by Stefan Spjut
Normally they didn’t crap in the kitchen, but judging from the smell they must have done, and it was when he was searching for their droppings with the torchlight that he caught sight of her, only a few metres away.
She was sitting with her back propped against the wall and her legs straight out in front of her, her hands resting limply on the floor. The head torch was resting on her chest like a large pendant.
It never occurred to him to approach Ejvor, so he must have immediately registered that something was wrong, but he aimed the torch at her for several seconds before realising that the back of her head with the shiny knot of hair was where her face should be, and that she was staring straight at the wallpaper without seeing it.
The long hours of daylight that fortify us and the unyielding darkness that wraps itself thickly around the shimmering green swirls of the northern lights – it is primarily these extraordinary and mutually opposed forces that led our family, the Myréns, to investigate and eventually reveal the existence of trolls.
Dad was drawn to the dramatic play between light and darkness, and to the landscape itself, of course. And he drew us with him.
This is what I remember him saying, or rather singing:
‘Sweden, Sweden, country of wildlife, winter country of fiery northern lights.’
I used to wonder what kind of image foreigners have of our circumpolar land. A windswept and frost-ravaged expanse? A barren and for the most part wretched region, sparsely populated, if not to say uninhabited? A stag standing proudly on a mountain, with jutting chest, a nimbus of hoar frost around his raised antlers, the northern lights radiating behind him? Or is it a howling wolf, or the muffled sound of troll drums? I know. Perhaps I know better than anyone how that image has been formed, and that is because I come into contact with the hordes of tourists. The airport buses deposit their cargo literally outside my shop door, and the mine tours start and finish here. Naturally I’m grateful for that: if the shop had not been quite so central and located next to the tourist information office, lending it an unmerited official status, I would have frozen to death in seconds.
In winter the northern lights are our foremost attraction, and naturally enough the capriciousness with which they choose to reveal themselves increases their appeal. Many who come here like to think of the northern lights as some sort of compensation for the stolen daylight, that they appear every night in the same way that the moonlight is switched on. They stand with their faces turned skywards, waiting patiently. Then the next day they come into my shop and complain: ‘No aurora last night.’
But it isn’t the deep, solemn winter that brings the tourists here, it’s the midnight sun. The light that never fades. People come from all over the world to see it. The majority are Germans, of course, then the French and the Spanish. They think it’s amazing, seeing the sun hanging on the horizon. Odd, in fact. As if there must be something wrong.
That’s our high season, when the shop is most crowded, the backpacks colliding between the shelves. And that is the time I think about Dad the most. He stands with me behind the counter, which is strange because he certainly never did that in real life.
The shop is named after him: Gunnar Myrén Ltd. Here, among all the other things, are his photos, reduced to postcard size or enlarged as posters. And books of photographs that are so large they have to be laid flat to fit on the shelves. Folios, they are called.
Like Dad I make a living from the landscape. My business is the exotic shimmering image of Lapland which Dad, in a not inconsiderable way, has helped to shape. The shop window says Photographs Books Cards Handicrafts, underlined with the billowing line of the familiar silhouette of the Lapland Gate, in far northern Sweden.
We stock what were previously called Lapland handicrafts but are now known as duodji. There are knives with handles and sheaths made of reindeer horn. Cups, boxes and figurines carved from mottled masur birch, and Sami ceremonial drums.
We also stock a lot of random knick-knacks, because you have to: key rings and bottle openers; small round badges you can pin onto your lapel which say Kiruna, but also Sverige or Sweden; and sweatshirts with prints of wolf heads, the northern lights, reindeer herds and magic inscriptions. We have fridge magnets, and even Dala horses: it would never occur to a Swede to buy a horse from Dalarna while visiting Kiruna, but people from Spain are not so fussy and we get a lot of Spanish people here. So they sell well.
We also have trolls, naturally. The artist Rolf Lidberg, from Sundsvall, has made picture books about kindly, large-nosed trolls who live on the banks of the Indals River and fish for salmon, and we stock his books. These trolls are also pictured on napkins and paper cups and plates.
But the real troll – the family’s troll, if you like – is not something we have tried to make a profit from. We keep that to ourselves.
At least, we did for many years.
It was my daughter Susso who changed everything.
*
Dad was a pilot. He flew a single-engine amphibious Piper. In fact, he owned three aircraft through the years, all Pipers, so in my mind they are one and the same plane. In this fragile but heroically reliable mode of transport he floated above the most northerly regions of Sweden. He was a genuine pioneer. No one had flown there before him. Not like that, not to look around and capture those fabulous views on paper.
Often he photographed Tjuonavagge, the valley commonly known as the Lapland Gate. If you have ever seen a photograph of the Lapland Gate, there is a good chance it was Dad who took it, and if it is an aerial shot, then I can almost guarantee it was him. This particular motif did not interest him especially, but it was popular, and Dad was a businessman through and through, if perhaps a hot-headed and impatient one.
He would rather photograph the striking lowland fell in Rapadalen, the one he called the Lonely Mountain, though its real name is Nammatj. In the Sami language that means ‘nameless’. He also loved the Skierfe: the ‘sheer drop’.
There are dramatically sharp features on the face of the ancient landscape.
In the beginning he travelled on skis. He trained with the Ski Battalion in Boden, and it was during his military service that he became familiar with the most northerly parts of the country. He came into the world further south in Örnsköldsvik, which made him a man of Ångermanland, and I like to believe that I have Ångermanland in my heart as well, because I have never liked it up here. In a way I hate the life here: the coarse mentality that dominates the iron ore mining fields, the macho culture, the stubbornness and the corrosive, everlasting gossip. The darkness and the cold which leave deep and permanent frost damage in their wake, both in buildings and people. The reindeer and their pastures, as sacred as cemeteries.
But I got stuck here, somehow. Just like Dad. Although for him it was different: he was mesmerised by the mountains. During the war he was posted to Riksgränsen, the northern border, and liked the place so much that he settled there. ‘A fells convert,’ he used to say.
Riksgränsen was a dreadfully isolated place when Dad first went there. It’s almost impossible to imagine how isolated it was. So living there was more or less impossible. And I think that was what attracted him because few were as stubborn as he was. He bought a ski cabin by Lake Vassijaure and above the front door, which opened inwards, he nailed a sign with the words: MYRÉN’S PHOTO STUDIO.
He stayed there for as long as a person can be in one place. When he died he had been living in Riksgränsen for over fifty years.
He was a physically strong man, but fragile in spite of that. It changed from one day to the next. He was something of a hypochondriac too, if I’m honest. He often grimaced, bared his teeth and sighed, relating in detail how his body had let him down, and he complained despairingly that nothing worked the way it should: the plane, the cameras, his knees. There was always something letting him down.
The fragile side of him would carry him to unsuspected heights, however. That’s how we’ll have to look at it. Following a knee in
jury, when Dad felt as if the fell world was drifting out of his reach, he acquired an aircraft and then learned to fly. In that order. It was a large and risky investment, but it succeeded. No one had photographed the fells from above before.
With the plane he could reach in a few hours places that it had taken him days to get to before, or else had been completely inaccessible. It was revolutionary. The world saw the Swedish fells from above for the first time, and it was entirely thanks to Dad.
Reindeer appeared as small dots on the blindingly white mountainsides. Distant, silent hordes, such as only the hawks had seen before. The valleys were filled with shining, black, meandering water courses, veiled in driving clouds of rain. Remnants of snow appeared as lines on the hillsides, like white scratch marks. The bogs changed colour, as if a red-brown wind was blowing over them.
*
Dad demonstrated that he was a fully-fledged pilot by landing on the top of Kebnekaise – or, to be more accurate, immediately below the summit, because of course no plane can land on the actual mountain top – and he was the first person in history to do it.
He took a picture of himself up there, to capture the moment.
It was 1 May 1967.
Dad has his hands raised to the heavens and is leaping for joy. Landing on Sweden’s highest mountain meant he could land anywhere. He was not too old for the world of the fells.
I look at that photograph often. Very often.
It is a moment of happiness.
If only it could have stopped there, I think.
The aircraft’s wing casts a long shadow, and the trail Dad has trampled in the permanent snow cover is littered with small shards. The mountain tops in the background are disappearing in a milky-white haze that is growing larger, hurtling forwards.
I call it the troll mist.
Here it comes.
But it would take twenty years before it reached its destination.
*
There is an aerial photo from Rapadalen dated 18 April 1987. A bear is lumbering among the birches, but there is nothing remarkable about that: it has just woken up and is looking for something to fill its belly. It is moving away from the low-flying plane, probably driven on by the sound of the engine as it grows louder.
On the bear’s hunched back is a lighter patch, and if you focus your gaze or, even better, look through a magnifying glass, you can make out a naked body with spindly arms and legs.
It looks like a monkey, but of course it most definitely is not a monkey.
It is not an animal.
And it is not a human being.
It is something else.
Something in between.
*
Dad sat for ages at the desk, staring at the bear’s inexplicable rider. As he was flying through the valley he thought he had seen something strange on the bear, but decided it was just the sun illuminating the bear’s fur. It was not until he was in the dark-room that he managed to see what the camera had captured. It gave him his first heart attack.
If only his eyes had seen it, well, that would have been different. Then he could have dismissed it as an apparition. But it was impossible to believe that his camera, his reliable Hasselblad, had been fooled. It was the model they had sent to the moon, the most reliable camera on the planet.
He banged the handle of the magnifying glass against the desk’s green imitation-leather underlay. Then he put his eye against the lens and glided over the boggy ground, trying to get around the bear to see from the other side.
I could see him through the crack in the door. Sitting there, wanting to get inside the picture.
*
Could it be a Nordic monkey, unknown to science? A shy and lethargic creature, a kind of weasel, living off new spruce shoots and extremely averse to being on the ground or even, in fact, fearing the ground. A dark mass in the fork of a spruce, moving between the trees so carefully it is almost motionless.
But the naturalists Dad approached dismissed the idea of such an animal. Quite simply, it could not possibly exist.
And suddenly, there it was.
The word.
The thing clinging to the bear was a troll.
It was only a word, after all.
A name for something extraordinary and elusive.
A troll is quite simply something that will not allow itself to be categorised.
A hybrid that has not been given a scientific description or a habitat.
*
No one could explain what Dad had photographed, and that frightened him. He had developed heart trouble and could no longer fly alone. To save the business my stepmother Gunilla studied for a pilot’s licence, as did my husband Arne.
But the truth was that he did not want to fly any more.
He did not dare.
The plane remained in the hangar.
From time to time he went off on the snowmobile and photographed the light that floated on the surface of Vassijaure. Slowly he made his way around the area, staring down at the points of his skis. He kept the lens in a cone-shaped leather case hanging across his shoulder, and the Hasselblad protruded like a growth under his winter overall.
And then he was gone.
We were taking a walk alongside the railway line, me, Dad and Arne, on a beautiful day in October with a high blue sky. Dad grew tired and slowed down. When we asked if we should turn back, he told us to go on ahead and he would follow at his own pace.
I will never know what it was, a premonition perhaps, but after we had walked a short distance I turned round to see how he was getting on. He had grabbed hold of a small birch tree and I saw the leaves shaking as he tried, but failed, to keep himself upright.
I ran to him and watched him sink to the ground.
‘Don’t be afraid, Gudrun,’ he said to me. ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not afraid.’
And then he died. With a smile on his lips.
It was a heart attack. His second.
We travelled up to Vassitjåkka by helicopter to cast his ashes to the wind, because that was his wish. There was me and Arne, Gunilla and Susso – Cecilia couldn’t come because she was living abroad at the time. The pilot flew us there for free. He said it was an honour, and he looked as if he meant it.
It certainly is a little strange up there at the top. The mountain is steep and completely untouched, and there, right in the middle, is a small hut, or at least that’s what it looks like. Susso went into the hut and sat down. She was annoyed about something, I don’t remember what, and it is only looking back that I realise it was because she was feeling sad and for some reason had the idea she mustn’t show it. Because no one else cried, not even me. It was probably because Gunilla was there.
Afterwards I regretted taking her up there. It was as if the ash was flung back on itself in the strong wind raging up the mountainside and blew into her. As if Dad was carrying on his quest through her eyes. I know that’s sentimental and irrational, but that is how I see it.
*
We stayed at Riksgränsen for almost ten years. Then Arne cheated on me with Susso’s boyfriend’s mother. I discovered them myself, in Dad’s old workroom, of all places. They had not undressed or anything but were standing close together, and when the door opened they sprang apart and acted as if nothing had happened.
But I knew what I had seen and when I confronted Arne he confirmed it with his silence. When I carried on asking he shouted at me to stop.
It was a real mess, I can tell you. It was one thing that our marriage came to an end – it hadn’t been particularly good for many years – but it also meant the end for Susso and her boyfriend Torbjörn. They were thrown together in a kind of sibling relationship and Torbjörn especially couldn’t handle it. He told Susso he thought the whole thing was sick, and I comforted her by saying that if that was the case, the feelings weren’t right anyway. But it was a pity they had parents who behaved like that, who didn’t think!
The worst thing was not being able to move straight away. There was
so much to sort out. Arne part owned the company and I was forced to buy him out. I did that by giving up my share of the properties, and in the autumn of 2003 I moved down to Kiruna. By that time Siv had already moved up and taken my place. It was like a slap in the face. Fifteen years younger than me and fifteen centimetres taller. She is a good-looking woman – slender limbs and raven-black hair – and I can’t help seeing her in Torbjörn.
*
Susso was thirteen when Dad died and she didn’t show any particular interest in the troll initially, at least not as far as I can recall. It was a strange but natural part of her upbringing, but we seldom mentioned it, especially in the years immediately after Dad passed away. We thought it was about time to bury the troll – Gunilla even suggested that we destroy the photograph. If anyone was to blame for Dad’s death, it was the troll.
But then one day Susso told me she thought it was odd there was nothing about trolls on the internet. She thought other people would have seen something similar and written about it. She understood why reports of things like that didn’t appear in the newspapers, but wasn’t it weird that you could find no mention of it online?
That was in the mid-nineties, when I knew nothing about the internet. I knew it was something that existed on computers but that was as far as my knowledge went.
Susso started searching, and in actual fact she did it like Dad.
Because the search engine she used was called Altavista.
And that means ‘view from above’.
*
She didn’t find any trolls but she did come into contact pretty quickly with other people who were looking for the same things as herself, more or less. They were cryptozoologists. She introduced the word to me, wanting me to accept it. I didn’t. To be honest, I was irritated by her lively interest in that troll. It had only brought unhappiness. I thought it was childish of her not to understand that. But she hadn’t known Dad before he’d seen it. Before he became the person he became.