Blackwater. Part 16

What terms? And why did she say people? His name was Ulander.

Birger helped himself to a whisky and she said quite sharply that he had to listen to her. That meant, you mustn't fall asleep this evening. He was confused, but would do his best. When she had been talking for about an hour, the telephone rang. It was a mother whose son had an ear infection. They had been to the surgery that afternoon and now the child was spitting out the penicillin. He told her what she should do, but two more calls were necessary before she had got the dose into him.

Barbro said he ought not to let people phone him at home in the evenings. He replied that he didn't, but they phoned all the same. Then she went upstairs to bed.

The next evening she was decisive. She wanted them to talk it all through. He felt slightly scared and said she wasn't to be angry if the phone went.

'It won't,' she said.

He didn't understand what she meant. He was careful not to pour himself any whisky and brewed coffee instead. She waited, strangely irritated, and didn't touch her coffee. Then she talked, and finally she cried. He felt totally helpless, not knowing what to say or do. His mind was quite blank.

She talked and wept until she got cramp. But he didn't know if she meant any of what she was saying about loneliness and silence and his indifference.

She said that even his impotence was due to his indifference. He was almost relieved that she thought he was impotent. She said, 'A kind of cold, sullen indifference which is really political.' She used words like 'bourgeois' and 'cynical' and he didn't think he had to take such nonsense. So he started telling her about his working days, the long journeys to patients, the road accidents, the suicides and cases of abuse and all kinds of things about which she already knew perfectly well. He couldn't understand why he was degrading himself with this litany. Without his knowing how it happened, they were upstairs. She was lying on the bathroom floor, slapping her own face with both hands.

He leant over the rigid, tense body and tried to lift her up. He could feel how cold she had become from lying on the floor. She resisted and went on hitting herself. He said he would give her something to calm her. The slapping and screaming ceased for a few seconds, as if an engine had stopped. In an almost normal voice, she said he had been trying to drug her for several years.

He went out of the bathroom, took his bedclothes and decided to sleep on the sofa in the living room. But it did not go quiet upstairs. He could hear her sobs and screams and persuaded himself he could also hear the blows against her cheeks. He went out.

It was cold and damp outside. His breathing began to return to normal as he took in the night air, but his head started to ache, a flashing ache just above his eyes. He sat down on the steps with his head in his hands. He heard a car, then steps on the gravel, but was unaware someone had come into the garden until he felt a hand on his arm.

It was Marta in a raincoat over her nightdress, asking why he hadn't answered the phone. There had been a road accident on the border. The ambulance had left ostersund a quarter of an hour ago and Ivar Jonsson was on his way towards it in his taxi with the injured man. But Birger must go to meet Ivar. He was afraid the man was bleeding to death, and he needed painkillers. She went in with him and already in the hall she heard the screams. She looked him straight in the eye and he didn't know what to say.

'You go,' she said. 'I'll see to this.'

When he got back towards morning, Marta was in the living room doing the Friday crossword in an old copy of the Post. She had brewed some coffee and found a blanket to put round her legs. She said Barbro was asleep and the telephones were plugged in again.

'I didn't know they'd been unplugged,' Birger said.

It was quite light now and he could clearly see the grey hairs in Marta's sandy, severely permed hair and the hairs on her upper lip. He thought he ought to say something about Barbro, but he had no need to. Marta said several people had had breakdowns.

'These interrogations are driving people crazy. They ought to stop now. They serve no purpose, anyhow. It'd be best if they dropped it. It all drags up far too much.'

He didn't know if she really meant it. He had found Marta to be a fairly stern moralist, but she always had her own opinion on things. She had medical intuition and a talent for organisation on which he had become dependent. After she had left, he found himself thinking about what she had said, as if it were worth testing out.

If only you knew it wouldn't happen again what would it be like then if they dropped it? Like a natural disaster. An accident. A landslide. Would it ever be explained even if they found whoever had wielded the knife?

He knew that killing often had little to do with the victim. And whoever had held that long, sharp hunting knife up there by the Lobber did it have anything to do with him any longer? With the killer?

His thoughts dispersed and he felt very tired. He took the blanket Marta had had over her legs and lay down on the sofa. He soon fell asleep and when he woke he heard Barbro in the kitchen.

His thoughts, his emotions were wide awake, clear and unmuddied. He wanted her to leave and not return. But he didn't want to say it.

He longed for his solitude and the dull, regular days, for his surgery and the treatment room and morose Marta. Painting when he got back home. The can of lager. The TV doc.u.mentary and the Goldberg Variations. The weather forecasts. I'll subscribe to the ostersund Post, he thought. Alone.

She left the same day, and they said little to each other before she drove off. She had made no comment on his having painted the veranda. He supposed she hadn't even noticed how far he had got.

You cannot live in the world without living off it.

The words rang a bell in her head that told her they had not originated there. So she went round asking. Petrus answered.

'If by "the world" you mean nature, then that's right.'

Annie said she didn't believe 'the world' meant 'nature' and she had only wanted to know where the line came from. He didn't know. He gave her a long look, clearly thinking she was being b.l.o.o.d.y-minded.

She didn't know whether she was being b.l.o.o.d.y-minded. She was feeling good. It was warm and the scents from the meadow flowers were sweet. The old leader ewe in the flock had become so trusting that she would put her nose into Annie's hand, standing still and spreading warmth over her palm. When she brought up the cud and started chewing, Annie felt a puff of her mild, saturated breath.

No, the world did not mean nature. Bert, who didn't know where the words came from, either, but thought he had heard them before, said at once: 'The world is society, do you mean?'

'I don't mean anything. I just wondered what it was.'

'Don't do that,' Dan said one evening, his voice low and pleading. She felt a stab of guilt.

Whatever it meant, the world was full of cuckoo calls. She saw the cuckoo. At first she thought it was a bird of prey landing in a low spruce. A rich smell of decay came from the forest, blending with the delicate acidity of the reddish cones forming on the tips of the spruce branches. She squatted down on her heels in the moss. In the quiet, the bird called and revealed its presence.

In the old days, people had thought the cuckoo became a hawk when the summer was over. Then he struck with his claws extended, getting his beak b.l.o.o.d.y. He was calling like a bell in the forest. She was so close she could see the slate-grey throat feathers trembling at each call. He was perched with his wings folded and black tail feathers outspread, spotted with white.

As soon as he had flown away again, she turned and went back towards the houses. The first time she had walked down from the pasture and followed the stream in among the lichen-festooned trees, she had suddenly been frightened right in the middle of a step. Not by any sound, but frightened from within, icily and inexorably warned by an instinct she had never before known existed within her. She immediately turned round and started running back. Once she reached the woodshed, she sat down by the wall so the children wouldn't see her and stayed there until her breathing had become calm and regular.

They never mentioned what had happened down by the river. Two police officers had walked all the way up from the Stromgren homestead and in Petrus and Brita's cottage questioned them all again. The children had been left outside in the hot sunshine.

Petrus said afterwards that the fact that they wanted to hear it all over again meant the investigation had ground to a halt. But he had patiently told them the same things he had said when they had been questioned at the homestead. Then they had never mentioned it again.

So it seemed as if it would be possible to live here without thinking about what had happened by the Lobber. What had happened had been an anomaly. Something extraordinary. As if the cuckoo really had become a hawk, just once.

According to Petrus, that one time didn't even count. Only the tabloid papers blew up the atypical. But Annie wondered whether anomaly might not be the origin of much of what was included in the ordinary scheme of things in nature, as Petrus called it. Mutations, for instance, she said when they stared at her. Reproached slightly for intellectualising her problems, she cried out, 'My problems!'

At that moment, Dan leant right over his down-at-heel Lapp shoes and she sensed he was struggling with laughter. Again she felt the mixture of cheerfulness and desire that made it almost impossible to sit still listening to the evening's rundown and criticism. As usual, Dan was sitting in the strong sunlight pouring in through the window, lighting up odd strands in his ash-blond hair. Now, when he was trying to hide his face, his long hair fell like a flood of light towards the floor. Annie had a wild yearning to take it into her mouth. Not later. Now. Now, at once.

But first she wrote something down. She took out her notebook as soon as they had got back to their room because she didn't want to forget it. The wildly and chaotically unpredictable which formed the basis of new creation in nature must also exist in the world. In civilisation. Was the world really the predictable progression of cultural and economic order now being described? Was it so unlike nature, which could at any time spew or spit out anomalies, wild ones? Was it not also in a sense nature?

The moment pa.s.sed. Dan gathered his hair up into a ponytail and fastened it with some elastic she had given him so that he wouldn't wear it out with ordinary rubber bands. She could sense his irritation like kinetic anxiety in the room, gla.s.s trembling, books falling down. Though not really, she said to herself, trying to be sober for Mia's sake, pretending not to notice the shifts of mood of which unfortunately she was all too often the cause.

It didn't worry her too much that her philosophising irritated him. It implied a certain amount of respect, whereas when Petrus held forth, Dan clearly found it difficult not to laugh. When they were on their own, they couldn't discuss it. All the same she didn't really know where she stood with Dan in relation to Petrus. Whatever happened, she was not going to stop thinking in this way, because it was new and gave her some pleasure. It was like swimming or running. Sometimes it occurred to her that this life was ideal: physical labour and reflection, a great deal of staring at clouds and mountainsides, at trees and birds. The smells of sheep and gra.s.s. Dan's warm skin. Water pure, murmuring, running water. Children's voices.

Before her inner eye she could see the burnt skin on a child's back, a girl the same age as Mia. The girl was running along a bombed road, but she was really moving in a pattern, a suffocating order scorching the map of its pattern into her back and arms. Was it like that? Was she part of an order? Annie asked Bert.

He had no objection to talking about it and he replied that she was.

'And in Cambodia? Is that a new order establishing itself there?'

Her voice had probably been shrill. She saw that in Bert's brown eyes doggie brown rather than hearing it herself. He replied that peasant war was grim. Their order was grim. But then a new order would emerge. A new world.

World? So he meant that there would be peasant wars all over the world and then a new world?

One morning, Ylja brought his tea and said she had to go up to the car and go and do some shopping. She had brought some extra sandwiches; it seemed she was taking it for granted he wouldn't go into the house while she was away. But as soon as she started rummaging for money in the centre compartment of her handbag, she would discover he had already done so. After she had left, he would have to make his way up to the road and try to get a lift, however bad his foot.

The fact that he had hit her had not changed the atmosphere between them. She seemed to be neither afraid nor particularly angry. More contemptuous than anything else. But hadn't she been that all the time?

He lay still for half an hour, then waited no longer. He had to get up to the road and start hitching before she came back.

He took nothing with him except the old staff, the money and his sweatshirt tied round his waist. The mosquitoes were troublesome because he had to go so slowly, he couldn't much put weight on his foot. The swelling had gone down and it didn't ache as long as he lay still. But his foot was useless, and he still had to get round the lake to fetch the eel. He wasn't going to let it starve to death in a rat cage.

He had planned to let it go, but once he had got hold of it, it didn't seem impossible to take the cage with him up to the road. The eel would be all right for a while out of the water. He tied the cage round his waist and made his way laboriously along the far too soft path. His stick kept sinking in, he lost his balance so that had to put his weight on his foot, and then it started to hurt. It took him an hour to get no further than back to the main path. In an hour or two, she would be on her way back down from the car again, so he would have to listen out for her on the path to give him time to hide before she saw him.

He went on for a few hundred metres. As he sank to his knees, he could still see the lake through the pines and small spruces in the marsh. He had to sit down although the ground was wet. The pain in his foot kept up a slow, steady throbbing. He thought it would pa.s.s after resting for a while, but it persisted. At first he could think of nothing except the pain. Gradually he realised he would never get up again. He grew cold from the wet ground and mosquitoes attacked his face and wrists. He felt like a corpse in a sacrificial place of slaughter. But still in pain.

He didn't hear her coming. Suddenly she was standing there and it was the only time he had ever seen her surprised. He knew his face was swollen and bitten all round his eyes. She might think he had been crying. Perhaps he had, too. The last hour, or hours, had blurred in his mind. He had kept looking at his watch but had regarded time as something static. The lichen swung stiffly in the drought and every breeze had freed his face of insects for a few seconds. The pain in his foot, though, had not stopped, but was throbbing like clockwork, in its own time.

She hauled him to his feet and he was forced to lean on her. When she saw the cage with the eel, she s.n.a.t.c.hed it off him and threw it into the lake. He shouted and swore. Somehow he must have made an impression on her, because she searched around for the line, now caught in the willows along the sh.o.r.e, and hauled the cage back in. But then she didn't do as he told her, but opened the hatch at the bottom and shook the eel out. Johan caught only a quick flash before the eel had disappeared into the deep, dark water. He considered her unworthy of all his regrets, all his shame over hitting her.

Neither of them said anything as they made their way back, he leaning heavily on her, sometimes thinking she was almost carrying him.

When they got to the grouse shed, he simply wanted to be left alone but he didn't dare say anything. He kept thinking about the money. She must have discovered it had gone now. But she said nothing. She rummaged in the rucksack and fished out a bottle of colourless liquid with no label on it. He thought she must be very much at home here. People trusted her, otherwise she could never have bought home-brew.

She poured out a drink each and undressed when they had finished it. He sat on the chair by the table, unwilling to look at her.

She took off only her jeans and pants, then got hold of his trousers. She got him to lift his rear and pulled. He did it so that things wouldn't be any sillier. But it was, all the same; she pulled down his trousers and he did nothing, said nothing at all. His foot ached, the pain sharp, again and again running up from his foot. He thought she ought to understand, but he simply couldn't say, Leave me alone, it hurts.

He remembered hitting her and wondered how that had happened. Now he didn't dare even open his mouth. He didn't really care what she said or thought of him. She had already shown that so many times, though he hadn't wanted to understand. He had thought he could play with her judgement of him just as he had played with those small reddish-brown lips in her p.u.s.s.y. But she looked at him just as she had done when she'd opened the car door to let him in. If she said something scornful or s.m.u.tty, something that hurt, he would start crying. That was because he was tired and in more pain than he had ever been in before.

Tears are only fluid, he thought. Nothing but secretion. Like snot, sperm, whatever. But they mustn't come now. They mustn't come pouring down his swollen cheeks, now covered with mosquito bites.

She said nothing when she found his p.r.i.c.k limp. She ran her forefinger rapidly back and forth, making it strike like a clapper. She seemed absent-minded or thoughtful. Then, with out warning, she leant over and took it in her mouth. It promptly betrayed him. All the blood in his body seemed to rush there and start throbbing. He could feel the pain in his foot, naked but distant.

She snorted, as if laughing to herself, then she clambered up on to him. He felt cold all the time as she did so. Her movements were measured, her face slightly stiff, not looking at him, her gaze somewhere on the hollow of his neck.

His body refused to obey. He felt desire when she moved, but then he happened to put his foot down hard to accept her rocking thrusts and the pain immediately shot up from his ankle. He could feel nothing except the stabbing and throbbing, his face soon covered with fine sweat which ran down his neck. In the end, he couldn't keep it up and of course she noticed and at once got up. She acted as if she had finished with him, though he was sure she hadn't got what she wanted.

She took her rucksack and left without saying anything more. He curled up on the bunk and tried to sleep away the pain in his foot, but it was difficult, he was so thirsty. She had left nothing behind but a newspaper and a new pair of socks, which she had tipped out from the top of the rucksack when looking for the bottle. He realised he would have to go out to drink from the river, but he didn't know how he was going to manage it.

Morning came with the rain. He heard it in his dreams, the sound of running water growing louder. When he woke, there was no rustle of rain on the roof, but a powerful sound of river water that told him something had happened up on the mountain. Clouds had opened, the rains had come.

He limped out to find the leaves and gra.s.s covered with a veil of moisture. The river was singing, and he splashed water over his face and let it pour down over him. He managed to scramble down to the sweet-smelling, mossy ground where the b.u.t.tercups were still flowering, and put his mouth to the water dancing and swirling round the skull-like stones. He drank and peed. His foot was stiff, but the pain didn't seem to have woken properly yet. When he got back, his jeans were wet at the bottom and so was his shirtfront. He hung them over the back of a chair and the top bunk and limped out again with the soap. He managed to find a small place on the riverbed free of stones, where he could put his feet, and made sure he was standing firmly in the racing water. Then he washed himself as he had never washed before. The chill of the water at first took his breath away, but he got used to it and started breathing less heavily. Rubbing with his hands, he lathered the soap time after time and washed himself all over, his crotch, under his s.c.r.o.t.u.m, in the crack at the back, his armpits, scrubbing his neck and arms. He squatted down and splashed water over his head, rubbing soap into his scalp and his face until it stung.

The ache in his foot had started up again, aggravated by his movements, but the icy water numbed it. He rubbed himself over once, then a second time, then started all over again. He was really cold now and thought it wonderful.

It was drizzling. He became more and more mobile, apart from his foot, which was thrust down into the sand as if made of china or wood, and he managed to get his head down so far that he could let the water in the deep pool race through his hair.

As he got up again, a squall came and shook the birches along the river. It was a cold, harsh wind blowing down from the mountain, followed by one squall after another, which shook and swirled the treetops. Then the rain came. He cautiously got out of the river and stood on the moss, the cold from the raindrops striking his skin first like needles, then blows, then more and more diffuse, in the end like a kind of heat. He stood with his mouth open letting the water run and run, for the wind had dropped now and the rain was falling straight down, heavy and strong. A curtain of rain was drawn through the trees, a cloak of water over all that was hot and mangled and ragged in the foliage above him, making the lichens swell and move and the moss raise its soft coat. He was clean now, as clean as a rinsed stone.

When she came with the tea basket, he was lying flat out on the bottom bunk, naked but with a towel over him. Not for a moment was he afraid of her. She was not to touch him. When she gave him tea with no milk, he remembered she had said he was spoilt. That had been true then.

She was looking grey and she was sober. She sat down at the table and started reading the paper she had left behind. He thought she looked old, bored, her complexion sallow.

Perhaps he would have to wait a day or two. But as soon as his foot was better, he would leave. He would accept any food she brought, but he had no intention of asking for anything. There was water in the river.

She sat there for a long time, reading without speaking to him. Then she suddenly closed the paper, folded it and put it into the basket.

'Now, Jukka, my boy,' she said. 'The time's come. You're going home now.'

She went off with the basket and was gone a couple of hours. He didn't know what she had meant. He had to wait for his foot to heal. Then he would leave whether she said anything or not.

When she returned she brought her rucksack, fully packed.

'Take this now.'

She gave him a small folded paper packet. He didn't know what it was, so she unfolded it for him. It held a white, grainy powder.

'It's like tablets,' she said. 'You hold the paper like this and let it run into your mouth. Then rinse it down with water.

When she saw him hesitating, she said: 'Do you think I'm going to poison you? It's only an ordinary hangover powder. For headaches. Painkiller, Johan. You won't be able to walk on that foot otherwise.'

He poured the powder into his mouth. It stuck between his teeth and to the inside of his cheeks, and he had to fill his mouth with water to loosen the grains.

'One more,' she said.

She had a whole bag of packets of powder. He hoped they were strong. For he wanted to go now. He would go.

At first he hopped along with the staff, a short distance at a time, then resting, leaning on it. Gradually he found he had to sit down when he rested. His armpit began to hurt when the stick dug in.

They said nothing to each other. She walked ahead, frequently turning back to look at him. When he began to lag too far behind, staggering every time he hopped forwards, she went back to him and he put his arm round her shoulders. They went on that way, her body close to his.

He could feel nothing, not even embarra.s.sment. All he could think was, we'll soon be there now. In an hour or two. Perhaps three. It rained now and again, but not heavily. Sometimes he sat resting with his eyes closed, listening to the rain rustling in the gra.s.s and trees.

The rests grew longer and longer. They still said nothing to each other. He didn't even wonder whether she was getting rid of him because of the money. He had thought of leaving it on the seat when he got out of the car, but then changed his mind. He didn't have to go with her in the car. He would keep the money and stop up by the bridge to get a lift.

His foot was hurting really badly when they got there, but he said nothing. He didn't want her to know. She couldn't know how he had injured himself. Or had she realised when she'd seen the open window?

'I'll be all right now,' he said, once they were there and he was sitting on the bridge railing. 'I'll soon get a lift.'

He was wet, and so was she, her hair darker, flat in wet strands. She had mascara below her eyes, a blurred blue-black semicircle.

'You're coming with me,' she said.

He had no desire to argue, but he still thought he would keep the money. He had to find somewhere, get a room and lie down with his throbbing, exploding ankle.

He fell asleep in the car. It was good to doze off and he didn't want to talk. Nor did she. But they had been walking for so long, the silence between them had begun to be unreal.

She woke him an hour later and told him to get out and phone home. The car was standing by a building that looked like a community centre in a village he didn't recognise. There was a phone box beside it.

'Phone home now,' she said. 'They'll have to come and fetch you.'

She gave him a handful of Norwegian coins and he took them, though he had no intention of telephoning.

'I'll go and buy some cigarettes,' she said. Her voice sounded dry, almost rasping. She helped him out of the car and once he was upright with his stick, she got back in and started the engine, then drove off. Quickly, he thought. He could see no store where she could buy anything.

He went into the telephone kiosk, but he didn't phone. He didn't want to ask Gudrun for help, so he just stood there propped against the shelf as he waited.