Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘All you have to do is tell them Susso’s missing. And maybe remind them about Lennart Brösth’s jailbreak.’

  ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ll believe you.’

  I shook my head. Then I nodded.

  ‘Then I’ll do it,’ he said and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Or should we ask her friend, the doctor?’

  ‘No, you do it.’

  ‘They’re going to ask what my relationship is with her.’

  ‘So you’ll tell them the truth.’

  ‘And they will obviously send someone around her house. But you know that.’

  ‘I don’t like it. Even though he’s not there any more.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry.’

  ‘So they’ve moved him?’

  Roland gave me a mischievous look.

  ‘Maybe we should do something to thank them then,’ I sighed.

  ‘You’ll have a chance tonight. Because they’re coming here.’

  ‘They’re coming here? Why?’

  ‘Well, Harr said they had some questions. We’re meeting them at eight. At Momma’s.’

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They want money, how hard is that to figure out? They’re going to blackmail us! Or me, rather. They’re going to blackmail me! Oh God, Roland, what have you got me into?’

  My outburst baffled him; he even raised his eyebrows, making them pop up above the rims of his glasses.

  ‘Then you’d better hike up the price on those tablecloths,’ he said and shuffled off toward the door. ‘See you in a bit.’

  When I tried to put the cap back on the marker, my hands were shaking so hard I got myself on the knuckle and while I was rubbing the spot, I pictured the dark secret Håkan and I shared spreading from person to person; I envisioned the spread like a diagram. It seemed inevitable. Like all the misery afflicting me and my family.

  A paralysing sense of inescapable fate had seized me. It was absolutely clear to me that we were dealing with forces against which resistance was futile. Doomed to fail. My eyes darted around the shelves before settling on the glass display case at the far end of the shop, right next to the front door. It showcased Dad’s art treasures, gifts from the many Sami artists he had got to know in his day. That the artefacts were not for sale lent the shop a certain craft museum-like air, which I felt dignified the commerce, and encouraged it. There were boxes and guksis. Knives with elaborate sheaths. Ptarmigans coaxed out of the wood of the curly birch. A white, ghost-white, reindeer antler. And surrounded by all these objects, like some kind of chieftain, a strange wooden figure. The Hoarfrost Man was tall and emaciated like an old tree and his face was made of horn and from this hard face, grim like the face of a skeleton, stared a big, almond-shaped eye. It looked at me and I knew it would never blink.

  Anders was in the kitchen, dressed in a fleece jacket and undies. He had discovered a pack of tortillas in the freezer. The paper-thin breads couldn’t be separated, so he broke them into shards that he slipped in between his lips.

  Then he heard a bang. A shot from a small gun.

  He went out onto the front steps. Stava had heard it too. They exchanged a look. Stava walked up toward the road and Anders crept along behind her.

  Someone was running toward them. A police officer. A woman with blonde, flowing hair. It looked like she had run at full pelt until her strength had given out, because she was stumbling along with her mouth wide open. Anders’ first reaction was to want to hide. But there was no need. Even though she passed by just a few feet away from them, she didn’t seem to notice them. Where the road curved, she tramped up into the forest.

  Soon after, a wolf appeared and after it a woman at a trot. It was the one who had shown them to the cabin they were staying in. Ipa. She didn’t seem to notice them either; it was as though they didn’t exist. The wolf slipped in among the trees and she followed.

  *

  The police car with its jigsaw of yellow and blue squares was parked in the middle of the village. Like some kind of brightly coloured artwork touring the rural north. The man who had kicked Stava was standing a few feet away from it. He was holding a small pistol. He tried to spin it around his index finger like a gunslinger, but failed and almost dropped it.

  ‘What happened?’ Stava asked.

  Instead of answering, he aimed the gun at Stava, pretended to shoot her and blew smoke from the barrel.

  It was only at that point Anders realised there were people in the car. It was Erasmus and a police officer; they were in the back seat. The officer had his hands pressed against his ears. But it didn’t look like he was covering his ears because he didn’t want to listen to Erasmus; it looked more like he was trying to crush his own skull.

  *

  After a while, Ipa returned with the female officer, dragging her by the hand to make her walk faster. The wolf brought up the rear.

  Mikko opened the driver-side door and shoved the woman inside. She just sat there with her hands on the wheel.

  ‘I don’t know if I know how to drive a car,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a copper,’ Mikko said. ‘All coppers know how to drive.’

  ‘I’m a copper,’ she said and studied her uniform. Then she looked at her colleague, who was now in the passenger seat, gazing out the window. ‘We’re coppers.’

  Ipa had her hands in her jacket pockets.

  ‘I don’t think she can drive. Not for a bit. We don’t want them driving into a ditch up here, do we?’

  This prospect didn’t seem to worry Erasmus, who was scratching the wolf’s neck.

  ‘I’m a copper,’ the woman said and squeezed the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles turned white. ‘All coppers know how to drive.’

  ‘Goodbye then,’ Erasmus said and tipped his hat. ‘I’m sorry we can’t be of more help.’

  ‘To be honest,’ the woman said, ‘I don’t remember what we needed help with.’ She looked at her colleague, a man with a brown beard.

  ‘My God, I really feel like I know you!’

  The man smiled awkwardly, clearly embarrassed to be so confused he didn’t know where he was, and maybe not even who he was.

  Ipa leaned in.

  ‘Then it probably wasn’t important,’ she said.

  ‘No, it probably wasn’t,’ the woman agreed and started the engine.

  The police car rolled away very slowly and turned with blinking indicators. It took them a long time to turn around. Ipa waved when they drove past, but the woman was much too focused on the driving to see her and the other officer was crying into his hand.

  Anders pressed himself against Stava.

  ‘Are they looking for us?’ he whispered.

  ‘There they are,’ Roland said as he zigzagged between the tables, so eager to greet his friends he left me in his wake.

  They were at the very back of the room.

  Harr wore a leather cowboy hat on his head. His nose was a big, hooked thing that looked like it had been burnt to a crisp in the sun, but it probably went deeper than that. He tipped his hat to me and lurking behind his curly grey beard was a moist little grin I couldn’t read.

  If Harr was the man with the hat, Ensimmäinen was the man with the hair. It tumbled down his back like a hard-rocker’s and was more white than grey. It didn’t match his angular face and steel-rimmed glasses at all and definitely didn’t belong on a man his age; I thought he looked like a banker who had put on a zany wig for an office party. His long pale arms, which were resting on the table, were hairless like a woman’s. He wore no watch and, naturally, no ring.

  We sat down at the table and since they didn’t say anything and seemed to be waiting for something, I forced myself to ask if they wanted beer, but they didn’t even reply, and when, in a state of growing unease, I passed the question on to Roland, he didn’t answer either. It was as if
he’d suddenly gone over to their side, and it made me furious.

  ‘Do you want a pint or not!’ I cackled and that made him snap back in and nod with a flat look on his face.

  The waitress was a tired little girl with piercings all over her face and dyed black hair; when she left, I noticed Harr was watching me and that he was doing it fairly unabashedly. As though he felt free to take the liberty of inspecting me. He and his friend had an advantage over me that no one had ever had before. That was how it was. It felt like they owned me and that made me insecure and it made me angry. My face glowed hot from time to time and I was certain the flushes were fully visible on my cheeks, which did nothing to help matters.

  ‘May I ask how business is going?’ Harr said. ‘Or is that intrusive?’

  ‘Business? You mean my shop? Well, I guess it’s going fine.’

  ‘Rolle tells us you have competition now.’

  ‘That man sells nothing but tat. He’ll go belly-up in no time.’

  ‘If he doesn’t,’ he said and adjusted his hat, ‘Nänne and I would always be happy to go have a chat with him.’

  During its fall toward the table top, my gaze touched his watery, light-blue eyes. Had he really said what I thought he’d said? No matter how I looked at it, the meaning was unambiguously clear: he had implied that they had resorted to mobster methods on my behalf and with that little dig at me, he was letting me know he had the upper hand. My face flushed again and this time the heat moved like a wave down through my body, like a hot flash. And Roland, he just sat there like a fool, picking at the label of his beer bottle.

  ‘Do you sell records in your shop?’

  ‘Records?’ I said, my mouth dry.

  ‘Music.’

  ‘I have Sofia Jannok’s CD. Her latest.’

  Harr reached back and dug around the pocket of his suede jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair. He took out a CD case and after putting it down on the table, he placed his hand over it and pushed it toward me with a secretive look on his face. He was sitting behind the wheel of a bus. His elbow hanging out the window rockabilly style. His hat was blindingly white and around the high crown ran a concho hat band. The album was called To Murjek and Back Again and his name was printed at the bottom, Harr Honkaniemi.

  ‘See who it is?’

  I turned the case over and read.

  ‘You might have heard “Give Me Your Hand”. They’ve played it on Radio Gällivare a few times. I thought you might want to stock it.’

  If this was the price for their services, it was low. The question was whether this was the final price, or just the start of a lifetime of blackmail. But I nodded. Thanked him, even.

  Harr stroked his beard, looking pleased.

  ‘You know, Gudrun, the only people singing about life up here are the Sami. And they just wail on and on about their roots and their lost pretend-country until your ears bleed. Now they rap too. On TV. It’s Sami this and Sami that. Sami, Sami, Sami. And I know a lot of Sami people feel that way too. Sjul Jonsson, do you know Sjul, Roland, he likes to say: What’s going to become of us old Lapps, now that the Sami have taken over?’

  He tapped his index finger on the CD case.

  ‘This here,’ he said, ‘is a different voice. You can tell them that. If anyone asks about the record and wants to know what the old man’s about. You could put it somewhere people will see it. You don’t have to advertise it or anything, but it would be nice if it sat out where people could see it.’

  He took a sip of his beer and after putting his glass down he caught his moustache with his lower lip and sucked down the droplets that were stuck in the bristles. Then he asked in a quieter voice how my daughter liked her new potato patch.

  They didn’t know Susso was still missing, so I told them about Diana’s little trip to Norway. I left out the part about her saviour wearing the face of a dead man and having the tail of a German Shepherd, because I was in no mood to be scoffed at.

  They hadn’t heard about the suicide wave in Tornedalen last spring, but they knew about Lennart Brösth and Harr wanted to know more about him and his kidnapping cult. I didn’t know how to answer his questions; Roland had to ride to the rescue.

  ‘Well, I did tell you,’ he said, turning his bottle in his hands, ‘what kind of people Gudrun and her daughter have got on the wrong side of. That they are tough to label. So to speak.’

  ‘Trolls,’ Harr said. ‘That was the word you used.’

  He said it loudly and with a naturalness that made me embarrassed; it was as though he had shouted out a four-letter word.

  ‘Yes,’ Roland said. ‘But as I said, that’s just a word.’

  Harr unbuttoned the breast pocket of his denim shirt and dug around in it with his index finger, either looking for something or seeking to reassure himself something was still in there.

  ‘We made fun of that word, you know,’ he said and closed the pocket by pushing the button with his thumb. ‘On our way to Vittangi. We had a good laugh at your expense, Rolle. For finding a woman on the internet who not only believes in trolls but is pestered by them too.’

  That this man, a bigoted bus driver with swirls of lichen around his mouth, a tragic bachelor from Malmberget who didn’t take his hat off in restaurants, who thought he was a troubadour, that he described me like that didn’t bother me in the slightest; if anything, his ignorant arrogance gave me a soothing feeling of superiority. If only you knew, I thought to myself.

  At that moment, the mocking glint in his eye vanished.

  ‘But afterwards, when we were leaving,’ he said, ‘we didn’t much feel like laughing. Did we?’ He glanced at Ensimmäinen, who with a graceful movement of the hand caught a stray lock of white hair and pushed it behind his ear.

  ‘Something happened while we were there,’ Harr said without taking his eyes from me. ‘And Nänne and I haven’t been able to talk about it. We have tried to talk about it, but it’s as if it can’t be done.’ He leaned forward. ‘Why is it so hard to talk about?’

  ‘What’s so hard to talk about?’

  ‘What happened to us. At your daughter’s house.’

  I really didn’t want to talk about those things and I showed them as much by averting my eyes. Through the unwashed window above Harr’s hat, I could see the building where I lived; I could even see my own living room window, the little lamp.

  ‘How should I know?’ I mumbled, somewhat absently.

  ‘I think you do know.’

  Something about his tone made me think he wasn’t referring to the dirty work they had performed.

  ‘You saw something.’

  He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  ‘About this size,’ I said and pointed to my pint glass. ‘Plus the bright, bushy tail?’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘we only glimpsed it. Once, when it was sitting up on the ridge of the roof, like a weathervane. So I said to Nänne, I said, look, a squirrel. But then we started suspecting that it wasn’t that simple. That what we’d seen was something else.’

  He glanced at Nänne, who nodded agreement.

  ‘As I said, we barely saw it, but the whole time we were there I could sense it was looking for something. Under my hat. It was sitting up on the roof, but it was down here, under my hat. And that,’ he said and scratched his beard, ‘I didn’t much care for.’

  ‘It’s incredibly fond of Susso,’ I said. ‘So it probably wanted to know if you knew where she is.’

  ‘I felt like a pine cone. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Maybe not entirely.’

  ‘Completely powerless.’

  ‘Yes. You were lucky to get away.’

  ‘I’m not sure we did.’

  He bowed his head and took off his hat and after pushing his empty glass aside, he placed the hat on the table, and he did it all with slow, precise movements. His hair lay slicked across his head in sparse strands that came together in a silvery hook at the nape of his neck.

  ‘
It doesn’t feel like we did,’ he sighed. ‘I still feel like a pine cone, just a used-up one. Pried open. And plundered.’

  ‘He’s a monster,’ I said and quickly washed the slur down with a sip of beer. ‘That’s what I’ve always thought.’

  ‘A monster?’

  I nodded.

  Roland tilted his head, humming agreement.

  ‘I don’t suppose I ever really understood what you meant by that …’

  ‘What do you actually know,’ Harr said, ‘about this creature?’

  Sitting at Momma’s bar, or steakhouse, as they called it, discussing with two perfect strangers from Malmberget the thing I had never before had the energy or courage to even mention to anyone, was exceedingly healing.

  ‘I know he’s old. Over a hundred years.’

  ‘A hundred years?’

  Harr leaned back and crossed his arms. They were alarmingly skinny; he didn’t look like he’d done manual labour a single day of his life.

  ‘The only thing you need to know is that he’s dangerous. Because he won’t let go until he feels like it.’

  ‘Like a parasite.’

  ‘There is nothing to be done about it.’

  ‘We were lucky, Nänne. Do you hear me? He had no interest in us. Not even you, with your angel’s hair.’

  ‘He finds a secret way into your head and when he’s inside, he goes looking for things. Things you’ve hidden. Every time I went over to Susso’s, when she lived here, I left feeling lower than low. Everything turned black and I sat around dwelling on all kinds of misery that bubbled up, my divorce and other things, and you can back me up here, Roland, I got depressed. And it obviously took me a while to figure out the squirrel was causing it and I think he was doing it so I’d leave them alone. And he got his way, in the end.’

  ‘Gudrun,’ Roland said. ‘Tell them about the mouse.’

  ‘When we were there, at Susso’s, that night, when it happened, there was a mouse there, and it was because of the mouse things turned out the way they did. It got into both our heads but especially Håkan’s. And Håkan, he flew into a rage, because he thought that person had something to do with Diana going missing. And things went pear-shaped. It was the mouse’s fault. One hundred per cent. I’m certain of it. That’s why I killed it.’