The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  And then there’s a picture she drew after a visit to Kiruna. It’s a woman, pulling her Pekingese along on a lead. You can see only her calves from behind, they’re quite thick, and her feet are stuffed into high-heeled shoes. The Pekingese is crouching, trying to have a crap. But it looks as if his mistress has grown tired of waiting, and is dragging him along on his walk. You see him from behind too, still in the position, the claws of his hind feet leaving drag marks on the ground.

  They’re asking her something. Inside her head, her aunt nudges her impatiently.

  But Ester keeps her mouth firmly closed. What can she say? That she’s interested in shit?

  Her aunt wants to know how it went. How’s Ester supposed to know? She doesn’t like all that talking. But she tried. With the pictures of Nasti, for example. She realizes they’re trying to see a deeper meaning in them. His captivity. His little dead body. Her father’s words come out of her mouth: They’re so sensitive, she said. They can cope out there on the mountain, but when they’re exposed to our cold germs, for example…They all looked questioningly at her.

  Now she feels like an idiot. Thinks she did too much talking. Although they think she hardly said a word, she knows that.

  It went really badly, she thinks now. She’ll never get in.

  Ester Kallis put the empty pan down beside her bed. All she could do now was sit here and wait. She wasn’t sure what for.

  It’ll show itself, she thought. It’s like falling. It happens all by itself.

  She mustn’t put the light on in her room. Mustn’t give herself away.

  Downstairs they were having dinner. Like a herd of reindeer, grazing. Unaware that the wolf pack is getting closer, blocking off their escape routes.

  Pitch-black night outside. No moon. It made virtually no difference whether she closed her eyes or opened them. A small amount of light from the lamp on the wall outside filtered into her room.

  The dead were approaching. Or was she approaching them? She recognized several of them. Relatives on her mother’s side whom she’d never met.

  Inna too. Not as far away as you might think. Maybe she was worried about her brother. But there wasn’t much Ester could do about that. She had her own brother to think about.

  It wasn’t too long since Inna had sat here in Ester’s room. The swelling on her face had begun to subside. The bruises had changed color, from red and blue to green and yellow.

  “Aren’t you going to get out your palette and paint me?” she’d asked. “I’m so colorful at the moment, after all.”

  She’d changed recently. Stayed at home at the weekends. Wasn’t as cheerful as she had been. Sometimes she’d come up and sit with Ester for a while.

  “I don’t know,” she’d said. “I just feel so tired of everything. Tired and depressed.”

  Ester had liked her like that. Depressed.

  Why should a person always be happy? she’d wanted to ask Inna.

  These people. Happy and easygoing, lots of friends. That was the most important thing of all.

  But still. Inna made that demand only of herself. Not of Ester.

  In that way Inna was like Ester’s mother.

  They both let me be who I am, she thought. Mother. She promised the teachers in school that she’d tell me to try harder. Try to learn math and writing. “And she’s so quiet,” the teachers said. “She hasn’t got any friends.”

  As if it were some kind of illness.

  But my mother let me be. Let me draw. Never asked if I had a friend I’d like to invite home. Being alone was something completely natural.

  At art school it wasn’t the same. You had to pretend you weren’t alone. So that the others wouldn’t have to feel worried and weighed down by guilt.

  Ester starts at the Idun Lovén Art School in Stockholm. Gunilla Petrini has a friend whose apartment in Östermalm is being renovated, and so the owners are spending the winter in Brittany. Little Ester can have one of the rooms, that’s absolutely fine. The men working on the apartment arrive early in the morning and have finished for the day by the time Ester gets home.

  Ester is used to being alone. She had no best friends in school. She has spent the whole of her fifteen years of life living on the fringes, sitting alone on school outings and munching her sandwich. She stopped hoping somebody would come and sit beside her on the bus at a very early stage.

  So of course it’s her own fault. She’s not used to making contact with people. Besides which, she’s convinced she’d be rejected if she tried. Ester sits on her own during break times. She doesn’t initiate any conversations. The other students are very much aware of the age difference, and make the excuse to themselves that Ester must have friends of her own age to hang out with in her free time. Ester wakes up alone. Gets dressed and eats her breakfast alone. On the way out, she sometimes meets the men who are renovating the apartment, dressed in their blue overalls. They nod or say hi, but there’s a million miles between them.

  She isn’t particularly bothered by the fact that she’s an outsider at college. She paints models and learns by watching the older students on her course. When the others go out for a coffee, she often stays behind in the studio, walks round and takes a look. Tries to work out how this one got the lines to look so light, how that one found those colors.

  When she doesn’t have classes in life drawing, she goes for walks. And it’s easy to be alone in Stockholm. Nobody can tell by looking at her that she’s an outsider. It isn’t like Kiruna, where everybody knows who you are. There are lots of people walking here, all on the way to different places. It gives her a sense of liberation, to be one of the crowd.

  In Östermalm there are old ladies who wear hats! They’re even more entertaining than dogs. On Saturday mornings Ester pursues them with her sketch pad. She draws them in rapid lines, their frail bodies in thick nylon stockings and good coats. When it goes dark, they disappear from the streets like frightened rabbits.

  Ester goes home and eats sandwiches and yogurt for dinner. Then she goes out again. The autumn evenings are still warm and black as velvet. She walks over the city’s bridges.

  One evening she is standing on Västerbron, looking down at a trailer park. A week later she comes back and watches a family who live there. The father is sitting on a camping stool, smoking. The family has hung up their washing between the trailers. The children are kicking a ball around. They are shouting to one another in a foreign language.

  Ester catches herself longing to be part of them. That family down there that she doesn’t even know. She could look after their children. Fold their washing. Travel down through Europe with them.

  She tries calling home, but the conversation is hard work. Antte asks what it’s like in Stockholm. She can hear from his voice that she’s already turned into a stranger. She’d like to tell him that Stockholm’s not so bad. That the autumn is beautiful here, with the deciduous trees like friendly giants against the clear blue sky. Their yellow leaves, as big as Ester’s hand, rustle dryly through the streets in flocks. And there’s a little flower stall close to where she lives; she can stand there and watch. But she knows he doesn’t want to hear any of that.

  And her mother seems to be so busy all the time. Ester can’t work out what she can talk about so it won’t feel as if her mother’s about to hang up all the time.

  And so the winter comes. Wind and rain in Stockholm. The old ladies are hardly to be seen now. Ester paints a series of landscapes. Mountains and rocks. Different seasons, different kinds of light. Gunilla Petrini takes some of them home to show her friends.

  “They’re terribly desolate,” says one of them.

  Gunilla Petrini has to agree.

  “Her drawings are very different. But she’s not afraid of desolation. She really is comfortable with the realization that man is very small in relation to the world and to nature, don’t you agree? She’s like that as a person, too.”

  She shows them some of the drawings. They comment on what a driven artist sh
e is. And how many artists can one say that about these days? It’s as if Ester has been brought here in a time machine. They can see something of Gustaf Fjæstad’s reflections in the water, Bror Lindh’s wintry forests. And then they come back to the topic of desolation in her paintings of nature once again.

  “She doesn’t have a problem with being alone,” says Gunilla Petrini.

  “That’s a good quality for an artist to have,” someone says.

  They talk about her background. About the mentally ill woman who had a child by another patient. An Indian. About the little girl with the Indian appearance who has grown up with a Sami family.

  One of the older men looks at the pictures, pushing his glasses up and down his nose. He owns a gallery in the Söder district of the city, and is well known for buying artists’ work before they break through. He owns several pieces by Ola Billgren, and bought Karin Mamma Andersson early on. He has a ridiculously large Gerhard Richter on the wall at home. Gunilla Petrini had something in mind when she invited him this evening. She tops up his glass.

  “The lines of her mountains are interesting,” he says. “There’s always a gap, or a crack or a valley or a crevice in the landscape. Can you see? Here. And here.”

  “Another world behind this one,” someone says.

  “Narnia, perhaps,” someone jokes.

  And so it’s decided. Ester is to have her own exhibition at the gallery. Gunilla Petrini wants to jump up and down for joy. It will attract attention. Ester’s age. Her background.

  Rebecka drove Alf Björnfot home to his crash pad on Köpmangatan. There was no point in going to bed, he wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep yet. Besides which, he felt a little too upbeat to sleep. The visit to Rebecka Martinsson’s neighbor had been very pleasant. He felt a strong sense of kinship with Sivving Fjällborg, who had chosen to move down into his boiler room.

  That was why he felt so at home in his crash pad in Kiruna; he had what he needed, and no more. There was a sense of tranquility in that. Things were different in the apartment in Luleå.

  His skis were propped up against the wall in the hallway. He might just as well see to them now, then he’d be ready to go in the morning. He laid them over the backs of two chairs with the runners uppermost, placed toilet paper over the fastenings and poured on the wax, waited three minutes and then wiped it off.

  He managed to wax his skis, sort the pile of washing that was lying on the sofa and get the washing-up done before the telephone rang.

  It was Rebecka Martinsson.

  “I’ve been looking at Kallis Mining’s sales over the past few months,” she said.

  “Are you working?” asked Alf Björnfot. “Haven’t you got a cat you’re supposed to be looking after?”

  Rebecka ignored his question and went on:

  “Within a very short time they’ve sold a whole load of minority holdings in different projects around the world. And in Colorado the prosecution service has started a preliminary investigation into a subsidiary company of Kallis Mining with regard to serious financial irregularities. The subsidiary company has bought assets to the value of five million dollars. The prosecutor is of the opinion that this is a fictitious transaction, and the payment couldn’t be traced to the alleged vendor in Indonesia, but to a bank in Andorra.”

  “Oh yes?” said Alf Björnfot.

  He had the feeling that Rebecka was expecting him to draw some kind of conclusion from what she’d just said. But he hadn’t a clue as to what it might be.

  “It seems as if Kallis Mining needs to get its hands on some cash. But they don’t want to draw attention when they release capital. That’s why they’re selling minor holdings in different parts of the world. And they seem to have emptied the Colorado company of money. And they’re moving money to a bank in Andorra, which has a very strong code of confidentiality in banking. So what I’m wondering is this: why does Kallis Mining need to release money? And why are they transferring it to a bank in Andorra?”

  “Well, why?”

  “Last summer, three engineers were killed by a militia group when they were on their way from a mine belonging to Kallis Mining in northern Uganda. Immediately afterwards, Kallis Mining shut down all activity in the area; there was just too much unrest. Then things just got worse, and the mine fell into the hands of various groups who fought over it. The same thing has happened to all the other mines in the northern part of the country. But in January the situation was stabilized, to a certain extent. General Kadaga has taken control of most of the mining areas in the North. Joseph Kony and the LRA have retreated up to the southern parts of the Sudan. Other groups have withdrawn into the Congo and are still fighting among themselves there.”

  Alf Björnfot could hear Rebecka leafing through some papers.

  “And this,” she said, “is the really interesting part. For a long time there has been antagonism between the president and General Kadaga. A year ago, he was dismissed from the army. He’s kept away from Kampala for fear that the president will have him arrested and brought to trial for some alleged crime. The president wants to get rid of him. Kadaga has managed as well as he could with a dwindling group of men. But now his private army has grown, and they’ve even managed to take over large areas in the North. And there’s a report in New Vision saying that President Museveni is accusing a Dutch businessman of supporting Kadaga financially. The businessman is called Gerhart Sneyers, and he owns one of the mines in Uganda that was forced to shut down. These accusations are rejected by Sneyers, of course. He dismisses them as groundless rumors.”

  “Oh yes?” said Alf Björnfot again.

  “This is what I’m thinking. I think that Mauri Kallis and Gerhart Sneyers, and maybe other overseas businessmen, are supporting Kadaga. Many people are in the process of losing their assets in the area. That’s why they’re releasing capital as discreetly as possible. They’re financing his military operations, and in return he promises to leave their mines alone. Perhaps they’re hoping they might be able to start up again if the situation stabilizes. And if a bank in Andorra is paying out money to commanders-in-chief, the payer’s identity is protected by their code of conduct.”

  “Is it possible to prove any of this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, well, for the time being we’ve got Diddi Wattrang on suspicion of insider dealing. We’ll start there,” Alf Björnfot stated firmly.

  Mauri Kallis’s dinner guests arrived just after eight on Friday evening. Cars with blacked-out windows drove along the avenue up to the estate. Mikael Wiik’s security staff met them down by the gates.

  Up at the house, Mauri Kallis, his wife, Ebba, and Ulrika Wattrang received their guests: Gerhart Sneyers, mine owner and oil company owner, and chairman of the African Mining Trust; Heinrich Koch, vice president of Gems and Minerals Ltd.; Paul Lasker and Viktor Innitzer, both of whom owned mines in northern Uganda; and former general Helmuth Stieff. Gerhart Sneyers had heard about Inna Wattrang, and offered his condolences.

  “Some madman,” said Mauri Kallis. “It still seems unreal. She was a loyal colleague and a good friend of the family.”

  Between handshakes he asked Ulrika, “Is Diddi coming to dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ulrika, fixing Viktor Innitzer a drink. “I just don’t know.”

  I’m not a drug addict. This was something Diddi Wattrang had said to himself with increasing frequency over the past six months. Drug addicts inject themselves, and he was no drug addict.

  Last Monday Mikael Wiik had dropped him off at Stureplan. He’d gone on a bender that had lasted from Monday through to Thursday night, when he’d come home in a cab. Now he’d woken up in the darkness, his hair drenched in sweat. It wasn’t until he’d managed to switch on the bedside light that he realized he was at home at Regla. The past days and nights lay behind him like fragments of memory. Snapshots without any intrinsic order. A girl, laughing loudly in a bar. Some guys he’d started chatting to; he’d gone to a party with them.
His face in a bathroom mirror, Inna inside his head at that exact moment, he’s standing in there wetting a piece of toilet paper, pouring amphetamine onto it, screwing it up into a ball and swallowing it. A steaming dance floor in some warehouse. Hundreds of hands in the air. He wakes up on the living room floor of the company’s crash pad in Stockholm. Four people are sitting on the sofa. He’s never seen them before. Doesn’t have a clue who they are.

  Then he must have sorted out a taxi. He seems to remember Ulrika helping him out of the taxi; she was crying. But that might have been some other time.

  He was no drug addict. But anybody who’d seen him right now, searching through the medicine cabinet, might have thought differently. He threw Alvedon and plasters and thermometers and Nezeril and a thousand other things on the floor as he hunted for tranquilizers. He searched through his drawers, and he looked behind a desk down in the cellar, but this time Ulrika had managed to find the lot.

  There had to be something. If not tranquilizers, then coke. If not coke, then speed. He’d never been much of a one for hallucinogenic drugs, but right now he could imagine smoking some grass or dropping some E. Something. Anything that could make this black thing inside him stop crawling and writhing.

  Down in the kitchen he found a bottle of cough medicine in the refrigerator.

  He gulped it down. And then there was someone standing behind him. The nanny.

  “Where’s Ulrika?” he asked.

  She replied, unable to take her eyes off the medicine bottle in his hand.

  The dinner. Oh my God. Mauri’s dinner.

  “What do you actually think of Mauri Kallis?” he asked her. And when she didn’t reply, he said with exaggerated clarity, “What do you really think?”

  And he squeezed her shoulder as if to squeeze an answer out of her.

  “Let go of me,” she said in an unusually firm voice. “Let go. You’re frightening me and I don’t like it.”