Blackwater (59 page)

‘You don’t have to mock me,’ he said. ‘I believed it.’

‘The time has come to stop now, then. Thank Torsten and the forest roads for the life you’ve been given. School and university and all. And that you were able to live with Sakka and Per. He has paid every day for you. I wasn’t going to let one single insane event ruin your whole life. A sixteen-year-old. Who was frantic.’

‘But it wasn’t me!’

‘And I wasn’t going to let that teacher destroy your whole life, either. When everything had gone so well. Just as I’d thought it would. As long as you had the chance to get away from all that, to forget it as if it had never happened.’

‘But you were wrong!’

She either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to listen any longer.

‘She poked her nose into everything. Asking questions and digging up the past. You’ve no idea what she’s been like here. How she’s interfered in everything although she wasn’t even born here. Out of curiosity, and because she thought she knew everything better than anyone else. When Magna Wilhelmsson told us at county fairs about Jonas in Brannberg, who was your great-grand-father, I’ll have you know, she got up afterwards and said that Magna had forgotten to mention that he had had children with both the sisters up there. His wife and her sister. And she said you mustn’t forget the near-starvation and the tuberculosis and the incest, when you talk about what it was like before. You couldn’t just talk about what hard-working people they were, how fine Grandfather’s stonemasonry was and the songs your auntie sang. Annie Raft poked and pried and interfered, and I don’t think she ever grasped that these were the relatives of living people she was talking about. The truth must out, she said. We mustn’t forget. And then she came and started digging into what had happened down at the Lobber!’

‘She saw her daughter together with the person she thought had done it. She wanted to protect her child.’

But that didn’t get through to her. She’s the only one with a child, he thought.

‘Mia and I are going to have a baby,’ he said.

Then she really did look at him.

‘That’s impossible!’

Indeed, it was irretrievably difficult. Annie and Gudrun. The two grandmothers. Everything would come out over the years. It was too black. Too extreme. Condemning a child to such knowledge, even if it came trickling in late and perhaps diluted and falsified.

‘It’ll have to be possible,’ he said. He felt he didn’t want to talk to her about it. It simply had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Deliverance may come to the person who hates. Sakka’s laughter. Her good-natured casualness. Johan seemed to see before him the piece of elastic that joined button and buttonhole in Mia’s jeans. The way it stretched and bounced.

‘Lie down on the sofa,’ he said to Gudrun. ‘Try to sleep for a while. It may be a long time before Birger Torbjörnsson phones.’

She actually obeyed him. He drew the blanket over her, pulling it right up to her chin. When he brushed her hands, they were cold.

Things between Gudrun and him would be much as before, though he would be the one to go to see her occasionally. Torsten and she would probably have to move later, when she came back home. They would get older. Perhaps in a flat. Torsten would not live to old age there.

Torsten. He visualised him as he had seen him under the porch light beside the dark, shaggy wall of hops. Thinner, more worn and greyer than he had thought it possible for him to become.

The person who hates may be delivered. In this incredibly untidy existence. And all the insanity we have been part of. To some, deliverance comes like a laugh. Well – good heavens! We have to make our way somehow.

But why doesn’t it come to us all? he thought childishly. My mother. There’s a hole where she used to be. A hole that is now closing.

He went round feeling the radiators. Saddie was lying in the hallway, staring silently at the door, and he realised she hadn’t been out since Birger and he set off that afternoon. He let her out and quickly locked the door again.

He was frightened of Björne. He had no difficulty imagining him down at the Lobber. He had seen him slaughtering beasts. He had always been the one to do it. Pigs. Ram lambs. He could see his face as he thrust in the knife. A rigidity, teeth. It was called an archaic smile. Most people saw it only in museums. But it was alive and ecstatic.

Johan stood holding the blind in the kitchen slightly away from the window, watching Saddie squat and urinate for a long time a little way out on the grass. She wanted to come in again immediately.

When he went into the living room, Gudrun was lying with her eyes closed. It was impossible to know whether she was asleep. The tension had gone from her thin face, now smoothed out and childish. He could well imagine the girl who had read magazines, studying the pink-complexioned women with their hair en bouffant and in rigid waves. Sakka had also told him how they had read about film stars and tried to resemble them. They had gone for Ava Gardner. That was who they wanted to look like. They had wet their hair with pilsner and rolled it tightly on to Grandmother’s chamois-leather curlers. They had painted their mouths with a moistened red crayon.

Gudrun’s narrow little mouth with its tightly closed lips.

Sakka had laughed at it all. She had laughed so that her breasts bounced when she told him about it. But the other girl, with her terrible gravity, was now lying on Annie Raft’s sofa under a grey blanket, looking as if nothing had happened to her since then.

Solitude. The pattering of mice. Clicks in the stove. Showers of rain on the metal roof. The birches shuddering in the sharp wind from the high mountain. Yellow leaves tearing loose and sticking to the cottage windows.

No shooting for Birger; silent solitude instead. Colour prints of Jesus gave him meek and disturbed looks. He had leafed through Nostradamus, but had given up. Good grief! There was a pack of cards in the table drawer and he played the patiences he could remember: Round the Clock, Four Queens, Solitaire.

Now I am myself, he thought. Whatever is inside here, that is me.

The Klöppen was grey and rough, the waves white-capped. He could just see it when the tops of the birches swayed and formed a gap. Ravens seemed to detach themselves from the sky, shrieking and chattering.

He had quite a lot of food with him, a rucksack full, and he was determined to stay until Björne came back. His car had been found just outside the village. He couldn’t get anywhere. But Birger didn’t want him to be met by police when he came back to the cottage. Then things might go off the rails again.

The police didn’t like Birger being there. But he never left the meadow and only seldom the cottage. He chopped a little firewood for himself and took it inside. Made kindling. Tore up birch bark. Went to the privy. Fetched two full buckets of water and heated a pan of water on the stove. Then he washed himself properly. He had put newspapers under the stool the washbasin was on. After that he made coffee.

He realised that this was how you did it. You divided up the day. The evening would come in the end. The radio worked faintly for the first two days, though the batteries were running out. Then it stopped. He was himself.

In the evening he could see the ridges beyond the Klöppen darkening in the autumn twilight. They still had some colour and there was a great deal of gold among it all, dark gold. The greenery was the colour of smoke and earth. There was a smell of smoke. The smoke from his own stove came down when the weather calmed and the landscape smelt like the colours. Twilight thickened more and more. Violet came into the earth and smoke. The clouds behind the ridges looked like gold that had been drawn out of the actual ground. The cookhouse windows glimmered.

He was reminded that there was supposed to be silver in the Klöppen. Down towards the church, just before the mouth of the Röbäck. A Lapp had seen the vein open one Christmas night. Good Lord!

Three panes were shiny in the cookhouse window, the fourth covered with a piece of cardboard. A crow circled above it all.

If he did not eat and divide the day up into chores, if he lay on the bed listening to what was not human – the clicks in the timber walls, the hissing of the sedge – then he would soon be on the borderline. But he didn’t want that. He preferred to read Nostradamus. At least it had been written by a human being.

It was misty in the morning. He could see nothing, no ridges, none of the waters of the Klöppen, nothing. Out of the marsh rose two or three dense shapes, probably spruces. Anna Starr maintained she had seen Artur Fransa in the marsh water when there was a mist. That he showed himself there. Crazy old women, they must want to be able to see the dead. But why?

The wind got up and the mist vanished. The dense shapes as well. So they hadn’t been spruces. Maybe elks.

He looked at the patient forest beneath the northwest wind. The ragged surface of the water. The weeping windows of the cottage.

Find a lair. Crouch down. Creep in. Sooner or later, he was bound to come.

It was night. Birger had been woken so many times by a rustling, thinking it was him. Now he rolled over and longed to return to his shallow, easily disturbed sleep.

The porch door creaked. Then he could faintly hear that he was standing there, sniffing the air. Yes, he could tell by the scent that someone was living here. Sausages had been fried, coffee brewed and the stove was still a bit warm.

‘It’s only me,’ Birger said quietly.

He got up from the low bed and went out into the kitchen.

‘Come on in.’

Once he had the oil lamp lit, he could see him by the door. He was soaking wet. His clothes were dark with the wet dripping off him and running down to the floor. His hollow cheeks were covered with grey stubble. He had smeared something round his mouth.

‘Where have you been?’

‘In Klemmingsberg.’

That was an old defence installation, dynamited out of Torsberg Mountain during the war and named after a major called Klemming. Birger had thought it had collapsed long ago.

‘Let’s have a look at your thumb.’

He had wrapped a strip of shirt material round it and the parcel was stiff and brown.

‘I’ve got the things with me now, so I can stitch it for you. But I wonder if it’ll work. That wound must look bloody nasty by now. I’ll probably just have to bandage it up again. I’ll make you something hot to drink. When I’ve done something about the wound, you can sleep. We won’t be going down until morning.’

Björne said nothing. He was swaying slightly. He couldn’t get his boots off by himself. There was water inside them and Birger had to keep wrenching and pulling to get them off. He lit the stove and was glad of the few embers left inside. Then he helped him off with garment after garment until he stood naked on the floor in front of the stove.

A big man. His lower legs and hands were thickly scarred. His face was sunburnt and so were his forearms; his forehead was white above the mark from the rim of his cap. His body was whitish yellow, the skin slack across his belly. He had starved. The tuft of hair below his stomach had thinned out. Prematurely, Birger thought. Prematurely, too, his penis had shrunk and the scrotum shrivelled.

He felt over him a little and listened to his heart. There was nothing wrong with it, he knew. The heart was pumping. The chest was being raised and lowered by his lungs. But Birger thought someone ought to touch him.

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Epub ISBN: 9781446484432

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Published by Vintage 1996

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Copyright © Kerstin Ekman 1993

English translation copyright © Joan Tate 1995

The right of Kerstin Ekman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First published in Swedish as
Händelsere vid vatten
in 1993 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1995

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EPUB ISBN 9781446484432