The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  She’s breathing heavily at the other end of the phone, and then it comes.

  “A while ago there was a journalist, Örjan Bylund, asking questions about Quebec Invest quitting Northern Explore. And about a few other things. He died right after that.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Don’t give me that! I thought at first it was Diddi, but he’s not smart enough. Just desperate enough for money to let himself be used, though. I’ve checked up on you, Mauri. It was easier for me than it was for the journalist. I’m part of the company, after all. You’ve emptied the company accounts, we’re talking huge amounts of money! A whole lot of the payment invoices taking the money out of the company are just so much thin air. The money’s disappearing into a protected account in Andorra. And guess what? At roughly the same time as you started emptying the company accounts, General Kadaga started to mobilize his forces. A number of gangs joined him, because suddenly there was financial support. Loyalty is just a matter of who’s paying. In newspaper articles that nobody outside Central Africa reads, it says that weapons are being smuggled across the borders to these groups! By plane! How can they afford that? And they’ve taken control of the mining complex in Kilembe. You paid them, Mauri. Paid Kadaga and the military leaders who’ve joined him. So they’ll protect your mine. So they won’t plunder it and destroy it. Who are you?”

  “I don’t know where you’ve got these ideas…”

  “Do you know what else I did? I met Gerhart Sneyers at the Indian Metal Conference in Mumbai. We had a few drinks one evening. And I asked him: ‘So, you and Mauri will soon be getting things going again in Uganda?’ Do you know what he said?”

  “No,” replies Mauri.

  He’s sat down on the bed next to the sleeping Diddi. The whole situation is unreal.

  This isn’t happening, he’s screaming inside.

  “He said…nothing! He said: ‘What has Mauri said to you?’ I was actually frightened of him. And for the first time he didn’t keep on about the fact that Museveni is a new Mobutu, a new Mugabe. In fact, he didn’t say a word about Uganda. I’ll tell you what I think. I think you and Sneyers are providing Kadaga with money and weapons, and I think you’re planning to get rid of Museveni. Am I right? If you lie to me I swear I’ll spill everything I know to some really hungry media group, and they can sort out the truth.”

  Fear sinks its teeth into Mauri as if it were an animal.

  He swallows. Takes a deep breath.

  “It’s company property,” he says. “I’m protecting it. You’re a lawyer, haven’t you heard of jus necessitatis, the right of necessity?”

  “Haven’t you heard of child soldiers? You’re giving those fucked-up lunatics money for drugs and guns. These people who are protecting your property for money, they kidnap children. Kill their parents in cold blood.”

  “If the civil war in the North never ends,” ventures Mauri, “if the unrest is just allowed to continue, then the population will never have peace. Generation after generation will end up as child soldiers. But now, at this precise moment, there’s the chance to bring it to an end. The president isn’t getting any aid, the World Bank has frozen everything. He’s in a weakened position. The army’s short of money. And the army is fragmented. Museveni’s brother is busy plundering mines in the Congo. With a different regime, perhaps the children of tomorrow can be farmers. Or miners.”

  Inna remains silent for a long time. When she does speak, she doesn’t sound angry anymore. Her voice is almost tender. It’s as if a couple, after all the arguments, finally decide to go their separate ways, and their thoughts turn from the current situation to the way things used to be. And it hasn’t all been bad.

  “Do you remember Pastor Kindu?” she asks.

  Mauri remembers. He was the pastor in the mining community near Kilembe. When the government started making life difficult, one of the first things that happened was that garbage collections stopped. They said it was a strike, but in fact it was because the military were threatening the garbage collectors. After only a week or so the whole place seemed to be lying beneath a blanket of the sickly stench of rotting garbage. They started to have problems with rats. Mauri, Diddi and Inna went over there. They didn’t realize this was only the beginning.

  “You and the pastor sorted out a fleet of trucks and took the garbage out of the town,” said Mauri, a sorrowful smile in his voice. “You stank when you got back. Diddi and I put you up against a wall and sluiced you down with a hosepipe. The cleaning women stood at the windows laughing.”

  “He’s dead. Those men you’re paying, they murdered him. Then they set fire to his body and dragged it along behind a car.”

  “Yes, but that kind of stuff has gone on all along! Don’t be so naive.”

  “Oh, Mauri…I really respected you.”

  He tries. To the very last, he tries to save her.

  “Come home,” he begs. “So we can talk.”

  “Home? Is that Regla? I have no intention of ever coming back there. Don’t you understand?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are. That journalist, Örjan Bylund…”

  “You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with that?”

  “You’re lying,” she says tiredly. “I did tell you not to lie.”

  He hears a distinct click as she puts the phone down. It sounded like…it sounded like an old-fashioned public telephone. Where the hell was she?

  He needs to think clearly. This could go really badly. If the truth comes out, then…

  A series of pictures in his head. He becomes persona non grata in the Western world. No investors want to be associated with him. Even worse pictures: investigations involving Interpol. He ends up facing an international tribunal accused of crimes against human rights.

  There’s no point in regretting things you’ve done in the past. The question is, what has to be done now?

  Where is she? A public telephone?

  When he thinks back to the conversation, he could actually hear something in the background…

  Dogs! A chorus of howling, singing, barking dogs. Sled dogs. A team of dogs, just before they set off.

  And then he knows exactly where she is. She’s gone to the company’s house in Abisko.

  He puts the telephone down carefully. He doesn’t want to wake Diddi. Then he picks it up again and wipes it with the sheet from Diddi’s bed.

  Ester pushed the empty macaroni pan under the bed. It could stay there. She put on the black clothes she wore for her mother’s funeral, a polo-neck sweater and a pair of trousers from Lindex.

  Her aunt would probably have preferred it if she’d worn a skirt, but couldn’t quite bring herself to mention it. Ester had been quieter than usual. And it wasn’t just grief. It was anger too. Her aunt had tried to explain:

  “She didn’t want us to say anything to you. She wanted you to paint for your exhibition. Not to be worrying about her. She wouldn’t let us say anything.”

  So they said nothing. Not until it was absolutely necessary.

  It is the private viewing of Ester’s exhibition. Lots of people drinking mulled wine and eating ginger biscuits. Ester doesn’t understand how they can actually see anything of the pictures, but perhaps that’s not the idea. She’s interviewed by two newspapers, and has her photograph taken.

  Gunilla Petrini introduces her to various important people. Ester is wearing a dress and feels odd. When her aunt turns up, she’s really pleased to see her.

  “This is amazing,” whispers her aunt, impressed by what she sees.

  She pulls a face when she discovers the mulled wine is alcohol-free.

  “Have you spoken to Mother?” asks Ester.

  And something shifts in her aunt’s face. A hesitation, or perhaps it’s the fact that she’s avoiding Ester’s eyes, that makes Ester ask:

  “What? What is it?”

  And she wants her aunt to say: nothing.

  But her aunt
says:

  “We need to talk.”

  And they go off to a corner of the room which is now full of people exchanging air kisses and handshakes and taking a quick glance at Ester’s pictures in between and it’s getting very loud and very warm and Ester is able to pick up only parts of what her aunt is saying.

  “You must have noticed that she’s started dropping things…and that she can’t manage to hold the brush…was letting you paint the backgrounds…didn’t want you to know, what with the exhibition and everything…a muscular disease…finally reached her lungs…won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

  And Ester wants to ask why, why nobody said anything. The exhibition! How can anybody think she cares about the damned exhibition?

  Mother dies the day after Christmas Day.

  Ester has said goodbye. She and her aunt have cleaned the house in Rensjön like mad things, visiting the hospital in Kiruna in between. Ester tries to find eatnan behind the stiff mask into which the illness has transformed her face. The muscles beneath the skin have stopped functioning.

  Her mother can talk, but it’s slurred and she tires quickly. She wants to know how the private viewing went.

  “They don’t understand a thing,” her aunt snaps.

  The exhibition attracted a few reviews. They weren’t good. Under the headline “Young, Young, Young” one reviewer wrote that Ester Kallis is certainly talented for her age, but that she has nothing to say. He is left completely unmoved by all her little nature pictures.

  They’re all the same. Ester Kallis is a child. What’s the point of the exhibition? One of the reviewers questions both the gallery owner and Gunilla Petrini. She writes that Ester Kallis is not the young genius they would like her to be, and that unfortunately it is Ester who has to pay the price for their desire to attract attention.

  Gunilla Petrini rang Ester the day the first review appeared.

  “Don’t take any notice of it,” she said. “The very fact that you’ve managed to get a review is good, lots of people never even get that. But we’ll talk about this again. Take care of your mother now. Give her my best.”

  “What about this?” says her aunt, quoting from one of the reviews. “It says here that Ester Kallis ‘grew up among the Sami.’ What do they mean by that? It’s a bit like Mowgli, growing up among the wolves, but he can’t become a wolf because of his race.”

  Her mother looks at Ester with her strange, expressionless face, making a huge effort to find the words.

  “It’s good,” she says sharply. “That you don’t have a Sami name, that you don’t look like a Sami. Do you understand? If they’d realized you were a Sami, none of them would have dared to criticize you. Your pictures would have been…”

  “…good, considering they were by a Lapp kid,” her aunt chips in.

  But her mother wants to explain more clearly:

  “…an expression of our exotic culture, not real art. You would never have been judged by the same criteria. It gives you a small advantage, perhaps, in the beginning. A little bit of free attention. But then you can’t get any further…”

  “…than Luleå,” says her aunt, rooting in her purse for her cigarettes; she’ll need to go out on the balcony for a smoke shortly.

  “Maybe they think they can’t judge our art properly. Maybe that’s why those who aren’t much good get the same acclaim as the best. And that’s fine for those who are mediocre, but you…”

  “…will compete with the best,” her aunt finishes off the sentence.

  “For me it’s been a cage. Nobody ever thought anything I did could be of interest to anybody apart from tourists or other Sami.”

  She looks at Ester. Ester can’t interpret her look.

  “There’s so much of our grandmother in you,” she says.

  “I know,” says her aunt. “Just like áhkku. I’ve always said that.”

  Behind her, Ester hears her aunt begin to cry.

  “Many times at home in Rensjön,” says her mother. “I remember watching you. The way you moved. How you were with the animals. I thought: my God, that’s just what my little granny used to do. But you never got to meet her.”

  Ester doesn’t know what to say. In her earliest memories, there were always two women in the kitchen. And the other one wasn’t her aunt, she knows that. Her aunt doesn’t wear a jorbot, the traditional cap that Sami women wear, nor does she have a flowery dress with buttons down the front, and an apron.

  Then her mother dies. Not immediately after that conversation, but a week later it’s over. And Father and Antte take her home. Now she’s dead, she belongs only to them. Antte’s mother, Father’s wife. Ester is not allowed to be present at the division of their property. Neither is her aunt.

  After the funeral her father and aunt have a quarrel. Ester can hear them through the door of the community center kitchen.

  “The house is too big for me and the boy,” says her father. “And what do I want with the studio?”

  He says he’s going to sell everything. The reindeer too. He has a friend who owns a holiday village outside Narvik. He and Antte can go in as part owners, and work there full-time as well.

  “But what about Ester?” hisses her aunt. “Where’s she supposed to go?”

  “She’s got her own arrangements,” her father defends himself. “She’s supposed to be going to that art school, isn’t she? What can I do? You’re not expecting me to move to Stockholm with her? And I can hardly hang on to all this just for her sake, can I? I was no older than her when I had to stand on my own two feet.”

  That evening at home in Rensjön, when they’re sitting in front of the television—her aunt, her father, Antte and Ester—he takes out his wallet, removes the rubber band around it and takes out twenty 500-kronor notes, which he gives to Ester.

  “You’d better look in the studio to see if there’s anything you want to take with you,” he says.

  He rolls up the notes and puts the rubber band around them.

  “Bloody hell,” says her aunt, getting up with such force that the coffee cups on the table rattle on their saucers. “Half of all this was hers. Ten thousand! Is that Ester’s rightful share, do you think?”

  Her father answers by remaining silent.

  Her aunt rushes into the kitchen and turns the taps full on to do the washing up, and Ester and her father and Antte can hear over the rushing water and the crashing of the dishes that she’s crying loudly.

  Ester looks at Antte; his face is chalk-white, blue in the glow of the television. She tries to hold back. She doesn’t want to know. But she’s floating up toward the ceiling in the glow of the television as if she were floating through blue water. And from up there she looks down on Antte and her father. It’s the same television, but a different room. Different furniture.

  It’s a small apartment. They’re slumped on a sofa, gazing at the TV. Antte is a few years older, and he’s got quite fat. Her father has acquired lines of bitterness around his mouth. Ester can see that he was hoping to meet someone new. That he thought he’d have a better chance working in a holiday village outside Narvik.

  No woman, thinks Ester. No holiday village, either.

  When Ester lands, she’s standing in the kitchen. Her aunt has stopped crying and is smoking underneath the extractor fan. She talks about how things are going to be for Ester, about how angry she is with Ester’s father. And then she talks about the new man in her life.

  “Jan-Åke has asked me to go with him to Spain. He plays golf in the winter. I can ask him if you can come with us, before term starts. I mean, the apartment isn’t very big, but we’ll manage somehow.”

  “There’s no need,” says Ester.

  Her aunt is relieved. Presumably the love between her and Jan-Åke isn’t the kind that can cope with a teenager.

  “Are you sure? I can ask.”

  Ester assures her that she’s quite certain. And her aunt keeps on about it until Ester is forced to lie and say she has friends in Stockholm, people wh
o are on the same course, that she can go and stay with.

  In the end, her aunt is satisfied.

  “I’ll call you,” she says.

  She exhales smoke and gazes out into the winter darkness.

  “This will be my last time in this house,” she says. “It’s hard to believe. Have you looked in the studio, decided what you want to take?”

  Ester shakes her head. The following day her aunt fills Ester’s suitcase with tubes of paint and brushes and good paper. Even clay, which weighs a ton.

  Ester and her aunt say goodbye at the central station. Her aunt has a ticket, and wants to celebrate New Year’s Eve with that guy, whatever his name was. Ester has forgotten already.

  Ester drags her suitcase, heavy as lead, back to her room on Jungfrugatan. The apartment is silent and empty. The builders have taken some time off over the holiday. It’s over three weeks until the new term begins. She doesn’t know anybody. She won’t see a soul until then.

  She sits down on a chair. She still hasn’t cried over her mother. But she would feel very insecure doing it here, in this situation. When she’s so totally alone. She simply daren’t do it.

  And so she sits there like that in the darkness. She doesn’t know how long for.

  Not just now, she says to herself. Some other time. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow it’s New Year’s Eve.

  A week passes. Sometimes Ester wakes up and it’s light outside. Sometimes she wakes up and it’s dark. Sometimes she gets up and puts some water on to make tea. Stands there looking into the pan as it boils. Sometimes she can’t bring herself to take the pan off the hotplate, just stands there watching it boil away. Then she has to start again with fresh water.

  One morning she wakes up feeling dizzy. Then she realizes it’s a long time since she had anything to eat.

  She wanders along to the 7-Eleven store. Going out is unpleasant. It feels as if people are looking at her. But she has to do it. The weather is gray. The tree trunks are damp and black. Wet gravel on the pavements. Disintegrating dog crap and garbage. The sky dense and close. Impossible to imagine that the sun is up there. That the top of the cloud cover is like a snowy landscape on an early spring day.