The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  Another time. Winter again. Snowing again. And Inna has a good friend, as she calls them. Although this is somebody else. Things have been over between her and Ecke for a long time. She’s going to the Nobel dinner with this man, and Diddi decides that he and Mauri must go round to her apartment on Linnégatan with a bottle of champagne to help her zip up her dress.

  She looks absolutely amazing when she opens the door. A long, poppy red dress, moist lips the same color.

  “Okay?” she asks.

  But Mauri is actually incapable of replying. He learns what the word “breathless” means.

  He waves the bottle of champagne and disappears into the pantry to hide his feelings and to fetch glasses.

  When he comes back she’s sitting at the little dining table putting on more eye shadow. Diddi is standing behind her. He’s leaning over her, supporting himself with one hand on the table. He has slipped his other hand inside her dress and is caressing her breast.

  Both of them look at Mauri, waiting for his reaction. Diddi raises one eyebrow a fraction, but doesn’t move his hand.

  Inna is smiling, as if the whole thing were a joke.

  Mauri doesn’t move a muscle. He remains completely expressionless for three seconds, has total control over the fine network of muscles in his face. When the three seconds have passed, he raises his eyebrow slightly, assumes an indescribably decadent Oscar Wilde expression, and says:

  “My boy, when you have a hand free, I have a glass for you. Cheers!”

  They smile. He really is one of them.

  And they drink from her antique champagne glasses.

  Ebba Kallis and Ulrika Wattrang met in the yard outside Regla. Ebba looked up at Mauri’s window. The curtain was moving.

  “Have you heard from Diddi?” asked Ebba.

  Ulrika Wattrang shook her head.

  “I’m so worried,” she said. “I can’t sleep. I took a sleeping tablet last night, although I don’t really want to do that when I’m breastfeeding.”

  Echnaton pulled impatiently at the reins. He wanted to get into the stable, get the saddle off and be fussed over.

  “He’ll be in touch soon,” said Ebba mechanically.

  A tear seeped out from beneath Ulrika’s thick eyelashes. She shook her head skeptically.

  Lord, I’m so tired of this, thought Ebba. I’m so tired of her crying.

  “Don’t forget he’s going through a difficult period at the moment,” she said gently.

  Aren’t we all, she thought waspishly.

  Several times over the past six months Ulrika had turned up at her house crying. “He just pushes me away, he’s completely out of it, I don’t even know what he’s taken, I try asking if he doesn’t at least care about Philip, but he just…” And she’d hug the baby so hard he’d sometimes wake up and sob inconsolably, and then Ebba would have to carry him around.

  Echnaton laid his muzzle against her head and blew, ruffling her hair. Ulrika laughed through her tears.

  “He’s in love with you, I’m sure of it,” she said.

  Yes, he is, thought Ebba, glancing up at Mauri’s window. The horses love me.

  She’d got this particular stallion for next to nothing, when you looked at his pedigree. Simply because he was like the devil himself to ride. She remembered how expectant she’d been as they brought him out of the trailer. Nostrils flaring, eyes rolling in that divine little black head. A back leg you needed to watch out for. It had taken three men to hold him on that occasion.

  “Good luck.” They’d laughed when they finally got him into his stall and could be on their way to carry on celebrating Christmas. The stallion had stood there, eyes rolling.

  Ebba hadn’t taken him to the paddock with a lunging whip and draw reins. Instead they drove the devil out of his body together. She let him run and jump, far and high. She put on a hard hat and a back protector and let him go, instead of reining him in. They’d been covered in mud when they got back. One of the stable girls who helped Ebba had seen them and laughed. Echnaton had stood there waiting to go into his stable, his legs trembling with tiredness. Ebba had rinsed him down with warm water. He had whinnied with pleasure, and had suddenly leaned his forehead against her.

  She had twelve horses at the moment. She bought foals and hopeless cases and broke them in. She intended to start breeding them herself, gradually. Mauri used to laugh and say that she bought more than she sold. And she politely played along with the role of the housewife with two expensive hobbies. Racehorses and stray dogs.

  “Regla is yours,” Mauri had said when they got married.

  As a compensation for the fact that Kallis Mining belonged to him alone, and to give her financial security.

  But he bought and renovated Regla with borrowed money, and never repaid the loans.

  If she were to leave Mauri, she would have to leave Regla. The horses, the dogs, the staff, the neighbors, her whole life, was here.

  She had made her choice. She smiled and received their guests when he entertained. She kept him informed about their sons’ progress in school, and their hobbies. She organized Inna’s funeral without kicking up a fuss.

  I’m like him, thought Ebba, looking at her horse. We’re both slaves, freedom is not an option. If you make sure you’re always exhausted, you can stop yourself from going crazy.

  And just as she had finished thinking that very thought, Ester came bounding across the yard.

  Anna-Maria Mella unlocked the door of her house around lunchtime on Thursday and said, Hello, house. Her heart lifted when she saw that everything had been cleared away after breakfast and that the table had been wiped.

  She got herself a bowl of cornflakes and a liver pâté sandwich, then rang Lars Pohjanen’s number.

  “Well?” she said when he answered, without even saying who she was.

  There was a strange sound at the other end of the telephone, like a crow trapped in a chimney. You had to know Lars Pohjanen to realize he was laughing.

  “Hätähousu.”

  “Give the hätähousu what she wants. What did Örjan Bylund die of? Did he hang himself, or was it something else?”

  “What she wants.” Pohjanen’s voice was suddenly creaking with annoyance at the other end of the line. “What’s the matter with your colleagues? You should have sent him to me for an autopsy when you found him. It’s remarkable how bloody useless the police are when it comes to following the rules. It’s only the rest of us who have to do that.”

  Anna-Maria Mella refrained from commenting acidly that the police hadn’t even been called to the scene, since a doctor, one of Pohjanen’s professional colleagues, had chosen to ignore the proper procedures and written “heart attack” on the death certificate and allowed the undertaker to collect the body. But it was more important to keep Pohjanen in a good mood than to make that particular point.

  She muttered something that could be interpreted as an apology, and allowed Pohjanen to carry on.

  “Okay,” he continued in a pleasanter tone of voice. “It’s a good job he was buried in the winter, because the soft tissue hasn’t deteriorated. Although of course it’s happening quickly, now he’s thawed out.”

  “Mmm,” replied Anna-Maria, taking a bite of her sandwich.

  “I can understand the assumption that it was suicide; the external injuries are consistent with the victim having hanged himself. There’s the mark of a ligature around the neck…and he’d been taken down by the time the local doctor saw him, hadn’t he?”

  “Yes, his wife cut him down. She wanted to avoid the gossip. Örjan Bylund was a well-known person in Kiruna. He’d worked on the newspaper for thirty years.”

  “In that case it would be difficult to see if the injuries are consistent with the actual…hrrr…hrrr…method of hanging…hrrr…”

  Pohjanen broke off and cleared his throat.

  Anna-Maria held the receiver away from her ear while he got it over with. She didn’t mind talking about corpses while she was eating, but li
stening to that made her lose her appetite. He could talk about the police not following the rules! He was a doctor, and he smoked like a chimney.

  Pohjanen went on:

  “I became a little suspicious as soon as I started a superficial examination of the body. There were a number of small bleeds in the conjunctiva of the eyes. Nothing much, just like tiny pinpricks. And then there are the internal injuries, bleeds at different levels, around the throat and in the musculature.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, if this is a hanging, you would normally expect the bleeding to be beneath and around the ligature mark, wouldn’t you?”

  “Okay.”

  “But these bleeds are too big and too scattered. Besides which there’s considerable damage to the hyoid cartilage and the tongue bone.”

  Pohjanen sounded as if he’d finished and was about to hang up.

  “Just a minute,” said Anna-Maria. “What conclusions would you draw from all this?”

  “That he was strangled, of course. You wouldn’t expect these internal injuries to the throat from a hanging. I’d guess at strangulation. By hand. He’d been drinking too. A great deal. So I’d check out the wife if I were you. They sometimes take the opportunity when the old man’s had a bit too much.”

  “It wasn’t his wife,” said Anna-Maria. “It’s bigger than that. Much, much bigger.”

  Mauri Kallis saw Ester come jogging across the yard. She nodded briefly to Ulrika and Ebba, then carried on down toward the little woods that lay between the old and the new jetties. She liked to run along that route, following a little path leading down to the old jetty, where Mauri’s forestry manager kept his motorboat.

  It was remarkable, this obsession with exercise that seemed to have replaced her painting. She read about proteins and building up muscles, lifted her weights and went running.

  And it seemed as if she closed her eyes when she ran. It was like a challenge. Trying to run without bumping into the trees. Allowing her feet to find the path, even though she couldn’t see.

  He remembered a dinner party they’d had not so long ago. Ebba’s cousins from Skåne, Inna, Diddi and his wife and the little prince. Ester had just moved into the attic, and Inna had persuaded her to eat with them. Ester had tried to get out of it.

  “I’ve got to exercise,” she’d said, staring at the floor.

  “If you don’t eat, it won’t matter how much exercise you do,” Inna had said. “Go for a run, then come in and eat when you’re ready. You can go when you’ve finished eating. Nobody will notice if you slip away a little bit early.”

  In the middle of dinner, with the white linen tablecloth and the candelabra and the silver cutlery, Ester came down to the table. Her hair was wet and there were grazes all over her face; she was bleeding in two places.

  Ebba had introduced her. White and concerned beneath her smile and words like “art school” and “acclaimed exhibition at the Lars Zanton Gallery.”

  Inna had found it difficult not to laugh.

  Ester had eaten, focused and silent, with blood on her face, taking huge mouthfuls and leaving her serviette untouched beside her plate.

  When they went out for a smoke on the veranda after the meal, Diddi said:

  “I’ve seen her running down through the glade on the way to the old jetty with a blindfold over her eyes. That’s when she gets…”

  He made a clawlike gesture toward his face, indicating scratches and scrapes.

  “Why does she do that?” one of Ebba’s cousins had asked.

  “Because she’s crazy?” Diddi suggested.

  “Exactly!” Inna agreed happily. “You must see that we have to get her to start painting again.”

  Ester cut across the lawn and almost ran over the top of Ulrika and Ebba and that black horse. Once she would have seen his slender little head, the line of him, his big beautiful eyes. Lines and lines. The sway of his back when Ebba practiced his dressage turns in the paddock. The curves of his whole body: the throat, the hollow of his back, the legs, the hooves. And Ebba’s line: straight back, straight neck, straight nose, the reins tight and straight in her hands.

  But nowadays Ester didn’t bother about any of that. Instead she was looking at the horse’s muscles.

  She nodded in the direction of Ulrika and Ebba, thinking she was an Arabian horse.

  Light is my burden, she thought as she headed for the little woods between the estate and Lake Mälaren. She was beginning to know the path. Soon she would be able to run the whole way blindfolded, without bumping into a single tree.

  It was the dogs that first realized Mother was ill. She was hiding it from Ester and Antte and Father.

  I didn’t understand anything, thought Ester as she ran with her eyes closed through the dense wood toward the Regla estate’s old jetty. It’s strange. Often, time and space do not constitute impenetrable walls, but are like glass; I can see straight through. You can know things about people. Big things, small things. But when it came to her, I saw nothing. I was so preoccupied with my painting. So happy that I could finally paint in oils that I didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand why she was suddenly allowing me to hold the brush.

  She ran faster. Sometimes branches scratched her face. It didn’t matter, it was almost a relief.

  “Right, then,” says Mother. “You’ve always wanted to paint in oils—would you like to learn now?”

  She lets me stretch the canvas. I exert myself so much when I’m stretching it from corner to corner that I get a headache. Desperate for it to be right. I pull and fold and staple. My father has made the frame. He doesn’t want my mother to buy cheap frames made from poorly dried wood that will warp.

  My mother doesn’t say anything, and I know that means I’ve stretched the canvas perfectly. She saves money by buying cheap canvas, but it has to be prepared using tempera. I’m allowed to do this. Then she draws guidelines using charcoal, and I’m allowed to stand beside her and watch. I think excitedly that when I’m allowed to paint all by myself, my own pictures, I won’t draw one single line with charcoal. I’ll just use the brush straightaway. In my head I’m forming shapes using burnt umber or Venetian red.

  My mother gives instructions, and I paint in the large areas of color. The snow in dazzling white and cadmium yellow. The shadow of the mountain in cerulean blue. And the rock face, tending toward a dark violet.

  It’s difficult for my mother not to be holding the brush herself. Several times she snatches it out of my hand.

  “Big brushstrokes, stop hesitating like that, shaking like a leaf. More color, don’t be such a coward. More yellow, more yellow. Don’t hold the brush like that, it’s not a pen.”

  At first I resist. She knows what will happen, after all. When the colors are as harsh and unsettling as she wants them to be, the pictures are difficult to sell. It’s happened before. My father looks at the finished painting in the evening, and says: “That won’t do.” And then she’s had to change it. The contrasts have been made less disturbing. On one occasion I tried to console her by saying:

  “The real picture is there underneath, though. We’ve seen it.”

  My mother carried on patiently painting, with the brush pressed hard against the canvas.

  “It doesn’t help,” she said. “They’re idiots, the lot of them.”

  She became more and more impatient, thought Ester, running between the trees. I didn’t understand. Only the dogs understood.

  Mother has made a thick meat soup. She places the big pan on the kitchen table to cool down. Later she will pour the soup into separate containers and freeze it. While it’s cooling, she settles down in the studio to work on her ceramic birds.

  A noise from the kitchen makes her wipe the clay from her fingers and go up there. Musta is standing on the table. She’s knocked the lid off the pan and is fishing for bones in the soup. She burns her nose on the hot soup, but can’t stop herself from trying again. Burns herself and barks angrily, as if the soup were burning her on purpo
se and needed to be told off.

  “What on earth,” says Mother, making a movement toward Musta to shoo her off the table or perhaps give her a smack.

  Like lightning Musta goes for her. Snaps at my mother’s hand, her lips drawn back over her teeth. A low, threatening growl comes from deep in her throat.

  My mother pulls back her hand in shock. No dog has ever dared do anything like that to her. She picks up the sweeping brush from the corner and tries to drive Musta off the table.

  Then Musta really goes for her. The soup is hers, and nobody’s going to take it away from her.

  My mother backs out of the kitchen. Just at that moment I get home from school, go up the stairs and almost bump into my mother on the landing. She turns around, her face white, her red, bitten hand clenched against her breast. Through the door behind her I can see Musta on the kitchen table. Like a little black demon, teeth bared, hackles up. Ears flattened. I stare at the dog, and then at my mother. What the hell has happened?

  “Ring your father and tell him to come home,” says my mother hoarsely.

  My father arrives in the Volvo a quarter of an hour later. He doesn’t say much. Fetches his shotgun and throws it in the trunk. Then he fetches Musta. She doesn’t have time to jump down from the table when she sees him, whimpers with pain and submissiveness as he grabs her by the scruff of the neck and the tail, carries her to the car and throws her in. She lies down on top of the gun case.

  The car means outdoor work and fun, she doesn’t understand what’s going to happen. That’s the last we see of her. My father comes home that evening without the dog, and we don’t mention it.

  Musta was a born leader. I’m sure my father was sorry to lose such an excellent worker and companion, out there in the mountains. She could set off across the mountain after a straying reindeer and return with it after two hours.

  She could see what was happening to my mother. That she was growing weaker. Naturally Musta tried to take my mother’s place as leader.