Blackwater (37 page)

Oh, to be carried along! To move with the slowly pulsating water and yet be quite still. Like the water weeds in the stream, rigid hornwort and water lobelia.

She felt a strong desire to test out her voice and see whether those diaphragm muscles were still there. Whether her voice had any volume and she could open up for the keynote. She moved a little further away. The ewes didn’t follow her across the stream, but they got to their feet and stood watching her as they chewed the cud, their jawbones working. It made them look absent-minded.

She climbed a bit up the shale slope and tried seated at first, but was unable to produce a note worth mentioning. Then she did some exercises and could feel it beginning to swell. She sang. It was a strong feeling and just the same as before. The note hadn’t shrivelled, nor the feeling. She sang:

Again and again she sang it, filled by the tone and the feeling, which was the strongest she would ever experience.

But she knew that if there had been people down there, rather than sheep, her feelings would have been of anguish and fear, and her clothing would have smelt sour with sweat. She had been given a gift. But only one half of it.

The ewes raised their heads as she passed them on her way back. The pasture was still. No smoke from the chimneys dissolved into the sky. September dusk. She opened the door very quietly as she went in, hoping they were all asleep.

He had to take Galm out of the reindeer enclosure and scold him. But actually he was glad to be able to get away for a while. He was supposed to be one of Tuoma Balte’s labourers and look for his markings, but he couldn’t distinguish many in that maelstrom of bodies, hoofs and horns. Stamping and grunting and clicking. The largest antlers hovered above the herd. Most of them were speckled grey, but white animals gleamed here and there, trembling in his field of vision as long as he could keep track of the body in the whirling, creaking, hawking wheel of beasts. The click of hoofs sounded like the ticking of a huge clock.

Galm was totally wild. He didn’t herd like the Lapp dogs – he hunted. Someone came towards Johan as he was struggling with Galm.

‘Dov biene dan nihkoe!’

Johan didn’t understand, though he thought he knew a little by now. When he looked up it was Oula Laras. At first he hardly recognised him because he was so much smaller that he remembered. What little of his black hair was showing under the cap was streaked with white, like a badger.

‘What kind of wild thing you got there? Is’t a Siberian?’

In his haste, he said yes, then immediately regretted it. The first thing he had ever said to Oula Laras was not entirely true. Only in part. But it was too late now, for Laras took hold of Galm by the scruff of the neck and said:

‘You should have a team of these. And compete.’

‘Yes, I’d thought of that,’ said Johan, though that wasn’t strictly true, either. But it became so that very moment.

‘Who are you, then?’

He was just about to say the Pergutt’s cousin, but at that moment the Pergutt himself came towards them and Johan remembered what they had agreed on at school. He didn’t want to be called just Per’s boy any longer. So Johan said:

‘I’m cousin to him – Lars Dorj.’

‘He’s Torsten Brandberg’s youngest,’ the Pergutt said.

‘And Gudrun,’ said Johan.

He didn’t see how Oula Laras reacted when he was told, because he hadn’t dared look up. His face burned and he knew he had flushed scarlet. But Laras said something to the Pergutt that Johan didn’t understand, though he heard him calling him Pergutt. Then Laras ran his tongue under his lip, caught the wedge of snuff and spat it out. He rubbed his front teeth with a curved forefinger, then smiled a whiter smile and said:

‘Now, lads, time for some bloody work!’

Galm barked, hearing from the tone of voice that something was going to happen, and he went on barking at Laras for a long time after he had gone back to the enclosure and disappeared behind the seething stream of creatures rushing clockwise inside the fencing.

‘What did he say to you?’ said Johan.

‘Nothing, just “So you’re to go to school, eh?”’

Pergutt also went back inside the enclosure and Johan could occasionally see him close to Laras, sometimes far away. His lasso swirled round in the air and shortly after, with the help of his father, Pergutt was dragging out a bull reindeer. The creature was rolling its eyes and tossing its antlers. When they got to the slaughtering shed, it thrust its four hoofs into the ground and tried to get away from the smell of blood and the sound of the saw. A diesel engine was rumbling evenly, and water was spurting out of the hose from the pump down by the stream. He could see the ravens sailing above the stack of heads and antlers, but he couldn’t hear them. Oula Laras cried out as he was almost dragged down by a bull. His knife dangled at his belt as he ran, a long, curved knife. Must be the same one. Johan tried to remember it all again. It had gone too quickly this time as well.

That time, it had been late winter – April – the light strong and the silence like a glass bell round the mountain. Now all the dogs were barking, the generator rumbling and the bone-saw whistling. He could just see the peaked cap. It was orange with white lettering on the front and easily spotted.

‘Christ almighty!’ Oula Laras yelled. ‘Calm down a bit, can’t you, you old devil!’

We walk in a dark forest, thin strings of light between the branches of the trees. There is a strong smell of lichens, as if from the coat of an animal. Not much foliage inside the dimness scarcely penetrated by the light. The birches are shaggy with black lichen.

The scent of almonds comes welling up out of all the acidity and decay. Strong and sweet. Do you want us to follow it?

I don’t know who you are. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of an unshaven cheek, a pair of round glasses of the kind we used to laugh at. A long overcoat of stiff woollen fabric. We won’t imagine each other. That’s not good for us. You walk with me.

There’s a wolf in here. A she-wolf. She’s roaming round the edge of our field of vision.

What shall we do with the wolf? Have you got a scooter? If it were winter and you had a scooter, you could harry her to death. Now it’s summer and there’s a strong smell of almonds over this sun-spotted, mossy ground. The air is very still and when it moves, the breeze brings with it the scent of predators. What can you do with a wolf except kill it? We must go now. We must leave the forest and we are already far away from that other smell, the familiar smell that was so strong, it was almost bitter. We never found out where it came from.

Shuffling. The day always began with the shuffling or the squeak of the stove door. Petrus put a log inside. Then his sheepskin slippers shuffled across the floor again. He was over by the window, reading the thermometer. If there was a scraping sound, the window was covered with a jungle of ice crystals. He made a peephole with the nail of his forefinger among white ferns and starwort.

Then she remembered the forest in her dream. It was painful.

The bed was a nest of body heat, but the tip of Mia’s nose was cold. She was lying with her back and bottom against Annie’s stomach and chest, curled up like the child inside. The foetus. She usually straightened out. She sometimes fetched a log, too.

Petrus was peeing now, splashing into the pot. It made her angry, hearing it. As early as November, they had had to move into the old cottage. Annie had hung blankets as a curtain round the bed in which she and Mia slept. She always washed and dressed behind the blankets and when she used the pot at night, she tried to be restrained. Petrus just splashed. Sometimes he farted, too. She wished he would wait until he had dressed and could go out. He probably didn’t sleep much. He kept the fire going all night.

She tried to remember that he was kind and also deeply miserable, though he never said anything. Brita was in Röbäck for the winter, with the baby, and he hadn’t been able to go down there for almost two weeks. First there had been storms, and then it had been too cold. They had received no mail. There might be a letter from Dan in the postbox.

Cold is standstill. Her own was over. It had lasted ever since that doctor had called after her in the forest. The ragged jeans had long since been burnt, but she hadn’t been able to decide anything else. She was considering abortion. An abortion in Östersund?

It was Dan’s child as well, though still only a foetus, a shoot of herself. A small tumour she had to have the right to remove. He didn’t even have to know, so she said nothing about it in her letters. She had thought she would wait until he came back, and now she hadn’t even an address.

When did it become a child? And when did it become his?

Petrus disposed of the kids. People disposed of dogs that had turned fierce or were no good for hunting. The expression was repugnant.

There were mornings when she woke feeling blissful without knowing why. She had dreamt, but what? That they had slept together, of course. But there was something else.

She had dreamt that he explained. She couldn’t even laugh at it in the daytime, but at night when she was asleep, it was vivid. All his lies had been explained and he wanted the child and to live with them. What she had felt when they exchanged their gentle flow with each other was true.

In his letters, he never said that he was going to come back. All he said was that he been in Alved again, sleeping in a tent for the second time. For a whole month he had been running off stencils on a duplicator in a basement in Högbergsgatan. He thought he might be able find a couple to replace Bert and Enel. He wrote that he was working on it.

He still knew nothing about the child. It was a child now. Mia put her ear to Annie’s stomach and listened. She could feel it in there. It was like the birds in the timber wall at night. Heartbeats and small movements.

Annie believed Dan had taken the car away from them. They became dependent on Yvonne and her old bus, and she thought it inconsiderate, but assumed he hadn’t meant to be away so long. Sometimes they got a lift with Henry Strömgren down to the store and the post office in Blackwater, and one day he had asked whether it wasn’t Annie’s car that was parked below Aagot’s barn.

‘A pink Beetle?’

She asked him to look at the numberplate next time he went down there. When they met again he said that was right. It was her car. It had been there all the time.

That night she lay awake. At about one in the morning she heard footsteps on the floor. She lay waiting for the stove door to screech. As soon as Petrus had put two logs inside, he usually shuffled back to bed. But there was no shuffle. Pattering. She thought it was Önis getting up for a pee. There were whispers, then a bed creaking. She was just about to fall asleep when she heard a suppressed noise, as if someone were whimpering.

A few nights later she heard the pattering steps again. Then the bed springs squealed and after a while there was no doubt whatsoever about what she was hearing.

She thought they were betraying everything. Brita. The commune. She remembered Ola Lennartsson’s sly grin, his dirty innuendo. They were living down to the expectations of the village. Stoking up the prejudices.

Though that wasn’t logical. The village knew nothing. Only Annie knew and she felt like a voyeur. Or an auditeur if there was such a thing. It was considered normal to be a voyeur in front of a television or cinema screen. But how many would stand the reality? That light moan. Broken-off gasps. The rhythmical creak of the bed.

They did it almost every night, at about one in the morning. Petrus was never the one to take the initiative. Marianne went across to his bed. Sometimes, Annie thought she understood them – anything for a little warmth and closeness in this cold. But she never longed for Dan when they were moving over there. She was sickened and thought they were preventing her from dreaming about him.

She often dreamt. Awake, she was frightened and bitter.

Her old antipathy to Petrus had returned. For a while she had quite liked him. He was an oddball. He thought mostly about cheese, talked like the Bible and did everything very slowly. But he did it well. Now she was remembering repellent things.

When Brita had given birth to her child and the journalists had come, Petrus had taken over. It was he who had told them what it was like to have a child at Starhill. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to read the article. Now she hunted for it while he was out. She found a whole heap of newspaper cuttings. He had been collecting cuttings on the murders.

In the interview on giving birth, he had said he had buried the afterbirth below the kitchen window. It made good manure.

He wanted to do what they used to do before, in the olden days, as he always said. But he didn’t understand that the afterbirth was sacrificed so that the earth would be fertile like the woman. Petrus thought it was about manure. That was not only stupid, but vile.

She wanted to leave, a vague but persistent desire. But then the cold had come. It had grown much too cold to ski down, though she had tried once. It was twenty-seven degrees below freezing, the first morning in almost two weeks that the temperature had not dropped to thirty. But when she got up a little speed down the first slope, the fluid from her tear glands had frozen. She thought her eyes might break like glass, so she had turned back.

She put out her hand and grabbed her sweater, longjohns and thick woollen socks. Mia didn’t wake as she dressed under the covers, which she then pulled over Mia so that nothing showed but a tuft of reddish hair.

It was hot next to the stove. They had put blankets and sheepskins against the windowpanes to keep out the draught. She peered through the hole Petrus had scraped in the icy armour of the pane. Eighteen below.

It was over. The cold was evaporating, the water moving, at least on the windowpanes. Her breath made the ice melt as she blew on it slowly.