Blackwater (58 page)

He had been frightened and shown it. A moment ago, he had wept. He wished he could have been different now. But she was looking at him so strangely, maybe it did not cross her mind that he could help her. He was and remained a child to her.

She had seen her child threatened. So had Annie Raft. As soon as the two met, danger loomed. Neither of them had considered talking to us, handing over the problem.

If only it had been spontaneous at least. A reflex action, the way a cat lashes out with its paw. But she had arranged it. It was quickly done, but it was thorough. She had lured Annie Raft up to Nirsbuan. That gave her plenty of time. She wrote the note, fixed the thermos of coffee and put buns in a plastic bag. The irony of such ordinariness.

‘You never found her cartridges.’

‘She hadn’t got any,’ she said.

‘Yes, she had. Behind the clock radio.’

For a moment he saw her face as it must have looked then, tense and calculating. But now she was calculating with hindsight. If only she had known. If only she had looked behind the radio. Just as swiftly, the expression vanished. She stared at the flimsy oriental rug Saddie had rucked up, but she didn’t seem to see it. She had lost interest in the house and Annie Raft. Her glass of whisky was untouched, and he remembered now that she never drank spirits.

Somehow or other he recognised most of what she had done. She had arranged things for her family. She had brought her everyday competence to the tasks she had to carry out. The thermos. The buns. The written note. He remembered the times when she had brought him milk and sandwiches to his room. She never pretended it was anything special. Only an arrangement that would make things easier for everyone. She seldom sat the way she was sitting now.

Once he could remember her sitting on the bed in his room, her face pale. She had been staring out of the window, chewing her bottom lip. She had had moments of doubt. But she did not yield to them.

He thought he could follow her in the everyday actions she had carried out that Saturday afternoon, with determination and without letting their irony get through to her.

But he couldn’t picture her down at the Lobber.

And yet she had been there. It had been calculated. Annie Raft would have to cross the river at the ford when she came back from Nirsbuan. No matter how the paths wound and divided within the parcel of forest, that was the only place where she could get across the river. But Johan was incapable of picturing Gudrun there.

He could not picture her going up close, removing the safety catch, pulling the trigger and firing. He wanted to ask, but the question could not be spoken aloud. It was too shameful and too emotional – as if there were still some decorum to adhere to.

How could you? That question would not pass his lips.

He remembered a night of wine-drinking and talk. First, Mia had taken him along to the library, where a famous old poet gave a reading of poems he’d written over five decades. Afterwards, they had had wine and pizza and eventually had gone back to the home of one of her colleagues at the museum. There had been much talk and quantities of cheap wine were consumed.

They had talked about the event by the Lobber. And about that mass rape outside Piteå. The old poet, a sensitive, gifted person, a conscience for them all, was able to describe it in detail. The way the last youth in the tent had cut up the unconscious girl with a broken bottle. How he had jammed it up her vagina.

They had been ordinary boys, boys who bought Mother’s Day roses and Christmas presents. A consensus prevailed beneath the lamplight and the coils of smoke. Their eyes smarted. They were speaking rather indistinctly, but were in agreement on the influence of alcohol, on mass psychosis and the crudeness of army life. On violations in childhood, poverty and Rambo films. Then the old poet said:

‘I think I would’ve been capable of doing that myself.’

There was utter silence.

‘Under those circumstances. The tent. Drink. Yes, I would have been capable of it myself.’

And they could see beneath that bowl of yellow light and in the bluish coils of cigarette smoke that he was staring into himself. They realised that he could see backwards to that event in the tent which they had not been able to make out in all their talk, and which still none of them could see clearly could not even imagine at all. They had been very taken with his greatness and the depth of his humanity, and a long time went by before they had started talking again, and drinking wine and smoking.

But Johan had grasped Mia fiercely by the elbow and said that they were going home now. She had been irritated and a bit cross, but she had gone with him. He had drawn a very deep breath out in the cold winter air and thought of the poet up there as an anti-Christ.

‘You didn’t like him,’ said Mia.

‘He made me sick.’

‘Why? Because he tells the truth about us?’

‘Because what he says about himself is probably true.’

They hadn’t mentioned it again. It had been an open question between them, whether you can see into your own darkness and whether it actually is your responsibility to do so. Or whether you evoke the darkness and make it into your own by toying with it.

‘Are you still cold?’

Gudrun nodded.

‘This may last quite a time. Wouldn’t you like to lie down for a while?’

She shook her head. He got up and put more wood in the stove. Should he ask her if she wanted anything to eat? A sandwich or something? But it was late. Perhaps she was feeling sick.

‘How could you think it was me?’ he said.

That question had also been difficult to ask. But now he had asked it. She looked up with a trace of derision.

‘Well, you’re believing it of me.’

Her face took on a little life from the irony, but it didn’t last many moments.

‘I had help, after all,’ she said.

‘Björne?’

She nodded.

‘What did he say?’

‘I don’t really remember. That he’d found your moped up where the path ended.’

‘Up by the river?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a shit he is!’

‘He’s the only one of the brothers you’ve ever had anything in common with.’

‘I had nothing in common with him. How could I have done?’

‘He said you used to take turns in guarding the buzzard’s nest. That you thought Lill-Ola had taken the chicks and was going to sell them. There’d been a Dutchman in the store that afternoon. And the chicks had gone. He thought you’d been . . . you’d just gone on stabbing. At the tent.’

She fell abruptly silent, her face floating out in the lamplight. She had bent back her head, with her mouth wide open. She looked as if she were in pain. He thought about birth pains. But she was quite quiet now.

‘How could you have believed him?’ he whispered. She didn’t answer for a moment. Her lips looked stiff.

‘We didn’t talk about it all that much. No one at home wanted to say it straight out. We were trying to help you.’

For a moment they looked each other straight in the eye.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ she cried. ‘You seemed to be afraid of being caught. Why did you agree to move to Langvasslien if you hadn’t done anything!’

‘I thought Torsten was fed up with me. I’m not even his son.’

‘
What
did you say?’

‘I’m not his son. We’ll have to talk about that some time or other.’

She snorted.

‘Are you laughing?’

‘Well, what else can I do? Are you saying you’re not Torsten’s son?’

‘I’m Oula Laras’s son. The man you were with before Torsten.’

She had clasped her hands and was moving her head, rocking it. Suddenly she reminded him of his grandmother, an old woman rocking her head.

‘My dear child,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Oula Laras! Of all people.’

‘Am I wrong?’

‘Yes. I’ve never had anyone except Torsten.’

She was looking at him as if she had never really seen him before. Her eyes slid over his pullover and tight leather trousers. She snorted again, almost imperceptibly this time. But it was ridicule. He could see every shift in her expression.

‘Antelope trousers,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they? Leather trousers. Made of South American antelope skin. Cost four thousand kronor. Oh, so you thought you were Sami? Totally? I ought to have known. The way you carried on about our people’s old sacrifical places and all that.’

She thrust her head forwards and stared at him.

‘You’ve never been right down in the shit.’

He couldn’t imagine her having been there, either. But he didn’t dare say anything.

‘We had to go into the privy to speak our own language. My teacher wasn’t exactly on the right side. Not like yours, petting the dear little Lapp children. Telling them about the troll drums and all that stuff. When I went to school, they made you ashamed of being a Lapp, like having vermin or tuberculosis. And we didn’t even own any reindeer. Dad was a drunk. Did you know that? Did you know your grandfather was a drunk? Well, now you know, anyhow. He sang and drank and talked shit. He wasn’t violent. Only silly. I can’t stand the way people are now collecting the Sami songs and all that. Singing and singing and singing. Do you know what it means to be poor, Johan? Piss-poor. ‘Patch-pants Lapp, Lapps are crap,’ the kids used to say, turning their backsides on you. Oh, no, Johan. No ancient places of sacrifice. That isn’t what we went around thinking about. But electricity! And patterned sweaters and a stainless-steel sink. Even your aunt Sakka dreamt Swedish dreams.’

Sakka had read the weekly magazines. And saved them all up. Taken them with her up to Langvasslien in bundles tied up with string. The Pergutt and Johan had found them in the attic and Sakka had laughed. She remembered how she had tried to forget she had short little legs, a round bottom and dead-straight hair.

‘Sakka laughed at those magazine dreams,’ said Johan. ‘I know she did.’

‘She did a complete about-turn as best she could when she married Per Dorj. Borrowed a silver collar for the wedding. Got herself a Sami costume, though it wasn’t real wool. Now she’s on every single committee there is and Per is chair of the Sami village. But that doesn’t make the sun turn.’

‘I think they do it well,’ said Johan. ‘All the same.’

‘Sakka’s southern Sami is spoken by a few hundred people. Did you know that? A few hundred!’

Yes, Sakka tried to get the sun to turn and the mountain birch to grow with its roots up in the air. She loved her language. But perhaps it had already been squeezed to death under the synthetic material. A stronger myth had swallowed hers. He had thought so himself, many a time. But living up there was so easy. For him it was a life of Sundays; winter life with the dogs, and branding the calves, fishing and walking in the summer.

‘I suppose they do the best they can,’ he said. ‘Hanging on. Like everyone living here. There’s no difference between the Sami and the others in that respect. They make do somehow. It can’t be all that grand. They try to live a life that somehow connects to the past. And most of them want to remember. Not everyone can build roads for the company. Not everyone is involved in turning this into the Area.’

‘Yes, they are.’

The treetops. The sleeping birds. Sparks between the trees. No more memory here, but a tumour, growing as fast as the destruction.

The Area has no paths. Here are steep slopes and rubbish, stones, log stacks, scrub. A network of roads out on the Area. A system of road networks running out to the cleared areas. Rubble after dynamiting along the roadside slopes. Shattered stony gravel. Dry root systems. Oil drums. Torsten has built the network of roads. Do you hate him for that? Do you hide in the treetops, creep along paths under capercaillie spruces that are no longer there? Then you’re lost in the cancer that is called longing.

Hate you. Know what you did, what you took part in. It was the haste, nothing else. The great haste. Everyone was in such a hurry, hurrying towards death.

Paths run and disappear like roads, like forests. But it was fatal that it all went so quickly. Now you have only the presence and a hole of hunger.

Hate you.

Bend over your reflection in the water and hate.

She said it so quietly, he had to lean over towards her.

‘Yes, everyone. You, too. And Annie Raft. Though she thought she was so much better than the rest of us. But all the same, she was involved in it.’

‘Did you hate her?’

What a word. She didn’t reply.

But she does hate. I have never dared disturb my hatred. She touched on hers, and that was enough. It had been sleeping so lightly.

What shall we do with this hatred of ourselves – of the devastation? What shall we do? It fills our mouths. Rotten. Bitter. A taste we don’t recognise. An unfamiliar vomit.

I would like to glide above it all like Ylja, with ridicule, with sarcasm, with affection. Like gliding above the treetops, above forests on fire, like vapour. Or just work, eyes closed, work to heal, like Birger. Healing. Assuaging.

But what do you do with the weather? You make forecasts. You provide a service. Five days at a time. Small bursts of controlled future. An ingratiating magic.

‘It’s over, Johan. A few hundred people. The northern Sami language will probably remain for a while. Nostalgia, it’s called, so I’ve learnt. That’s all right for cultured people. Those who write and dance and carry on. But the reindeer owners drive their herds with scooters these days. That’s not actually Sami culture. It’s crude. It’s Swedish. They search and drive with helicopters and move the creatures to summer grazing in long-distance trailers. They’re living another life now. We’re living another life. But we are alive.’

‘You took part in rejecting the old life,’ said Johan. ‘At least Sakka didn’t do that. Apart from daydreaming over weekly magazines for a while, as a teenager.’

‘Yes, I took part. From shame. From compulsion. From a longing for something else as well. I was only human; perhaps human first and foremost. Even a Lapp can long for electricity. But you, you’re a Sami. In antelope trousers.’