Blackwater (26 page)

When she came with the tea basket, he was lying flat out on the bottom bunk, naked but with a towel over him. Not for a moment was he afraid of her. She was not to touch him. When she gave him tea with no milk, he remembered she had said he was spoilt. That had been true then.

She was looking grey and she was sober. She sat down at the table and started reading the paper she had left behind. He thought she looked old, bored, her complexion sallow.

Perhaps he would have to wait a day or two. But as soon as his foot was better, he would leave. He would accept any food she brought, but he had no intention of asking for anything. There was water in the river.

She sat there for a long time, reading without speaking to him. Then she suddenly closed the paper, folded it and put it into the basket.

‘Now, Jukka, my boy,’ she said. ‘The time’s come. You’re going home now.’

She went off with the basket and was gone a couple of hours. He didn’t know what she had meant. He had to wait for his foot to heal. Then he would leave whether she said anything or not.

When she returned she brought her rucksack, fully packed.

‘Take this now.’

She gave him a small folded paper packet. He didn’t know what it was, so she unfolded it for him. It held a white, grainy powder.

‘It’s like tablets,’ she said. ‘You hold the paper like this and let it run into your mouth. Then rinse it down with water.

When she saw him hesitating, she said:

‘Do you think I’m going to poison you? It’s only an ordinary hangover powder. For headaches. Painkiller, Johan. You won’t be able to walk on that foot otherwise.’

He poured the powder into his mouth. It stuck between his teeth and to the inside of his cheeks, and he had to fill his mouth with water to loosen the grains.

‘One more,’ she said.

She had a whole bag of packets of powder. He hoped they were strong. For he wanted to go now. He would go.

At first he hopped along with the staff, a short distance at a time, then resting, leaning on it. Gradually he found he had to sit down when he rested. His armpit began to hurt when the stick dug in.

They said nothing to each other. She walked ahead, frequently turning back to look at him. When he began to lag too far behind, staggering every time he hopped forwards, she went back to him and he put his arm round her shoulders. They went on that way, her body close to his.

He could feel nothing, not even embarrassment. All he could think was, we’ll soon be there now. In an hour or two. Perhaps three. It rained now and again, but not heavily. Sometimes he sat resting with his eyes closed, listening to the rain rustling in the grass and trees.

The rests grew longer and longer. They still said nothing to each other. He didn’t even wonder whether she was getting rid of him because of the money. He had thought of leaving it on the seat when he got out of the car, but then changed his mind. He didn’t have to go with her in the car. He would keep the money and stop up by the bridge to get a lift.

His foot was hurting really badly when they got there, but he said nothing. He didn’t want her to know. She couldn’t know how he had injured himself. Or had she realised when she’d seen the open window?

‘I’ll be all right now,’ he said, once they were there and he was sitting on the bridge railing. ‘I’ll soon get a lift.’

He was wet, and so was she, her hair darker, flat in wet strands. She had mascara below her eyes, a blurred blue-black semicircle.

‘You’re coming with me,’ she said.

He had no desire to argue, but he still thought he would keep the money. He had to find somewhere, get a room and lie down with his throbbing, exploding ankle.

He fell asleep in the car. It was good to doze off and he didn’t want to talk. Nor did she. But they had been walking for so long, the silence between them had begun to be unreal.

She woke him an hour later and told him to get out and phone home. The car was standing by a building that looked like a community centre in a village he didn’t recognise. There was a phone box beside it.

‘Phone home now,’ she said. ‘They’ll have to come and fetch you.’

She gave him a handful of Norwegian coins and he took them, though he had no intention of telephoning.

‘I’ll go and buy some cigarettes,’ she said. Her voice sounded dry, almost rasping. She helped him out of the car and once he was upright with his stick, she got back in and started the engine, then drove off. Quickly, he thought. He could see no store where she could buy anything.

He went into the telephone kiosk, but he didn’t phone. He didn’t want to ask Gudrun for help, so he just stood there propped against the shelf as he waited.

He soon realised he had waited far too long. He went out and sat down on the grass, unable to stand any longer. She didn’t come.

He wondered what that last little scene had meant. Decency? Consideration? She would be far away now, smoking her damned cigarettes in the car. He was sure she hadn’t run out of them. She never let things slip that far.

Anyhow, she was out of his life and that was what he had wanted. He was standing by a community centre in a village he knew nothing about, his sweatshirt over his shoulders and the long walking stick with its brass knob and leather loop to lean on, but he knew he would not be able to go much further.

Late in the afternoon, he got a lift on a lorry loaded with fibreglass. The driver did not get much joy out of him, because he soon fell asleep. He was woken in Namsos. He knew where he was there. It was horribly, ordinarily and tangibly Namsos: the warehouses down by the harbour, the small side streets. He could just see Karoliussen’s bookshop.

He limped across the street to where he had seen a sign for a guesthouse. It had a dining room and smelt of fish, a stale though not too greasy smell which also cling to the curtains and bedspread in the room the landlady gave him.

He tried to pull off his boot but couldn’t, not just because it hurt, but it stuck over his ankle. He knew he would have to get the boot off and hopped out to the landlady again to ask for a pair of scissors. A large pair of kitchen scissors. She helped him cut through the thick rubber. His sock was soaked through and very tight.

When he at last got his foot out of it and saw the dark-blue, distended skin, he knew he couldn’t go on. He asked if he could use the telephone.

Gudrun was at home. She was nearly always at home. She spoke terribly quietly and he could make nothing of what she was thinking or feeling. She just said she would come.

‘Stay where you are. What’s it called?’

‘Lucullus. In Havngatan.’

‘Stay where you are and wait. It’ll probably take two or three hours. And don’t phone anywhere.’

She repeated that before ringing off.

‘Don’t phone anyone else. Just stay in your room and wait.’

He couldn’t do that because he had to get something to eat. It was too late for dinner and he couldn’t go out. But the landlady took pity on him, heated up some fishcakes and fried large, floury pieces of potato in an overheated pan. He ate it all. While he was waiting for coffee, he limped over to a newspaper, a two-day-old copy. When she brought the coffee and saw it, she said she would fetch a more recent one.

‘No,’ he said. He just wanted to be left in peace to read. At the bottom of the front page was a big photograph of two women and a man by a road sign saying Blackwater.

What the signpost actually said was
bla kw ter
. He couldn’t make out why on earth Blackwater should feature in this newspaper, an Oslo paper, and he was ashamed of the tatty signpost.

In a column on the centre spread was a photograph of a rather pretty, dark girl. It said Mountain River, but they must mean the Lobber, because there was a crudely drawn map with the Strömgren homestead and Starhill on it. A small tent had been drawn by the river. There was something about a road to a summer pasture. And a moped.

It was stale news and he couldn’t make it out at all – the big centre spread with photographs of tourists by the general store, by the homestead and by the Lobber was a follow-up.
tourists in death village
.

He found it at last in the caption below the picture of the girl: a young girl and an unknown man had been knifed to death in a tent on Midsummer night.

By the Lobber.

He had had the newspaper all that last night in the grouse shed. It had been on the floor, folded over double. He remembered the photograph of fishing boats at the top of the front page. Ylja had read it.

She had read it that morning and then she hadn’t wanted to have anything more to do with him.

Can you really live in the world without living off it? Unexpectedly enough, it was Brita who recognised the words.

‘It’s not a question,’ she said. ‘You’ve twisted the whole thing.’

She had been walking round heavily in the last weeks of her pregnancy, apparently not listening to all their chat. But she was the only one who knew where the words came from.

‘It’s St Paul, the First Epistle to the Corinthians. “And they that live in this world, not living off it: for the fashion of this world passeth away.”’

Annie wanted to get hold of a Bible at once, but no one had one. Brita thought there had been one lying about in the rubbish they had taken over to the fishing-club loft when they moved into the old house. Annie got up there by putting a ladder against the end gable and crawling through a hatch. It was full of timber and just by the hatch, lying in the sawdust, she saw a whole lot of papers, damaged by the damp. She opened a book with a stiff grey cover. Enrolment book. Someone had signed up for military service, his name Arne Jonasson, in the year 1951. At first she thought she had mistaken the year. The few pages in the book had yellowed and looked as if they were beginning to be eaten away. Inserted in the book was a black and white photograph of cows on a slope and a house at the top; six people were standing in front of a fence at the bottom. It was an ordinary thin, shiny print, otherwise she would have guessed it was a photograph from the previous century. But the women’s skirts were short.

Her first impression that it was a photo of cows was somehow right. They hadn’t just happened to be there. There were two children carrying long sticks up on the slope, and they were driving the cows on their way out of the photograph. The cows had no horns but curly foreheads and were spotted like a map of small islands.

There was a liquor ration book, the rations taken out regularly, a litre a month. In Östersund. Strange, if he had lived here. Perhaps the shopkeeper in Blackwater had done it for him. Had this man – Erik Jonasson was his name – gone once a month down to the village with his ration book? Why hadn’t he taken it with him when he moved? Perhaps he had died? But then she remembered that liquor rationing had been abolished some time in the 1950s. The book hadn’t been stamped all the way through. Perhaps they had gone on living here in the fifties. Twenty years ago. The papers looked as if they had been there for a century. But I was at school then, she thought. I lived in Enskede and in Gärdet in Stockholm. With a fridge, telephone and trams. Erik Jonasson and his family had been tucked away in a pocket of time.

Someone had cut photographs of motorcars out of magazines and stuck them on to squared paper. That could hardly be Arne, because the cars were bulging fifties models. They were on double pages that must have been taken out of a school arithmetic book. Had the teacher noticed it had become thinner and thinner?

A cut-out advertisement ‘
technical articles
. Private sender.’ The little cutting lay together with a chemist’s prescription in a cigar box of thin wood. Technical articles. Dildos and leather items crossed her mind. He couldn’t have trotted up to Starhill with such things.

They would have been condoms, of course. Why had people been so furtive about them? They weren’t prohibited. Did people attract derision by sending off for contraceptives? She wasn’t sure the cutting was only twenty years old. There were prescriptions going right back to the thirties in the box, some never used. No prescription had been used more than once, although most of them were valid for three doses. Had they recovered more quickly than the doctor had thought? Or had they been unable to afford more?

The thought dislodged the feeling she had had all the time she had looked at these mouldering papers. Compassion, albeit a feeble compassion mixed with shame, as if she would have preferred not to see or know. Yet she went on looking through the papers and found a 1937 school report, from the third year in the village school in Blackwater. A report with many reservations, the marks all very modest, but the girl, Astrid Jonasson, had the top mark for conduct. She must have been ten years old then. Born 1927. If still alive, she wouldn’t be fifty yet.

Why shouldn’t she still be alive? She must have gone to school in Blackwater and spent most of her school years in lodgings, As I did, Annie thought. And not really much further away from home than I was. Had she also had that feeling and still lived with it, a meagre normal life above dark waters? Solitude. Devotion. Profound loneliness. One more wild attempt. Dry, cold loneliness. Like me. Until now.

The girl and her parents had left their private papers to the damp and the mice. It was impossible to say whether it had been sheer carelessness with the memories of their lives. They might have fallen ill and died. Or had Astrid and Arne thought of coming to retrieve their mother’s and father’s belongings one day, and then it had never happened? It was too far away? Perhaps they lived in Östersund or even further south.

There were letters of condolence. White envelopes with black edges. She poked one out to see whether there was any Jonasson among the dead. Five printed letters of condolence with hymn verses and names of mourners. There was only one Jonasson. Arne, who had been drafted in 1951 and who according to his enrolment book had never returned for retraining in the reserve.

Had he died during his military service? Was it an accident? Or was his death connected with the big brown envelope from Österåsen Sanatorium? She couldn’t make out the date of the postmark. Had people died of tuberculosis in the fifties? The envelope was empty, but something must have been inside it. Perhaps Arne’s army book and the shiny little photos of girls and boys in their twenties. They must have sent back things like that. There were letters, too, not many, but some of them had Arne’s name on the back of the envelope. She opened one and saw a few words: ‘ . . . take them although they aren’t mature . . .’ Was he writing about trees? He was probably a forester. Perhaps he was in the sanatorium and worrying about the felling he could see from the window or the balcony?