Blackwater. Part 10

Did she think he should have knocked? Had yet another displacement taken place without his noticing?

'This is my fault, too, Barbro,' he said.

And realised at once what a b.l.o.o.d.y stupid thing it had been to say.

'I mean, I know it's my fault.'

She stared at him, her eyes quite black; the pupils must have been enormously enlarged. Her mouth was tightly shut and colourless. He realised he couldn't tell her. What should he say? I was involved in a peculiar thing; it was at the Sulky, you know, that little hotel at the end of Rdhusgatan. It was the strangest thing that's ever happened to me, and then things turned out this way. That's why I seemed to sadden.

But he didn't say it, for he already knew she wouldn't ask what it was he had been through. She would just look. Her pupils were as large as crowberries now. He had to touch her instead and do it now, take her.

He really had thought he was going to do it. Then the moment when it was at least possible had gone. She twisted round, lay down with her back to him, her body quite still under the covers, her face invisible.

Then he did a h.e.l.l of a stupid thing. He took hold of her when it was wrong, although he knew it. He sat heavily down on the bed and put his hands on her shoulders, pulling her up round towards him. Her body twisted unnaturally because she neither cooperated nor resisted. He ran his lips over her hair and forehead, felt the knitted eyebrows, sought her mouth, and at that moment her arms shot out and she pushed him away, making a sound like a groan or a grunt.

At first he thought it was because he smelt of whisky; then came the true, profound humiliation. He knew he had been frightened of this all his life. In one way or another. He got up and went over to the door. She didn't move.

Talking c.r.a.p about the forest and the river and the guilt of the west. I have a double chin and sandals. That's all. Stomach, belly. That's it.

But she was in a bad way. Perhaps worse than she realised. He stood for a moment with his hand on the doorhandle, looking at the hump under the duvet. Not a strand of hair was visible. He felt calmer now. It was as if he were looking at a patient.

'Which one of you thought up that joke?' he said.

'What joke?'

'That he was to pretend to be your son?'

'I don't know. He did, probably.'

He was lying on the bed with the star pattern of the net curtain on his bare brown skin. There was sun in the room, body heat and moisture. The scent of him that used to come to her in her sleep rose from the bed, although nothing there was moving. A new pattern appeared to prevail, the light picking out other strands of hair among the ash blond. A movement could endanger the equilibrium in the room. Nor did it seem a movement as she slid down and the moist skin on his upper lip met her tongue, but more like a displacement of time, a slow movement of a wave bringing them together after weeks of cold and haste and hours of terror.

She whispered, 'Dan, Dan', thinking, I oughtn't to, anyhow not now, for the cottage is bright with sunlight and there are windows in all directions. Mia had spotted the Volkswagen Beetle when she woke. It had been driven down behind the barn on the opposite side of the road. They had rushed down from Aagot f.a.gerli's house to see if he had come.

But Mia had immediately gone out again. Perhaps it was the memory of that time. She ought not to have such memories, let alone be given any more. It's only natural, Dan said. Annie thought she could just see Mia's face up on the slope, hidden by birch scrub, then appearing again. But thinking was not possible now, sorting out what was good or not good. 'How did you find us?' she whispered, and he said it was the rucksack they had left on the steps. He had recognised it. The striped woollen rucksack from Crete.

'Why didn't you want to open the door?'

She said it into his ear at the very moment he entered her and she felt her nerves tingle. A tree of light branched all over her body. She forgot the question, but repeated it when he let her rest in a moment of calmer breathing, in restraint, while he whispered: 'Don't move, don't move.' And then: 'Open the door?'

For he knew nothing.

'Were you asleep? In Nirsbuan? It was you, wasn't it?'

She had no desire to talk much about it, not now anyway, and she couldn't bring herself to describe that terrible walk all over again. Nor did she need to, he said. Everything was all right now. Everything was just the way it should have been when she got off the bus. He said she enclosed him like a tight, soft, wet glove and so everything was all right now and she had no need to wonder. But she did think one thing was strange.

'But I knocked on the window.'

He knew nothing about that, but probably because he had been asleep, sound asleep.

'Why didn't you meet the bus? Did you think Mia and I were coming on the old Midsummer Eve?'

That was it. Nothing that had happened had anything to do with them. She had just happened to walk past. It was like being a witness to a train crash. It had nothing to do with you, but was simply terrible. They were free now.

She had been ensnared. A fish in a net. A thousand stupid things, people, regulations, papers and things, things, things. Like the car battery. In the winter it had to be taken out, carried indoors and left on the draining board, if it was more than ten degrees below zero and if the car was to start at a quarter to seven.

The child minder took tranquillisers because she needed to lose weight, but the truth was she couldn't even vacuum-clean without them. So on some days her face was like a pale moon with spots, and she had to be sent home. For Annie it was back to the car, the road, the black ice, lamplight. And at college. 'Sit down and draw now, Mia. I'll get you some biscuits.'

Eight lessons with biscuit crumbs and chalk dust and the smell of sweaters and exhalations, Mia wanting to pee and being bored, her chatter dispersing whatever concentration there had been in the cla.s.sroom, if any.

Dan had come to the college during the revolution. The revolt, anyhow. It had been slightly ridiculous, because he was so slim and his words so powerful. Beautiful little body, dark stubble. He never cared what he ate.

To revolt. That presumably really meant to roll round. Just as we rolled round. It hurt a little at first. 'Isn't it a little nice as well?' he whispered. Oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d, oh G.o.d.

At first in town, at an artist friend's of his. Those friends. Sometimes a three-week acquaintance: share everything, Kropotkin. But this one was the kind who still bought crisps. Cans of beer, bottles of turpentine, bags of potato crips, flattened tubes of paint, paint on cardboard plates, stained mattress. To revolt! With a pupil.

Grandmother Henny babysat in Karlbergsvagen, thinking Annie was on a course. Then Mia and she had begun to stay overnight in Malarvg, the second winter. That was the car battery. But Dan as well.

Out there, though, the atmosphere had turned grey around them. The revolt was sluggish in a county college of great brutes who wanted to be policemen and put rebels up against the wall. And little girls wanting to be nurses and dental receptionists and put on plasters and mend people as well as rebels.

In the corridor it always smelt of cake baking and hairspray. The pupils exchanged magazines and drank lager. Dan was a storm petrel but the storm was a long time coming. They were still washing their nylon shirts and hanging them up to dry.

She would never have broken free. Although three colleagues had ceased talking to her, she would never have had the energy, never dared (Mia!), if he hadn't come in one morning when Mia was asleep and crept under the covers and made love wonderfully and sweetly as if in a summer cottage.

She would never have broken free if Mia hadn't woken, seen them and run out, still quite silent but crying, and met Arlen, who taught social studies.

'Dan's hurting Mummy!'

Then it was the princ.i.p.al, his light office with its tapestry pictures and woodwork bowls.

'Your presence here is no longer a matter of course.'

Trembling chin. The ballpoint to hold on to. He was more terrified than she was. G.o.d, how she had longed for a reprimand, a few gobs of words, real language! These academics on the staff, councillors and female volunteers.

Dan was like a dog shaking itself, not even wet. But my life.

It was the test. He must realise that.

Mia didn't want to come. That was already quite clear when they started driving up. She curled herself up into a ball in the back, put her hands over her face and said something inaudible in a sharp little voice. Anna asked Dan to stop.

'Want to go back home.'

Annie tried to explain, but she wouldn't listen.

'Want to go home. Want to go home.'

She was speaking doggedly behind her hands. Annie got out and went to sit in the back with her.

'We're going up to Starhill now. We're not going to Nirsbuan at all. And we can take another road to Starhill. We won't be going past where we walked before. We're going to live up there. There are other children there.'

Dan had started driving again while Annie was talking. Mia threw herself backwards, arching her back and screaming.

'Stop, Dan!' said Annie.

But he drove on, very slowly along the b.u.mpy timber track up towards Bjornstubacken. When they stopped at a loading bay by the road, she tried to take Mia in her arms, but the girl had grown big over the last year and she was strong when she resisted. Dan had got out of the car and was standing watching them. He's thinking I'll give up now. He d.a.m.ned well looks as if this is just what he expected.

Anger flared up and died away just as quickly. She grew angry when she was under pressure and could say idiotic things. But she had never before felt under pressure like this with Dan. Mia was sobbing now, though she sounded slightly calmer. Outside, Dan was tying up the rucksack, looking rather absent, and she thought he was pale. The police questioning had presumably been more unpleasant than he had let on.

'Do you still want to?' he had asked her when they left. She had simply nodded.

'You're not afraid?'

It had nothing to do with them. It was something that had happened during Midsummer drunkenness tourists, a foreigner. It was horrible, but it was over.

'We're a whole gang up there,' he said. 'No one is alone.'

Packing up their things and paying Aagot f.a.gerli had gone quickly. Aagot had asked about Dan. They could have coffee before they left. She seemed to want to see him. But Annie said no thank you and that they were in a hurry.

'Hurry' was a word from the old days, but when it slipped out of her she thought it all right. At least it was something people understood. She felt the same powerful relief as she had the first time she had left the village. But Dan set off towards the store.

'I've got to make a phone call.'

His words seemed to remain hanging in the car. She had thought they had left all that behind. He sounded as if he were tied up, fully booked. Perhaps he was phoning home? But where, in that case? He had said he no longer had anything to do with his parents.

But there had been a murder. She herself had phoned her parents from Aagot f.a.gerli's house and told them everything was all right.

He spoke earnestly for a long time. She could see him through the gla.s.s and it hurt inside, the nerves in her stomach cutting like knives. It hurt so much she realised with a kind of astonishment that she was jealous. Suspicious. I am destroyed. Perhaps I can never live any other life but this complicated one.

He said nothing about the phone call when he came back. Perhaps he hadn't time. The police car slid out from the s.p.a.ce behind the petrol pumps the moment they set off up towards the road to the homestead and the mountain. It must have been there all the time, and now it pa.s.sed them and flagged them down before they had got out of the village.

She thought it unpleasant, but Dan was openly scornful. He told them that the faded red VW had been outside Aagot f.a.gerli's barn since early that morning.

'You could have come in at any time,' he said.

They took no notice of what he said, only asked him to go with them to the camping site where they had an incident room. Annie had to have coffee with the old Norwegian woman after all, afterwards roaming round the steep slope with Mia until he came back two hours later. By then they were hungry and she ought to have gone back to the cottage to fix something, at least for Mia. But she thought it would take so. long to explain to the old woman why they had come back. And to go shopping for food, then clean up the cottage again after they had eaten. Anyway, Dan had some fruit in the car.

He had two ways of being. He was mostly turned on and energetic, a field of force surrounded him and he inspired others. When he moved round a room and spoke, everyone looked at him. She had thought of intellectual and s.e.xual energy when she had seen him for the first time, reckoning it was zest for life.

But it was more a gathering of strength, willpower, defying boredom and loss of energy. Dancing. Keeping himself visible.

His other way of being always started with pallor, his lips turning thin, his voice slightly irritable as he retreated into himself, and he seemed to turn grey. She wondered whether that was coming on now. He walked round the car without looking at them. In a quiet voice, she tried to explain to Mia that they were going to walk a totally different way. They weren't going to wade across the river. There was a small bridge higher up and then an easy path through the forest all the way to Starhill.

'All our things will go there later.'

'How? Cars can't go that way.'

Yes, how? They would presumably have to be carried up.

'I don't know,' said Annie. 'But we'll have all our things there.'

When they reached the bridge late in the afternoon, she saw it was quite big and the path was broad with tractor tracks along it. Dan said the bridge was new and they were making a road for timber trucks, so presumably they were going to start felling soon. The commune felt threatened, but still didn't really know what was going on or how close to Starhill the felling would come.

'Petrus doesn't want us to use the bridge.'

'Because it belongs to the Enemy?'

But he seemed to dislike her joking about it.

It took them a long time to get up there. Usually it took about an hour, Dan said, but they had heavy rucksacks with them and often had to stop to let Mia rest. The much used path ran steadily upwards, the bark on spruce roots worn away by feet, paws and hoofs. Occasionally they saw a deep, clear hoofprint where the ground was dark and muddy. Annie knew nothing about tracks, but such large cows didn't exist, so she told Mia elk had been there, leaving their round and oval spheres of droppings in big heaps.

They came to a plateau and Mia had to rest again. Annie was worried Dan might think they were being too slow. But he let Mia look through his binoculars and talked encouragingly to her. The spruces were spa.r.s.er now and there were no pines to be seen. Birches had taken over with their black banners of lichen and pale-green clouds of foliage.

Dan whistled under his breath as he walked. Annie realised it was quite unconscious, a toneless whistling through scarcely pursed lips. She could distinguish two tunes. One was a popular song from the fifties of which she remembered only the chorus: 'We'll go far we'll be fine in the back here in the car.'

The other was a song of yearning. They had been walking for over an hour when she realised what it was: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Film music. She couldn't connect either of the tunes with Dan. Of course, that was because she knew nothing about his previous life. Things hadn't been good for him. That was all he had said. Had they been so poor? Were there any really poor people nowadays? Her own background never felt so pet.i.tbourgeois as when she thought about his past. She didn't even know how to ask the questions.

Her head was aching and she reckoned it must have something to do with the pressure of the rucksack straps on her shoulders. After a time she couldn't think about anything else. She had thought they would talk to each other, but they did so only at the beginning, then fell into a kind of vacant plodding and got out of breath on the uphill stretches. Her headache settled above one eye, where it kept exploding and flickering. As soon as the going was more or less level or went downhill, Dan started whistling again. She wished he would stop, but was reluctant to say anything. In the end she began to lag behind with Mia in order not to have to hear that hissing little whistling, just out of tune.

After two hours, the birches started thinning out. They walked down into a hollow where the path turned darkly muddy, thick clumps of globeflowers growing in the gra.s.s, the buds still tight, hard and green, only faintly turning yellow. She remembered they had been right out at Nirsbuan and realised that here they must be very high up, almost in another season. She also saw the gra.s.s was grazed where the slopes rose after the hollow. When they reached the first hilltop, Starhill became visible.

A handful of cottages, red and grey. One with a stone base. The nearest cottage was wooden, the colour of the timbers alternating, gleaming in grey, silver and grey-green. Beyond it were red-painted houses, the paintwork eroded by the wind. They look natural, she thought. Sensible.

It was all washed over by a chilly mountain breeze, carrying neither smells nor warmth. Tasteless and odourless, the breeze washed over their faces as if they were stones or gra.s.sy slopes, the sound of birds rising and falling from the birchwoods.

A stony mountain rose behind the pasture, a perpendicular precipice down towards the belt of birches collapsed into a rectangular pattern. The meaningless straight lines and angles frightened her. In the other direction, the pasture land was encircled by blue-black mountains with irregular white patches, unmoving and distant to the north, west and south. The ravine of the river Lobber ran in a wide curve round the foot of the mountain, separating the forested hillside and pastureland from the mountain. But it was really their height that made them so distant.

They all had different characteristics. Furthest north stood a long sloping mountain that appeared to have been halved like a loaf of bread, the perpendicular sliced surface gleaming blue. It looked unreal, a piece of scenery. Diagonally behind it rose another which was white and gleaming with ice. It resembled the top of a pyramid and must have been very high and far away.

Fallen, shattered shapes, inhuman proportions. This chaos of stone appeared to have been recently petrified in the wind.

She heard a low grunting sound and when she turned to look at the pastureland down below the mountainside, she saw a flock of ewes with their lambs. They were watching, standing quite still, their silvery heads and long curved noses raised and turned towards the path. Their ears were pink, the sun coming through them. She felt they were waiting for one of them to move or say something. Mia looked scared. Then Annie took a step towards them and without her knowing where they came from, a few words appeared, a childish rigmarole.

'Oh, little sheep, oh, little sheep, we won't harm your babies . . . such lovely babies, such lovely babies you have, you little sheep . . .'

Mia giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. The ewes resumed grazing. Of course they hadn't recognised her voice, but she hadn't frightened them.

A dog started barking. She should have known how quiet it was up there from the whispering of the gra.s.s. She could hear the tinkling of the waterfall in the stream far away, but she first heard the silence when the barking of the dog broke out and sounds came from the mountain. They were dull, regular and of frightening strength. At first she couldn't connect them with the figure silently but rhythmically raising and lowering an axe at the corner of one of the houses. Then she managed to make out the dry real sound of the axe blade and the echo from the perpendicular mountainside.

She still knew nothing and was accepting everything as if it were reality. The primaeval wielding of the axe. The security of the rhythmical sounds of a blade striking wood. The eternal barking of a dog.

They came closer and she realised that the long cloven beard of the axe wielder was not white round his mouth but yellow, his eyes not faded and watery, and he was not ancient as he had first appeared to be. Petrus. She had the impression that the wood chopping had been staged the moment Dan, she and Mia had come into sight from the cottage nearest to the path. The dog must have come out at the same time as the man. Otherwise it would have started barking much earlier.

Then Brita appeared in her long home-woven skirt and an ap.r.o.n raised by her stomach. She was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her plait lay curled into a knot at the nape of her neck. The plaits of the two girls were hanging down in front. Annie could see the plaits were glossy, but only because they were greasy, lying close to their heads and divided into strands. Confused, she felt a sense of disgust. Mia had stiffened.

Children are like strange dogs. Alert almost to the point of terror. So she didn't hear or see much more than Mia and the strange children as they were taken into the timbered cottage. She was also more tired than she cared to show and she knew Mia was very hungry.

Porridge, it was. Brita ladled it out of a saucepan on the iron stove. Porridge with husks and seeds and small hard bits in it. Petrus thoroughly a.n.a.lysed it in his melodious voice, names of gra.s.ses and herbs, kinds of seed, fruits and nuts slowly enumerated and repeated. Mia pushed her bowl away so that the milk slopped.

'It smells nasty,' she said. 'Like inside shoes.'