by Stefan Spjut
‘We’re going to the circus,’ he said.
‘Cut it out,’ Stava said.
‘What circus?’
‘We’re not going to the circus.’
*
Erasmus was standing down by the lake, gazing out across the water, or maybe at the forest climbing the mountain on the other side. His feet were placed close together, his hands were folded behind his back, he wore no hat and from afar he looked like an old juniper bush.
When they approached him, a lone wolf rose from the ground. Anders stopped instantly, but Stava continued. She sank into a squat in front of the animal, who looked at her and then withdrew.
Stava spoke to her father, but it was in Sami, so he didn’t understand a word. Eventually, she reached for the old man. That made the wolf lunge at her and push her to the ground. Then Erasmus left and the wolf followed.
Anders rubbed his cheek. There was something weird about his cheek. It was like touching someone else’s cheek. He went closer to the small, rolled-up body and standing there looking at her, he felt like an animal coming across roadkill by the side of a highway. A certain level of wonder and a dash of worry. Other than that, nothing. Her black hair wound through the grass like some kind of strange and suffocating plant. He sat down and looked at it; then he touched it gingerly.
Lennart stood there with the boy on his arm, turning the sunglasses display rack.
‘What about these, how do you like these?’ He turned his face to the boy, whose hand instinctively shot out, but he was prepared and pulled his head away. He leaned forward and studied himself in the small mirror.
‘Not these? All right. Aren’t you the picky one?’
He pushed the temples back into the holes in the rack and pulled out another pair.
‘What do you say to these then? Like a rock star, eh? Like Elvis Presley!’
He went over to the till, pulled out his wallet and threw it down on the counter. It was made of leather with a gold clasp. The man picked it up and looked inside.
‘This is Norwegian money, I can’t take that.’
‘Sure you can.’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘You can take as much as you like.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Without taking his eyes off the man, he put the sunglasses and the yoghurt pots and the bananas in his pocket. Then he picked up his wallet and walked toward the exit.
The man had caught up by the time the doors slid open to let him out. Another man was approaching at a run between the shelves. They started circling him.
Lennart could hear himself breathing heavily through his nose.
He reached out for the young man who had refused his money and after he had backed himself into the evening papers with a terrified look on his face, he caught hold of him with his massive hand. He squeezed his childishly weak throat. At first, the man tried to wrest free, but then his face turned red and he helplessly started scratching and touching anything he could reach: the sleeve of Lennart’s jacket, his zipper, his buttons, the boy. In the end, he was simply wiggling his fingers in the air as if performing a hexing so petrifying it was only ever used as a last resort. Lennart let go and tossed him aside. The man crashed into a shelf and lay there, sucking air into his lungs with long, hissing breaths.
He went out to the van and buckled the child in and started the engine and turned out onto the road. After driving for a while, he glanced at the child. His plaster had come off. It was dangling like an open hatch door. The wound was a nasty-looking hole through his cheek, about half an inch across. It looked more like an acid injury than something he’d scratched open.
Lennart put his stump on the wheel and stuck the plaster back on. Then he fished a banana out of his jacket pocket.
‘Here you go. And if you’re going to be peeling bananas one-handed, there’s one thing you have to get straight: they’re easier to open from this end. See? People open them from this end, but that’s wrong. Or maybe not wrong, but it’s harder. Dig in.’
The car was parked behind the petrol station, seemingly deliberately tucked away. It was a Chevy, a very long and pompous hatchback with light wood panelling on the sides. There was a doll’s head with sooty angel’s hair on the tow ball; I thought it looked creepy.
Roland climbed out and went over to talk to someone sitting in it. I couldn’t see who it was; all I could see was a leg sticking out the door. Camouflage trousers, white with a grey and black woodland pattern.
I’d felt sick all morning and now it washed over me again, like a cold undertow. Roland had told me not to come, but I had been too restless to stay at the hotel. A hundred yards from my own flat, which felt odd in an incredibly enervating way. Besides, being around Diana and her little girl made me feel awful. Not to mention Susso, and even more so her flame-coloured rat, which was never where you thought it would be.
Parked under the sign displaying the fuel prices was a lorry with the text ‘Rönnberg’s Fish’ on it and next to that a cart that was a kiosk and from which Harr was now walking toward us. Tall and lanky and comically bow-legged. He had traded his hat in for a baseball cap.
He stopped briefly and bent down to me like a traffic officer and I had no choice but to roll down my window. He was holding a paper plate and had food both in his mouth and his beard. Little clumps of mashed potato that moved when he chewed. He grinned and pointed to the Chevy with his plastic fork.
‘I’ve bought CDs for you.’
‘CDs?’
‘My album.’
‘Yes, the one with the bus.’
‘Exactly, the one with the bus. Twenty copies. I reckon that’ll do you.’
I nodded, which made him doff his cap and walk on.
I was surprised it wasn’t that guy Ensimmäinen who climbed out of the car, but a young man in his twenties. I had no idea who he was and was angry with Roland for not telling me he had involved yet another person, and a young one at that, with everything that entailed.
They stood there, talking. It didn’t seem to be a discussion. They laughed fairly often and hard and I thought that was inappropriate given what they were about to do. Though I suppose it was a way of releasing some tension. It struck me I had never seen Roland with friends before, or other men of any description, but I wasn’t sure if that was because of him or me.
After a few minutes, he returned. He climbed into his seat and rummaged around the centre console, eventually pulling out a phone charger. The string of a reflector was entangled in the spiral cord; he sighed through his nose and started untangling it.
‘Who’s that guy?’
‘Pontus. It’s Harr’s lad.’
‘So he’s going too?’
‘He’s going too.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’
‘Because I didn’t know he was coming.’
I stayed in the car, mulling things over. Then I opened the door and went over to join them. That was, obviously, an incredible intrusion. Pontus smiled at me, but in an awkward way. His strawberry-blonde hair was shaped into a scraggly mohawk. I grabbed his shirtsleeve and pulled him aside.
‘I don’t know what your dad’s told you about this undertaking or whatever we should call it, but I want you to be aware that it’s going to be dangerous in ways you can’t imagine.’
‘Don’t scare the boy,’ Harr said.
Pontus looked at me with one eye, squeezing the other shut against the sun.
‘I know it’s dangerous all right.’
‘It’s not just that. There’s other aspects. If you get blood on your hands, you’ll never be able to get it off.’ I showed him my open hands and he looked at them.
‘I just want to help.’
‘And that’s very sweet of you, of course. But you have to think about yourself too. And you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. This is going to make you miserable, I promise you.’
A van with Lithuanian plates came driving toward us. The door opened and Ensimmäinen jumped
out. His hair was braided and hung down his back like a rope. He opened the Chevy’s boot, which was like a door, and pulled out a shotgun and a rifle with a scope the size of a wine bottle. That was too much for me. A wave of nausea washed over me and I got back in the car.
After the van left, Roland came back to our car.
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘You hungry?’
‘Please don’t talk about food. I want to throw up.’
I could feel him watching me.
‘What’s in the bag?’ I said.
He looked at the carrier bag he had placed in the back seat and then he looked back at me.
‘CDs.’
I nodded.
‘Want to have a listen?’
‘No, Roland, I don’t want to have a listen.’
‘Then what do you want to do?’
‘Just let me sit here for a while.’
He went over to the petrol station and when he came back, I was feeling a bit better; I could even give him a small smile. He held out a paper cup of coffee and I accepted it. Then, surprisingly, he handed me a chocolate bar as well. And a cold bottle of mineral water that he put between my thighs.
He took the cup out of my hand and slurped down some of the coffee. Then he gave me the cup back; it was like my hand was a cupholder.
‘We can’t just sit around here,’ he said and started the car.
*
We drove into Vittangi and ambled around without really knowing where to go. Several of the pavements had been demolished and there were a lot of sand heaps and traffic cones. It was warm; I could feel sweat breaking out underneath my bosom. A pitch-black child with an oversized helmet pedalled by on a bicycle; I believe that was the only person we saw.
The pizzeria was housed on the ground floor of a yellow wooden house. The awnings above the windows were so old their stripes were all but indistinguishable. The front steps had been removed to accommodate the roadworks, leaving the front door a foot and a half above ground level. To make this unmistakeably obvious, the entrance had been cordoned off with a piece of string with red and yellow plastic flags on.
The outdoor serving area was a fenced-in wooden deck with picnic tables and parasols; we sat down. We were the only guests. My feet were killing me; taking my shoes off made me moan with pleasure. Thankfully, a breeze was blowing from the river, which was, to my delight, actually visible between the houses. Roland went inside to buy a beer and I moved the ashtray, an upside-down terracotta pot on a saucer, to another table. A tower of beer crates loomed next to the door. A watering can with a rose hung on the wall and there was a number of planters, but they had nothing but dirt in them. Dry old dirt. And cigarette butts.
Roland nursed his bottle of beer, reading the paper with his hand spread over the pages the wind was trying to fold every which way.
‘When Jerker Persson went out to weed his garden early one morning, he made what can only be called an unusual discovery. A few feet away, Herman the camel was munching on his lawn.’
It was as though my ears were blocked.
‘A camel?’ I heard myself say.
He nodded.
‘In Boden.’
He read on and took a sip from his bottle.
‘Western Farm. Bloody stupid nonsense.’
Anders was kneeling on a cardboard box with galvanised staples in his hands. They were attaching chicken wire to a frame of pressure-treated wood held together with nail plates. It was going to be a kennel, Stava had told him. She was doing the carpentry. Every hammer blow made him blink.
Now she was sitting with her palm extended toward him. Instead of putting a staple in it, he grabbed it. She looked at him. Then she put the hammer down and wiped her forehead with her arm.
‘Anders,’ she said quietly.
In a fit of profound confusion, he pulled her strong, coarse little hand closer, clutching and bending over it as though he were praying; he stayed in that position until she pulled her hand away.
Then he straightened and began gathering up the staples that had scattered across the grass. Näcken, who was working on the other side of the frame, was watching him with a look of revulsion on his face.
He knew he looked horrible these days and from time to time, he would touch his own face. Feel his cheek, which was taut and weird.
The dog house was a red box with a tar-paper roof. The girl called Kerstin was rooting around in there and just then, she stuck her head out the little door and waved. The wave was for Ipa, who was approaching on a quad bike with sheets of rusty steel mesh trembling on its trailer.
She turned in the front yard and got off. Erasmus helped her unload. He had his hat on but was otherwise naked to the waist. His arms were boyishly sinewy and there was a butterfly of greyish-white hair on his chest.
‘Is it nice in there?’ Ipa said.
‘Oooh yes,’ came the reply from inside the doghouse.
‘Do you think she’ll like it?’
‘I want to live here too.’
‘It’s the new girl’s house. But if you’re nice to her, she might let you into her house sometimes.’
‘Anders,’ Erasmus called.
Anders stayed seated for a while, anxious, before crawling across the grass toward the old man, who was sitting on a plastic chair in the shade of the house.
‘You know what I think, I think you should bite Stava.’
‘You want me to bite her,’ he slurred.
‘Yes, give her a proper bite.’
Anders crawled back. He knew he was supposed to do something, but not what it was. Then he spotted Erasmus, who was watching him, and remembered. He bit her arm. Stava cursed and shoved him back. Erasmus and Näcken laughed.
‘You broke the skin,’ she said, examining the mark on her arm.
Anders wanted to know what Erasmus thought of that, that he’d bitten her hard enough to break the skin. He turned expectantly to the old man. Then he noticed Erasmus had lost his hat and that his head with its long grey hair was drooping to one side as though he’d suddenly fallen into a deep sleep. One eye stared at nothing and where the other one had been, there was nothing but a dark hole.
Näcken had sprung to his feet. He stared at the lifeless body. His hammer hit the ground and he clapped both hands to his throat. He coughed up bloody froth and staggered aside. Then he took a few steps in the opposite direction. His legs buckled and he collapsed, right on top of the bed of clattering steel mesh.
Ipa had dashed toward the quad bike and leapt onto it, but that was as far as she got. She lay slumped over the handlebar.
Anders had heard the bangs, but it took him a while to realise someone was shooting at them. When he did, he dropped to his stomach in the grass.
‘It’s the police,’ he said. ‘The police are shooting at us!’
‘No,’ Stava said, ‘it’s not the police.’
‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me.’
Stava tugged at him, trying to get him to stand up, but he refused. Several rifles were firing from up in the woods; it sounded like a firing range.
‘If you don’t come right now, you’re on your own.’
‘Tell them it wasn’t me!’
He hid his head under his arms and shut his eyes tight and lay that way until everything had gone so quiet around him all he could hear was his own laboured breathing. He had no idea how much time had elapsed. He raised his head and looked around. The heavy tread of Näcken’s boots. The glop spattered across the board-and-batten wall behind the elder’s lifeless body dripping slowly onto the ground like some kind of sap. Of Ipa’s head, resting on the quad bike’s handlebar, only the lower half remained. Everything below her nose was intact; her soft, delicate lips expressed an indifference that seemed unsettling in the context. The silence rumbled inside him. The little ones who so loved to comfort him were nowhere to be seen. Stava was gone too.
The pale oval of a face was visible through the doghouse door. Anders stared at the little girl. Then he got up and d
ashed over at a crouch. He crawled in and made a space for himself next to the child, who shifted further in and sat with her knees pulled into her chest, watching him guardedly.
‘Let’s just sit here for a bit,’ he whispered. ‘Until it stops.’
After a while, his eyes were drawn to a shadow stretched out in the grass. At first, he thought someone was standing outside, studying the devastation, but after a long time passed without the shadow moving, he figured it must belong to a tree or some such that he hadn’t noticed earlier.
Just then, it slid sideways.
He turned to the girl, holding his index finger to his lips.
A grey-bearded man whose face was shaded by a camouflage baseball cap peered in through the opening.
‘Well now,’ he said. ‘There you are.’
He didn’t look hostile at all. Friendly, if anything.
‘I’m not really supposed to be here,’ Anders said.
The man mumbled something inaudible and straightened up. He was holding a rifle by his hip, a shotgun, a gas-operated, semi-automatic shotgun with a chequered forend. The barrel had a ventilated rib and red front sight and Anders saw the red dot being aimed at him and then he saw nothing else.
It was incomprehensible to me that Roland could eat, and a pizza at that. Or a Bedouin pancake, as he called it with a veiled smile. I had pushed my chair back and was glancing at him askance as though it were cheese-crusted roadkill he was cutting up with his knife and fork. It turned my stomach. And he could tell. Because he pushed his plate over with a grin behind his moustache.
‘Care for a bite?’
‘I’m good, thanks.’
He looked out at the street, chewing.
‘Pretty dead around here.’
‘They may never come back.’
‘Whatever happened to that graphite mine?’
‘Don’t you get that, Roland?’
‘What?’
‘They may never come back.’
He put his cutlery down on his plate. He picked up a napkin he had trapped under his beer bottle and wiped his lips. Then he crossed his arms and studied me. A string of gold glinted inside the collar of his polo shirt.