The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  Inside the store the smell of newly baked Danish and grilled sausages suddenly hits her. Her stomach contracts so violently that it hurts. She feels dizzy again, grabs hold of the edge of a shelf, but it’s only the plastic strip they fasten the prices and the names of the items to, and she falls to the floor with the strip in her hand.

  Another customer, a man who was standing over by the chilled-goods counter, quickly puts down his basket and hurries over to her.

  “Hey, what happened to you, kid?” he asks.

  He’s older than her mother and father, but not old. His eyes are concerned, and he’s wearing a blue woolly hat. For a moment she’s almost in his arms as he helps her to her feet.

  “Here, sit down. Can I get you anything?”

  She nods and he comes back with coffee and a freshly baked Danish.

  “Hey.” He laughs as she bolts it down, drinking the coffee in great gulps although it’s really hot.

  She realizes she ought to pay, but then thinks that maybe she hasn’t got any money with her. How could she leave home without thinking about that? She searches through her coat pockets and there’s the money from her father. A roll of twenty 500-kronor notes, held together with a rubber band.

  She pulls it out.

  “Jesus,” says the man. “I’ll stand you the coffee and the cake, but just use one of those at a time.” He removes one of the notes from the bundle and places it in her hand. He pushes the rest of the money back into her pocket and zips it up carefully, as if she were a very small child. Then he looks at the clock.

  “Will you be okay now?” he asks her.

  Ester nods. The man leaves, and Ester buys fifteen Danish pastries and some coffee to take back to her room on Jungfrugatan.

  The following day she goes back to the 7-Eleven at the same time to buy more pastries. But the man isn’t there. He doesn’t come the following day either. Nor the day after that. She goes back, hoping, four days in a row, then she stops going there.

  She carries on sleeping through the days. It’s hard when she’s awake. She thinks about her mother. About the fact that she no longer belongs to anyone, or anywhere. She wonders if they’ve emptied the house in Rensjön yet.

  Her aunt rings once on her cell phone.

  “How’s things?”

  “Fine,” replies Ester. “What about you?”

  Just as she’s asking, she sees that her aunt takes the opportunity to cry when Jan-Åke is out playing golf.

  It’s so strange, thinks Ester. All of us who miss her so. How did we end up being so lonely in our sorrow?

  “Fine,” says her aunt. “And of course Lars-Tomas hasn’t called.”

  No, her father hasn’t called. Ester wonders whether her father and Antte can talk to each other. No. Antte has been silenced by Father’s “You have to look to the future” and “It’ll all work out somehow.”

  One morning she wakes up, and as she’s walking through the hallway to the kitchen to make some tea, she bumps into one of the workmen. He’s wearing blue overalls and a thick jacket. “Hey there,” he says. “You scare easily! I’m just here to pick up a few things. Plenty of snow out there.”

  Ester looks at him in surprise. Has it snowed?

  “There must be at least a meter,” he says. “Look out the window and you’ll see. We should have been back at work here today, but nobody can get through.”

  Ester looks out the window. It’s another world.

  Snow. It must have been snowing all night. Longer than that. She hadn’t noticed anything. The cars on the street are visible only as small snow-covered mounds. Deep snow on the road. The streetlamps are wearing thick white winter hats.

  She totters out into the white world. A mother is toiling along in the middle of the street, pulling her child on a sledge. A man in a long, smart black coat is skiing in the center of the road. Ester has to smile; he’s somehow managing to hold his ski pole and his briefcase in the same hand. He smiles back. Everybody she meets is smiling. They shake their heads; it’s crazy, this much snow! Everybody seems to be taking it all very calmly. The city is so quiet. No cars can get through.

  There are little birds in the trees. Now there aren’t any cars, Ester can hear them. She’s only seen jackdaws and pigeons, magpies and crows before.

  It’s proper fresh snow, vahca in the Sami language. Loose, cold, fluffy right down to the bottom. Not the kind with that slushy watery mess underneath.

  She gets home an hour later. Her head full of snow pictures. Her grief has taken a step back.

  She needs a canvas. A really big one. And loads of white.

  Between the dining room and the old servant’s bedroom in the apartment, the workmen have taken down a wall. It’s lying there on the floor, more or less in one piece. Ester looks at it. It’s an old wall. Old walls are made of stretched fabric.

  Out in the hallway are several sacks of plaster, she knows that.

  It’s as if she catches fire. She becomes manic with the desire to do something, finds a plastic bucket and drags in one of the sacks of plaster. It’s heavy, she’s sweating.

  She trickles the plaster through her fingers and stirs it with her arms; she’s white right up to her elbows.

  But if her body is in a fever, her head is full of ice-cold snow. Snow. And a wind cutting across the mountains. The light is misty gray, lacking in color. You might be able to see a few spindly birch branches over to the right, down by the edge. In the center of the picture lie an elk cow and her calf. They’ve slept in a hollow and the snow has covered them during the night. The fresh, deep snow insulates them from the cold.

  Ester pours the plaster carefully over the big wall. She spreads it with her hands. She works in shifts, the picture is so big. The plaster sets, but before it’s finished setting it becomes creamy, and you can draw in it. She draws with her fingers, using bits of debris and dust from the renovations to get some structure, tearing leftover wallpaper into strips to form the branches of the trees in the foreground.

  It takes several days to complete the picture. Ester works hard. When the plaster has set, she hunts through the apartment for a base coat. The painters have put undercoat on the ceiling in the bedroom, and the paint is still there. It’s perfect. Once she’s done the base coat, she can add pigment without the plaster cracking. She takes her mother’s colors out of her rucksack and paints in several layers; the first layers thin, thin, lots of turpentine and just a little pigment from the tube. No oil, she doesn’t want it to be shiny. Matte, cold, blue. And the shadow in the hollow: yellow, brown, umber. She wants to show they’re happy there, beneath the snow together.

  She adds thicker layers of color, less turpentine. She has to wait for it to dry. She sleeps in her clothes, wakes up and adds more layers of color. It feels as if the painting wakes her up when it’s ready for a new layer. She walks around it, munching whatever she can find in the kitchen. Drinks tea. She feels she can’t go out. Because out there the weather has changed and it’s turned mild, everything has melted away. She mustn’t see that. She’s living in a world of snow. In her big white picture.

  But one day it isn’t the picture that wakes her, but Gunilla Petrini.

  Term has started. The principal of the Idun Lovén Art School has called Gunilla and asked about Ester. Gunilla Petrini has called Ester’s aunt. She’s called Ester too, but Ester’s cell phone needs recharging. Her aunt and Gunilla have become very concerned. Gunilla Petrini has called her good friends in whose apartment Ester has a room. The friends have given Gunilla the name of the builder who’s responsible for the renovations, and he’s come along to unlock the apartment. He’s standing in the doorway as Gunilla Petrini sinks down onto Ester’s bed, greatly relieved.

  God, they’ve been so worried. They thought something had happened to her.

  Ester remains lying on the bed. She doesn’t sit up straightaway. As soon as Gunilla Petrini woke her up, the real world came back. She doesn’t want to get up. She hasn’t the strength to get up and gri
eve for her mother.

  “I thought you were with your family,” says Gunilla Petrini. “What have you been doing here?”

  “I’ve been painting,” says Ester.

  And as she speaks she knows this is her last picture. She won’t paint anymore.

  Gunilla Petrini wants to see, so Ester gets up and they go into the dining room. The builder comes along too.

  Ester looks at the picture and thinks with relief that it’s actually finished. She didn’t know that, but she can see it now.

  At first Gunilla Petrini doesn’t say a word. She walks around the enormous picture, lying there on the floor. Then she turns to Ester. Her expression is questioning, searching, strange.

  “A portrait of you and your mother,” she says.

  Ester is incapable of replying. She carefully avoids looking at the picture.

  “Nice,” says the builder with feeling. “A bit on the big side, maybe.”

  He looks at the doorway and then at the window in despair, shaking his head anxiously.

  “I want it out,” says Gunilla Petrini with the voice of total authority. “I want it out in one piece. You can pull down walls if necessary.”

  Where am I going to go? thinks Ester.

  The realization that she will never paint again crashes down inside her like a heavy anchor.

  No painting. No going back to art school.

  Anna-Maria Mella and Sven-Erik were sitting in the Vanadis Hotel chatting. The room was traditionally decorated, with a fitted carpet and a flowery bedspread made of some synthetic material.

  “Tomorrow we’ll talk to Inna Wattrang’s parents,” said Anna-Maria. “And we’ll try Diddi Wattrang again. I do wonder what happened at the cottage in Abisko. There’s just so much that’s odd about it all. Why was she wearing such fancy lingerie under her sports gear, for example?”

  Inna Wattrang is burrowing in her suitcase. It’s the fourteenth of March. She spoke to Mauri on the telephone last night, but she hasn’t the strength to think about that right now.

  In two hours and five minutes she will be dead.

  There are other jobs, she thinks.

  And she thinks about Diddi. She has to get hold of him. She’ll talk to Ulrika.

  I’m going to stop closing my eyes to things, she thinks.

  She’s going to take a month’s sabbatical, starting next week, and she’s going to start doing some exercise. She’s packed some sports gear, but as she rummages through her case now, she realizes she’s forgotten to pack any sports underwear. It doesn’t matter. She can go for a run in what she’s wearing, then rinse them through later.

  She puts her sneakers on.

  She runs along the snowmobile tracks out on Torneträsk. People are lying outside their arks, fishing through holes in the ice. Or sitting on reindeer skins on the sledges behind their snowmobiles, their faces turned up to the sun. The sun is hot, and she’s sweating. But she feels strong. The disappointment over Mauri drains away from her.

  It’s beautiful, she thinks. There is actually life outside Kallis Mining.

  The mountain on the other side of the lake glows pink in the afternoon sun. Blue shadows in the ravines and precipices. A few scraps of cloud cling to the mountaintops, they look like little woolly hats.

  It’ll be okay, she thinks.

  When she gets back the sun is setting. It almost looks as if there’s a hole in it, and its glowing insides are pouring down over the sky toward the horizon. She’s so preoccupied with looking at the sun that she doesn’t notice the man standing outside the house until she’s in the yard.

  Suddenly he’s there. He’s wearing a light, thin coat.

  “Excuse me,” he says, and explains that his car has broken down up by the road, and that his cell phone has no reception.

  Could he borrow hers?

  She knows he’s lying. She realizes it straightaway. She can tell he’s dangerous.

  It’s that deep suntan and the coat that’s way too thin. It’s that grimace that’s supposed to represent a smile beneath the lifeless eyes. And it’s the way he’s getting closer to her all the time he’s talking.

  She doesn’t have time to do anything. He sees the key in her hand. He’s already reached her. He hasn’t even finished speaking. It happens so quickly.

  The man’s name is Morgan Douglas. On the passport in his inside pocket it says John McNamara.

  Morgan Douglas was woken by the sound of his cell phone on the night of March 13. The telephone’s ring tone, the click of the bedside light, the familiar skittering across the floor as the cockroaches scuttled away from the light, the girl beside him mumbling something inaudible, flinging her arm across her eyes and going back to sleep, and then a voice on the telephone that he recognized.

  The woman greets him politely and apologizes for disturbing him at this hour. And she quickly gets to the point.

  “There’s a job that needs taking care of now. Northern Sweden.”

  He’s so bloody pleased to hear her voice, he makes a real effort to speak slowly when he replies so that he won’t seem so desperate. But he’s been short of money for a long time now, he’s had the odd little job, collecting debts and so on. But any black can do that kind of job, there’s no real money to be made there. But this will pay well. He’ll be able to live well for quite a while, move out of this place and find something better.

  “Payment as usual into your account once the job is done. A map, information, photo and travel expenses of five thousand euros are at the Coffee House at Schiphol. Ask for Johanna and say hello from—”

  “No,” he says. “I want all that at N’Djili Airport. How do I know this isn’t some kind of bluff?”

  She falls silent. It doesn’t matter. Let her think he’s paranoid. The truth is he can’t afford the ticket from Kinshasa to Amsterdam, but he has no intention of admitting that.

  “No problem, sir,” she says after just a second or two. “We’ll arrange all that according to your wishes.”

  She ends the conversation by passing on greetings from the major. He likes that. She speaks to him with respect. These people know what it means, the fact that he was a paratrooper in the British Army. There are so many people who don’t understand a damned thing. Who’ve never been there.

  Morgan Douglas gets dressed and shaves. The bathroom mirror is mottled with age; soon it will be impossible to see a reflection at all. The water comes spluttering out of the tap, the pipes banging, and to begin with it’s a brownish color. One morning when he came in for a pee, there was an enormous rat. It turned round lazily and looked at him, then crawled under the bath, taking its time, and disappeared.

  When he’s ready he wakes up the girl, who’s still asleep.

  “You have to leave,” he says.

  She sits on the edge of the bed, still half asleep; he picks her clothes up off the floor and throws them at her. While she’s putting them on, she says:

  “My little brother. He must go to doctor. Sick. Very sick.”

  She’s lying, of course, but he doesn’t say anything. Gives her two dollars.

  “You have a little something for me, yes?” she says, looking longingly toward the chair where he had his glass pipe yesterday. He’s already wrapped it in a piece of cloth and pushed it underneath his clothes. He’ll have to take whatever he needs in his coat pockets and under his clothes. He can’t take the case, otherwise the guy on reception will make a huge fuss and insist he pay for the room, accusing him of trying to get out of paying, which is precisely what he intends to do. This place is crap, and they haven’t even cleaned the room during the weeks he’s been living here. They can forget any chance of being paid.

  “No, I haven’t got anything,” he says, pushing her out of the room.

  He shushes her as they go down the stairs. The porter is asleep behind the counter; presumably he has another day job. No sign of the night watchman. He’s probably asleep somewhere else.

  The fluorescent light is humming and flickering coldly.<
br />
  “I stay here,” whispers the girl. “Until tomorrow. It’s not safe on the streets, you know.”

  She points toward an armchair in the dreary lobby. It’s so scruffy the stuffing is poking out of the upholstery.

  Morgan Douglas shrugs his shoulders. If the guy on reception wakes up before her, he’ll take her money, but that’s not his problem.

  He takes a cab to the airport. After two hours a guy comes in who looks as if he works for the diplomatic service. There aren’t many people in the waiting area. The suit comes straight over to him and asks if they have a mutual acquaintance.

  Morgan Douglas gives the required answer and the suit hands him a business-size envelope and turns to leave in one single movement.

  Morgan Douglas opens the envelope. All the information is there, and the advance payment is in dollars, not euros. Good. It’s an hour and a half before his plane leaves. And it’s a long journey.

  He has time to do a little shopping. Just so he can relax on the journey. So that he’ll be able to cope afterwards. No doubt he’s going to be on his feet and on the move for three full days. That’s what he’ll need to do the job.

  He takes another taxi out to one of the suburbs. It’s still dark when he gets to his dealer. Who doesn’t even have time to say “No credit” before Morgan Douglas manages to slip some unfolded dollar bills through the doorway.

  And when morning comes and the air is rippling like hot glass, Morgan Douglas is sitting on the plane to Amsterdam. Speedballing. No tension. Calm happiness, that’s all. He feels so bloody good.

  In Amsterdam he buys two bottles of Smirnoff and drinks one on the plane to Stockholm. When everybody else stands up, he stands up too.

  Then he’s somewhere else. Lots of people going past, this way and that. Somebody takes his arm.

  “Mr. John McNamara? Mr. John McNamara?”

  It’s a flight attendant.

  “Boarding time, sir. The plane to Kiruna is ready for takeoff.”