The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  He put the light on, threw back the bedclothes as if they were an enemy, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up.

  Don’t think about Inna. She’s gone. Regla’s still here. Ebba and the boys. Kallis Mining.

  There was something wrong with him, of course. He tried to think about the boys, but it was no good. Their royal names sounded ridiculous and alien: Carl and Magnus.

  When they were small they’d lain in their expensive prams. He’d always been away, traveling. Never missed them. Not that he could remember, in any case.

  At that moment he heard a thud from the attic above. Then another thud.

  Ester, he thought. She’s at it again with her weights.

  God, it sounded as though the entire ceiling was about to come down on him.

  It was Inna who brought Ester into their lives.

  “You have a sister,” she says.

  They’re sitting in the SAS lounge at Copenhagen airport, on the way to Vancouver. It looks like summer outside, but the wind is still cold. In a year she’ll be dead.

  “I have three,” replies Mauri in a cool voice, indicating that this conversation does not interest him.

  He doesn’t like thinking about them. The eldest sister was born when he was nine. She was one when she was taken into care. They took him a year later.

  He tries not to think about the time when he was growing up in Terrassen, the tower block in Kiruna where social services had apartments for people who couldn’t get a rental agreement of their own. Harsh voices and the sound of quarreling and screaming penetrated constantly through the walls, and nobody ever rang the police. The graffiti in the stairwell was never washed off. A feeling of hopelessness clung to the whole place.

  And there are thoughts he never, ever thinks. The memory of a child crying, standing up in her cot. Mauri, ten years old, picks up his jacket and slams the front door behind him. He just can’t listen to her any longer. Her voice penetrates through the closed door, follows him down the stairs. The sound of his footsteps bounces off the concrete walls of the stairwell. Their neighbor is playing Rod Stewart. A sweet, stale smell comes from the garbage chute. He hasn’t seen their mother for two days, but he just can’t look after the kid any longer. And they’ve run out of porridge.

  His middle sister is fifteen years younger than him. She was born while Mauri was living with the foster family. Their mother was allowed to keep her for a year and a half, supported by social services. Then she got so bad she was taken into hospital, and the middle sister was taken into care as well.

  Mauri met his elder sisters at their mother’s funeral. He flew up to Kiruna alone for the funeral, he didn’t allow Ebba and the boys to go with him. Inna and Diddi didn’t offer.

  There was just Mauri and his two sisters, a priest and the consultant from the hospital.

  Very appropriate weather, Mauri had thought as he stood by the coffin. The rain cascading down from the sky like gray chains. The water gouging into the ground, creating a delta of streams of water, carrying earth and gravel down into the grave. Like a weak brown soup down at the bottom of the hole. His sisters were freezing as they stood there soaked to the skin in their poor, hastily assembled funeral clothes. They had black skirts and blouses, but a coat was too big an investment; one of them was wearing dark blue, the other didn’t have one at all. Mauri gave them his umbrella, allowing the rain to ruin his Zegna suit. The priest was so cold he was shaking, his hymnbook in one hand and his umbrella in the other. But he gave a really nice address, speaking very honestly about the difficulty when a person can’t manage to fulfill the most important duty in life, taking care of their children. Then there were phrases such as “the inevitable conclusion” and “the road to reconciliation.”

  His sisters wept in the rain. Mauri wondered what they were crying for.

  On the way to the cars they were overcome by a hailstorm. The priest was running with the hymnbook pressed against his chest. His sisters had their arms around each other so they’d both fit under Mauri’s umbrella. The hail was shredding the leaves on the trees.

  It’s Mum, thought Mauri, fighting down a rising sense of panic. She’ll never die. Pouring and hammering down. What am I supposed to do? Raise my clenched fist to the sky?

  After the burial he invited his sisters to lunch. They showed him pictures of their children, said how lovely the flowers on the coffin had been. He felt extremely uncomfortable. They asked about his family, he answered as briefly as possible.

  The whole time he was tormented by those aspects of their appearance that reminded him of their mother. Even the way they moved reminded him of her. The angle of the neck. The eldest sister had a way of suddenly screwing up her eyes when she looked at him. It made a dart of inexplicable fear stab through him.

  In the end, they got around to Ester.

  “You know we have another sister?” asked his middle sister.

  Yes, they could tell him all about her. The girl was eleven now. Their mother got pregnant and had Ester in 1988. The father was another patient. Ester was taken into care straightaway. A family in Rensjön looked after her. They sigh and say “poor little thing.” Mauri clenches his fists beneath the table, while he asks politely if they’d like something sweet with their coffee. Why was she a poor little thing? She didn’t have to go through it all.

  They seemed relieved when he said he had to leave. Nobody said anything stupid about keeping in touch.

  Inna looks at him. The planes look like pretty toys out there, taking off and landing.

  “Your youngest sister Ester,” she says, “is only sixteen. And she needs somewhere to live. Her foster mother has just…”

  Mauri raises his hands to his face as if he were splashing water on it, and groans.

  “No, no.”

  “She can live with me at Regla. It’s only temporary. She’s starting her second year at the Idun Lovén Art School in the autumn—”

  He never usually interrupts Inna. But this time he says, “Absolutely not.” He can’t, he doesn’t intend to have a living image of his mother wandering around the place. He tells Inna he can buy his sister an apartment in Stockholm, whatever she wants.

  “She’s sixteen!” says Inna.

  And she gives him a pleading smile. Then she becomes serious.

  “You’re her only relative who…”

  He opens his mouth to mention their other sisters, but she won’t let him interrupt.

  “…who can take care of her. And right now your name is really hot…. Oh, I forgot to tell you, Business Week is going to do a big feature on you…”

  “No interviews!”

  “…but you ought to let them do a photo shoot. Anyway, if it comes out that you have a sister who hasn’t got anywhere to go…”

  She wins. And as they board the flight to Vancouver, Mauri thinks that it doesn’t really matter. Regla isn’t the kind of home that can be invaded. At Regla he has his wife and the boys and Diddi with his pregnant wife and Inna. A lot of the company’s corporate entertainment happens at Regla. They can hunt there, go out on a boat, give dinner parties.

  He can feel that the recent media attention and the social life that has followed as a consequence are taking their toll on him. Much more than work has ever done. All these people who want to shake his hand and talk to him, where do they all come from? He’s making the maximum effort all the time. In order to remain calm and friendly. Inna has been by his side constantly, whispering names and connections. Without her it would never have been possible. He can feel that he needs a rest. There are periods these days when he feels completely empty, it’s as if everyone he meets takes a little piece of him. Sometimes he worries that all of a sudden he won’t know where he is and who he’s sitting in a meeting with and what it’s about. Sometimes he just feels full of rage, like an animal that wants to growl, attack and satisfy itself. He gets irritated. By the way someone keeps their jacket buttoned to hide the fact that they’re wearing yesterday’s shirt. By the
way someone else pokes at their teeth after a meal and puts the disgusting, used toothpick on the edge of their plate in full view. By the way one person thinks he is somebody, the way another person is too much of a crawler.

  He’s looking forward to the flight across the Atlantic. Because he’s on the way to somewhere, he doesn’t feel restless. They’re sitting still, reading, sleeping, watching a film, having a drink. He and Inna.

  Mauri Kallis looked at himself in the mirror. The thudding noises above his head continued.

  He’d always loved the game. Closing the major deals. It had been his way of measuring himself against others. The one with the most money when he dies is the winner.

  Now it felt as if all that didn’t matter at all. Something had caught up with him. Something heavy. It had always been close by, right behind him. Sucking him backward, back to the tower block.

  I’m losing it, he thought. Letting go.

  Inna had kept the thing that was pulling him backward at bay.

  He didn’t want to be alone right now. It was two hours before his working day would begin. He looked up at the ceiling, heard the sound of a dumbbell rolling across the floor.

  He’d go up and chat for a bit. Or just be there for a while.

  He pulled on his dressing gown and went up to see his sister.

  Ester Kallis is conceived in a secure psychiatric ward. It is the supervisor of ward P12 at the psychiatric clinic in Umeå who reports the matter at a team meeting. Britta Kallis is in her fifteenth week.

  The other ward supervisors come to life and slurp a little coffee from their mugs. Best to drink it while it’s too hot to taste. This is going to be interesting. And fortunately it isn’t their problem.

  When the ward supervisor has finished speaking, Nils Gunnarsson the consultant puts his head in his hands. His mouth contracts into a wrinkled, hamster-like grimace.

  “I see, yes, right, I see,” he says thoughtfully.

  Like a chicken in its eggshell, thinks one of his colleagues with a sudden pang of tenderness.

  He looks such a sight. His white hair is far too long. He wears horrible old-fashioned spectacles with thick lenses, like the bottom of a bottle; he also has a habit of placing his finger on the lens to push them back into place when they’ve slipped too far down his nose. New employees at the hospital have been known to try to stop him leaving the ward, assuming he’s a patient.

  “Who’s the father?”

  “Britta says it’s Ajay Rani.”

  A quick exchange of glances. Britta is forty-six, but looks sixty. She’s smoked since she was twelve, and is on strong medication—that’s what does it. Her bloated body on the sofa in front of the TV. The slow, muddled thoughts. The involuntary movements of her mouth, her tongue suddenly poking out, her jaws moving from side to side.

  Ajay Rani is thirty-something. He has slender wrists and white teeth. They still have high hopes of a recovery. He’s training for work, and studying Swedish for immigrants.

  Nils Gunnarsson wonders what Ajay has said on this matter. The ward supervisor shakes her head and smiles apologetically. No, of course not. Who’d admit it? Britta is way down the scale as far as the patients go.

  “What does she say? Does she want to keep the child?”

  “She says it’s a love child.”

  The consultant lets slip an “Oh God,” and flicks through Britta’s notes. Nobody says anything for a while. Their thoughts are touching shamefacedly on abortion pills and the compulsory sterilization of times gone by.

  “We’ll have to take her off the lithium,” he says. “We’ll have to try and get the little one out in as good a condition as possible, I suppose.”

  Who knows, they think. Perhaps Britta will begin to have regrets when she starts to feel worse, and will want to get rid of the child. That would be best for all concerned, really.

  Nils Gunnarsson attempts to close the notes and bring the matter to a conclusion, but the ward supervisor isn’t about to let him get away that easily. She’s worked herself into a state before she’s even begun to speak.

  “I have no intention of having Britta on the ward without extra resources when she’s off her medication,” she says agitatedly. “She’ll cause absolute havoc up there.”

  The consultant promises to do what he can.

  The ward supervisor isn’t satisfied with that.

  “I mean what I say, Nisse. I’m not taking responsibility for the ward if I have to have her there on a low-dose sedative. I’ll quit.”

  The consultant notes dryly to himself that Britta is going to set the ward on fire. And the ward supervisor is her first victim.

  Six months later, Britta is wheeled into the delivery room. Cursing and swearing. Midwives, junior nurses and the doctor in charge look at her with shocked expressions. Is she going to give birth like that? Strapped down? With her hands and feet shackled?

  It’s probably the only way, explains Nils Gunnarsson, taking an enormous pinch of snuff.

  The staff of the maternity unit watch in amazement as he wanders back and forth outside the delivery room like a parody of a father in the good old days, when the man wasn’t allowed to be present at the birth.

  Two care assistants from the ward are in there with her; a guy and a girl, calm and resolute. They’re wearing T-shirts; he has tattoos on his arms, she has a ring in her eyebrow and a stud in her tongue. This is not something they’re going to hand over to just anybody. It’s the delivery room staff who are degraded to just anybody.

  Britta is beside herself. During her pregnancy her condition has steadily worsened as she has been taken off the medication that would have harmed the baby. Her delusions have increased, as have the aggressive outbursts.

  Now she’s playing hell as much as she can between contractions. She’s cursing everybody in the room, calling down the wrath of Satan and his hairy angels. They’re all whores and dried-up old cunts and fucking fucking…as she searches for the next insult. From time to time she loses herself in incomprehensible exchanges with creatures only she can see.

  But when the next contraction kicks in she screams “no, no” in terror, and the sweat pours out of her. When that happens, even the care assistants from her own ward look sympathetic. One of them tries to talk to her. Britta! Hello! Can you hear me? And the pains increase. She’s dying, she’s dying!

  They all look at one other. Is she dying? Can she simply do that?

  Then the pains abate and the rage returns.

  Nils Gunnarsson is listening to her through the door. He’s so proud of her. How she grabs hold of her fury. That’s all she has right now. Her ally against the pain, the powerlessness, the illness, the fear. She clings on tightly to it. It’s getting her through all this, and she’s screaming that it’s their fault. The fucking doctor and the dried-up cunts. She saw one of the cunts grinning. Oh, yes she did. What’s she grinning at, eh? What? Why doesn’t she answer, fucking bully, answer me when I speak to you, fucking fucking…And the dried-up cunt feels compelled to attempt an answer of some sort, that she wasn’t really smiling; the response is that she can take a scrubbing brush and shove it up her…But a fresh contraction interrupts the sentence.

  Then the birth pains come. The midwife and the doctor are shouting: come on, Britta. And Britta tells them to go to hell. They shout that it’s going really well, and Britta spits at them, trying her best to hit them.

  The child finally arrives. It is taken into care immediately according to paragraph 2 § LVU and is carried out. The consultant makes sure Britta is given a tranquilizer and painkillers. She’s been so good, fought her way through the birth, and the clinic has fought its way through her pregnancy.

  She doesn’t really seem to know what’s happened. She has to stay strapped down while they stitch her up. She becomes calm at once, and is very tired.

  Elsewhere the midwives are looking down at the newborn child. Poor little soul. What a start in life. They’re all completely shattered.

  They can see
that her father must be Indian. To think their children are so much prettier than Swedish ones. The girl is absolutely beautiful, with her brown skin and all that hair and those dark, serious eyes. It almost makes them want to cry. It’s as if she understands. Everything.

  And nobody really thinks about it, but all those who were present at the birth are affected in one way or another during the following week. Britta has hurled her curses at them, heaped them on their heads. Most fell on barren ground, but some have taken root in their lives.

  One of the nurses gets an abscess in her gum. The doctor is reversing in the parking lot and smashes one of her rear lights. Her house is broken into as well. Another person loses her wallet. The male care assistant with the tattooed arms loses his partner in a fire in their apartment.

  That’s how powerful Britta Kallis’s gift is. Despite the fact that she is but a fraction of what she could have been, despite her own ignorance of what she does. Despite all this, her words gain a strange power when she is in a state half outside herself. There are various capabilities above and beyond what is normal on her mother’s side of the family, but it is many generations since anyone has been aware of them.

  And little Ester Kallis. She also has gifts. And Ester will get another mother, and will inherit also from that mother’s side of the family.

  My name is Ester Kallis. I have two mothers and no mother.

  The person I call Mother in my mind married my father in 1981. She brought with her fifty reindeer. The majority of them were female, so my parents were hoping they would soon be able to support themselves by breeding reindeer. But my father always had to do other jobs. He drove the mail van sometimes, worked on the railways. Temporary measures. He was never free.

  They bought the old station house in Rensjön, and my mother made a studio for herself out of the old waiting room. The house was tucked in between Norgevägen and the railway line; the windows shook every time the train carrying ore went past.