Breathless (3 page)

He knows all about beasts of prey, I thought, as I watched him dry his mouth and sit down again. I realized that he was the one who had started the fire. I didn't understand why. Sitting on the burned-out field on the lookout for signs that it was starting up again, I was suddenly aware that he hoped it would.

The sandy field, the heat under the soles of our feet, the smell of burned flesh when we ran. If the fire hadn't started, I would never have encountered him. When I returned home that morning I knew hardly any more about him than before we had met. Not much was said during the night, but the fire had burned all the way between our two houses, and that had altered everything.

At home in the dawn, blue with cold and altered, everyone still asleep. I slowly washed my hands with Grandmother's lily-of-the-valley soap; the rest of me was so black I would probably never be clean again. Creeping down into the bed between Mama and Aunt Marina, I tried to steal some of their warmth under the blanket without waking them with my ice-cold hands and knees. I wanted to face both of them, couldn't choose, and lay on my back instead. Mama's sleep was troubled, and she tossed her head back and forth so that her long hair became more and more tangled on the pillow.

When the family assembled on the veranda for a very late and silent breakfast, I behaved as if nothing had happened. Papa's hands were wrapped in clean new bandages. He fumbled and grimaced and swore as his mother and Mama's sisters had to help him with his coffee and porridge. He looked as though he enjoyed being waited on from two sides, his father teased. No one else said anything, the subject of the fire having been exhausted long before. All that remained was to eat in silence and then to go down and gawk at the devastation.

I couldn't tell them that I had met someone who had offered me cigarettes, and had seen the sun rise from another world on the other side of the field. I was hurt that no one had even noticed my absence. But belonging to everyone in a way meant belonging to no one—at night I often wandered around between the beds and any one of them could have thought that I was sleeping with one of the others.

—

Just as the guilty return to the scene of the crime, all the villagers returned to the burned-out field. Perhaps it had all been a nightmare, but no, it looked as though war had rampaged along the field of barley and the railway line. The wind had died down and the sour smell of smoldering vegetation hung stubbornly over the black landscape. No one spoke, as there was nothing to add, except possibly a cautious word of thanks directed obliquely upward, that at least the fire had been halted before it reached the houses.

The boy who had said he was called Lukas was there as well. He stood slightly aside and hung on his rusty bicycle, with a look I didn't really comprehend. I glanced back, but didn't go up to him, stayed with Papa's brothers and counted charred electricity poles along the embankment. Growing up, I could see, meant not saying all you knew.

The rain finally came, a day too late. A grime over everything that had burned. The impression that something had threatened the village gave a feeling of solidarity in misfortune, even if it didn't last.

W
e lived at the edge of the village in a district with no name, where beauty and wilderness began. The sloping fields of grain and the sky, the forest of bats and the power station. And the lake that wasn't a lake, just as our village wasn't a proper village in that it didn't have its own name. It was an unwanted growth or maybe a free zone with its own laws, or lawless, depending on your point of view. We lived at the place where three silver trails ran together—the river, the railway, the highway—where the world began or ended. That also depended on your point of view. Lately I have started to think that nearly everything depends on your point of view.

—

The secret about him I had to keep better than any secret I had kept before. I had never learned the secret about secrets, apart from what I hid under Mama's wardrobe where she never vacuumed: a worn-out hunting knife, a bottle of Paco Rabanne, the steel guitar strings I couldn't resist unscrewing from Rikard's guitars, a porn magazine with pressed butterfly wings and chewing gum wrappers. And now the cigarette as a relic among the others in the dust.

Until now I had been able to go from one to another of the family's thirteen adults and pour out everything I wanted to without anyone tiring of me. Now I had fallen through the rabbit hole into a world I couldn't speak about. Lukas had said that that night was a baptism of fire. I didn't know what this meant, but he said it as though I would clearly understand. How he said it was all that mattered.

—

A few days after the fire, I walked down the gravel track to his house by the lake. Through the trees, with leaves as dry as sloughed snakeskin, I caught a glimpse of him with someone I assumed to be his papa. He was at the top of the roof, his papa down below on the step, appearing to give his son an order, though I didn't hear what. I went closer, accustomed to bringing a smile to the faces of adults. The indifference in the man's eyes when he turned made me feel uneasy in the ensuing silence, a quiet so stark that I could hear the snakeskin leaves rustle. Lukas shot me a quick glance before he turned away. I spun around and walked up the hill toward home without looking back.

People around here are different, hard to make out, Mama's father used to claim. And that wasn't a good thing—to be different—it was preferable to be the same. Like us in our family. It was true that Lukas had said they weren't from around here either, but they were from another foreign place and differed in another way.

—

Boy's eyes, boy's hands, boy's smell. I wasn't afraid of him. The feeling was more like the one brought on at the lake. Bottomless. So swampy you never knew if there was something under your feet or not. Not exactly frightened but disturbed by the fact that from the very first day at school he stood in one corner of the enclosed yard and looked at me as if I had something he wanted. It was obvious he didn't intend to come up to me and take it, like the older boys, with a modicum of force. Not him. No threats from him—he just watched. As if he had all the time in the world to wait. His eyes were like suction cups—not moist and warm, but reserved and insistent. I kept far away from the spot he had earmarked for himself, but his gaze cut right through the schoolyard. He was alone like me. No, more alone, so alone that no one even quarreled with him. He didn't look as though he kept to the wall because he was afraid of ambush, just that he had laid claim to the patch and sat on the back of one of the benches looking at nothing in particular. Or at me.

—

A few weeks later, when he happened to be behind me in the lunch line, I noticed that he still smelled of smoke. It was hard to believe it could be from the railway fire, but I hadn't heard talk of any other since that one. Mama's mother had bathed me of it in heavy-handed fashion and then thrown out my clothes, so impossible was it to get rid of the smell of sulfur pervading them. But then, she often flung things out and bought new, in thrall to a phobia of everything that didn't smell immaculately clean. She used to scrub Grandfather Aron in a hot bath every afternoon when he came home from the leather factory. Clean clothes were lying ready for him on the bed, and then it was time for the afternoon shave, a custom that lived on from the past, from the north where he always had to have a protective layer of stubble when he went out into the harsh cold of the morning.

—

“You have a strange accent. Where do you come from?” Lukas had asked me toward the end of the night of the fire. He spoke a husky, soft, slow SkÃ¥ne dialect that poured like maple syrup in the darkness between us. Outside the family I had hardly met anyone before starting school, but I knew there was one world at home and another beyond. At the grocery Papa would pretend he understood, while mumbling to me that he didn't grasp a word of it and how long did you have to live here before you could understand this impossible language? Mama didn't pretend. She said “What?” after every sentence until they became irritated with her and thought she was making fun of them. I didn't understand everything either, but it wasn't me they were talking to, so it didn't matter.

“Ripberget,” I said. True, I had never lived there, but all the same that was where I came from, and my language too.

“Dialect,” the boy corrected me. “You don't speak a language, you speak a dialect.”

“Okay, but it's a different country anyway. Twelve hundred miles away,” I said, making a sweeping gesture somewhere toward the field.

“Me too. Twelve hundred miles. But that way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction.

Snow patches, wind-exposed slopes, cloudberry ants, burned forest land, ore fields, bare mountain above the tree line, clearwater lakes. These I had heard about since the day I was born. “Clearwater lakes, if only I could describe them to you, but you can hear in the words how pretty they are, Lo?” When I closed my eyes on Papa's knee I saw them quite distinctly, one lake behind each eyelid, as clear as crystal.

“Grilled whitefish,” Mama said. “Over an open fire down by the water. Better than anything you can ever dream of if you've never tasted it.” If I really concentrated hard I could taste the sooty flavor.

“In summer you can sometimes see bears roaming around in the big expanse,” said Papa's eldest brother. “Most often alone. Bears are solitary creatures.”

“Soli-what?”

“Lone wolves,” Mama explained. “Like your grandfather.” I opened both my eyes.

“Is that why he's called—”

“No, no, your papa's father got his name because his father was killed by a she-bear just before he was born,” Papa's mother said.

“And bog myrtle vodka,” Mama's mother interrupted, and blew her nose into the tissue she always had up the sleeve of her cardigan. “Bog myrtle vodka and bleak fish under the birch tree by the river,” she went on. “That's my dearest memory from home.”

She pointed to the silver birch casket where she kept this memory. I opened the lid.

“But it's empty.”

“I know,” she said, nodding, and did not care to explain further. It was typical of her to say strange things that you had to try to understand as best you could.

“The cabinet's empty, the emperor's naked, and all of you are homesick!” Papa's father's voice was heard suddenly from the hammock. We had hoped that he was asleep, but he never slept. And he hated nostalgia. Ripberget and Laxberget were just romanticized translations of Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara, as they said at home. Homesickness, as persistent as piles—he blamed all on that. It was one thing to move house, Papa's mother objected, but to move your roots was quite another.

“The dark, the cold, the unemployment, the mosquitoes? Is all that to be forgotten now?” Grandfather asked. A feeling of disquiet spread around the table on the veranda. Papa stood up and left, and his brothers contented themselves with staring at their plates. Grandfather pierced me with his eye over the edge of the hammock. “Don't listen to them, Lo, it's pure hogwash, we come from a land where no one can stand still. You get eaten alive. Swarms of mosquitoes suck your blood until you lose your reason, if you ever had any. As long as you keep moving you can survive, but any man who has to stop to eat, have a pee, sleep . . . God help him. Set birch bark alight in a tin bucket and lay it in the grass, that's the only thing that helps. And not even the thickest grass smoke works on those bloodsucking monsters. No place for sensitive folks, Lo, no place for the likes of you and me.”

I didn't know who to believe, if the Promised Land were here or there or somewhere else entirely. According to Papa's father it was here, in the warm south, in the land of rich earth and short winters. He was never heard to say he wished he were back there, like the others. I was happy too, but that, Papa assured me, was because I had never seen anything else.

It couldn't only have been the never-ending winter darkness or the unemployment or even the mosquitoes that had made them move. There must have been something more. Perhaps the girl whose name we couldn't mention, the youngest one who drowned. If her name couldn't even be mentioned, how could they continue to live in the place where it happened? To see that water each day and not know if it was a lake or a grave they saw. Everything must have lost its beauty after that, or at least have borne a bitter tinge, nature's cruel indifference.

—

After the fire, silence soon settled over our village once more. Everyone retreated to his own side of the overgrown hedges. It wasn't like at home, Papa's mother let it be known, where garden boundaries didn't exist and you went to see people when you felt like it, went in without knocking, helped yourself to something to eat, and lay down for a rest on the kitchen sofa while you waited for the owner's return. All my pictures of what the family called home had been painted by someone else. A ptarmigan is a bird that can be snared in the snow and eaten, with a wild and bluish taste—that I knew. But I didn't know what it looked like when it was flying or how the snare worked in reality, if they were caught by the neck or the foot and which was worse.

His dark eyes turn blue when it's cold. But I don't know that yet. The night of the fire was a state of emergency, and since then I have just seen him at a distance. The age difference should be enough to keep us apart. He is almost an adult, at least not a child, not in my eyes.

The very first afternoon that I'm going to walk home from school by myself, he coasts up beside me on his man's bicycle, slightly too large for him, so close that I think I can smell the smoke from the fire again. Instead of increasing my pace I slow down, walk so slowly that he finds it difficult to keep his balance on the bicycle.

I don't reply. He doesn't ask anything either.

I don't know where he wants to go, only that I shouldn't go with him.

I walk slower and slower until he wobbles right into me. The handlebars tilt straight against my face, the pain so sharp I can't even cry. I'm normally paralyzed at the sight of blood, but this time I just clench my teeth, struggle to my feet, and start to limp away. It's raining, and my shoelaces, my favorite skirt, and my minuscule ponytail are soon hanging down. I hear him come after me on his bicycle, which has a new squeak, and he says something about sorry and damn well didn't mean it and wait. When he catches up with me he takes hold of me around the waist and lifts me up roughly onto the crossbar.

“Hold on,” he says. As if I had any other choice. He has already started pedaling.

—

Your life flashes before your eyes when you die, Papa has said, though how should he know that? As we sway through the traffic at top speed, the voices of my family flood through my mind. The boy rides twice as fast and half as steadily as Mama does. I close my eyes and get ready to throw myself off, but I stop short at the last minute. At this speed . . . I would kill myself. After an eternity he brakes so hard that the gravel scatters. I want to look and yet don't want to see where he has brought me and what is going to happen there. Not until I hear a familiar dull chopping noise do I open my eyes.

I should just run in and not say that it was his fault, because then it would be too bad for . . . I can't hear if he says “you” or “me.” His voice is drowned out by another that is shouting my name. Mama with the ax. Striding through the grass and wearing an expression that warned she was expecting the worst.

“Is
she
your mom?” he says in a strangled voice and takes a step backward.

Did he really think he would be able to drop me off at my house unseen?

Mama stares at my bloodstained T-shirt, then at Lukas, and then back at the blood. Holds me so hard as if she believes she can stop the red that is oozing from my mouth in a copious mix with saliva. Papa's father has appeared behind her and examines my mouth decisively. Says that it's only a bite, admittedly right through the lip, but only a bite nevertheless, and a bite means that the teeth are fine. Children bleed a lot, they have to, he says, so it cleans the cut and prevents blood poisoning. Mama is not listening, just glowering darkly at Lukas as if she thinks it was he who bit me.