The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  “I’m busy,” he’d said to Inna. “You show them round. I’ll ring when you can come over.”

  In the end he’d pulled himself together and rung.

  And his whole body had become one huge sigh of relief when she walked in through the door. She was Indian. She looked Indian. Not a trace of their mother.

  Her aunt had forced out the words:

  “Thank you for looking after her, I only wish I could do it myself, but…”

  And Mauri had seized hold of Ester’s wrist, almost dizzy.

  “Of course,” he’d said. “Of course.”

  Ester sneaked a look at Mauri. He was going through her pictures again. If she still drew, she would draw herself in her head, lifting her weights, and above her Mauri with the boxes in his arms. She was lifting him and his curiosity. Carrying both without showing any sign of it on the outside. Moving the pain to the pectoralis major, to the triceps brachii. Lift, nine…ten…eleven…twelve.

  But I still want him here, she thought. He needs to have a refuge here with me. That’s the way it’s meant to be.

  Mauri looked into a different life when he went through Ester’s drawings. He wondered what would have become of him if he’d been the one who ended up in the Far North when he was very small. A trip to an alternative life.

  The motifs were almost exclusively taken from her childhood home, the old railway station in Rensjön. He took out a few pencil drawings of her foster family. Her mother, busy with indoor tasks or with her ceramics. Her brother, in his blue overalls and baseball cap, tinkering with his snowmobile in the middle of summer, a riot of delicate wildflowers framing them both. Her foster father, cleaning the reindeer enclosure on the far side of the railway track down toward the lake, the pack reindeer standing by. And everywhere, in almost every picture, the sinewy little Swedish Lapphunds with their shiny coats and wagging tails.

  Ester was struggling to get the bar back into its rest; her arms had gone limp. She took no notice of him at all, seemed to have forgotten he was there. It was nice to be able to sit here in peace for a while.

  He took out the sketches of Nasti in his cage.

  “I like this hamster,” he said.

  “It’s a mountain lemming,” Ester corrected him, without looking.

  Mauri looked at the lemming. The broad head with the black button eyes. The little paws. Consciously or subconsciously, Ester had made them so human. They looked like little hands.

  Nasti on his hind legs with his hands around the bars of the cage. Nasti’s bottom as he bends over his food dish. Nasti on his back in the sawdust with his legs in the air. Cold and dead. As was so often the case in her pictures, those who were outside the motif were still there. A shadow. A fraction of a daily newspaper outside the cage.

  Ester turned over onto her stomach and started doing back lifts. It was Father who came home with Nasti. He’d found him out on the marsh. Soaked to the skin and close to death. Father put him in his pocket and saved his little life. For eight months he lived with them. You can learn to love someone in considerably less time than that.

  I cried then, thought Ester. But she taught me what you can use a picture for.

  “Paint him,” says Mother.

  Father and Antte haven’t come home yet. I hurry to get out paper and a pen. And even after the first few strokes, the violent emotion is starting to calm down. The grief becomes muted, silent in my breast. The hand lays claim to the brain and the emotions, the tears must step aside.

  When Father gets home I cry a little bit more, mainly because I want the attention. The drawing of Nasti after his death is already right at the bottom of my box in the studio. Father comforts me. I’m allowed to sit on his lap. Antte doesn’t care. He’s much too grown up to grieve for a lemming.

  “You know how it is,” says Father. “They’re so sensitive. Can’t cope with all our germs. We’ll put him in the woodshed and bury him in the summer.”

  Over the next few weeks I do three drawings of the woodshed. Thick snow covering the roof. The black darkness inside the barred windows, covered in frost. It’s only my mother and I who understand that they’re really pictures of Nasti. He’s lying inside there, in a box.

  “You should start painting again,” said Mauri.

  Ester changed the weights on the bar. She looked at her legs. Her thighs were starting to get noticeably thicker. Quadriceps femoris. She ought to eat more protein.

  Mauri took out some of the drawings of Ester’s aunt. Her foster mother’s sister. In one she was sitting at the kitchen table, staring with resignation at the telephone. In another she was lying on her back on the kitchen sofa with a contented expression on her face, reading a novel. In one hand she was holding a Mora knife with a lump of dried meat speared on the end.

  He was about to ask Ester whether she’d heard from her aunt, but refrained. They were bloody awful people, both the aunt and the foster father.

  Ester bent her knees beneath the bar. She looked at Mauri. At the brief furrow that appeared between his eyebrows. He shouldn’t be angry with her aunt. Where could she go now when she needed a bolt-hole? She was just as homeless as Ester.

  Her aunt comes to Rensjön to visit them at regular intervals. It usually starts with a telephone call to Mother.

  There have been calls all week. Mother has been walking around with the receiver clamped between her shoulder and her ear, trying to make the lead reach.

  “Mmm,” she says into the telephone, trying to reach the washing up and the slop bucket and the dogs’ bowls; she can’t just sit there doing nothing and talk, it’s impossible.

  Sometimes she says, “He’s an idiot!”

  But most of the time she doesn’t say anything. For long periods she simply listens. I can hear my aunt weeping in despair at the other end of the phone. Sometimes she swears.

  I fetch the extension lead for Mother. Father is getting annoyed. He feels totally invaded by these endless telephone conversations. When the phone rings, he gets up and leaves the kitchen.

  And then one day my mother says, “Marit’s coming.”

  “Oh, it’s that time again, is it,” says my father.

  He pulls on his snowmobile overalls and disappears without saying where he’s going. Comes home long after the evening meal. Mother heats up his food in the microwave. Silence. If it wasn’t so cold in the rest of the house, Antte and I would escape to the studio, or up to the junk room in the attic where the washing hangs, frozen stiff, and the rime frost snakes across the windows like fronds of fern.

  But instead we’re sitting in the kitchen. Mother is washing up. I look at her back and at the clock on the wall. In the end Antte gets up and switches on the radio. Then he goes into the living room and switches on the TV and the computer, and plays a football game. The silence still manages to drown out all the rest of the noise. Father is glaring at the telephone.

  But I’m pleased, at any rate. My aunt is a pretty creature. She has a whole suitcase full of makeup and perfume that you’re allowed to try if you’re careful. My mother is different when my aunt comes to visit. Laughs often. At the silliest things.

  If I could still draw, I would redo all my pictures of her. She would look the way she wanted to look. Her face like a little girl’s. Her mouth softer. Fewer lines between her eyebrows, and between her nose and the corners of her mouth. And I wouldn’t bother putting in the fan-shaped network of fine wrinkles from the outer corners of her eyes down toward her high cheekbones. The delta of her tears.

  She comes by train from Stockholm. It takes an afternoon, an evening, a night and half a day.

  I’m standing in the living room upstairs, where my mother and father sleep at night on a pull-out bed. Antte sleeps on the kitchen sofa. I’m the only one who has my own space. A little cubbyhole with room for a bed and a chair. There’s a little window that’s so high up you have to stand on a chair to see out. I stand there sometimes watching the railway workers in their yellow overalls, working on the points. It’s b
ecause I’m a foster child that I have my own room.

  But at the moment I’m standing in the living room with my nose pressed against the window. I can see my aunt if I close my eyes.

  It’s the middle of winter. Stockholm is sepia and ochre on rain-soaked watercolor paper. Wet, black tree trunks, thin lines in ink.

  I can see her on the train. Sometimes she goes to the toilet for a crafty cigarette. Otherwise she sits there looking out through the window. House after house after house. Forest after forest after forest. Her soul can feel that it’s coming home.

  She looks at her cell phone from time to time. No network coverage. Perhaps he’s tried to ring anyway. The pinging sound from the level crossings, the cars queuing to get across.

  She can only afford a seat, not a berth. Pulls her coat over her like a blanket and falls asleep with her head against the window. The electric heaters are full on. There’s a smell of burnt dust. Her feet and her narrow ankles in their nylon tights are sticking out from underneath her coat, resting on the seat opposite and suggesting something fragile and vulnerable. The train sways and sighs and rumbles. It’s a lot like life before birth.

  Mother and I meet her on the platform in Rensjön. My aunt is the only person who gets off. The snow hasn’t been cleared, and we have to battle our way through. Dark blue afternoon twilight. Lumps of snow stick to the bottom of her suitcases.

  She’s wearing a little too much makeup and her voice is a little too cheerful as she chatters and trips along through the deep snow. She’s going to be frozen in her Stockholm coat and her fine shoes. And she hasn’t got a hat. I drag the case along. It gouges a deep track in the snow.

  My aunt laughs happily when she sees the house. At one side the snowdrift reaches right up to the upstairs window. Mother tells her that my father had to climb out there, out of the upstairs window, the week before last, and that it took him and Antte four hours to dig out the front door.

  My aunt has brought presents. An expensive watercolor block for me, with ready-pasted pages.

  Mother tells me not to use it all up at once, then she tells my aunt off—it’s too expensive.

  At first my aunt wants the kind of food she and my mother used to eat when they were little. My mother makes suovas and blood dumplings and blood rissoles and elk, and in the evening my aunt carves thin slices of dried meat and eats as she talks. And they drink the wine and spirits my aunt brought with her as a present.

  My father puts the heating on in the living room and watches TV in the evenings; my mother and my aunt stay in the kitchen, talking. She often cries, but we pretend not to notice that sort of thing in my family.

  “You’re having to move a lot,” says my father when he comes into the kitchen to top up his whisky. “Maybe you should get yourself a caravan.”

  My aunt doesn’t move a muscle, but I can see the irises in her eyes become like two pinpricks.

  “I’m bad at choosing good men,” she says in a deceptively light tone of voice. “I think it’s a family trait on my mother’s side.”

  Every evening she puts her cell phone on charge. She hardly dares go out skiing, because then the phone gets cold and the battery stops working.

  One evening it rings, and it’s the bastard. My aunt talks to him in the kitchen, very quietly. For a long time. My mother sends us out to play. We play in the dark for almost two hours. Dig a cave right into the snowdrift. The dogs dig too, like mad things.

  We’re allowed to come in when my aunt has finished talking. I listen while I’m taking off my dungarees and boots.

  “I don’t understand,” my mother says. “How can you possibly take him back? All he has to do is click his fingers. It’s such a waste of a woman’s strength.”

  “‘A waste of a woman’s strength,’” says my aunt. “What’s more important to devote your strength to than trying to catch a little bit of love before this life is over?”

  That’s what’s difficult, thought Ester, fitting new weights to the bar. When Mauri comes up to my attic and looks at the pictures. Now I’ve started to think about my aunt, all the other memories will come too. At first you remember something that isn’t dangerous at all, but behind it all the difficult stuff is pushing its way forward.

  The difficult stuff: my aunt and I are driving along Norgevägen on the way to the hospital in Kiruna. Darkness and snow. My aunt is gripping the steering wheel. She has a license, but she’s not used to driving.

  The end is near. I don’t even remember where Antte and my father are.

  “Do you remember the fly?” my aunt asks me as we’re driving along.

  I don’t reply. There’s a huge truck coming toward us. My aunt brakes just before we pull level. That’s the last thing you should do, even I know that. It’s easy to go into a skid, and then you’ll end up squashed. But she’s scared and she does the wrong thing. I’m not scared. Not because of that, at any rate.

  I don’t remember the fly, but my aunt has told me about it before.

  I’m two years old. Sitting at the kitchen table on my aunt’s knee. The daily paper open on the table in front of us. A picture of a fly. I’m trying to pick the fly up off the page.

  My mother is laughing at me.

  “You can’t do that,” she says.

  “Don’t teach her that she can’t do things,” says my aunt crossly.

  My aunt has a weakness for that particular trait from her mother’s side of the family. The side that can staunch blood, and see things. She’s probably a little bit annoyed with my mother, because she suspects that her sister has rather more of this ability than she lets on. She doesn’t want my mother to teach me to put a lid on things. Even when I was a baby she used to look in my eyes and say to my mother, “You see, it’s áhkku, it’s Grandmother.”

  My father heard her once.

  “Numbskulls,” he said to them. “She isn’t even related to us. She isn’t your grandmother.”

  “He doesn’t understand a thing,” my aunt said to me. Her voice was deceptively amused and she was completely focused on me, but after all I was a baby; it was my father who was meant to hear what she said. He thinks family is only to do with biology.

  I try to pick the fly up from the picture in the newspaper. And suddenly it happens. It’s buzzing around our heads, banging into my aunt’s reading glasses, zooming down to the floor and crawling around, taking off clumsily and landing on my hand.

  And I scream. A heartrending, terrified scream. My aunt tries to calm me down, but it’s impossible. My mother chases the fly out through the window and it dies instantly in the cold. The fly is still there in the picture, but my aunt still stuffs the newspaper into the wood-burning stove and it is destroyed in the fire with a crackle.

  “It was probably just a winter fly that had woken up,” says my mother, choosing to be a realist.

  My aunt says nothing. Now, fourteen years later, she asks me:

  “Why did you scream like that? We thought you were never going to calm down.”

  I tell her I don’t remember. And it’s true. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t know. I know exactly why I screamed. The feeling is always the same when it happens, and it has happened to me later in life as well.

  You become one with everything else. But at the same time, you’re moving apart from everything. There’s a feeling of disintegration. Like when a gust of wind whirls down into a valley and disperses the mist. Very frightening. Particularly when you’re little, and you don’t know it will pass.

  Sometimes I know it’s coming. It’s as if my feet go to sleep, a thousand pinpricks. Then it feels as if there’s a cushion of air between my feet and the ground. You’re more at one with your body than you can imagine, and it’s horrible to be separated from it.

  I could say to my aunt: Imagine if gravity suddenly ceased to exist. But I don’t want to talk about it.

  I know why my aunt is reminding me about the fly as we drive along. It’s her way of saying I’m related to my mother. That I have their g
randmother within me.

  Nobody really wants to know. Including my aunt.

  I’m three years old. Once again I’m sitting at the kitchen table on my aunt’s knee. She and my father have been sniping at each other for almost two weeks, and Father and Antte have gone up into the mountains. But on this particular day the telephone has rung. My aunt has booked her ticket home and packed her suitcase. Now she’s showing me pictures. This man has a big sailing boat. She shows me pictures of the boat.

  “It’s in the Mediterranean,” she tells me.

  They’re going to sail down to the Canary Islands.

  “I remember,” I say. “You sat here and cried.”

  I point at the prow of the boat.

  My aunt laughs. She doesn’t want to hear this. Ester doesn’t have the gift.

  “You can’t possibly remember that, poppet. I’ve never even set foot on a sailing boat. This will be the first time.”

  Mother gives me a quick warning glance. They don’t want to know, it means. That you can remember both forward and backward. Time goes in both directions.

  Mauri doesn’t want to know either, thought Ester, placing the bar across her shoulders. He’s in danger, but it’s pointless to try and tell him.

  “You could paint me,” he said with a smile.

  It’s true, thought Ester. I could paint him. It’s the only picture I have left in me. Apart from that, the pictures are finished. But he won’t want to see it. It’s been here inside me since the first time I met him.

  Inna meets my aunt and me at the door of Regla. Hugs my aunt as if they were sisters. My aunt relaxes. Feels her guilty conscience about me releasing its grip, I presume.