The Black Path (17 page)

Mauri Kallis was lying awake in his bedroom on the second floor. He didn’t want to look at the clock, because if it was quarter to six, he’d have to get up in quarter of an hour, which meant it was too late to go back to sleep. On the other hand, it might be an hour before it was time to get up. He looked at the clock; he always did in the end. Quarter past four. He’d slept for three hours.

He had to get more sleep, otherwise anybody could see the whole thing was going to go to hell any day now. He tried to breathe calmly, to relax. He turned his pillow over.

When he’d managed to lull himself into a kind of half sleep, the dream returned.

In the dream he was sitting on the edge of his bed. His room looked exactly as it did in reality. Sparsely furnished, with the slender desk inlaid with wood, and the beautifully worn Gustavian chair with upholstered arms. His purpose-built dressing room in walnut and frosted glass, where his suits and perfectly ironed shirts hung in rows, his handmade shoes in a special cupboard with cedarwood shoe trees. The walls painted with linseed oil paint, pale blue with the faintest of color variations; he had rejected borders and decorative paint effects when his wife was renovating the place.

But in the dream he could see Inna’s shadow on the wall. And when he turned his head, she was sitting on the window seat. Behind her there was no glittering Lake Mälaren. Instead he could see the outlines of Terrassen, the apartment block where he grew up, through the window.

She was scratching and tearing at the watery circular mark around her ankle. The flesh was catching under her nails.

He was wide awake again now. He could hear the beating of his own heart. Calm, calm. No, it was no good, he couldn’t stand it, he’d have to get up.

He put the light on, threw back the bedclothes as if they were an enemy, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up.

Don’t think about Inna. She’s gone. Regla’s still here. Ebba and the boys. Kallis Mining.

There was something wrong with him, of course. He tried to think about the boys, but it was no good. Their royal names sounded ridiculous and alien: Carl and Magnus.

When they were small they’d lain in their expensive prams. He’d always been away, traveling. Never missed them. Not that he could remember, in any case.

At that moment he heard a thud from the attic above. Then another thud.

Ester, he thought. She’s at it again with her weights.

God, it sounded as though the entire ceiling was about to come down on him.

It was Inna who brought Ester into their lives.

“You have a sister,” she says.

They’re sitting in the SAS lounge at Copenhagen airport, on the way to Vancouver. It looks like summer outside, but the wind is still cold. In a year she’ll be dead.

“I have three,” replies Mauri in a cool voice, indicating that this conversation does not interest him.

He doesn’t like thinking about them. The eldest sister was born when he was nine. She was one when she was taken into care. They took him a year later.

He tries not to think about the time when he was growing up in Terrassen, the tower block in Kiruna where social services had apartments for people who couldn’t get a rental agreement of their own. Harsh voices and the sound of quarreling and screaming penetrated constantly through the walls, and nobody ever rang the police. The graffiti in the stairwell was never washed off. A feeling of hopelessness clung to the whole place.

And there are thoughts he never, ever thinks. The memory of a child crying, standing up in her cot. Mauri, ten years old, picks up his jacket and slams the front door behind him. He just can’t listen to her any longer. Her voice penetrates through the closed door, follows him down the stairs. The sound of his footsteps bounces off the concrete walls of the stairwell. Their neighbor is playing Rod Stewart. A sweet, stale smell comes from the garbage chute. He hasn’t seen their mother for two days, but he just can’t look after the kid any longer. And they’ve run out of porridge.

His middle sister is fifteen years younger than him. She was born while Mauri was living with the foster family. Their mother was allowed to keep her for a year and a half, supported by social services. Then she got so bad she was taken into hospital, and the middle sister was taken into care as well.

Mauri met his elder sisters at their mother’s funeral. He flew up to Kiruna alone for the funeral, he didn’t allow Ebba and the boys to go with him. Inna and Diddi didn’t offer.

There was just Mauri and his two sisters, a priest and the consultant from the hospital.

Very appropriate weather, Mauri had thought as he stood by the coffin. The rain cascading down from the sky like gray chains. The water gouging into the ground, creating a delta of streams of water, carrying earth and gravel down into the grave. Like a weak brown soup down at the bottom of the hole. His sisters were freezing as they stood there soaked to the skin in their poor, hastily assembled funeral clothes. They had black skirts and blouses, but a coat was too big an investment; one of them was wearing dark blue, the other didn’t have one at all. Mauri gave them his umbrella, allowing the rain to ruin his Zegna suit. The priest was so cold he was shaking, his hymnbook in one hand and his umbrella in the other. But he gave a really nice address, speaking very honestly about the difficulty when a person can’t manage to fulfill the most important duty in life, taking care of their children. Then there were phrases such as “the inevitable conclusion” and “the road to reconciliation.”

His sisters wept in the rain. Mauri wondered what they were crying for.

On the way to the cars they were overcome by a hailstorm. The priest was running with the hymnbook pressed against his chest. His sisters had their arms around each other so they’d both fit under Mauri’s umbrella. The hail was shredding the leaves on the trees.

It’s Mum, thought Mauri, fighting down a rising sense of panic. She’ll never die. Pouring and hammering down. What am I supposed to do? Raise my clenched fist to the sky?

After the burial he invited his sisters to lunch. They showed him pictures of their children, said how lovely the flowers on the coffin had been. He felt extremely uncomfortable. They asked about his family, he answered as briefly as possible.

The whole time he was tormented by those aspects of their appearance that reminded him of their mother. Even the way they moved reminded him of her. The angle of the neck. The eldest sister had a way of suddenly screwing up her eyes when she looked at him. It made a dart of inexplicable fear stab through him.

In the end, they got around to Ester.

“You know we have another sister?” asked his middle sister.

Yes, they could tell him all about her. The girl was eleven now. Their mother got pregnant and had Ester in 1988. The father was another patient. Ester was taken into care straightaway. A family in Rensjön looked after her. They sigh and say “poor little thing.” Mauri clenches his fists beneath the table, while he asks politely if they’d like something sweet with their coffee. Why was she a poor little thing? She didn’t have to go through it all.

They seemed relieved when he said he had to leave. Nobody said anything stupid about keeping in touch.

Inna looks at him. The planes look like pretty toys out there, taking off and landing.

“Your youngest sister Ester,” she says, “is only sixteen. And she needs somewhere to live. Her foster mother has just…”

Mauri raises his hands to his face as if he were splashing water on it, and groans.

“No, no.”

“She can live with me at Regla. It’s only temporary. She’s starting her second year at the Idun Lovén Art School in the autumn—”

He never usually interrupts Inna. But this time he says, “Absolutely not.” He can’t, he doesn’t intend to have a living image of his mother wandering around the place. He tells Inna he can buy his sister an apartment in Stockholm, whatever she wants.

“She’s sixteen!” says Inna.

And she gives him a pleading smile. Then she becomes serious.

“You’re her only relative who…”

He opens his mouth to mention their other sisters, but she won’t let him interrupt.

“…who can take care of her. And right now your name is really hot…. Oh, I forgot to tell you,
Business Week
is going to do a big feature on you…”

“No interviews!”

“…but you ought to let them do a photo shoot. Anyway, if it comes out that you have a sister who hasn’t got anywhere to go…”

She wins. And as they board the flight to Vancouver, Mauri thinks that it doesn’t really matter. Regla isn’t the kind of home that can be invaded. At Regla he has his wife and the boys and Diddi with his pregnant wife and Inna. A lot of the company’s corporate entertainment happens at Regla. They can hunt there, go out on a boat, give dinner parties.

He can feel that the recent media attention and the social life that has followed as a consequence are taking their toll on him. Much more than work has ever done. All these people who want to shake his hand and talk to him, where do they all come from? He’s making the maximum effort all the time. In order to remain calm and friendly. Inna has been by his side constantly, whispering names and connections. Without her it would never have been possible. He can feel that he needs a rest. There are periods these days when he feels completely empty, it’s as if everyone he meets takes a little piece of him. Sometimes he worries that all of a sudden he won’t know where he is and who he’s sitting in a meeting with and what it’s about. Sometimes he just feels full of rage, like an animal that wants to growl, attack and satisfy itself. He gets irritated. By the way someone keeps their jacket buttoned to hide the fact that they’re wearing yesterday’s shirt. By the way someone else pokes at their teeth after a meal and puts the disgusting, used toothpick on the edge of their plate in full view. By the way one person thinks he is somebody, the way another person is too much of a crawler.

He’s looking forward to the flight across the Atlantic. Because he’s on the way to somewhere, he doesn’t feel restless. They’re sitting still, reading, sleeping, watching a film, having a drink. He and Inna.

Mauri Kallis looked at himself in the mirror. The thudding noises above his head continued.

He’d always loved the game. Closing the major deals. It had been his way of measuring himself against others. The one with the most money when he dies is the winner.

Now it felt as if all that didn’t matter at all. Something had caught up with him. Something heavy. It had always been close by, right behind him. Sucking him backward, back to the tower block.

I’m losing it, he thought. Letting go.

Inna had kept the thing that was pulling him backward at bay.

He didn’t want to be alone right now. It was two hours before his working day would begin. He looked up at the ceiling, heard the sound of a dumbbell rolling across the floor.

He’d go up and chat for a bit. Or just be there for a while.

He pulled on his dressing gown and went up to see his sister.

E
ster Kallis is conceived in a secure psychiatric ward. It is the supervisor of ward P12 at the psychiatric clinic in Umeå who reports the matter at a team meeting. Britta Kallis is in her fifteenth week.

The other ward supervisors come to life and slurp a little coffee from their mugs. Best to drink it while it’s too hot to taste. This is going to be interesting. And fortunately it isn’t their problem.

When the ward supervisor has finished speaking, Nils Gunnarsson the consultant puts his head in his hands. His mouth contracts into a wrinkled, hamster-like grimace.

“I see, yes, right, I see,” he says thoughtfully.

Like a chicken in its eggshell, thinks one of his colleagues with a sudden pang of tenderness.

He looks such a sight. His white hair is far too long. He wears horrible old-fashioned spectacles with thick lenses, like the bottom of a bottle; he also has a habit of placing his finger on the lens to push them back into place when they’ve slipped too far down his nose. New employees at the hospital have been known to try to stop him leaving the ward, assuming he’s a patient.

“Who’s the father?”

“Britta says it’s Ajay Rani.”

A quick exchange of glances. Britta is forty-six, but looks sixty. She’s smoked since she was twelve, and is on strong medication—that’s what does it. Her bloated body on the sofa in front of the TV. The slow, muddled thoughts. The involuntary movements of her mouth, her tongue suddenly poking out, her jaws moving from side to side.

Ajay Rani is thirty-something. He has slender wrists and white teeth. They still have high hopes of a recovery. He’s training for work, and studying Swedish for immigrants.

Nils Gunnarsson wonders what Ajay has said on this matter. The ward supervisor shakes her head and smiles apologetically. No, of course not. Who’d admit it? Britta is way down the scale as far as the patients go.