Blackwater (42 page)

They are small religious creatures with no theology, she had once said. They repeat actions without asking themselves what they mean.

But reluctantly, she had been moved and had taken the flowers home. He wanted to throw them out but was afraid that would upset her. They had handed over these fragrances as if apologising for all the musty odours from their clothes, hair and mouths throughout a whole winter.

We are releasing you. Be someone else now. Alone and free.

Her happiness, if it existed, was perhaps linked with solitude. He didn’t want to know that. But she had never been inconsiderate towards him. Never gone out without telling him where.

Why had he reached down into the space between the bed and the wall? He had had no suspicion, because the discovery sent a physical spasm through him, as if he had walked into an electric fence.

Then he leapt up and started searching everywhere for the gun.

The search party for Mia’s mother started up at the Strömgren homestead where she had left her car. They had found out that her mother really was missing when Birger had phoned in the morning.

They got into the car as soon as they had had some coffee and when they got to Blackwater several cars were already on their way up. Then everything became slightly more real for Johan. Nonetheless it mostly seemed very strange to be walking with twenty-metre gaps between them from the road across this half-forgotten but familiar territory, his legs apparently remembering on their own all its hollows and mounds. Advancing inwards and upwards, calling out the name of a person he had never met and who was going to be his mother-in-law. Grandmother to his child.

‘Ann-iiee!’ he called out with the others. ‘Ann-iiee!’

She must be sitting or lying somewhere up towards Fjellström’s clearing, perhaps with a broken leg. Per-Ola was organising them. He was leader of the shoot these days and the search party consisted largely of the shooting team. Torsten had not joined them. Gudrun said his back was too stiff.

Per-Ola instructed them to call out at long intervals. They had to be able to hear if she replied and had to reckon on any answering call being faint. But it was difficult to listen out for faint sounds, what with people calling and dogs barking. Despite everything, it was all slightly festive, a foretaste of the autumn and the shoot.

Per-Ola had greeted Johan with a nod. His small, light-blue eyes had paled slightly and sunk even further in. His body was stronger. He showed no surprise. Gudrun must have told him about Johan and Mia. She was walking some distance away from them. He had also caught a glimpse of Väine, but not Björne or Pekka. He presumed Pekka was working further south somewhere. He was a crane driver.

The grass was gleaming as if it were painted. This was the time of year when everything was drawn up to a light that scarcely dulled even at night; the fern spires with their hairy shepherd’s crooks, the cornets of may lilies and the speckly buds of petty spurge. The shoots of the rosebay willowherb tasted like asparagus and were faintly pink.

She had gone to look for morels. Once Birger Torbjörnsson had taken that in, he had started phoning round. She had arranged with a friend to go up towards Fjellström’s clearing, now two years old so just right for morels. But when her friend came to pick her up, she had already gone. There must have been some misunderstanding.

Johan called out the unknown woman’s name and trudged on. The friend was Gudrun. It was strange for him to find out a little bit of Gudrun’s everyday life in this way. All those meetings over the years, stiff conversations in restaurants in Trondheim or by his own coffee table, had not resulted in anything so simple. Gudrun and the teacher out picking morels. Though this time nothing had come of it. The teacher had gone off on her own. ‘I suppose it was never quite clear which car we were going to take,’ Gudrun said.

They walked on until the clearing came to an end and there Per-Ola sent a message down the line that they should veer west and take the rest of the clearing on the way down. Twenty-metre gaps as before.

The ground was rough going, with deep tracks left by the forestry tractors. Up here the birch leaves were still sticky, grooved and pleated. The brushwood rose in yellowish green and reddish clouds over the piles of stones and collapsing heaps of scrub.

They were all faintly dispirited when they got down again. No one had any idea where to look next. Per-Ola had inserted a great wedge of snuff and was standing there in silence.

Johan had disturbed a sitting sandpiper and had caught sight of her blue-spotted eggs. He had also found a couple of unusually large morels which he put in his pocket. But he hadn’t yet shown them to Mia. It seemed hardly decent to be picking morels and looking at bird’s eggs at such a time.

Finally, Per-Ola spat out the snuff and said they should all go back home and get something to eat. Those who were willing could assemble again in two hours’ time. Johan stayed by the car with Mia, watching Gudrun leaving in Per-Ola’s Ford. She didn’t look in their direction. Mia clearly never gave it a thought. Johan was glad he didn’t have to explain, but he knew he would have to sooner or later.

There wasn’t really anything else to say except what he had told her from the beginning: relations with his father and brothers had never been good. It had always been like that. Anyhow, he couldn’t remember anything different. And it’ll always be like that, he thought. Silent. Lousy. Hostile without anything being said about it. Would Mia be able to understand this? Or did she think that everything could be put right as long as you were sensible and looked on the positive side of things? He never really knew how deep her bright matter-of-factness went.

He wondered what her mother was like. Birger Torbjörnsson was standing further up the road, staring down at the gravel. A woman in a pink jacket was talking eagerly to him, but he looked as if he weren’t listening.

In the end, all the cars had driven off except Johan’s and Birger Torbjörnsson’s. The big, heavy man came slowly over to them.

‘Johan?’

‘Mia and I are together.’

Johan thought it best to get that over with as soon as possible. But Birger made no comment. It might not have sunk in. He was staring down at the ground and looked tired, his hair clammy with sweat.

‘I have to talk to you,’ he said to Mia. ‘I don’t think she went up to the clearing.’

It was a peculiar thing to say, because it was he who had given instructions for the search party. Mia also pointed that out. He sat down on the verge and stared down into the gravel, his heavy face closed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t slept. I found the bag on the steps. Gudrun had hung it on the doorhandle when she came. Annie had already left by then. Gudrun thought she had just nipped out on an errand or something. So she hung the bag there.’

‘What bag?’

‘It was a thermos of coffee and buns and so on. And she wrote a note to ask Annie to phone her when she got back. But Annie never did. She seems to have found something else to do.’

‘But you said Gudrun Brandberg had already gone off in her own car and Annie had followed.’

‘Yes, I did say that. But I don’t know if I think so any longer.’

‘What
do
you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

They waited for him to go on, but he said nothing more. In the end Mia went and sat in the car.

‘Let’s go down and get something to eat,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll have to see.’

As Johan was getting into the car, Birger Torbjörnsson took hold of his arm.

‘She has a shotgun with her,’ he said. ‘I know that, because normally it’s always behind her bed.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t reply and Johan didn’t know what to say, either.

‘Was she depressed?’ he asked.

‘No, for Christ’s sake, there was nothing wrong with her!’ Birger burst out. ‘She was expecting me. I was to go there yesterday afternoon. There was nothing wrong with her!’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Mia from inside the car. But Birger was already on his way over to his own car.

‘He didn’t sleep at all last night,’ said Johan.

They drove on down and he said nothing about the shotgun to Mia. Nor did he think he could ask anything. But he would have liked to know what Annie Raft was like and why she kept a gun by her bed when she slept.

On one of the first occasions they had been together, Birger had told Annie what had happened to him at the Sulky. He described the experience as best he could, although he had no name for it. He also told her what the consequences had been, that he had begun to be with Frances afterwards and in that way had wrecked his marriage. She had listened without interrupting. After he had finished, she said:

‘I don’t want to get near the other reality. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want to provoke visions and altered states.’

He was very surprised. He had expected objections, but of another kind. She accepted his story and that almost disconcerted him. How could she keep a balance between incompatibilities in such an untroubled way?

‘I like this reality,’ she said. ‘Or the unreality. But I can’t dismiss the other. The weave of reality is often loose – I can see through it. I’ve done that ever since I was a child and it isn’t a frightening experience, though perhaps it ought to be.

‘I don’t belong here. The surroundings I have ended up in haven’t been chosen. Anyhow, not by me. They make me feel affection for what is all around me. Even for human beings sometimes. But mostly for the landscape – and houses.’

‘A little house like this,’ she had said as they lay beside each other in the bed in that winter-night dark room. ‘It can fill me with great affection. It is so fragile and temporary. It might burn down in a couple of hours one night when thunder rumbles over the mountain. But it keeps the fiercest cold out. Did you know we had thirty-six degrees of frost last winter? And it keeps out the rain rattling on its metal roof, furiously on autumn nights. Wait till you hear it.’

Wait till you hear it.

That was how he found out that she also thought they would go on being together. He listened carefully in the dark, sensing that the opportunity would not come again so soon. She was seldom as serious as she was now. Ordinarily she wasn’t particularly open at all, although she talked a lot.

‘We’re not alone here,’ she said. ‘This place houses a whole lot of creatures. They live here with us. Wasps, flies, beetles, silverfish and mice. The hawk on the telephone wires by the wall belongs, too, and the stoat living in the foundations. So do the great tits under the eaves. On the coldest of winter nights, they creep in between the weather-boarding and the beams. The house had been here almost a hundred and sixty years when I first came, and it will still be here after me if it doesn’t burn down.’

When they got down to the house, Mia, Johan Brandberg and Birger, it was empty. It made no difference what she had said about mice and silverfish and he was not in the slightest consoled by the thought of her words on unreality and reality. The house was terrifyingly empty and smelt stuffy.

Mia started gathering up the flowers and throwing them into the garbage bag. She had to get another bag to clear them all. She’s got a sturdy rear, he thought. She’s not really like Annie. But there was something about her hands. When she took a carton of eggs and a pack of butter out of the refrigerator, her hands looked like Annie’s. Johan was sitting at the table, his eyes resting on her, those narrow brown eyes, usually so quick. Both the irises and the brown-black hair had paled considerably. Birger hadn’t seen him for several years. Previously he had often come to their house with Tomas, but that had stopped when Tomas had moved to Stockholm. He wondered how Mia and Johan had met. As far as he knew, Johan never came back to Blackwater.

He was a meteorologist at the airport in Trondheim. Once, largely in jest, Birger had said he had chosen a profession in line with his origins after all, and Johan had been annoyed. He could be hot-tempered, anyhow had been when he was younger. ‘Do you think we go up into the mountains and stare at the clouds?’ he had said. Then he had rather long-windedly explained how he worked with tables and graphs.

Mia fried eggs and sliced some smoked lamb. Birger couldn’t eat. He had some coffee with them and nibbled again at bits of granary bread. His thoughts wandered and he wasn’t really listening to what they were saying, so Mia had to repeat the question she had put to him.

‘Are there no morel places on the other side of the road?’

‘There’s only marshland down to the river there,’ Johan answered in his place. But she persisted that they should search on that side.

Annie hadn’t gone out to look for morels. Birger had also hoped that. Now he would have to pull himself together and tell them what the situation was.

‘She phoned me early this morning,’ he said. ‘Before five.’ They waited for him to go on but he couldn’t. He couldn’t think any more. He got up from the table.

‘We can’t bloody well go on sitting here,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go on up and start looking again.’

They made their way down, across the road towards the Strömgren homestead. The search party had set off uphill again and their shouts could be heard right down at the old homestead. ‘Ann-iiee! Ann-iiee!’ Birger saw a sharp expression, almost of disgust, forming round Mia’s mouth. They started walking a little faster.

The old house was empty, the curtains in the windows dirty. The pasture had begun to grow again. Later in the summer it would be difficult to get through all the sowthistle, monkshood and meadowsweet. When they got down to the marsh, they saw the print of a boot in the wet path. Later, Birger remembered that he had wanted to suggest they should walk on the side of the path so as not to destroy the tracks. But he thought it a weird, almost distasteful thing to say. Especially as Mia was with them.

He never did get his thoughts straight that long Sunday. Revolting ideas about where Annie might be kept flickering through his head, then were gone. Suddenly, he found himself thinking about what they would have for dinner and wondering whether Annie had had time to do any shopping before she left. When they got down to the ford across the Lobber, he noticed Mia was now very uneasy. Hitherto she had been quite composed, although she had begun to see the situation was serious. Now she stopped and didn’t want to go on any further.