The Black Path (3 page)

She smiled inwardly at Sven-Erik’s big wet moustache. It looked like road kill. Recently it had been more or less growing wild. She wondered how lonely he really was. His daughter lived in Luleå with her family. They probably didn’t get together very often.

And then about eighteen months ago that cat of his had disappeared. Anna-Maria had tried to persuade him to get another one, but Sven-Erik refused. “They’re nothing but trouble,” he said. “They’re such a tie.” She knew exactly what that meant. He wanted to protect himself from the anguish. God knows he’d worried about Manne and pondered over what might have happened to him, until in the end he’d given up hope and stopped talking about him.

It was such a shame, thought Anna-Maria. Sven-Erik was a good man. He’d make a fine husband for someone. And a good master for any animal. He and Anna-Maria got on well, but it would never occur to them to spend their leisure time together. It wasn’t just that he was much older than her. They simply didn’t have that much in common. If they met by chance in town or in a shop when they weren’t working, it was always so difficult to make conversation. But at work they’d chat away and get on really well.

Sven-Erik looked at Anna-Maria. She really was a little woman, no more than one meter fifty, she almost disappeared inside the big snowmobile overalls. Her long blonde hair flattened by the hat. Not that she cared. She wasn’t one for makeup and that sort of thing. Probably didn’t have the time either. Four kids and a husband who didn’t seem to do all that much at home. Apart from that, there was nothing wrong with Robert, things seemed to be good between him and Anna-Maria, he was just so lazy.

Although how much had he actually done at home when he and Hjördis had been married? He didn’t really remember, but he did remember not being used to cooking when he was first living on his own.

“Okay,” said Anna-Maria. “What if you and I fight our way through the snowstorm and go round the arks, while the others take the village and the tourist station?”

Sven-Erik grinned.

“Might as well, Saturday night’s ruined anyway.”

It wasn’t really ruined. What would he have been doing otherwise? Watching TV and maybe taking a sauna with his neighbor. Always the same old routine.

“True,” replied Anna-Maria, zipping up her overalls.

Although she didn’t really feel like that. This wasn’t a ruined Saturday night. A knight can’t just stay at home nestling in the bosom of his family, he’ll go mad. He needs to get out there and draw his sword. To come home, tired and sated with adventures, to the family who have no doubt left their empty pizza boxes and fizzy drinks bottles in a heap on the living room table, but it didn’t matter. This was life at its best. Knocking on doors out on the ice in the darkness.

“Hope she didn’t have kids,” said Anna-Maria before they went out into the storm.

Sven-Erik didn’t reply. He was a little ashamed. He hadn’t even thought about children. The only thing he’d thought was that he hoped there wasn’t a cat shut in an apartment somewhere, waiting for his mistress.

N
OVEMBER
2003

R
ebecka Martinsson is discharged from the psychiatric clinic at St. Göran’s hospital. She takes the train up to Kiruna. Now she’s sitting in a taxi outside her grandmother’s house in Kurravaara.

Since her grandmother died, the house has belonged to Rebecka and Uncle Affe. It’s a gray stone house down by the river. Worn linoleum on the floors, damp patches on the walls.

The house used to smell old, but lived in. A permanent background aroma of wet Wellington boots, the barn, cooking and baking. Grandmother’s own, safe smell. And Daddy’s, of course, at that time. Now the house smells abandoned, closed up. The cellar is stuffed full of glass wool to keep away the chill that strikes up through the ground.

The taxi driver carries her suitcase inside. Asks if it’s to go upstairs or downstairs.

“Upstairs,” she replies.

She used to live upstairs with her grandmother.

Daddy lived in the flat downstairs. The furniture is standing in there in a strangely silent, timeless sleep beneath big white sheets. Uncle Affe’s wife, Inga-Britt, uses the ground floor as a
storeroom. More and more banana boxes full of books and clothes are being gathered here, along with old chairs Inga-Britt has picked up cheaply and is intending to restore one day. Daddy’s furniture beneath the sheets has to shuffle closer and closer to the walls.

The fact that it doesn’t look the way it used to is no help. For Rebecka, nothing changes the flat on the ground floor.

Daddy has been dead for many years, but as soon as she walks through the door she can see him sitting there on the kitchen sofa. It’s time for breakfast, upstairs with Grandmother. He’s heard her coming down the stairs and has sat up quickly. He’s wearing a red and black checked flannel shirt and a blue Helly Hansen sweater. His blue work trousers are tucked into the long thick socks that Grandmother knitted. His eyes are slightly swollen. When he catches sight of her, he runs his hand over his stubbly chin and smiles.

She can see a great deal now that she didn’t see then. Or did she? Running his hand over his stubble—she can see now that it was a sign of embarrassment. What does it matter to her? The fact that he doesn’t shave? That he’s slept in his clothes? Not in the slightest. He’s handsome, handsome.

And the beer can standing on the draining board. It’s so battered and scruffy. It’s a long time since it held beer. He drinks something else out of it, but he wants the neighbors to think it’s ordinary beer.

I never cared about that, she wants to say to him. It was Mummy who went on about it. I really, really loved you.

The taxi has gone. She’s lit the open fire and switched on the radiators.

She’s lying on her back in the kitchen on one of Grandmother’s rag rugs. Following a fly with her eyes. It’s buzzing loudly, in distress. Thumping heavily against the ceiling, as if it’s blind. They get like that, the ones that wake up because the house is suddenly warm. A tortured, tense noise, its flight slow and erratic. It lands on the wall now, wandering around listlessly and aimlessly. It has no ability to react at all. She could probably kill it with her bare hand. Then she wouldn’t have to listen to the noise anymore. But she can’t summon up the strength. Lies there watching it instead. It’ll die soon anyway. She can sweep it up then.

D
ECEMBER
2003

I
t’s Tuesday. Every Tuesday, Rebecka goes into town. Has a session with her therapist and collects her weekly dose of Cipramil. The therapist is a woman in her forties. Rebecka tries not to despise her. Can’t help looking at her shoes and thinking “cheap,” and at her jacket and thinking it doesn’t fit properly.

But despising another person is a treacherous thing to do. It suddenly turns around: What about you, then? You haven’t even got a job.

The therapist asks Rebecka to tell her about her childhood.

“What for?” asks Rebecka. “That’s not why I’m here, is it?”

“Why are you here, do you think?”

She’s so tired of these professional questions being fired back at her. She looks down at the carpet in order to hide her expression.

What could she say? The least thing is like a red button. If you press it, you don’t know what might happen. You remember drinking a glass of milk, and then everything else comes flooding in.

I’ve no intention of wallowing in all that, she thinks, glaring at the box of tissues that’s always there at the ready on the desk between them.

She looks at herself from the outside. Can’t work. Sits there on the cold toilet seat in the morning popping the tablets out of the box, afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t.

There are many words. Embarrassing, pathetic, feeble, disgusting, revolting, a burden, crazy, sick. Murderer.

She has to be a little bit nice to the therapist. Accommodating. On the road to recovery. Not such hard work all the time.

I’ll tell her about something, she thinks. Next time.

She could lie. She’s done that before.

She could say: My mother. I don’t think she loved me. And perhaps that isn’t really a lie. More of a small truth. But this truth is hiding the big truth.

I didn’t cry when she died, thinks Rebecka. I was eleven years old, and cold as ice. There’s something wrong with me, something basic.

N
EW
Y
EAR’S
E
VE
2003

R
ebecka is celebrating New Year’s Eve with Sivving Fjällborg’s dog, Bella. Sivving is her neighbor. He was a friend of her grandmother’s when Rebecka was little.

He asked if Rebecka would like to go with him to his daughter Lena and her family. Rebecka wriggled out of it, and he didn’t say any more. Instead he left the dog behind. It isn’t usually a problem to take Bella along. He said he needed a guard dog, but in fact it’s Rebecka who needs guarding. It doesn’t matter. Rebecka is glad of the company.

Bella is a lively pointer. She loves her food like all pointers, and would be as fat as a sausage if she weren’t always on the move. Sivving lets her run off the worst of her restlessness down on the river, and he usually manages to persuade some of the villagers to take her hunting from time to time. She paces around in the house, winding herself around your legs—it’s enough to drive you mad. Jumps up and barks at the least sound. But the constant activity keeps her as thin as a rake. Her ribs can be seen quite clearly beneath her skin.

Most of the time, lying down is a punishment. But at the moment Bella is lying on Rebecka’s bed, snoring. Rebecka has been
skiing along the river for several hours. At the beginning she had to drag Bella along with her. Then she let her off the lead, and Bella scampered here and there kicking the snow up all around her. For the last few kilometers she trotted along happily in Rebecka’s tracks.

At around ten o’clock Måns rings; he used to be Rebecka’s boss at the office.

When she hears his voice, her hand moves to her hair. As if he could see her.

She’s thought about him. Often. And she thinks he rang and asked about her when she was in the hospital. But she isn’t sure. She remembers things so badly. She has the idea she told the nurse in charge of the ward that she didn’t want to speak to him. The electric shock treatment made her so confused. And her short-term memory disappeared. She became like an old person, saying the same thing several times in the course of a few minutes. She didn’t want anything to do with anyone at the time. And certainly not Måns. She didn’t want him to see her like that.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“Fine,” she says; she feels like one of those bloody automatic pianos inside when she hears his voice. “How about you?”

“Bloody great, fantastic.”

Now it’s her turn to say something. She tries to come up with something sensible, preferably something funny, but her brain isn’t working at all.

“I’m sitting in a hotel room in Barcelona,” he says at last.

“I’m watching television with my neighbor’s dog. He’s gone to celebrate New Year’s with his daughter.”

Måns doesn’t answer straightaway. It takes a second. Rebecka listens. Afterwards she’ll sit and analyze that silent second like a teenager. Did it mean anything? What? A stab of jealousy directed at the unknown male neighbor with the dog?

“What kind of guy is he, then?” asks Måns.

“Oh, it’s Sivving. He’s retired, he lives in a house over the road.”

She tells him about Sivving. How he lives down in the boiler room with his dog. Because it’s simpler. He’s got everything he needs down there after all, including a refrigerator, a shower and a hotplate. And less housework to worry about if you don’t spread yourself all over the place. And she tells him how Sivving got his name. That his real name is Erik, but that his mother, in a fit of pride, had his civil engineer title added to the telephone book: “civ. ing.” And that the punishment had followed swiftly in the village, where it was a crime to regard oneself as better than anyone else: “Oh, yes, here comes civ.ing himself.”

Måns laughs. So does Rebecka. And then they laugh a little more, mostly because they haven’t got anything to say. He asks if it’s cold. She clambers up onto the sofa and looks at the thermometer.

“Minus twenty-five degrees.”

“Bloody hell!”

Silence again. A little too long. Then he says quickly:

“I just wanted to wish you Happy New Year…I mean, I’m still your boss.”

What does he mean by that? wonders Rebecka. Is he ringing everybody who works for him? Or just those he knows don’t have a life? Or does he actually care?

“Happy New Year to you too,” she says, and since the words are bordering on the formal, she allows her voice to soften.

“Right…well…I’ll probably go out and take a look at the fireworks…”

“And I’ve got to take the dog out…”

When they’ve hung up, she sits there with the receiver in her hand. Was he alone in Barcelona? Hardly likely, is it? It was all a bit quick there at the end. Did she hear a door? Did somebody come in? Was that why he ended the conversation so abruptly?

J
UNE
2004

I
t was fortunate that Rebecka Martinsson never got to see Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot begging to be allowed to give her a job. If she had, her pride would have made her turn it down.