The Blood Spilt

24


Rebecka Martinsson and Nalle turned up outside Sivving Fj?llborg’s door like two casual laborers. He greeted them as if he’d been expecting them and invited them down to the boiler room. Bella was lying in a wooden box on a bed of rag rugs, sleeping with the puppies in a heap under her stomach. She just opened one eye and thumped her tail in greeting when the visitors came in.
At around one o’clock she’d called at Nalle’s house and rung the doorbell. Nalle’s father Lars-Gunnar had opened the door. A big man, filling the doorway. She’d stood out on the porch feeling like a five-year-old asking her friend’s parents if her friend can come out to play.
Sivving put the coffee on and got out thick mugs with a pattern of big flowers in yellow, orange and brown. He put some bread in a basket and took margarine and sausage out of the refrigerator.
It was cool down in the cellar. The smell of dog and fresh coffee blended with faint traces of earth and concrete. The autumn sun shone down through the narrow window below the ceiling.
Sivving looked at Rebecka. She must have found some clothes stored at her grandmother’s. He recognized the black anorak with the white snowflakes on it. He wondered if she knew it had belonged to her mother. Probably not.
And it was unlikely that anybody would have told her how much she looked like her mother. The same long, dark brown hair and distinctive eyebrows. Square-shaped eyes, the iris an indefinable light sandy color with a dark ring.
The puppies woke up. Big paws and ears, tumbling playfully, tails like little propellers against the side of the box. Rebecka and Nalle sat down on the floor and shared their sandwiches with them as Sivving cleared away.
“Nothing else smells quite this good,” said Rebecka, inhaling deeply with her nose pressed against a puppy’s ear.
“That particular one isn’t spoken for yet,” said Sivving. “Want to stake your claim?”
The puppy was chewing on Rebecka’s hand with needle sharp teeth. His coat was chocolate brown, the hair so soft and short it felt like silky skin. His back paws had been dipped in white.
She put him back in the box and stood up.
“I can’t. I’ll wait outside.”
She’d been on the point of saying she worked too hard to have a dog.
* * *

Rebecka and Sivving were lifting potatoes. Sivving went in front pulling off the tops with his good hand. Rebecka followed with the hoe.
“Just dig and hoe,” said Sivving, “that’s great. Otherwise I was going to ask Lena, she’s coming up at the weekend with the boys.”
Lena was his daughter.
“I’m happy to do it,” said Rebecka.
She pushed the hoe back and forth; it was easy to work in the sandy soil. Then she picked up the almond potatoes that had come away from the tops and remained in the ground.
Nalle was running around on the lawn with an old bird’s wing on a string, playing with the puppies. From time to time Rebecka and Sivving straightened their backs and looked across at them. You had to smile. Nalle with his hand holding the string high up in the air, yelling and shouting, his knees pumping up and down as he ran. The puppies chasing after him, full of the excitement of the chase. Bella was lying on her side on the grass, enjoying the warmth of the autumn sunshine. Lifted her head from time to time to snap at an annoying horsefly or to check on the little ones.
I’m just not normal, thought Rebecka. I can’t cope with being around my work colleagues who are the same age as me, but with an old man and somebody who’s retarded I feel as if I can be myself.
“I remember when I was little,” she said. “When the adults had lifted the potatoes, you always lit a fire out on the field in the evening. And we were allowed to bake the potatoes that were left behind.”
“Charred black on the outside, reasonably well cooked just inside the skin, and raw on the inside. Oh, I remember. And what you looked like when you came in later. Covered in soot and soil from top to toe.”
Rebecka smiled at the memory. They had learned to respect fire, the children weren’t really allowed to be responsible for a fire on their own, but the evening after potato picking was an exception. Then the fire belonged to them. There was Rebecka, her cousins, and Sivving’s Mats and Lena. They used to sit there in the darkness of the autumn evening, gazing into the flames. Poking at it with sticks. Feeling just like Red Indians in a boys’ adventure story.
They wouldn’t go in to Grandmother until ten or eleven o’clock— it was practically the middle of the night. Happy and filthy. The adults had taken a sauna much earlier, and were sitting around drinking and chatting. Grandmother and Uncle Affe’s wife Inga-Lill and Sivving’s wife Maj-Lis drinking tea, Sivving and Uncle Affe with a Tuborg. She remembered the picture of the old men on the label. “Hvergang.”
She and the other children had had the sense to stay in the hallway rather than trailing half the potato field into the kitchen.
“My, here come the Hottentots,” Sivving would laugh. “I can’t tell how many there are, because the hall is as dark as a mine shaft and their skin is as black as coal. Come on, let’s see you laugh so we can count the rows of teeth!”
They used to laugh. Take towels from Grandmother. Run down to the sauna by the river and get themselves clean in the fading heat.