The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  The studio was freezing cold. In the winter my mother stood there painting in gloves and a hat. But still. She enjoyed the fragile light. Father painted the whole room white. It was before I came to them. At the time when he wanted to do things for her.

  In 1984, Antte was born. They didn’t really need any more children. Antte would have been enough. He could drive a snowmobile along a crack in the ice without going through, he had the right way with the dogs, that mixture of gentleness and reserve that made them work hard and put in the extra effort, running ten miles to bring back a straying reindeer; he was never cold, he went with Father and worked with the reindeer. He never moaned about wanting to stay at home and play video games like many of his friends.

  And while Father and Antte were out in the mountains, my mother painted and undertook commissions for Mattarahkka, the Sami craft cooperative: ceramic foxes, ptarmigans, elk and reindeer. She didn’t answer the telephone. Forgot to eat.

  Father and Antte would often come home to a freezing cold house with nothing in the refrigerator. It didn’t matter, of course. The fact that they were tired and dirty, and had to get in the car and drive into town to go shopping before they could do anything else. She was useless in that way. When Antte and I were going to school, for example. We’d tell her beforehand, in plenty of time. On Thursday there’s a trip to this place or that place. We’re to bring a packed lunch. Then she wouldn’t get anything ready. On the Thursday morning she’d be standing there rooting in the refrigerator while the school bus waited for us. And then we got given any old thing. For example, sandwiches made with sliced fish balls. At school, the other kids pretended to throw up when we got our packed lunches out. Antte was embarrassed. I could see it from his reddening cheeks, patches of carmine against his almost zinc-white skin, and his ears burning with the light behind them, shining through the blood vessels, slender threads of cadmium red. Sometimes he made a big point of throwing away what she’d given him. Spent the whole day hungry and furious. I ate mine. In that way, I was like her. Didn’t really care what I shoveled down. Didn’t care about my schoolmates either. And most of them left me in peace.

  The one who was the worst was an outsider himself. His name was Bengt. He had no friends. He was the one who would yell, hit me on the back of the head and start up.

  “You know why you’re so thick? Do you, Kallis? Because your mother was in the loony bin. Took a load of pills that screwed your brain. Get it? And it was some curry-cock that gave her one. Curry-cock.”

  And he’d laugh and look sideways at the other boys. With his watery blue eyes. A hunted look, the whole iris visible, a watercolor, watered-down cobalt blue. But it didn’t do him any good. He stayed right there with me, way down at the bottom. Although it was worse for him, because he cared.

  I didn’t care. I’d already become like her. The one I call eatnan in the Sami language, my little mother.

  Completely obsessed with looking at things. Everything around me, all the people who are actually alive and filled with blood, all the animals with their little souls, every single thing and every plant, all the relationships between them—all these things are lines, colors, contrasts, compositions. Everything ends up inside the rectangle. It begins to lose taste, aroma, one dimension. But if I’m clever it regains everything, and more. The picture finishes up between me and what I see. Even if it’s myself I’m looking at.

  That’s the way she was. Always took a step back to have a look. Driven. More or less absorbed. I remember several dinners. Father working away. She’d prepared something quick. Sat there in silence all through the meal.

  But Antte and I were children, we usually ended up squabbling at the table. We might end up knocking over a glass of milk or something. Then all of a sudden she would sigh heavily. Sorrowfully, somehow, because we’d disturbed her thoughts, because she’d been forced to come back to us. Antte and I would fall silent and stare at her. As if a corpse had suddenly begun to move. She would wipe up the milk. Sullen and terse. Sometimes she just couldn’t be bothered, but would call one of the dogs to lick it up.

  She did everything she was supposed to do: cleaning, cooking, washing clothes. But it was only her hands that were occupied with these tasks. Her thoughts were far away. Sometimes Father would try complaining.

  “This soup is too salty,” he might say, pushing the bowl away.

  But it didn’t offend her. It was as if someone else had cooked the inedible food.

  “Shall I make you a sandwich instead?” she’d ask.

  If he complained that the place was a mess, she’d start cleaning. Perhaps that was why Father decided they should take me in. He probably told her they needed the money. Maybe he believed that himself. But when I think about it now, I think he was probably hoping subconsciously that a baby would force her back to this world. Like when Antte was tiny. She’d been there then. Perhaps another child could make her into a proper wife.

  He wanted to open doors inside her. But he didn’t know how. And he thought I would be the bridge that would lead her back to him and Antte. But it turned out to be the other way round. She painted. I lay on my stomach in the studio, drawing.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? Get outside and get some fresh air!” he would say to me, slamming the door.

  I didn’t understand why he was so angry; I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  These days I understand his rage. I understood it then, but I didn’t have the words. Although I did paint it. In my attic room at Mauri’s I have almost all my paintings and drawings. There’s an Elsa Beskow pastiche. When I did it, I didn’t even know what pastiche meant.

  It shows a mother and daughter picking blueberries. A little way off, between some gnarled mountain birch trees, a bear stands watching them. He’s standing up on his hind legs, his head at a clumsy, sluggish angle. His expression is difficult to interpret. If I cover half his face with my hand, it has different expressions. One half is angry. The other half is sad.

  My God, the bear is so much like my father I have to smile. It’s like Antte too. I’ve only realized it now.

  I remember Antte standing in the doorway of Mother’s studio. He’s eleven. I’m seven. Mother is choosing canvases. She’s been given the opportunity to hang five pictures in a gallery in Umeå, and is finding it difficult to decide. She asks me what I think.

  I consider and point. Mother nods and ponders.

  “I think you should take these,” says Antte, who has appeared at the door.

  He points to completely different pictures from the ones I’ve chosen, looking at each of us in turn, challenging and defiant.

  In the end Mother goes for the ones I picked out. And Antte stands there in the doorway, his bear’s head drooping.

  Poor Antte. He thought Mother was choosing between him and me. In fact she was choosing art. She would never have been able to include something that was less good, just to please him. That’s how simple it was. And how difficult.

  And it was the same with Father. He probably knew, deep down. He felt lonely in the reality that consisted of the house and the children, their bed, the neighbors, the reindeer, and the Sami council.

  I remember before I started school, when Father and Antte had already left in the mornings. How I helped her look for her wedding ring in their big bed. She used to take it off at night when she went to sleep.

  Now she’s gone. When her body stopped obeying her, that must have been the worst time.

  Before that time came, she used to stand in the studio painting until late at night. Not very rewarding financially, compared with the commissions from Matarahkka and a shop in Luleå that sold her silver jewelry and ceramic animals.

  I would try to make myself invisible. I used to sit on the stairs leading up to our apartment, two rooms and a kitchen, looking into the old waiting room. Our home was full of different smells. Both old and new. You don’t open the windows in the winter when it’s minus thirty outside. So there’s a kind of shut-in smell, a
nd wet dogs. There’s the smell of cooked meat and the sharp odor of old reindeer skins, the way it gets when the fat in the skin has gone off slightly. She had so many things made of reindeer skin in the studio, from when she was little. Papooses and winter shoes, rucksacks and rugs. And in the quiet of the evenings, the smell of turpentine and oil paints, or a faint aroma of clay if she was working on her ceramics. I knew the staircase inside out, moving down little by little so that she wouldn’t hear, avoiding every spot that creaked. I would push down the handle of the studio door so carefully, then sit out in the hall watching her through the gap. It was her hand I used to watch. How it moved over the canvas. Long, sweeping movements with the wide brush. The distinctive marking with the knife. The dance of the fine brush made of pine marten hair as she leaned forward shortsightedly, working on the small details: a blade of grass sticking up above the snow, or a reindeer’s eyelashes.

  She didn’t usually notice I was there, or at least she pretended not to notice. Sometimes she’d say, “It was bedtime a long time ago.”

  Then I’d say I couldn’t sleep.

  “Come and lie down here then,” she’d say.

  There was an old sofa in the studio. The arms were made of pine, and it was covered in a speckled pink fabric. It was covered with lots of blankets to protect it from the dogs. I’d pull one of the hairy blankets over me.

  Musta and Sampo would wag their tails in greeting as I wriggled my legs in between them so they didn’t need to move.

  In a cardboard box in the corner lay all my drawings, done in pencil, ink and chalk.

  I longed to paint in oils. But it was too expensive.

  “When you get a summer job and start earning your own money,” she’d say.

  I wanted to paint layer on layer. My longing was purely physical. Making a sandwich could take me ages as I spread the butter, trying as hard as I could to make it as smooth as newly fallen snow, or layered like snow that has drifted.

  I tried to beg sometimes, but she was implacable.

  She was painting a white landscape. I said, “Can I paint something down there in the corner? You can paint over it afterwards. It won’t show.”

  That aroused her interest.

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “It’ll be like a secret. Between you, me and the canvas.”

  “No, it would still show. You’d be able to see that the layers of paint were thicker and had a different structure just there.”

  I didn’t give in.

  “Even better,” I said. “That’ll make the person looking at the picture curious.”

  She was smiling now.

  “It’s a good idea, I’ll give you that. Maybe we could do something slightly different.”

  She gave me several sheets of white paper.

  “Paint your secrets,” she said. “Then stick a sheet of white paper on top and paint something else on that.”

  I did as she said. I still have that picture in a box here in my room at my biological half brother’s house.

  Mauri. He rummages through my pictures and canvases. Now Inna’s died it’s as if he’s homeless. He owns the whole of Regla and more, but it doesn’t help much. He comes up here to me and looks at my pictures. Asks a load of questions.

  I pretend everything’s fine, and talk to him. Work with my weights all the time. If I get a lump in my throat, I change weights or switch to the bench.

  I did the picture the way my mother suggested. It was nothing special of course, I was a child after all. You can see a winter birch tree and a mountain. The railway winding through the landscape toward Narvik. The picture is stuck onto another sheet of paper. But the bottom right-hand corner is loose and has been folded back. I rolled the corner of the paper around a pen so that it wouldn’t lie flat against the motif underneath. I wanted the person looking at it to be seized by the desire to try to tear the sheets of paper apart to see the hidden picture. All you can see of that is a dog’s paw and the shadow of someone or something. I know it’s a woman with a dog, the sun shining on his back.

  She was very pleased with the picture. Showed it to Father and Antte.

  “The ideas she has,” she said, fingering the rolled-up corner of the paper.

  I was filled with an enormous emotion. If I’d been a house, the roof would have lifted off.

  Morning briefing at Kiruna police station. It was seven o’clock, but nobody seemed tired or reluctant to be there. The trail was still warm, and they hadn’t ground to a halt.

  Anna-Maria Mella summed things up and pointed to the pictures on the wall.

  “Inna Wattrang. Forty-four years old. She travels up to Kallis Mining’s holiday place…”

  “…on Thursday morning, according to the airline,” supplied Fred Olsson. “She took a taxi up to Abisko. Expensive trip. I had a chat with the driver. She was alone. I asked if they’d talked, but he said she was very quiet and seemed down.”

  Tommy Rantakyrö gave a little wave.

  “I got hold of the woman who usually does the cleaning up there,” he said. “She told me they always let her know in plenty of time if somebody’s going to be staying at the house. She turns up the heating before they arrive, and does the cleaning while they’re there. Nobody had informed her. She didn’t know anybody had been in the house.”

  “Nobody seems to have known that she’d gone up there,” said Anna-Maria. “The killer taped her to a chair in the kitchen and electrocuted her. She went into some kind of epileptic shock, chewed her tongue to pieces, clenched…”

  Anna-Maria pointed to the pictures taken from the autopsy report, showing the palms of her hands with the livid marks of her nails.

  “But,” she said, “the cause of death is probably a penetrating blow to the heart with a long, sharp object. It went straight through her body. Not a knife, Pohjanen says. And at that point—although this isn’t entirely clear—at that point she wasn’t sitting on the chair, she was lying on the floor. Tintin found a mark on the floor under the floor covering. The lab says the blood from that mark is Inna Wattrang’s.”

  “Maybe the chair fell over,” suggested Fred Olsson.

  “Maybe. Maybe somebody untied her and laid her on the floor.”

  “To have sex with her?” asked Tommy Rantakyrö.

  “Perhaps. There was no sperm in her body…but we still can’t rule out sex, consensual or otherwise. After that the killer moved her to the ark.”

  “And the ark was locked, wasn’t it?” asked Inspector Fred Olsson.

  Anna-Maria nodded.

  “But it wasn’t a difficult lock,” said Sven-Erik. “Any of our villains could deal with it.”

  “Her purse was in the washbasin in the bathroom,” Anna-Maria went on. “Her cell phone and laptop are missing; they’re not in her house at Regla either, we’ve asked our colleagues in Strängnäs to check.”

  “It’s all so peculiar,” exclaimed Tommy Rantakyrö.

  There was silence for a moment. Tommy Rantakyrö was right. It was impossible to get a clear picture of the course of events. What had actually happened up there?

  “Yes,” said Anna-Maria. “We need to try and keep all our options open. It could be anything. A crime of hatred, a sex crime, a madman, blackmail, a kidnapping that went wrong. Mauri Kallis and Diddi Wattrang are keeping quiet about what they know about her, that’s for sure. If it was a kidnapping, then these are the kind of people who won’t involve the police.

  “And we haven’t found a weapon of any kind either. We’ve searched all around the cottage and Tintin has searched, nothing there. I definitely want the list of calls from her cell phone network operator. Her address book would be brilliant too, but that’s probably in the missing laptop and her phone. But the list of calls, please. Could you take care of that, Tommy?”

  Tommy Rantakyrö nodded.

  “And yesterday,” said Anna-Maria, “the divers found this coat under the ice.”

  She pointed at a picture of the light-colored poplin coat.
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  “It doesn’t show up very well there,” she said, “but there’s a stain just here, just on the shoulder. I think it’s blood, Inna Wattrang’s. But we’ve sent it to Linköping, so we’ll see. I hope they can find a strand of hair or a trace of sweat or something from the inside of the collar. Then we might get the murderer’s DNA.”

  “Do you really think it’s the murderer’s coat?” asked Tommy Rantakyrö. “I mean, it’s a summer coat.”

  Anna-Maria Mella pressed her fingers against her forehead, a sure sign that she was thinking.

  “Of course!” she exclaimed. “It’s a summer coat. And if it’s the murderer’s coat, that means he came from the summer.”

  The others looked at her. What was she talking about?

  “It’s winter here,” said Anna-Maria. “But in Skåne and the rest of Europe, it’s spring. Pleasantly warm. Robert’s cousin and her partner were in Paris last weekend. They were able to sit outside the pavement cafés drinking their coffee. What I mean is this: if he came from somewhere warm, then he wasn’t from here, he was from somewhere far away. In which case he must have come by plane, mustn’t he? And maybe hired a car? It’s worth checking. Sven-Erik and I will go out to the airport and check if anyone remembers a guy in a coat like this.”

  Mauri Kallis was squatting down in Ester’s attic. He was looking through her paintings and drawings, which were in two big cardboard boxes. Inna had provided paints, canvas, easel, brushes, watercolor paper. Everything top of the range.

  “Is there anything else you’d like?” she’d asked a young Ester, standing there with her suitcases, looking very small.

  “Weights,” Ester had replied. “Weights and a bar.”

  Ester was lying on her back using the bench press while Mauri rummaged through the boxes.

  I was terrified the day she arrived, he thought.

  Inna had rung to tell him that she and Ester and Ester’s aunt were on their way. Mauri had wandered back and forth in his study, thinking about how he’d felt at his mother’s funeral. His sisters, who had reminded him of her. And now he was going to run the risk of bumping into his mother at any moment. It would feel like Russian roulette every time he poked his nose outside the bedroom door.