The Blood Spilt (8 page)

“Come over here and let me have a proper look at you!” called the woman with the dog, pushing her soup bowl to one side.

Rebecka suddenly noticed how alike Mimmi and the woman with the dog were. They must be mother and daughter.

The dog at the woman’s feet raised its head and gave two tired wags with its tail. Then it put its head down and went back to sleep.

The boy went over to the woman with the dog. She clapped her hands.

“Don’t you look wonderful!” she said. “Happy birthday! What a smart shirt!”

Nalle smiled at her flattery and raised his chin toward the ceiling in an almost comical pose that made Rebecka think of Rudolph Valentino.

“New,” he said.

“Well yes, we can see it’s new,” said Mimmi.

“Going dancing, Nalle?” called one of the men. “Mimmi, can you do us five takeaways from the freezer? Whatever you like.”

Nalle pointed at his trousers.

“Too,” he said.

He lifted up his arms and held them straight out from his body so that everybody could see his trousers properly. They were a pair of gray chinos held up with a military belt.

“Are they new as well? Very smart!” the two admiring women assured him.

“Here,” said Mimmi, pulling out the chair opposite the woman with the dog. “Your dad hasn’t arrived yet, but you can sit here with Lisa and wait.”

“Cake,” said Nalle, and sat down.

“Of course you can have some cake. Did you think I’d forgotten? But after your meal.”

Mimmi’s hand shot out and gave his hair a quick caress. Then she disappeared into the kitchen.

Rebecka leaned across the table to Torsten.

“I was thinking of staying the night here,” said Rebecka. “You know I grew up by this river, just a few miles upstream, and it’s made me feel a bit nostalgic. But I’ll drive you into town and pick you up in the morning.”

“No problem,” said Torsten, the roses of adventure on his cheeks in full bloom. “I can stay here as well.”

“The beds won’t exactly be the height of luxury, I shouldn’t think,” said Rebecka.

Mimmi came out with five aluminum packages under her arm.

“We were thinking of staying here tonight,” Torsten said to her. “Do you have any rooms free?”

“Sorry,” replied Mimmi. “One cottage left. Ninety centimeter bed.”

“That’s okay,” Rebecka said to Torsten. “I’ll give you a lift.”

He smiled at her. Beneath the smile and the well-paid successful partner was a fat little boy she didn’t want to play with, trying to look as if he didn’t mind. It gave her a pang.

* * *

When Rebecka got back from town it was almost completely dark. The forest was silhouetted against the blue black sky. She parked the car in front of the bar and locked it. There were several other cars parked there. The voices of burly men could be heard from inside, the sound of forks being pushed forcefully through meat and clattering on the plate underneath, the television providing a constant background noise, familiar advertising jingles. Nalle’s moped was still standing there. She hoped he’d had a good birthday.

The cottage she was sleeping in was on the opposite side of the road on the edge of the forest. A small lamp above the door lit up the number five.

I’m at peace, she thought.

She went up to the cottage door, but suddenly turned and walked a few meters into the forest. The fir trees stood in silence, gazing up toward the stars which were just beginning to appear. Their long blue green velvet coats moved tentatively over the moss.

Rebecka lay down on the ground. The pine trees put their heads together and whispered reassuringly. The last mosquitoes and black-flies of the summer sang a deafening chorus, seeking out whatever parts of her they could reach. She could cope with that.

She didn’t notice Mimmi, bringing out some rubbish.

Mimmi went into the kitchen.

“Okay,” she said, “it’s definitely wacko-warning time.”

She told him that their overnight guest had gone to bed, not in her bed in the cottage, but on the ground outside.

“It does make you wonder,” said Micke.

Mimmi rolled her eyes.

“Any minute now she’ll decide she’s a shaman or a witch, move out into the forest, start brewing up herbs over an open fire and dancing around an ancient Sami monolith.”

YELLOW LEGS

It is Easter time. The she-wolf is three years old when a human being sees her for the first time. It’s in northern Karelia by the river Vodla. She herself has seen people many times. She recognizes their suffocating smell. And she understands what these men are doing. They’re fishing. When she was a gangly one-year-old she often crept down to the river at dusk and devoured whatever the two-legged creatures had left behind, fish guts, dace and ide.

Volodja is laying ice nets with his brother. His brother has made four holes in the ice and they are going to lay three nets. Volodja is kneeling by the second hole ready to catch the cane his brother sends beneath the ice. His hands are wet, aching with the cold. And he doesn’t trust the ice. All the time he makes sure his skis are close by. If the ice gives way he can lie on his stomach on the skis and pull himself ashore. Alexander wants to lay nets here because it’s such a good spot. This is where the fish are. The water is fast flowing and Alexander has struck with his ice pick exactly where the bottom plunges down into the deep river channel.

But it’s a dangerous place. If the water rises, the river eats up the ice from below. Volodja knows. The ice can be the thickness of three hand breadths one day and two fingers the next.

He has no choice. He’s visiting his brother’s family over Easter. Alexander, his wife and two daughters are crammed together on the ground floor. Alexander and Volodja’s mother lives on the upper floor. Alexander is stuck with the responsibility for the women. Volodja himself travels all the time working for Transneft, the oil company. Last winter he was in Siberia. In the autumn in the gulf of Viborg. In recent months he’s been stuck out in the forest on the Karelian isthmus. When his brother suggested they should go out and lay nets, he couldn’t say no. If he’d refused Alexander would have gone out alone. And tomorrow evening Volodja would have been sitting at the dinner table eating fish he hadn’t bothered to help catch.

Such is Alexander’s rage, it makes him force himself and his younger brother out onto the perilous ice. Now they’re here, the weight pressing down on Alexander’s heart seems to have eased slightly. He is almost smiling as he kneels there with his hands in the water, blue with cold. Maybe that buttoned-up fury would lessen if he had a son, thinks Volodja.

And at that very moment, with a fleeting prayer to the Virgin that the child in the belly of his brother’s wife shall be a son, he catches sight of the wolf. She is standing on the edge of the forest on the opposite side, watching them. Not far away at all. Slant-eyed and long-legged. Her coat is curly, thick for the winter. Long coarse silver strands sticking up among the curls. It feels as if their eyes meet. His brother sees nothing. He has his back to her. Her legs are really extremely long. And yellow. She looks like a queen. And Volodja is on his knees on the ice before her like the village boy he is, with wet gloves and his fur cap with the earflaps sitting askew on top of his sweat drenched hair.

Zjoltye nogi, he says. Yellow legs.

But only inside his head. His lips don’t move.

He says nothing to his brother. Alexander might grab the rifle resting against his rucksack and fire off a shot.

So he is forced to release her from his gaze and take the net line off the pole. And when he looks up again she is gone.

By the time Yellow Legs has gone three hundred meters into the forest she has already forgotten the two men on the ice. She will never think of them again. After two kilometers she stops and howls. The other members of the pack answer her, they are just a few miles away and she sets off at a steady trot. That’s the way she is. Frequently goes off on her own.

Volodja remembers her for the rest of his life. Every time he returns to the place where he saw her, he peers at the edge of the forest. Three years later he meets the woman who becomes his wife.

The first time she rests in his arms he tells her about the wolf with the long yellow legs.

W
EDNESDAY
S
EPTEMBER
6

The meeting about involvement in a legal and economic umbrella organization was held in the home of Bertil Stensson, the parish priest. Present were Torsten Karlsson, partner in the legal firm of Meijer & Ditzinger, Stockholm; Rebecka Martinsson, a lawyer with the same firm; the parish priests from Jukkasjärvi, Vittangi and Karesuando; the leaders of the church councils; the chairman of the joint church council and the dean, Stefan Wikström. Rebecka Martinsson was the only woman present. The meeting had begun at eight o’clock. It was now quarter to ten. At ten o’clock coffee was to be served to finish off the meeting.

The priest’s dining room served as a temporary conference room. The September sun was shining in through the hand-blown, uneven panes of the big barred windows. Wooden shelves full of books reached right up to the ceiling. There were no ornaments or flowers anywhere to be seen. Instead the windowsills were full of stones, some softly rounded and smooth, others rough and black with sparkling red garnet eyes. Strangely contorted branches lay on top of the stones. On the lawns and the gravel path outside lay drifts of rustling yellow leaves and fallen rowanberries.

Rebecka was sitting next to Bertil Stensson. She glanced at him. He was a youthful man in his sixties. Like a kindly uncle with a bad boy’s haircut, pale silver. Sunburn and a warm smile.

A professional smile, she thought. It had been almost comical, watching him and Torsten standing and smiling at each other. You could easily have believed they were brothers, or old childhood friends. The priest had shaken Torsten by the hand and at the same time grabbed hold of Torsten’s upper arm with his left hand. Torsten had seemed charmed. Smiled and run his hand through his hair.

She wondered if it was the priest who had brought home the stones and branches. It was usually women who did that sort of thing. Who went for walks by the sea and picked up smooth pebbles until their cardigans were dragging on the ground.

Torsten had made good use of his two hours. He’d quickly shrugged off his jacket and made sure his conversation was just personal enough. Entertaining without becoming flippant or slapdash. He’d served up the whole thing like a three-course meal. As an aperitif he’d poured a little flattery into them, things they already knew. That they had one of the wealthiest associations in the country. And one of the most beautiful. The starter consisted of small examples of areas where the church was in need of legal expertise, which was more or less every area, civil law, the law governing societies and associations, employment law, tax law… For the main course he had served hard facts, figures and calculations. Shown that it would be cheaper and more advantageous to sign an agreement with Meijer & Ditzinger, giving them access to the company’s combined expertise in legal and economic matters. At the same time he had been quite open about the disadvantages, which were not significant, but even so…, and thus gave an impression of honesty and trustworthiness. They weren’t dealing with a vacuum cleaner salesman here. Now he was busy spooning the dessert down their throats. He was giving a final example of how they had helped another community.

The church administration in this community had cost an enormous amount. A considerable number of churches and other buildings that had to be maintained, many lawns to be mown, graves dug, gravel paths raked, moss scraped off gravestones and goodness knows what, but all of that cost money. A lot of money. This community had employed a number of people on work placements, or whatever it was called, workers who were sponsored by the state through the department of employment. Anyway, this meant that the community didn’t have high wage costs for these people, so it didn’t really matter if the employees didn’t exactly break into a sweat. But then they’d been taken on as temporary employees by the church, and the church was now responsible for paying the whole of their wages. There were a lot of them, and the majority weren’t exactly working themselves into the ground, if he could put it like that. So they took on more people, but the work ethos had now become such that it no longer allowed people to come in and roll up their sleeves. Anyone who tried soon got frozen out. So it was difficult to get things done. Some of the employees even managed to hold down another full-time job alongside their full-time job with the church. And now the church was suddenly completely separate from the state, the community was an autonomous organization, and had to take responsibility for its own finances in a completely different way. The solution had been to help the community to put the church administration out to contract. Just as many others had done over the past fifteen years.

Torsten went through the exact figures showing how much money had been saved per year. The others exchanged glances.

Right on target, thought Rebecka.

“And,” Torsten went on, “I still haven’t included the saving the church makes by having responsibility for fewer employees. Besides more cash in the coffers, you have more time available for the real work of the church, meeting the spiritual needs of its members in different ways. Parish priests shouldn’t have to be administrators, but they’re often bogged down with that sort of work.”

Bertil Stensson pushed a piece of paper sideways in front of Rebecka.

“You’ve certainly given us plenty to think about,” it said.

Oh yes? thought Rebecka.

What was he up to? Did he want them to sit there scribbling notes to one another like two school kids keeping secrets from the teacher? She smiled and gave a slight nod.

Torsten finished off, answered a few questions.

Bertil Stensson stood up and announced that coffee would be served outside in the sun.

“Those of us who live up here have to seize the opportunity,” he said. “We don’t often get the chance to use our garden furniture.”