The woman who entered the house was tall, dressed in some kind of shaggy fur coat, and she didn’t smile when she said hello.
It smells of insecurity. This house has been quiet for a very long time. She looks like I thought she would – like a rabbit.
Anna repeated, “Yes, it was nice of you… I mean, it’s important to get my mail, but nevertheless…” Anna paused a moment for a reply and then went on. “I’ve made some coffee. You do drink coffee, don’t you?”
“No,” said Katri pleasantly. “I don’t drink coffee.”
Anna was taken aback, more astonished than hurt. Everyone drinks coffee if it’s offered. It’s only proper; you do it for the hostess’s sake. She said, “Tea, perhaps?”
“No thank you,” said Katri Kling.
“Miss Kling,” said Anna abruptly, “you can put your boots by the door. Water will damage the rugs.”
Now I like her better. Let her be an opponent, let me struggle against resistance, amen.
They went into the parlour.
I should have got one of her books. No, I shouldn’t, that would have been dishonest.
“Sometimes,” said Anna Aemelin, “sometimes I think it might be nice to have a wall-to-wall carpet in here. Something light and very soft. Don’t you agree, Miss Kling?”
“No. That would be a shame on such a pretty floor.”
Naturally she wants a fluffy floor. Carpet or no carpet, it’s all fluffy in here anyway – hot and hairy. Maybe there’s more air upstairs. We’ll have to crack the windows at night or Mats won’t be able to sleep.
Anna Aemelin had her glasses on a thin chain around her neck and now she lifted them, breathed on the lenses and started rubbing them with a corner of the tablecloth. They were probably covered with fluff.
“Miss Aemelin, have you ever had rabbits?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you had rabbits?”
“No… how do you mean? The Liljebergs keep rabbits, but I understand they’re very troublesome animals…” Anna answered automatically in her own vague manner, her tone of voice never ending a sentence. Then she made a move towards the coffee pot and remembered – this guest didn’t drink coffee. Suddenly, sharply, she asked, “And why, Miss Kling, why would I have rabbits? Do you have rabbits?”
“No, I have a dog. A German shepherd.”
A dog? Anna’s attention began to wander in a different direction. You never knew about dogs…
The untouched coffee service troubled the hostess. She rose and remarked that they needed more light. It was already growing dark, and she lit one softly shaded lamp after another, then suggested that Katri take home an autograph. Anna had beautiful handwriting. When she finished signing her name, she began as usual to draw a rabbit, ears first, stopped herself, and took a fresh sheet of paper. Katri had gone out to the kitchen and put the mail on the kitchen table and the groceries on the counter. Pink juice ran from the package of liver.
“How horrid,” said Anna behind her. “Is it blood? I can’t stand the sight of blood…”
“Leave it. I’ll put it away.”
But Anna had opened the package and the liver lay there exposed, brownish red, swollen with blood, small white seams running through the meat. She went pale.
“Miss Aemelin, I’ll give it to my dog. I’ll take it away. I’m going now.”
Quickly, Anna began to explain. She had always been so fearful that things might begin to smell. You put them away and forget them and they start to smell and you start worrying that they’ll go bad and have to be thrown out… “And you can’t throw out food, the way the world is today…”
“I understand,” said Katri. “You hide things, and then they start to smell. Why don’t you stop buying things that can start to smell? If you loathe organ meats, then say so. Why do you order liver?”
“It wasn’t me, it was him! He was nice enough to put some aside…”
“The storekeeper,” said Katri slowly, “the storekeeper – remember this – is not a nice man. He is a very malicious person. He knows you’re afraid of liver.”
Outside in the back yard, Katri lit a cigarette. Darkness was coming on quickly.
Anna Aemelin hurried to the veranda window and watched her guest go down the hill, a tall dark shape, and down on the road there were two silhouettes, as if a big wolf had come out of the twilight to join her. Side by side they walked back towards the village. Anna stayed at the window in irresolute anxiety. Maybe a cup of coffee would be nice… but suddenly she didn’t want one. It was a small but definite insight. She didn’t like coffee. In fact, she never had.
Chapter Three
WHEN KATRI GOT HOME, she sat down on the bed with her coat on. She was very tired. What had been won? How much had been lost? The first meeting was so terribly important. Katri closed her eyes and tried to get a clear picture of what had happened, but she couldn’t manage it. The picture kept slipping away, as soft and diffuse as Anna Aemelin herself, and her shaded lamps and impersonal, well-tuned room and the tentative way they had spoken to one another. But the liver on the kitchen counter, that was tangible, a reality. Did I take it with me for her sake? No. Was it for my own sake, to win points? No, no, I don’t think so. It was a purely practical act; there was this bloody thing that frightened her, and it had to go. I wasn’t being underhand or dishonest. But you never know, you can never really be sure, never completely certain that you haven’t tried to ingratiate yourself in some hateful way – flattery, empty adjectives, the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want; maybe an advantage, or not even that, mostly just because it’s the way it’s done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook… No, I don’t think I made myself especially agreeable. I lost this opportunity. But at least I played an honourable game.
Mats had done some new drawings. They lay out on the table as usual. He never talked about his boat designs, but he wanted Katri to see them. The drawings were always on the same blue-squared paper that made it easier to figure scale, and the boat was the same: quite large, with an inboard motor and a cabin. Katri noticed that he had altered the curve of the hull. And the cabin was lower. She went carefully through his notes – cost of lumber, motor, labour – facts she would need to check to make sure he wasn’t cheated. The drawings were beautifully done. And they weren’t just boyish dreams of a boat; they were competent work. Katri knew that they represented long and patient observation, the love and care a person devotes to a single thing, a single overarching idea.
Katri had borrowed books for Mats in town, everything the library had on boats and boat construction and stories of great adventures at sea, mostly boys’ books. And at the same time, almost apologetically, Katri had tried to get him to read what she called literature.
“I read them, I do,” Mats said, “but I don’t get anything out of them. Nothing much happens. I understand they’re very good, but they just make me sad. They’re almost always about people with problems.”
“But your seamen, your shipwrecked seamen? Don’t they have problems?”
Mats shook his head and smiled. “That’s different,” he explained. “And anyway, they don’t talk about it so much.”
But Katri went on. If Mats got to read four of his own books, then he had to read one of hers, just one. She worried that her brother would lose himself in a world where the bad parts of life were hidden away behind falsely foursquare adventures. Mats read Katri’s books to make her happy, but he didn’t talk about them. In the beginning, she would ask, and he would say only, “Yes, that was extremely fine.” So she stopped asking.
They rarely talked to each other. They owned a silence together that was peaceful and straightforward.
It had been dark for some time when Mats came home. He had probably been with the Liljebergs. Katri didn’t like that. He was always hanging around the Liljebergs, hoping they would talk about boats. They were nice to Mats the way people
are nice to a house pet. They let him hang around, but he didn’t count. Her brother didn’t count. Katri put out the food and they ate as usual, each with a book. These reading meals had always been the most tranquil moment of the day, a complete and blessed peace. But this evening, Katri couldn’t read. Again and again, she returned to Anna Aemelin’s house, and again and again she left it in defeat. She had ruined everything for Mats. Katri raised her eyes from her book, which she no longer understood, and looked at her brother. The lamp between them had a broken shade and the light fell on his face in a gentle network of light and shadow that made her think of the dappled shadow of leaves under trees or the sun reflecting on a sand bottom. No one but Katri could see how beautiful he was. All at once she had an overwhelming desire to speak to her brother about the implacable goal that never left her thoughts: to explain her notion of honour, defend herself, no, not defend, just explain, just talk to him about everything it was unthinkable to talk about to anyone but Mats.
But I can’t. Mats has no secrets. That’s why he’s so mysterious. No one must ever disturb him; we have to leave him undisturbed in his clean, simplified world. And maybe he wouldn’t understand but just worry that I’ve got problems. And what would I actually explain..? But I know what I have to do. I just have to take what I take completely openly and fight as honourably as I can.
Mats looked up from his book. “What is it?” he said.
“Nothing. Is that a good book?”
“It’s great,” Mats said. “I just got to the sea battle.”
Chapter Four
EVENINGS IN THE VILLAGE WERE VERY QUIET, just the barking of a mongrel dog or two. Everyone was at home having dinner, and there were lights in every window. As usual, it snowed. The roofs had heavy overhangs of snow, the paths tramped into the snow during the day went white again, and the hard-packed banks on either side grew higher and higher. Inside the snow banks were deep, narrow tunnels where the children had dug hideouts for themselves during thaws. And outside stood their snowmen, snowhorses, formless shapes with teeth and eyes of bits of tin and coal. When the next hard freeze came, they poured water over these sculptures so they’d harden to ice.
One day Katri paused before one of these images and saw that it was a likeness of herself. They had found shards of yellowish glass for eyes and given her an old fur cap, and they’d captured her narrow mouth and her stiff, straight bearing. Attached to this woman of snow was a large snow dog. It wasn’t well done, but she could see they meant it to be a dog, and a threatening dog at that. And crouched at the hem of her skirt, very small, was a dwarfish figure with a red potholder on its head. Mats usually wore a red wool cap in winter.
Katri kicked the little figure to pieces, and when she got home she threw her brother’s cap in the stove and knitted him a new one in blue. Later she retained a single, grimly valued memory of the children’s caricature – the paper they had covered with numbers and driven into the snow woman’s heart on a wooden stake. It was, after all, a token of respect from the village. The children listened to their parents’ talk and knew she was good at maths. They knew her heart was riddled with numbers.
For years, people had come to Katri and asked her to help them with sums they couldn’t do themselves. She handled difficult calculations and percentages with complete ease, and the answers fell into place and were always correct. It began while Katri was doing the storekeeper’s ordering and paying his bills. It was then she acquired a reputation for being shrewd, penetrating and good with figures – she discovered that several merchants in town were cheating. Later, she found the storekeeper in the village doing the same thing, but no one knew about that. Katri Kling also had an unerring sense for how sums should be justly allocated and for unambiguous solutions to knotty problems requiring a different kind of arithmetic. The villagers began coming to her with their tax declarations or to talk about bills of sale, wills and property lines. There was a lawyer in town, of course, but they had more faith in her, and why throw money away on a lawyer?
“Give them the meadow,” Katri said. “You can’t do anything with it anyway; it isn’t even good pasture. But put in a clause that says it can’t be developed, or sooner or later you’ll have them living next door. And you don’t like them.”
Then she told the opposing party that the meadow was worthless, but they could use it for peace of mind by putting up a fence and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign so they wouldn’t constantly have to hear the neighbours’ kids. Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbours. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families that had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time. She also helped people to see that they’d been cheated. Everyone was highly amused by Katri’s decision in the case of Emil from Husholm. He’d contracted severe septicaemia that had cost him a lot of money and kept him from working for quite some time, and Katri said it was a job-related accident and called for workman’s compensation. His employer would have to apply to the employment office on his behalf.
“Well, not really,” Emil objected. “It didn’t happen while I was building a boat. I was just cleaning some cod.”
And Katri said, “When will you learn? Work is work. A cod or a crowbar – it’s all the same. Your father was a fisherman, wasn’t he? And he worked for the fishery, didn’t he? How many times did he injure himself at work?”
“Now and then.”
“Of course. And he got no compensation. The government cheated him more times than he knew, so this makes it even.”
People could cite many examples of Katri Kling’s perspicacity. She seemed to make all the pieces fit together. If people doubted her, they could always have their important papers checked by the lawyer in town. But so far he had never questioned Katri’s judgment. “What kind of wise old witch do you have out there? Where did she learn all this?”
In the beginning, people wanted to pay Katri for her services, but when that met a frosty reception, they stopped mentioning compensation. It seemed odd that a person who understood so much about other people’s difficulties with out-of-the-ordinary situations should have been so unable to deal with the people themselves. Katri’s silence made everyone uncomfortable. She responded to matter-of-fact questions, but she didn’t talk. And, worst of all, she didn’t smile when she met people, didn’t encourage them, didn’t help, didn’t socialize at all.
“But why do you go to her?” said the elderly Madame Nygård. “Yes, she puts your business to rights, but you no longer trust anyone when you come back. You’re different. Leave her alone and try to be nice to her brother.”
People did sometimes ask about Mats, but not even that made her more agreeable. She just looked past them with her yellow slits of eyes and said, “Fine, thank you.” And when they moved on, it was with a sense that they’d been prying, and they felt very small. So people brought her their problems and then slunk away as quickly as they could.
Chapter Five
THE CONTINUOUS SNOWFALL carried with it an imprecise darkness that was neither dusk nor dawn, and it depressed people. Things that might have been done with pleasure became merely things that needed doing. Edvard Liljeberg had the winter blues. When work was finished in the boat shed, there was nothing else to do but go home, so all four Liljeberg brothers went home and made dinner. Then they listened to the radio, and the evenings were very long. Edvard Liljeberg decided to overhaul the van, which usually cheered him up. And it wouldn’t hurt to have the motor in shape when the township finally got around to ploughing.
Years ago, Edvard drove the schoolchildren into town and was paid by the pound, but now the village had its own school for the l
ower grades, and the older children rented rooms in town. There weren’t so many of them nowadays. Nevertheless, the storekeeper was certainly not losing money on the van. The government paid freight for hauling gas tubes from the village out to the lighthouse as well as for carrying the mail, on top of which they paid for the petrol. All the same, every time the storekeeper counted out Liljeberg’s salary, he was careful to point out what a burden it was for him to perform all these community services. Edvard Liljeberg had nevertheless come to regard the van as his own. It was a Volkswagen, green. And the only vehicle in Västerby.
He turned on the light and pulled his cap down over his ears. It was colder inside than it was outdoors. Working on the van was a private thing, it was no one else’s business, and now here was the boy again just inside the door, standing and waiting and waiting and staring at Liljeberg and giving him a bad conscience. Were these qualms about the boy or about his sister? What have we done in this village to deserve these two? What sin have we committed that things can’t be normal? Liljeberg swung around and said, “Are you here again? You’re never going to learn a damn thing about engines!”
“No,” said Mats. “I know.”
“Have you been over to Nygård’s and chopped wood?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want? To help?”
Mats didn’t answer. It was always the same. The boy would slink into the garage and just hang around in silence, watching, until the hair on the back of Liljeberg’s neck began to stand on end and he couldn’t concentrate, but he couldn’t be mean to the boy and the whole thing was really annoying, so he just said, “This is hard, this part, so I can’t talk right now.”
Mats Kling nodded and didn’t move. He was so like his sister – the same flat face, though his eyes were blue. Somehow the sister was always around, and her brother was behind her. It was unendurable, and it made Edvard Liljeberg very tired. Finally he said, “If you want, you can pick up a little. It’s getting hard to move around in here.”