Blackwater. Part 35

'That wasn't what she wanted to find out,' she said. 'She wanted to know where they'd put all the sc.r.a.p they brought up when they dragged the lake.'

'Come right away,' Birger had said. 'I've got something to show you.'

He hadn't told him what it was, but Johan got ready to go at once. Mia thought it odd that he simply obeyed. He couldn't explain it himself, but he could tell from Birger's voice that it was serious. Mia couldn't accept it. She thought Birger was being unnecessarily secretive and she phoned him back, but all he said was: 'It's important that Johan sees this without knowing what I think.'

When they said goodbye, Mia was standing with Lars Dorj in front of the dog run, and everything they said to each other was drowned by howling. The dogs used to howl for twenty minutes or half an hour every afternoon. Mia was pulling at a ragged sleeve. One of the dogs had been playing with her and had torn it. She was wearing a thin, washed-out T-shirt and he knew the fly of her jeans was open underneath it. Her stomach was bulging and she had put elastic between the b.u.t.tons.

He had been given no a.s.surances, and yet he knew she believed him. She did so because she needed him. He felt no bitterness about this. She was tired and pale. She believed what was necessary for her to believe. She had no strength left for anything else.

Unemployed now. The project over. She had sold the car. He would look after her, but how could things be like this? Or rather, how could what she had longed for and wanted so much be like this? Mia had rejected Annie's dry, frozen life, her flexible solitude. But what did she want now?

Pregnant, unemployed. No alternative. Calling out, trying to make herself heard over twenty-two dogs companionably howling. He could see her mouth opening. Suppose she was saying: YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME HERE!

But she was probably only saying, don't forget to fill up the car, and check the oil, too. She was always so prudent.

He drove through the damp, dark but still green river valley, then up to the mountain where the colours were turning brown and yellow. Here and there a thin layer of snow lay on the shifting surfaces of the sedge. When he started going downhill again, the colours flared. There had been frost on the long slopes down to the lakes and the birches had tongues of fire. The water was harder and bluer than the sky.

The sign with the village name on it on the Norwegian side had lost a few more letters. If you didn't know where you were, what it said was incomprehensible.

BLKWE.

Birger saw him coming and came down the slope to meet him. He must have been sitting waiting in the kitchen window. He was out of breath when he got into the car. Saddie had followed him halfway down the slope, then sat down.

'It's down in Tangen,' he said. 'Furthest out.'

The village was quiet, people presumably at their evening meal. It would soon be dusk and Birger was keen they should get out there before it got dark. They drove past Anna Starr's cottage and the road shrank to a couple of b.u.mpy tractor tracks. With the four-wheel-drive, Johan would make it all the way there, Birger thought. Parallel with the tractor path ran the road to the camping site.

The tractor road ended at a loading point. Tangen had been clear-felled, but the birch wood had grown and become impenetrable. They could make out pine plants with split and deformed tops. Elk lived out on the headland.

'The path's ruined,' said Birger. 'We'll have to get down to the sh.o.r.e as best we can, and I'll probably find the way from there.'

The sky darkened, but it looked as if light were coming out of the lake. When they were finally facing the place a steep, stony slope littered with sc.r.a.pmetal they could only make out each other's faces if they turned to the water. A wheel glinted, a petrol tank, a broken headlight. Johan went closer. The petrol tank was shaped like a small body. He had often thought that when it had been between his knees in front of him. He had bought the enamel in tiny little tins. Such good quality! He could still distinguish the colours in the science-fiction landscape painted on the tank. Orange, violet, black and yellow.

'My moped,' he said.

'Are you sure?'

'Yes. Look at the enamel on the picture. Most of it's still there. Everything else is just rust.'

'Yes, that's what I thought,' said Birger. 'Actually, I was almost certain.'

They sat at Annie's kitchen table. It was dark out now, the wind tearing through the aspens. Birger had put out sausage and bread.

'Lumberman's food,' he said. 'You'll have to excuse it. But it'll get better. I'll start cooking proper food again.'

He sounded as if he were making a promise to himself.

'I thought I'd fill the freezer after the share-out. Mia wouldn't mind, would she?'

Birger didn't start talking about Annie until they had finished eating and were sitting on the sofa in the almost dark room.

'She had so many whims. She talked such a lot. But we should have kept in mind how sensible she was. She really was tremendously sensible. Of course she hadn't run off to look for any ufo after she had seen you and recognised you. She didn't go up to Gudrun to suggest they should go and pick morels. That was probably just an excuse. I think she asked Gudrun about you. But she probably confused the issue, so Gudrun never thought any more about it except as chat. Annie wasn't going picking morels at all. She went straight down to Anna Starr to ask where the sc.r.a.p they had fished out of the lake was. She'd heard about it, of course. She made her way out there and looked at it. That confirmed it for her.'

'They sank my moped?'

'They?'

Johan fell silent. Birger still hadn't switched on the lamp by the sofa. That made it easier. It was like looking into the dark and getting used to it. You began to distinguish faces. The face.

'There's a moment that I've occasionally thought about,' said Birger. 'You remember what you were doing when you heard Kennedy had been shot. Or it's probably Palme for you. I remember what it was like when I found out what had happened up by the Lobber. ke Vemdal had gone to the office on the camping site. He was talking to Henry Stromgren on the phone. Then he came back. I was standing at the window, looking out over the lake. I have always thought of it as serenity. Then everything became different, for me as well. Barbro and everything. Nothing was ever the same again after that moment. I saw Bjorne Brandberg rowing towards me. He was using an otter board. He must have been holding the long line between his teeth. When everyone else was sleeping off a hangover, Bjorne Brandberg was taking the opportunity to fish with the otter board. That was serenity.'

He fell silent for a while. Johan couldn't see his face because Birger was sitting with his back to the window and it was growing dark very quickly now.

'It was only today I realised what it was I had seen. Bjorne had the otter board with him for the sake of appearances. He had been out on the lake to sink your moped. I don't know how he got it down to Tangen without anyone seeing it. After all, it's impossible to move around here without being observed. Never mind whether it's day or night. And the moped would have made a b.l.o.o.d.y awful row.'

'The Duett,' said Johan. 'I don't know if I remember it, or whether I just think I remember it. We were driving through the village, that woman from Finland and I. I saw Henry Vidart's Duett on its way out to Tangen. I crouched down because I didn't want anyone to see me.'

'It's true that someone had moved it. It was by the road up to Vidart's later.'

'The Duett had been parked up by the barn at our place. He could put the moped in the back without anyone seeing it.'

He could hear Birger breathing heavily through his open mouth and Saddie snoring under the table.

'If only they had sunk the moped again, then nothing would have happened to Annie. That's the sort of thoughts you have,' said Birger. 'But they must have been afraid the nets would get caught on it. The fishing's good outside Tangen. They usually put out lines from the point and outwards.'

'Do you think he sank the moped to help me?'

'No. But Annie may have thought that. She decided to go down Memory Lane and ask him.'

'Do you mean she was on her way to Starhill?'

'No, Memory Lane doesn't go that way. All the paths have been obliterated. There aren't any fixed points for the memory. It's a clear-felled area that became tundra. Hardly anything grows there. It's too exposed to frosts. No, all memory has been wiped out there. If Annie created her own Memory Lane with all the stations as she taught the children, I think it led to Nirsbuan.'

'What would she go there for? Was that sensible?'

'Don't you know he lives there?'

'Bjorne?'

'He started living in a company hut by the bridge across the Lobber. That was when he was working on the clear-felling. It was a large area and took a long time. In the end he had to move to Nirsbuan. There's a narrow strip left there which belongs to you lot. Didn't you know that Bjorne has become the sort who can't live among other people any longer?'

'Gudrun told me he keeps himself very much to himself.'

'He lives up there when he is not admitted to Froson. I think Annie was on her way to him. We must go there tomorrow.'

When they got up, Johan saw that the streetlights were on, a bluish-white light in the foliage along the edge of the road. He wondered what they were supposed to illuminate.

They walked over what had first been called the Starhill area but now, after almost twenty years, was never called anything but the Area. The other clear-felled areas had gradually filled in. First with birch and rowan scrub. Then the pine plants came out of their tubes and fought their way up to the light.

But the Area had not become forest. It was mossy and even had patches of berry scrub. In among the low birch thicket, here and there a spruce plant had survived, deformed by the snow, elk and storms.

They had had difficulty getting away. It was already Sunday afternoon when they left the car at Bjornstubacken. Birger didn't want to cross the ford at the Lobber. Johan was also glad not to have to see that cold, racing water.

A path had once run here. The path began to run when the gra.s.s bent over. Summer after summer. Soles and hoofs and the weight they carried repeated the action. The bilberry scrub finally learnt and retreated.

A network of paths, walking veins, memory vessels finer and finer out into the headlands of spruce forest towards the marshes and mountain heaths.

Remembering right out into the stony scree. Not getting lost. Remembering with your feet. Not with a sick tumour called longing which reproduces images wildly and crudely and crookedly. No, foot memories, leg memories. The capercaillie's coa.r.s.e droppings of pine needles, on pine needles below a large pinetop he had ripped at with his beak.

The Anton Jonssa path. He herded horses for the village. And the horses thundered out the path, thumping it so that it came into existence and stayed firm. Everyone knew it.

The morels: their white threads found themselves in a fresh pile of soil kicked up by a horse. They remembered year after year with their brown bodies in the Whitsun damp.

In the olden days the Lapp took timber for his reindeer enclosure here. Barking dogs and soft calls. There, there. Peaked Lapp shoes pointing out the path. It was steeper then, up towards the stream. Later the sowthistle grew into it. Lynx tracks in the mud of the stream. The lynx makes no path. She is present but outside. Hunger holes where the soul of the lynx should be.

The memory must also have time to lose itself slowly. Gra.s.s to rise. Grow again. New path. Behind the Lapp path, working backwards. Another new path, taking another winding curve. Strange to call it new when it is older, but memory renews. All the way back to the youth of the forest.

Imagine a time when the ground responded to the foot. That is how young the earth was.

Leafy treetops. Birds. Fires.

The path had gone. There were the remains of a tractor track, but that led upwards. They had to follow the river to find it. Johan had Birger ahead of him and saw his great body taking the steep falls and plodding on up the rises. He had strong thigh muscles, visible under the material of his trousers, his b.u.t.tocks small, his weight all in front, arching him forwards at a sluggish but steady gait. He had walked trackless ground a great deal when out shooting.

Johan couldn't figure out what they were going to say to Bjorne. They had seen his car, an old wine-red Saab, at the Stromgren homestead. He must have taken the path and avoided the Area where he had driven the processor.

Birger showed no fear once they had got going. He had taken some packs of dressings out of his doctor's bag and put them into a rucksack. Johan carried it for him.

They came to the Brandbergs' land where the great spruces still stood. 1:34, it was called. The mosses grew out in the damp autumn air, drinking and swelling. The deciduous trees were thinning out, their colours vanishing, the leaves fading and displaying their skeletons of nerves. Here and there colour flared, caused by the frost.

It was very quiet. He had expected to hear the clatter of game birds taking off, perhaps even see a large capercaillie c.o.c.k flying between the trees with his heavy load of flesh.

The sound of an axe broke the silence, the rhythm that of someone chopping wood. Two, at the most three blows of the axe, then silence as he picked up the next log. One or two were stubborn. Duller sounds as he swung the axe and log onto the block. They were now so close that they could hear the dry sound of wood splitting as he twisted the two parts free with his hands.

They couldn't see him. He was probably behind the cookhouse he used as a woodshed. Johan was standing by the privy, now slowly being taken over by forest. Moss and lichen were growing in the cracks of the steps, greyish-black and green-spotted lichen covering the planking with a rough skin, the timber slowly decaying beneath it.

Birger had sat down on a stone, presumably to rest in order to be level-headed when they confronted him. Perhaps he was wondering what to say. But Johan didn't really believe he was planning anything beforehand. He was used to plodding straight on, straight into misfortune.

The chopping stopped, but Bjorne didn't appear. It seemed to Johan that he was standing there, listening. Could he have heard them? Or could he sense them? Pick up their scent?

Bjorne was singular. Johan had been quite young when he realised it. There was something dark about Bjorne. He followed the brothers, moved just like them. But he was shapeless. No one could say Bjorne was like this or that great talker, quick-witted, like Pekka, or compet.i.tive, like Per-Ola, unafraid of pain. Bjorne was the one who followed them.

Birger got up, went over and shouted. Bjorne immediately appeared from behind the cookhouse. He held one hand in his pocket and was walking rather stiffly.

Then everything became quite ordinary. Birger and Bjorne greeted each other, the words falling as they should. Oh, yes, so you two're out an' about, are you? Yes, we thought we'd make our way up here. Did yer come across t'Area? Yes, Christ, there'll never be any forest there. Not many birds this year. Well, there's some all right. But higher up. In t'thick forest.

They followed him indoors. There were rat droppings in the porch where he stored the firewood, and a rank smell. Maybe the stoat hunted there. When he opened the kitchen door, the air hit them like a sickly warm wall, reeking of coffee and snuff. Previously Bjorne had given off an earthy smell, but now the smell had sickened. The smell of old man, Johan thought. He's old. Not yet fifty, but old.

Bjorne put a log into the stove, picked up a battered, blackened coffee pot and tipped a scoop of water into it. Then he opened the window and threw out the water and the old grounds. Johan wondered what it looked like outside the window. All the time, as he scooped in fresh water, added the coffee, put out a loaf and a box of soft cheese, he said nothing, and that was quite usual. Bjorne usually said nothing when he was working. But at the moment he was using only one hand, the other still in his pocket.

'We've been to take a look at Johan's moped. The one you sank outside Tangen,' said Birger, after emptying his cup of coffee.

Bjorne looked up. The colourless blue eyes appeared. Then his face closed up again, as if it had no features. He was shapeless. Heavy rather than fat. The hair, once brown, had faded and thinned. There was a deep mark round his head where his cap had been, greasy compressed hair at the base. His cheeks and chin were unshaven, the stubble grey and white. He was holding a slice of bread in a big hand spotted black where engine oil had penetrated.

'Hadn't you heard they'd got a moped up? When they were dragging for something fallen from the skies, or whatever it was.'

He made a movement that might have been a shake of the head.

'Sleeping all right?' said Birger unexpectedly. Johan remembered Bjorne had been his patient.

'Not so well,' said Bjorne. 'Used to. But now 'tis h.e.l.l. Usually put a buckler fern in t'bed. There's somethin' in ferns what makes you drop off. But you have t'watch it. You might drop off for ever.'

He dipped his slice of bread into his coffee and sucked into him the part that became too loose and was about to fall back into the coffee.

'Used to work so hard a man jist fell in t'bed. A man slept then.'

'I saw you when you were coming from the lake and had sunk the moped. You were pretending to fish with the long line and the otter board. Johan saw you going down in Vidart's Duett.'

'Remember once cycling home, at night t'was, and quite light. Been clearing above Alda's and decided to b.l.o.o.d.y well finish before t'weekend. An' I did. But was so b.l.o.o.d.y tired I didn't think I'd make it home on t'bike. Then I felt it going by itself. T'was like if someone had his feet on the pedals and were pedalling for me.'

His eyes glinted. He seemed to want to see the effect of his story. If they believed that he believed it.

'A man can get help,' he said, and he grinned.

'Remember old man Annersa?' said Johan. 'He didn't get any help.'

Johan had been quite young when his brothers had told him about the old man in Vitstensviken. His name was Paul Annersa and he lived alone ten kilometres from Blackreed village. His cottage was on one side of the road and the stable and barn on the other. A great many people had seen the old man crossing the road, especially on autumn evenings before the snow had come. He was going to tend his horse. He died late one autumn.

Sometimes he used to be away for a couple of weeks at a time, sleeping in forest cabins, his horse with him. So no one exactly gave it much thought when he hadn't been seen for quite a while.

It had been his appendix. The bottle of liquor and box of painkillers found on the floor by his bed showed that he must have suffered. The horse died of thirst. The old man never got to it. Its stall was kicked to pieces, but the iron chain had held.

The old man is very bent as he walks without looking where he's going. There's no need. One of the Brunstrom boys came driving at high speed round a corner. He didn't see the old man until it was too late and he had time to think, Christ Christ Christ Almighty! But he drove right through the old man. He was like grey air.

The horse screamed and its kicks thundered on the wall of the stall. The wood splintered and broke. But its screams went unheard and the old man's body was lying still on the pull-out sofa.

Ever since then, he crosses the road at dusk. He's going to see if his horse has water. He must have worried about it at the time, although he couldn't get out of bed. That is how strong the impulse was. And strongest in the autumn, at dusk.

'Do you remember him?'

Bjorne nodded.

'It hurts sometimes,' said Johan.

''Tis why I haven't no woman,' said Bjorne. 'Haven't even a cat. No one after me.'

It was growing dark outside. They would be sitting there getting nowhere with him. He would talk about things that made his strangeness and aloneness quite pleasing to his listener. But Bjorne was no oddball. Perhaps he's empty, Johan thought. Nothing but that inside him. He himself isn't there.

He had done it.