The True Deceiver (4 page)

But I can’t. Mats has no secrets. That’s why he’s so mysterious. No one must ever disturb him; we have to leave him undisturbed in his clean, simplified world. And maybe he wouldn’t understand but just worry that I’ve got problems. And what would I actually explain..? But I know what I have to do. I just have to take what I take completely openly and fight as honourably as I can.

Mats looked up from his book. “What is it?” he said.

“Nothing. Is that a good book?”

“It’s great,” Mats said. “I just got to the sea battle.”

E
VENINGS IN THE VILLAGE WERE VERY QUIET
, just the barking of a mongrel dog or two. Everyone was at home having dinner, and there were lights in every window. As usual, it snowed. The roofs had heavy overhangs of snow, the paths tramped into the snow during the day went white again, and the hard-packed banks on either side grew higher and higher. Inside the snow banks were deep, narrow tunnels where the children had dug hideouts for themselves during thaws. And outside stood their snowmen, snowhorses, formless shapes with teeth and eyes of bits of tin and coal. When the next hard freeze came, they poured water over these sculptures so they’d harden to ice.

One day Katri paused before one of these images and saw that it was a likeness of herself. They had found shards of yellowish glass for eyes and given her an old fur cap, and they’d captured her narrow mouth and her stiff, straight bearing. Attached to this woman of snow was a large snow dog. It wasn’t well done, but she could see they meant it to be a dog, and a threatening dog at that. And crouched at the hem of her skirt, very small, was a dwarfish figure with a red potholder on its head. Mats usually wore a red wool cap in winter.

Katri kicked the little figure to pieces, and when she got home she threw her brother’s cap in the stove and knitted him a new one in blue. Later she retained a single, grimly valued memory of the children’s caricature – the paper they had covered with numbers and driven into the snow woman’s heart on a wooden stake. It was, after all, a token of respect from the village. The children listened to their parents’ talk and knew she was good at maths. They knew her heart was riddled with numbers.

For years, people had come to Katri and asked her to help them with sums they couldn’t do themselves. She handled difficult calculations and percentages with complete ease, and the answers fell into place and were always correct. It began while Katri was doing the
storekeeper
’s ordering and paying his bills. It was then she acquired a reputation for being shrewd, penetrating and good with figures – she discovered that several merchants in town were cheating. Later, she found the storekeeper in the village doing the same thing, but no one knew about that. Katri Kling also had an unerring sense for how sums should be justly allocated and for unambiguous solutions to knotty problems requiring a different kind of arithmetic. The villagers began coming to her with their tax declarations or to talk about bills of sale, wills and property lines. There was a lawyer in town, of course, but they had more faith in her, and why throw money away on a lawyer?

“Give them the meadow,” Katri said. “You can’t do anything with it anyway; it isn’t even good pasture. But put in a clause that says it can’t be developed, or sooner or later you’ll have them living next door. And you don’t like them.”

Then she told the opposing party that the meadow was worthless, but they could use it for peace of mind by putting up a fence and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign so they wouldn’t constantly have to hear the neighbours’ kids. Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the
assumption
that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbours. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families that had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time. She also helped people to see that they’d been cheated. Everyone was highly amused by Katri’s decision in the case of Emil from Husholm. He’d contracted severe septicaemia that had cost him a lot of money and kept him from working for quite some time, and Katri said it was a job-related accident and called for workman’s compensation. His employer would have to apply to the employment office on his behalf.

“Well, not really,” Emil objected. “It didn’t happen while I was building a boat. I was just cleaning some cod.”

And Katri said, “When will you learn? Work is work. A cod or a crowbar – it’s all the same. Your father was a fisherman, wasn’t he? And he worked for the fishery, didn’t he? How many times did he injure himself at work?”

“Now and then.”

“Of course. And he got no compensation. The government cheated him more times than he knew, so this makes it even.”

People could cite many examples of Katri Kling’s perspicacity. She seemed to make all the pieces fit together. If people doubted her, they could always have their important papers checked by the lawyer in town. But so far he had never questioned Katri’s judgment. “What kind of wise old witch do you have out there? Where did she learn all this?”

In the beginning, people wanted to pay Katri for her services, but when that met a frosty reception, they stopped mentioning compensation. It seemed odd that a person who understood so much about other people’s difficulties with out-of-the-ordinary situations should have been so unable to deal with the people themselves. Katri’s silence made everyone uncomfortable. She responded to matter-of-fact questions, but she didn’t talk. And, worst of all, she didn’t smile when she met people, didn’t encourage them, didn’t help, didn’t socialize at all.

“But why do you go to her?” said the elderly Madame Nygård. “Yes, she puts your business to rights, but you no longer trust anyone when you come back. You’re different. Leave her alone and try to be nice to her brother.”

People did sometimes ask about Mats, but not even that made her more agreeable. She just looked past them with her yellow slits of eyes and said, “Fine, thank you.” And when they moved on, it was with a sense that they’d been prying, and they felt very small. So people brought her their problems and then slunk away as quickly as they could.

T
HE CONTINUOUS SNOWFALL
carried with it an
imprecise
darkness that was neither dusk nor dawn, and it depressed people. Things that might have been done with pleasure became merely things that needed doing. Edvard Liljeberg had the winter blues. When work was finished in the boat shed, there was nothing else to do but go home, so all four Liljeberg brothers went home and made dinner. Then they listened to the radio, and the evenings were very long. Edvard Liljeberg decided to overhaul the van, which usually cheered him up. And it wouldn’t hurt to have the motor in shape when the township finally got around to ploughing.

Years ago, Edvard drove the schoolchildren into town and was paid by the pound, but now the village had its own school for the lower grades, and the older children rented rooms in town. There weren’t so many of them nowadays. Nevertheless, the storekeeper was certainly not losing money on the van. The government paid freight for hauling gas tubes from the village out to the lighthouse as well as for carrying the mail, on top of which they paid for the petrol. All the same, every time the storekeeper counted out Liljeberg’s salary, he was careful to point out what a burden it was for him to perform all these community services. Edvard Liljeberg had nevertheless come to regard the van as his own. It was a Volkswagen, green. And the only vehicle in Västerby.

He turned on the light and pulled his cap down over his ears. It was colder inside than it was outdoors. Working on the van was a private thing, it was no one else’s business, and now here was the boy again just inside the door, standing and waiting and waiting and staring at Liljeberg and giving him a bad conscience. Were these qualms about the boy or about his sister? What have we done in this village to deserve these two? What sin have we committed that things can’t be normal? Liljeberg swung around and said, “Are you here again? You’re never going to learn a damn thing about engines!”

“No,” said Mats. “I know.”

“Have you been over to Nygård’s and chopped wood?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want? To help?”

Mats didn’t answer. It was always the same. The boy would slink into the garage and just hang around in silence, watching, until the hair on the back of Liljeberg’s neck began to stand on end and he couldn’t concentrate, but he couldn’t be mean to the boy and the whole thing was really annoying, so he just said, “This is hard, this part, so I can’t talk right now.”

Mats Kling nodded and didn’t move. He was so like his sister – the same flat face, though his eyes were blue. Somehow the sister was always around, and her brother was behind her. It was unendurable, and it made Edvard Liljeberg very tired. Finally he said, “If you want, you can pick up a little. It’s getting hard to move around in here.”

The boy began cleaning up, annoyingly slowly. He started methodically in the far corner and worked his way forwards, moving things and sweeping and
organizing
, almost silently but not quite. It was like having a rat behind the wall – rustling and then silence, scraping and shuffling and then silence again – until Liljeberg turned around and shouted, “Forget that! Come here. Stand here where I can see you. Okay, I’m fixing my van. Watch what I do. But you’re never going to learn it for real, and I’m not going to explain anything. So don’t talk to me.”

Mats nodded. By and by, Liljeberg calmed down and forgot his audience and forgave the intrusion and
eventually
got the motor running properly.

* * *

But usually Mats was down in the boat shed. He worked in helpless slow motion, but there was great care and patience in his slowness. They could give him small jobs with complete confidence that whatever they entrusted to him would get done. Mostly, they forgot he was there. The Liljeberg brothers gave Mats boring jobs like polishing or filling screwheads. And then all of a sudden Mats would vanish without anyone’s having noticed when he left. Maybe he’d promised to fix something for a neighbour, or he’d gone to the woods to do nothing at all. You never knew. Mats Kling had no fixed working hours but came and went as he liked, which of course made it impossible to pay him an hourly wage. Now and then, when the spirit moved them, the Liljebergs paid him – but not much. It seemed to them that he saw work mostly as a form of play, and it’s hardly necessary to pay someone for playing. From time to time, Mats would be gone for longer periods, and no one knew or cared where he was.

If it got really cold, it didn’t make sense to go on working. The shed wasn’t insulated, and the stove was barely able to warm it enough to keep their hands from stiffening. They locked it up and went home. But on the seaward side where the boats were launched, the doors had a latch that was easy to open. Mats would go out on the ice with his cod hook and when no one was in sight he’d go into the boat shed. Sometimes he’d go on with his work, usually details so trivial that no one noticed they’d been done. But most times he just sat quietly in the peaceful snowlight. He never felt cold.

T
HE NEXT TIME
E
DVARD
L
ILJEBERG
skied to town and came back with mail and groceries, Katri Kling was there again wanting the mail for Anna Aemelin. She didn’t ask, didn’t explain; she just wanted it. Like her brother, she just stood and waited until he gave in.

“All right, then,” he said. “Take it. But remember, now and in future, that you’re to be very careful with everything having to do with money orders. You’re not to misplace even the tiniest scrap of paper, and when it’s been signed by Miss Aemelin and properly witnessed it’s me who withdraws the money. And when it arrives, she’s to have every last penny.”

“You amaze me,” said Katri, and her voice was very cold. “When have I ever been careless with numbers?”

Liljeberg was silent for a moment and then said, “I spoke hastily. I didn’t stop to think. The fact is, there isn’t anyone else I would trust with this kind of thing.” And he added, “One could say a great many things about you, but at least you’re honest.”

Katri went into the shop and the storekeeper’s hatred. “I’m delivering the mail to Miss Aemelin. Has she called to order anything I can take along?’

“No. Miss Aemelin eats out of tins and can’t cook. But Liljeberg brought some kidneys.”

“Eat them yourself,” Katri said. “Eat all the kidneys and liver and lungs you like, but stop being unkind to a woman who can’t defend herself.”

“But I’m not being unkind,” he burst out, genuinely hurt. “I sell to the whole village, and no one’s ever said I was unkind…”

Katri interrupted. “One packet of spaghetti, one bouillon cube, two pea soups, small, and a kilo of sugar. I’ll take it with me. Put it on her account.”

The storekeeper said, very softly, “You’re the one who’s unkind.”

Katri moved on down the aisle. “Rice,” she said. “The easy kind.” And she added, “Don’t make a fool of yourself.” It was the same kind of indifferent, dismissive remark that had once seared his desire into hatred. She sounded as if she were giving an order to a dog.

When Katri came to the rabbit house for the second time, she had the dog wait in the back yard. Anna Aemelin had seen her coming up the hill and opened the door at once. After the first, breathless courtesies she became quiet and self-conscious. Katri took off her boots and took the groceries into the kitchen.

“I didn’t bring fresh meat,” she said. “Only tins, things that are easy to fix. The mail came this afternoon with Liljeberg.”