Blackwater. Part 26

She must be sitting or lying somewhere up towards Fjellstrom's clearing, perhaps with a broken leg. Per-Ola was organising them. He was leader of the shoot these days and the search party consisted largely of the shooting team. Torsten had not joined them. Gudrun said his back was too stiff.

Per-Ola instructed them to call out at long intervals. They had to be able to hear if she replied and had to reckon on any answering call being faint. But it was difficult to listen out for faint sounds, what with people calling and dogs barking. Despite everything, it was all slightly festive, a foretaste of the autumn and the shoot.

Per-Ola had greeted Johan with a nod. His small, light-blue eyes had paled slightly and sunk even further in. His body was stronger. He showed no surprise. Gudrun must have told him about Johan and Mia. She was walking some distance away from them. He had also caught a glimpse of Vaine, but not Bjorne or Pekka. He presumed Pekka was working further south somewhere. He was a crane driver.

The gra.s.s was gleaming as if it were painted. This was the time of year when everything was drawn up to a light that scarcely dulled even at night; the fern spires with their hairy shepherd's crooks, the cornets of may lilies and the speckly buds of petty spurge. The shoots of the rosebay willowherb tasted like asparagus and were faintly pink.

She had gone to look for morels. Once Birger Torbjornsson had taken that in, he had started phoning round. She had arranged with a friend to go up towards Fjellstrom's clearing, now two years old so just right for morels. But when her friend came to pick her up, she had already gone. There must have been some misunderstanding.

Johan called out the unknown woman's name and trudged on. The friend was Gudrun. It was strange for him to find out a little bit of Gudrun's everyday life in this way. All those meetings over the years, stiff conversations in restaurants in Trondheim or by his own coffee table, had not resulted in anything so simple. Gudrun and the teacher out picking morels. Though this time nothing had come of it. The teacher had gone off on her own. 'I suppose it was never quite clear which car we were going to take,' Gudrun said.

They walked on until the clearing came to an end and there Per-Ola sent a message down the line that they should veer west and take the rest of the clearing on the way down. Twenty-metre gaps as before.

The ground was rough going, with deep tracks left by the forestry tractors. Up here the birch leaves were still sticky, grooved and pleated. The brushwood rose in yellowish green and reddish clouds over the piles of stones and collapsing heaps of scrub.

They were all faintly dispirited when they got down again. No one had any idea where to look next. Per-Ola had inserted a great wedge of snuff and was standing there in silence.

Johan had disturbed a sitting sandpiper and had caught sight of her blue-spotted eggs. He had also found a couple of unusually large morels which he put in his pocket. But he hadn't yet shown them to Mia. It seemed hardly decent to be picking morels and looking at bird's eggs at such a time.

Finally, Per-Ola spat out the snuff and said they should all go back home and get something to eat. Those who were willing could a.s.semble again in two hours' time. Johan stayed by the car with Mia, watching Gudrun leaving in Per-Ola's Ford. She didn't look in their direction. Mia clearly never gave it a thought. Johan was glad he didn't have to explain, but he knew he would have to sooner or later.

There wasn't really anything else to say except what he had told her from the beginning: relations with his father and brothers had never been good. It had always been like that. Anyhow, he couldn't remember anything different. And it'll always be like that, he thought. Silent. Lousy. Hostile without anything being said about it. Would Mia be able to understand this? Or did she think that everything could be put right as long as you were sensible and looked on the positive side of things? He never really knew how deep her bright matter-of-factness went.

He wondered what her mother was like. Birger Torbjornsson was standing further up the road, staring down at the gravel. A woman in a pink jacket was talking eagerly to him, but he looked as if he weren't listening.

In the end, all the cars had driven off except Johan's and Birger Torbjornsson's. The big, heavy man came slowly over to them.

'Johan?'

'Mia and I are together.'

Johan thought it best to get that over with as soon as possible. But Birger made no comment. It might not have sunk in. He was staring down at the ground and looked tired, his hair clammy with sweat.

'I have to talk to you,' he said to Mia. 'I don't think she went up to the clearing.'

It was a peculiar thing to say, because it was he who had given instructions for the search party. Mia also pointed that out. He sat down on the verge and stared down into the gravel, his heavy face closed.

'I don't know,' he said. 'I haven't slept. I found the bag on the steps. Gudrun had hung it on the doorhandle when she came. Annie had already left by then. Gudrun thought she had just nipped out on an errand or something. So she hung the bag there.'

'What bag?'

'It was a thermos of coffee and buns and so on. And she wrote a note to ask Annie to phone her when she got back. But Annie never did. She seems to have found something else to do.'

'But you said Gudrun Brandberg had already gone off in her own car and Annie had followed.'

'Yes, I did say that. But I don't know if I think so any longer.'

'What do you think?'

'I don't know.'

They waited for him to go on, but he said nothing more. In the end Mia went and sat in the car.

'Let's go down and get something to eat,' she said. 'Then we'll have to see.'

As Johan was getting into the car, Birger Torbjornsson took hold of his arm.

'She has a shotgun with her,' he said. 'I know that, because normally it's always behind her bed.'

'Why?'

He didn't reply and Johan didn't know what to say, either.

'Was she depressed?' he asked.

'No, for Christ's sake, there was nothing wrong with her!' Birger burst out. 'She was expecting me. I was to go there yesterday afternoon. There was nothing wrong with her!'

'What's the matter?' said Mia from inside the car. But Birger was already on his way over to his own car.

'He didn't sleep at all last night,' said Johan.

They drove on down and he said nothing about the shotgun to Mia. Nor did he think he could ask anything. But he would have liked to know what Annie Raft was like and why she kept a gun by her bed when she slept.

On one of the first occasions they had been together, Birger had told Annie what had happened to him at the Sulky. He described the experience as best he could, although he had no name for it. He also told her what the consequences had been, that he had begun to be with Frances afterwards and in that way had wrecked his marriage. She had listened without interrupting. After he had finished, she said: 'I don't want to get near the other reality. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to provoke visions and altered states.'

He was very surprised. He had expected objections, but of another kind. She accepted his story and that almost disconcerted him. How could she keep a balance between incompatibilities in such an untroubled way?

'I like this reality,' she said. 'Or the unreality. But I can't dismiss the other. The weave of reality is often loose I can see through it. I've done that ever since I was a child and it isn't a frightening experience, though perhaps it ought to be.

'I don't belong here. The surroundings I have ended up in haven't been chosen. Anyhow, not by me. They make me feel affection for what is all around me. Even for human beings sometimes. But mostly for the landscape and houses.'

'A little house like this,' she had said as they lay beside each other in the bed in that winter-night dark room. 'It can fill me with great affection. It is so fragile and temporary. It might burn down in a couple of hours one night when thunder rumbles over the mountain. But it keeps the fiercest cold out. Did you know we had thirty-six degrees of frost last winter? And it keeps out the rain rattling on its metal roof, furiously on autumn nights. Wait till you hear it.'

Wait till you hear it.

That was how he found out that she also thought they would go on being together. He listened carefully in the dark, sensing that the opportunity would not come again so soon. She was seldom as serious as she was now. Ordinarily she wasn't particularly open at all, although she talked a lot.

'We're not alone here,' she said. 'This place houses a whole lot of creatures. They live here with us. Wasps, flies, beetles, silverfish and mice. The hawk on the telephone wires by the wall belongs, too, and the stoat living in the foundations. So do the great t.i.ts under the eaves. On the coldest of winter nights, they creep in between the weather-boarding and the beams. The house had been here almost a hundred and sixty years when I first came, and it will still be here after me if it doesn't burn down.'

When they got down to the house, Mia, Johan Brandberg and Birger, it was empty. It made no difference what she had said about mice and silverfish and he was not in the slightest consoled by the thought of her words on unreality and reality. The house was terrifyingly empty and smelt stuffy.

Mia started gathering up the flowers and throwing them into the garbage bag. She had to get another bag to clear them all. She's got a st.u.r.dy rear, he thought. She's not really like Annie. But there was something about her hands. When she took a carton of eggs and a pack of b.u.t.ter out of the refrigerator, her hands looked like Annie's. Johan was sitting at the table, his eyes resting on her, those narrow brown eyes, usually so quick. Both the irises and the brown-black hair had paled considerably. Birger hadn't seen him for several years. Previously he had often come to their house with Tomas, but that had stopped when Tomas had moved to Stockholm. He wondered how Mia and Johan had met. As far as he knew, Johan never came back to Blackwater.

He was a meteorologist at the airport in Trondheim. Once, largely in jest, Birger had said he had chosen a profession in line with his origins after all, and Johan had been annoyed. He could be hot-tempered, anyhow had been when he was younger. 'Do you think we go up into the mountains and stare at the clouds?' he had said. Then he had rather long-windedly explained how he worked with tables and graphs.

Mia fried eggs and sliced some smoked lamb. Birger couldn't eat. He had some coffee with them and nibbled again at bits of granary bread. His thoughts wandered and he wasn't really listening to what they were saying, so Mia had to repeat the question she had put to him.

'Are there no morel places on the other side of the road?'

'There's only marshland down to the river there,' Johan answered in his place. But she persisted that they should search on that side.

Annie hadn't gone out to look for morels. Birger had also hoped that. Now he would have to pull himself together and tell them what the situation was.

'She phoned me early this morning,' he said. 'Before five.' They waited for him to go on but he couldn't. He couldn't think any more. He got up from the table.

'We can't b.l.o.o.d.y well go on sitting here,' he said. 'Come on, let's go on up and start looking again.'

They made their way down, across the road towards the Stromgren homestead. The search party had set off uphill again and their shouts could be heard right down at the old homestead. 'Ann-iiee! Ann-iiee!' Birger saw a sharp expression, almost of disgust, forming round Mia's mouth. They started walking a little faster.

The old house was empty, the curtains in the windows dirty. The pasture had begun to grow again. Later in the summer it would be difficult to get through all the sowthistle, monkshood and meadowsweet. When they got down to the marsh, they saw the print of a boot in the wet path. Later, Birger remembered that he had wanted to suggest they should walk on the side of the path so as not to destroy the tracks. But he thought it a weird, almost distasteful thing to say. Especially as Mia was with them.

He never did get his thoughts straight that long Sunday. Revolting ideas about where Annie might be kept flickering through his head, then were gone. Suddenly, he found himself thinking about what they would have for dinner and wondering whether Annie had had time to do any shopping before she left. When they got down to the ford across the Lobber, he noticed Mia was now very uneasy. Hitherto she had been quite composed, although she had begun to see the situation was serious. Now she stopped and didn't want to go on any further.

'I don't like this place,' she said quietly.

'No one does,' said Birger.

'Those b.l.o.o.d.y birds.'

A couple of birds of prey were circling above them, making long-drawn-out cries.

'Are they kestrels?' said Johan.

'Peregrine falcons.'

She sounded dead certain. One of the birds swerved away and flew out of sight. The other went on watching over them.

'So you know about birds?' said Birger. 'I didn't think you were all that interested otherwise.'

'Nature,' she said with mocking emphasis. Birger had a feeling she was being ironic about one of Annie's doctrines; there's nothing that is not nature. We are all nature. Even the big cities will be broken down into quarries where eagles nest and lizards sun themselves on the walls. Into jungles or secretive formations of spruce forest.

He wondered how Mia saw Annie. With some criticism, presumably, unnatural otherwise. Or did she just laugh at Annie's faith in the cleared forests coming back? With affection, anyhow. He had heard her saying, 'Mummy, Mummy.' She used to say that when she was small and wanted to protect me, Annie had told him. He remembered the thin, sunburnt child with her red hair cut like a boy's. And Annie at that time. She had had long fair hair and timid no, irritable eyes. Narrow mouth. Always on her guard.

'I'll go down to the river,' said Johan. 'You two stay here. We can go on up towards Norbuan afterwards.'

'Aagot f.a.gerli taught me,' said Mia. 'She had those big bird books. I really only learnt that one bird. The peregrine falcon. I thought it was called peregrim because it was very grim.'

They had found one of the small islands of firm, mossy ground scattered over the marsh, and they sat down beside each other on a rotting birch, watching Johan making his way down. The marsh was full of pools of water like mirrors. Between them beds of sedge bubbled as if all the melting snow had absorbed water. They squelched when stepped on. Sky and earth met in those mirrors, and where the river ran they could see the greyish borders of the downy willow in the greenery. The sound of currents and small rapids was unclear at a distance, sometimes as if crowds of people were talking or even shouting at each other, sometimes like the sound of distant traffic, rising and falling, a totally mechanical mumble.

'I almost think I can recognise the place,' said Mia. 'And the birds are still here. I suppose they're the great-great-grandchildren of that bird.'

'Surely you can't remember that Midsummer Eve?'

'I was six. I remember two peculiar spruces. My mother sat me on a fallen birch. There was bracket fungus just like on this one. They frightened me. I thought they were some kind of animals sticking to it. Mum was going to go down to the river to look for the tent because she thought we would be able to get some help there. But I went after her. I was terrified of losing her. There was that bird all the time. It dived down over the tent when we went there for the first time. Like a spool. You should see what force there is in them when they dive to kill. Strike, it's called. I got quite close and saw the tent. It was all b.l.o.o.d.y and ragged and I could see someone was lying there. A foot and all that. Mum was lying beside it, then she scrambled up and made her way down to the river and splashed and splashed in the water with her hands.'

'Do you mean you really saw the tent and what had happened?'

'Yes.'

'Annie doesn't realise that.'

'No, of course not. She wouldn't be able to cope with that. Though she must have seen I was much further down the path when she came back. I thought she'd be angry. But she never even noticed.'

'Angry?'

The picture she had drawn for him was a strange one. Her voice was light, almost shrill, scarcely the voice of a grown woman any longer.

'Then everyone talked about it all.'

'Did they talk to you about it?'

'Yes, of course. Though I was the only one who knew how it had happened.'

'How did it happen then?' Birger whispered.

'The bird dived down and stabbed them to death with its sharp beak.'

She laughed at his expression. He had always thought Mia a splendid girl. Happy and jolly. Or, if he were to be truthful, a bit simple. Not particularly like Annie outwardly or inwardly. Now he wondered how much of that had been genuine.

'That was what I believed,' she said. 'For several years. I don't know when I went over to the general opinion.'

She had sounded totally adult for a moment, but then suddenly the little-girl voice came back.

'I was frightened but didn't dare say anything. Mum and I were s.h.i.t-scared that night afterwards. She bailed out and ran up to Aagot's. I took my blanket and followed her. It was so cold outside at night and quite light. I wasn't used to that. I thought something was wrong. That it'd never be dark again. She couldn't cope with me. She was too frightened herself. I've thought about that. Did you know I'm going to have a baby?'

'No, I didn't. Annie hasn't said anything.'

'She doesn't know yet. I thought perhaps you'd noticed, as you're a doctor.'

'It doesn't show yet.'

'No, but it's true anyhow.'

She sounded slightly aggressive and added: 'Johan and I are tremendously pleased.'

'I'm sure you are,' said Birger.

'Aagot put Mum to bed in the other room. She was cold and shaking and said she could hear a strange whining sound. Though there wasn't any sound. Neither the old lady nor I could hear anything. You met Aagot, didn't you?'

'Many times,' said Birger.

'Jersey over her nightgown and no teeth. Well, she put them in later. There was a smacking noise when she clamped them down. She fixed a bed for me on the kitchen sofa, but I didn't dare sleep alone. I'll sit here, she said. All night. I won't leave you. I thought it was so odd that she said night when the sun was already shining outside. You could see all the way down to Tangen, the sun on the first houses there. I didn't dare go to bed. I stayed at the kitchen table and got cold. She lit the stove. I had never seen a stove like that before. It crackled and banged. She heated up milk and of course it boiled over and burnt. Then she started swearing. Do you remember how Aagot used to swear? In a mixture of Norwegian and American. And Jamtland dialect. "T'h.e.l.l with t'saucepan," she said. "Nivver git thissun clean again. Dammit. h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation." She went on and on like that. She got out another pan. Everything became so ordinary, although there was that awful light in there. Then I said I'd seen that bird. I didn't say what it'd done, because I don't think I'd really understood that yet. That came later when people talked. It was only the bird. And those blood-stained rags of tent. Pale blue. When I told Aagot where I'd seen the bird, that it was just by the river, just before the lake, and she said it was the peregrine falcon, I thought a very grim falcon was right. That it really was scary, like a cruel spear. I'd seen it swooping down. Then she took out a big book, awfully heavy, by one of the von Wright brothers, of course. Mum's got them at home. She bid for them at the auction when Aagot died. We sat there at the kitchen table and leafed through it till we got to the peregrine falcon. Its beak and yellow eyes. It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen, not just grim, but terrifying. She read about it to me. I suppose she thought she could distract me from all that horrid business. Then I read it myself, many many times. I was wizard at finding the place. Daylight Birds of Prey. Subheading Falcons. Falco peregrinus.'

Johan came walking along the path. They got up and went to meet him. The marsh was squelching and swaying under his boots as he came unsteadily towards them.

'Shall we go up towards Norbuan now?' said Birger.

'No, we'll go to the road. We've got to talk to them.'