She said she had been six when she had heard it for the first time. She hadn’t understood what it was at the time. She still thought it sounded feverish, inhuman. And yet like singing or cries.

‘The marsh is rutting,’ he said.

They listened for a while over their coffee and then walked across the river and the marshes towards the place where they slaughtered reindeer, their faces turned up to the mild drizzle. They could still hear the blackcocks when they got to the parking lot.

He had tried once before. That attempt had also been unpremeditated. He had been in Östersund, had three days free and was going to go home to Langvasslien. In the evening, he had felt like driving across the border to Blackwater. It was a long way round, and he might have had the notion of staying the night.

He regretted it as soon as he got to Tuvallen, but by then it was too late. The road was deserted, it was January and very cold. The forest was nothing but white wall with black streaks on either side, the road a tunnel in the beam of his headlights. He had met no one since leaving Laxkroken. If his engine packed in, he would freeze to death.

It didn’t, of course. He got to Blackwater and parked the car a little way away from the store, leaving the engine running as he went to look at the notice board. These days it was illuminated, otherwise just the same. The thermometer on the wall by the postbox said almost thirty degrees below zero. It was half past eleven at night, not a light in a single window and nothing moving on the road. Of course not.

As he got back into the car, he noticed a light on the other side of the lake. Not still. An uneasy light up on the Brandberg slope. Must be a strong light to be visible across the lake. It seemed to him to be crawling.

Then he remembered Gudrun had told him that Torsten and Per-Ola had bought processors and together they had formed a company. She had been defiantly proud of that development and things had gone well for them. Per-Ola was go-ahead and not afraid of large loans, and Väine was to work for them as well. But he wasn’t a partner in the company.

‘Don’t you go thinking I won’t make sure of your rights,’ she had said, touching in her determined eagerness. She always ensured his rights. She explained that he would inherit from Torsten and with that a share in the company. He needn’t be afraid of losing anything by the formation of the company.

No, he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t think he had any right to inherit from Torsten. But he didn’t say so. The processor hadn’t become real to him until he found himself sitting in the car watching the play of that crawling light far up on the mountainside.

That must be it. Per-Ola and Väine working despite the cold night, presumably working in shifts. If they let it stand still, they couldn’t pay the interest.

Twenty-seven degrees below zero. The white light crept along the mountain slope, playing jerkily across the falling trees. The machine up there must be roaring and creaking, but nothing could be heard across the silent white lake.

Crawling light. Crawling over all that sleeping life. All that shitty life that didn’t deserve the warmth. Didn’t deserve the song, the playing and the water. Not even leaves.

It’s the hatred in me that crawls in the forest, he thought. I am a part-owner of a processor. It has to be worked day and night, winter and summer. It costs money, it costs lives. The hero in the driver’s seat with his head beneath the stars is working harder than I have ever worked. I’m nothing but a part-owner. It’s the hatred in me crawling along up there.

He had driven away from the streetlights that had appeared since he was a boy, and on into the darkness on the Norwegian side. He had been afraid of the cold, afraid of his engine failing. But he got away from there.

This time he had made another attempt and it had gone well. Quite well, for he had avoided the house. It worried him that Gudrun might hear on the grapevine that he had been in the village with Mia Raft. He thought of phoning and explaining as soon as he got back to Östersund. That it was an experiment, and had been done on an impulse. More or less.

Two or three times a year, Gudrun travelled to Trondheim to see him, usually dressed in her best and fairly wrought up. Each time he saw her, she had aged a little. She had some kind of trembling in her hands. She was fifty-six now and dyed her hair black. Johan no longer knew much about her troubles and nothing at all about her everyday life. He had to assume that much was the same as before, though things had gone well for Torsten. He had several diggers now, a crusher on the other side of the lake and a new gravel pit up by Torsberget. Gudrun’s clothes were not cheap and she still drove an Audi. It was new and it was obvious it was her own.

As Johan was sitting in the car waiting for Mia, he looked up towards the house. He could see the kitchen window, the curtains drawn so far across, it must have been almost impossible to look out. Or look in, so perhaps that was the intention. He presumed she was in there moving between stove, refrigerator and sink. The treadmill. Though he knew she had a dishwasher.

He was waiting for Mia. It had gone well. If it hadn’t been so filthy and cold at Nirsbuan, and so little wood, he could have stayed another day. Mia had suggested he should go on up to Gudrun and Torsten to get a few hours’ sleep. But he drew the line at that. He had driven her up to her mother’s cottage, which he still thought of as Aagot Fagerli’s, and he had slept in the car.

She was asleep, her cheek rounded and shiny with cream, her eyelashes faintly reddish without mascara. He thought his own thoughts when she was asleep.

She was very sleepy in the evenings now she was pregnant. It didn’t matter to her if he kept the light on and lay reading. She slept like a child. When she was awake she was very sensible. He reckoned she felt very much at home in the world, that she understood it.

Alone with the lamp lighting up her slightly curly, auburn hair, he felt for the threads that bound her so profoundly to him. Previously he had been turned on like lightning and lived in a state of mild intoxication for a few weeks, particularly in the summer. But since he had grown up, his relations with women had been sensible, at heart perhaps amused. Both ways.

Mia was sensible, and they took it light-heartedly even when desire made them dizzy. She rapidly sobered up again. It amused him that she was always planning – outings, maternity leave, work projects. But he liked it. He liked her strong will, as fresh as a clean nut in a young, green but already hardening shell.

There were other things. Finer threads down among the feelings he found difficult to put into words. Then again, it could be expressed brutally simply: when he met Mia it had seemed to him that she had come to take him home.

That was an unattractive thought, but it was there and it worked. Telling her about it, even implying it, would be injudicious. He didn’t want Mia to feel like a tool. Nor was she. She was a prerequisite.

When she was asleep, the room turned slightly alien. She had a poster on the wall above the bed with a face and a name on it he didn’t recognise, a black singer in mirrored sunglasses. A hat hung over the reading lamp as an extra shade, black and decorated with large cloth poppies. He had never seen her in a hat and couldn’t imagine it on her head. He wondered why she had bought it.

She had been disappointed when he had wanted to drive straight back to Östersund. Eventually she would like to visit Torsten and Gudrun. He could foresee it and knew it would happen. But not yet.

She was disappointed but not cross as they drove away. Mia never sulked. Usually she got her own way, and instinctively knew when she should give in. It had been a lovely day despite the rain in the morning and naturally it was not tempting to go back to Östersund. He tried to compensate by taking her out to dinner. She said the salmon tasted musty.

It wasn’t off, he would have noticed that. When they got home to her place she vomited. She came out of the bathroom looking determined. She was having some troubles but said they would pass.

She fell asleep early, presumably because she hadn’t felt well. At about nine, he went out and phoned Gudrun. He didn’t want Mia to wake and listen to their conversation.

He felt miserable afterwards. Gudrun had never suggested he should come home to Blackwater to see them. This time she had made no comment on their visit. He hadn’t thought much about these things before. He looked on the Dorjs as his nearest kin. But since he had met Mia he had started thinking that unnatural.

Basically he knew this had nothing to do with naturalness or nature, but with conventions. But it was all part of Mia’s worldly wisdom that she had some respect for them. Reasonable respect.

Several of the humorous, sensible and unconventional women he had taken back home to Langvasslien and given a ride behind his sled dogs had balanced along very narrow planks over rushing water. Over pure chaos.

When he got back, he went to bed and read, but lay there for long spells, looking at her. She was sleeping soundly when the telephone rang. When he woke her and handed her the receiver, she found it difficult to understand what it was all about. It was almost one in the morning. He went out and put on water for tea and made some toast. She usually felt sick when she woke and her stomach was empty. When he brought the tea in, she was still talking, not really saying much, but calming someone. Perhaps succeeding, because in the end she put back the receiver and curled up again.

‘Mum’s bloke,’ she said. ‘Torbjörnsson. She’s gone off somewhere without telling him. Now he’s half crazy.’

She fell asleep again without touching the tea. He lay there wondering how he could get her to move in with him in Trondheim. Strong feelings make us mobile. But he still hadn’t dared ask her.

In the middle of the night, Birger discovered the shotgun had gone. It was light indoors and he was lying on his back on her bed, still dressed, his head aching fiercely. He had talked to Mia. It was she who had had tea with Annie in the morning. She hadn’t been worried. All she said was that her mother had probably taken it into her head to go somewhere.

Mia didn’t know what the situation between them was. She had no idea about the telephone calls that morning and evening. She probably thought what was between them was quite practical, an arrangement that secured company for them at weekends and sex without either of them becoming too involved. He had never considered that it might seem like that. It was an unpleasant thought.

For a moment, he had considered phoning the police. Then he had stopped thinking about anything for a long time and just waited. He hadn’t really been able to eat anything all day. But he kept spreading butter on pieces of thin crispbread and eating them one after the other. The hours went by slowly. Outside the birds had gone insane. He couldn’t understand how she ever got any sleep at all at this time of year.

The kitchen and the living room were still full of fat bunches of flowers the schoolchildren had brought; cowslips, globe flowers and red campion, forget-me-nots with tiny flowers, lilies-of-the-valley, their bells turning brown at the edges. They had plundered the flowerbeds. Even the boys used to bring flowers. They had found wood anemones that had been grotesquely enlarged but still hadn’t faded, and they had picked them as if they had a price per kilo on them. And they’d sung to her, sure to have.