The Black Path (21 page)

My aunt says nothing. Now, fourteen years later, she asks me:

“Why did you scream like that? We thought you were never going to calm down.”

I tell her I don’t remember. And it’s true. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t know. I know exactly why I screamed. The feeling is always the same when it happens, and it has happened to me later in life as well.

You become one with everything else. But at the same time, you’re moving apart from everything. There’s a feeling of disintegration. Like when a gust of wind whirls down into a valley and disperses the mist. Very frightening. Particularly when you’re little, and you don’t know it will pass.

Sometimes I know it’s coming. It’s as if my feet go to sleep, a thousand pinpricks. Then it feels as if there’s a cushion of air between my feet and the ground. You’re more at one with your body than you can imagine, and it’s horrible to be separated from it.

I could say to my aunt: Imagine if gravity suddenly ceased to exist. But I don’t want to talk about it.

I know why my aunt is reminding me about the fly as we drive along. It’s her way of saying I’m related to my mother. That I have their grandmother within me.

Nobody really wants to know. Including my aunt.

I’m three years old. Once again I’m sitting at the kitchen table on my aunt’s knee. She and my father have been sniping at each other for almost two weeks, and Father and Antte have gone up into the mountains. But on this particular day the telephone has rung. My aunt has booked her ticket home and packed her suitcase. Now she’s showing me pictures. This man has a big sailing boat. She shows me pictures of the boat.

“It’s in the Mediterranean,” she tells me.

They’re going to sail down to the Canary Islands.

“I remember,” I say. “You sat here and cried.”

I point at the prow of the boat.

My aunt laughs. She doesn’t want to hear this. Ester doesn’t have the gift.

“You can’t possibly remember that, poppet. I’ve never even set foot on a sailing boat. This will be the first time.”

Mother gives me a quick warning glance. They don’t want to know, it means. That you can remember both forward and backward. Time goes in both directions.

Mauri doesn’t want to know either, thought Ester, placing the bar across her shoulders. He’s in danger, but it’s pointless to try and tell him.

“You could paint me,” he said with a smile.

It’s true, thought Ester. I could paint him. It’s the only picture I have left in me. Apart from that, the pictures are finished. But he won’t want to see it. It’s been here inside me since the first time I met him.

Inna meets my aunt and me at the door of Regla. Hugs my aunt as if they were sisters. My aunt relaxes. Feels her guilty conscience about me releasing its grip, I presume.

Personally, I feel really bad about being there. A burden to everybody. I can’t paint. Can’t provide for myself. Haven’t got anywhere else to go. And because I don’t want to be there, I keep disappearing. I can’t help it. As my feet walk across two rugs toward Inna, I am two weavers, a man with his tongue stuck in a gap in his teeth the whole time, and a young boy. I brush against a wooden wall panel, and I’m the carpenter with his aching hip, planing the wood. All these hands that have turned and carved, woven and stitched. I get so tired, and I can’t hold myself together. I force myself to hold out my hand to Inna. And I see her. She’s thirteen years old, placing her cheek against her father’s cheek. Everyone says she winds him around her little finger, but her eyes are so thirsty.

Inna shows us round. There are too many rooms to count. My aunt looks impressed. All the old furniture, polished wood with intricate legs. Urns with a blue Chinese pattern on the floor.

“What a place,” she whispers to me.

The only thing she has a problem with are the dogs belonging to Mauri’s wife; they’re allowed to go anywhere they like, and they jump up on the furniture. She has to stop herself grabbing them by the scruff of the neck and heaving them out through the door.

I don’t reply. She wants me to be happy about coming here. But I don’t know these people. They’re not my family. I’ve been carted off here.

Suddenly Inna’s telephone rings. When she hangs up, she says I’m going to meet my brother.

We go into his room, a combined bedroom and study. He’s wearing a suit, although he’s in his own house.

My aunt shakes hands and thanks him for agreeing to look after me.

And he smiles at me. And says, “Of course.” Twice he says it, looking me in the eyes.

And I have to look down, because I feel so happy. And I think that he’s my brother. And that now I have a place here with him.

And he seizes my wrist and then…

Then the floor drops away. The thick carpet begins to writhe like a sea snake, trying to throw me off. There is a prickling feeling underneath my feet. I could do with something to hold on to, a heavy piece of furniture. But I’m already up near the ceiling.

The glass from the windows falls into the room like heavy rain. A black wind sucks the curtains inward and tears them to pieces.

I have lost myself.

The room becomes almost completely dark, and shrinks. It’s a different bedroom, long long ago. A bedroom that exists inside Mauri. A fat man is lying on top of a woman in a bed. There is no cover on the mattress, it’s just dirty yellow foam rubber. His back is broad and sweaty, like a big smooth stone by the water’s edge.

I realize afterwards that the woman is our mother, Mauri’s and mine. The other one. The one who gave birth to me. But this is before I existed.

Mauri is so small, two or three years old. He’s on the man’s back, hanging round his neck and shouting Mummy, Mummy. Neither of them takes any more notice of him than if he were a mosquito.

That’s my portrait of Mauri.

A pale little back, like a shrimp, above that great rock of a back in that dark, enclosed room.

And then he lets go of my hand and I’m back.

And then I know that I have to carry him. Neither of us has a place here at Regla. There is only a little time left.

Ester was doing lunges with the bar over her shoulders. Took a big step forward.

Mauri smiled at her and tried again:

“I can pay. There’s plenty of money in portraiture. People who work in industry have egos as big as zeppelins!”

“You wouldn’t like it,” she replied simply.

She glanced at him. Could see him trying to choose not to be offended. But what could she say?

At any rate, she couldn’t bear him rummaging about among her pictures any longer. She bent her knees beneath the bar and he disappeared down the stairs.

Y
es, I do recall a customer wearing an overcoat like that.”

Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik Stålnacke were at Kiruna airport, talking to a guy on the car rental desk. He was around twenty, frantically chewing gum as he searched through his memory bank. He had quite bad acne on his cheeks and throat. Anna-Maria was trying not to stare at a fully mature pimple, like a white larva on its way out of a red-rimmed lunar crater. She held her cell phone up to show him. It had a built-in digital camera, and was displaying a picture of the overcoat the divers had found beneath the ice of Torneträsk.

“I remember thinking he was going to be cold.”

He laughed.

“Foreigners!”

Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik didn’t say anything. Waited without asking questions. Better if he could remember by himself, rather than being pointed in a particular direction. Anna-Maria nodded encouragingly, and made a note in her memory: “foreigner.”

“It can’t have been last week, because I was off with flu. Just a minute…”

He tapped away at the computer, then came back with a form that had been filled in.

“Here’s the contract.”

This is crazy, thought Anna-Maria. We’re going to get him.

She could hardly wait to see the name.

Sven-Erik pulled on his gloves and asked if he could have the form.

“A foreigner,” said Anna-Maria, “what language did he speak?”

“English. That’s the only foreign language I know, so…”

“Any kind of accent?”

“Mmm…”

He shifted the chewing gum around in his mouth. Placed it between his front teeth so that half of it was sticking out, then increased the rate of chewing. It made Anna-Maria think of a sewing machine, rattling its way around a scrap of white fabric.

“British, actually. Although not that kind of, like, posh English, more sort of…working class.

“That’s it,” he continued, nodding as if he were agreeing with himself. “Yes, because it didn’t really go with the long trench coat and the shoes. He looked a bit haggard, I thought. Although he was very tanned.”

“We’ll hang on to the contract,” said Sven-Erik. “We’ll get a copy to you, but don’t talk to any journalists about this, if you don’t mind. And we’ll need all the information you’ve got on the computer, how he paid, anything at all.”

“And we want the car,” said Anna-Maria. “If it’s out at the moment, you’ll need to get it back. Give the customer a different one.”

“This is about Inna Wattrang, isn’t it?”

“Was he wearing the overcoat when he brought the car back?” asked Anna-Maria.

“Don’t know. I think he left the key in our deposit box.”

He switched on the computer.

“Yeah, he probably took the evening flight last Friday. Or maybe early Saturday.”

Then perhaps one of the flight attendants might have seen him without the coat, thought Anna-Maria.

“We’ll put out a call for the man on the contract,” Anna-Maria said to Sven-Erik once they were back in the car. “John McNamara. Interpol can help us with the British contacts. Then if the lab can confirm that the blood on the coat is Inna Wattrang’s, and if they can do a DNA analysis on what’s on the coat…”

“It might not be possible, it’s been in the water.”

“Then the Rudbeck lab in Uppsala can do it. It has to be possible to link this guy to the coat, it isn’t enough that he happened to rent a car here at the time she was murdered.”

“Unless we find something in the car.”

“Forensics will have to go over it.”

She turned to Sven-Erik with a broad grin. Sven-Erik pressed his feet to the floor of the car, automatically searching for a brake; he preferred it if she looked at the road while she was driving.

“Bloody hell, but we’ve worked fast,” said Anna-Maria, flooring the accelerator with sheer joy. “And we’ve done it ourselves, without getting Stockholm involved, that’s bloody fantastic.”

R
ebecka had her evening meal with Sivving. They were in his boiler room. Rebecka was sitting at the little Formica table watching Sivving prepare the food on the small hotplate. He placed slices of fish pudding in an aluminum pan and warmed them gently with a dash of milk. Almond potatoes were simmering in a pot alongside. On the table stood a basket of crispbread and a tub of extra-salted margarine. The aroma of the food mingled with the smell of freshly washed woolen socks, hanging on the washing line.

“Quite a party,” said Rebecka. “What do you say, Bella?”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Sivving quietly to the pointer bitch, who had been sent to her basket beside Sivving’s bed.

Saliva was dangling from her jaws like two pieces of string. Her brown eyes told a tale of starvation and near death.

“You can have my leftovers afterwards,” promised Rebecka.

“Don’t keep chatting to her. She just takes it as permission to get out of her basket.”

Rebecka smiled. She looked at Sivving’s back. He was a wonderful sight. His hair hadn’t thinned, just turned a silky white and somehow lighter, standing out around his head like a fluffy fox’s
brush. His combat trousers from the surplus stores stuffed into thick woolen socks. Maj-Lis must have knitted a good stock for him before she died. A flannel shirt covering his big stomach. One of Maj-Lis’s aprons that didn’t quite meet at the back; instead he’d pushed the ties into the back pockets of his trousers to hold it in place.

Up in the rest of the house, Sivving had dutifully put up Christmas decorations in December; he’d hung the Christmas stars in their respective windows, the orange paper star from the ICA store in the kitchen, the handcrafted straw one in the living room. He’d got out the little Christmas elves and goblins, the Advent candlesticks and Maj-Lis’s embroidered cloths. After Twelfth Night everything had been put back in boxes and carried up into the attic. The cloths hadn’t needed washing. He never ate a meal off them, after all. Nothing got dirty up in the house.

Down in the boiler room where he lived nowadays, everything had remained the same. No cloths. No little goblins on the cupboard.

I like that, thought Rebecka. The fact that everything stays the same. The same pans and plates on the shelf on the wall. Everything has a purpose. The bedspread keeps the dog hairs off the sheets when Bella sneaks onto the bed. There’s a rag rug on the floor because the floor is cold, not for decoration. She’d got used to it, she realized. She no longer thought it was strange that he’d moved down here into the cellar.

“What about all that business with Inna Wattrang?” said Sivving. “It’s all over the papers.”

Before Rebecka could answer, her cell phone rang. An 08 number. The law firm’s exchange on the display.

Måns, thought Rebecka, and all of a sudden she was so nervous she stood up quickly.

Bella seized the opportunity and leapt up as well. In half a second she was over by the stove.

“Get away,” grumbled Sivving.

To Rebecka he said, “The potatoes will be ready in five minutes.”

“One minute,” said Rebecka, and dashed up the stairs. She could hear Sivving’s “In your basket” as she closed the cellar door behind her and answered the phone.