The Black Path (36 page)

“God, that sounds wonderful,” said Ulrika, “can’t you do that for me as well? Then I can just lie there watching a film and eating something delicious.”

They laughed, slightly embarrassed.

“I just want my macaroni,” said Ester obstinately.

She opened the refrigerator door and took out a big pan of cold cooked macaroni. Lots of carbs.

Then Ester looked at Ulrika. It was unavoidable. She was standing there when Ester closed the refrigerator door and turned around. Ulrika as white as paper. A red hole in the middle of her face.

A voice. Ebba’s or Ulrika’s.

“Are you okay? Don’t you feel well?”

Oh yes, she felt fine. She just had to get back upstairs to her room in the attic.

She made her way up the stairs. A while later she was sitting on her bed. She was eating macaroni out of the pan with her hands, she’d forgotten to bring a fork. When she closed her eyes she could see Diddi Wattrang sleeping deeply in the matrimonial bed. He was fully dressed, although Ulrika had taken his shoes off when he got home last night. She could see Mikael Wiik stationing his men around the estate. He wasn’t expecting any problems, just wanted the guests to see the guards and feel secure. She could see Mauri, wandering back and forth in his study, nervous about that evening’s dinner party. She could see that the wolf had climbed down from the tree.

She opened her eyes and looked at her oil painting of Torneträsk.

I left her, she thought. I went to Stockholm.

Ester goes by train to Stockholm. Her aunt meets her at the station. She looks like a bookmark, or a hard-nosed film star. Her straight, black Sami hair has been curled and sprayed into a Rita Hayworth style. Her lips are red and her skirt is tight. Her perfume is sweet and cloying.

Ester is going to the art school for an interview. She’s wearing an anorak and sneakers.

At the Idun Lovén Art School, they have seen Ester’s entry exam work. She’s good, but actually she’s far too young. That’s why the board want to meet her.

“Now remember to talk,” her aunt exhorts her. “At least answer when they ask you something. Promise!”

Ester promises, from within her numbed state. There is so much going on around her: the screeching and whistling of the subway train as it pulls into the station, words everywhere, posters advertising all kinds of things. She tries to read them, to work out what they’re trying to sell, but she hasn’t time, her aunt’s heels are like drumsticks keeping up a rapid rhythm through a crowd of people; Ester doesn’t have time to look at them either.

She is to be interviewed by three men and two women. They’re all well into middle age. Her aunt has to wait out in the corridor. Ester is invited into a conference room. There are large paintings on the walls. Ester’s entry exam work is leaning against the wall.

“We’d very much like to talk to you about your pictures,” says one of the women in a friendly tone.

She’s the principal. They’ve shaken hands and explained who they are and what their names are, but Ester doesn’t remember. She can only remember that the woman who’s talking now said she was the principal.

There’s only one oil painting. It’s called
Midsummer’s Eve,
and it’s a picture of Torneträsk, with a family just about to get into a boat by the shore. Midnight sun, and swarms of mosquitoes filling the air. A boy and his father are already sitting in the boat. The mother is pulling at a girl, who wants to stay ashore. The girl is crying. The shadow of a flying bird across her face. In the background the mountain, with the remains of the snow still lying there. Ester has painted the water black. The reflections in the water have been enlarged; if you look only at them, you get the impression that the lake is nearer to the observer than the family is. But in the composition of the picture, the family is in the foreground. It worked well, making the reflections bigger. It makes the water look big and threatening. And beneath the surface of the water there is something white. But it could just be the reflection of a cloud.

“You’re not used to painting in oils,” says one of the men.

Ester nods her head. Because it’s perfectly true.

“It’s an interesting picture,” says the principal pleasantly. “Why doesn’t the girl want to get into the boat?”

Ester hesitates.

“Is she afraid of the water?”

Ester nods. Why should she tell them? If she does, everything will be ruined. The white shadow beneath the water is the ghostly water horse that has awoken on midsummer’s eve. When Ester was little, she read about the horse in a Swedish book from the school library. In the painting he is swimming down there, wishing for a child to fall in the water so that he can drag it down and eat it up. The girl knows she is that child. The shadow of the bird across her face is the Siberian jay,
guovsat,
the bringer of misfortune. Her parents see only clouds in the sky. They have promised the boy in the boat he can steer, he wants to go.

They pull out other pictures. Nasti in his cage. Pencil drawings from her home in Rensjön, both indoors and outdoors.

And they ask about this and that. She doesn’t know what they want to hear. And what can she say? After all, they’ve got the pictures right there in front of their noses, all they have to do is look. She doesn’t want to explain and go into details, so she answers in monosyllables and becomes torpid.

Her aunt and her mother are sitting inside her head, conducting a lively discussion.

M
OTHER:
It’s obvious a painter doesn’t want to talk about his or her pictures. You don’t really know yourself where they’ve come from. And perhaps you don’t want to know, either.

A
UNT:
Yes, but sometimes you just have to give something of yourself if you want to achieve a goal. Say something, Ester, you do want to get into art school after all. They’re going to start thinking you’re retarded in some way.

They’re looking at all the dogs having a crap. It was Gunilla Petrini who chose which pictures Ester should send in. And she liked the dogs.

There’s Musta, of course, madly kicking snow over her little pile with her hind legs.

The neighbor’s pointer, Herkules. An austere, quite military hunting dog. Broad-chested, his muzzle slightly crooked. But when he wanted a crap, for some reason he always had to find a small fir tree. He had to do it with his ass pressed against a tree. Ester herself is happy with the way she’s captured his expression, pleasure and straining combined, as he stands there with his back arched over the little tree.

And then there’s a picture she drew after a visit to Kiruna. It’s a woman, pulling her Pekingese along on a lead. You can see only her calves from behind, they’re quite thick, and her feet are stuffed into high-heeled shoes. The Pekingese is crouching, trying to have a crap. But it looks as if his mistress has grown tired of waiting, and is dragging him along on his walk. You see him from behind too, still in the position, the claws of his hind feet leaving drag marks on the ground.

They’re asking her something. Inside her head, her aunt nudges her impatiently.

But Ester keeps her mouth firmly closed. What can she say? That she’s interested in shit?

Her aunt wants to know how it went. How’s Ester supposed to know? She doesn’t like all that talking. But she tried. With the pictures of Nasti, for example. She realizes they’re trying to see a deeper meaning in them. His captivity. His little dead body. Her father’s words come out of her mouth: They’re so sensitive, she said. They can cope out there on the mountain, but when they’re exposed to our cold germs, for example…They all looked questioningly at her.

Now she feels like an idiot. Thinks she did too much talking. Although they think she hardly said a word, she knows that.

It went really badly, she thinks now. She’ll never get in.

Ester Kallis put the empty pan down beside her bed. All she could do now was sit here and wait. She wasn’t sure what for.

It’ll show itself, she thought. It’s like falling. It happens all by itself.

She mustn’t put the light on in her room. Mustn’t give herself away.

Downstairs they were having dinner. Like a herd of reindeer, grazing. Unaware that the wolf pack is getting closer, blocking off their escape routes.

Pitch-black night outside. No moon. It made virtually no difference whether she closed her eyes or opened them. A small amount of light from the lamp on the wall outside filtered into her room.

The dead were approaching. Or was she approaching them? She recognized several of them. Relatives on her mother’s side whom she’d never met.

Inna too. Not as far away as you might think. Maybe she was worried about her brother. But there wasn’t much Ester could do about that. She had her own brother to think about.

It wasn’t too long since Inna had sat here in Ester’s room. The swelling on her face had begun to subside. The bruises had changed color, from red and blue to green and yellow.

“Aren’t you going to get out your palette and paint me?” she’d asked. “I’m so colorful at the moment, after all.”

She’d changed recently. Stayed at home at the weekends. Wasn’t as cheerful as she had been. Sometimes she’d come up and sit with Ester for a while.

“I don’t know,” she’d said. “I just feel so tired of everything. Tired and depressed.”

Ester had liked her like that. Depressed.

Why should a person always be happy? she’d wanted to ask Inna.

These people. Happy and easygoing, lots of friends. That was the most important thing of all.

But still. Inna made that demand only of herself. Not of Ester.

In that way Inna was like Ester’s mother.

They both let me be who I am, she thought. Mother. She promised the teachers in school that she’d tell me to try harder. Try to learn math and writing. “And she’s so quiet,” the teachers said. “She hasn’t got any friends.”

As if it were some kind of illness.

But my mother let me be. Let me draw. Never asked if I had a friend I’d like to invite home. Being alone was something completely natural.

At art school it wasn’t the same. You had to pretend you weren’t alone. So that the others wouldn’t have to feel worried and weighed down by guilt.

Ester starts at the Idun Lovén Art School in Stockholm. Gunilla Petrini has a friend whose apartment in Östermalm is being renovated, and so the owners are spending the winter in Brittany. Little Ester can have one of the rooms, that’s absolutely fine. The men working on the apartment arrive early in the morning and have finished for the day by the time Ester gets home.

Ester is used to being alone. She had no best friends in school. She has spent the whole of her fifteen years of life living on the fringes, sitting alone on school outings and munching her sandwich. She stopped hoping somebody would come and sit beside her on the bus at a very early stage.

So of course it’s her own fault. She’s not used to making contact with people. Besides which, she’s convinced she’d be rejected if she tried. Ester sits on her own during break times. She doesn’t initiate any conversations. The other students are very much aware of the age difference, and make the excuse to themselves that Ester must have friends of her own age to hang out with in her free time. Ester wakes up alone. Gets dressed and eats her breakfast alone. On the way out, she sometimes meets the men who are renovating the apartment, dressed in their blue overalls. They nod or say hi, but there’s a million miles between them.

She isn’t particularly bothered by the fact that she’s an outsider at college. She paints models and learns by watching the older students on her course. When the others go out for a coffee, she often stays behind in the studio, walks round and takes a look. Tries to work out how this one got the lines to look so light, how that one found those colors.

When she doesn’t have classes in life drawing, she goes for walks. And it’s easy to be alone in Stockholm. Nobody can tell by looking at her that she’s an outsider. It isn’t like Kiruna, where everybody knows who you are. There are lots of people walking here, all on the way to different places. It gives her a sense of liberation, to be one of the crowd.

In Östermalm there are old ladies who wear hats! They’re even more entertaining than dogs. On Saturday mornings Ester pursues them with her sketch pad. She draws them in rapid lines, their frail bodies in thick nylon stockings and good coats. When it goes dark, they disappear from the streets like frightened rabbits.

Ester goes home and eats sandwiches and yogurt for dinner. Then she goes out again. The autumn evenings are still warm and black as velvet. She walks over the city’s bridges.

One evening she is standing on Västerbron, looking down at a trailer park. A week later she comes back and watches a family who live there. The father is sitting on a camping stool, smoking. The family has hung up their washing between the trailers. The children are kicking a ball around. They are shouting to one another in a foreign language.