Tucking up her legs, the old woman demonstrated how they had curled up in the lair and Salmon laughed so much she dropped the fish.
«But they were discovered by huntsmen who woke them up and killed them. As they were skinning the carcasses, the youngest sister sprang out of the lair. She threw herself onto the outstretched skin, all but one paw. She regained her human shape but one hand remained a bear's paw…»
Salmon thought for a while, wiping her fish-stained hands on her skirt.
«What's the point of the story? What does it mean?»
«What's the point of life?» blinked the old lady. «Or of the day gone by? Or the night? Unless we learn from our mistakes no story can teach us anything.» the Saami woman laughed, daubing Salmon's nose with flour.
Rolling crushed bark in leaves, Savage watched young boys packing reindeer antler buttons into packets. The Saami loaded them on to a sled, along with the tanned skins, and took them into town to be sold or exchanged for much needed items. The boys' father, a round-faced man with such fat cheeks he seemed to have his mouth full all the time, used to take the goods into town. Once he met some local freight handlers, jolly red-faced drunkards with whom he spent all his earnings on drink. Then, so as not to go back empty-handed, he sold the reindeer and the sled but drank the money away in a nearby bar. He couldn't remember how he got home. He walked for many miles with his pockets emptied out and his spirit as black as the forest after wildfire, until he collapsed in the snow and into a fever. The old Saami woman nursed him with an infusion of wormwood and heather, spiced with prayers and charms, and the children wept at his feet but he died all the same without regaining consciousness. From then on, his wife pulled the loaded sled, keeping her purse beneath her shirt and her lips sealed. All the crying over her husband had cost her the sight of one eye and, looking at her, Savage was reminded of his own wife, widowed while her husband was still alive.
The old Saami woman took a bottle of vodka from under her skirt and the men held out their mugs that had small stones or a coin at the bottom. The old woman poured out thick coffee-like brew made from pine bark, splashing in vodka measured out by sight like medicine. The men drank, smacking their lips to avoid swallowing the stones. Savage, draining his cup in one gulp, admitted that he wanted to stay.
«Everybody wants to,» said the Saami shaking their heads, «but no-one ever does.»
But Salmon did. She went into convulsions and her arms clutched at the women like the branches of a dry tree. Her chest heaved so fiercely it seemed that the beautiful girl she once was might leap out of it at any moment. Wailing like the wind in a churchyard, the old Saami woman battled to drive out the demons. She shook her head and beat her drum and the others took up her songs which rolled around in the mouth like pebbles in a river. Salmon just kept getting worse. Already she lay still, staring in terror at the Saami women who looked to her like evil spirits. And then, mouth wide open in horror, she died and her whole life, gone in a flash like a terrible dream, was reflected in her still gaze. The old woman hurtled to the exit, lifting the edge of the tent like the hem of a skirt and the women shouted out loud to drive away Salmon's soul, which, they believed, could get lost and fail to find the world of the dead. As he came out of the tent, Savage saw an old Saami man fashioning a cross. He had a vision of a girl dancing in the coiling smoke over the fire, her ashen hair streaming in the wind like a flag. Savage lit a roll-up from the fire and, listening to the lament of the Saami women, he decided it was time to go home.
«A single log can't burn for long,» said the Saami, huddling together like children afraid of the dark. Savage was sick and tired of his wanderings. There was no longer anyone to cling to and feel that he wasn't alone. He felt as he had on the burning rubbish tip where he had abandoned the red-haired woman and all of a sudden Savage became indifferent to his fate that was as wild and free as the wind in a burning ruin. He understood that for many months he had lived like a wild beast, reliant on his instincts, taking no thought for where he was heading or why. Now, though, he had come to his senses, there in the middle of the Saami encampment, suddenly aware that he was running away from someone he couldn't escape — himself.
Reading his mind, an old Saami man took Savage by the arm and said, «Death is like life, rain, sun and snow. It's given us whether we ask for it or not.»
«What's left?»
«To thank the heavens or curse them. Either way, they won't hear you!»
As required by ancient custom, an empty coffin, hastily cobbled together from planks of wood, was buried on the lake shore. Salmon herself they buried in the Saami cemetery, hidden on one of the islands in the vast lake. From the lakeside, the island with its rocky shores was the same as all the others and it was only on going closer that wooden crosses could be made out, peeping from behind boulders. The Saami believed water stopped the dead returning to the land of the living and so they buried them on islands or the other side of a river.
The Saami tied their boats to a tree and came out on the shore. They set about digging a grave while Salmon's coffin lay in the bay, rocked on the waves like a baby in a cradle. The old man placed the cross on the ground and began to draw Salmon's face on the cross with a piece of coaclass="underline" first one oval then a slightly smaller one for her large toothless mouth, a stripe for a nose, wavy lines for her hair and black dots for eyes. The portrait reminded Savage of the children's drawings stuck up on the walls of the children's home and it occurred to him that the whole world was a children's home, for children forsaken by their Father.
The coffin was lowered into the ground, covered in earth and marked with stones. A cross was set at Salmon's feet and a moss-covered boulder at her head. Food, a headscarf and a knife were left on the grave and Savage, kissing the cross in farewell, secretly slipped a little pebble into his pocket.
The Saami bury their dead silently, without songs or lamentations, because they believe the best funeral song is silence.
Lapin roamed the town, pocketing snatches of conversation, newspaper headlines and inadvertent sighs as he tried to work out how the Savage case had suddenly dissolved and where the evidence against Karimov, seemingly written in invisible ink, had come from.
«I had him down as suspicious straight away. Dark as a gypsy, a real predator and putting himself up in the hotel as if he was always ready to do a runner,» Karimov's secretary told him when he waylaid her after work.
The woman's heels clicked rapidly like fingers on a keyboard and Lapin, struggling to keep up, tried to decipher her Morse code.
«People say he used to help the children's home,» he reminded her.
«That's right. He went there as if he was going to work,» the woman said, curling her lip. «He hugged the kids and stared into space like a zombie. He could stand there for a whole hour, not moving a muscle. You can imagine what the carers had started to think but who could they complain to?»
What Lapin picked up from the click of her heels, however, was: «Talk about the things you don't know, keep quiet about the ones you do know.»
Lapin wandered the streets like a lost soul, joining old ladies on their benches, popping into the bar and starting up conversations with all comers. Lapin thought of himself, «A man without other people is like a letter without a word.» He tried to understand why he had dropped out of the world around him like a word missed out of a poem. He remembered Savage, as superfluous as an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence, and regretted he couldn't look him in the eye and ask, «What makes a man so lonely when he's surrounded by other people?»