Blackwater. Part 21

But why not? She couldn't understand, and she held him off, grabbing his upper arms and forcing him up so that she could see his face.

'You're a teacher so of course you would have gone up and asked what had happened and put yourself at the disposal of the authorities.'

His mockery was now friendly. She remembered the interrogation down in the Stromgrens' kitchen and thought he was mistaken about her. But not entirely.

They had not wanted to get involved. He said Petrus and Brita were worried about the girls. If the Starhill commune were mentioned in the papers because they had been questioned by the police, that wouldn't be good for the custody dispute. Nor was it good that people had died close to Starhill, and it would be best not to know anything whatsoever about what had happened.

One of them had had the idea of going down to Roback and pretending they had been there all night. The children had slept there, hadn't they? It would seem credible that the adults had also done so. But Dan and Barbro had to go on to Bjornstubacken because the VW Beetle was up there. Barbro couldn't have been in Roback. She didn't know Yvonne and had no good reason to be there.

So Dan and Barbro had set off eastwards where the path divided and had continued down to the bridge and Bjornstubacken. The others had left the path and gone down towards the Kloppen. It had been difficult for onis and Brita to walk on unbeaten tracks, but then they had found the path along the lake and followed it to the outlet at the Roback and had turned up at Yvonne's. She had been in complete agreement that they had done the right thing.

His p.e.n.i.s was between her thighs, trying to nudge its way in. She felt it as a round head, puppylike, with an innocent forehead. She had no desire to reject his playfulness, nor could she. But it was strange that while he moved inside her, she was thinking about that light night when she had been drifting about in the marshlands looking for the paths.

He was not that big, but swelled inside her and her own desire also swelled for every soft thrust, her walls tightening and loosening again, a.s.suaging the memory of her terror, diffusing it, melting it down into a blurred recollection of confusion.

If he had asked why she had walked across unfamiliar and treacherous ground instead of trying to find somewhere to stay in the village, she would not have had an answer. She had answered in a muddled way when the police had asked her, almost lied, in any case kept some things quiet.

We didn't want to expose our confusion, she thought, not even to each other, though we ought to have. He had not told the truth about Midsummer Eve because he was ashamed. He hadn't gone to Nirsbuan expecting me to go there at all. He thought I was staying in Roback with Yvonne.

He had had a guilty conscience because he had done nothing about the cottage. We were to live there, he had promised me that. So he went there to see if he could do something about it in a hurry.

Dan always has so many irons in the fire. He promises too much. Dan, so delicious, so intensely warm and delicious, moving inside me, slowly, who is inside me and as confused and ashamed as I am.

'It doesn't matter any longer about Nirsbuan,' she whispered. 'I wouldn't want to live there, anyhow. Not now after what's happened. It's better here with the others.'

'Are you frightened?'

'Sometimes.'

He tickled her with his tongue in the cleft in her upper lip. It was a game she recognised. In the end he used to get her to put her legs round his back and make a violent movement towards him. But her desire was splintered, coming and going.

'Don't think, don't think,' he whispered.

'Just one thing. When you were at Nirsbuan. I can't understand how you got into the cottage?'

'Not difficult. The Brandbergs always hang the key under the eaves.'

Later, when summer was on its way out and the haymaking over, Mia wanted to sleep in the hay. They took blankets and pillows up with them to the loft in the barn. Annie herself had helped fill it with the fine meadow hay from the pastureland. They lay enjoying the scents, which might have been mint, white clover and maiden pinks. The bright yellow of the b.u.t.tercups faded in the darkness and the columbines grew brittle. She and Lotta and Mia rustled and giggled beside each other. Mia didn't want to go back to bed that night, but slept in the hay. As you and Dan did, she said.

But Annie hadn't slept that night when it was raining, though she said nothing about it now, just fell in with Mia. Not until towards four in the morning did Mia start complaining of the cold. Annie carried her down and put her into her own bed, and Lotta followed with the blankets and pillows and the Moomin book, which they hadn't been able to read because it had been too dark up in the loft. The summer was drawing to an end and it was no longer so brilliantly light at night.

No, she hadn't slept at all that night with Dan, although they had stayed there until three in the morning. He had slept, his breathing calm as he lay curled up in the curve her body formed round his back. She had hardly dared move for fear of waking him.

She had lain there seeing Nirsbuan before her eyes. The door of the cottage. The metal bar and the padlock that no one had unlocked. There was no other way of remembering it. That was what it had been like.

The man looked like a satyr the goatee, the moist red lower lip. Was that why the villagers said he kept a harem?

A herd of goats had faced Birger on his way up. He hadn't dared turn his back on the big billy goat and had had to make grotesque twists and turns to keep it ahead of him. The billy goat was a s.h.a.ggy grey and yellow, his horns coa.r.s.e and curved, a dark-spotted s.c.r.o.t.u.m weighing at least a kilo dangling between his hind legs. The goats were inquisitive, staring fixedly at him, pressing round him on the path so he didn't dare sit down to rest. Once up there, he was exhausted, a st.i.tch in his side and blisters here and there.

Marta had told him they had already had a visit from the social services and he wondered who had had the energy to get up there. Marta had shown him the large headline in the local paper: FIRST CHILD BORN AT STARHILL.

Below it had been a photo of the parents. The man with the cloven beard was holding the child. He was wearing a kind of bobble hat. The woman sat beside him on a porch entwined with hops. Two women, a small boy and a dog were sitting in the gra.s.s below the steps. Annie Raft could not be seen in the photo. Round the corner of the house peered a face which he thought was a boy's. Then he realised it was the little girl he had examined at the Stromgrens'. She had had her hair cut and he thought she looked thin.

The memory of the little face he had seen at Oriana and Henry's came back to him. The greyish light of a summer's night in the room had been deceptive and he'd thought she had been abused, but then he'd seen the swellings were caused by insect bites. Looking at the photo, he was uncertain. The small face was blurred, thin, resolute. How was she? Did she get enough to eat up there?

The social worker had told them the baby was healthy. But had they looked at the girl? Marta didn't know.

The goat-man had no cap on now. He received Birger with a friendliness that made him ashamed of having acquired papers from the company to say he was allowed to fish in the two small lakes below Starhill and spend the night at the club cottage. He had been afraid they would be suspicious if he came for no particular reason. He remembered Annie Raft, her remoteness during that first questioning.

The Starhill crofter really had four womenfolk, which must have been what the villagers meant. No man put in an appearance and the diabetic man and his woman seemed to have gone.

They had come to his surgery a week or two earlier, the man pale and complaining of headaches. His skin was cold and moist and he had begun to get small sores on his feet that refused to heal.

The woman had sat in the waiting room in her long woollen skirt, a kerchief on her head pulled right down over her forehead, hiding her hair. She had said nothing and had scarcely even looked up from her knitting, but she had spread a strange atmosphere in the room. Eight people were waiting and not one of them said a word, nor did they touch any of the tattered magazines.

Birger fetched her in to ask about their diet and way of life at Starhill and she told him that the man had had severe insulin troubles. One day during haymaking he had almost gone into an insulin coma. He seemed ashamed to mention it himself. She had had the presence of mind to put out a bowl of the soft goat's cheese for him and he had gobbled down the lot and recovered. Otherwise they ate mostly potatoes and goat's meat, milk and cheese, just the things he ought to be very careful about. Besides, he was supposed to take light and regular exercise, not do heavy physical labour. Birger advised him to move back to Nynashamn, his original home town.

'And when it comes to hash and that sort of thing,' he had said, 'you must realise yourselves that it's just not on in this situation.'

Thank heavens they hadn't got angry. They were probably too tired. She just said quietly that they had nothing to do with that kind of thing that was those people down in Roback.

He knew Yvonne in Roback had been caught when she had crossed the border with a stash of marijuana. She and her two lodgers, a couple of strays considerably older than she, had been charged. She maintained that they had only been on their way to a party and she hadn't sold anything. The court had been inclined to believe her. For one thing, they were friendly with some Norwegian petty rogues in a village just over the border, and for another, the marijuana was of very poor quality, according to the police. In fact, hardly saleable.

The police had found hemp plants flourishing in a mountain crevice below Starhill when they searched the terrain after the murders, by the Lobber. Then the customs people had begun checking on Yvonne whenever she crossed the border in her old Volkswagen bus. She maintained the commune had nothing to do with growing it, but the police suspected one of the men up there. Birger didn't believe it was the diabetic. He and his woman had seemed much too wretched. Their faces remained with him, hers thin and sunburnt, his pale and flabby. Marta had arranged a draught in the surgery after they had gone, to rid it of the strong smell of goat they had brought with them.

He couldn't smell it up here. One of the women was conspicuously beautiful, with very fair hair but dark eyebrows and eyelashes, dark-blue eyes and a marked cupid's bow. She was severely overweight and must have found it as difficult as he had getting up to Starhill.

That might be a solution for me, he thought. A plump woman. Swayingly fat. A meeting between two lots of generous flesh, our angular cores embedded. She must have dark hair down there. And those beautiful eyes and thick eyelashes, her mouth, the contours of her upper lip, which seemed all the clearer and finer because the rest of her face had flowed out into the fat. b.u.t.tocks fitting tightly together, huge thighs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s weighed down and swinging towards the midpoint of the earth.

The man with the divided beard was talking eagerly about cheese mould. The billy goat is in me, Birger thought. The satyr. This man's only interested in goat's cheese.

He knew people as far away as Byvngen were divided into two camps, one considering the commune should be eradicated like vermin, and the other thinking they ought to be allowed to stay. They were putting a derelict place in order and bringing some life into the area, letting animals into the forest, which the company could well have done, mowing the pasture where the wild Silvatic.u.m geranium and the poisonous monkshood were taking over and the scrub creeping in.

Without thinking about it, he had joined the tolerant camp. He was used to doing that with Barbro. He reckoned they could stay as long as they didn't neglect the children.

Up here, he couldn't take a stand, his att.i.tude vacillating. He was angry when he saw the ramshackle clubhouse and wondered whether they knew it wasn't insulated. How would they cope with the winter? When the fat woman called Marianne leant over and poured herb tea into his mug, he was uneasy. She didn't smell of goat, but of milk and cotton fabric and warm skin. The divide between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s was deep and narrow. In confusion, he raised his eyes and looked out over the pastureland. In three directions he could see the mountain ridges, the dark-blue precipices, the patchy, still snow-covered peaks which looked like grouse b.r.e.a.s.t.s in the thaw, the shifting green and blue slopes of marshland down towards the forest. The sky was blue-white, sizzling in the hot air above the pasture.

He wondered what it would be like to live alone here with four women and have their quiet voices and gentle movements around him all day. The murmur of the stream and the wet swaying tussocks in the marsh down towards the lakes. The feel of water.

He couldn't think of it in any other way: the feel of water running through the ground, flowing and trickling over it. The meadowsweet had firm whitish-pink buds in their panicles and he could smell that they were just beginning to come out. Filipendula ulmaria. Soon they would sweep sweetly over the fields. At night when he was out on call, he sometimes had to drive off the road and sleep for a while. When he woke and got out to relieve himself, that scent lay floating like bands of something ambiguous and intoxicating in the smell of the marsh. Elks would stand there munching in the mist, half-asleep perhaps in the fragrance. You lived in it here and walked every day on the oozing ground, inhaling the smell of the marsh and seeing it ferment and brew as the clouds of morning mist swirled above it.

That angular Annie Raft had become calmer here. She had also had her hair cut short and was wearing a pair of incredibly ragged, faded jeans instead of that long skirt. Her trousers and extremely short hair made her look modern among the others. She kept out of the way quite a lot, but didn't seem to have any objection to his talking to the little girl.

Mia told him that she didn't drink goat's milk, but her mother had had dried milk brought up for her. And Party Puffs. Birger didn't quite know what they were, but they sounded sweet. He was told that her mother had had her hair and her own cut short so that it was easier to wash. He felt relieved. Mia dragged kid goats round and showed him a dead shrew her kitten had caught. She was thin, but looked quite healthy and was sociable.

He had quailed slightly at asking the mother whether she would like him to prescribe vitamins for Mia and the boy who belonged to the beautiful Marianne, but his suggestion was not taken ungraciously.

He went fishing in the evening and as he came out of the birch woods, he could see the long marshlands sloping down towards the lakes. The lakes were on different levels and from this high point just north of Starhill, he could see two of them like steps of water, reflecting the sky and taking their light from it, but the dark-yellow, metallic shade seemed to come from their own depths. The sh.o.r.es were already dark the light receding rapidly now. He could see the frost-scorched sedge marshes shifting in red and brown and a great many shades of yellow, their scent so unique and bound to those colours that the open channels in the marsh really seemed to be fermenting and steaming in reddish and golden brown. On the nearest marsh were a few poles from some long-ago haymaking.

Even right up here, he thought. Wherever they could harvest the meagre blades of gra.s.s. Everywhere inland further north. The realm of the sedge.

Without the sedge, the inland areas would never have been settled. There were almost a hundred species and they used to be called alpine sedge, fingered sedge, bird's-foot sedge and many more. Lapp sedge. Quaking-gra.s.s sedge. Now it wasn't called anything.

The marshes had sunk into oblivion. The water in the pools glinted against the sky, and the sky saw nothing. The pines twisted, even when dead providing a silvery-grey but hardly ever read sign for storm. The marshes and their dark poles were now lying in the shadow of time. The poles had once been racks for drying the hay and had now slowly fallen apart, just as the barns had long since fallen apart, decrepit and greenish-grey where lichens grew over them. The water kept bubbling under the ground, seeping through it and flowing over it in the spring light, dissolving everything done by human beings.

He wondered again what it would be like to live there. To live right out on the edge of the shadow that lay over the land, over the country villages and small hamlets, over everything that was slowly falling apart. To live right out in complete oblivion, going through its motions and rhythms. Did they even know what they were doing?

As long as he went on walking, the insects kept away, but once he got down to the first pool and stopped, he had to set fire to some bark and sticks in a herring pail he had brought with him, putting gra.s.s on top and standing in the thick smoke as he started baiting his line.

He had a telescopic rod that reached a long way out, but the salmon trout nonetheless kept guardedly just beyond his reach, making circles like silver nooses in the turgid, gleaming water. The bunched stars of bogbean could be seen by the sh.o.r.es, their pinkish petals, hairy inside, as yet untouched by brown shadow. Here it was full summer, although the frost had already scorched off the tops of the gra.s.ses out on the marshland several times. But he noticed the absence of birdsong and thought how quickly the lightest weeks had gone, and that he had mostly been miserable, thinking the light painful and the birds raucous in the mornings as he had lain awake thinking about Barbro.

The salmon trout were now leaping high up over the water out there, but he couldn't reach them. Perhaps he had frightened them from the edge with the heavy tramp of his boots on the swaying ground. Or cast a dark shadow over their crystal-clear s.p.a.ce. He decided to try the other pool, and made his way down there as quietly as he could, stopping two or three metres away from the sh.o.r.e. When he cast, the line landed right by the bank, which cut sharply down in the black marsh soil. He had a very light hook, neither float nor sinker on the line, and he could feel the worm wriggling. A bird of prey flew like an arrow straight past him above the darkening surface of the water, nothing but a black silhouette, front-heavy. An owl?

At that moment he got a bite. The line straightened and sang, the fish pulling on it and swimming in wild, wide curves. When he hauled it in, it danced down into the crowberry scrub, a large, almost black salmon trout, glimmering dully as if it had oxidised silver rivets in its neck. He had to get out his gla.s.ses. Fish lice. A cunning old devil with lice in its coat.

He was suddenly exhausted and started walking back as soon as he had gutted it, plodding along without thinking. Night birds cut through his field of vision. The tussocks were glowing. Millions of white tufts floated in the cold layer of air above the tops of the sedge gra.s.s. Thin sedge, scorched by the frost, washed out. The summer would soon be over, its frenzy and abundance.

He had been allocated a sleeping place in the room where the diabetic and his family had lived. Someone had put in a gla.s.s of small pale harebells and spa.r.s.e lesser st.i.tchwort. There was a pillowcase on the pillow and a blanket over the mattress. He hoped the beautiful woman had been the one to pull on the pillowcase and put the flowers on the chair by his bed.

It wasn't that late, but he was exhausted, mostly from the long walk up to Starhill. As he closed his eyes, he longed for the radio. A few minutes later he heard one from the other side of the wall. That must be Annie Raft listening to the weather forecast. Every word penetrated through the boarded wall next to him. He tensed in case she would switch it off once the mountain district of southern Norrland had gone. But she didn't. She left it on throughout the shipping forecast, and he could follow the lighthouses from the Atlantic all the way up into the Gulf of Bothnia. Not until the journey was complete did she switch off. He lay there in the silence, wondering whether that had been sheer chance. Or did she always follow them from Oxoy all the way up to Farstugrunden and Kemi just as he did himself?

No one mentioned the events of Midsummer night. On the way up, he had crossed the ford without looking at the place where the tent had been, with no particular feeling of unease. But he wanted to return while it was still daylight.

First he bought some cheese from Petrus Elia.s.son. It was yellowish-white, a very mild goat's cheese, and when Petrus realised that he valued mature cheese, he went to fetch two small brown ones wrapped in damp linen. He unwrapped them with greater ceremony than he had shown for the wrinkled little body of his infant. Brita Wigert (not yet his wife, Birger realised) stayed in the background, the babe in her arms. He saw that she was in the symbiotic state and it hurt him to look at her, remembering Barbro with Tomas held to her in the same way. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had become blue-veined, the skin shimmering, thin and extended. Her areolae had flowed out, their dark-brown colour muted to pinkish brown. She had nearly always had her lips against the child's scalp when she had him in her arms. She said he smelt of almonds there.

The child. Tomas. Tomas with his gruff voice and downy chin. Puppylike and kind. Could still come nudging and nuzzling when he was about to go to bed at night, as if wanting to be cuddled. Birger used to nudge him back or pat him on the back. Couldn't she have given him another year? Why had she suddenly been unable to stand it? And where was Ulander?

He stared at the cheeses. Petrus Elia.s.son cut a piece out of the brownest, the spotted, scabby crust like the underside of an old boat. It was almost brown inside, yellowish and creamy like the innards of a large insect. They ate, looking each other straight in the eye. Birger nodded several times.

'I don't sell that,' said Petrus. 'No doubt you understand why. It's priceless. But this isn't far behind. You can buy half of it. And I'll throw in a bit of the soft cheese. The hunting will be starting soon and I suppose you'd like a little in the venison ca.s.serole.'

They were kind, but they were also unhappy. Brita was not only bound to the child in that impenetrable state of milk and the smell of almonds. She was also bound by sorrow for her girls, who had gone to their father. They wouldn't be allowed to come back until next summer. He wondered why she had chosen Petrus. But perhaps she hadn't chosen at all? She had had the child and she couldn't very well make the trip down to some parsonage in Blekinge with another man's child and demand that everything should be as before.

Annie Raft had said that she lived with Dan Ulander. Where was he now? She was going to teach the commune children, but now there were no schoolchildren left. Marianne ohnberg's boy didn't look anywhere near school age.

They offered Birger porridge and he said he would like the yellow milk separately in a mug. Mia watched him and the gla.s.s, noticing that he didn't drink any. He winked at her. Annie Raft said little when the others were talking, but when she heard he had come down from the Stromgren homestead, she became interested.

'Are you going back that way?'

He said he had left his car up at Oriana and Henry's place.

'I wanted to look in on them. But to be honest, I wasn't at all sure I'd make it all the way up here. So I thought I could fish in the Lobber if I couldn't get this far. The water's fine and calm down there. It races along in Bjornstubacken.'

He wondered whether Annie was frightened of the Lobber. He would have liked to ask her whether she was sleeping well, but he didn't dare.

He didn't get away until about seven that evening. It was still very light and would stay that way until about ten. The path ran steadily downhill between very large, high spruces. He heard a great black woodp.e.c.k.e.r whirring and the fine whistling of bullfinches. A lovely strong scent came towards him on a breeze, the summer-warm air that had lain still all day and now smelt of almonds and infants. It hurt, and he wondered if he would always have to turn away from memories rising out of the slopes of tussocks of twinflower, out of a warm bed or a child's downy hair. Or would he become sentimental? Sucking and dwelling on it.

He was already tired and stopped to get his breath back. Then he heard footsteps on the dry ground. A twig snapped with a sharp little sound. He waited.

It came again and he felt a certain unease. They must have been footsteps he had heard and now they had stopped, as if someone was waiting. He had seen no one behind him. He pretended to stand looking up into the trees. He was sure someone was watching him. But he didn't want to turn round and look back up the path.

He started walking very quickly. As long as he was walking he could hear nothing. He came to a crest and half ran down the slope on the other side until he was sure he was well ahead and wouldn't be seen in the hollow. Then he turned straight in among the trees, aiming for a large stone covered with white moss, and hid behind it. He could see the path between some birch branches if he inclined his head slightly. And now he could hear the footsteps. At that moment he regretted hiding. He should have hurried on instead. Got away from there.

It occurred to him that he had been too trusting. The atmosphere had been friendly up at Starhill. Petrus Elia.s.son looked like a billy goat and had offered him cheese. Marianne ohnberg had smelt of milk.

So that's the kind of judgements I make, he thought. Like a five-year-old, or a pet dog.

He could hear a light crackling on the path. He had been running on pine cones. There she was. It was Annie Raft. She stood still and listened, then hesitantly went on downwards. Then, of course, he came out and called: 'Did you want me for anything?'

He regretted that too, straight away, but it was too late. She spun round and stared. She had nothing with her except binoculars on a strap round her neck. He went up to her, thinking he was crashing around like an elk. Her face was very like the little girl's those watchful eyes, the mouth narrow, lips pressed together. Her hair was slightly auburn now it was short and her eyebrows so dark he reckoned she dyed them. But would she do that up here? She had a small straight nose and was somehow rather good-looking. But dismissive, totally without warmth or openness. Besides, she had crept up on him.

'What do you want?'

'Nothing.'

'But you're following me.'

She stood there, biting her lower lip, almost ridiculously like her daughter.

'I was just going to watch you,' she said finally.

Perhaps she's crazy, he thought. That peculiar tremor round her, the lack of contact. It's frightening and you daren't talk to her as you would to others. How the h.e.l.l can she be a teacher?

Then she said, in such a sober and lightly persuasive voice that he could perfectly well imagine her as a teacher: 'I was only going to watch you through the binoculars as you crossed the river.'

Was this some kind of consideration? He was uncertain, but then he remembered the way the path went.

'You can't see the river from here.'

'A little further down. There's a plateau there's a view over the river and the marshes towards the homestead from there.'

'No,' he said. 'Not here in the steep bit. It's thick forest all the way. In that case, it's probably over towards Bjornstubacken. And you can't see the ford from there. It's several kilometres away. If that was where you planned to watch me.'

'I'll find the place,' was all she said. Then neither of them knew what to do. Sooner or later he had to go on down. Was she going to follow him at a distance? That would be ridiculous. She must have thought something similar, because she said: 'I can come with you for a bit. Until we find the place. The viewpoint.'

'It doesn't exist.'

Of course, she didn't believe him, or she pretended not to. They went on, he ahead, she just behind. His head was completely empty. He couldn't for the life of him find anything to say to her, but that didn't seem to worry her. After they had been walking for five or perhaps ten minutes, she stopped.

'This is where the path divides,' she said.

'Yes, the one to the right goes down to Bjornstubacken.'

She stood still, and he thought she was looking strange.

'I'm going back now,' she said.

There was no point in asking her anything. Her face was closed in on itself, on some kind of sadness. Or fear.