by Stefan Spjut
After a few seconds she said:
‘I went to visit an old lady.’
‘An old lady?’
‘She saw something.’
‘Where?’
It was pointless lying. She would see the mileage counter anyway.
‘In Vaikijaur.’
There was a momentary silence.
And then it came:
‘And where’s that?’
Now she was really going to get it in the neck because she had driven the car more than five hundred kilometres. Her sister was enjoying dragging it out.
‘A little village just north of Jokkmokk.’
Cecilia slowly tucked her feet beneath her as she reached for the silver-coloured plastic snus tin on the coffee table. She looked at her little sister with narrow, glittering brown eyes. A square of oily skin shone on her forehead where her fringe had parted.
‘How did it go then?’
‘She seemed pretty sound,’ Susso said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘So I set up a camera. The Reconyx.’
Cecilia inserted a snus pouch.
‘Tell Mum,’ she said slowly, ‘that you’ll work instead of me.’
Not a day went by without Susso looking in on her mother. It seemed natural because they lived in the same block of flats on Mommagatan 1, Susso on the second floor and Gudrun on the third. It was a shabby concrete three-storey building with a dirty-pink facade, situated opposite the big hotel with its dark-brown brick permanently covered with expanding frost patches.
When she opened the door the dog started barking and thrashing its bushy tail. Susso crouched down and was forced to grab hold of a coat hanging in the hall to stop herself from being knocked over by the eager dog. He was part terrier but also part Spitz, as was evident from his curled tail. In the spirit of irony he was called Hound of the Baskervilles, but was also known as Basker. Her mother claimed he was registered with the kennel club.
‘Hasn’t he had a walk today?’ she called into the flat.
‘I’m not well!’
‘So I heard.’
Susso removed her jacket and hung it from the hall cupboard handle. Through the doorway she saw half of her mother sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. Her sleeve was pulled up, revealing her watch with its thin strap of blue leather. The radio was on, the volume turned to a pointlessly low level. There was a smell of burnt coffee.
When Susso sat down at the table Gudrun looked up and smiled quickly, wrinkles radiating out from the corners of her eyes. There were beads of mascara on the tips of her eyelashes. Had she been working in the shop anyway? Either that or her boyfriend Roland had looked in.
Susso pulled off her hat, put it on the table and kept her hand inside it, playing with the wool.
‘Do you want coffee?’
‘Coffee? What, now?’
Gudrun folded the newspaper and looked at her.
‘Wine then?’
Susso shrugged: why not? She took out a stick of lip salve and rubbed it over her lips. They were always dry when she was out in the cold. There was something wrong with her, some gene that made her unsuited to the subarctic climate. Gudrun stood up, took two glasses out of the cupboard and walked over to the worktop, where the wine bottles lay in a cast-iron rack next to the microwave. She was wearing a loose-fitting apricot-coloured viscose top, the fabric so thin her bra was visible.
The glasses arrived on the table and Gudrun sat down, one foot beneath her, the way she always did when she drank wine: it was her relaxed mode. There was a short clucking sound from the bottle, then streams of red poured into the glasses.
Susso tucked a greasy strand of hair behind her ear.
‘The woman I was with today might have seen something, I think,’ she said slowly. ‘The one in Vaikijaur. Edit, she’s called.’
Gudrun pulled at her top but said nothing.
‘It came sneaking into her garden. A little old man, or that’s what it looked like, about a metre tall. She said he had cat’s eyes.’
‘Cat’s eyes?’
‘You know. Horizontal pupils.’
‘That sounds strange . . .’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘But you believe her then? Has she got any evidence?’
‘Not evidence exactly, but she saw him in full daylight, at a distance of about two metres, maybe less. Through the window. That makes it an absolutely unique observation.’
Gudrun placed the tips of her thumbs and index fingers on the foot of the wine glass and turned it a half circle.
‘Did you set up the camera?’
Susso nodded.
‘So in a few weeks’ time I’ve got to borrow your car so I can drive up and collect it. I don’t want to ask Cecilia again, she gets so shitty about it. She lives to lend me her car and then make me pay her back somehow.’
Gudrun nodded.
They sat without speaking for a moment, and then Susso said:
‘I was thinking about something when I stopped in Porjus. There are cables there, running above the road, coming from the power station. And they kind of sing. Why do you think they do that? Does electricity sing?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘But think if it is because of all the electricity streaming through them, and the trolls felt it. I’ve heard they disappeared when electricity came to the countryside. They must have felt the current really strongly, everywhere, in every single wire. Do you think that could have been why?’
‘Susso . . .’
‘But don’t you think that sounds logical?’
Gudrun pushed up her sleeves and looked at the clock.
‘Are you working tomorrow?’
After he had replaced the receiver on the wall he remained standing in the unlit kitchen, hesitating. He had detected an undisguised tension in Börje’s voice and it made him uncertain. He regretted saying he would go in and look. Now he more or less had to.
He pulled on his boots and went out, but turned back immediately to get his torch, which was attached to the fridge door by a magnet. There was no lighting in Hybblet. There had been too much playing about with the switches.
The snow was biting cold against his neck and he stopped to zip his jacket all the way up to the top. As he walked across the yard he recognised a feeling of resistance.
The beam from his torch swept over the netting of the dog compound and met eyes suspended in a row. The dogs were uneasy, not surprisingly. The previous night had made them afraid.
Why had they never told him before what had happened in the dog pen? Why had no one told him they were capable of such meaningless cruelty? Börje and Ejvor had always assured him they were entirely safe. But if they could set on the dogs, where did they draw the line? Was there a line?
It is like some bloody frenzy.
That was all Börje would say when Seved asked him what had happened. He realised it was serious all right—more serious than Börje and Ejvor let on. Lennart had turned up no less than three times during the last month, and on one occasion he had been accompanied by a couple of people Seved had never seen before. A bearded man who had walked with a limp around the outside of the building and an older woman in a wheelchair. He had only seen her back. There was also a girl, pushing the wheelchair. Seved had not dared to ask who they were.
Now he had reached the veranda, and he stopped to listen before pulling down the door handle. It was so silent he could hear the snowflakes floating in and landing on the black sacks.
Because he knew the door was warped and difficult to open, he tugged it hard.
The stench hit him, a warm, sickening blast from the dark interior. It was a smell of rotten meat, rancid dry fodder and old piss, blended with fumes from a strong alkaline cleaning solution. And excrement. What it had smelled like when Ejvor had gone in to clean up he did not want to imagine. By then no one had cleaned in there for almost three weeks. All they had done was carry in plastic bags and boxes of food.
With his left hand covering hi
s nose and mouth he stepped over the threshold and carefully kicked the snow off the soles of his boots. Not too hard—he did not want it to sound as if he was knocking.
He shone the torch on the circular pattern of the cork matting and then over the faded floral wallpaper on the narrow wall that separated the two doors on the opposite side of the hall. There was a rustling of small clawed feet in one of the rooms. He stood listening, feeling anxious, and after a while was forced to let go of his nose and draw in air.
Christ, what a stink! He twisted his face in disgust and fought as hard as he could against the impulse to run out.
Perhaps he ought to let them know he was here after all? It went against his instinct, but the big ones did not like people creeping up on them. They were exactly like bears in that respect. It could get dangerous.
‘Ejvor?’ he said.
He waited a few seconds and then he said:
‘Mum?’
There was no way he would shout. Even sudden noises could irritate them, and it would almost certainly upset the little ones.
He could not see her, so she must have gone downstairs, as he thought. Because she couldn’t be upstairs, surely? He shone his torch up the staircase but quickly lowered it. He did not know which of them was in the house, and considering Ejvor was hardly likely to be on the upper floor it was unnecessary to disturb them.
He looked into the kitchen. They had already made a mess. A real mess.
On the floor lay polystyrene trays with remnants of minced meat long turned grey. There were half-eaten packages of black pudding and liver pâté and bacon, and an upturned paper carrier bag from the supermarket with its contents of apples and potatoes strewn across the floor. It looked as if they had amused themselves by trampling on it.
Around the buckets lined up under the draining board the cork matting was black with pellets of dry fodder. Someone had dug down deeply to see if there was anything else at the bottom.
Normally they didn’t crap in the kitchen, but judging from the smell they must have done, and it was when he was searching for their droppings with the torchlight that he caught sight of her, only a few metres away.
She was sitting with her back propped against the wall and her legs straight out in front of her, her hands resting limply on the floor. The head torch was resting on her chest like a large pendant.
It never occurred to him to approach Ejvor, so he must have immediately registered that something was wrong, but he aimed the torch at her for several seconds before realising that the back of her head with the shiny knot of hair was where her face should be, and that she was staring straight at the wallpaper without seeing it.
The long hours of daylight that fortify us and the unyielding darkness that wraps itself thickly around the shimmering green swirls of the northern lights—it is primarily these extraordinary and mutually opposed forces that led our family, the Myréns, to investigate and eventually reveal the existence of trolls.
Dad was drawn to the dramatic play between light and darkness, and to the landscape itself, of course. And he drew us with him.
This is what I remember him saying, or rather singing:
‘Sweden, Sweden, country of wildlife, winter country of fiery northern lights.’
I used to wonder what kind of image foreigners have of our circumpolar land. A windswept and frost-ravaged expanse? A barren and for the most part wretched region, sparsely populated, if not to say uninhabited? A stag standing proudly on a mountain, with jutting chest, a nimbus of hoar frost around his raised antlers, the northern lights radiating behind him? Or is it a howling wolf, or the muffled sound of troll drums? I know. Perhaps I know better than anyone how that image has been formed, and that is because I come into contact with the hordes of tourists. The airport buses deposit their cargo literally outside my shop door, and the mine tours start and finish here. Naturally I’m grateful for that: if the shop had not been quite so central and located next to the tourist information office, lending it an unmerited official status, I would have frozen to death in seconds.
In winter the northern lights are our foremost attraction, and naturally enough the capriciousness with which they choose to reveal themselves increases their appeal. Many who come here like to think of the northern lights as some sort of compensation for the stolen daylight, that they appear every night in the same way that the moonlight is switched on. They stand with their faces turned skywards, waiting patiently. Then the next day they come into my shop and complain: ‘No aurora last night.’
But it isn’t the deep, solemn winter that brings the tourists here, it’s the midnight sun. The light that never fades. People come from all over the world to see it. The majority are Germans, of course, then the French and the Spanish. They think it’s amazing, seeing the sun hanging on the horizon. Odd, in fact. As if there must be something wrong.
That’s our high season, when the shop is most crowded, the backpacks colliding between the shelves. And that is the time I think about Dad the most. He stands with me behind the counter, which is strange because he certainly never did that in real life.
The shop is named after him: Gunnar Myrén Ltd. Here, among all the other things, are his photos, reduced to postcard size or enlarged as posters. And books of photographs that are so large they have to be laid flat to fit on the shelves. Folios, they are called.
Like Dad I make a living from the landscape. My business is the exotic shimmering image of Lapland which Dad, in a not inconsiderable way, has helped to shape. The shop window says Photographs Books Cards Handicrafts, underlined with the billowing line of the familiar silhouette of the Lapland Gate, in far northern Sweden.
We stock what were previously called Lapland handicrafts but are now known as duodji. There are knives with handles and sheaths made of reindeer horn. Cups, boxes and figurines carved from mottled masur birch, and Sami ceremonial drums.
We also stock a lot of random knick-knacks, because you have to: key rings and bottle openers; small round badges you can pin onto your lapel which say Kiruna, but also Sverige or Sweden; and sweatshirts with prints of wolf heads, the northern lights, reindeer herds and magic inscriptions. We have fridge magnets, and even Dala horses: it would never occur to a Swede to buy a horse from Dalarna while visiting Kiruna, but people from Spain are not so fussy and we get a lot of Spanish people here. So they sell well.
We also have trolls, naturally. The artist Rolf Lidberg, from Sundsvall, has made picture books about kindly, large-nosed trolls who live on the banks of the Indals River and fish for salmon, and we stock his books. These trolls are also pictured on napkins and paper cups and plates.
But the real troll—the family’s troll, if you like—is not something we have tried to make a profit from. We keep that to ourselves.
At least, we did for many years.
It was my daughter Susso who changed everything.
Dad was a pilot. He flew a single-engine amphibious Piper. In fact, he owned three aircraft through the years, all Pipers, so in my mind they are one and the same plane. In this fragile but heroically reliable mode of transport he floated above the most northerly regions of Sweden. He was a genuine pioneer. No one had flown there before him. Not like that, not to look around and capture those fabulous views on paper.
Often he photographed Tjuonavagge, the valley commonly known as the Lapland Gate. If you have ever seen a photograph of the Lapland Gate, there is a good chance it was Dad who took it, and if it is an aerial shot, then I can almost guarantee it was him. This particular motif did not interest him especially, but it was popular, and Dad was a businessman through and through, if perhaps a hot-headed and impatient one.
He would rather photograph the striking lowland fell in Rapadalen, the one he called the Lonely Mountain, though its real name is Nammatj. In the Sami language that means ‘nameless’. He also loved the Skierfe: the ‘sheer drop’.
There are dramatically sharp features on the face of the ancient landscape.
In the beginning
he travelled on skis. He trained with the Ski Battalion in Boden, and it was during his military service that he became familiar with the most northerly parts of the country. He came into the world further south in Örnsköldsvik, which made him a man of Ångermanland, and I like to believe that I have Ångermanland in my heart as well, because I have never liked it up here. In a way I hate the life here: the coarse mentality that dominates the iron ore mining fields, the macho culture, the stubbornness and the corrosive, everlasting gossip. The darkness and the cold which leave deep and permanent frost damage in their wake, both in buildings and people. The reindeer and their pastures, as sacred as cemeteries.
But I got stuck here, somehow. Just like Dad. Although for him it was different: he was mesmerised by the mountains. During the war he was posted to Riksgränsen, the northern border, and liked the place so much that he settled there. ‘A fells convert,’ he used to say.
Riksgränsen was a dreadfully isolated place when Dad first went there. It’s almost impossible to imagine how isolated it was. So living there was more or less impossible. And I think that was what attracted him because few were as stubborn as he was. He bought a ski cabin by Lake Vassijaure and above the front door, which opened inwards, he nailed a sign with the words: MYRÉN’S PHOTO STUDIO.
He stayed there for as long as a person can be in one place. When he died he had been living in Riksgränsen for over fifty years.
He was a physically strong man, but fragile in spite of that. It changed from one day to the next. He was something of a hypochondriac too, if I’m honest. He often grimaced, bared his teeth and sighed, relating in detail how his body had let him down, and he complained despairingly that nothing worked the way it should: the plane, the cameras, his knees. There was always something letting him down.
The fragile side of him would carry him to unsuspected heights, however. That’s how we’ll have to look at it. Following a knee injury, when Dad felt as if the fell world was drifting out of his reach, he acquired an aircraft and then learned to fly. In that order. It was a large and risky investment, but it succeeded. No one had photographed the fells from above before.
