The True Deceiver (14 page)

“Well, well,” said the storekeeper. “So unusual to see you in the shop for once, Miss Aemelin. We were almost a little worried. I mean, we have no way of knowing what’s going on at your place… Nowadays, I mean. What can I get for you?”

“I wanted some sweets, but I can’t remember what they’re called… It was such a long time ago. Something with kittens on it. Rectangular box with kittens.”

“Kitty-Kitt,” said the storekeeper caressingly. “It’s an old brand. But we’ve got a new one, too, with puppies.”

“No, thank you. The one with kittens.”

“Very good. It can’t be easy having such a big dog in the house. They say it’s wild.”

“The dog is very well behaved,” said Anna
guardedly
. She recalled that the storekeeper had cheated her. His smile was not friendly, not even polite. Anna turned her back on him and walked over to the canned goods, but as usual it was impossible to decide what she really wanted. Fru Sundblom came in and greeted her with exaggerated amazement, bought coffee and macaroni, took a lemonade and sat down at the window table to listen.

The storekeeper said, “And Miss Kling has become such a marvellous housekeeper. Well, I’ve always said that she knows what she’s doing. And her brother seems to be cleverer than we thought. Now they’re building a boat that he designed. Isn’t that right?”

“What’s this?” Anna asked.

“That’s yeast. People use it when they’re baking bread.”

Fru Sundblom cackled and poured herself more lemonade.

“Boats,” the storekeeper resumed. “Boats are really wonderful things. I’ve always liked them. The boat is your commission, isn’t it, Miss Aemelin?”

“No,” Anna said. “I don’t know a thing about boats, unfortunately. I read about them. This will be fine – please put it on my bill.”

Suddenly the room seemed full of malice. As Anna was leaving, Fru Sundblom called after her. “Say hello to Miss Kling. Please give my very special regards to Miss Kling!”

Anna walked home, forgetting to take her mail. What had they said? Just ordinary shop gossip… No. Oh, no, they couldn’t fool her any more. She knew. They were venomous, inwardly they were sneering at her, Anna Aemelin, sneering at Katri and Mats… She would never go back. Never go anywhere, except into the woods. She needed to work, as quickly as possible… Right away…

The Kitty-Kitt didn’t taste the way it had forty years ago and got stuck in her teeth in an unpleasant way. Anna walked faster, looking only down at the road. Several neighbours passed by, but she didn’t notice their greetings, just wanted to get home, home to the dreadful Katri, to her own altered world which had grown severe but where nothing was wicked and concealed. At the end of the village street, Madame Nygård came towards her, placed herself in the middle of the street, and said, “Such a hurry we’re in, Miss Aemelin! Are you out looking to see if spring is on its way? We’ll be seeing the ground now pretty soon.”

Her calm, friendly voice stopped Anna in her tracks. She stood in the slush and looked up, the spring sun burning her eyes.

“How’s everything up at the rabbit house?”

“My, my,” said Anna quickly. “Is that what you call it in the village?”

“Yes, indeed. Didn’t you know?”

“No. No, I really didn’t.”

Madame Nygård looked earnestly at Anna and said, “But it’s just a nickname. No one means any harm.”

“Excuse me, I’m in something of a hurry,” Anna said. “You wouldn’t understand, but I’m very short of time just at the moment…”

The road was even icier closer to the shore. Her stick slipped, and it didn’t help much to shuffle along with her legs wide and her toes turned out. It felt ridiculous. Anna climbed up in the snow beside the road to catch her breath, then went on. It wasn’t much further now, but she grew steadily more anxious. She needed to get onto her own land as quickly as she could, in under her own wall of spruce where the snow was clean and unmarked by other people’s tracks. At the bottom of the hill, the village children stood shouting something rhythmically, over and over the same thing, a single word that she couldn’t make out. They were staring at her house.

“Don’t shout!,” Anna called at them. “I’m right here. What is it you want?”

The children stopped shouting and moved away.

“Now, don’t be frightened,” Anna said. “It was nice of you to come… But you see right at the moment I don’t have time for you, I’m in a very great hurry…” She tried to find the bag of sweets in her purse. The children had lost interest in her, had turned towards the house and taken up their shouting again. It sounded like ‘Witch, witch, witch…’ Anna passed them and walked up the hill. The bag of sweets was sticky in her hands; she ripped it open and threw the sweets in the snow. “They’re for you,” she yelled, shaking her stick at them. Then she struggled on up the slippery hill.

A steady land breeze blew through the trees behind the house. The heavy new snow tumbled from spruce branches, first here, then there, filling the whole woods with steps and whispers. Between the tree roots on the sun side, the soil was showing dark and wet with little sprigs of lingon. Anna paused now and then as if waiting, and then walked on.

“She’s out early this year,” Liljeberg said, looking out his window. “Maybe the old girl misread her calendar. And she’s not as steady on her legs as she used to be.”

“No wonder, with a witch in the house,” his brother observed. “Gets to you eventually.”

Edvard Liljeberg turned back into the room and said, “Now, you just hold your tongue. That witch you look down your nose at is ten times smarter than you are. And you’re not that much nicer, either.”

Anna walked along the edge of the woods, from tree to tree, the same route she took every year, with the same excitement, the accumulated anticipation of an entire winter. She recognized her forest floor, but today, this premature day, the black earth held no promise. It was just patches of wet soil that gave no hint, inspired no faith in coming miracles.

Anna went home.

A
NNA ALWAYS THOUGHT OF HERSELF
as a painter of the ground. She had said as much on several occasions and discovered to her surprise that her listeners took it as a sign of modesty. On the contrary, beneath this
self-description
was a quiet, sovereign conviction that she, Anna Aemelin, was, strictly speaking, the only person who could paint the forest floor in the one correct manner. And that this eternally living, growing forest floor could never fail her. But after her first visit to the woods, Anna was gripped by a terrible anxiety. Nothing and no one could have calmed her fears. She felt bereft and uprooted.

The day wore on and her anxiety grew. Anna hardly knew why she took out the letters Mama and Papa had received in the course of their long lives, but it had to do with her work, her relationship to her work. Somewhere in all these crowded folders there had to be an
explanation
, maybe a reference to when and why the child Anna or the little girl Anna had been captivated by the ground in the woods, had consecrated herself to this one thing that had never failed her, never until today. It was important. Someone, sometime, must have talked about her. There were many letters, far too many. But the people who had written to Julius and Elise Aemelin didn’t mention their daughter. Anna went on reading, more and more rapidly, skimming, scanning. She wanted no supper, and when it got dark she lit the lamp and read on, making her way through a flood of words, messages, comments that had once had significance for these people long since dead, and with every folder she opened and then laid aside. Anna grew older, but no one mentioned her. At the most they wrote “Greetings to your daughter” or “Merry Christmas to all three of you”. She didn’t exist.

There was Papa’s correspondence with government offices, his receipts for membership fees in clubs and societies, Mama’s household accounts, rail tickets saved from trips abroad, postcards someone had sent from one of those Mediterranean places where people suddenly remember friends they never see, and “My dear Elise, congratulations on your daughter’s graduation…” Later, condolences to Elise Aemelin, and then they stopped.

“Of course,” Anna said. “Maybe that was when I started painting the ground.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
A
NNA DIDN’T WANT TO GET UP
. “Go away,” she said.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Katri asked.

“It’s nothing. I just don’t want to.”

Katri put the tea tray on the bed table. “That’s the wrong book,” Anna said. “I’ve read it. Anyway, it’s so silly I didn’t even bother to find out how it ended. They’re all the same, the same things over and over again.” And she put the pillow over her head and waited to be contradicted. But Katri went away. In the back hall, she stopped Mats on his way out and said, “Couldn’t you go and talk to Anna for a while? She doesn’t want to get up, and there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just sulking.”

“Why?” Mats said.

“I don’t know.”

“But what should I say?”

“Well, what do you talk about in the evening?”

“Not much,” Mats said. “We talk about books.”

“She doesn’t read any more.”

“I know. It’s bad.”

“And what is it that’s so bad?”

Mats didn’t answer, he just looked at his sister. When he went in to see Anna, he talked in general about getting boats in the water, how it wouldn’t be long before the ice broke up.

“Listen, Mats,” Anna said. “I realize you’re here to comfort me, and Katri sent you.”

“It’s true.”

“And it doesn’t matter to me one whit when the boats go in the water.”

“You’re mistaken, Miss,” said Mats earnestly. “It matters a great deal. And I can tell you that we’re building a very beautiful boat at the moment.”

“You don’t say.”

“And it’s from my drawings.” Mats paused in the doorway but couldn’t come up with anything else to say. Finally, he asked if there was anything he could do.

“Yes, there is,” Anna said. “You can take all this out on the ice. This house is getting so crowded I can hardly breathe!”

“But that would be a shame,” Mats objected. “Those folders were expensive. Katri got white to match the furniture.”

“Take them out,” Anna said. “Carry them out to the furniture pile on the ice. They’ll match just perfectly. And then it will all go down together. You said the ice was about to break up. I’d love to watch it all sink.”

Anna didn’t come to dinner, but later in the evening, when the house was dark, she went to the kitchen to find something nice in the refrigerator. And she’d hardly started rummaging through Katri’s plastic containers when Mats appeared in the doorway and said, “Hi.”

“So there you are again,” Anna said. “Just look how your sister has organized this food! No one could possibly know what’s in these without opening every one of the wretched things… Did you take it out on the ice?”

“Yes, I did. But if you want anything more out there, you’ll have to hurry. The ice could go any time.”

“I’m looking for cheese. But why cheese should be in plastic I can’t imagine. Do you think it will sink?”

“Most of it. But some of it will float around for a while before it does.”

“You know, Mats, sometimes I get so tired without any reason. What was it you were saying about the plans for that boat?”

“Just that they’re my drawings.”

“I’d like to look at them.”

“But the best ones are down at the boat shed. I’ve only got the sketches.”

“Bring them here.”

“But they’re not that good. They’re very rough.”

“Mats,” Anna said. “Go get them. This will probably be the only time in your life you’ll get a chance to show your sketches to someone who really understands the concept ‘sketch’.”

Anna sat and studied the drawings for a long time, going through all of them. Finally she said, “That line is good.”

“It’s called the sheer,” Mats said.

Anna nodded. “It’s a good word. Did you ever stop to think how often the terminology of work is beautiful and expressive and still matter-of-fact? You know, the names of things, the names of tools, the names of colours?”

Mats smiled at Anna. In drawing after drawing, she saw the line feeling its way stubbornly, patiently,
searchingly
towards its final arc of suppressed energy, and suddenly for the first time she saw the snowdrift out on the veranda. It was the same curve. “I think your boat will be beautiful,” she said.

Mats started to explain. With a stream of words, he tried to give Anna an education about the
seaworthiness
and bearing capacity of boats. He made no attempt to avoid the technical terminology she had never heard, but Anna did not break her attentive silence by asking questions. Finally, Mats leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms straight above his head and laughed. “Twenty horsepower!” he said. “Straight out! All the way!”

“Yes,” Anna said. “All the way out. Now I see why you don’t care about reading old sea stories any more, not now, while you’re building your own boat.”

“But it’s not mine,” Mats said.

“It’s not your boat?”

“No, only the drawings are mine. They’re going to sell the boat.”

“And who’s going to buy it?”

“I don’t think the Liljebergs know yet. They’re just building it.” He stood up and rolled up his papers.

“Wait a moment,” Anna said. “If you had your own boat… What would you do?”

“Take it out, of course. And stay away for days.”

“Alone?”

“You bet.”

“I used to long for a boat,” Anna said. “A boat of my own at the shore so I could go off whenever I wanted. Without them knowing, the others… I imagined a white rowing boat. Can you run a motor?”

“I’m learning,” Mats said.

The garden door opened and closed again. They waited. They heard Katri walk down the hall.

“Is it hard to learn?” Anna asked.

“Not if you want to. When we’ve got the boat launched and moored, we’ll do the final inspection. And then it’s time to think about the motor housing and the petrol tanks and the seats. And the cabin. All that stuff comes later. The main thing is getting the boat out of the way to make room in the shed for the next job.”