Blackwater (36 page)

Like Aron’s staff sprouting on the blood-stained altar in the preacher’s tent, greening with buds and flowers and ripe almonds.

It didn’t work in the long run. She felt guilty, and she tried, but it didn’t work. Åke had found her a studio flat in Karlbergsvägen and Annie knew it had cost him his life savings. You must stay out of debt, Henny said. Annie took on all the work she could get to be able to live free of debt – funerals, singing classes, school choirs.

She was capable. That was what she was. She played the piano or the bass at assembly-room gigs and at student unions. But she couldn’t sing solo before an audience. When she tried, there was a sour smell of sweat in her clothes afterwards. Henny went on saying it would pass, but Åke no longer said anything.

He was an imperturbably dignified man, well-dressed and courteous. She had always admired him. But she began to understand that he wasn’t driven by any high ambitions. Gradually she realised that his elegance was also questionable. Co-respondent shoes, brown and white, still lay in the attic, and spats, the kind called dog-jackets, to wear over pumps. An excessively loud striped jacket.

Henny’s life was a drama. She wept and stormed when she was cheated of an engagement or got slated in a review. But things had mostly gone well with her. She had found her slot, the amusing, bold female supporting rôle. She drove out vapidity by bandying words and putting a spin on the romance in operettas. This was written into the parts, it was the way it should be. But the amazing thing was that there always seemed to be a rôle and a stage in the world specifically for Henny. On the other hand, none for Annie.

Åke was a fine musician and he had a good ear. But he was remarkably uninterested. Or had he become so over the years? Annie couldn’t remember his ever playing at home, except when Henny had wanted him to accompany her. He used to read.

He was short-sighted and wore glasses with thick lenses, behind which he lived like a goldfish in a round bowl. He read his way through decades of bus journeys and life in a one-roomed flat with Henny ceaselessly talking, practising and vacuum cleaning. He had a leather briefcase with large metal catches which Annie used to play with. He carried it, crammed full, to and from the City Library. Annie had taken this for granted, just as it was taken for granted that Uncle Göte had read one book in his whole life, the memoirs of a great liar called Kalle Möller.

Without giving it a thought, she herself had become a reader. Once she had left school and escaped from the ramshackle wooden house in Enskede, she wanted just one thing, a room of her own. To be left in peace. To read. But since she had got a place at college, she agreed to start studying singing, and Henny had said how tremendous and fantastic it was simply to have been accepted.

After two years she realised she was not doing well at the Academy and she really ought to change to the music-teacher course. That meant failure, and she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She was at a total standstill, incapable of leaving, incapable of singing. That was when Sverker Gemlin became one of her teachers.

He taught harmony and counterpoint. He was a quiet, sensitive man; Mia got her brown eyes from him. They would look into each other’s eyes and quietly talk about commonplace things. She would lie on her bed for hours, analysing the meaning of what had been said. Once they held hands, in a taxi after a party, hiding their hands under her coat.

She had lived a cautious and parched life. Sexually she was not inexperienced; she had had light-hearted relationships, though when she thought about it they hadn’t been much fun. But with Sverker, a grass fire started.

One morning, he came and stood behind her at the photocopier and pressed his crotch up against her behind. He didn’t kiss her, only held his lips pressed against the nape of her neck, parting the hair first to reach it. His hands were on the photocopier. She could see them on either side of her, the tips of his fingers whitening. He had a strong erection and she could feel it through their clothing. He stood like that for a little while, not quite still, and she almost fainted.

Two evenings later, she stayed behind on the premises when she knew he was teaching. They met in the corridor and stood still for a long spell at quite a distance from each other. A few minutes later they were locked in his office. She had just had a bath and had bought a lace bra, making all these preparations without really thinking about their significance.

Beside themselves with desire, they tried to make do with the narrow blue couch in his room. The main difficulty was trying to avoid the wooden arm rest. Either she had the back of her head pressed against it, making the angle of her neck lethal, or her head hung right off the sofa.

From then on they met at Annie’s place. It couldn’t be very often, because he had My. Presumably that wasn’t her name, but it was what he called her. It was even in the telephone directory. Annie stared at the Ängby address and the number, but she never phoned.

He spoke of his marriage in graceful circumlocutions such as, we must cherish of what we have. What he had, of course, was My, the children Jesper and Jannika, the house in North Ängby and a summer place in Kullen together with My’s parents. Annie had her small flat in Karlbergsgatan and her precious freedom. He talked about that a lot. But it was Annie who had brought up the subject.

When summer came, he went with his family to Kullen, where she couldn’t contact him. They didn’t write. ‘That’s impossible because down there we all live on top of one another,’ he had explained. She turned over his words again and again. Sometimes she pictured the whole household with in-laws and children and the cocker spaniel as a great snakepit of lecherous writhings.

She sang at a summer wedding and was choir leader at an adult-education course that summer. In July, she spent a few days at home and took the opportunity to go to the college to photocopy notes. She ran into Sverker in the entrance. He knew her times. She had written them down in case he was able to make himself free during the summer.

He said the trip from Kullen had been unplanned and he had forgotten which days she would be in town. At that, she realised what the situation was.

A raging woman took over the stage. It was not Annie; it was Brangane or Medea. Her performance lasted scarcely an hour, but long enough for him to retreat for ever. Temporarily he calmed her down on the blue couch. She had no contraception with her, since she hadn’t known they would meet. She left the Academy. The time before she knew she was pregnant was very difficult to remember. She had been in the eye of the storm, unbudging grief and hatred, but she couldn’t remember what it was like.

As soon as she realised she was expecting, she had decided to apply for teacher training. She told Åke and Henny she was going to have a child. When they were alone, Henny had said:

‘But what are you going to do?’

She had meant an abortion, though she would never have taken that word into her mouth. For the first time in her life, Annie had known what she wanted to do. As she was to have a child, she had to have a job. To support herself and the child. Not dither around. Not sing at funerals. Not have an affair with a married teacher. Nothing of what had gone before. Just herself and the child.

At first she had considered registering the father as unknown. That would be revenge, but he wouldn’t notice. She realised it would be an injustice to the child. At the time, she imagined it was a boy. A boy couldn’t grow up without having at least a name for his father.

All this was unpleasant and she thought about it during endless walks across the city. It was a wet autumn. She felt disintegrated, whipped through by water and wind. Brooding led to nothing. She wanted to hurt him but couldn’t. There was no way to do that except by writing to My and she didn’t want to be mean. Without being mean, she couldn’t get at him.

Gradually she extracted from herself the germ of revulsion from which all this had grown: she was afraid he would question his paternity. It was like the fear of reviews. Someone would write that she had a thin, sharp, hopeless little voice and an affected manner.

She hadn’t slept with anyone else, with one exception right at the beginning, when she was confused and hadn’t known whether the affair would continue. But what did he think?

He became paralysed and thought nothing and said just as Henny had:

‘What are you going to do?’

She explained she wasn’t going to do anything except get herself a training as a teacher, and he dropped a piece of his almond cake into his cup of coffee. It was sodden and he had held it in the air too long. They were at Tösse’s and it was very warm inside. Both of them had kept on their outdoor clothing and he had beads of sweat along his hairline. She thought, What if he wants to bring Christmas presents? Or come on the child’s birthday? What shall I say?

‘Have you thought about it carefully?’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s a big decision. There are other ways of thinking. If that’s how you put it.’

He didn’t want to say the word, either. Then they parted. He knew what Mia’s name was and her date of birth, but not where she was. He had no idea that at the moment his maintenance payment was essential for the existence of the Starhill commune, because Pastor Wigert had stopped his payments.

She could never think calmly about Sverker, nor with indifference. All the same, seven years had passed since he had silenced her outburst on the blue couch.

‘Where’s the ephebe?’

Henny went on talking to Petrus, but Annie was sure she had caught that aside.

This had happened before. Henny’s outpourings of friendliness were always under control. They were not questioned as long as feelings ran warm. Then a lightning attack. Pure surgery.

Ephebe? Something from an operetta. A youth with sparse down. Now Annie felt a greater weariness than ever. But it was not possible to get away yet.

Clear, cold scorn. Because she knew, sensed, sniffed the scent of – what? Something more than bickering. Sadness and fatigue.

Fear. No, she could not guess that.

Henny had very properly written in advance and said they were coming and Annie had written back to say it was no good. They couldn’t be fetched from Blackwater because Dan had the car – he was away on behalf of the commune. But naturally Henny was not to be stopped and Annie should have known that. The moment when she appeared by the stream had been illuminating in any case. Although this kind of thing would inevitably become clear sooner or later. Worse had been the moment when that chubby doctor had turned round and called out: ‘Whatever kind of trousers are those?’ She had ripped the trousers off as soon as she got home. That had been really disgusting.

Yet she regarded it as an illuminating moment. Though not decisive. She couldn’t decide anything. That had happened time and time again in her life. Standstill.

‘As if it had nothing to do with you,’ Henny had said at the time Annie was messing around at the Academy. And later in Mälarvåg. All had gone well at first. She had liked it in a dull way. Gradually it had come to a standstill, though she had never noticed until Dan came and started asking about her life.

She had thought of burning the jeans, but couldn’t think where. She wanted no one to see her doing it and the thick denim probably wouldn’t burn well. She realised that was why she still had them. They had been wet way up the legs when she saw them hanging outside the tent. Over a spruce branch.

She must have recognised them all along. The grid of threads at the back. The label. It was as if she were two people. One who knew. And one who happily pulled on the jeans when she had grown tired of wearing skirts. Cut off the legs, which were too long. Too long for Dan, too. She ought at least to have thought about that.

But she hadn’t. Not until that doctor had called out – he had no idea, of course, she realised that afterwards – ‘Whatever kind of trousers are those?’ Then she knew.

She had wanted to rip them off there and then. Thought she would vomit on the path. But she just ran and it kept thumping in her head: he lied he lied he lied.

She had suspected that there was no viewpoint from which you could see the tent. And it was just as she had thought. He must have been right down by the tent. Or else they had all been down there. He had gone on lying, although he’d said he would tell her exactly what they’d done. He had never slept at Nirsbuan.

But that night she had dreamt that he was back and lying in her arms. He smelt strongly; out of his newly washed body rose a smell of earthstar, autumnal and brown, and she recognised it. In her dream, they exchanged fluids and they were still pouring out of her when she woke; she wept and she was wet.

Henny poked and pried. She sensed something, perhaps not the worst. She thought Annie had begun to tire, that she was ripe for a minor attack.

Ephebe.

She loathed making a fool of herself and Henny knew it. In that respect Annie was like her father, and Henny knew them both. It was the lesson of her life and one she had had to learn properly.

She meant well, of course. Annie tried to imagine Mia as a grown-up. Mia mindlessly, perhaps fatally in love.

Mia unhinged.

Evening came and she withdrew. The ewes were grazing by the stream, the grass rustling as they tugged at it. After a while they gathered round the stone she was sitting on. The leader ewe lay down first to ruminate and as she chewed, she blew through her nostrils. A sigh. The air was chilly, the insects no longer daring to emerge. The ewe’s udder had shrunk and the sores from insect bites had healed. But she was in lamb again. She laid her long, slightly curved nose in Annie’s hand. Annie could feel the hard jawbone and the soft tissues between. She was pressing hard.

A weariness was visible in the very grass and leaves. They had paled and bent over, the turning inwards had begun. Towards the root. Towards the placenta. That had nothing to do with knowing. It could elude all light. It happened. Throbbing like water in the flooded moss by the stone, the pulse beats, gently touching the lobes of flat fungus.