Blackwater (34 page)

He couldn’t think of it in any other way: the feel of water running through the ground, flowing and trickling over it. The meadowsweet had firm whitish-pink buds in their panicles and he could smell that they were just beginning to come out.
Filipendula ulmaria.
Soon they would sweep sweetly over the fields. At night when he was out on call, he sometimes had to drive off the road and sleep for a while. When he woke and got out to relieve himself, that scent lay floating like bands of something ambiguous and intoxicating in the smell of the marsh. Elks would stand there munching in the mist, half-asleep perhaps in the fragrance. You lived in it here and walked every day on the oozing ground, inhaling the smell of the marsh and seeing it ferment and brew as the clouds of morning mist swirled above it.

That angular Annie Raft had become calmer here. She had also had her hair cut short and was wearing a pair of incredibly ragged, faded jeans instead of that long skirt. Her trousers and extremely short hair made her look modern among the others. She kept out of the way quite a lot, but didn’t seem to have any objection to his talking to the little girl.

Mia told him that she didn’t drink goat’s milk, but her mother had had dried milk brought up for her. And Party Puffs. Birger didn’t quite know what they were, but they sounded sweet. He was told that her mother had had her hair and her own cut short so that it was easier to wash. He felt relieved. Mia dragged kid goats round and showed him a dead shrew her kitten had caught. She was thin, but looked quite healthy and was sociable.

He had quailed slightly at asking the mother whether she would like him to prescribe vitamins for Mia and the boy who belonged to the beautiful Marianne, but his suggestion was not taken ungraciously.

He went fishing in the evening and as he came out of the birch woods, he could see the long marshlands sloping down towards the lakes. The lakes were on different levels and from this high point just north of Starhill, he could see two of them like steps of water, reflecting the sky and taking their light from it, but the dark-yellow, metallic shade seemed to come from their own depths. The shores were already dark the light receding rapidly now. He could see the frost-scorched sedge marshes shifting in red and brown and a great many shades of yellow, their scent so unique and bound to those colours that the open channels in the marsh really seemed to be fermenting and steaming in reddish and golden brown. On the nearest marsh were a few poles from some long-ago haymaking.

Even right up here, he thought. Wherever they could harvest the meagre blades of grass. Everywhere inland further north. The realm of the sedge.

Without the sedge, the inland areas would never have been settled. There were almost a hundred species and they used to be called alpine sedge, fingered sedge, bird’s-foot sedge and many more. Lapp sedge. Quaking-grass sedge. Now it wasn’t called anything.

The marshes had sunk into oblivion. The water in the pools glinted against the sky, and the sky saw nothing. The pines twisted, even when dead providing a silvery-grey but hardly ever read sign for storm. The marshes and their dark poles were now lying in the shadow of time. The poles had once been racks for drying the hay and had now slowly fallen apart, just as the barns had long since fallen apart, decrepit and greenish-grey where lichens grew over them. The water kept bubbling under the ground, seeping through it and flowing over it in the spring light, dissolving everything done by human beings.

He wondered again what it would be like to live there. To live right out on the edge of the shadow that lay over the land, over the country villages and small hamlets, over everything that was slowly falling apart. To live right out in complete oblivion, going through its motions and rhythms. Did they even know what they were doing?

As long as he went on walking, the insects kept away, but once he got down to the first pool and stopped, he had to set fire to some bark and sticks in a herring pail he had brought with him, putting grass on top and standing in the thick smoke as he started baiting his line.

He had a telescopic rod that reached a long way out, but the salmon trout nonetheless kept guardedly just beyond his reach, making circles like silver nooses in the turgid, gleaming water. The bunched stars of bogbean could be seen by the shores, their pinkish petals, hairy inside, as yet untouched by brown shadow. Here it was full summer, although the frost had already scorched off the tops of the grasses out on the marshland several times. But he noticed the absence of birdsong and thought how quickly the lightest weeks had gone, and that he had mostly been miserable, thinking the light painful and the birds raucous in the mornings as he had lain awake thinking about Barbro.

The salmon trout were now leaping high up over the water out there, but he couldn’t reach them. Perhaps he had frightened them from the edge with the heavy tramp of his boots on the swaying ground. Or cast a dark shadow over their crystal-clear space. He decided to try the other pool, and made his way down there as quietly as he could, stopping two or three metres away from the shore. When he cast, the line landed right by the bank, which cut sharply down in the black marsh soil. He had a very light hook, neither float nor sinker on the line, and he could feel the worm wriggling. A bird of prey flew like an arrow straight past him above the darkening surface of the water, nothing but a black silhouette, front-heavy. An owl?

At that moment he got a bite. The line straightened and sang, the fish pulling on it and swimming in wild, wide curves. When he hauled it in, it danced down into the crowberry scrub, a large, almost black salmon trout, glimmering dully as if it had oxidised silver rivets in its neck. He had to get out his glasses. Fish lice. A cunning old devil with lice in its coat.

He was suddenly exhausted and started walking back as soon as he had gutted it, plodding along without thinking. Night birds cut through his field of vision. The tussocks were glowing. Millions of white tufts floated in the cold layer of air above the tops of the sedge grass. Thin sedge, scorched by the frost, washed out. The summer would soon be over, its frenzy and abundance.

He had been allocated a sleeping place in the room where the diabetic and his family had lived. Someone had put in a glass of small pale harebells and sparse lesser stitchwort. There was a pillowcase on the pillow and a blanket over the mattress. He hoped the beautiful woman had been the one to pull on the pillowcase and put the flowers on the chair by his bed.

It wasn’t that late, but he was exhausted, mostly from the long walk up to Starhill. As he closed his eyes, he longed for the radio. A few minutes later he heard one from the other side of the wall. That must be Annie Raft listening to the weather forecast. Every word penetrated through the boarded wall next to him. He tensed in case she would switch it off once the mountain district of southern Norrland had gone. But she didn’t. She left it on throughout the shipping forecast, and he could follow the lighthouses from the Atlantic all the way up into the Gulf of Bothnia. Not until the journey was complete did she switch off. He lay there in the silence, wondering whether that had been sheer chance. Or did she always follow them from Oxöy all the way up to Farstugrunden and Kemi just as he did himself?

No one mentioned the events of Midsummer night. On the way up, he had crossed the ford without looking at the place where the tent had been, with no particular feeling of unease. But he wanted to return while it was still daylight.

First he bought some cheese from Petrus Eliasson. It was yellowish-white, a very mild goat’s cheese, and when Petrus realised that he valued mature cheese, he went to fetch two small brown ones wrapped in damp linen. He unwrapped them with greater ceremony than he had shown for the wrinkled little body of his infant. Brita Wigert (not yet his wife, Birger realised) stayed in the background, the babe in her arms. He saw that she was in the symbiotic state and it hurt him to look at her, remembering Barbro with Tomas held to her in the same way. Her breasts had become blue-veined, the skin shimmering, thin and extended. Her areolae had flowed out, their dark-brown colour muted to pinkish brown. She had nearly always had her lips against the child’s scalp when she had him in her arms. She said he smelt of almonds there.

The child. Tomas. Tomas with his gruff voice and downy chin. Puppylike and kind. Could still come nudging and nuzzling when he was about to go to bed at night, as if wanting to be cuddled. Birger used to nudge him back or pat him on the back. Couldn’t she have given him another year? Why had she suddenly been unable to stand it? And where was Ulander?

He stared at the cheeses. Petrus Eliasson cut a piece out of the brownest, the spotted, scabby crust like the underside of an old boat. It was almost brown inside, yellowish and creamy like the innards of a large insect. They ate, looking each other straight in the eye. Birger nodded several times.

‘I don’t sell that,’ said Petrus. ‘No doubt you understand why. It’s priceless. But this isn’t far behind. You can buy half of it. And I’ll throw in a bit of the soft cheese. The hunting will be starting soon and I suppose you’d like a little in the venison casserole.’

They were kind, but they were also unhappy. Brita was not only bound to the child in that impenetrable state of milk and the smell of almonds. She was also bound by sorrow for her girls, who had gone to their father. They wouldn’t be allowed to come back until next summer. He wondered why she had chosen Petrus. But perhaps she hadn’t chosen at all? She had had the child and she couldn’t very well make the trip down to some parsonage in Blekinge with another man’s child and demand that everything should be as before.

Annie Raft had said that she lived with Dan Ulander. Where was he now? She was going to teach the commune children, but now there were no schoolchildren left. Marianne Öhnberg’s boy didn’t look anywhere near school age.

They offered Birger porridge and he said he would like the yellow milk separately in a mug. Mia watched him and the glass, noticing that he didn’t drink any. He winked at her. Annie Raft said little when the others were talking, but when she heard he had come down from the Strömgren homestead, she became interested.

‘Are you going back that way?’

He said he had left his car up at Oriana and Henry’s place.

‘I wanted to look in on them. But to be honest, I wasn’t at all sure I’d make it all the way up here. So I thought I could fish in the Lobber if I couldn’t get this far. The water’s fine and calm down there. It races along in Björnstubacken.’

He wondered whether Annie was frightened of the Lobber. He would have liked to ask her whether she was sleeping well, but he didn’t dare.

He didn’t get away until about seven that evening. It was still very light and would stay that way until about ten. The path ran steadily downhill between very large, high spruces. He heard a great black woodpecker whirring and the fine whistling of bullfinches. A lovely strong scent came towards him on a breeze, the summer-warm air that had lain still all day and now smelt of almonds and infants. It hurt, and he wondered if he would always have to turn away from memories rising out of the slopes of tussocks of twinflower, out of a warm bed or a child’s downy hair. Or would he become sentimental? Sucking and dwelling on it.

He was already tired and stopped to get his breath back. Then he heard footsteps on the dry ground. A twig snapped with a sharp little sound. He waited.

It came again and he felt a certain unease. They must have been footsteps he had heard and now they had stopped, as if someone was waiting. He had seen no one behind him. He pretended to stand looking up into the trees. He was sure someone was watching him. But he didn’t want to turn round and look back up the path.

He started walking very quickly. As long as he was walking he could hear nothing. He came to a crest and half ran down the slope on the other side until he was sure he was well ahead and wouldn’t be seen in the hollow. Then he turned straight in among the trees, aiming for a large stone covered with white moss, and hid behind it. He could see the path between some birch branches if he inclined his head slightly. And now he could hear the footsteps. At that moment he regretted hiding. He should have hurried on instead. Got away from there.

It occurred to him that he had been too trusting. The atmosphere had been friendly up at Starhill. Petrus Eliasson looked like a billy goat and had offered him cheese. Marianne Öhnberg had smelt of milk.

So that’s the kind of judgements I make, he thought. Like a five-year-old, or a pet dog.

He could hear a light crackling on the path. He had been running on pine cones. There she was. It was Annie Raft. She stood still and listened, then hesitantly went on downwards. Then, of course, he came out and called:

‘Did you want me for anything?’

He regretted that too, straight away, but it was too late. She spun round and stared. She had nothing with her except binoculars on a strap round her neck. He went up to her, thinking he was crashing around like an elk. Her face was very like the little girl’s – those watchful eyes, the mouth narrow, lips pressed together. Her hair was slightly auburn now it was short and her eyebrows so dark he reckoned she dyed them. But would she do that up here? She had a small straight nose and was somehow rather good-looking. But dismissive, totally without warmth or openness. Besides, she had crept up on him.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But you’re following me.’

She stood there, biting her lower lip, almost ridiculously like her daughter.

‘I was just going to watch you,’ she said finally.

Perhaps she’s crazy, he thought. That peculiar tremor round her, the lack of contact. It’s frightening and you daren’t talk to her as you would to others. How the hell can she be a teacher?

Then she said, in such a sober and lightly persuasive voice that he could perfectly well imagine her as a teacher:

‘I was only going to watch you through the binoculars as you crossed the river.’