Blackwater (27 page)

It could be metaphorical. He himself was not mature. None of those twenty-year-olds in the photographs was. She didn’t want to know what he meant. It could be cloudberries or spruce trees or people and she didn’t want to read the letters. It was bad enough that they had been chucked in here in thin bundles, now falling apart.

She started gathering up the papers and shaking them clean of sawdust. Someone had drawn horses on school exercise-book paper, one horse after another carefully drawn with much too hard pencil. Shaded to show the curve of the huge hindquarters, hoofs filled in as darkly as possible with the faint pencil. Several of the horses had harness and bridles drawn in precise detail. She didn’t know what the parts were called. They looked like small ears standing high up on the back, perhaps sticks. But whoever had drawn them knew what they were called. If still alive, he still knew every word for these complicated arrangements and knew the construction of the material of the straps and the harness down to the last detail.

There were several sheets of yellowish-brown tissue paper, apparently used, for they had once been folded in quite a different way. Creases had been smoothed out but not entirely eliminated. She had found no trace of the woman who had been the children’s mother and the wife of Erik Jonasson. Perhaps the tissue paper was something she had saved. She could have made a pattern out of it by laying it over a dress, but who had a dress she wanted to copy? This wasn’t the ghost of a dress but of a desire.

Annie found a notebook with songs in it. The first ones were written in very old-fashioned handwriting with an aniline pen the writer must have moistened now and again, for in some of the words, the violet colour was stronger. Verses about mountains and blue hills, about longing and all kinds of misery, among others that of the sanatorium. She felt an embarrassed compassion again, but also uncertainty. Had they laughed or cried as they had sung these songs?

Further on in the notebook, another hand had written songs of the thirties and maybe the forties in pencil. ‘It’s the woman behind it all’, ‘Per Olsson, he had a goodly farm’, ‘The Old Bureau’. She recognised her father’s repertoire. They were all there, the older sentimental ones and the modern jolly ones, all of them very proper. She suddenly remembered the song she had heard while waiting for Dan outside the store. ‘Dad’s cock’s in front’! He had actually sung ‘cock’. She noticed she had remembered it and decided to write it down. There must be an underworld treasure trove of songs that people did not write down but had no difficulty whatsoever in remembering.

There was indeed a Bible, and three bundles of diaries. They were tied together with string, ten to a bundle. She found six loose diaries down in the sawdust. She was now almost certain they had gone on living there until 1957. The series beginning in 1922 ended then, and all the slim volumes books were bound and bore the subtitles ‘For the Year after the Birth of Our Saviour Jesus Christ’ and the name of the Luleå local paper.

Had the family come to live here in modern times when electricity and cars had already come to the villages? Had Erik Jonasson been a Luddite? A dour Jämtland man with a taste for the life of a loner, forcing his family to live in the wilderness and relinquish company, light, oranges, cars and photographs of film stars? Or was the place inherited? Had Erik’s family been the second and last generation up here?

The cellar dug out of the ground had been built in 1910. The date was carved on the crossbeam above the door. Had everything been over after two generations of frantic labour? They had carried up a grindstone and a sledgehammer, iron wheels, spades and a chaff cutter. She had seen them in the sheds and lying in the grass. There was an old Singer sewing machine at the back of the woodshed. Wooden lasts they made shoes on, several small children’s feet of darkened wood. Rusty flat irons. Medicine glasses and cake tins. A bottle of tincture called Universal.

She had hoped to find notes in the diaries about their lives, but she was disappointed. Very sporadically, first the aniline pen and then the pencil had been used to write abbreviated entries. They were impossible to make out: ‘HK. B Bt.’ Sometimes there were a few words about the weather. ‘Storm 3 days. Frost.’ That was 3 July. She opened the diary of her own year of birth and leafed through it backwards. On 11 January it said ‘-52°.’ That frightened her. Oh, but that was during the war, she told herself. Though what had war to do with the cold? It could drop to fifty-two degrees below zero here. War or no war.

So it had been fifty-two below zero when she was conceived. Not much less, anyhow. How and where could people make love when it was so cold? Perhaps they had to?

The soldiers had been billeted in barns and empty dwellings during the war. In Blackwater, her father had lived in a cottage they had named the Sun Hut. They put attractive names on all the houses: the calm, the Bun House, Snowpeace and Soria Moria. He can’t have had sex with Henny in the billet. Had there been a guesthouse in those days? Was there a letter or any other record that would tell her where they had lived?

Henny was a great tidier and she would have thrown everything away if they hadn’t stopped her. Perhaps you got like that if you had to keep a studio flat in Gärdet in order? Before they moved house, Annie had also had to throw things away and she had lain in bed at night worrying about it and running her mind over the things she had left.

When Dan had told her that the commune lay above Blackwater, she had had a strong feeling of significance and destiny. She would be literally returning to her origins if she moved there. She wondered if the people who had left behind these tattered papers, incomprehensible in their incompleteness, had also suffered from a sense of destiny. Or had they looked on their lives, as the papers seemed to indicate, as something random and soon scattered?

Only a couple of hours ago she had been sitting at the table by the window in their room, writing in her notebook, expounding on living in the world. Now her words seemed embarrassing. But she had found that dangerous ideas could come of thinking like that. In all likelihood she would never have noticed if it hadn’t been written down.

However, she had never told Dan she had been conceived in Blackwater. That had been just as arbitrary as the fifty-two degrees below zero that winter of war. But why do we keep looking for meaning and connections? It’s the way our minds work, seeking pattern and order. Yet we scatter our lives, helplessly and absently.

She gathered up the papers. When she first saw them, she had thought of showing them to the others, but now she decided to hide them. They should be preserved, not thumbed over, giggled at or have compassion poured over them. The interval since they had been written was too short, and they held the secrets of living people. Somewhere there was a woman called Astrid occasionally thinking about Starhill and life there – as a summer paradise with warm milk and freshly baked thin-bread, perhaps? As an awful dump where she was thrashed? Or, as Annie thought about Enskede, alternately wine and water? But well meant.

She had the few papers illuminating her identity and her past in her bag. Her mother was called Henny Raft and was born in 1905, a fact not recorded in the papers Annie had with her. Inquiries would have to be made to find that out. No one would even think of researching into Annie Raft’s parents. Yes, if I had died, she thought. If it had been me. In the tent.

Mia? Did she know what her grandmother’s name was? She had been an operetta singer, and Henny Raft was her stage name. Her real name was Helga, née Gustafsson, and Annie was sure Mia didn’t know that. Henny’s father, Annie’s grandfather and Mia’s great-grandfather, was dead. His name had been Ruben Gustafsson and Annie had gone to his funeral when she was about ten, but she could no longer remember where he was buried. He had owned a small publishing company, publishing among other things song books, collections of folk remedies, gardeners’ almanacs and books on the interpretation of dreams. Some of these could be found on the shelves at home, but no one else would be able to link them with the Raft family.

Henny, who for decades travelled up and down the country, had been born in a back-courtyard block in Östermalm in Stockholm. Annie had had it pointed out to her and they had gone into the courtyard to look up the steep stairway, but she could no longer remember whether it was in Skeppargatan or Grev Turegatan. Åke Raft, her father, had originally been a Pettersson. He had been born in 1908, the third son of a pastry cook. Annie didn’t know why he became a musician. He was primarily a pianist and had worked in theatre orchestras and as a
répétiteur
. He had married Henny Raft in 1939, when he was thirty-one and Henny thirty-four. Annie knew this by heart, because it formed part of the story of her birth, which Henny loved to tell. There had never been any talk of children. Henny’s career as an operetta singer was at a sensitive stage.

They both legally took the name Raft when they married. Annie’s grandfather had carted a large wedding cake by train all the way from Hudiksvall. The china bridal couple that had crowned it now lay in the top left-hand drawer of Henny’s desk. The bride had a tiny veil of real tulle, and some caramel had remained on the plinth until Annie had sucked it all off.

Grandfather had died when she was small, but she couldn’t remember the year. Grandmother had grown old enough for Annie to be able to sing at her funeral. Grandmother had wanted to have her favourite sentimental ditty in farewell, but naturally that had been impossible.

Annie felt ashamed when she thought about it. Why hadn’t she done as Grandmother had wished? She had sat at Seraphina Hospital with that thin, yellowish hand in hers and promised. Now she could no longer remember her grandmother’s maiden name and just hoped Henny had preserved it in some hiding place. Couldn’t she have had her own way when her life was so soon to be scattered and forgotten?

Henny and Åke married at Whitsun. That September, the war came and Åke was called up, not into the forces’ entertainment section as he had hoped, but into the infantry. He was sent to the Jämtland village of Blackwater on the Norwegian border. Henny went to see him there and became pregnant. Perhaps it was impossible to acquire condoms in Blackwater, something implicit in Erik Jonasson’s papers. At that time, a lady presumably couldn’t go into a chemist’s even in Stockholm on such an errand. Annie was born in October. According to family legend, because of her pregnancy Henny lost the chance of playing the lead in
Annie Get Your Gun
, so instead she christened her baby girl Annie.

Annie was still quite young when she realised Henny would never have been given the lead. Dolly Tate was the best she could hope for. The aunt and uncle in Enskede had an old boxer called Dolly, so Annie had been quite content all her life with Henny’s good-natured deception.

She ought to tell Mia that story. Thanks to the dog, it would probably register. She could tell her that the aunt and uncle she had lived with whenever her parents were touring the country were called Elna and Göte. But she realised she would never be able to show Mia their house, way out on Sockenvägen in Enskede, as it had looked then. And felt. It had been restored now and was presumably properly insulated. During the winters in the 1950s, it had been like living in a cardboard box.

She had shared a room with two cousins called Susanne and Vivianne, who were as soppy as their soppy names. She had felt guilty for even thinking like that. Mia was not yet much troubled by guilt. She wouldn’t even speak to Pella because she found her name so hard to bear.

Two loud-voiced brothers called Nisse and Perra had occupied the former wash house in the basement, which Uncle Göte had equipped. It struck her that it must have been cold and dark, but she hadn’t thought about that at the time. She had just been pleased to have them at a distance. The whole family was noisy. But she hadn’t been homesick, because their home in Gärdet was just a one-room flat with a sleeping alcove.

It occurred to her that in the past people used to write down important family events on the flyleaf of the Bible. When she opened the Bible she had found in the sawdust, it seemed unread, the thin pages adhering to each other. Astrid Jonasson had received it from the congregation in 1942. ‘In Memory of your Confirmation, Psalm 116:1–2.’ Had Astrid ever looked it up? Annie did not do so. But she hunted out St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians and started reading it.

It was all about a small gathering of people exposed to contempt but in possession of something they called spiritual gifts. They were advised against sexual intercourse and eating meat, but if necessary could do both. They were seriously warned against doubting that people could live after death. As they believed, so it would be.

The passages on living in the world did not really sound the way Brita had quoted them, nor like the words that had preoccupied her. But she sensed the origins were right after all. It was clear St Paul believed that a disaster was imminent and it would put an end to any possibility of an earthly life. So now people could – and ought to – give up worrying about their nearest as well as their own feelings and affairs and the world in general. This was obviously the opposite of her own fumbling but basically sensible thoughts.

She had sat for a long time inside that hatch into the loft. Gertrud and Sigrid had walked past a couple of times and looked up at her, but they had said nothing. Sigrid had a worried old face for her nine years. She would probably make her way up there and rummage in the papers. Annie had better hide them. But where? There was no cupboard she could lock and she hadn’t even a box for her things. Everything was common property. She decided to put the whole lot under her bed for the time being and think up somewhere to keep them so that they wouldn’t be spoilt by damp or found and spread around. There were so many of them anyway, she had to make two journeys down the ladder.

As she stood on the ladder fetching the last lot, she stirred up the sawdust and caught sight of a cardboard box in one corner. It had damp patches and must have been there much longer than the rest. It had once been a blue chocolate box bearing the name Freia, and the gold lettering was in Norwegian.