To Mervas (11 page)

Over the years, being watched or spoken to had come to feel invasive, like a violation. She'd wrapped layer upon layer of solitude around herself to protect her from a gaze, yet she wasn't exactly sure whose. If she was really honest with herself, she knew it was her own eyes watching her, but she nevertheless kept wrapping that solitude around her; there was nothing else to do.

She tried to sit up a little in the bed to calm down. It can be scary to lie on your back, stretched out and vulnerable. She tried to think of how she'd come to Deep Tarn, how she'd come to Arnold and Lilldolly. This was unknown territory for her, all the trees and the great solitary lakes watching over everything. She contemplated that she'd arrived in a place of still, ancient mountains and loud, winding, gouging rivers and that it was a landscape you couldn't grasp. It was both open and closed, it was din and silence and emptier than anything she could have imagined. This was where she'd come, to this little pocket called Deep Tarn and to the two people who lived here. She tried to think that she was with them now; they'd been here for a long time and they'd let her in, invited her
into their world as if that were completely normal. As if her neighbors back home would've opened their door and said:
Just come on in and sit down,
and then just let her be part of their life. As if there were space for her. As if it were possible, and people didn't have to stick to their own schedules and their own lives.

She tried to stay as present and alert as possible. But something kept telling her she'd misunderstood the situation and made a mistake by staying. Arnold and Lilldolly had probably expected her to decline firmly everything they'd offered and to sleep in the car again. They probably expected her to leave for Mervas, or wherever it was she was going, as early as possible in the morning. They'd insisted on her staying only to be polite, all the while hoping she'd say:
No, no thanks, you're so kind but I have to go.

The strange thing was that she'd never felt that they thought she should have said no and left quickly, and this made everything feel blurry and complicated in the early hours of dawn; their generosity confused her, made her lose track of herself. It would have been easier if she'd been turned away, if they'd sullenly muttered:
Well, you can't stay here, that's for sure.
Or if they'd at least established some firm boundaries so she'd know exactly what was going on. But to just invite her in – it was like falling and sinking into something bottomless. Who was she to receive this hospitality? Did she exist other than as a cast of herself, the remains of something that had long been in ruins? She didn't have a sense of herself other than as a dead weight, dead weight and patches of darkness. Her thoughts pecked at her: how could she let herself be exposed to this? And then the other thoughts: she had to respond to life, she had to find an answer to her life. Then again: how could she be so mindless, so stupid?

She sat very still in bed and stared at the dark timber on the walls. She tried to breathe with long, slow breaths, tried to breathe herself free
from the shapeless burden, the weight of being herself. It wasn't possible to know if she, with her past and her actions, could be accepted among human beings, if she could move among them as if she were one of them.

But even on this morning, she found ways of escaping her anxiety for a little while. They were brief, these moments, small breaks from the ribbon of worry winding through her mind. During these moments, she felt present, almost happy. Then, she almost wanted to head into the dark city and, like an old-fashioned night guard, walk around and light the streetlights one after another.

Her own mother was locked up in that dark city. In there, she was faceless – large and frightening. The darkness had dissolved her features a long time ago; it was too late for Marta to assemble them into a whole again. It was as if her mother's face had been scattered in the dark and the different pieces would never find each other again.

She now longed for that face, longed for it the way you may long for a place, a town, a room. In the short moments when she escaped her anxiety, she felt a deep longing. As a small child she'd never really felt that she'd had her mother, but her mother's face had once been all she'd known. It had been the very firmament of life, and through it, she had come into the world. She'd lived with the scattered and blurred image of that face almost her entire life. Why she'd come to think of it so intensely now, here in Deep Tarn, she didn't know. Something about the landscape had seized her and now it held her. The landscape was breathing, it was a pulse that she could feel, and it was heavy and monotonous and beautiful.

Perhaps the landscape was also a face; perhaps it resembled the first face she'd known. It was a gate, an entrance, to something.

Whenever Marta mumbled something about setting out for Mervas, Arnold and Lilldolly would interrupt her.

“Mervas will be there,” they'd say. “No need to be in a rush to Mervas.”

They'd show her the way there when it was time, they promised. They'd take a day trip there together in Marta's car since Arnold and Lilldolly no longer owned one, at least not one you could drive. They were content to stay around Deep Tarn now that they were retired and didn't have to chase after money. They had the whole world here, they said. Sun, moon, stars, and forests. Birds, fish, and all the animals. The water and the earth. They had food delivered to them once a month and got their milk, butter, and cheese from their two cows. They grew their own potatoes and got meat from the forest, from their calves and their sheep.

“But Arnold is the one who needs the meat. I'm a peaceful person, I don't eat humans or animals,” Lilldolly declared, and emitted her little giggle.

“She's sensitive, that one,” Arnold said. “She has looked too deep into the animals' eyes, so to speak. Saw herself in there.”

She was an extraordinary person, Lilldolly. And she looked like a little girl, but with wrinkles. Her eyes were small and brown, with a razor-sharp gaze. Her movements were also like those of a girl, light and bouncy. She
was like a squirrel. Next to her, Marta felt old and slow, even though she was many years younger.

Since Marta came to Deep Tarn, it had been windy, and the rain from the north had been cold. All the snow had melted, and there was water everywhere. It was an in-between time, a time for waiting. Everything was waiting for warmer weather to arrive and drive every shoot of grass up from the cold, wet ground, and lure the birch leaves out of their casings.

“All this water will blossom and grow green,” Lilldolly said. “When the early summer drinks its fill.”

Most of the time, Marta followed Lilldolly at her tasks. Arnold was busy with the firewood. They dug holes and spread manure on the potato field and they took care of the animals. When the sky cleared, they walked together from one farm building to the next, over wet paths in last year's grass, zigzagging between rusty old farm equipment and broken-down cars, troughs, and graying wooden constructions. Everything was sinking into the grass, into the ground, moving down into the underground.

“Soon, the wind will be the only thing left here in Deep Tarn,” Lilldolly said. “Nothing but the wind, opening and closing doors and windows. It will be the only thing following the forest paths and visiting the houses. This place will become something else. Everything will change, will go back to what it used to be. Nature, she's strong, my daddy used to say. She can conquer cities. This little place will be nothing but a morsel to her. She'll swallow it whole without even bothering to chew.”

Lilldolly's laughter rippled through the woods. It was always there, even when she was quiet. Suddenly, at a turn or behind a corner, it would appear again. Or when you stumbled a little.

Marta walked around breathing in the scents. There was the scent of water, of melted ice, and then the scent of burning wood and the odor of soil and dung and decomposing plants. The
lavvu
smelled of sharp wood
smoke; the house had a sweet cottage aroma. Around some of the huts and barns there was a faint aroma of tar in the air and arching over all the other scents was that of forest, of conifers and pine needles, of turpentine and wind filtered through branches. Marta let the scents fill her like wine, like a young and vibrant wine. They made everything around her, the light, the deep yet muted colors, become visible as if they'd been created and shaped by them.

Sometimes when she felt tired, she went to the
lavvu
by herself to rest or to write in her journal. The
lavvu
wasn't a simple traditional one, which was what she'd imagined the first night she heard about it, but a wooden structure without windows or chimney that looked like a little cabin or a fort with a cone-shaped roof. She liked to sit in its dim half-light, smelling the wood smoke and hearing the sounds outside as close as if she were out there. She felt protected inside there, childishly safe. She didn't feel the same anxiety she'd had on the first morning; at any rate it was weaker, sort of diluted. All the roads and paths she walked down with Lilldolly were now being sewn into her life and although these paths might have been made with fast, simple stitches, they attached her to something, they kept her in the world. The fact that Deep Tarn was a place on the edge of things, and that Arnold and Lilldolly were outsiders, seemed significant somehow.

One morning, Marta went with Lilldolly to the tarn the farm had been named after. It looked like a big eye and was situated in the woods not more than a hundred yards from the house. They followed an often-used path along the edge of the water and came to a small cabin at the farthest end of the tarn. Lilldolly explained that she lived there during the summer. Once the goats and the cows had been let out to roam the forest for the summer, she'd stay there, that's what she'd always done. A short distance from the cabin was the summer barn, a shelter with a roof
and three rough walls. Lilldolly would milk the animals there, where they could also escape the gnats. Gnats don't like roofs, Lilldolly said. Under a roof, their bites are useless.

Together, Marta and Lilldolly started organizing the cabin for the summer. They swept and scoured the floors, aired out rugs and mattresses, cleaned the chimney, and cleared out the woodstove. They placed bunches of budding blueberry branches in glass jars around the hut. Marta felt light and happy, as if she were a child again, puttering about in her playhouse, making it nice. During some summer vacations, Marta and her sister had stayed on farms and at one of them there'd been a playhouse where they could spend as much time as they wanted. It was as if they'd been given their own kingdom to rule, a kingdom where they were the king and queen and their rules were the only ones that applied.

“By midsummer, lilies of the valley will be blossoming here by the tarn,” Lilldolly said when they carried blueberry branches inside the cabin. “Tons of lilies of the valley. Then you have to come and visit and pick some!”

Marta never felt as lightheartedly chatty as Lilldolly. In some way, she was speaking the wrong language, and she felt everything she said sounded artificial and stiff, like a newscaster on television. Arnold and Lilldolly spoke as if they were in love with every word and expression they used; as if they caressed them inside their mouths and shamelessly enjoyed using them.

“My, it's fun to have company,” Lilldolly now exclaimed. “Even to haul out the sour dung to the potato field! Now, let's see if we can get the woodstove here going, so we can make some coffee.”

She'd already started a fire that was snapping and crackling behind the stove door and the coffeepot jerked suddenly from the heat on the burner.

“Yes, out here, we're on our own,” she continued contently. “Just you and me.”

They were sitting on two small stools by a little table attached to the wall right by the stove. Lilldolly took out a piece of the tart-smelling cheese, a vat of butter, and bread cut into triangles. There were cups in the hut and she'd brought sugar in a little bag. They were quiet for a moment while waiting for the coffee. The low door was open toward the water, and on the other wall, the only window in the hut looked out over the forest. It was too early for mosquitoes, and the only sounds came from the birds outside and the low murmur of the woodstove.

Lilldolly settled her searching, vibrant gaze on Marta, carefully studying her, sort of feeling her way across her face little by little.

“This is a good place to talk,” she said. “After all, we haven't told each other very much over these last few days. You don't say much, do you? You keep things close to yourself.”

She turned the stool around and dealt with the coffee, pouring it into cups and continuing:

“I can see you've got your own story. It's the story that brought you here, and that will take you up to Mervas. I'm not blind, but I'm not going to question you about it. Anyone has the right to keep as quiet as they like. I'm a curious person, of course, but not so much that you have to tell me. You can keep quiet if you want. If you want to talk about yourself, you're welcome to. But stories have to come on their own accord, they're alive like everything else. If they're going to come out, they'd better come out alive, otherwise there's no point.”

Marta felt hard and mute during Lilldolly's speech. When she lifted the coffee cup to her lips, she noticed that her hand was trembling; from the corner of her eye, she saw that Lilldolly had noticed too. She desperately tried to think of something appropriate to say, but there was
nothing to say, she found nothing. Somewhere inside her, there was a small rupture, a faint desire to place her life in Lilldolly's hands, to simply let her receive it.

“But if you don't want to talk, perhaps I can tell you something? It's something I've never told anyone before, not in its entirety at least. It's not a secret I want to share with you; it's just that it so rarely happens that someone I can talk to comes here. I really feel the urge to tell you, if you want me to, if you want to hear it.”