Scratchcards

At first Elis thought a Norwegian had driven up. But it was a Swede in a Norwegian rental car. There was no telling how old he was. Everyone between eighteen and thirty-five looked the same age. Nowadays no one had to have teeth pulled.

The man walked over to the chopping block where Elis was standing in the hot sunshine. He’d been about to split a little kindling.

“Elias Elv. Is that you?” he shouted. “Fantastic to meet you.”

Suppen was barking so loud it wasn’t easy for the fellow to make himself heard. He had a crew cut, but not so short that his scalp shone through. Spikes of reddish hair standing straight up. He was wearing an undershirt, topped with a vest with lots of pockets. It was apparent that the pockets were full of film. The man’s skillful fingers pushed up a roll and inserted it into the camera he was carrying.

“You don’t mind if I take a shot of you,” he said.

“I damn well do.”

“Oh, but I’ve got to have a picture, ” he said. “This is just fantastic.”

“Put that infernal camera away,” said Elis, as Suppen approached the man on his stiff legs, and produced a deep, rumbling bark. It died away soon enough, though. He was no longer what he used to be; he tired easily and preferred to lie in the sun right up against the cowshed wall, baking himself groggy.

“I’m from the Express," the man said. “Come to see you because of the exhibition at the National Museum. Congratulations. What a fantastic success.”

Didn’t he realize he was making waves from an ancient sea break on the usually quiet, stony shore? There was something peculiar about him. He was showing off. Or intentionally playing the fool. Something wasn’t right, anyway. When he said he thought they ought to go inside where they could sit and talk for a while, Elis retorted that they could just as well talk where they were. He said just go ahead and talk if you’ve got anything to say.

“You’ve had a long life,” the man said, squinting off in the direction of the front steps and the door. He reminded Elis of burglars who insinuate their way in. He’d be asking for a glass of water before long.

“Fantastic,” he said again.

Elis stayed at his chopping block. It was a hot day but he had his hat on, and wouldn’t be the first to succumb. If I have to, I’ll go sit on the steps to the hayloft, he thought to himself. If I can just make it over there.

The reporter from the Express was telling him they wanted to do a really good story about the remarkable life of Elias Elv. He said it was a fittya, and when Elis asked what a fittya was he talked for ages, but he couldn’t explain. Not until he spelled it out did Elis realize he was talking about a feature.

“A fittya,” Elis said tentatively. Suppen raised his head and let out a couple of deep, listless barks.

It didn’t seem to matter much that Elis wasn’t talking, because the fellow knew the story of his life as if it was his own, beginning way back when he had lived in Oslo and studied at the Academy of Art. He’d read up on Elis in the newspaper’s archive, in art books and catalogues from previous exhibitions. He could have become a millionaire on quiz shows if the topic was the remarkable life of Elias Elv.

“And then there was Germany,” the fellow said. “From nineteen twenty-six to nineteen thirty-five. What was that like?”

“What?”

“What was it like in Germany?”

“I’m not deaf,” said Elis, which was almost true, because he’d been expecting Anand and had his hearing aid on.

“There’s nothing from those years in the retrospective,” the man said.

“No, I wasn’t into glass in those days.”

“There’s not a word in the catalogue, either,” he said. “Not in any catalogue, as far as I know. Or any art book.”

“Ah, no.”

“Why not?”

“What?”

“You’ve had plenty of exhibitions, but you’ve never shown anything from those years.”

You numbskull, Elis thought. Would they bring up whole stone walls by express freight? Whole auditoriums? But you probably know nothing about that. You and your fittyas.

But he did, actually, because the next thing he said was: “You were doing big work then. Real showpieces.”

Suppen had fallen asleep. His big paws were extended and he was snoring so hard his breath was making the dandelions quiver. Elis wished he could lie down somewhere. Or at least sit. The numbskull went on:

“So did you join?”

“What?”

"The German National Socialist Worker’s Party. Did you join?”

The blood was coursing through his veins. It was the kind of jolt he never got any more. Every blood vessel in his body was alive. They were filling up, almost to bursting. His ears were ringing. Even the little vessels in his fingers were tingling.

It wasn’t shame though, and it wasn’t fear either. Astonishment? Yes, possibly astonishment. And something resembling appreciation, akin to admiration. He was a sneaky bastard, with his red spikes sticking straight up as if someone had brushed them with melted butter.

“Where did you get that from?”

The man with the spikes smiled, as if with pleasure.

“Who?” Elis amended.

It was really just the rushing blood expressing itself. He hadn’t expected an answer. They never revealed their sources. It wasn’t a matter of ethics, he didn’t think they had any. But it was the law. So he was even more astonished, absolutely stunned, when the man replied: “Her name is Dagmar Dickert, née Ellefsen. She asked to be remembered to you.”

He pulled out a copy of a Norwegian local newspaper, turning the pages until he found what he was looking for. Elis took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on slowly and ceremoniously to gain time. Once he was able to focus he saw a large photo of an old woman, a vase of oxeye daisies and a coffee cup on a checked tablecloth. A veined hand with no ring was also lying there, like an object.

An old lady in whom a huge fire was raging.

“I’ve been to see her,” said the journalist. “She was definitely looking her age, even though the home care people must have dressed her up the day the people from Adresseavisen were there. When I called she asked me to bring a couple of bottles of Rosita from Sweden.”

“What’s that?”

“Cheap imitation Campari.”

He’s playing her off against me, thought Elis. Undoubtedly did the same with her. If he needed to. As Elis skimmed the article in the Trondheim paper about Norwegian-born Elias Elv and the huge retrospective that was going on tour after the National Museum in Stockholm and would be coming to Oslo, it occurred to him Dagmar Dickert had probably phoned the local paper herself. Took a swig right out of the bottle. To keep the fire going. Waited.

“Did you know she was in prison after the war?”

He didn’t answer.

“She told me she spent her days cutting rags for rugs.”

The furnace was roaring. Revenge! The fire bellowed. There’s life in me yet. Think nothing else. Not a stale exhalation from a nearly toothless mouth, but a fiery flame hot as hell. Ah, so there’s life in you yet, is there? Well. There’s life in me, too!

Once upon a time you left without a word. That was in 1926. But time doesn’t pass. Not down at the very bottom.

You got fame. I got prison. You took my money and went off unpunished to a new life. You had all that talent. A genius takes the money and runs. The first time he leaves behind a messy studio and a lot of empty bottles of vintage wines from the Ellefsen wine cellar. The next time a prison cell in which he should have been. The genius.

You can’t get a prison sentence. But shame.

Shame is what you have earned and shame is what you will have.

Does a little old woman have such thoughts in her toothlessness? Her muscles have atrophied but her mind is bright and clear. The flame of hate cuts like a welding iron.

Then he heard the voice of the young man, the mastermind journalist on his way to instant fame. He was still hacking questions into his flesh. But now there were no feelings.

“Go to hell,” said Elis.

"That’s hardly fair. I’ve travelled three thousand nine hundred kilometers. I’ve waded through the pages of old German newspaper files. And you know what? You ought to say something about it for your own sake.”

He’s starting to get intimate, Elis thought. Soon he’ll be addressing me as if we were old friends.

“You asked me a question and I answered it. Now you owe me an answer, too,” the man insisted.

Elis turned towards the chopping block and picked up his axe. That was to make it clear that the conversation was over. He was going back to his everyday life. Chop some wood. Or at least split some kindling. He was tired of being nagged at and wanted to be left in peace. To emphasize his feelings, he raised his bid to go straight to hell! That woke Suppen. He rushed up and growled, mostly to put a good face on it and show his sympathy. He was a tired old dog. Not much bothered him any more. But still: Growl! You go right to hell. Do that.

That was when the genius of a journalist snapped the photo.

///

When my son Klemens stood trial there were no high level gentlemen from the Swedish Association there, no well-educated Sami in all their finery. I’ve heard they only come when precedents are at stake. When the case is about grazing rights on forest land, they come, all dressed up in their ceremonial garb.

And it’s true, Klemens is nothing but an old Lapp. No two ways about it. He’s not bothered by the farmers who own great tracts of forest, all he’s bothered by is the wolves. A she-wolf and the two males who were her own vicious offspring had killed seventeen of his reindeer. When his case was heard in the district court in Östersund he did not appear in Sami folk dress because he doesn’t own any. He would have been given one by his paternal Uncle Aslak when he was confirmed. A woman in Langvasslia who was kin to us had been asked to make it. But that never happened. Klemens, because he was a Lapp, didn’t feel comfortable in the Röbäck church. That’s how things were in those days.

It’s a different time now and Klemens has to live in it. He has lived through a number of times and I haven’t had the power to protect the life that was rightfully his. He certainly didn’t grow up with the old songs and sagas. He is a reindeer herder and that is that. He is the man his Uncle Aslak taught him to be: a rope lasso on his shoulder and a dog at his heels. That is how he lived. His dog always there, running alongside his snowmobile, if not in front of it. When he tired, Klemens would let him jump in and sit in front of him. But that is all over now, that and lots of other things as well.

His maternal uncle, Anund Larsson, was the death of lots of wolves in his time, and highly respected for it. But he no longer had any reindeer to look after. Anund’s father, who was my grandfather, and Klemens great-grandfather, Mickel Larsson, lost all his reindeer status because the wolves went so hard at his herds. All the reindeer herding families who lived here at the time were in the same kind of trouble, they had to leave for elsewhere. It was a real den of wolves around here, they said, and no place for mankind. My grandfather stayed and tried to manage. In the end he had to get himself a pair of goats he could bring inside at night. They reproduced well for him, and I imagine it was their milk I drank, right up until I was brought down to the village and taken in by the shopkeeper and his family.

The newspapers gave the case against Klemens a lot of coverage. He had committed something they called a “fauna crime.” That was what the Minister for Environmental Affairs called it. He wasn’t making a statement on the specific case, he said, but there was a considerable amount of criminality associated with hunting, and such crimes were often extremely brutal. He planned to submit a draft bill that would make two years in prison the top sanction.

“I jes can’t b’lieve me eyes,” said Mats when he read that. “Two years behind bars for a wolf. It’s more than ye get for killing a man, almost. At least if yez been drinkin’.”

What he said about the trial was that Klemens had got himself trapped in a position, which was why it had ended up so badly.

But Klemens doesn’t get trapped. I don’t think either Mats or I can describe how he thinks about the world. He sits here at the kitchen table sometimes with his betting sheet in front of him, raises his head and watches the wind pull the rain out of a heavy-hanging cloud and drive it across the lake. He watches for ages. He’s spent lots of time in the blustery cold winter watching his reindeer out on the ice, watching them make the most of the few rays of sunlight that penetrate the rolling clouds being pressed along by the western wind. They would raise their heads and their antlers would sway like bare branches in the woods as they sought a scent that would tell them there was a breeze they could run to meet, a lively stretch of wind they could run with. Klemens was the one who told me there were bears up on Mount Brannberg. I would never have known I had an ermine with a litter of five cubs under the sheep shed if he hadn’t told me about it.

Then, though, he was trapped in his position. The police investigation lasted ages, which is typical around here, but this time they took DNA samples that had to be sent for analysis. That was particularly time consuming. When they finally finished, the prosecutor announced that Klemens was being held on probable suspicion of having violated the Hunting Act.

He had been aware of those two men on snowmobiles by whom he had had the bad luck to be trailed and who had therefore seen the site of the slaughter. He would have considered it probable that the blood on his trousers and on the butt of the rifle had been from a wolf. It was clearly the blood of an animal, maelie, not virre from a human being.

But the fact that a wad of snuff could tell whose mouth it had been in was just going too far for him. Some people thought he was stupid. He’s not. Mats called it getting trapped in a position. I don’t really think that’s quite right either.

He just gave up. He just didn’t want to acknowledge the world he had to live in. That’s the closest I can come to putting into words what he must have been thinking. So he pleaded not guilty. That was what he said at the very beginning and he stuck to it, even when they told him it had been proven beyond doubt that he had killed the she-wolf. The lawyer had a word with Mats and explained to him that there was no point in Klemens denying it, that he would be better able to defend Klemens if he told the truth. It could be seen as an extenuating circumstance that he had lost so many reindeer. But only if Klemens was prepared to answer their questions.

“Mom, make him see reason,” said Mats. “They’ve got their DNA analysis.”

But in fact I understood what quicksand Klemens would be in if he changed his statement and admitted he’d been lying. Although I couldn’t explain it in sensible words, I knew how he was feeling. Mats was furious with me, but I said:

“You and I believe in DNA sampling. But why, actually?”

“Dammit, it’s proof. Scientific,” said Mats.

“We’ve read that in the newspaper,” I said. ‘That’s why we b’lieve it.’

“You have to believe what they say. The scientists.”

And everybody did, of course. So did I. But Klemens refused.

When the court pronounced judgement, Klemens Klementsen was convicted of having committed a gross violation of the Hunting Act, and sentenced to one year in prison. He was also fined forty thousand kronor. Of course he didn’t have forty thousand and neither did I. I had lent my savings to Mats to refurbish the guest house kitchen that time when the board of public health wouldn’t stop hassling him. Klemens's lawyer said there was no point in appealing unless he was prepared to plead differently and contribute new facts to the investigation. The prosecutor, on the other hand, wanted to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. He said there was a significant principle at stake. The wolf had been hunted down and put to death with extreme ruthlessness and cruelty. That's what he said on the local news. They also had a man from the county administrative board on, who talked about how important it was to prosecute fauna criminals. Vigorously and consistently. He said that there had been a crusade in our area to exterminate the wolves. Unfortunately, quite a successful crusade. Now that we have an incipient stock we must safeguard both the stock and the individual animals, and remain aware of the fragility of the situation. In this case the most valuable animal in the flock had been killed, namely the she-fox, and at autopsy she had been found to have three cubs in her womb.

He went on and on like that, sounding like a preacher. I cannot describe my disgust. Autopsy. Womb. Are wolves like human beings? All I knew was that there was no way Klemens could be away from his reindeer for a year. Before he began to serve his sentence he would have to sell off as many as he could and have the rest slaughtered.

The sentence served upon him made him a poor man. He no longer had a life to speak of. I was glad they had revoked his weapon license and confiscated his rifle.

Linda Schenck’s translation of the first volume of the Wolfskin trilogy, God’s Mercy, was published in the University of Nebraska Press European Women Writers series. It is the only novel in the trilogy available in English.

These excerpts from Scratchcards were translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck for this portfolio. Reproduced by permission of Bonnier Rights, Sweden.