Blackwater (50 page)

The head had got up and kept opening his mouth without getting a word in, but his attempts were not really serious. They were doing his dirty work for him.

‘D’you think everything’s coming to an end?’ cried a fat little woman whose whole figure I had rarely seen because she worked in the kiosk.

‘Are you frightening the kids with that!’

‘There’s no need,’ I replied. ‘They’re frightened enough already.’

They didn’t want me as a teacher of their children. Some thought I was mad, and most thought I was a leftie, which was the same thing, though self-inflicted. They demanded that the class should have another teacher.

The head came into the firing line now that it was serious, so he had to get to his feet and take the abuse. He stood there in a blazer with huge lapels, tight flared trousers and an open-necked shirt, the points of the collar spread out over his jacket, a silver pendant shaped like a fish dangling at his throat. His hair was brushed forward and grew just below the lobes of his ears, and the shoes he was wearing made him quite a bit taller than he was. I had been wrong to think they were afraid of him. He was one of them. Even though he’d been bright enough to become a head, he still had to remember that his salary was paid by the taxpayer.

No one had had any coffee yet. The thermoses stood untouched on the red paper tablecloths and the pastries still lay there under the clingfilm. Occasionally someone nudged a cup with an elbow or banged the table so hard the china rattled.

‘This has got to stop!’

That meant: Annie Raft has to go.

‘Otherwise we’ll have to go further up.’

That meant the education authority.

Finally we were left alone, he and I. He said he at least partly understood that there was an educational idea behind my exercises with the pupils. But it was all far too original. And as the plumber had said, it seemed simpler to learn things the ordinary way.

‘Cicero had that objection to this memorising technique,’ I said. ‘But he hadn’t even a whiff of what frightened them here.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the head. ‘You’re full of ideas and there’s nothing wrong with that. But one mustn’t frighten the children.’

‘I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve frightened the parents.’

‘We’ve talked enough now. You sleep badly and are rather wrought up. You behaved in a very unbalanced way in the staff room. You’d better take some sick leave and then we’ll see.’

I really did feel ill. I was ready to throw up and I had a dreadful headache. It wasn’t difficult to stay at home the next day. I had forty-five pastries in the larder.

Going back was more difficult. I decided to leave. After all, I had never meant to end up in Byvången. I went to Stockholm, thinking of supply teaching until the autumn and seeing what cropped up.

But it didn’t work. The city had changed. I remembered it as composed of artefacts, but it was becoming organic, with a substratum of sustenance. A green clump I had never seen before protruded out of the cliff above Slussen. Bad smells were coming from basement windows. The ventilation systems were crawling. The city hadn’t stayed in place. It was growing, and smelt of procreation.

In August, the air became difficult to breathe, heavy with humidity and invisible gases. Rats scuttled around in the creeper on the house in Strindbergsgatan where I was staying with Henny. I went back to Blackwater and moved into Aagot’s little red cottage by the road. Mia was lodging in Byvången and came back on the bus at weekends.

I had no idea what I was going to do. But then the teacher who lived in Lersjövik drove off the road on one of the first icy days and broke her arm. She became so scared of the daily drive to Blackwater that she resigned.

My headmaster was also the principal here. But he didn’t turn me down. It was probably just as difficult to get teachers to come to this village as it was to get a pastor to stay in Röbäck. He gave me some fatherly advice. Stick to the curriculum. They’ll keep their eye on you. That kind of thing gets around. And one mustn’t frighten the children.

No, we mustn’t frighten each other with the situation we already live in, which struggles and labours towards its fulfilment. It has neither invention nor direction, and yet it takes on innumerable forms, many of them so complex that some kind of fantasy seems to be indicated. And we mustn’t try to predict the bizarre and cruel things that the end will produce before it reaches its own end.

I should have taken it more calmly. And yet the talk about radiation sickness and life without electricity was not that upsetting. For the parents, it was the memory lane that was the real stumbling block. The fact that the children had an inner room that was empty except for fear, they had already sensed. They had one themselves. What frightened them more than anything was that the children might gain access to a large and strange building with many rooms, the contents of which they didn’t have to tell anyone at all.

‘Mia’s mother was a proud creature. She would never have tolerated this defence. No affection that was mixed with shame. And most of all no compassion.’

‘But Mia was magnificent,’ said Johan.

She’s taken the lead, Birger thought. All his life he’ll plod along behind her, looking like this.

‘What are you two saying about me?’

Mia had got up.

‘We’re saying you were magnificent,’ said Birger. ‘Petrus has an inspiring effect on women. But now I’ll have to give the minister some venison.’

‘They were just going to use her for their own ends,’ Mia said.

‘When Annie created Memory Lane, she was surrounded by very pronounced opponents,’ Birger explained to Johan. ‘Dark-blue, true-blue members of the Centre Party. Cautious bourgoisie in Byvången, who looked on involvement as a sign of mental imbalance – I was one of them – and irresolute, politically ignorant women. Village women who one day want to live like their forefathers and the next day want to learn English and go to Rhodes with a woman friend. Away from their menfolk. But they leave food ready in the freezer: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 . . . That was their revolution, and it mostly didn’t come off. Sometimes they come to life again. You saw them at the community centre. Their aims aren’t really dubious.’

‘But it was Petrus who took over,’ said Mia.

‘He has a strong personality.’

‘He’s an animal. And now he’s become trendy as well. A café in a red and white cottage. Hand-painted notices. And money from the local authority for courses in ethics. But his breath still smells bad. And he’s only interested in one thing: cheese and screwing.’

‘That’s two,’ said Birger.

‘He was already a dirty old man up at Starhill. We kids thought he was disgusting. He climbed on the ladies. At any time of the day. Well, not on Mum. Don’t go thinking that.’

Preferably not, Birger thought.

‘Did you find it difficult up there?’ Johan asked in a troubled voice.

‘No, we had fun. Everyone was kind. To be fair, so was Petrus. They didn’t squabble with each other.’

‘Was Dan kind to you?’

Birger found it difficult to say the name and felt he had moved closer to the morass within him. He didn’t want to start crying. He was ashamed of these attacks, which came without warning and which Mia regarded with rigid dislike.

‘Dan was great. He was so lovely somehow. Though I went crazy when he was with Mum. I wanted him to be with me. She thought I was angry with him. Dan never rowed about anything. He sat there with his long golden hair and laughed at Petrus and the women. Yes – he was angry once. Then he went quite crazy. That was all my fault.’

She fell silent.

‘What happened?’ said Birger.

‘I’d found a pair of jeans in that old barn they didn’t use. We were always looking everywhere for fun things and there were lots. People had lived there once. We were always digging around and searching, and I found those jeans stuffed under the feedstuffs table. I gave them to Mum because they were too big for me. They were too big for her, too, the legs miles too long. But she was frightfully pleased. She always wore them. Then Dan came home and they had a row about them. He yelled and shouted and I was frightened. That was the only time. But that was because it was my fault. Though he didn’t know that.’

‘Did Dan know anything about that business down by the Lobber?’

‘He knew who the guy in the tent was. They all knew.’

‘Annie too?’

‘I think so.’

‘She never said anything about it.’

‘No, they didn’t want to talk about it. I’ve no idea how it all hung together. Though I do know one thing. I had a Barbie boy doll called Ken originally. But we rechristened him, the other kids and I. He was called John Larue. I knew how it was spelt and how it was pronounced. I was six. And in some way I have always known that it was the name of the guy in the tent. Us kids knew that.’

Johan hadn’t often thought of Ylja. That memory was silent and cut off. A blind alley.

But he had thought about those forests. After almost two decades, he still remembered his dream of flying, without wings of any kind, above a sweet-smelling forest of deciduous trees; late-flowering limes, dark-leaved guelder-rose trees, oaks and chestnuts, each treetop a world of its own. Gigantic ashes, elms with stiff leaves, silvery grey willows by reflecting water. Hazel bushes in airy thickets, washed through with light.

He had thought out the names of the species of trees later. He had liked thinking about that twilight forest and the way he had slowly moved above its treetops in a gliding flight which hadn’t surprised him in the slightest.

Gradually he had found out the truth about that roof of foliage, which had looked to him like a billowing floor. Ylja had been right. Europe really had been covered with forests. There had been huge marshland areas and morasses. Mountain ranges and wide rivers. But most of all forest. Far away beneath the Caucasus, trees had soughed, far out by the shores of the Atlantic.

He regarded his thoughts on forests as respectable, the kind you can dwell on occasionally. But her tall story about the Traveller and the women was not so good. He had never reflected much on it.

One winter afternoon, he had been in the county library in Östersund. He was waiting for Mia, who was out shopping, and he took the opportunity to look through what they had on Sami culture and religion. On a shelf labelled Religious Knowledge, General, his eye fell on a spine with the title
The Myth of the Traveller
.

He could feel a movement in his chest. It was powerful and resembled the swift change of pressure in a bow when the arrow is released. He thought what he regarded as his ego was for ever changing, though the process was slow and with a great many retakes. The idea of an arrow that had been in the firing position for almost two decades amazed him.

The book had been rebound by the library; the paper was shiny and heavy. It had been printed in Åbo and had a very involved subtitle inside. The author was a lecturer in folklore and religious knowledge called Doris Hofstaedter. It was impossible to get anything out of it by just leafing through and reading at random. When Mia arrived, he took it out on her library card. Laughing, she asked what he wanted that off-putting tome for. For the very first time, he lied to her. He said it dealt with a Sami fairy tale he had heard as a child.

It had happened so quickly that not until afterwards had he realised it was a double lie. He had never heard any Sami fairy tales as a child.

It was a terribly dull book and he never got right through it. It had a footnote system in small print which was the most comprehensive he had ever seen. He gathered that the myth of the Traveller was well known all over Europe. The author accounted for its spread and all the different variations in a thoroughly scholarly manner. There were no modern complications. The women who preserved the myth and who were spread all over the world had been invented by Ylja. He dismissed it as feminist blather, though that was not the way he ordinarily thought. He substituted it with fantasies of the kind he had at puberty. Ylja had known how to get the blood racing through his head and elsewhere.

She had not been a blatherer. More fervent and stern. Images came to him of her regular features, too boyish to be beautiful, of the coarse blonde hair and her body, smelling of sun and dry forest slopes, stretched out on a foam mattress with a yellow and green striped cover. Suddenly they changed. He saw Ylja walking towards the dark house in the dusky night, unsteadily and swerving towards the river. All the time she was singing:

‘What are you thinking about?’ said Mia.

Well, what was he thinking about? He wasn’t thinking at all, just staring at images. One of them ought to have disappeared in the shedding of shells and emptying of content he had thought was the process that constituted his ego. And the other was one he had never known he had. He was feeling like a very old person. He had heard that old people could haul up fresh memories from the well of the past.

At first he thought Ylja must have read the book. Then he saw that it had come out two years after their stay in Trollevolden. But what does a lecturer absorbed in a major work of learning on the myths of wandering do? Lectures about them, of course, runs seminars. Ylja must have been one of a group of young students at a seminar in Åbo. Future scholars of religion.

No – that was too ridiculous. She had been studying another subject and had gone to the lectures out of curiosity. Only someone who approached the subject as pure entertainment could twist the myth of the Traveller round in the way she had done.

It then struck him that if Ylja had belonged to a seminar group, the lecturer would know her. If he described the fair, boyish, perhaps rather caustic girl student, it was possible her teacher might remember her.

He wasn’t keen on the idea. He didn’t want to go to the police. That was like putting your hand down into dark waters and fishing up God knows what kind of trash. He wanted to know what would be brought to light before he went to the police with it.