The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  MALOU VON SIVERS [to Inna]: So what’s Mauri’s strength, then?

  INNA WATTRANG: Well, he’s got a real nose for a good business opportunity. An internal divining rod. And he’s an excellent negotiator.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: What’s he like as an employer?

  INNA WATTRANG: He’s always calm. That’s the most fascinating thing about him. Things can get really rocky at times, like during the early years when he was buying concessions before he’d got the finance sorted. He never showed any hint of unease or stress. And that means that those of us who work around him feel enormously secure.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: But now you’ve been sounding off in the papers. Showing your feelings.

  MAURI KALLIS: You mean the mine in Ruwenzori? The AIDS business?

  MALOU VON SIVERS: You called Swedish AIDS a joke, among other things.

  MAURI KALLIS: That was a quote that was taken completely out of context. And I wasn’t sounding off in the press, a journalist came along to a lecture I was giving. But obviously I get annoyed eventually when I’m constantly pestered by Swedish journalists who haven’t done their homework. “Kallis Mining builds roads for militia troops.” And then they see me shaking hands with a general from the Lendu militia, and they write about what that particular group has done in the Congo, and all of a sudden my mining company in northwestern Uganda is the work of the devil himself. And so am I. It’s very easy to maintain your high moral values, simply by having nothing whatsoever to do with countries in crisis. Send in a contribution and keep your fingers out of it. But the population of these countries needs businesses, growth, employment. The government, on the other hand, wants budgetary assistance, with no form of control at all. You only have to look at the situation in Kampala to see where a great deal of the money goes. Incredibly luxurious houses all over the mountainsides. That’s where the members of the government live, and highly placed officials within the administration. And anybody who refuses to recognize that AIDS money is going to the military, who as well as terrorizing the civilian population spend their time plundering mines in northern Congo—well, they’re just being naive. Every year billions are pumped into Africa to combat AIDS, but if you ask any African woman in any African country you care to name, she’ll say: It doesn’t make any difference. Where does all that money go?

  MALOU VON SIVERS: Yes, where does it go?

  MAURI KALLIS: Into the pockets of members of the government, but that isn’t the worst of it. Better to build luxury houses than spend it on arms. But the AIDS workers have jobs they enjoy, and that’s fine. I’m only trying to say that if you’re going to run a company down there, you need to be prepared to interact with people who are dubious in one way or another. You’re going to get your own fingers a little bit dirty, but at least you’re doing something. And if I build a road from my mine, then it’s difficult for me to prevent opposing troops from using it.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: So you have no trouble sleeping soundly?

  MAURI KALLIS: I’ve never slept soundly, but that isn’t the reason.

  MALOU VON SIVERS [he’s adopted a defensive stance now, she changes tack]: Let’s go back to your upbringing then, can you tell us something about that? Born in Kiruna in ’64. Single mother who couldn’t look after you.

  MAURI KALLIS: No, she wasn’t really capable of looking after a child. My half brothers and sisters who came along later were more or less taken into care straightaway, but as I was her first I lived with her until I was eleven.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: And how was that?

  MAURI KALLIS [ fumbles for the right words, closes his eyes sometimes, it’s as if he pauses to look at the scenes playing in his head ]: I had to manage on my own…a great deal. She was asleep when I went to school. She…used to get very angry if I said I was hungry…. She could disappear for several days at a time, and I had no idea where she was.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: It’s difficult for you to talk about this?

  MAURI KALLIS: Extremely.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: You have a family of your own now. A wife, two sons aged ten and twelve. In what way has your upbringing influenced you in that role?

  MAURI KALLIS: It’s hard to say, but I have no internal picture of how to live a normal family life. In school I used to see, how shall we put it, normal people. They had nice clean hair…and fathers. Occasionally I’d go to a classmate’s house, but not very often. And I’d see their homes. Furniture, rugs, ornaments, an aquarium with tropical fish. We had almost nothing at home. Social services once bought us a lovely secondhand sofa, I remember that. It had one of those holes in the back that you could open, and pull out a spare bed. I thought it was just the height of luxury. Two days later it was gone.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: Where did it go?

  MAURI KALLIS: I guess somebody sold it. People were always coming and going. The door was never locked, as far as I remember.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: And you were finally placed in a foster home.

  MAURI KALLIS: My mother became extremely paranoid, and behaved in a threatening manner to the neighbors and people in town. She was taken into care. And when she was taken into care…

  MALOU VON SIVERS:…you were taken into care as well. And you were eleven at that time.

  MAURI KALLIS: Yes. And you can always think back and wish…that things had been different, that I’d been taken into care earlier and so on…but that’s the way things were.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: Are you yourself a good father?

  MAURI KALLIS: That’s a hard one. I do my best, but of course I’m away from the family far too much That’s a disadvantage.

  Anna-Maria Mella shifted position in her chair.

  “That drives me mad,” she said to Sven-Erik. “If you confess your sin it doesn’t count, somehow. As soon as he says ‘I ought to spend more time with my children,’ that makes him a good person. What’s he going to say to his boys when they’ve grown up? ‘I know I was never there, but I can assure you I had a guilty conscience the whole time.’ ‘We know, Daddy. Thank you, Daddy. We love you, Daddy.’”

  MAURI KALLIS: But I have a reliable wife who’s always there. Without her I’d never have been able to run this company and have children as well. She has had to teach me.

  MALOU VON SIVERS [obviously charmed by his gratitude toward his wife]: What, for example?

  MAURI KALLIS [ ponders]: Often really simple things. That a family sits down and eats together. That kind of thing.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: Do you think you appreciate “normal” life more than someone like me, who’s had an ordinary upbringing?

  MAURI KALLIS: Yes, if you’ll forgive me, I do think that. I feel like a refugee in the “normal” world.

  When Diddi is in his third semester at Business School, he is finally able to leave the normal world. He has always had beauty and charm, but now he has money. He goes beyond Stockholm. Farther than Riche. He totters along the Canal Saint-Martin with two calf-legged models as the sun rises over Paris. Not because they’re so drunk they can’t walk properly, but because they’re pushing each other like playful children as they walk home. The trees droop over the water like abandoned women, dropping their leaves into the water like old love letters, every one blood-red, steaming. There’s the smell of newly baked bread from the bakery. Delivery vans go tearing by toward the city center, their tires bumping on the cobbles. The world will never be more beautiful than this.

  He meets an actor at a pool party and is invited along on someone’s private jet to two weeks’ filming in the Ukraine. Diddi is able to show the required generosity. He has ten bottles of Dom Pérignon with him on the plane.

  And then he meets Sofia Fuensanta Cuervo. She is much older than him, thirty-two, distantly related to the Spanish royal family on her mother’s side, and to John of the Cross on her father’s side.

  She’s the black sheep of the family, she says, divorced with two children who are at boarding school.

  Diddi has never met anyone who even came close. He is a wanderer wh
o has finally reached the sea, and he wades out up to his elbows and drowns. Her arms can cure anything. He can lose himself if she only smiles, or scratches her nose. He is even filled with thoughts about himself and the children. Vague pictures of flying kites on the beach and reading aloud to them at night. He isn’t allowed to meet them, and Sofia doesn’t talk about them much. She goes to visit them sometimes, but he isn’t allowed to go with her. She doesn’t want them to get attached to someone who is suddenly going to disappear, she says. But he’s never going to disappear. He wants to stay there forever, his hands entwined in her coal black hair.

  Her friends own huge boats. He joins them when they go hunting during a visit to the country estate of some acquaintances in the northwest of England. Diddi looks just wonderful in his borrowed hunting clothes and his little felt cap. He’s like a little brother to all the men, and all the women adore him.

  “I refuse to kill anything,” he tells everybody with all the seriousness of a child. He and a thirteen-year-old girl are allowed to go along and join the beaters, and they talk for a long time about her horses; in the evening she persuades their hostess to place Diddi beside her at the table. Sofia lends him out and laughs, claiming her nose has really been put out of joint.

  Diddi takes Sofia out to dinner, he buys her ridiculously expensive shoes and jewelry. He takes her to Zanzibar for a week. It looks like a theater set: the decaying beauty of the town, the intricately carved wooden doors, the skinny cats chasing little white crabs on the long white beaches, the heavy aroma of cloves lying there drying in great heaps on red cloths spread out on the ground. And against this backdrop of beauty breathing its last, soon the doors and the façades will have crumbled away, soon the island will be exploited to death, soon the beaches will be packed with noisy Germans and fat Swedes, against this backdrop is their love.

  People turn and gaze after them as they wander along, their fingers entwined. His hair has been bleached almost white by the sun, hers is a shining black mane on an Andalusian mare.

  At the end of November, Diddi rings from Barcelona wanting to sell. Mauri explains there’s nothing to sell.

  “Your capital has been used up.”

  Diddi tells him there’s a furious hotel owner after him who’s very keen for Diddi to pay up.

  “I mean, he’s bloody livid, I have to sneak out so he doesn’t catch me on the stairs.”

  At first Mauri bites his tongue during the long, embarrassing silence while Diddi waits for him to offer to lend him money. Then Diddi asks straight out. And Mauri says no.

  After the telephone conversation, Mauri goes out for a walk in a snowy Stockholm. The rage of a person who has been abandoned follows in his footsteps like a dog. What the fuck was Diddi thinking? Did he think he could just ring up and Mauri would just bend over with his pants around his knees?

  No. Mauri spends the next three weeks at his new girlfriend’s house. Many years later, sitting in an interview with Malou von Sivers, he wouldn’t be able to remember her name even if somebody were holding a gun to his head.

  Three weeks after their telephone conversation, Diddi turns up in the kitchen on Mauri’s student corridor. It’s Saturday evening. Mauri’s girlfriend has gone out to dinner with her friends. Håkan, who lives on Mauri’s corridor, looks at Diddi as if he were watching him on TV. He forgets to look away and behave like a human being. Stares at him uninterruptedly, his mouth hanging open. Mauri feels an inexplicable urge to punch him in the face. So he’ll close his mouth.

  Diddi’s eyes are white cracked ice covering a blood-red sea. Sticky snow is melting in his hair and trickling down his face.

  Sofia’s love vanished with the money, but Mauri doesn’t know anything about that yet.

  Inside Mauri’s room it all comes pouring out. Mauri’s a fucking con man. Twenty-five percent? Fucking ridiculous. He’s so fucking mean he screams when he has to go for a crap. Diddi can go along with ten percent, and he wants his money. Now!

  “You’re drunk,” says Mauri.

  He sounds very compassionate when he says it. He’s gone through the school of life and learned how to deal with exactly this sort of thing. He slips easily into his foster father’s stance and tone of voice. Soft on the outside, rock hard on the inside. He has his foster father inside him. And inside his foster father, his foster brother is waiting. It’s like those Russian dolls. Inside his foster brother is Mauri. But it will be many years before that particular doll comes out.

  Diddi doesn’t know anything about any Russian dolls. Or he doesn’t care. He drills his rage into the foster father doll, screaming and going crazy. He will have only himself to blame if the foster brother comes out.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: So you were placed in a foster home when you were eleven. How was that?

  MAURI KALLIS: It was a significant improvement on the way things had been. But it was a way of earning money for my foster parents, this business of fostering. They both did a lot of different things, one way or another. My foster mother had at least three jobs at the same time. She called my foster father the old man, and so did my foster brother and I. And he called himself that too.

  MALOU VON SIVERS: Tell me about him.

  MAURI KALLIS: He was a con man who kept himself more or less within the boundaries of the law, but he lacked scruples. A really small-time businessman. [He smiles and shakes his head at the memory.] For example, he bought and sold cars, the whole yard was full of old wrecks. Sometimes he went to other towns to sell. He’d put on a shirt and a dog collar, because after all people trust a man of God. “I’ve read the laws of the church from cover to cover,” he said. “Nowhere does it say you have to be ordained to wear a collar like this.”

  Sometimes people who think they’ve been conned turn up at the house. Often they’re angry, sometimes they’re crying. The old man sympathizes, he’s sorry. He offers them a coffee or something stronger, but business is a matter of honor. The deal stands. He won’t let go of the money.

  On one occasion a woman who’s bought a used car from the old man turns up. She’s brought her ex-husband with her. The old man can read him in an instant.

  “Fetch Jocke,” he says as soon as the couple get out of the car in the yard.

  Mauri runs to fetch his foster brother.

  When Mauri and Jocke get there, the old man has already been pushed around a little. But Jocke has a lump of wood in his hand. The woman’s eyes grow big.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says, tugging at her ex-husband’s arm.

  He allows her to pull him along. That way he can give in with his integrity in one piece. You only have to look at Jocke to see that he’s completely crazy. And yet he’s only thirteen. Still just a little boy, making mischief. Like the business with the dog. Such mischief. One of the neighbors in the village lets his dog run loose. The old man has been getting annoyed because it pisses in his yard. One day Jocke and his friends catch it, pour kerosene over it and set it alight. They laugh as it runs across the meadow like a torch. It’s almost as if they’re competing to see who can laugh the loudest, who’s having the most fun. Egging each other on with sneaky glances.

  And Jocke teaches Mauri to fight. When he first arrives at the foster home, Mauri doesn’t have to go to school, he’s going to restart the year in the autumn. He hangs about in the village. There isn’t much to do in Kaalasjärvi, but he isn’t bored. He goes along with the old man in the car on his “business trips.” A quiet little lad is an excellent accessory. The old man sells water purifiers to old people and ruffles Mauri’s hair. The old ladies offer them coffee and cakes.

  There’s no hair ruffling at home. Jocke leans over him at the dinner table and calls him cripple, spastic, retard. He knocks over Mauri’s milk as soon as his foster mother turns her back. Mauri never tells. It doesn’t actually bother him. Being teased is normal. He concentrates on eating! Fish fingers. Pizza. Sausage and mash. Blood pudding with sweet lingonberry jam. His foster mother watches him in fascination.

&nb
sp; “Where do you put it all?” she asks him.

  The summer passes. Then school starts. Mauri tries to keep his head down, but there are kids who have a nose for a compliant victim.

  They push his head down the toilet and flush. He doesn’t say anything, but somehow they find out at home.

  “You’ve got to get them back,” says Jocke.

  Not that he cares about Mauri. Jocke just likes it when something’s happening.

  Jocke has a plan. Mauri tries to say that he doesn’t want to do it. It’s not that he’s afraid of being beaten up. Being hit by his peers is…nothing. It’s unpleasant, that’s all. And he tries to avoid unpleasantness as much as he can. But that alternative isn’t available.

  “In that case I’ll beat you up instead, you get it?” says Jocke. “I’ll make so much trouble they’ll send you back to your mother.”

  Then Mauri agrees to go along with it.

  It’s three boys in another class who are the worst tormentors. They find Mauri in a corridor near the recreation room and start pushing him around. Jocke has stayed nearby, and now he comes over with two of his friends and says it’s time to get things sorted out. Jocke and his pals are in Year 7. Mauri might think his three tormentors are big and scary, but next to Jocke and his pals they’re just little shits.