Blackwater (48 page)

That was quite usual. All she said about it was that she had seen the effects of murderous violence once only and that was quite enough.

No one believed any longer that Annie’s death was accidental or self-inflicted. They wanted to arrange an exhibition in the community centre in her memory. It was also to be a statement against mindless violence.

‘I’m not sure it was all that mindless,’ said Birger, when the minister had telephoned. They were thinking of moving the summer church’s coffee shop from Röbäck to Blackwater. That was where the tourists stopped off, ever since the police had held a press conference and retreated from the accident theory. On the Sunday the exhibition was to be opened and the minister was to say a memorial prayer for her. Birger thought that was mad. She hadn’t been indifferent to religion as most people were, but utterly hostile to his Christianity.

All concepts of a god had begun as belief in ghosts, she had said. A power-drunk gangster keeps his tribe in terror and awe. When he dies, they are so terrified and dominated by his will, they hallucinate his voice and his steps and his mad laughter at night. And they claim they can still hear them, or that was her understanding of it, though they’ve covered it all with sugar icing. She was extremely grateful that neither Henny nor Åke nor her uncle and aunt had taken her to any church or made her go to Sunday school. She sensed that if you imbibed those confused outpourings early on, you would always to some extent be susceptible to them.

It would have been tactless to tell the minister that, and anyway he wouldn’t have believed it. Annie had led the church choir and she had sung a solo every year from the gallery at funerals and weddings. None of that tallied. Nor had she ever claimed that it did.

The minister was to contact Mia for contributions to the exhibition – pictures and drawings from Annie’s school material, her nature screens and all that kind of thing. Birger phoned Langvasslien and Mia came down with Johan and six Siberian huskies in a dog van. She was pleased about the exhibition. As long as Annie’s death was said to have been self-inflicted, there seemed to be something shameful about it. Now Lisa Kronlund patted Mia on the cheek and said:

‘You poor thing, you, losing your mother.’

Mia came down in the dog van with Annie’s most beautiful drawings. The chairs in the community centre had been taken out and stacked in the little coffee room. The minister was up a ladder in his wine-red shirt and discreet little dog collar, fastening a nylon fishing line to the head of a white paper dove and trying to find the right place to fix it so that the dove didn’t tip over when hung up.

Screens had been put round the walls in the assembly room.
memory lane
it said on the first one and underneath was a childish drawing of a house, diagrammatical and at the same time very complicated. In each room one object had been drawn in detail. In the first basement room was an axe on a chopping block beside an amputated foot; in the other two, broken jars out of which something red was pouring. The rooms were numbered and their contents macabre, possibly a little more gruesome with each floor.

Mia stood there with her cardboard box in her arms, breathing fast. The five people in the hall were working by the screens, busy with paper and drawing pins. Clumsily they put down their utensils and came over to greet her, their faces expressing compassion and embarrassment. The minister, alone familiar with grief, came quickly over. But he couldn’t catch up with Mia, who was striding swiftly from screen to screen. At the fifth or sixth she started saying something between clenched teeth. It sounded like ‘hell’, In the intervals her mouth was moving as if she were chewing something between her front teeth. Suddenly she caught sight of a thin man in a crocheted skullcap.

‘Petrus! You bloody creep!’

Petrus Eliasson’s goatee was quite white nowadays. He was wearing a shirt of heavy cream-coloured material which fell beautifully over the cuffs round his wrists. The Tree of Life was embroidered on the back of his crocheted waistcoat. He had been at the funeral, but either Mia hadn’t seen him there, or he hadn’t succeeded in annoying her. Birger had thought it quite touching that he had come all the way down from the Gädde district, where he lived with his women and his cheesemaking. His women were new. One of them worked, just as Annie had, as a teacher. One came every weekend from Östersund and her job in a builder’s office. The third was a textile artist, a younger version of Barbro Lund.

‘You’ve arranged this,’ Mia hissed at Petrus. Then her voice rose in volume. ‘Take it down! Take it all away!’

Petrus stood there blinking. Anna Starr and the members of the church choir were breathing heavily through their open mouths.

‘Are you involved in this? Don’t you understand anything? Take it down. There’ll be no exhibition.
Are you deaf
?’ Mia shouted. ‘Take it all down! Help me, Birger! Johan! All this has got to come down. Out you go, the lot of you! Don’t imagine you can do things like this.’

The minister approached with all the assurance gained from a professional attitude to crises in life. Mia flung down her box and made whisking movements with her hands right in his face, as if trying to wave away an apparition. And she succeeded. As the women retreated into the coffee room, the minister followed them, but he stopped in the doorway.

Petrus approached Mia from behind, his head on one side and constantly licking his moist lips. When he addresssed her in his soft singsong voice, she spun round and slapped him across the face.

‘Out! Go away! You’ve no business in this village. Stay at home with your bloody stinking goats and your intellectual witches.’

He stumbled towards the door. The pastor had got the hiccups and was trying to keep his mouth shut, but kept forgetting. Birger itched to intervene with some good advice, but then saw Anna Starr holding a glass of water to the pastor’s mouth. She carefully closed the door behind her.

Mia didn’t start crying until they were left on their own. She wept with her mouth wide open and went on ripping the drawings off the screens.

‘Johan, get a bin bag out of the car!’

Petrus opened the door, put his head round and said that the material had not belonged to Annie. It had been her school-children’s. They had collected it up from pupils who were now adult and they had to return it. He had to keep on talking for some time, since Mia was at the other end of the hall. But when she strode across the floorboards and hit him with a piece of cardboard, he retreated.

Birger thought Johan was looking rather pale, but he was working efficiently, asking no questions. They filled two bin bags. Mia kicked them into the coffee room, where the banished ones were lying low.

‘Do what the hell you like with them. But don’t exhibit them. Not anywhere. Leave my mother in peace! Do you hear!
Leave her in peace
.

When they got up to the house, Mia was exhausted and went to lie down on Annie’s bed. Birger made coffee and Johan sat at the kitchen table.

‘What was all that about?’ he asked in a low voice.

Well, what was it all about? Shame, partly. Shame and affection.

‘Annie had rather original educational ideas,’ said Birger. ‘Mia will probably tell you about them later.’

At first Annie had spoken of of it only flippantly and in passing. When there was no longer any risk of his thinking consolation was what she wanted, she told him. Corny or not, she had said, but I loved my work and was fulfilled by it all those years in Byvången. Otherwise I would have probably lived like most people and kept looking at my watch in working hours.

At first, of course, it was the usual mild boredom. I had little encounters that brightened the day. I read a lot and longed for bed and my book. Moved in with Göran Dubois. That didn’t last long enough to be serious. His mother put an end to it. But that was nothing important. I realise that now. I was sleeping spasmodically and eating too much.

The tedium of school has a particular flavour. Knobbly jerseys and unwashed bodies. And that lethargy. They did as I told them. Snorted sometimes, giving me shifty looks. That meant some internal joke I hadn’t heard. Occasional shoving, chairs scraping, bursts of laughter and suppressed swearing. But never a protest.

They were prepared to spend six years in this half-light. And they obeyed me. They never asked why they had to learn this or that. They just tried, most of them absently. The girls were more ambitious, but their efforts were also swallowed by the winter darkness. Towards the end of the autumn term, we were like fish in a lake that has almost frozen solid.

Then Police Day came. The police chief and his assistant came to the school in their black-and-white car. They were in uniform and carrying briefcases. For a whole day, they went from classroom to classroom to talk about their work.

At the time there was considerable contempt for the police in radical circles. The idea of a PR drive had originated higher up and down south. Demonstrations or the formation of terrorist groups were unlikely up here. In my classroom there were only future drink-drivers and workers in the black economy who might occasionally bash the wife or a neighbour. They would add an amplifier or an electric typewriter when reporting a burglary, but they would never think of protesting against anything. In what the police chief called the present scenario, the children were not interested in hearing how he and his assistant served the community and made life safe for people. They wanted to hear how they chased robbers.

The police chief came to my classroom late in the afternoon. Maybe he was exhausted, because when they asked him, he told them without any evasions how he had chased a robber.

This was two years ago, he said, when he was working in Sveg. There was a nationwide alert out for a bank robber. He had escaped while on a hospital visit, stolen a car, picked up his girlfriend in Borlange and driven on north. In Mora, he had abandoned the first car and stolen a red Cortina.

At about two o’clock in the afternoon someone had phoned from the main supermarket in Hede asking the police to go after a couple who had left without paying for two full carriers of beer and food from the deli-counter. They were in a red Cortina.

The red car got away, but the road was blocked further north. Our police chief, an assistant at the time, was one of those who found the car up in Vemdalsskalet. They had run out of petrol. That night there had been a blizzard which lasted until towards noon. The car was buried in the snow and all tracks obliterated. The police searched through a whole holiday village for the runaway and his girl and found them in the end in the only proper building up there. They were dead, frozen to death. The wood stove was stuffed with logs and newspaper. They had used up several boxes of matches. But they had never opened the damper. It had smoked in, but they hadn’t died from inhaling smoke. They had died of cold.

‘They went out like a light.’

All eyes were on the police chief. Behind him, the green blackboard was blank.

‘They died because they didn’t know how to light a wood stove,’ he said. There were questions and cries, objections and assertions, but he stuck to it: they had died because they couldn’t get the stove going.

When the bell went, he had to go to the next classroom. But the children carried on. I saw them in the playground. In the deepening dusk they were gesticulating. I had never seen them do that before. They usually stood with their hands thrust into their jacket pockets, their shoulders hunched in the cold. The bus from town went past and the beam from its headlights swept over them. Some children ran over to the kiosk to catch the bus back to Blackwater.

Why should I learn this? The police chief had managed to arouse this question in them. Not me. To survive, was the harsh answer his story gave. That was how we got on to what you needed to survive. Without even a cottage. Lighting a fire. Filing a hook out of a barb. Out of what? What do you use? And have you any fishing line on you? Do you go around carrying a fishing line?

Tying on a fly. Making a cooking vessel out of a beer can. Looking for Norrland lichen. What about when the matches run out?

A girl pointed out that you could avoid going out in mist and blizzards. If you behaved yourself, you wouldn’t have to escape from prison either. Then Stefan with the brown eyes said:

‘But what if everything runs out?’

‘What do you mean, everything?’

‘The electricity. If the cables fall down. If there’s a war and a nuclear bomb.’

In that way, I had access one winter afternoon to their fears. That was a room they very seldom opened to adults. They had all seen a girl running along the road with her burning skin crackling into a white map pattern. They had seen her several times. She was running underneath the thick curved glass of the television screen. She was naked and the same age as they were, so she was real. They learnt to read that map of cracked skin.

One bright spark said they ought to learn to light a wood stove at school. In case. Then suggestions fell thick and fast. Now it was a question of what you needed to survive the collapse of civilisation. Not in reeking, radioactive ruins, nor on contaminated shores. No, they would retreat into the forest. Up to the mountain. The long slopes below Bear Mountain would still be there. They ran over, unstable marshlands. Their skin wasn’t burnt away. They ran in cold, fresh air and I hadn’t the heart to spoil their picture. Someone said they ought to learn to weave. And to build a log house. That should be taught at school. In case.

One of them who had mostly said nothing asked who decided what they should learn. I promised I would bring the curriculum to show them. I was in state of great tension, my skin prickling. I was full of laughter and had tears in my eyes. They had started asking the questions: Why should I learn this? Isn’t it unnecessary? They balanced this against that
in case
.

I was feverish with eagerness that evening and simply couldn’t sleep. I kept having one idea after another, my mind exploding and brilliant.