The Black Path (40 page)

Her mother can talk, but it’s slurred and she tires quickly. She wants to know how the private viewing went.

“They don’t understand a thing,” her aunt snaps.

The exhibition attracted a few reviews. They weren’t good. Under the headline “Young, Young, Young” one reviewer wrote that Ester Kallis is certainly talented for her age, but that she has nothing to say. He is left completely unmoved by all her little nature pictures.

They’re all the same. Ester Kallis is a child. What’s the point of the exhibition? One of the reviewers questions both the gallery owner and Gunilla Petrini. She writes that Ester Kallis is not the young genius they would like her to be, and that unfortunately it is Ester who has to pay the price for their desire to attract attention.

Gunilla Petrini rang Ester the day the first review appeared.

“Don’t take any notice of it,” she said. “The very fact that you’ve managed to get a review is good, lots of people never even get that. But we’ll talk about this again. Take care of your mother now. Give her my best.”

“What about this?” says her aunt, quoting from one of the reviews. “It says here that Ester Kallis ‘grew up among the Sami.’ What do they mean by that? It’s a bit like Mowgli, growing up among the wolves, but he can’t become a wolf because of his race.”

Her mother looks at Ester with her strange, expressionless face, making a huge effort to find the words.

“It’s good,” she says sharply. “That you don’t have a Sami name, that you don’t look like a Sami. Do you understand? If they’d realized you were a Sami, none of them would have dared to criticize you. Your pictures would have been…”

“…good, considering they were by a Lapp kid,” her aunt chips in.

But her mother wants to explain more clearly:

“…an expression of our exotic culture, not real art. You would never have been judged by the same criteria. It gives you a small advantage, perhaps, in the beginning. A little bit of free attention. But then you can’t get any further…”

“…than Luleå,” says her aunt, rooting in her purse for her cigarettes; she’ll need to go out on the balcony for a smoke shortly.

“Maybe they think they can’t judge our art properly. Maybe that’s why those who aren’t much good get the same acclaim as the best. And that’s fine for those who are mediocre, but you…”

“…will compete with the best,” her aunt finishes off the sentence.

“For me it’s been a cage. Nobody ever thought anything I did could be of interest to anybody apart from tourists or other Sami.”

She looks at Ester. Ester can’t interpret her look.

“There’s so much of our grandmother in you,” she says.

“I know,” says her aunt. “Just like
áhkku
. I’ve always said that.”

Behind her, Ester hears her aunt begin to cry.

“Many times at home in Rensjön,” says her mother. “I remember watching you. The way you moved. How you were with the animals. I thought: my God, that’s just what my little granny used to do. But you never got to meet her.”

Ester doesn’t know what to say. In her earliest memories, there were always two women in the kitchen. And the other one wasn’t her aunt, she knows that. Her aunt doesn’t wear a
jorbot,
the traditional cap that Sami women wear, nor does she have a flowery dress with buttons down the front, and an apron.

Then her mother dies. Not immediately after that conversation, but a week later it’s over. And Father and Antte take her home. Now she’s dead, she belongs only to them. Antte’s mother, Father’s wife. Ester is not allowed to be present at the division of their property. Neither is her aunt.

After the funeral her father and aunt have a quarrel. Ester can hear them through the door of the community center kitchen.

“The house is too big for me and the boy,” says her father. “And what do I want with the studio?”

He says he’s going to sell everything. The reindeer too. He has a friend who owns a holiday village outside Narvik. He and Antte can go in as part owners, and work there full-time as well.

“But what about Ester?” hisses her aunt. “Where’s she supposed to go?”

“She’s got her own arrangements,” her father defends himself. “She’s supposed to be going to that art school, isn’t she? What can I do? You’re not expecting me to move to Stockholm with her? And I can hardly hang on to all this just for her sake, can I? I was no older than her when I had to stand on my own two feet.”

That evening at home in Rensjön, when they’re sitting in front of the television—her aunt, her father, Antte and Ester—he takes out his wallet, removes the rubber band around it and takes out twenty 500-kronor notes, which he gives to Ester.

“You’d better look in the studio to see if there’s anything you want to take with you,” he says.

He rolls up the notes and puts the rubber band around them.

“Bloody hell,” says her aunt, getting up with such force that the coffee cups on the table rattle on their saucers. “Half of all this was hers. Ten thousand! Is that Ester’s rightful share, do you think?”

Her father answers by remaining silent.

Her aunt rushes into the kitchen and turns the taps full on to do the washing up, and Ester and her father and Antte can hear over the rushing water and the crashing of the dishes that she’s crying loudly.

Ester looks at Antte; his face is chalk-white, blue in the glow of the television. She tries to hold back. She doesn’t want to know. But she’s floating up toward the ceiling in the glow of the television as if she were floating through blue water. And from up there she looks down on Antte and her father. It’s the same television, but a different room. Different furniture.

It’s a small apartment. They’re slumped on a sofa, gazing at the TV. Antte is a few years older, and he’s got quite fat. Her father has acquired lines of bitterness around his mouth. Ester can see that he was hoping to meet someone new. That he thought he’d have a better chance working in a holiday village outside Narvik.

No woman, thinks Ester. No holiday village, either.

When Ester lands, she’s standing in the kitchen. Her aunt has stopped crying and is smoking underneath the extractor fan. She talks about how things are going to be for Ester, about how angry she is with Ester’s father. And then she talks about the new man in her life.

“Jan-Åke has asked me to go with him to Spain. He plays golf in the winter. I can ask him if you can come with us, before term starts. I mean, the apartment isn’t very big, but we’ll manage somehow.”

“There’s no need,” says Ester.

Her aunt is relieved. Presumably the love between her and Jan-Åke isn’t the kind that can cope with a teenager.

“Are you sure? I can ask.”

Ester assures her that she’s quite certain. And her aunt keeps on about it until Ester is forced to lie and say she has friends in Stockholm, people who are on the same course, that she can go and stay with.

In the end, her aunt is satisfied.

“I’ll call you,” she says.

She exhales smoke and gazes out into the winter darkness.

“This will be my last time in this house,” she says. “It’s hard to believe. Have you looked in the studio, decided what you want to take?”

Ester shakes her head. The following day her aunt fills Ester’s suitcase with tubes of paint and brushes and good paper. Even clay, which weighs a ton.

Ester and her aunt say goodbye at the central station. Her aunt has a ticket, and wants to celebrate New Year’s Eve with that guy, whatever his name was. Ester has forgotten already.

Ester drags her suitcase, heavy as lead, back to her room on Jungfrugatan. The apartment is silent and empty. The builders have taken some time off over the holiday. It’s over three weeks until the new term begins. She doesn’t know anybody. She won’t see a soul until then.

She sits down on a chair. She still hasn’t cried over her mother. But she would feel very insecure doing it here, in this situation. When she’s so totally alone. She simply daren’t do it.

And so she sits there like that in the darkness. She doesn’t know how long for.

Not just now, she says to herself. Some other time. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow it’s New Year’s Eve.

A week passes. Sometimes Ester wakes up and it’s light outside. Sometimes she wakes up and it’s dark. Sometimes she gets up and puts some water on to make tea. Stands there looking into the pan as it boils. Sometimes she can’t bring herself to take the pan off the hotplate, just stands there watching it boil away. Then she has to start again with fresh water.

One morning she wakes up feeling dizzy. Then she realizes it’s a long time since she had anything to eat.

She wanders along to the 7-Eleven store. Going out is unpleasant. It feels as if people are looking at her. But she has to do it. The weather is gray. The tree trunks are damp and black. Wet gravel on the pavements. Disintegrating dog crap and garbage. The sky dense and close. Impossible to imagine that the sun is up there. That the top of the cloud cover is like a snowy landscape on an early spring day.

Inside the store the smell of newly baked Danish and grilled sausages suddenly hits her. Her stomach contracts so violently that it hurts. She feels dizzy again, grabs hold of the edge of a shelf, but it’s only the plastic strip they fasten the prices and the names of the items to, and she falls to the floor with the strip in her hand.

Another customer, a man who was standing over by the chilled-goods counter, quickly puts down his basket and hurries over to her.

“Hey, what happened to you, kid?” he asks.

He’s older than her mother and father, but not old. His eyes are concerned, and he’s wearing a blue woolly hat. For a moment she’s almost in his arms as he helps her to her feet.

“Here, sit down. Can I get you anything?”

She nods and he comes back with coffee and a freshly baked Danish.

“Hey.” He laughs as she bolts it down, drinking the coffee in great gulps although it’s really hot.

She realizes she ought to pay, but then thinks that maybe she hasn’t got any money with her. How could she leave home without thinking about that? She searches through her coat pockets and there’s the money from her father. A roll of twenty 500-kronor notes, held together with a rubber band.

She pulls it out.

“Jesus,” says the man. “I’ll stand you the coffee and the cake, but just use one of those at a time.” He removes one of the notes from the bundle and places it in her hand. He pushes the rest of the money back into her pocket and zips it up carefully, as if she were a very small child. Then he looks at the clock.

“Will you be okay now?” he asks her.

Ester nods. The man leaves, and Ester buys fifteen Danish pastries and some coffee to take back to her room on Jungfrugatan.

The following day she goes back to the 7-Eleven at the same time to buy more pastries. But the man isn’t there. He doesn’t come the following day either. Nor the day after that. She goes back, hoping, four days in a row, then she stops going there.

She carries on sleeping through the days. It’s hard when she’s awake. She thinks about her mother. About the fact that she no longer belongs to anyone, or anywhere. She wonders if they’ve emptied the house in Rensjön yet.

Her aunt rings once on her cell phone.

“How’s things?”

“Fine,” replies Ester. “What about you?”

Just as she’s asking, she sees that her aunt takes the opportunity to cry when Jan-Åke is out playing golf.

It’s so strange, thinks Ester. All of us who miss her so. How did we end up being so lonely in our sorrow?

“Fine,” says her aunt. “And of course Lars-Tomas hasn’t called.”

No, her father hasn’t called. Ester wonders whether her father and Antte can talk to each other. No. Antte has been silenced by Father’s “You have to look to the future” and “It’ll all work out somehow.”

One morning she wakes up, and as she’s walking through the hallway to the kitchen to make some tea, she bumps into one of the workmen. He’s wearing blue overalls and a thick jacket. “Hey there,” he says. “You scare easily! I’m just here to pick up a few things. Plenty of snow out there.”

Ester looks at him in surprise. Has it snowed?

“There must be at least a meter,” he says. “Look out the window and you’ll see. We should have been back at work here today, but nobody can get through.”

Ester looks out the window. It’s another world.

Snow. It must have been snowing all night. Longer than that. She hadn’t noticed anything. The cars on the street are visible only as small snow-covered mounds. Deep snow on the road. The streetlamps are wearing thick white winter hats.

She totters out into the white world. A mother is toiling along in the middle of the street, pulling her child on a sledge. A man in a long, smart black coat is skiing in the center of the road. Ester has to smile; he’s somehow managing to hold his ski pole and his briefcase in the same hand. He smiles back. Everybody she meets is smiling. They shake their heads; it’s crazy, this much snow! Everybody seems to be taking it all very calmly. The city is so quiet. No cars can get through.

There are little birds in the trees. Now there aren’t any cars, Ester can hear them. She’s only seen jackdaws and pigeons, magpies and crows before.

It’s proper fresh snow,
vahca
in the Sami language. Loose, cold, fluffy right down to the bottom. Not the kind with that slushy watery mess underneath.

She gets home an hour later. Her head full of snow pictures. Her grief has taken a step back.

She needs a canvas. A really big one. And loads of white.

Between the dining room and the old servant’s bedroom in the apartment, the workmen have taken down a wall. It’s lying there on the floor, more or less in one piece. Ester looks at it. It’s an old wall. Old walls are made of stretched fabric.

Out in the hallway are several sacks of plaster, she knows that.

It’s as if she catches fire. She becomes manic with the desire to do something, finds a plastic bucket and drags in one of the sacks of plaster. It’s heavy, she’s sweating.

She trickles the plaster through her fingers and stirs it with her arms; she’s white right up to her elbows.