Blackwater (45 page)

When she was a teenager and he had got to know her again, she had always been restless and impatient during the weekends she was at home. She had gone to junior high and on to senior high in Byvången, and she had been furious when Annie moved away from there and took the job in Blackwater. But in recent years she had found a strength or balance – or whatever the hell it was – of a kind Annie had never had. Mia knew what she wanted and mostly got what she wanted. After leaving school, she had read cultural geography and some other subjects which had not seemed particularly useful for a living. But up to now she had never been unemployed, though she had only been hired for short-term projects, either with the local authority or the college. Her pregnancy is planned, he thought. That’s more than her mother ever succeeded in achieving. She’s got a well-educated and also good-looking man, getting on a bit, of course, but maybe that was what she wanted. Maybe it held an attraction for her. He couldn’t see Mia getting entangled with the kind of young men that had been called non-valid during his student days. Freedom neurotics moving in together on trial and gliding apart on trial like amoebae. Like that damned Göran Dubois, he thought.

‘What are we going to do about it, then?’ said Birger.

‘Why did you come here?’ said Mia quite sharply.

‘You know why. I promised to look after Saddie.’

She had started sieving flour into a bowl.

‘Are you going do some baking?’ he said stupidly.

‘I’m sieving this to see if there are any weevils.’

He was suddenly unreasonably angry with her. Out with it all, he thought. Everything you’ve thought, all the criticism you’ve had to hold back – for you did respect her, after all – you can release by doing things now, cleaning and tidying up. Eliminating. You say it’s going to be a summer place. But it won’t be for long. I think you’ll sell it, he said silently behind her back. And once you’ve sold it you’ll soon have forgotten.

Christ, how unpleasant the young can be! Christ, how unpleasant and vile everything is! Living and struggling and then falling apart because of an anomaly in cell formation, or a bunch of bacteria, or shotgun pellets – or water!

Enjoined through water.
Why had she said that? ‘I am enjoined through water.’

Living and talking – including a whole lot of quasi-religious crap – and trying to hold on although all the time you know you’re going under – no, being dissolved. Truly enjoined. That’s loathsome. That’s unendurably loathsome. But all the same, the worst of all is the vile way young people pretend not to notice. No, they simply don’t know anything about it. They have everything in their grasp. They plan! And some never grow up.

Johan was looking at him and Birger sensed he had noticed his anger. He turned round and went out. Saddie stayed where she was under the table. The gateau was melting and there were flies on it. Unplanned, he thought maliciously. Something not going the way it was supposed to after all.

‘I’m a useless person,’ Annie used to say. Her words were as clear in his head as if he had just heard her voice. In this warm air, heavy with scents, in the rustle of the aspens. Those sober words: ‘I’m a useless person.

‘I can’t see any particular point in my life. I read a lot and I like being alone. I like being with you, too. And I like the birds and the sound of rain.’

The rustle of the aspens, he thought. And the dry clicks in the autumn when their leaves fell to the frosty ground. She used to stand here on the steps and listen to them.

Slowly his anger and loathing dispersed, but he was very tired now, almost exhausted. He took the gateau with him and went back into the kitchen.

‘I’ll take Saddie and go home,’ he said. ‘That’s best. But you two must think this over.’

‘There’s nothing to think over,’ said Mia.

Birger didn’t reply. He went over to the cupboard under the sink and opened it.

‘What do you want?’

She sounded sharp.

‘Saddie’s food bowl. I want her lead, too. And that old sheepskin. Then I’ll go.’

Johan was the one to go out with him, his hands still thrust into his pockets. He was looking rather stiff. He delayed their leavetaking down by the car, as if afraid of returning to the kitchen and Mia. Things are going off the rails for them, thought Birger. Perhaps quite unnecessarily. He had that helpless feeling he had had ever since they had started looking for Annie. The feeling of complicity and impotence.

The village had never had so many cows as during the war, and full-cream milk could be bought well into the 1950s. Later the hay meadows had grown meagre and matted, the grazing lands were overgrown, and the birch shoots had moved in, as did the ineradicable willow.

Then finally the tourists came. They wanted to see the river Lobber. A society that absorbs its life force out of fatal violence has to pay tribute to the village and its mystery – because it is unsolved. There the force is unfettered.

That had been Annie’s belief. That was the way she used to talk.

If you solve the mystery, the force runs out and the village becomes a dying village among many others. A place no one sees and no one knows about. The force goes over to the man who did it and you never solve his mystery. Yet it is just as attractive as the smell of well-hung meat. His dark destiny is transferred to you in swift electronic flashes. But the village dies.

And she had been consistent, he thought bitterly. Never a single contribution towards weakening the enigmatic force of the village.

After saying goodbye to Birger, Johan Brandberg walked back up the steep slope to the house and found he was out of breath. That annoyed him, since he considered himself fit and athletic, but the air was very heavy and humid, a spicy, cloyingly sweet scent coming from the roses. They were an old-fashioned kind which could be found in several places in the village, a multi-petalled, deep-purple rose. It flowered in abundance and the heavy heads hung over the stone wall terracing the slope in front of the shed. Many of the blooms had faded now, displaying interiors of decay and dissolution. They looked shameless at this stage and those still flowering were full of hover flies and bumblebees. Such an abundant species should be checked before it got to the obscene stage. He wondered whether Annie used to deadhead them. He didn’t know much about her. Anyhow, Mia hadn’t done it.

He was annoyed with Mia. And worse. But he had said nothing until his thoughts had turned to the odd demand that she ought to have thought about deadheading the roses.

She had been clearing out and cleaning for three days now. It was hard, dirty work, and painful for her. She was trying to keep the shock and the draining grief at bay. Maybe she was just postponing them, but he couldn’t reproach her for trying to do so by hard work and an effort of will. She was pregnant and wanted to be happy. She had used that word. He sensed that she meant something more modest, simply a state that was good for the baby. She was using the word baby, now.

He had realised she was protecting him and had expected her to talk to him about it. But she hadn’t. He had never imagined living with Mia in an atmosphere in which it was so difficult to breathe. Nor did he understand how he had accepted it for over a month. Maybe that was because he wasn’t sure what she meant by protecting him. Whether she really meant to.

It was all very confusing and burdensome. He sat down at the garden table, knowing she could see him from the kitchen. The police had asked her whether she knew who it was Annie might have seen. Had Annie said anything when they were having tea together that morning? No, she hadn’t. What about when Mia had come that night? No, she hadn’t woken then.

‘Then your fiancé didn’t drive the car right up?’

‘No, he didn’t.’

Just as simply and clearly as when she had replied to Birger.

‘Yes he did.’

He had probably pushed it aside, but he could no longer do that. If she was protecting him, then that was because she thought there was something from which he needed protecting. Didn’t she realise that it made it worse? That was what made breathing so difficult.

He got up and went inside. She had her back to him, still busy taking things out of the larder.

‘Has he gone?’

‘Yes. He was miserable.’

‘I couldn’t stand him any longer,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. He’s like a wet old sponge.’

‘You don’t want him to tell the police that I was the person your mother saw?’

‘That’s unimportant. Nothing but unpleasantness would come of it. The fact that she saw you and you look like that guy means he’s right. She saw someone. She was frightened. That’s why she took the gun with her.’

‘I was that guy.’

It looked extremely peculiar, but she actually went on pouring rice out of one carton into another which wasn’t quite full.

‘It was me running up the path that night,’ said Johan. ‘I was on my way to Nirsbuan. I don’t even know if I was on my way there. I just ran. But then I got there and slept for an hour or two. In the morning I paddled down to the Räbäck and got a lift. Your mother meant me when she phoned Birger.’

‘A foreigner?’

‘A Lapp.’

He said the word with an unpleasant sting he himself thought sounded childish.

‘She’d only just come here. I probably looked like a foreigner to her. Asian, she thought. Mongoloid, some would say. I had long hair at the time. It was darker than it is now.’

‘So what?’ said Mia.

What he was afraid of had already occurred.

‘Mia, you didn’t tell the police the truth. You told them I didn’t drive you right up to the house.’

‘Did I?’

That made him angry.

‘You’re not being honest now,’ he said. ‘What are you afraid of? At least admit it to yourself. I did not stab two people to death in a tent later on that night. I did not go after her with her own shotgun and shoot her. You know that perfectly well. I was with you in Östersund.’

‘When I woke up in the night you weren’t there.’

‘I’d gone out to phone Gudrun.’

‘You went
out
to phone?’

This should never have been said. It should never have been thought. It was only some kind of delirium of words.

‘Mia, you wouldn’t even dream of protecting me if you really thought so badly of me. But if you go on being devious, you’ll get into a bad mood and start thinking ill of me.’

‘Being devious? Am I the one being devious?’

She had said so much that afternoon. Once he found himself on his own – on a forest road just north of Lersjövik – he realised he had gone straight into the kitchen and caused the row himself. He had intended to be open with her and force her to be open – and to stop deceiving herself. He wanted to live in clarity with Mia. In dry air. He still found it difficult to see what was wrong with such a project. He had told her he had grown up in an atmosphere of silences and concealment, but had managed to get out of it.

‘I ran away from it. I know quite a lot about the hatred generated in that kind of sludge of silences and suspicions. When my mother was twenty-one, she became pregnant. I’ve no idea what her hopes or plans were. I only know that the father of the child – my father, I mean – was married. He was a Sami like her. She started housekeeping for Torsten Brandberg, who had lost his wife and had been left on his own with three boys and a baby. I don’t know whether Gudrun decided to acquire a father for her child or whether it just happened. Anyhow, Torsten probably thought he was the father when he married her. But he must have gradually realised he had been deceived. Look at me. I don’t look particularly Swedish. I looked even less so when I was a child. I don’t think anything has ever been said. I’m convinced they just went on and on saying nothing. But I grew up in that mess of suspicion and humiliation and minor racist outbursts, protected by a powerful force. Mother-love, Mia! Watch out for that.’

‘You’re mad,’ she said, quietly and bitingly.

‘Yes! Mother-love has thick, thick blood. It has substances you find in mares and female rats. It’s good for eighteen months. Fitting and necessary. After twenty-four months it has to become human. Humanistic. Even dry and matter-of-fact. It has to acquire an element of indifference. Of consideration for other things. I ran away from it. I don’t want my child to grow up in that thick, murky soup. I want you and I to know exactly where we stand.’

‘Then why didn’t you say you were the person Mum saw?’

‘I’m saying it now.’

‘You never said a word about it until you had to. I could have lived my whole life with you without knowing you were by the Lobber that night.’

‘But it had nothing to do with you. It was long before your time.’

‘I was there.’

‘You were six.’

‘Is everything that happened to you before I grew up to be discounted? Is that not part of you?’

He remembered the conversation, or the quarrel, or the confessions, as nothing but retakes. Sometimes an outburst became something to hold on to in the flood of repetitions, in the increasing disintegration.

‘I think you’re horrible!’

He tried to remember that soberly as well. That meant, You frighten me. Everything you’ve been involved in frightens me. But it made no difference. He remembered the feeling even better, the fierce jab that had caught him unawares. Yes, he was also frightened, though he had expressed it more soberly than she had.

‘Now you’re being illogical, Mia.’

They were both on holiday and had been going to put Annie’s house in order, then go home to Langvasslien to fish and walk in the mountains. Now she said she was going to Stockholm, because she was feeling sorry for her grandmother and would like to go and look after her. She could go to Åland with her.

He couldn’t imagine Henny Raft wanting to leave her little flat and walk on her swollen feet up the Åland-ferry gangway. She would rather stay at home and feed her gulls and crows and squabble with the neighbours and the public-health authority about the matter. She was considered a character (by those who did not consider her a dotty old bat who let crows and gulls shit all over the balconies) and she lived up to the image with determined dignity.