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.
Torbjorn Ylitalo, the chairman of Poikkijarvi hunting club, was out in his yard sawing wood when Anna-Maria Mella arrived. She stopped the car and got out. His back was toward her. His red ear protectors meant that he hadn’t heard her. She took the opportunity to have a little look around in peace.
Well-looked-after geraniums in the window behind checked curtains. Presumably married, then. Tidy flower beds. Not a single fallen leaf on the lawn. The fence beautifully painted Falun red, with white tips.
Anna-Maria thought about her own fence, covered in patches of algae, and the paint flaking off the southern gable in great lumps.
We must paint it next summer, she thought.
But wasn’t that just what she’d thought last autumn?
Torbjorn Ylitalo’s chainsaw bit through the wood with a piercing shriek. When he threw the last piece to one side and bent down to pick up a fresh meter-long piece, Anna-Maria shouted to attract his attention.
He turned around, took off his ear protectors and switched off the saw. Torbjorn Ylitalo was in his sixties. A bit rough, but somehow well groomed. The remaining hair on his head was just like his beard, gray and well cut. When he had taken off his goggles, he opened his shiny blue work jacket and took out a pair of flexible, rimless Sven- Goran Eriksson glasses which he fixed firmly on his big lumpy nose. Sunburned and weather-beaten above the white neck. His earlobes were two big flaps of skin, but Anna-Maria noticed that the razor had been over them as well.
Not like Sven-Erik, she thought.
Sometimes there were clumps of hair like witches’ brooms growing out of his ears.
They sat down in the kitchen. Anna-Maria accepted the offer of a cup of coffee when Torbjorn Ylitalo said he was having one himself anyway.
He measured coffee into the machine and rummaged ineffectually in the freezer, seemed relieved when Anna- Maria said she didn’t want anything to eat.
“Are you on holiday before the elk hunting season starts?” asked Anna-Maria.
“No, but I’ve got very flexible working hours, you know.”
“Mmm, you’re the forestry officer for the church.”
“That’s right.”
“Chairman of the hunting club, and a member of the hunting team.”
He nodded.
They chatted for a while about hunting and gathering berries.
Anna-Maria took a notepad and pen out of the inside pocket of her jacket, which she’d kept on. She placed them on the table in front of her.
“As I said outside, this is about Mildred Nilsson. You and she didn’t get on, according to what I’ve heard.”
Torbjorn Ylitalo looked at her. He wasn’t smiling, he hadn’t smiled once so far. He took a sip of his coffee without hurrying, placed the cup on the saucer and asked:
“Who told you that?”
“Was it true?”
“What can I say, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but she sowed a lot of discord and bitterness in this village.”
“In what way?”
“I’ll be honest with you: she hated men. I really believe she wanted the women in the village to leave their men. And there isn’t much you can do in that situation.”
“Are you married?”
“Tick the yes box!”
“Did she try to get your wife to leave you?”
“No, not her. But there were others.”
“So exactly what did you and Mildred fall out about?”
“Well, it was this bloody stupid idea of having a quota system in the hunting team. Top-up?”
Anna-Maria shook her head.
“You know, every other member a woman. She thought that should be a condition if the lease was to be renewed.”
“And you thought that was a bad idea.”
A little more energy crept into his almost leisurely way of speaking.
“Well, there wasn’t really anybody who thought it was a good idea, apart from her. And I certainly don’t hate women, but I do think people should compete for places on the board of a company, or for parliament, or for that matter for our little hunting team, on equal terms. It really would be inequality if you got a place just because you were a woman. And how would you gain any respect? And besides- what’s wrong with letting the men do the hunting? Sometimes I think hunting is our last outpost. Leave us to do at least that in peace. I didn’t bloody well insist on joining her women’s Bible group.”
“So you fell out about that, you and Mildred?”
