The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  “…we can talk about this tomorrow, I just really need to be on my own now…thanks. Please don’t say anything to Diddi and Mauri, I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

  She closes the door in their shocked little fawnlike faces.

  She kicks off her shoes and hauls herself slowly up the stairs. Roots around in the medicine cabinet, takes some Xanor, using her hand to scoop water from the tap so she can swallow them, then Imovane; she doesn’t swallow those, but sucks patiently until the shell dissolves so they’ll work more quickly.

  She wonders if she can make it down to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of whisky.

  She sits on the edge of the bed and flops back, tasting the bitterness in her mouth as the Imovane kicks in. It’s quick. Everything’s fine now.

  The outside door opens and closes, rapid footsteps on the stairs, Diddi’s voice:

  “It’s only me.”

  He always says that. He always opens the door and walks straight in with those very words. And since he got married it makes Inna feel like his concubine, with her own residence.

  “Who was it?” is all he says when he sees her. The blood on her shirt, the swollen nose, the split lip, the closed eye.

  “It was Malte,” she says. “He got a bit…he kind of lost control.”

  She smiles at him, as mischievously as she can manage. There’s no possibility of laughing with her ribs like this; they’re still hurting, despite the painkillers.

  “If you think I look bad, you should see the cream carpet in his bedroom,” she jokes.

  Diddi tries to smile back.

  God, he’s got so boring, thinks Inna. She wants to throw up all over him.

  “How bad is it?” he asks.

  “Getting better.”

  “Let me look after you,” says Diddi. “Is there anything special you want?”

  “Ice, I’m going to look like shit tomorrow. And a line.”

  He brings everything she wants. He gives her a whisky too, and she starts to feel pretty good, under the circumstances. She’s not in so much pain now, and the whisky is making her feel warm and relaxed, while the cocaine is keeping her head clear.

  Diddi undoes the buttons of her shirt and carefully eases it off. He dips a flannel in warm water and washes the blood from her face and hair.

  Inna holds a pack of ice wrapped in a tea towel against her eye, and tries out a few Rocky Balboa lines:

  “I can’t see nothing, you got to open my eye…cut me, Mick…you stop this fight and I’ll kill you…”

  Diddi sits down between her knees and slides his hands up beneath her skirt. Unfastens her suspenders and rolls down her stockings, kissing the inside of her knees as he does so.

  His fingers move upward again, caressing her inner thighs. They are trembling with desire. Inside her panties she is sticky with another man’s sperm. It’s incredibly sexy.

  They usually laugh at her boyfriends, he and Mauri. She really does meet the most unlikely men. Where does she find them? He and Mauri often ask themselves that question.

  Stick Inna on a bare rock out at sea, and some old guy in a wig and a dress will come sailing along, filled with dark desires that Inna can fulfill.

  Sometimes she tells them all about it. To amuse them. Like last year, when she texted them from a luxury hotel in Buenos Aires. “Haven’t been out of the room all week,” it said.

  When she got home, Mauri and Diddi were standing there like two expectant Labradors, hoping she might throw them a bone. “Tell us, tell us!”

  Inna had laughed and laughed.

  Her boyfriend had been a ship spotter.

  “He travels around visiting the world’s biggest harbors,” she’d explained. “Books into a top hotel with a view of the harbor, and sits there all week writing down details of the ships. Close your mouths while I’m talking, there’s good boys.”

  Mauri and Diddi had closed their mouths.

  “He films them too,” she’d gone on. “And when his daughter got married last year, he showed films of ships coming into and out of various harbors all over the world. For twenty minutes. The guests were moderately amused…”

  She made a hesitant gesture with her hand to illustrate the wedding guests’ level of interest.

  “What did you do?” Mauri had asked. “While he was watching the ships.”

  “Well,” she replied. “I read a whole load of books. Mostly he just wanted me to lie there and listen while he talked. You can ask me anything you like about tankers, though. I know lots.”

  They’d laughed. But Diddi had thought with love that this was his sister. For her, everything was okay. She found her slightly peculiar companions. She loved them, found them interesting, helped them to make their dreams come true. And sometimes it was all completely harmless.

  In fact, everything was harmless in her eyes.

  We’ve always played innocent games, thinks Diddi as his fingers seek out Inna’s vagina. Everything’s okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t want to be hurt.

  He longs for the feeling that used to surround him. The feeling that life is as fleeting as the ether. Every moment exists right now, and then it’s gone. The feeling of being a wide-eyed child, gazing at everything in wonder.

  He loses that feeling with Ulrika and the baby. He can’t really work out how it happened. How he ended up married.

  He wants Inna to give him back that sense of being lighthearted, carefree. He wants to feel weightless, to float in life as if it were the sea. To be washed up on a beach. Wander along it for a while. Find a beautiful shell. Lose it. The tide takes him out again. That’s how life should be, exactly like that.

  “Stop it,” says Inna crossly, pushing his hand away.

  But Diddi doesn’t want to listen.

  “I love you,” he mumbles against her knee. “You’re amazing.”

  “I don’t want to,” she says. “Stop it.”

  And when he doesn’t stop, she says, “Think about Ulrika and the little prince.”

  Diddi stops at once. Moves a little distance away from her along the floor, placing his hands on his knees as if they were porcelain ornaments, each on their own pedestal. He waits for her to pacify him, to pour oil on troubled waters.

  But she doesn’t. Instead she digs out her cigarettes and lights up.

  He sulks. Feels rejected and upset. Suddenly he wants to hurt her.

  “What is it with you?” he asks, his voice making it clear that she’s a hypocrite.

  He’s always loved his women, and a few men, with tenderness. He’s never understood all that business of violence and treating them mean. But he’s never felt the need to defend his point of view. If a partner wanted that kind of thing he’s always declined politely, but wished them much pleasure. He even watched once. Just to be polite. And possibly because he didn’t have the energy to get up and go home.

  But Inna. She’s done most things. Look at her now. So what is it with her?

  He asks her the question.

  “So come on, what is it with you? Is it only the perverted stuff that gets you going these days? Do you need to be slapped around like some bloody drugged-up whore?”

  “Stop it,” she says, with something tired and pleading in her voice.

  But by now Diddi is almost at his wits’ end. He can feel that he’s really losing her. Perhaps he already has. She’s disappeared into a world populated by smelly old men with peculiar desires; his mind is filled with pictures of big, musty apartments in the expensive areas of Europe’s capital cities. The still air carries the smell of layers of dirt from the drains and the toilets in the big bathrooms. Apartments where the heavy, dusty curtains are always kept closed against the sunlight.

  “What is it with you and disgusting old men?” he asks, deliberately filling his voice with revulsion.

  “That’s enough.”

  “I remember when you were twelve and—”

  “Stop! Stop it, stop it!”

  Inna gets up. The drugs have taken
care of the pain in her body. She drops to her knees in front of him, takes his chin in her hands and gazes at him with sympathy. Strokes his hair. Comforts him. While her soft voice says the most terrible things.

  “You’ve lost it. You’re not a boy any longer. And it’s just so sad. Wife, kid, house, cozy dinners for two, invitations to country houses, it really suits you. And your hair’s thinning. These long, stringy bangs are just pathetic. You’ll be combing them to cover your bald head soon. That’s why you always need money nowadays. Can’t you see it for yourself? You used to get everything for free. Company, coke. Now you’ve turned into a buyer.”

  She gets up. Takes a drag of her cigarette.

  “Where do you get the money from? How much do you go through? Eighty a month? I know you’ve conned the company out of money. When Quebec Invest sold and the value of Northern Explore fell. I know it was you that fixed it. A journalist from Norrländska Socialdemokraten rang me and asked a whole load of questions. Mauri would go crazy if he found out about it. Crazy!”

  Diddi was on the verge of tears. How had things come to this? When had the situation between him and Inna got like this?

  He wants to rush out and leave her. At the same time, that’s the last thing he wants to do. If he goes now, he can never come back—that’s how it feels.

  They’ve always been perfidious, he and Inna. Well, not perfidious—but they’ve never let anybody weigh them down. People come and go in life. You open yourself completely, then you let go when it’s time. And the time to let go always comes. Sooner or later. But Diddi has always felt that he and Inna are the one exception for each other. While their mother has always been a cardboard cutout obsessed with thoughts of money and social standing, Inna has been flesh, blood, life.

  He isn’t Inna’s exception. He’s slipped away from her. She has allowed it to happen.

  “Could you go now, please,” she says in her friendly voice, the voice that’s for just anybody.

  She’s so very soft, so very pleasant.

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  He shakes his blond head. Shakes his stringy bangs, feels them flopping against his forehead. They won’t talk about this tomorrow. It’s all been said, it’s all over.

  He shakes his head all the way down the stairs, across the yard, through the darkness and home to his wife and his little son.

  Ulrika meets him in the doorway.

  “How did it go?” she asks.

  The little prince is asleep, and she moves in close to him. He forces himself to put his arms around her. Above her head, he meets his own gaze in the gilded hall mirror.

  He doesn’t recognize the person looking back at him. The skin is like a mask that is beginning to come unstuck.

  And Inna knows about that business with Quebec Invest, that’s bad, very bad. What was it she said? That a journalist from NSD had been asking questions.

  Inna lies on the bed holding the damp towel over her nose, which has started bleeding again. She hears the door downstairs open and close again. Mauri’s voice this time.

  “Hello.”

  She groans inside. Hasn’t got the strength to explain. Has no intention of doing so either. Hasn’t the strength to forbid them to call the police and the doctor.

  At least Mauri knocks. First of all he knocks on the outside door, then on the doorjamb downstairs as he calls up to her. He almost knocks on the banister as he calls out that he’s coming up. And he knocks on the open bedroom door before tentatively peeping in.

  He looks at her swollen face, her wrecked lips, her bruised upper arms, and he says:

  “Do you think you’ll be able to powder over that? You need to come to Kampala with me tomorrow to meet the Minister for Industry.”

  Inna has to laugh. She’s absolutely delighted that Mauri is playing it cool and keeping the mask in place.

  When Inna and Mauri disembark from the air-conditioned plane in Kampala on December 3, the heat and the humidity explode in their faces like an airbag. The sweat courses down their bodies. There’s no air-conditioning in the cab, and the seats are plastic; their backs and bottoms are soon soaked through, and they try to sit on just one cheek some of the time in order to avoid contact with the seat. The driver is cooling himself down with a huge fan, singing lustily along with the songs pouring out of the radio. The traffic is chaotic; from time to time the cab is at a complete standstill while the driver hangs out the window discussing the situation with other cabdrivers, or shouts and gesticulates at the children who pop up like jack-in-the-boxes wanting to sell this or that, or just to beg. “Miss,” they say with a pleading expression, knocking on the window where Inna is sitting. Inna and Mauri are sitting in the back with the windows closed; it’s like being in a glass box, and they’re sweating like pigs.

  Mauri is angry, they were supposed to be picked up at the airport, but there was nobody there so they had to take a cab. The last time he was in Kampala, he noticed the beautiful green parks, the hills around the town. This time he notices only the marabou storks, gathering in flocks on the roofs with their disgusting red wattles.

  The air-conditioning is working in the government building; Inna and Mauri soon begin to shiver in their wet clothes. A secretary shows them into the building and the Minister for Industry comes to meet them as soon as they reach the top of the wide marble staircase with the red carpet and the banister made of ebony. She’s a woman in her sixties, with big hips. She’s wearing a dark blue suit, and her hair has been straightened and put up in a French braid. Her black pumps are worn, you can see her little toe pushing the leather out into a bulge. She shakes hands with them, laughing and chatting and placing her left hand over their right hands. As they walk toward her office, she asks how the journey went, what the weather is like in Sweden. Asks them to sit down and pours them an iced tea.

  She claps her hands and wonders with horror in her voice what happened to Inna.

  “Girl, you look like someone who’s tried to cross Luwum Street during rush hour.”

  Inna tells her the story of how she was attacked by a gang of boys in Humlegården.

  “I’m telling you,” she says to finish off the tale, “the youngest can’t have been more than eleven.”

  It’s the details that make the lie particularly credible, thinks Mauri. Inna lies with such enviable ease.

  “Whatever is the world coming to?” wonders the minister, pouring more iced tea.

  Silence for a second. They’re all thinking the same thing, but none of them admits it. The fact that a gang of little boys jump on a woman and beat her up and take her money is like a Sunday church service compared with the problems in northern Uganda, where military security forces and the LRA are spreading terror among the civilian population. And the LRA regularly recruits children as soldiers; they come in the night, aim a gun at the parents’ heads, and force the child to kill the neighboring family “or your mother will die,” then take them away. There’s no need to be afraid that they will run away after that. What would they be coming back to?

  Every night, twenty thousand children walk from their country villages into the town of Gulu and sleep near churches, hospitals and bus stations, because they’re afraid this will happen to them. In the morning, they walk home again.

  But Kampala is an orderly town where people can sit outside the cafés conducting their business. They don’t want to acknowledge the problems in the North. So neither Inna, Mauri, nor the minister say another word about children and violence.

  Instead they begin to touch on the reason for their meeting today. That’s another minefield. They would all like to come to an agreement. But not on the other party’s terms.

  Kallis Mining has closed the mine in Kilembe. Five months earlier, three Belgian mining engineers were killed when the Hema militia attacked a bus on the way to Gulu. The infrastructure is falling apart completely. Together with two other mining companies, Kallis Mining built a road from northwestern Uganda to Kampala. Three years ago, it
was new. Today it’s practically impassable in places. Various militia groups have mined it, blockaded it and blown it up. They sometimes set up roadblocks once darkness has fallen, and then just about anything can happen. Eleven-year-olds, drugged to the eyeballs and completely spaced out, carrying weapons. And a little distance away, their older brothers-in-arms.

  “I didn’t build up the mine for it to fall into the hands of militia groups,” says Mauri.

  His security guards around the complex fled long ago. Now there is illegal mining going on there. It isn’t clear who’s actually in charge of things there, using the equipment the company didn’t manage to move out and running it into the ground. Mauri has heard rumors that they’re groups which are allies of the government troops. It’s therefore more than likely that it’s Museveni who’s stealing from him.

  “It’s a problem for the whole country,” says the minister. “But what can we do? Our soldiers can’t be everywhere. We’re doing our best to protect schools and hospitals.”

  Bullshit, thinks Mauri. If they’re not stealing from me, the government forces are fully occupied taking over mines in northeastern Congo, plundering them and transporting the gold across the border.

  The official line is, of course, that all the gold sold for export has been mined in Uganda in state-owned mines, but everybody knows the truth.

  “You’re going to have problems attracting foreign investors to your country,” says Mauri. “They won’t be too keen when they hear you can’t control things in the North.”

  “We’re very interested in foreign investors. But what can I do? We’ve offered to buy your mine.”

  “For nothing!”

  “For the amount you paid.”

  “And since then I’ve invested over ten million dollars in the infrastructure and equipment!”

  “But now all that’s completely worthless! It’s worth nothing to us, either. The region has many problems.”

  “You’re telling me! And you don’t seem to realize there’s only one way to solve this problem. Protect the investors. You’d be rich!”