The Black Path (18 page)

“What does she say? Does she want to keep the child?”

“She says it’s a love child.”

The consultant lets slip an “Oh God,” and flicks through Britta’s notes. Nobody says anything for a while. Their thoughts are touching shamefacedly on abortion pills and the compulsory sterilization of times gone by.

“We’ll have to take her off the lithium,” he says. “We’ll have to try and get the little one out in as good a condition as possible, I suppose.”

Who knows, they think. Perhaps Britta will begin to have regrets when she starts to feel worse, and will want to get rid of the child. That would be best for all concerned, really.

Nils Gunnarsson attempts to close the notes and bring the matter to a conclusion, but the ward supervisor isn’t about to let him get away that easily. She’s worked herself into a state before she’s even begun to speak.

“I have no intention of having Britta on the ward without extra resources when she’s off her medication,” she says agitatedly. “She’ll cause absolute havoc up there.”

The consultant promises to do what he can.

The ward supervisor isn’t satisfied with that.

“I mean what I say, Nisse. I’m not taking responsibility for the ward if I have to have her there on a low-dose sedative. I’ll quit.”

The consultant notes dryly to himself that Britta is going to set the ward on fire. And the ward supervisor is her first victim.

Six months later, Britta is wheeled into the delivery room. Cursing and swearing. Midwives, junior nurses and the doctor in charge look at her with shocked expressions. Is she going to give birth like that? Strapped down? With her hands and feet shackled?

It’s probably the only way, explains Nils Gunnarsson, taking an enormous pinch of snuff.

The staff of the maternity unit watch in amazement as he wanders back and forth outside the delivery room like a parody of a father in the good old days, when the man wasn’t allowed to be present at the birth.

Two care assistants from the ward are in there with her; a guy and a girl, calm and resolute. They’re wearing T-shirts; he has tattoos on his arms, she has a ring in her eyebrow and a stud in her tongue. This is not something they’re going to hand over to just anybody. It’s the delivery room staff who are degraded to just anybody.

Britta is beside herself. During her pregnancy her condition has steadily worsened as she has been taken off the medication that would have harmed the baby. Her delusions have increased, as have the aggressive outbursts.

Now she’s playing hell as much as she can between contractions. She’s cursing everybody in the room, calling down the wrath of Satan and his hairy angels. They’re all whores and dried-up old cunts and fucking fucking…as she searches for the next insult. From time to time she loses herself in incomprehensible exchanges with creatures only she can see.

But when the next contraction kicks in she screams “no, no” in terror, and the sweat pours out of her. When that happens, even the care assistants from her own ward look sympathetic. One of them tries to talk to her. Britta! Hello! Can you hear me? And the pains increase. She’s dying, she’s dying!

They all look at one other. Is she dying? Can she simply do that?

Then the pains abate and the rage returns.

Nils Gunnarsson is listening to her through the door. He’s so proud of her. How she grabs hold of her fury. That’s all she has right now. Her ally against the pain, the powerlessness, the illness, the fear. She clings on tightly to it. It’s getting her through all this, and she’s screaming that it’s their fault. The fucking doctor and the dried-up cunts. She saw one of the cunts grinning. Oh, yes she did. What’s she grinning at, eh? What? Why doesn’t she answer, fucking bully, answer me when I speak to you, fucking fucking…And the dried-up cunt feels compelled to attempt an answer of some sort, that she wasn’t really smiling; the response is that she can take a scrubbing brush and shove it up her…But a fresh contraction interrupts the sentence.

Then the birth pains come. The midwife and the doctor are shouting: come on, Britta. And Britta tells them to go to hell. They shout that it’s going really well, and Britta spits at them, trying her best to hit them.

The child finally arrives. It is taken into care immediately according to paragraph 2 § LVU and is carried out. The consultant makes sure Britta is given a tranquilizer and painkillers. She’s been so good, fought her way through the birth, and the clinic has fought its way through her pregnancy.

She doesn’t really seem to know what’s happened. She has to stay strapped down while they stitch her up. She becomes calm at once, and is very tired.

Elsewhere the midwives are looking down at the newborn child. Poor little soul. What a start in life. They’re all completely shattered.

They can see that her father must be Indian. To think their children are so much prettier than Swedish ones. The girl is absolutely beautiful, with her brown skin and all that hair and those dark, serious eyes. It almost makes them want to cry. It’s as if she understands. Everything.

And nobody really thinks about it, but all those who were present at the birth are affected in one way or another during the following week. Britta has hurled her curses at them, heaped them on their heads. Most fell on barren ground, but some have taken root in their lives.

One of the nurses gets an abscess in her gum. The doctor is reversing in the parking lot and smashes one of her rear lights. Her house is broken into as well. Another person loses her wallet. The male care assistant with the tattooed arms loses his partner in a fire in their apartment.

That’s how powerful Britta Kallis’s gift is. Despite the fact that she is but a fraction of what she could have been, despite her own ignorance of what she does. Despite all this, her words gain a strange power when she is in a state half outside herself. There are various capabilities above and beyond what is normal on her mother’s side of the family, but it is many generations since anyone has been aware of them.

And little Ester Kallis. She also has gifts. And Ester will get another mother, and will inherit also from that mother’s side of the family.

M
y name is Ester Kallis. I have two mothers and no mother.

The person I call Mother in my mind married my father in 1981. She brought with her fifty reindeer. The majority of them were female, so my parents were hoping they would soon be able to support themselves by breeding reindeer. But my father always had to do other jobs. He drove the mail van sometimes, worked on the railways. Temporary measures. He was never free.

They bought the old station house in Rensjön, and my mother made a studio for herself out of the old waiting room. The house was tucked in between Norgevägen and the railway line; the windows shook every time the train carrying ore went past.

The studio was freezing cold. In the winter my mother stood there painting in gloves and a hat. But still. She enjoyed the fragile light. Father painted the whole room white. It was before I came to them. At the time when he wanted to do things for her.

In 1984, Antte was born. They didn’t really need any more children. Antte would have been enough. He could drive a snowmobile along a crack in the ice without going through, he had the right way with the dogs, that mixture of gentleness and reserve that made them work hard and put in the extra effort, running ten
miles to bring back a straying reindeer; he was never cold, he went with Father and worked with the reindeer. He never moaned about wanting to stay at home and play video games like many of his friends.

And while Father and Antte were out in the mountains, my mother painted and undertook commissions for Mattarahkka, the Sami craft cooperative: ceramic foxes, ptarmigans, elk and reindeer. She didn’t answer the telephone. Forgot to eat.

Father and Antte would often come home to a freezing cold house with nothing in the refrigerator. It didn’t matter, of course. The fact that they were tired and dirty, and had to get in the car and drive into town to go shopping before they could do anything else. She was useless in that way. When Antte and I were going to school, for example. We’d tell her beforehand, in plenty of time. On Thursday there’s a trip to this place or that place. We’re to bring a packed lunch. Then she wouldn’t get anything ready. On the Thursday morning she’d be standing there rooting in the refrigerator while the school bus waited for us. And then we got given any old thing. For example, sandwiches made with sliced fish balls. At school, the other kids pretended to throw up when we got our packed lunches out. Antte was embarrassed. I could see it from his reddening cheeks, patches of carmine against his almost zinc-white skin, and his ears burning with the light behind them, shining through the blood vessels, slender threads of cadmium red. Sometimes he made a big point of throwing away what she’d given him. Spent the whole day hungry and furious. I ate mine. In that way, I was like her. Didn’t really care what I shoveled down. Didn’t care about my schoolmates either. And most of them left me in peace.

The one who was the worst was an outsider himself. His name was Bengt. He had no friends. He was the one who would yell, hit me on the back of the head and start up.

“You know why you’re so thick? Do you, Kallis? Because your mother was in the loony bin. Took a load of pills that screwed your brain. Get it? And it was some curry-cock that gave her one. Curry-cock.”

And he’d laugh and look sideways at the other boys. With his watery blue eyes. A hunted look, the whole iris visible, a watercolor, watered-down cobalt blue. But it didn’t do him any good. He stayed right there with me, way down at the bottom. Although it was worse for him, because he cared.

I didn’t care. I’d already become like her. The one I call
eatn
an
in the Sami language, my little mother.

Completely obsessed with looking at things. Everything around me, all the people who are actually alive and filled with blood, all the animals with their little souls, every single thing and every plant, all the relationships between them—all these things are lines, colors, contrasts, compositions. Everything ends up inside the rectangle. It begins to lose taste, aroma, one dimension. But if I’m clever it regains everything, and more. The picture finishes up between me and what I see. Even if it’s myself I’m looking at.

That’s the way she was. Always took a step back to have a look. Driven. More or less absorbed. I remember several dinners. Father working away. She’d prepared something quick. Sat there in silence all through the meal.

But Antte and I were children, we usually ended up squabbling at the table. We might end up knocking over a glass of milk or something. Then all of a sudden she would sigh heavily. Sorrowfully, somehow, because we’d disturbed her thoughts, because she’d been forced to come back to us. Antte and I would fall silent and stare at her. As if a corpse had suddenly begun to move. She would wipe up the milk. Sullen and terse. Sometimes she just couldn’t be bothered, but would call one of the dogs to lick it up.

She did everything she was supposed to do: cleaning, cooking, washing clothes. But it was only her hands that were occupied with these tasks. Her thoughts were far away. Sometimes Father would try complaining.

“This soup is too salty,” he might say, pushing the bowl away.

But it didn’t offend her. It was as if someone else had cooked the inedible food.

“Shall I make you a sandwich instead?” she’d ask.

If he complained that the place was a mess, she’d start cleaning. Perhaps that was why Father decided they should take me in. He probably told her they needed the money. Maybe he believed that himself. But when I think about it now, I think he was probably hoping subconsciously that a baby would force her back to this world. Like when Antte was tiny. She’d been there then. Perhaps another child could make her into a proper wife.

He wanted to open doors inside her. But he didn’t know how. And he thought I would be the bridge that would lead her back to him and Antte. But it turned out to be the other way round. She painted. I lay on my stomach in the studio, drawing.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? Get outside and get some fresh air!” he would say to me, slamming the door.

I didn’t understand why he was so angry; I hadn’t done anything wrong.

These days I understand his rage. I understood it then, but I didn’t have the words. Although I did paint it. In my attic room at Mauri’s I have almost all my paintings and drawings. There’s an Elsa Beskow pastiche. When I did it, I didn’t even know what pastiche meant.

It shows a mother and daughter picking blueberries. A little way off, between some gnarled mountain birch trees, a bear stands watching them. He’s standing up on his hind legs, his head at a clumsy, sluggish angle. His expression is difficult to interpret. If I cover half his face with my hand, it has different expressions. One half is angry. The other half is sad.