Blackwater. Part 15

She simply wanted to get her other guests out of the way to some other hotel before calling the police and ambulance. Then there would be some chance that it wouldn't get out that it happened at the Sulky. She had also worked out how to do it.

We said she had called me in because she was in pain. I diagnosed a kidney-stone attack and phoned a hotel owner she knew. Fortunately, he wasn't away, though I think she knew that. Frances was pale and extremely determined.

He agreed to take in the guests, but we couldn't get them all to leave at the same time. We waited all of Christmas Day. I told you it was an attempted suicide and I had to stay until I knew which way it was going. I was terribly afraid you'd phone the hospital to ask for me. Frances stayed in her room and didn't show herself.

By the time the last guest had gone, it was eight in the evening. Then I stood outside that room, ready to go in. I was to pretend I had to disturb him to tell him he would have to change hotels, then pretend to find him. It was sickening. And it was even colder in there now.

Frances had to look as if she were in pain when the police came. It was complicated and unpleasant. I had never been involved in anything like this before. I felt as if we had murdered him. He was so helplessly cold, actually stone cold when they came. He had apparently turned off the radiator before lying down. Had he been afraid it would be a long time before anyone knocked?

We didn't know. In a way, he was probably being considerate. Well, then I was go back home, but I simply couldn't. I don't think Frances could have coped with being alone in the empty hotel.

That was probably roughly what I told you, that I hadn't the energy. That I was affected by what happened. My patient had died. I would stay overnight.

I wonder whether you thought I was escaping from Christmas celebrations and the mothers.

We were overcome by hunger, quite literally. She got out marinated herring and carved some ham. We had a schnapps each. We ate thick slices of dark bread and I remember there was a crisp, sweet crust on it. We spread b.u.t.ter. Everything was good. The pilsner. The jellied veal. The liver sausage one of the guests had brought her.

She smelt strong. Not bad, but strong. That long, curly, dark-auburn hair hung down over her shoulders. She dyes it with henna. Where it's grown out, you can see that it's streaked with grey. The bush down there is dark brown, a real bush. She was still in her dressing gown. This is not the kind of thing I can tell you, nor am I doing so. I'm only trying out words.

For our exhilaration. Our hunger.

She hadn't shaved her legs, probably because it was winter and she usually wore trousers or quite thick stockings. Her skin felt p.r.i.c.kly to the touch, up to her knees. Then she was soft, white. Then p.r.i.c.kly again. Curly. Smelt. It was like two hairy animal coats we had down there, chafing against each other, courteously as animals do.

She has a long pear-shaped a.r.s.e. Long legs with clearly defined muscles and sinews. Her stomach arches. The furrow in her spine goes down to the dark slit between her b.u.t.tocks. I wanted to be there and everywhere. Always, really.

But we go on living in that parsimonious way you have to live. Calculated. Usually with words. But for those hours there were no words.

In the end it ceased between you and me.

Presumably I have gone wrong. Or else right. I don't know.

The women didn't stay long. A day or so went by before he noticed they had gone. He was shut in with his aching foot. And ali he could see through the window overlooking the river was the racing water and flickering leaves. The women's voices vanished, like the voices of birds. When?

The Silver Fox could sometimes just be seen on the other side of the river, and Johan occasionally heard the sound of a shotgun. Shooting grouse in the middle of the breeding season, was he? Like Pekka. Johan couldn't care less.

Pekka always laughed off Gudrun's lectures, and she didn't really bother all that much about closed seasons, either. She just wanted them all to be respectable, to be decent people, as she put it. Johan had recently begun to understand what that meant to her. She was waging a continual battle. Hunting seasons. Changing s.h.i.+rts. No dogs in the kitchen. Theirs was to be like a house in Byvngen. Or preferably ostersund.

Vaine had shot birds of prey, sometimes just for fun. And yet he had joined in when they beat up the German. That time they almost went too far. The brothers had caught the German by the Roback and when they opened the boot of his car, they had found three frozen birds. Two buzzards and one short-eared owl. Someone must have got them for him, but they never found out who. They kept knocking the German down until he lay there on the ground.

The pastor found him in the covert down by the stream. The pastor, of all people. Vaine laughed at that along with the others, though he was only fifteen when it happened and couldn't have had much to do with it. The angry little pastor, they called him. But of course, the German hadn't reported them. He had that much sense. He stayed at the parsonage for several days.

The previous pastor had never bothered about fis.h.i.+ng. In his day, anyone could fish in the church's waters and put out nets where no one was looking. Then the new one came and started fis.h.i.+ng and spending his time out of doors. He acquired a boat and kept it up at Whitewater. Pekka and Vaine were fis.h.i.+ng with a long line there one evening and the d.a.m.ned pastor had appeared and started gabbling away in his reedy voice.

He had begun something he called 'forest services' and had invited guest speakers to talk about the company's spraying and clear-felling policies. No one had reckoned on his being out and about all the time. Everything that wasn't town or indoors he called 'nature'.

Him runs round t'marshes, the old men said. He had learnt to make his way through the downy willow and leap between the beaver holes without breaking his leg.

But no one had reckoned on his beginning to make a fuss about fis.h.i.+ng, and that's why the boat disappeared. He put notices up in three villages: 'boat stolen from Whitewater, colour green.' Then people knew, and they also realised who'd done it. Gudrun hummed and hawed, but Torsten had no objection because the d.a.m.ned pastor had once come chugging up in that silly little car of his, walked straight into the kitchen and told him that he knew the Brandbergs dumped waste oil into the Blackreed River. That made the s.h.i.+t hit the fan, but luckily for the pastor the kitchen had been full of people.

That was the kind of thing Johan told Ylja. He had not intended to at all, but once he was confined indoors with his foot, his thoughts kept going to Gudrun, Torsten and the brothers.

He was miserable stuck indoors, peeing into a coffee tin, the other, too, then having to heave it out of the window into the river. He couldn't expect her to run about with a pot for him. But on the second day, he went out. She gave him an old carved walking stick for support and it felt better peeing out of doors. He could wash in the river, too. She told him he needn't be afraid of being seen any longer. The Silver Fox had also left.

They were alone, yet there was no mention of Johan moving up to the house. She seemed to have grown tired of him, at any rate in the daytime. She was doing something up there, writing and reading. He had been stupid to talk about Gudrun and Torsten. All that sounded so ordinary. He realised she liked his being a Sami. She said Lapp, of course. He had said he was a full-blooded Sami and told her about the man with the scooter. But now she appeared to have lost interest.

He found it very dull in the daytime and slept a great deal. He was tired, too. She liked to keep going at night. He was given as much food as he liked and he wondered just how much they had carried up there. She slept with him at night, but no longer told him about the great forests and the Traveller and the women. Maybe it was childish, but he wished she would have continued. It made her different. He found it easier to like her when she talked about the forests and the fires glowing in the clearings at night. Dark nights they were, warm. The women hid from the Traveller, the dark deciduous forest full of laughter like birdsong. Though the birds had long since gone to sleep in the dark summer night that was Europe, that was not yet called Europe, but was just greenery and fast streams and wooded mountains.

Instead she got him to tell her about Torsten and Gudrun. She never really asked him anything, but she listened.

'You've got an Oedipus complex,' she said one evening. 'Do you know what that is?'

'It's when you don't like your dad.'

'You want to kill Father Torsten and sleep with Mother Gudrun,' she said. At that he hit her, slapped her in the face. He felt the palm of his hand against her soft face and her cheekbone.

Afterwards he found it incomprehensible and had no idea what to do to have it undone. It was as if it hadn't happened, as if it had been nothing but a nightmare.

The atmosphere between them had been troubled. They had been tired and not sober. She was very pale, and then she had said that. It was too crude, as if she'd told a dirty joke. But as soon as he had hit out, a split second afterwards, as she sat there with her head down and her cheek at first flared, then showed marks from the blow, he realised she had only been talking the way she usually did. Ironically. Outspokenly, but not seriously. She hadn't meant he wanted to sleep with Gudrun and fantasised about it. She had meant something else, something foolish which had no significance at all. And he had hit her. Like a machine. A piston firing. No he was dreaming.

'You're that sort after all.'

Her mouth was open, her eyes still fixed on him. She had the same expression as when she was astride him.

'Torsten's son,' she said.

Then he knew that at all costs he had to get away.

On Tuesday morning, Vemdal phoned before eight to say he was sending a man to fetch Birger's boots. In fact two police officers were already there, which ke clearly didn't know. They wanted much more than boots. They rummaged in the dirty-laundry basket, holding up Barbro's white bra and examining panties and towels. When they had finished, they put the heap of clothes on the kitchen table. Birger considered that not only wrong but also disgusting. They included filthy fis.h.i.+ng clothes he had thrown into the basket on Midsummer Day, the underpants stained from the accident that had almost happened to him at the approach to Blackwater. They went through the pockets of his green trousers and found a whole lot of mint-toffee papers. Violent rage raced through him, like congestion of blood in the head and a moment of severe pain. An attack of migraine that didn't come off.

One of the officers opened the was.h.i.+ng machine and fumbled round inside the cylinder; the other hooked up the grid over the drain, using a small, pointed spade. Turning the spade over, he started scooping the sludge from the drain into a plastic box.

They wanted his knife, which was still hanging from his belt. It was a childish knife, the first one Barbro had ever had. But she had never been very keen on fis.h.i.+ng. The knife had deep grooves along the top, perhaps for scaling perch.

They asked him if he had any more knives. He said, 'What the h.e.l.l do you think?', opened drawers and took out knives; heavy Mora knives in black plastic sheaths, some with paint on them and ruined cutting edges; and Tomas's j.a.panese fis.h.i.+ng knife encased in wood, which had swollen so they couldn't get the narrow blade out. There was a little lady's knife Tomas called the Lapp knife, a souvenir from the south with reindeer skin on the sheath.

'And then we need the boots.'

'I haven't got any Three Towers boots,' he said. 'So there can hardly be any confusion.'

They asked about other boots, and furiously, he fetched several pairs from the garage and the shed. Tattered, patched boots, plastic boots that had cracked in the cold, alternately Tomas's and his own, because they took the same size. The police made no comment, but simply took them and numbered them. He had to go upstairs for his hunting knives and they went with him, their eyes roaming, taking in the gun rack and the stand of old weapons. They took all his knives away with them.

He was forty minutes late getting to the surgery. Marta was not pleased. He didn't want to tell her the police had been. He thought he would go out and buy some buns for coffee in the afternoon to appease her. If he had time.

Sister Marta ran the surgery. Everyone knew she decided who would see the doctor before whom and who needed to go to emergency. When Birger had started his practice in Byvngen, he had been afraid of her.

At three o'clock, she came in and said he was to go to the police station, managing to make it sound as if she had decided that herself.

ke wasn't there. A total stranger was sitting at his desk, older than Vemdal, his greying hair brushed forward. A uniformed constable was in charge of the tape recorder at a side table.

Afterwards, Birger could remember nothing of the questioning except odd sentences. He didn't get home until after six. It had lasted almost three hours.

He ate nothing that evening. He was too tired to prepare anything and he was feeling sick. They had gone on and on about Dan Ulander. About the staying overnight. About the tent. They knew perfectly well Barbro had not camped out.

'But you thought she had, didn't you?'

He didn't know what he had thought. It was hardly possible to camp that high up at midsummer when the spring floods were still under way. He said he hadn't known and still didn't know who Dan Ulander was. The greying policeman said that wasn't true. They had met. And in a way he was right, since Ulander was one of those environmentalists.

Much had been made of the fact that Birger had gone to Blackwater, that he had been so near and yet had not sought out his wife. How the h.e.l.l could I have done that? Gone haring up the high mountain?

Hadn't he been worried about her? He remembered the question but not what he had answered. During the whole interrogation he was thinking that Barbro was in a bad situation. She had lied and said that Ulander was her son. Birger had tried to explain that it was only a joke. She was so much older than Ulander.

How did he know that?

Well, how did he? It showed. Or had she said it? It was that kind of joke . . . between people who . . .

Made love together?

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d. What a way to put it. Like a soap opera. f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Nor had the grey man taken it back. On the contrary he had asked painful, intrusive, offensive questions. And Birger had replied, all courage and authority apparently drained out of him. From exhaustion. From weariness after all the repet.i.tions and questions he had already heard before. Until the last round. He remembered that, for then it had been easy to answer.

Had he left the fis.h.i.+ng place by the river at any time during Midsummer Night?

No, he hadn't. He'd been with ke Vemdal all the time.

He woke in the middle of the night. The window panes were wet. He didn't give it a thought until later, after he had long since given up any attempt to go back to sleep rain was coming at last.

Barbro had said she didn't want to take anything from the house as long as Tomas was living there. He had a right to live in his environment. She didn't say his home. Perhaps she sounded artificial only when she was talking to Birger, or perhaps it wasn't the words but the metallic reproduction membranes vibrating, electrically charged materials. Since Midsummer, they had talked to each other only on the telephone.

He took on the responsibility of keeping Tomas's home as it had been before she left. Cleaning on Sat.u.r.day mornings. Buying flowers. He wouldn't go out and pick any; it took up so much time and would have looked just too pathetic.

Only white flowers were supposed to be in the living room, or green leaves and gra.s.ses in gla.s.s vases. He bought a white cyclamen, but it died. Overwatering, said the cleaner who came in nowadays. In the long run, he hadn't time to clean the house and Tomas always found some excuse to get out of having to help. Birger had to try to get the painting of the woodwork finished before the autumn rains came, and he realised he couldn't run the house on his own. Though he resisted. He had resisted all the time, but had never mentioned it, nor even given it much thought when Barbro had found a cleaner.

It was really so simple. He wanted to be left in peace. He wanted a place where he could be absolutely on his own. Not have any comments. No one looking in. No talk about what it looked like at the doctor's.

But he had to accept the cleaner, though the result was not what he had hoped for. She changed something as she chased round with the vacuum cleaner and various cloths. Perhaps the smell? She drenched the cloths in chemicals, presumably not the same things Barbro had used. And some materials didn't like water, even he realised that. He looked at the delicate, silky surfaces of birchwood and wondered whether they had dulled. He wanted to keep the beauty of the rooms, at least the rare, pale, almost transparent beauty of the living room. The gla.s.s birds in the window, their slight hovering movements when he walked across the floorboards, now a hundred and fifty years old but fresh and polished to a dull sheen.

He found out that gla.s.s was difficult to keep clean. Water-spotted Finnish littala vases with yellowish chalky rings on them appeared. The cleaner broke one of the gla.s.ses with spiral stems. She had put the pieces on a newspaper together with an explanation, improbably spelt. She must have realised they were expensive, because the next time they met she said, 'No one could drink out of them, anyhow.'

It did not escape him that she sounded downright hostile. The seven gla.s.ses were twisted like flowers reaching out for the light.

'No, you can't drink out of them,' was all he said, and he found he was afraid of her.

No one came to the house any longer. He didn't invite people home, nor did anyone drop in. He was pleased to be left in peace because he had become obsessed with the sandpapering and painting of the elaborate latticework he thought gave the big house its character.

Maybe he had thought someone would ring up and ask him out for a meal. But they were Barbro's friends, though he had never considered that before. He hadn't had time to acquire any of his own. None of them phoned to find out how he was. Had they taken sides? If so, why against him? He did feel some guilt, but they wouldn't know anything about that.

He was glad to be left in peace with his painting, but in the long run couldn't avoid noticing that his life was falling apart. He thought about flesh putrefying. Something greyish white. Salt ling fish soaking. An absurd image he had long had.

At least he cooked his meals. He had promised himself that and kept to it.

He saw nothing of his neighbours. They shared a subscription to the ostersund Post, but he hadn't time to go across and fetch it. Barbro had always done that. He read it at the surgery, so quite a time went by before it occurred to him that the neighbours had not brought it over. In fact, they never had done.

One evening he met Karl-ke outside the kiosk. Without any preliminaries, he asked Birger to do something about the linseed. At first Birger didn't know what he was talking about, but then he remembered that Barbro had rented a patch of land and paid their neighbour to plough and harrow it. It had been sown with linseed. Birger trudged off in the evening and found the patch. It was in full flower, a lovely blue, a sight to take your breath away, as he said to Karl-ke later. But neither Karl-ke nor Birgit seemed to understand that he meant it was beautiful. They were sitting at their kitchen table and they wanted him to take the linseed away. He said he didn't know what to do with it. It had been Barbro's project, jointly with the local community council, he thought.

'Perhaps you could cut it?' he said. 'Or plough it in.'

Karl-ke looked so peculiar, Birger added: 'I'll pay you, of course.'

For some reason that aroused Karl-ke's ire. Or was it only an excuse to be rid of some sour old rage he had long been acc.u.mulating?

'Pay! Do you think that settles the matter? Linseed's a b.l.o.o.d.y weed. You can't plough it in. It seeds itself and comes back again.'

'Well, I don't know,' said Birger vaguely.

'You should have thought of that before you sowed it.'

He wanted to say he hadn't been involved. I know nothing about linseed. He left Karl-ke and Birgit, nodding goodbye and pretending he was in a hurry. I must think this through, he thought. There's something odd. Hostile.

He remembered Barbro's outburst about the neighbours after her miscarriage. And then there was that time he had been in bed with flu. It had snowed heavily all January.

She had half killed herself shovelling it away. Karl-ke cleared the drive with the plough as usual. That had been agreed and he was paid to do it. But not once over those three weeks had he offered to help shovel by hand up to the steps. He joked with Barbro, teasing her, she said. 'Now you'll have to set about it. Now you know what it feels like, eh?'

Suppose she was right? She had been here at home and presumably at the receiving end of their hostility, their envy of a life they believed was easy because it entailed no physical labour. The security of Birger's appointment. His salary. It struck him that they must know how much he earned, for that was a comment he had heard before, but it had pa.s.sed him by. Now he remembered and reckoned they must have got it from the tax authorities. The sum had actually been correct.

'Some people have it all right,' Karl-ke's father had said as he was digging in the potato patch when Barbro happened to be pa.s.sing. At the time she had been working on the council tapestry, the bilberry picture against the Agent Orange defoliant (though that didn't show directly on the huge dewy blue berries in the tapestry), and the hours she was putting in were absurd.

They must know how he drove like a maniac round his vast district, available at all hours of the day and night, his mouth dry with lack of sleep and worry that he might have made a misjudgement. Sleeping with one eye open. Never counting on any free time or a proper holiday. And yet this: some people have it all right!

And he thought so himself. They had touched on a sore conscience with their clumsy joke, which was nothing more than an outburst of envy. They had touched on a conscience he did not want and had no reason to have.

He forgot the linseed. Having offered Karl-ke money to take it away, he put it out of his mind. He was free of it and had really never had anything to do with it at all.

He decided to ask some people to dinner because he realised he was drifting into something he would have jokingly diagnosed as paranoia in anyone else. He phoned Vemdal. He ought to have done that long ago. The situation was strange, not knowing anything and hearing nothing from the police since that thorough questioning. For a while he had been so paranoid, he had thought they suspected him of having stabbed through that tent by the Lobber in the belief that Barbro was in there with Ulander. Since then he had calmed down. So he phoned Vemdal and said he was going to get a fillet of venison out of the freezer.

'Thanks very much,' said ke, in a wooden voice. 'But I can't possibly at the moment.'

Birger had encouraged him to choose another day, but he didn't want to come.

Later, Birger was overcome with a self-pity that was so fierce, he couldn't even laugh at it. His thoughts were scattered, yet manic, circling round his neighbours, the cleaner (who had quit without explanation) and ke Vemdal. He thought the only d.a.m.ned person who hadn't changed was Marta, but she had never been particularly friendly. He dwelt on all the calls he had made on neighbours without charging a fee, the medicines he had given them from his own supplies. He longed intensely for Barbro. A trip to ostersund to see Frances would make no difference. That was another world. She wouldn't understand the weight of what was happening all around him and it would sound so trivial. Fetching the newspaper. An overgrown field of linseed. A cleaner who had quit.

He telephoned Barbro's mother as well as her brothers, then finally got hold of her. As he was speaking to her, he found he had difficulty breathing. Her voice was low and intense, a dark voice, always had been. Dark like her hair, eyes and the bluish-brown skin of her eyelids. Like the hollows that became visible deep down below when she parted her legs.

When the cramp in his chest let go, he started shuddering, sobbing. She called out over the phone, not realising he had started crying. He hardly realised it himself. He asked her to come home. Afterwards, he had no idea why he had done so nor why he had been weeping. But she came.

That turned into three unreal days which he remembered afterwards as if they had lasted only a few hours. The first evening he drank too much at dinner and particularly afterwards. He woke alone in front of the television on the upper landing, and the bedroom door was shut.

They had still said nothing about what had happened. She cleaned and he tried to explain what had befallen the indoor plants. In the evening, she wanted them to sit in the living room and he recognised at once almost everything she said from those desperate early spring days. She kept talking about people with whom she had things in common, people who no longer wanted to live on these terms.