Blackwater. Part 37

'He's probably up at Nirsbuan,' he said.

'Is Gudrun there?'

'She's at her evening cla.s.s.'

'Where?'

'At the school.'

Before Birger shut the car door, he leant in towards Johan.

'I'll go in here and wait. You must go down and fetch Gudrun. Take her to Annie's house and wait there with her.'

'Are you going to phone the police now?'

'I must,' said Birger. 'I promised I wouldn't. But that was on condition he went with me.'

He himself thought it was odd to be standing there arguing the toss about his promise. Torsten was still standing in the strong light on the steps, trying to peer into the car.

'Who's that?' he said.

Women were on their way out to their cars when he got down to the school. But the Audi was still there. Johan drove up and parked as close to the steps as he could get. He wound down the window and listened to them chatting as they came out two at a time. He wondered what course they were taking this winter. Leatherwork? Genealogy? He marvelled at her going there. At the way she struggled on, day by day.

Her everyday life was to be ruined now. No more chat. No more coffee, lamplight, security. In a few moments, as soon as she looked up from the handbag she was just zipping up. Then he realised that it would take a little while. She wouldn't twig straight away.

'So it's you?'

She didn't want to go with him at first.

'You must,' he said. 'Just leave the car here.'

The other cars started up and he saw one or two people waving to her. She was annoyed with him.

'Why on earth should I go up to Annie Raft's house?' she said. 'What business have I there?'

But in the end she had got into his car and then she could do nothing about where they were going to go.

'You didn't really know her. You were never friends, were you?'

She said nothing, but she looked sideways at him. He drove straight up there. The gra.s.s was wet and his wheels probably left ugly marks. But he had to get her into the house.

'We're going to wait here,' he said. 'Birger Torbjornsson is with Torsten. The police are on their way.'

She asked no questions, but went ahead of him after he had unlocked. She was so small, her dark head level with his chest. He locked the outside door behind them.

'Wait,' he said. 'Don't switch on the light.'

He went round pulling down all the blinds and when he turned the light on, she was standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, her face closed and guarded. Saddie had been sleeping in the bedroom and came lumbering out in all her deafness, sniffing at Gudrun's slacks with no real interest, her tail vaguely wagging.

'Take your coat off and go in and sit down,' he said. 'We may have to wait quite a while.'

She sat down at the kitchen table. He wondered what she was feeling as she looked around. He could see the kitchen through her eyes. The batik cloth on the kitchen table was flimsy. A yellowed rice-paper shade hung from the ceiling. At least Mia had cleared away everything that had hung from the hood above the stove a pair of pigeon feet, bunches of dried herbs, a birch fungus all covered with cobwebs and dust.

'Birger Torbjornsson and I did just what Annie did,' he said. 'We went to Nirsbuan to see Bjorne.'

It was cold indoors, but he didn't want to light the stove. He reckoned he had to keep an eye on her all the time.

'We'd been down to take a look at my moped he'd sunk.'

She didn't reply. She had put aside her bag but not unzipped her jacket. She was sitting straight up on the chair, her hands on the cloth in front of her. Her face was pale, but he had thought that every time he had seen her in recent years. Perhaps that was because she dyed her hair. He wondered whether she would now let it go grey.

This is where it all began, he thought. This is where Annie Raft stood looking out through the window and spotted me. How did she recognise me? No one knows.

She had thought she was seeing her child in the arms of a madman. A boy who had been insane or drunk and had plunged a knife over and over again into two people enclosed in a tent.

He suddenly noticed that Gudrun was cold. They had sat in silence for so long, and she hadn't shifted position, but she was shaking and her nose was running slightly. She kept sniffing, a nervous sound, the only sound in the house.

'I'll light the stove,' he mumbled.

He fumbled with birch bark and matches. It was easier to talk to her when he wasn't looking at her.

'Bjorne has told Birger that he's the one who did that down by the Lobber. He was to come down with us, but he ran away. We were afraid he might come and hurt you. Now that he knows it was you.'

He very carefully made a little pile of kindling before putting a match to the bark. A long time went by before she said anything. Then her voice was dry. Or hoa.r.s.e.

'Bjorne?'

'Yes. Bjorne. Not me. You were wrong. Annie Raft was, too.'

For a long spell she sat quite still, then he saw she was beginning to tremble.

'Hasn't she got electricity in here?'

She almost screamed it, her voice breaking. She had risen to her feet and wrapped her arms round herself. She was so cold she was shaking.

'Yes,' he said. 'Of course.'

He rushed into the living room and switched on the lamps and the radiators. He found a blanket folded up on the bed.

'Here, put this round you. Sit on the sofa. It'll soon warm up. Birger's got some whisky somewhere. Wait.'

She wrapped the blanket round her and sat looking out of it at Annie Raft's room. The curtains were of unbleached cotton. A colourful p. er monster floated below the ceiling. Must have been something the schoolchildren had made. She looked across at the bed and he thought about what she had said: 'Hasn't she got electricity?' As if Annie Raft were still alive. And she looked as if she had never seen the room before. Yet she had gone in here with the key she had taken from the shed.

'Had Bjorne told you where she kept the key?'

She looked up and nodded. Absent-mindedly, he would have called it. But it couldn't have been that.

'And the gun? That it was behind the bed?'

'Everyone knew that.'

She looked so small, sitting there in that shapeless, grey blanket. It hurt him to see her; it was painful. He had had no idea you could feel so much for another person, and for a moment he felt terror at having a child. If the child were injured was this what he would feel like? Helpless and in pain.

His hands were uncertain as he poured whisky out for her and he spilt some on the coffee table. She gazed vacantly at the little pool, and suddenly tears came into Johan's eyes and his throat contracted. Normally she would have got up to fetch a cloth. She was always quick to do that kind of thing. Now she just sat there looking. She looked at him strangely as he wept. Guarded and timid. Almost frightened.

In the end he managed to control his tears. Gudrun sniffed again, that small moist sound in her nose so neat and tidy beside his noisy snivelling. He had to go and fetch some kitchen roll and took the opportunity to put another log into the stove. I'll do what I have to, anyhow, he thought. In the past, she too had had the sh.e.l.l of habit and everyday routine around her. She did what she was supposed to do. Took courses. Joined search parties and went to the funeral, for that matter. Now it was over.

'What did Annie say when she came to you?'

'She asked about you.'

'About that Midsummer Eve?'

She nodded.

'The moped,' she said. 'She had worked out that Bjorne had sunk it. I don't know how.'

'You didn't know they'd got it up?'

She shook her head.

'It had being lying at Tangen for several years. Annie must have figured out it might have been the same one. She probably knew from Birger that Bjorne was on the lake that Midsummer Eve.'

They heard a sound on the window and Johan jumped. It sounded like someone sc.r.a.ping on the pane. Then it was repeated more faintly and he recognised it the rain hurtling in gusts against the pane.

He had been frightened and shown it. A moment ago, he had wept. He wished he could have been different now. But she was looking at him so strangely, maybe it did not cross her mind that he could help her. He was and remained a child to her.

She had seen her child threatened. So had Annie Raft. As soon as the two met, danger loomed. Neither of them had considered talking to us, handing over the problem.

If only it had been spontaneous at least. A reflex action, the way a cat lashes out with its paw. But she had arranged it. It was quickly done, but it was thorough. She had lured Annie Raft up to Nirsbuan. That gave her plenty of time. She wrote the note, fixed the thermos of coffee and put buns in a plastic bag. The irony of such ordinariness.

'You never found her cartridges.'

'She hadn't got any,' she said.

'Yes, she had. Behind the clock radio.'

For a moment he saw her face as it must have looked then, tense and calculating. But now she was calculating with hindsight. If only she had known. If only she had looked behind the radio. Just as swiftly, the expression vanished. She stared at the flimsy oriental rug Saddie had rucked up, but she didn't seem to see it. She had lost interest in the house and Annie Raft. Her gla.s.s of whisky was untouched, and he remembered now that she never drank spirits.

Somehow or other he recognised most of what she had done. She had arranged things for her family. She had brought her everyday competence to the tasks she had to carry out. The thermos. The buns. The written note. He remembered the times when she had brought him milk and sandwiches to his room. She never pretended it was anything special. Only an arrangement that would make things easier for everyone. She seldom sat the way she was sitting now.

Once he could remember her sitting on the bed in his room, her face pale. She had been staring out of the window, chewing her bottom lip. She had had moments of doubt. But she did not yield to them.

He thought he could follow her in the everyday actions she had carried out that Sat.u.r.day afternoon, with determination and without letting their irony get through to her.

But he couldn't picture her down at the Lobber.

And yet she had been there. It had been calculated. Annie Raft would have to cross the river at the ford when she came back from Nirsbuan. No matter how the paths wound and divided within the parcel of forest, that was the only place where she could get across the river. But Johan was incapable of picturing Gudrun there.

He could not picture her going up close, removing the safety catch, pulling the trigger and firing. He wanted to ask, but the question could not be spoken aloud. It was too shameful and too emotional as if there were still some decorum to adhere to.

How could you? That question would not pa.s.s his lips.

He remembered a night of wine-drinking and talk. First, Mia had taken him along to the library, where a famous old poet gave a reading of poems he'd written over five decades. Afterwards, they had had wine and pizza and eventually had gone back to the home of one of her colleagues at the museum. There had been much talk and quant.i.ties of cheap wine were consumed.

They had talked about the event by the Lobber. And about that ma.s.s rape outside Pite. The old poet, a sensitive, gifted person, a conscience for them all, was able to describe it in detail. The way the last youth in the tent had cut up the unconscious girl with a broken bottle. How he had jammed it up her v.a.g.i.n.a.

They had been ordinary boys, boys who bought Mother's Day roses and Christmas presents. A consensus prevailed beneath the lamplight and the coils of smoke. Their eyes smarted. They were speaking rather indistinctly, but were in agreement on the influence of alcohol, on ma.s.s psychosis and the crudeness of army life. On violations in childhood, poverty and Rambo films. Then the old poet said: 'I think I would've been capable of doing that myself.'

There was utter silence.

'Under those circ.u.mstances. The tent. Drink. Yes, I would have been capable of it myself.'

And they could see beneath that bowl of yellow light and in the bluish coils of cigarette smoke that he was staring into himself. They realised that he could see backwards to that event in the tent which they had not been able to make out in all their talk, and which still none of them could see clearly could not even imagine at all. They had been very taken with his greatness and the depth of his humanity, and a long time went by before they had started talking again, and drinking wine and smoking.

But Johan had grasped Mia fiercely by the elbow and said that they were going home now. She had been irritated and a bit cross, but she had gone with him. He had drawn a very deep breath out in the cold winter air and thought of the poet up there as an anti-Christ.

'You didn't like him,' said Mia.

'He made me sick.'

'Why? Because he tells the truth about us?'

'Because what he says about himself is probably true.'

They hadn't mentioned it again. It had been an open question between them, whether you can see into your own darkness and whether it actually is your responsibility to do so. Or whether you evoke the darkness and make it into your own by toying with it.

'Are you still cold?'

Gudrun nodded.

'This may last quite a time. Wouldn't you like to lie down for a while?'

She shook her head. He got up and put more wood in the stove. Should he ask her if she wanted anything to eat? A sandwich or something? But it was late. Perhaps she was feeling sick.

'How could you think it was me?' he said.

That question had also been difficult to ask. But now he had asked it. She looked up with a trace of derision.

'Well, you're believing it of me.'

Her face took on a little life from the irony, but it didn't last many moments.

'I had help, after all,' she said.

'Bjorne?'

She nodded.