Part 35 (1/2)

'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-s.h.i.+rt 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 fis.h.i.+ng'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.