Part 27 (1/2)

Mia went ahead and Birger soon noticed Johan was dropping behind, waiting for Birger to catch up, then Johan grabbed his arm so fiercely that it hurt.

He had seen the face first. The water pouring over it was so clear, he thought she was lying there watching him approaching. Her eyes were open and the hair streaming out in the direction of the current couldn't hide her gaze. Then he realised she wasn't looking and the white skin couldn't feel the cold of the water. It took on the colours of the riverbed and the stones as ripples in the current and sunspots moved over it; for a moment or two her hand looked as if it were gold and then it darkened to brown. And yet the skin was always mostly white, the whiteness apparently a quality independent of the s.h.i.+fts of light and water.

Johan stepped backwards because he had no desire to see any more. Not for a moment had he considered going down among the stones into the racing water to touch her or try to lift her out. She was bloodless and as cold as the thaw water from the high mountain now rus.h.i.+ng over her. He didn't have to touch her to know.

As he made his way back up to the marsh, all he could think of was how to tell Mia. When he got there, he lost courage, so it was Birger he told, and the large solid man bent right forward as if he had received a blow in the solar plexus. A sound came out of him as well. Mia came running up.

'What is it?' she cried. He had never heard her voice so shrill. Birger seemed unable to get his breath back and Johan could no longer think at all.

'Where is she?'

'Under the water,' was all he could get out. She began running towards the river, talking shrilly all the time. Or was she screaming? He couldn't distinguish the words but it sounded as if she was quarrelling. Perhaps she was, with her mother. Then Birger woke up. He started stumbling after her and caught up with her just as she fell. Johan stayed where he was and heard her crying, her mouth wide open, her head swinging from side to side. Birger held her and pressed her face to his shoulder so the sound was m.u.f.fled. Johan stood looking at them, thinking it was like looking at two strangers.

Annie had once said that the only thing about her death that she was quite sure of was that she would leave a sizeable amount of rubbish behind. She hadn't meant it literally or had she? She must have been talking about modern Western people, or something of the kind. Birger couldn't remember. He was feeling great irritation and was aware that always preceded an attack of pain.

It often happened. He grew angry. He thought she had talked a lot of nonsense and said unnecessary things. Her joking or was it joking? then turned into irony. If it could be called that. It? What was it that was ironical? Anyhow, he couldn't stand it. It was impersonal. Came out of nowhere. He wanted to scream, which, of course, he didn't. But he often stood there with his mouth open.

Mia was clearing up. Her face was sweaty, and she had gardening gloves on her hands. She was hurling rubbish from the shed into a black sack. In a clumsy way, he was prepared to help her, but nothing came of it.

He hadn't been to Blackwater since the funeral. It was July now, the air heavy with moisture and scents. Mia had hugged him when he came. That was nice of her. Then she had gone back to clearing up.

Johan was going back and forth with cardboard boxes and bags. Birger sat down on a box inside the shed and looked at the mess. He tried to look at one thing at a time: boules, electric cables, skewers, chisels, nails. Bundles of used stamps in plastic bags, ballpoint pens, clothes hangers, an iron spit, a pickaxe with no handle, curtain rings. A round grid. He worked out that it was meant to be fixed in front of a headlight to protect the gla.s.s from stones thrown up, but as far as he knew, she had never had it put on. A dog lead with knots in it, wire lampshade frames, a dirty sheepskin, bits of polystyrene.

In some places the acc.u.mulation was untouched. He recognised it the way you know the pattern of an old carpet. In the places as yet untouched by Mia and still recognisable to him, there should have been no muddle. There hadn't been before. Only a compact and intricate acc.u.mulation. But now the pattern had been destroyed by that. That totally impersonal inhuman? atmosphere he took as irony, as bitterness, though it couldn't have either taste or smell.

Wire in lumpy coils, fuses, brushes full of dog hairs Saddie's and those of a lighter-coloured dog. Nuts and bolts, charcoal, putty knife, clogs, an empty glue tub, plastic sheeting, flowerpots, tattered boots. Tins, cups with no handles. Two lovely great Hoganas jars. Bundles of newspapers. They were from Aagot's day. Pieces of hardboard, emery paper, a sledgehammer, a whole lot of calendars tied up with string, curtain poles, sheets of birch bark. There were paper sacks full of roofing s.h.i.+ngles, but he knew of no s.h.i.+ngle roof there. Hexagonal screwdrivers from ikea, shoehorns, fis.h.i.+ng floats, ski sticks, spinners with rusty hooks, wine bottles, drainpipes, sockets, fis.h.i.+ng spoons, a torn sunhat, a curry-comb. A tea strainer. Medicine bottles, sungla.s.ses, radio valves. Earplugs. Yes, they were earplugs, here, where the silence at night was profound. The dirty yellow material looked like foam rubber. A bench for carding flax. He had seen one like it at the Folklore Museum. Stools, mosquito windows, a pedestal, a wooden club, an awl, tacks, shoelaces, lids of preserving jars.

'What are you looking for?' said Mia. He shook his head. He hadn't known it before she asked, but he was looking for a box of cartridges.

'Nothing,' he said.

'Don't sit here then,' she said, affection in her voice.

He went out into the heavy air. The roses in the hedge were flowering in abundance. Their scent was strong and sweet, scarcely fresh. Annie had said they smelt of incense and myrrh, another time that they smelt like the armpits of the G.o.ddess of love, and during a heat wave she had complained that they smelt like a north African brothel. The way she talked! Presumably just to breathe life into words that would otherwise not be used. Now they came back to him robbed of the note of careless and good-natured raillery. A voice was speaking them inside him. It couldn't be his own and was too mechanical to be human. Nonetheless it was bitter. Caustic.

Johan had cut the gra.s.s. Three large sacks of rubbish stood at the back of his car. He came out with two cans of beer and gave one to Birger. They sat down on the carding bench Mia had carried out on the gra.s.s.

'Oh, so you brought the car right up,' said Birger. Johan had no need to answer. Of course they didn't want to lug the garbage sacks all the way down to the road. But Annie hadn't liked people driving up to the house, though Johan couldn't have known that. Cars made ugly tracks in the gra.s.s when the ground was damp. Over all those years, she had carried her shopping and parcels of books up the slope, referring to Aagot and to Jonetta before her.

'Edit, up above Westlund's, do you remember her?' said Birger. Johan nodded.

'She broke her leg in March last year and had to go to hospital, then to a long-stay ward. In the summer her family came up to sort everything out, for Edit wouldn't be coming home again. A large heap of rubbish lay just where we usually park when we go up on the shoot. Old cake tins and stacks of magazines, tattered galoshes and preserving jars. They had even thrown away Edit's cloth strips she had cut up to make rag rugs.'

He fell silent and thought there had been at least twenty skeins of strips of cloth on that rubbish heap. It wouldn't have been possible to rescue them because it had rained a lot and by the autumn they were half-rotten. Anna Starr had been there and felt them. 'You wonder what kind of people do things like that, throwing away ready-cut rags,' she had said, although she had known perfectly well it was the sons and daughters-in-law.

'Anyhow, there was Edit's hat on the very top of the rubbish mound. The one she used to wear when she was out chopping wood or taking up potatoes. It was a brown felt hat that looked like a pot and had two flowers made of the same felt material on the front. Do you remember it?'

Johan looked at him sideways but said nothing.

'I was up with a beagle I had borrowed. It was November and I thought I'd see if there were any hares up there. On my way down the path, I heard someone chopping wood. It was dusk. I walked past Edit's woodshed, the one that has hut 3 on it, because she got it from the company. That's when I saw her. She was inside and the flowers on that old hat bobbed every time she split the logs.'

He fell silent.

'She was back then,' said Johan.

Why did I tell him that? Birger thought. It had just come out. Almost as if it had to. He had at least stopped himself before finis.h.i.+ng the story as he usually did: that when he had seen the greyish-brown figure in the autumn twilight he had thought it a premonition of Edit's death. The point was that she was alive. She had come back from the long-stay ward, found her felt hat and presumably quite a lot of other things on the rubbish heap, then had set about chopping wood for the winter. The way he had told the story to Johan, it was pointless.

He did talk away like that sometimes, without really knowing where it would lead. Then he saw that grin. With no face. In recent weeks he had mostly been silent. That was better.

Annie had left him alone with a cold scornful smile. It wasn't hers. It was a cold smile with no face.

Mia came out carrying a dirty coat of black cloth and opened it. It was lined with stoat pelts, the thick summer pelt in s.h.i.+fting brown colours. White streaks from the belly and neck patches. The seams joining them together had begun to give way. It looked as if the pelts were about to crawl out of the coat.

'Do you think it was Aagot's?'

'No, when Aagot came back after the war, she was dressed like an American,' said Birger. 'That's Jonetta's coat. Her sister's. She got it from Antaris. She was married to him. He was a Lapp.'

Antaris must have caught the stoats in traps over many years. She had probably been given the coat because he never bothered to fill in the cracks in the chimney breast or tried to insulate the walls. The cold swirled in and she was freezing cold. Antaris had been labourer to the reindeer herdsmen when they married, but then they meant to keep cows and goats. Jonetta came from a peasant farming family across the border, but Antaris never liked farm-work. Annie had shown Birger the stonecrop growing between the stones on the slope. There was also angelica from up on the mountain. That's the kind of thing Antaris brought home to Jonetta. And he had the coat made. But she must have been cold. When Antaris and Jonetta had gone and Aagot moved in, she had put in electric radiators.

But not straight away, he thought. He remembered one January storm, the first time he had ever been to Blackwater. In the late evening, the snow was swirling in a grey storm and the roads were slowly being snowed up. He didn't know where he was. Then he suddenly saw a light glowing in a window high up above the road. It was an electric light, but the squalls of snow seemed to suppress it. He had realised the electricity might go off at any moment, plunging the village into darkness, so he got out of the car and trudged up to the cottage while he could still see something. He wanted to ask where he was. Snow had already drifted up in front of the steps. When he peered through the kitchen window, he saw a woman sitting on a chair, reading in front of the wood stove. She had her feet at the oven door, halfway inside the oven. She was calmly reading and he stood there for so long looking at her that he saw her turning a page of the book.

Then he had knocked on the window, but it was some time before she heard him. That must have been the storm. Through an open door into the other room, he could see the television was on, but he could hear nothing. It was a flas.h.i.+ng black and white picture a sandstorm or a cosmic blizzard. The woman in front of the stove went on reading without looking up.

'What are you thinking about?' said Mia.

He shook his head. That was nothing to talk about just then. But he had been thinking that Annie had taken over Aagot f.a.gerli's life. It had been there all ready, a style to step into. Of course she had modified it. But it was a lifestyle she had taken over with the house. Though Aagot hadn't needed to sleep with a shotgun beside her.

'I was thinking about that snowstorm the first time I came here,' he said. 'It was about fifteen below zero and certainly even colder in the squalls.'

'It was thirty-one below when I was here a few years ago,' said Johan. 'Black as ink, and white. Not a soul.'

'I thought you'd not been back here since you moved to Langva.s.slien,' said Birger.

'Yes, I came and took a look one winter evening. Then I went back home across the border. That's all. And that time recently when we went to Nirsbuan and I drove Mia here.'

'Did you drive Mia here?'

'Yes, we got here at about four. I slept in the car afterwards. Parked down in Tangen.'

'But you drove her all the way up here?'

'Yes he did,' said Mia. 'I'll make some coffee. Get the gateau out of the freezer, would you, Johan?'

Saddie had displayed discreet delight when Birger had arrived and was now lying at his feet. He tried to talk to her, but when she looked up with her dim eyes and gave a subdued wag of her tail, he started to weep. Her nose was grey and white. He couldn't remember how old she was.

Johan came up from the cellar with a Black Forest gateau and put it in the sun to thaw. When they started eating it, it occurred to Birger that it might be a gateau left over from the funeral. Just how practical was Mia really?

At the funeral gathering at the hotel, he had sat beside Annie's mother, old Henny. He had picked her up at the airport and she had leaned very heavily on his arm, making her way with great difficulty on her bad legs. Not once had she given in to tears or any outburst over the senseless and cruel thing that had happened to her only child. She had acted a part. There had been no falseness or dissembling at all in the way she had played her role. She coped with what had happened to her in the same way as she had coped with and borne a great deal in her long life; she took it on herself as if it had been a part written for her and no one else.

She had given him strength. He remembered little of the three weeks that had pa.s.sed before they were allowed to bury Annie. In the end, he had been forced to take sick leave. When he saw the tiny, compact little lady in black with swollen ankles coming down the airport stairs, he had felt compa.s.sion and tenderness. That was the first time since the event that he had felt anything but a confusion that sometimes seemed like drunkenness or numbness, released momentarily by a sharp pain localised just above his diaphragm. Between the attacks, it came again, leaving him somehow helpless. Or disabled, he now thought.