Part 31 (1/2)

Then the questions started: 'Why do they have to learn the ikea sofas!'

'Backwards, for Christ's sake. Backwards!'

'What's all this b.l.o.o.d.y nonsense about the electricity being cut off?'

'Mats says he's got a room with five baby rats in a place and he's put the Bessemer process in there. Are you mad? How the h.e.l.l can you teach kids that kind of thing? Rats! And the Bessemer process.'

'Why do you say they've got a house inside their heads and that they have to learn all the rooms in the right order?'

I held up my hands and tried to quieten them.

'May I answer?'

'An amputated foot!' a woman cried out.

'Mats was to give a talk on the refining of iron,' I said. 'The house is an important part of the technique of memorising. That there are five baby rats in a place means that is the fifth place. So there he will presumably remember the Bessemer process.'

'Don't you know yourself what you're teaching?'

'They build their houses on their own. No one has any right to ask them what the buildings look like inside if they don't want to talk about it or draw it.'

'Skeletons! Rats! Blood on the floor. A white lady with no head. 'Tis pure madness. And palaces. Anna-Karin has had to learn a whole palace.'

'Sounds complicated,' said the plumber quietly. 'Isn't it easier to learn the ordinary way?'

That was a question I would have liked to answer, but I wasn't allowed to. And I had wanted to explain about the ikea sofas. But now they started on about the Starhill commune, the smell of goat in skirts, about marijuana and mate tea, about a dead foetus Petrus was supposed to have buried.

'Afterbirth,' I said. 'And I don't live like them nowadays. I have a flat here in Byvngen.'

'Though what sort of furniture d'you have?' cried a woman who had never been to my place. 'Cloths and wooden boxes! And a trestle table.'

The head had got up and kept opening his mouth without getting a word in, but his attempts were not really serious. They were doing his dirty work for him.

'D'you think everything's coming to an end?' cried a fat little woman whose whole figure I had rarely seen because she worked in the kiosk.

'Are you frightening the kids with that!'

'There's no need,' I replied. 'They're frightened enough already.'

They didn't want me as a teacher of their children. Some thought I was mad, and most thought I was a leftie, which was the same thing, though self-inflicted. They demanded that the cla.s.s should have another teacher.

The head came into the firing line now that it was serious, so he had to get to his feet and take the abuse. He stood there in a blazer with huge lapels, tight flared trousers and an open-necked s.h.i.+rt, the points of the collar spread out over his jacket, a silver pendant shaped like a fish dangling at his throat. His hair was brushed forward and grew just below the lobes of his ears, and the shoes he was wearing made him quite a bit taller than he was. I had been wrong to think they were afraid of him. He was one of them. Even though he'd been bright enough to become a head, he still had to remember that his salary was paid by the taxpayer.

No one had had any coffee yet. The thermoses stood untouched on the red paper tablecloths and the pastries still lay there under the clingfilm. Occasionally someone nudged a cup with an elbow or banged the table so hard the china rattled.

'This has got to stop!'

That meant: Annie Raft has to go.

'Otherwise we'll have to go further up.'

That meant the education authority.

Finally we were left alone, he and I. He said he at least partly understood that there was an educational idea behind my exercises with the pupils. But it was all far too original. And as the plumber had said, it seemed simpler to learn things the ordinary way.

'Cicero had that objection to this memorising technique,' I said. 'But he hadn't even a whiff of what frightened them here.'

'Yes, yes,' said the head. 'You're full of ideas and there's nothing wrong with that. But one mustn't frighten the children.'

'I haven't,' I said. 'I've frightened the parents.'

'We've talked enough now. You sleep badly and are rather wrought up. You behaved in a very unbalanced way in the staff room. You'd better take some sick leave and then we'll see.'

I really did feel ill. I was ready to throw up and I had a dreadful headache. It wasn't difficult to stay at home the next day. I had forty-five pastries in the larder.

Going back was more difficult. I decided to leave. After all, I had never meant to end up in Byvngen. I went to Stockholm, thinking of supply teaching until the autumn and seeing what cropped up.

But it didn't work. The city had changed. I remembered it as composed of artefacts, but it was becoming organic, with a substratum of sustenance. A green clump I had never seen before protruded out of the cliff above Slussen. Bad smells were coming from bas.e.m.e.nt windows. The ventilation systems were crawling. The city hadn't stayed in place. It was growing, and smelt of procreation.

In August, the air became difficult to breathe, heavy with humidity and invisible gases. Rats scuttled around in the creeper on the house in Strindbergsgatan where I was staying with Henny. I went back to Blackwater and moved into Aagot's little red cottage by the road. Mia was lodging in Byvngen and came back on the bus at weekends.

I had no idea what I was going to do. But then the teacher who lived in Lersjovik drove off the road on one of the first icy days and broke her arm. She became so scared of the daily drive to Blackwater that she resigned.

My headmaster was also the princ.i.p.al here. But he didn't turn me down. It was probably just as difficult to get teachers to come to this village as it was to get a pastor to stay in Roback. He gave me some fatherly advice. Stick to the curriculum. They'll keep their eye on you. That kind of thing gets around. And one mustn't frighten the children.

No, we mustn't frighten each other with the situation we already live in, which struggles and labours towards its fulfilment. It has neither invention nor direction, and yet it takes on innumerable forms, many of them so complex that some kind of fantasy seems to be indicated. And we mustn't try to predict the bizarre and cruel things that the end will produce before it reaches its own end.

I should have taken it more calmly. And yet the talk about radiation sickness and life without electricity was not that upsetting. For the parents, it was the memory lane that was the real stumbling block. The fact that the children had an inner room that was empty except for fear, they had already sensed. They had one themselves. What frightened them more than anything was that the children might gain access to a large and strange building with many rooms, the contents of which they didn't have to tell anyone at all.

'Mia's mother was a proud creature. She would never have tolerated this defence. No affection that was mixed with shame. And most of all no compa.s.sion.'

'But Mia was magnificent,' said Johan.

She's taken the lead, Birger thought. All his life he'll plod along behind her, looking like this.

'What are you two saying about me?'

Mia had got up.

'We're saying you were magnificent,' said Birger. 'Petrus has an inspiring effect on women. But now I'll have to give the minister some venison.'

'They were just going to use her for their own ends,' Mia said.

'When Annie created Memory Lane, she was surrounded by very p.r.o.nounced opponents,' Birger explained to Johan. 'Dark-blue, true-blue members of the Centre Party. Cautious bourgoisie in Byvngen, who looked on involvement as a sign of mental imbalance I was one of them and irresolute, politically ignorant women. Village women who one day want to live like their forefathers and the next day want to learn English and go to Rhodes with a woman friend. Away from their menfolk. But they leave food ready in the freezer: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 . . . That was their revolution, and it mostly didn't come off. Sometimes they come to life again. You saw them at the community centre. Their aims aren't really dubious.'

'But it was Petrus who took over,' said Mia.

'He has a strong personality.'

'He's an animal. And now he's become trendy as well. A cafe in a red and white cottage. Hand-painted notices. And money from the local authority for courses in ethics. But his breath still smells bad. And he's only interested in one thing: cheese and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g.'