Part 10 (2/2)

'Stop, Dan!' said Annie.

But he drove on, very slowly along the b.u.mpy timber track up towards Bjornstubacken. When they stopped at a loading bay by the road, she tried to take Mia in her arms, but the girl had grown big over the last year and she was strong when she resisted. Dan had got out of the car and was standing watching them. He's thinking I'll give up now. He d.a.m.ned well looks as if this is just what he expected.

Anger flared up and died away just as quickly. She grew angry when she was under pressure and could say idiotic things. But she had never before felt under pressure like this with Dan. Mia was sobbing now, though she sounded slightly calmer. Outside, Dan was tying up the rucksack, looking rather absent, and she thought he was pale. The police questioning had presumably been more unpleasant than he had let on.

'Do you still want to?' he had asked her when they left. She had simply nodded.

'You're not afraid?'

It had nothing to do with them. It was something that had happened during Midsummer drunkenness tourists, a foreigner. It was horrible, but it was over.

'We're a whole gang up there,' he said. 'No one is alone.'

Packing up their things and paying Aagot f.a.gerli had gone quickly. Aagot had asked about Dan. They could have coffee before they left. She seemed to want to see him. But Annie said no thank you and that they were in a hurry.

'Hurry' was a word from the old days, but when it slipped out of her she thought it all right. At least it was something people understood. She felt the same powerful relief as she had the first time she had left the village. But Dan set off towards the store.

'I've got to make a phone call.'

His words seemed to remain hanging in the car. She had thought they had left all that behind. He sounded as if he were tied up, fully booked. Perhaps he was phoning home? But where, in that case? He had said he no longer had anything to do with his parents.

But there had been a murder. She herself had phoned her parents from Aagot f.a.gerli's house and told them everything was all right.

He spoke earnestly for a long time. She could see him through the gla.s.s and it hurt inside, the nerves in her stomach cutting like knives. It hurt so much she realised with a kind of astonishment that she was jealous. Suspicious. I am destroyed. Perhaps I can never live any other life but this complicated one.

He said nothing about the phone call when he came back. Perhaps he hadn't time. The police car slid out from the s.p.a.ce behind the petrol pumps the moment they set off up towards the road to the homestead and the mountain. It must have been there all the time, and now it pa.s.sed them and flagged them down before they had got out of the village.

She thought it unpleasant, but Dan was openly scornful. He told them that the faded red VW had been outside Aagot f.a.gerli's barn since early that morning.

'You could have come in at any time,' he said.

They took no notice of what he said, only asked him to go with them to the camping site where they had an incident room. Annie had to have coffee with the old Norwegian woman after all, afterwards roaming round the steep slope with Mia until he came back two hours later. By then they were hungry and she ought to have gone back to the cottage to fix something, at least for Mia. But she thought it would take so. long to explain to the old woman why they had come back. And to go shopping for food, then clean up the cottage again after they had eaten. Anyway, Dan had some fruit in the car.

He had two ways of being. He was mostly turned on and energetic, a field of force surrounded him and he inspired others. When he moved round a room and spoke, everyone looked at him. She had thought of intellectual and s.e.xual energy when she had seen him for the first time, reckoning it was zest for life.

But it was more a gathering of strength, willpower, defying boredom and loss of energy. Dancing. Keeping himself visible.

His other way of being always started with pallor, his lips turning thin, his voice slightly irritable as he retreated into himself, and he seemed to turn grey. She wondered whether that was coming on now. He walked round the car without looking at them. In a quiet voice, she tried to explain to Mia that they were going to walk a totally different way. They weren't going to wade across the river. There was a small bridge higher up and then an easy path through the forest all the way to Starhill.

'All our things will go there later.'

'How? Cars can't go that way.'

Yes, how? They would presumably have to be carried up.

'I don't know,' said Annie. 'But we'll have all our things there.'

When they reached the bridge late in the afternoon, she saw it was quite big and the path was broad with tractor tracks along it. Dan said the bridge was new and they were making a road for timber trucks, so presumably they were going to start felling soon. The commune felt threatened, but still didn't really know what was going on or how close to Starhill the felling would come.

'Petrus doesn't want us to use the bridge.'

'Because it belongs to the Enemy?'

But he seemed to dislike her joking about it.

It took them a long time to get up there. Usually it took about an hour, Dan said, but they had heavy rucksacks with them and often had to stop to let Mia rest. The much used path ran steadily upwards, the bark on spruce roots worn away by feet, paws and hoofs. Occasionally they saw a deep, clear hoofprint where the ground was dark and muddy. Annie knew nothing about tracks, but such large cows didn't exist, so she told Mia elk had been there, leaving their round and oval spheres of droppings in big heaps.

They came to a plateau and Mia had to rest again. Annie was worried Dan might think they were being too slow. But he let Mia look through his binoculars and talked encouragingly to her. The spruces were spa.r.s.er now and there were no pines to be seen. Birches had taken over with their black banners of lichen and pale-green clouds of foliage.

Dan whistled under his breath as he walked. Annie realised it was quite unconscious, a toneless whistling through scarcely pursed lips. She could distinguish two tunes. One was a popular song from the fifties of which she remembered only the chorus: 'We'll go far we'll be fine in the back here in the car.'

The other was a song of yearning. They had been walking for over an hour when she realised what it was: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Film music. She couldn't connect either of the tunes with Dan. Of course, that was because she knew nothing about his previous life. Things hadn't been good for him. That was all he had said. Had they been so poor? Were there any really poor people nowadays? Her own background never felt so pet.i.tbourgeois as when she thought about his past. She didn't even know how to ask the questions.

Her head was aching and she reckoned it must have something to do with the pressure of the rucksack straps on her shoulders. After a time she couldn't think about anything else. She had thought they would talk to each other, but they did so only at the beginning, then fell into a kind of vacant plodding and got out of breath on the uphill stretches. Her headache settled above one eye, where it kept exploding and flickering. As soon as the going was more or less level or went downhill, Dan started whistling again. She wished he would stop, but was reluctant to say anything. In the end she began to lag behind with Mia in order not to have to hear that hissing little whistling, just out of tune.

After two hours, the birches started thinning out. They walked down into a hollow where the path turned darkly muddy, thick clumps of globeflowers growing in the gra.s.s, the buds still tight, hard and green, only faintly turning yellow. She remembered they had been right out at Nirsbuan and realised that here they must be very high up, almost in another season. She also saw the gra.s.s was grazed where the slopes rose after the hollow. When they reached the first hilltop, Starhill became visible.

A handful of cottages, red and grey. One with a stone base. The nearest cottage was wooden, the colour of the timbers alternating, gleaming in grey, silver and grey-green. Beyond it were red-painted houses, the paintwork eroded by the wind. They look natural, she thought. Sensible.

It was all washed over by a chilly mountain breeze, carrying neither smells nor warmth. Tasteless and odourless, the breeze washed over their faces as if they were stones or gra.s.sy slopes, the sound of birds rising and falling from the birchwoods.

A stony mountain rose behind the pasture, a perpendicular precipice down towards the belt of birches collapsed into a rectangular pattern. The meaningless straight lines and angles frightened her. In the other direction, the pasture land was encircled by blue-black mountains with irregular white patches, unmoving and distant to the north, west and south. The ravine of the river Lobber ran in a wide curve round the foot of the mountain, separating the forested hillside and pastureland from the mountain. But it was really their height that made them so distant.

They all had different characteristics. Furthest north stood a long sloping mountain that appeared to have been halved like a loaf of bread, the perpendicular sliced surface gleaming blue. It looked unreal, a piece of scenery. Diagonally behind it rose another which was white and gleaming with ice. It resembled the top of a pyramid and must have been very high and far away.

Fallen, shattered shapes, inhuman proportions. This chaos of stone appeared to have been recently petrified in the wind.

She heard a low grunting sound and when she turned to look at the pastureland down below the mountainside, she saw a flock of ewes with their lambs. They were watching, standing quite still, their silvery heads and long curved noses raised and turned towards the path. Their ears were pink, the sun coming through them. She felt they were waiting for one of them to move or say something. Mia looked scared. Then Annie took a step towards them and without her knowing where they came from, a few words appeared, a childish rigmarole.

'Oh, little sheep, oh, little sheep, we won't harm your babies . . . such lovely babies, such lovely babies you have, you little sheep . . .'

Mia giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. The ewes resumed grazing. Of course they hadn't recognised her voice, but she hadn't frightened them.

A dog started barking. She should have known how quiet it was up there from the whispering of the gra.s.s. She could hear the tinkling of the waterfall in the stream far away, but she first heard the silence when the barking of the dog broke out and sounds came from the mountain. They were dull, regular and of frightening strength. At first she couldn't connect them with the figure silently but rhythmically raising and lowering an axe at the corner of one of the houses. Then she managed to make out the dry real sound of the axe blade and the echo from the perpendicular mountainside.

She still knew nothing and was accepting everything as if it were reality. The primaeval wielding of the axe. The security of the rhythmical sounds of a blade striking wood. The eternal barking of a dog.

They came closer and she realised that the long cloven beard of the axe wielder was not white round his mouth but yellow, his eyes not faded and watery, and he was not ancient as he had first appeared to be. Petrus. She had the impression that the wood chopping had been staged the moment Dan, she and Mia had come into sight from the cottage nearest to the path. The dog must have come out at the same time as the man. Otherwise it would have started barking much earlier.

Then Brita appeared in her long home-woven skirt and an ap.r.o.n raised by her stomach. She was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her plait lay curled into a knot at the nape of her neck. The plaits of the two girls were hanging down in front. Annie could see the plaits were glossy, but only because they were greasy, lying close to their heads and divided into strands. Confused, she felt a sense of disgust. Mia had stiffened.

Children are like strange dogs. Alert almost to the point of terror. So she didn't hear or see much more than Mia and the strange children as they were taken into the timbered cottage. She was also more tired than she cared to show and she knew Mia was very hungry.

Porridge, it was. Brita ladled it out of a saucepan on the iron stove. Porridge with husks and seeds and small hard bits in it. Petrus thoroughly a.n.a.lysed it in his melodious voice, names of gra.s.ses and herbs, kinds of seed, fruits and nuts slowly enumerated and repeated. Mia pushed her bowl away so that the milk slopped.

'It smells nasty,' she said. 'Like inside shoes.'

<script>