People said of Katri that she didn’t care about anything except numbers and her brother. And they wondered where she’d got her yellow eyes. Mats’s eyes were as blue as their mother’s had been, and no one could really remember what their father looked like, it was so long ago he’d gone off north to buy a load of timber and never come back – he’d not been a local man. People were used to the fact that everyone’s eyes were more or less blue, but Katri’s eyes were nearly as yellow as her dog’s. She looked at the world around her through eyes narrowed to slits, so people seldom discovered their unnatural colour, more yellow than grey. But her perpetual distrust, so easily roused, could cause her eyes to open in a sudden straight stare, and in a certain light they were actually yellow and made people very uneasy. People sensed that Katri Kling did not trust or care about anyone except herself and the brother she had raised and protected since he was six years old. That kept people at a distance, that and the fact that no one had ever seen the nameless dog wag its tail. And the fact that the Kling woman and her dog accepted friendliness from no one.
After her mother died, Katri took over helping in the shop, where she also did the accounts. She was very clever. But in October she quit. It was thought that the storekeeper wanted her out of the building but didn’t dare say so. The boy Mats didn’t count. He was fifteen, ten years younger than his sister, tall and strong and considered a bit simple. He did odd jobs in the village but mostly hung out in the Liljeberg brothers’ boat shed when work hadn’t stopped because of the cold. The Liljebergs gave him small jobs that were not too important.
There hadn’t been any fishing in Västerby for a long time. It didn’t pay. There were three sheds that built boats, and one of them took in boats on slips for winter storage and overhaul. The best builders were the Liljeberg brothers. There were four of them, all unmarried. The eldest was Edvard, who designed the boats. In between he drove the mail truck to the market town where he also picked up goods and groceries for the storekeeper. The truck belonged to the storekeeper and was the only vehicle in the village.
The boat builders in Västerby were proud men. They signed every boat with a W, as if the village name were still the venerable Wästerby of olden days. The women crocheted coverlets in old, reliable patterns, and they too signed them with a W, and in June the summer people arrived, bought boats as well as bedspreads, and lived their easy summer life for as long as the warm weather held. Towards the end of August everything went quiet again, back to normal. And by and by came winter.
Now the morning twilight had turned dark blue, the snow had begun to glow, and people had turned on the lights in their kitchens and let their youngsters out. The first snowballs struck the window, but Mats slept peacefully on.
I, Katri Kling, often lie awake at night, thinking. As night thoughts go, mine are no doubt unusually practical. Mostly I think about money, lots of money, getting it quickly and taking it wisely and honestly, so much money that I won’t need to think about money any more. And I’ll repay it, later. First of all, Mats will get his boat, a big, seaworthy boat with a cabin and an inboard motor, the best boat ever built in this otherwise miserable village. Every night I hear the snow against the window, the soft whisper of the snow blown in from the sea, and it’s good, I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean… Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where the dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you’re screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree. They say that money smells; it’s not true. Money is as pure as numbers. It’s people that smell, every one of them with their own furtive stink, and it gets stronger when they’re angry or ashamed or when they’re afraid. The dog smells it, he knows immediately. If I was a dog, I’d know too much. Only Mats has no smell, he’s as clean as snow. My dog is big and beautiful and he obeys. He doesn’t like me. We respect each other. I respect the mystery of dogs, the secret natural wildness that big dogs hold on to, but I don’t trust them. How can anyone trust big watchful dogs? People give their animals almost human qualities, and they mean noble and attractive qualities. Dogs are mute and obedient, but they have watched us and know us and can smell how pitiful we are. It should astonish us, move us, overwhelm us that our dogs continue, incredibly, to follow us and obey us. Maybe they despise us. Maybe they forgive us. Or maybe they like having no responsibility. We’ll never know. Maybe they see us as some sort of unfortunate race of overgrown, misshapen beings, like huge sluggish beetles. Not gods. Dogs must have seen through us, they must possess a crushing insight that thousands of years of obedience holds in check. Why aren’t people afraid of their dogs? How long can what was once a wild animal deny its wildness? People idealize their animals, and at the same time they patronizingly overlook a dog’s natural life – biting fleas, burying rotten bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night… But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees. And the stuff they roll around in! No. My dog and I despise them. We’re hidden in our own secret life, concealed in our innermost wildness…
The dog was on its feet, waiting at the door. They went down the stairs and through the shop. In the hall, Katri put on her boots, and all the time her brain kept grinding out threatening night thoughts without any prompting from anywhere. When she came out in the cold and stood still, breathing winter’s cleanness, she looked like a tall black monument with the unreachable dog tight by her side as if they’d grown into one. He never wore a lead.
The children went quiet and trudged off through the snow. Around the corner of the first house, they started shrieking again and began to fight. Katri walked on towards the lighthouse. Liljeberg had driven some gas tubes out to the lighthouse only yesterday, but the tracks had nearly filled with snow. Closer to the point, the northwest wind blew straight in from the sea, and there was the side road leading up the hill to old Miss Aemelin’s house. Katri stopped, and the dog stopped instantly as well. On the wind side, both of them were white with snow melting slowly in their fur.
Katri studied the house the way she’d done for some time, every morning on her way towards the lighthouse. In that house Anna Aemelin lived alone, all by herself, alone with her money. Through the whole long winter she almost never appeared, the shop sent what she needed, and Fru Sundblom came once a week to clean. But early each spring, Anna Aemelin’s pale overcoat could be seen at the edge of the woods as she moved slowly among the trees. Her parents had lived long lives and never allowed anyone to cut trees in their woods. They’d been rich as trolls when they died. And the woods were still untouchable. Little by little they had grown almost impenetrable and stood like a wall behind the house; the “rabbit house”, they called it in the village. It was a grey wood villa with elabourate carved window frames in white, as grey-white as the tall backdrop of snow-drenched forest. The building actually resembled a large, crouched rabbit – the square front teeth of the white veranda curtains, the silly bay windows under eyebrows of snow, the vigilant ears of the chimneys. All the windows were dark. The path up the hill had not been shovelled.
That’s where she lives. Mats and I will live there too. But I have to wait. I need to think carefully before I give this Anna Aemelin an important place in my life.
Chapter Two
PERHAPS THE REASON PEOPLE called Anna Aemelin nice was because nothing had ever forced her to exhibit malice, and because she had an uncommon ability to forget unpleasant things. She just shook them off and continued on her own vague but stubborn way. In fact, her spoiled benevolence was frightening, but no one had ever had time to notice. On those rare occasions when visitors came to the rabbit house, she dispatched them quickly with an absent-minded graciousness that left them feeling they had paid their respects to some kind of lesser monument. It was not that Anna protected herself with an attitude, nor could it r
ightly be said that she hid her true face. It was simply that she was only fully alive when she devoted herself to her singular ability to draw, and when she drew she was naturally always alone.
Anna Aemelin had the great, persuasive power of monomania, of being able to see and embrace a single idea, of being interested in one thing only. And that one thing was the woods, the forest floor. Anna Aemelin could render the ground in a forest so faithfully and in such minute detail that she missed not the tiniest needle. Her watercolours were small and implacably naturalistic, and they were as pretty as the springy blanket of mosses and delicate plants that a person walks across in a dense forest but seldom really observes. Anna Aemelin made people see. They saw and recalled the essence of the forest, and, for a moment, experienced a vague yearning that felt pleasant and hopeful. It was a shame that Anna spoiled her pictures by putting rabbits in them, that is to say, Mama, Papa and Baby Bunny. Moreover, the fact that she drew little flowers on the rabbits dispelled much of the deep-forest mystique. The children’s book page had criticized the rabbits on a couple of occasions, and that hurt Anna and shook her confidence, but what could she do? The rabbits had to be there for the sake of the children and the publisher. A new little book came out about every other year. The publisher wrote the text. Sometimes Anna wanted to draw just the ground, the low vegetation, the tree roots – more and more precisely and in a smaller and smaller scale, so deep and close to the moss that its miniature brown and green world became an enormous jungle populated by insects. She could imagine a family of ants instead of rabbits, but now of course it was too late. Anna tidied away her mental picture of the empty, liberated landscape. It was winter, and she never worked until the first bare earth began to show. While she waited, she wrote letters to very small children who wanted to know how the bunnies got flowery fur.
But on the day when the real story of Anna and Katri begins, Anna wrote no letters. She sat in her parlour reading Jimmy’s Adventures in Africa, a highly entertaining book. He’d been in Alaska the last time.
Anna’s long, wide rooms were lovely in the snowlight – the blue-and-white tile ovens, the bright furniture that stood sparsely along the walls and was reflected in the parquet floors that Fru Sundblom polished once a week. Papa had always wanted space around him, he’d been a very big man. And he’d liked blue, a cautious blue colour that was all through the house and that grew paler and paler with the years. A deep serenity lay over the whole rabbit house, an atmosphere of finality.
Later, Anna set aside her book and decided that she ought to call the shop, a thing she disliked doing. The line was busy, so she sat down by the veranda window to wait. Outside on the summer veranda was a large snowdrift that the northwest wind had swept up in a bold curve, both playful and austere. A light, transparent fan of snow whirled above the knife edge at the ridge. This drift described the same line every winter, and it was always equally beautiful. But the drift was too big and too simple for Anna to have noticed it. She called again and the storekeeper answered. Had Liljeberg come back? She had forgotten to mention butter and pea soup; not the big one, a small tin. The storekeeper couldn’t hear what she said. He explained that the road still hadn’t been ploughed so the mail truck couldn’t get through, but that Liljeberg had skied to town and was going to bring the mail and some fresh liver…
“I can’t hear!” shouted Anna Aemelin. “Living? Has something happened?”
“Liver,” the storekeeper repeated. “There’s some fresh liver coming in with Liljeberg and I’ll put some aside specially for you, Miss Aemelin, a fine piece of liver…” And then he vanished in the snowstorm; another problem on the line. Anna drew the curtain on the world outside and went back to her book, relieved. Actually, she didn’t much care for pea soup. Or for mail.
When Edvard Liljeberg came back from town, he took off his skis and dropped his backpack on the shop steps. His back hurt, and he wasn’t in a mood to chat with anyone. He dumped the storekeeper’s supplies in a cardboard carton and carried them, still wet with snow, into the shop.
“That took time,” the shopkeeper said. He was lounging behind the counter, still in a bad temper at losing his shop assistant. Liljeberg didn’t answer but went back to the table in the enclosed porch to sort the mail. Katri Kling had seen him from her window as he skied up to the building, and now all at once she was on the porch looking over his shoulder, cigarette in her mouth as usual, examining the mail through the smoke. “That’s Miss Aemelin’s mail,” she said. It was easy to recognize. Most of her letters were decorated with flowers, and the addresses were handwritten by very small children. Katri went on, “Were you going to take it up to her straight away?”
“Can’t a man catch his breath?” Liljeberg said. “Being the postman in this village isn’t always such a picnic.”
She could easily have remarked on the heavy skiing weather, or asked how he could even see the road, or complained about the town not getting its ploughs out – anything at all to show interest or pretend to show interest, the way people talk to make things a little more pleasant – but no, not Katri Kling. There she stood squinting through her cigarette smoke, her black hair like a mane shrouding her face as she leaned over the table. She had wrapped herself in a blanket against the cold and held it closed with both hands clenched. She looks like a witch, thought Edvard Liljeberg.
“I can take the mail up to Miss Aemelin,” she said.
“I can’t let you do that; it’s the postman’s job to deliver the mail. It’s a position of trust.”
Katri lifted her face and opened her eyes at him; in the hard light on the porch they were truly yellow. “Trust,” she said. “Don’t you trust me?” She paused and then repeated, “I can take the mail up to Miss Aemelin. It’s important to me.”
“Are you trying to help?”
“You know I’m not,” Katri said. “I’m doing it entirely for my own sake. Do you trust me or don’t you?”
Afterwards Liljeberg thought that she might anyway have said that, since she was going out that way with the dog in any case, it would be no trouble. But at least Katri Kling was honest – he had to admit that.
* * *
Anna called again. “I can hear you better now,” the storekeeper said. “A small tin of pea soup, you said, and butter. Liljeberg has come with the mail, and he brought the liver. It’s fresh, straight from the belly, so to speak! I’ve set some aside for you specially, Miss, but it won’t be Liljeberg who brings it this time, but Miss Kling. She’s headed out your way.”
“Who?”
“My old shop assistant, Katri Kling. She’s bringing your liver, she’s on her way.”
“But liver,” Anna objected, but she was just too tired. “Liver is so awful-looking and so hard to prepare… But if you were kind enough to set some aside… This Miss… Kling, you said? Does she know to use the kitchen door?”
And then the line began howling again the way it always did in winter. Anna stood and listened for a while, then she went out to the kitchen and put on some coffee.
Mats came home from the boatyard as dusk came on. In winter, the men in Västerby worked only in mild weather to save on fuel, and the boat shed closed before dark to save electricity. They were very thrifty. Mats was always the last to leave.
“So they got you to leave,” the storekeeper said. “I’ll bet you’d sit and sandpaper in the dark if they’d let you.”
“It’s planking now,” Mats answered. “Can I have a Coca-Cola on our tab?”
“Yes, sir, right away! Such a shame that your dear sister doesn’t want to wait on you any more. Really too bad; she was so quick in the shop. So, planking. You don’t say. So you do planking too. Who would have thought?”
Mats nodded without listening and drank his Coca-Cola at the counter, slowly. In the small, overcrowded room, he seemed very large and tall. And his hair was long, much too long, and jet-black like his sister’s. Not local hair. He seemed to have forgotten that he wasn’t alone. But when Katri came dow
n the stairs, he turned around and the siblings exchanged an imperceptible nod, a little signal of solidarity that was theirs alone. The dog lay down by the door to wait.
The storekeeper said, “So I hear you’re delivering the mail to the rabbit villa. Here’s the groceries. Watch the liver so it doesn’t drip.”
“She doesn’t like liver,” Katri said. “As you well know. She gave that blood pudding to Fru Sundblom.”
“Liver isn’t blood pudding. Anyway, she ordered it. And remember to go in by the kitchen. Miss Aemelin is particular about her visitors.”
This exchange was quiet and hostile, like two wary animals circling for attack.
He doesn’t forget, this little storekeeper, he hasn’t forgiven me that time. His lust was ludicrous, and I let him know it. I wasn’t objective. Things get out of hand every time I lose my objectivity. I have to get away from here.
* * *
The snow was very blue in the early twilight. Katri motioned the dog to wait at the turnoff and walked on up the hill with the wind at her back. No one had shovelled.
Anna Aemelin opened the kitchen door and said, “Miss Kling, how kind of you. And in this weather, there was really no need…”