Blackwater. Part 30

Bjorne has simply done an about-turn in time and gone backwards into the olden days, as he calls it. In the olden days people did such and such. In the olden days they thought, saw, understood.

But what they understood was how to live in their own time and the loner in the cabin doesn't understand that.

Afore things was better'n they is now now you's worser off than you was then.

They rattle off that jingle at country fairs. Not Bjorne, of course, because he never goes to them. But he too denies tuberculosis and incest and abuse and near-starvation and ignorance he even denies aching joints, although the damp of his cabin gives them to him.

The difference between the loner in his cabin and me is that I always go back to school on Monday morning. I know my attempts at finding an alternative are imperfect, and that my job is to teach schoolchildren to think.

It was the dog days, in the compost, in the newspapers. Something swelled and ran. The flies became intrusive. The newspapers reported murders and perverted s.a.d.i.s.ts. The arts pages stank of rotting flesh, as if from the fridge of a ma.s.s murderer.

Birger didn't read about it, but he dreamt of it at night. He was being chased, he saw someone cut to pieces before his eyes, and he was acting mentally ill to escape the same fate.

He woke, got up and drank some milk. He spread some crisp-bread and heard it crackling and crunching between his teeth in the silent grey morning. He thought about that time, about the tent and the bodies. He didn't usually do that.

Nor had Annie. At any rate, she hadn't talked about it. He remembered once when they had been watching the news on television, a report from some republic that had recently been part of the Soviet Union. Two men lay on the back of a lorry, dead, their throats cut, one with his mouth wide open so you could see all his top teeth. Birger and Annie had been eating when the report started. After the two corpses on the lorry, a young man came on and said other men had cut his father's arms and legs off and slit open his belly, letting the intestines well out, and all this had happened while his father was still alive, the son looking on. Another report eventually came on and Birger started eating again. Annie had long since gone.

That was quite usual. All she said about it was that she had seen the effects of murderous violence once only and that was quite enough.

No one believed any longer that Annie's death was accidental or self-inflicted. They wanted to arrange an exhibition in the community centre in her memory. It was also to be a statement against mindless violence.

'I'm not sure it was all that mindless,' said Birger, when the minister had telephoned. They were thinking of moving the summer church's coffee shop from Roback to Blackwater. That was where the tourists stopped off, ever since the police had held a press conference and retreated from the accident theory. On the Sunday the exhibition was to be opened and the minister was to say a memorial prayer for her. Birger thought that was mad. She hadn't been indifferent to religion as most people were, but utterly hostile to his Christianity.

All concepts of a G.o.d had begun as belief in ghosts, she had said. A power-drunk gangster keeps his tribe in terror and awe. When he dies, they are so terrified and dominated by his will, they hallucinate his voice and his steps and his mad laughter at night. And they claim they can still hear them, or that was her understanding of it, though they've covered it all with sugar icing. She was extremely grateful that neither Henny nor ke nor her uncle and aunt had taken her to any church or made her go to Sunday school. She sensed that if you imbibed those confused outpourings early on, you would always to some extent be susceptible to them.

It would have been tactless to tell the minister that, and anyway he wouldn't have believed it. Annie had led the church choir and she had sung a solo every year from the gallery at funerals and weddings. None of that tallied. Nor had she ever claimed that it did.

The minister was to contact Mia for contributions to the exhibition pictures and drawings from Annie's school material, her nature screens and all that kind of thing. Birger phoned Langva.s.slien and Mia came down with Johan and six Siberian huskies in a dog van. She was pleased about the exhibition. As long as Annie's death was said to have been self-inflicted, there seemed to be something shameful about it. Now Lisa Kronlund patted Mia on the cheek and said: 'You poor thing, you, losing your mother.'

Mia came down in the dog van with Annie's most beautiful drawings. The chairs in the community centre had been taken out and stacked in the little coffee room. The minister was up a ladder in his wine-red shirt and discreet little dog collar, fastening a nylon fishing line to the head of a white paper dove and trying to find the right place to fix it so that the dove didn't tip over when hung up.

Screens had been put round the walls in the a.s.sembly room. memory lane it said on the first one and underneath was a childish drawing of a house, diagrammatical and at the same time very complicated. In each room one object had been drawn in detail. In the first bas.e.m.e.nt room was an axe on a chopping block beside an amputated foot; in the other two, broken jars out of which something red was pouring. The rooms were numbered and their contents macabre, possibly a little more gruesome with each floor.

Mia stood there with her cardboard box in her arms, breathing fast. The five people in the hall were working by the screens, busy with paper and drawing pins. Clumsily they put down their utensils and came over to greet her, their faces expressing compa.s.sion and embarra.s.sment. The minister, alone familiar with grief, came quickly over. But he couldn't catch up with Mia, who was striding swiftly from screen to screen. At the fifth or sixth she started saying something between clenched teeth. It sounded like 'h.e.l.l', In the intervals her mouth was moving as if she were chewing something between her front teeth. Suddenly she caught sight of a thin man in a crocheted skullcap.

'Petrus! You b.l.o.o.d.y creep!'

Petrus Elia.s.son's goatee was quite white nowadays. He was wearing a shirt of heavy cream-coloured material which fell beautifully over the cuffs round his wrists. The Tree of Life was embroidered on the back of his crocheted waistcoat. He had been at the funeral, but either Mia hadn't seen him there, or he hadn't succeeded in annoying her. Birger had thought it quite touching that he had come all the way down from the Gadde district, where he lived with his women and his cheesemaking. His women were new. One of them worked, just as Annie had, as a teacher. One came every weekend from ostersund and her job in a builder's office. The third was a textile artist, a younger version of Barbro Lund.

'You've arranged this,' Mia hissed at Petrus. Then her voice rose in volume. 'Take it down! Take it all away!'

Petrus stood there blinking. Anna Starr and the members of the church choir were breathing heavily through their open mouths.

'Are you involved in this? Don't you understand anything? Take it down. There'll be no exhibition. Are you deaf?' Mia shouted. 'Take it all down! Help me, Birger! Johan! All this has got to come down. Out you go, the lot of you! Don't imagine you can do things like this.'

The minister approached with all the a.s.surance gained from a professional att.i.tude to crises in life. Mia flung down her box and made whisking movements with her hands right in his face, as if trying to wave away an apparition. And she succeeded. As the women retreated into the coffee room, the minister followed them, but he stopped in the doorway.

Petrus approached Mia from behind, his head on one side and constantly licking his moist lips. When he addresssed her in his soft singsong voice, she spun round and slapped him across the face.

'Out! Go away! You've no business in this village. Stay at home with your b.l.o.o.d.y stinking goats and your intellectual witches.'

He stumbled towards the door. The pastor had got the hiccups and was trying to keep his mouth shut, but kept forgetting. Birger itched to intervene with some good advice, but then saw Anna Starr holding a gla.s.s of water to the pastor's mouth. She carefully closed the door behind her.

Mia didn't start crying until they were left on their own. She wept with her mouth wide open and went on ripping the drawings off the screens.

'Johan, get a bin bag out of the car!'

Petrus opened the door, put his head round and said that the material had not belonged to Annie. It had been her school-children's. They had collected it up from pupils who were now adult and they had to return it. He had to keep on talking for some time, since Mia was at the other end of the hall. But when she strode across the floorboards and hit him with a piece of cardboard, he retreated.

Birger thought Johan was looking rather pale, but he was working efficiently, asking no questions. They filled two bin bags. Mia kicked them into the coffee room, where the banished ones were lying low.

'Do what the h.e.l.l you like with them. But don't exhibit them. Not anywhere. Leave my mother in peace! Do you hear! Leave her in peace.

When they got up to the house, Mia was exhausted and went to lie down on Annie's bed. Birger made coffee and Johan sat at the kitchen table.

'What was all that about?' he asked in a low voice.

Well, what was it all about? Shame, partly. Shame and affection.

'Annie had rather original educational ideas,' said Birger. 'Mia will probably tell you about them later.'

At first Annie had spoken of of it only flippantly and in pa.s.sing. When there was no longer any risk of his thinking consolation was what she wanted, she told him. Corny or not, she had said, but I loved my work and was fulfilled by it all those years in Byvngen. Otherwise I would have probably lived like most people and kept looking at my watch in working hours.

At first, of course, it was the usual mild boredom. I had little encounters that brightened the day. I read a lot and longed for bed and my book. Moved in with Goran Dubois. That didn't last long enough to be serious. His mother put an end to it. But that was nothing important. I realise that now. I was sleeping spasmodically and eating too much.

The tedium of school has a particular flavour. k.n.o.bbly jerseys and unwashed bodies. And that lethargy. They did as I told them. Snorted sometimes, giving me shifty looks. That meant some internal joke I hadn't heard. Occasional shoving, chairs sc.r.a.ping, bursts of laughter and suppressed swearing. But never a protest.

They were prepared to spend six years in this half-light. And they obeyed me. They never asked why they had to learn this or that. They just tried, most of them absently. The girls were more ambitious, but their efforts were also swallowed by the winter darkness. Towards the end of the autumn term, we were like fish in a lake that has almost frozen solid.

Then Police Day came. The police chief and his a.s.sistant came to the school in their black-and-white car. They were in uniform and carrying briefcases. For a whole day, they went from cla.s.sroom to cla.s.sroom to talk about their work.

At the time there was considerable contempt for the police in radical circles. The idea of a PR drive had originated higher up and down south. Demonstrations or the formation of terrorist groups were unlikely up here. In my cla.s.sroom there were only future drink-drivers and workers in the black economy who might occasionally bash the wife or a neighbour. They would add an amplifier or an electric typewriter when reporting a burglary, but they would never think of protesting against anything. In what the police chief called the present scenario, the children were not interested in hearing how he and his a.s.sistant served the community and made life safe for people. They wanted to hear how they chased robbers.

The police chief came to my cla.s.sroom late in the afternoon. Maybe he was exhausted, because when they asked him, he told them without any evasions how he had chased a robber.

This was two years ago, he said, when he was working in Sveg. There was a nationwide alert out for a bank robber. He had escaped while on a hospital visit, stolen a car, picked up his girlfriend in Borlange and driven on north. In Mora, he had abandoned the first car and stolen a red Cortina.

At about two o'clock in the afternoon someone had phoned from the main supermarket in Hede asking the police to go after a couple who had left without paying for two full carriers of beer and food from the deli-counter. They were in a red Cortina.

The red car got away, but the road was blocked further north. Our police chief, an a.s.sistant at the time, was one of those who found the car up in Vemdalsskalet. They had run out of petrol. That night there had been a blizzard which lasted until towards noon. The car was buried in the snow and all tracks obliterated. The police searched through a whole holiday village for the runaway and his girl and found them in the end in the only proper building up there. They were dead, frozen to death. The wood stove was stuffed with logs and newspaper. They had used up several boxes of matches. But they had never opened the damper. It had smoked in, but they hadn't died from inhaling smoke. They had died of cold.

'They went out like a light.'

All eyes were on the police chief. Behind him, the green blackboard was blank.

'They died because they didn't know how to light a wood stove,' he said. There were questions and cries, objections and a.s.sertions, but he stuck to it: they had died because they couldn't get the stove going.

When the bell went, he had to go to the next cla.s.sroom. But the children carried on. I saw them in the playground. In the deepening dusk they were gesticulating. I had never seen them do that before. They usually stood with their hands thrust into their jacket pockets, their shoulders hunched in the cold. The bus from town went past and the beam from its headlights swept over them. Some children ran over to the kiosk to catch the bus back to Blackwater.

Why should I learn this? The police chief had managed to arouse this question in them. Not me. To survive, was the harsh answer his story gave. That was how we got on to what you needed to survive. Without even a cottage. Lighting a fire. Filing a hook out of a barb. Out of what? What do you use? And have you any fishing line on you? Do you go around carrying a fishing line?

Tying on a fly. Making a cooking vessel out of a beer can. Looking for Norrland lichen. What about when the matches run out?

A girl pointed out that you could avoid going out in mist and blizzards. If you behaved yourself, you wouldn't have to escape from prison either. Then Stefan with the brown eyes said: 'But what if everything runs out?'

'What do you mean, everything?'

'The electricity. If the cables fall down. If there's a war and a nuclear bomb.'

In that way, I had access one winter afternoon to their fears. That was a room they very seldom opened to adults. They had all seen a girl running along the road with her burning skin crackling into a white map pattern. They had seen her several times. She was running underneath the thick curved gla.s.s of the television screen. She was naked and the same age as they were, so she was real. They learnt to read that map of cracked skin.

One bright spark said they ought to learn to light a wood stove at school. In case. Then suggestions fell thick and fast. Now it was a question of what you needed to survive the collapse of civilisation. Not in reeking, radioactive ruins, nor on contaminated sh.o.r.es. No, they would retreat into the forest. Up to the mountain. The long slopes below Bear Mountain would still be there. They ran over, unstable marshlands. Their skin wasn't burnt away. They ran in cold, fresh air and I hadn't the heart to spoil their picture. Someone said they ought to learn to weave. And to build a log house. That should be taught at school. In case.

One of them who had mostly said nothing asked who decided what they should learn. I promised I would bring the curriculum to show them. I was in state of great tension, my skin p.r.i.c.kling. I was full of laughter and had tears in my eyes. They had started asking the questions: Why should I learn this? Isn't it unnecessary? They balanced this against that in case.

I was feverish with eagerness that evening and simply couldn't sleep. I kept having one idea after another, my mind exploding and brilliant.

A red file. A green file. Two workbooks. One for continuity. One for in case. I had found my teaching method.

It started that simply. Every element of knowledge from the basic curriculum we put into the red book for a start, then weighed it against that in case. Computer knowledge against mental arithmetic. Social studies? What if no society existed any longer? Political parties? The capitals of Europe?

They figured out that things that weren't directly necessary for a settler life could be forgotten and that was a pity. One girl wanted to transfer a crochet pattern of stars to the green book. That gave rise to several questions. Songs? Tunes? Notes even? The names of the stars and planets?

I watched out for inflationary tendencies in their new way of thinking. All by themselves or thanks to a tired police officer they had found out that they lived in a civilisation. Now they were finding out that there were the remains of a culture in it and that both were fundamentally based on knowledge. If all conceivable knowledge began to swirl like fireworks round their heads, they would soon give up. Faced with complications, we bow down and go on jogging along. Better to be bored than insane.

So with no discussion, I decided that everything they wanted to have with them in case should be written down in detail. No abstract generalisations, but recipes. Formulas. Construction drawings. Words and notes of songs. Thus the recorder, the loom, the sourdough loaf and the composition of mortar all went into the green workbook.

Winter came and we tussled with the curriculum, but relaxed with definitions of edible plants and a careful copy of 'My Pony Has Gone'. We discussed the manufacture of steel for knives and the tanning of elk hide. We got twice as much done and we felt no fatigue. We were playing, I suppose.

The fact that a teacher let the children have two workbooks, 'one more concrete', as I expressed it, was nothing remarkable. Teachers of music, art and sewing helped us with various projects. I didn't involve the woodwork teacher. Something told me that would be dangerous.

I was electrified from within by my ideas. They never seemed to come to an end. The children were excited or thoughtful, each according to his or her temperament. Many of them were ingenious, some sharp. Some were very imaginative, two or three rebellious. Perhaps, perhaps, I thought occasionally. But I was always on the watch for prophetic tendencies from within. I had quite simply found a way of teaching and that was it.

I lived for three years with those first children of the double files, and when they had moved up to middle school, I knew that my teaching had had an effect. I had echoes back through their new teachers. My experiment did not appear extreme. I blurred things whenever I was asked. It was not all that well thought out, I said. Just two workbooks. One for older and rather more concrete knowledge.

I was careful with my secret. It must not seem political. Anything political that was the red rag that made the bulls snort and stamp at their kitchen tables.

For two more years, I followed this double line in my teaching. With the new third form, I had to do the police officer's exploit all over again, but this time as a trick. It didn't work. They had already heard the story of the couple who had died of cold because they couldn't light a wood stove. I had to make up other stories and the start was sluggish. To my sorrow, I noticed that the majority accepted the green workbook in the same dull and compliant way as they would have accepted any idea at all if coming from above. Of three rebels in this cla.s.s, two were really grumblers.

There was one buffoon, of course. He was unusually unfortunate, an overweight boy, foul-mouthed and slow-witted. His genre was malice. With sleepy intuition, he found weak points and squeezed. It was like being bitten in the thigh by a horse.

He was the one to suggest that first and foremost you had to have beer to survive. Roars of laughter and belches. Indignant girls. Hopeful light in the expressions of the grumblers.

But I went into it and thanks to the brewing of beer, we actually got going. When they discovered its considerable complications the bundle of straw in the vat, the mash that must not be over sixty-five degrees Celcius if the enzymes are to survive, and has to be quickly cooled so as not to be attacked by micro-organisms they sat in silence for a long time. They had to invent the thermometer. They had no fingertip feel for the temperature of a liquid. We established that in the physics lab. Several of the girls could distinguish between body heat and hotter. Some of them used the skin on their upper lips as thermometers. But for the difference between sixty-five degrees and seventy, they could find no way to react.

The beer never went into the workbook. It stopped at drainage, when one genius found you couldn't grow grain without it. They were used to marshlands. So their own catastrophe, too, was blown through by the wind from the Norwegian mountains and driving rain and snow from the North Atlantic.

We had been working for almost two years when a girl called Unni patted her green workbook and said: 'So us must jist have'n wi'us then.'

That was how we started on ways of memorising knowledge. I showed them the Iliad and the Gilgamesh epic and told them that mnemonic professionals had had all that in their heads. Thanks to them it had survived. They had to start ransacking themselves. What would they remember without the green workbook?

We started working out techniques. I have to admit that looms and making nails were shoved into the background in this cla.s.s. They had found their sport. Even the most skilful soon noticed that there wasn't much they could take in and repeat, not in comparison with the orators of the past. I told them they had had their tricks, that the techniques of memorising had even been a special science at the time.

They had pictured the memory store equipped as a large, handsome and complicated building usually a temple. It had halls, apses, corridors and porticos. In the halls were altars and tables and pillars. In every room was an object they could connect with an element in the ma.s.s of knowledge they wished to remember. They organised it quite concretely, with imagery that was often startling, even macabre. I told them about the bloodstained, decapitated heads and the flayed deer, about the ram t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and poisonous snakes that had lain in these echoing halls and to which people of the past had linked their knowledge.

The children had none of the adult demand for a meaningful connection between what they wanted to remember and the symbol that would remind them of it. Without difficulty, they all thought up elements as they walked through the halls. The girls put five cute kittens in a memory room. Two boys found it more effective to use five drowned kittens.

The kittens lay on a flowery sofa, because we had to use the ikea store in Sundsvall as a memory temple and their sofas were floral. We had recently been on a school trip and knew of no other large premises we could use. Then they had to construct their own memory house. But they lived in places where there were no large or remarkable buildings, so I gave them permission to go down Memory Lane out of doors if they liked. But they were not to put too great a distance between the places, because then the memory became blurred. Many of the boys put their lane between the elk pa.s.ses in the hunting areas.

One girl asked if memory lanes could be secret. I said yes, as long as they worked, they could be secret. After that concession, I know I lost control over two or three of them as they went down their memory lanes. I had no idea which halls they were going through or what they saw. But I had no regrets.

Everything had been quite calm, but in the spring of the fourth year, one thing happened after another. First, I was invited to dinner at the headmaster's house. I didn't feel very comfortable there. They were equipped with kitchen gadgets, a stereo and inherited wine gla.s.ses. We had curried fillet of pork au gratin, bananas and cream, and the head wanted to talk about my relations with the children. I thought his interest seemed unwholesome.

The second event occurred in the empty staff room. I met the head and he talked about nothing in particular at first. All I remember was that he asked if I was depressed and found it hard to sleep. That was disagreeable. I said I was on fine form, but fell asleep late when my mind was full of ideas.

'Have you always had periods of depression alternating with periods of a great desire for activity?'

What do you say to that kind of thing? Of course, I said: 'Yes, haven't you?'

The third event: I was summoned to his office. He was more formal this time and I could see he was nervous. Without too much preamble, he asked me why I had given up my job at the college. He knows, I thought.

'You were teaching up at the Starhill commune, weren't you?'

Then the next incredible question: how had I taken that double murder? Taken. Double murder. They were words I simply couldn't fit into my way of thinking. They were so hopelessly inadequate.

I should have given the matter more thought. But I did as I usually do when people get too complicated. I thought, He's crazy. And left it at that. I went on working and reading.

The fifth event took place in the staff room. One of the teachers had a share in a racehorse. He used to arrange the bets. The stakes were collected up when you were paying your dues into the coffee pool. This time he had thought up something more piquant. The woman he was living with, a gym teacher at the school was going to have a baby and she was quite far gone. Now we could sign a list and leave ten kronor, then bet on when the baby would arrive. Nearly every day for fourteen days ahead had already been filled in when I came into the room.

I was furious. I knew that five of the younger male teachers got together to watch p.o.r.n films on Tuesday evenings when their wives were attending a batik course. That was silly. But this was indecent.

'Who wins if the baby's dead?' I said.

At first there was a silence, then a terrific hullabaloo because I refused to give way. I demanded an answer from him. The head came past in the middle of it all. He took me to his office and I told him what they were doing. The racehorses, the pregnant partner, the lot. You can imagine how many friends I had on the staff after that. The head said that of course no betting of any kind should take place in school. He asked me if I had taken it very hard when my own pregnancy had had such an unfortunate ending.

'That has nothing to do with this!' I shouted. 'This isn't about my psychology. It's about decency!'

Then I went out and slammed the door so the gla.s.s rattled. The only thing I regretted was that I had said decency. I really thought it was about dignity. But that word was too bizarre for this school, where senior pupils rubbed pea soup into each other's hair and men of fertile age got together to watch others s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g.

Things calmed down, though that was dull. Several teachers refused to speak to me in the staff room, but that didn't matter. I went on working. We were to have a parents' meeting.

I met the mothers of my cla.s.s an hour or so beforehand, and we laid the tables and decorated them. I thought they had put out far too many cups, but in fact a great many people did come. We had never had so many come to a cla.s.s meeting before. Most came in couples. I wasn't used to seeing fathers there. The head came down from his office and slipped in. Like an eel. The atmosphere was tense and I thought perhaps they were uneasy because he was there. Even a plumber I knew looked worried.

I began my little lecture, bade them welcome and told them how far we had got and what plans we had. I was interrupted.

'Can we ask questions instead?'

I noticed they turned to the head. He nodded, giving them permission to interrupt me just like that. But when they were to start asking questions, there was dead silence. That pleased me. I did nothing to help them out of their dilemma. The head seemed about to intervene when the first question which wasn't a question at all came. A woman's shrill voice said: 'I doesn't think it's right to frighten children with the end of the world!'