To Mervas (13 page)

“My dear child, what's happening?” Lilldolly asked. She leaned over Marta and touched her neck and hair.

“What's going on? Did you get sick?”

Marta eventually stopped throwing up but started sobbing and weeping instead. Lilldolly fetched some water in an old coffee can and wiped Marta's mouth and face and let her drink from her cupped hand. Marta was on all fours with her hair hanging over her face. She didn't want to look up. It struck her that she wanted to be nothing but an animal from here on; it would be a relief. She wanted her mouth to be a muzzle and she wanted to keep drinking from the cupped hand. She wanted to be an animal and hold her face toward the ground and never again stand upright with her breasts and belly and eyes exposed. Now she wanted her sounds to be loud, deep, and hollow; she wanted every sound that left her mouth to be a roar or a bellow.

“Dear child,” Lilldolly mumbled, and stroked Marta's back slowly where she was planted firmly on her hands and knees, shaking with tears. She wouldn't let herself be pushed into a sitting or lying position. Lilldolly stroked her as if she were an old sheep, groaning from contractions.

“You can stay like that if it feels good. I'm not going to force you to move. You just stay there and finish crying.”

“Oh, oh,” Marta moaned after a while, her tears pushing and pulling inside her. “It's not me; it's not me, not me . . .”

“That's right,” Lilldolly said, leaning her cheek against Marta's head. “It's not you; of course it's not.”

“It's not me,” Marta tried again. “I shouldn't be the one crying. You should be crying, not me,” she whimpered. “This is about you, Lilldolly.”

“It doesn't matter who does the crying, dearie. If it's you or me. It doesn't matter.”

“But I don't want to take it away from you, don't want to take anything away from you with my own troubles and stand here and. . . You having to comfort me.”

Marta had to force the words out between her sobs. It was as if she were pushing them through a perforated wall, which made them come out in mangled, deformed threads.

“You're the one,” she continued without making much sense. “I'm the one who, I mean, you're the one – who should be comforted.”

“You cry and I'll tell the story. It's as it should be. The one who tells the story can't cry. The one who tells the story has to find her way past the tears if she's going to get anywhere. You go on crying. You can cry for me.”

“Yes, and you, you . . .”

“I've had my share of crying, I've cried enough for you too.”

“But I can't, can't . . . I can't tell you, Lilldolly. I have . . . but I can't, can't tell you – ”

“No, you do the crying and I'll do the talking. That's how it'll be. Now you're the one crying.”

Lilldolly's hands kept working Marta's back and shoulders while she talked, they pinched and kneaded and stroked and pushed and Marta closed her eyes and let it happen. She was an animal now, she could allow herself to be stroked, she was an old, ugly animal who had nothing left
of shame or pride to defend. It didn't matter that she was sobbing and drooling, that some vomit was stuck in her hair. She could stay here and be without a soul and let her tears stab her apart.

“Let go of your shoulders now,” Lilldolly said. “It feels like you have a sack of taters under your skin. There you go. We agreed that you'd do the crying and I'd do the talking. That's what we said. But I can't help but wonder what kind of journey got started. No, don't answer me, you don't have to say anything, I understand it was something you had to do. You've left everything behind, that's obvious, you've got nothing to return to. God have mercy, what don't we humans have to do to be at peace. I want you to know that it's the greatest and most important thing we have to do in life, to find our peace. To stay at peace with life. That was the agreement, the promise we made when we first came into this life. To honor that promise you're allowed to make whatever journeys and do whatever crazy things you have to do. There's nothing to stop you from that, nothing at all. You're allowed to cry, as much as you need to. You can throw up too, go on, throw up as much as you can.”

Lilldolly went on talking while she stroked and kneaded Marta's body. But with an unexpected twist, she suddenly and decisively flipped her over so she wound up sitting on her behind. For an instant they looked at each other, a little surprised. Then Lilldolly grabbed Marta's chin and held her face.

“But you can't hide any longer,” she said. “That's cheating.”

“And you have to watch,” Marta said absently. She wrenched her face loose and began rubbing it with her palms. She looked up, present again, cleared.

“I'm sorry, you have to forgive me. I don't want to be like this. Your story was so . . . intense. I hadn't expected it to be such an important story. Such a dangerous story, dangerous for me. I'll carry it here in my heart,
like you said, inside what's beautiful. I'm happy, you see, I'm happy even though it doesn't make sense and I'm sitting here like an idiot, like a . . .”

Lilldolly started laughing her clucking, sparkling laughter, sounding like a lively creek between rocks and suddenly Marta began laughing too; she couldn't help herself. She just flowed along with it, floated on the laughter itself. She was sucked into it and twirled around inside it; it was like dancing, swimming, playing in water. All she needed to do was look at Lilldolly and see how her laughter made her jerk and jump and that same bliss moved through her as well.

“Oh dear,” Lilldolly said at last. “Dear, how crazy things can be.”

Afternoon had come and the sun penetrated and warmed everything. It moved through the top layer of the soil, into the tree trunks and the timber of the houses. It also penetrated the birds' soft down, the fur of animals, the anthills, and the stones. It penetrated your skin, your eyes, placed its sweet, warm sun muzzle in your hand.

Arnold had spread sheepskins on the ground in front of the house and was resting with his hat over his face when Lilldolly and Marta returned.

“Well now,” he said from underneath his hat when he heard them. “I'm getting some company here in the sun. At last.”

Then they lay there, the three of them, and let themselves be covered in sun. Marta fell asleep almost immediately and dreamed of the boy. He was calling her as she ran from room to room in a big building looking for him. She had to find him; there was something she had to tell him, something important. Good news. Once, he ran ahead of her in a stairway, he was young and held something in his hand, a piece of fabric. Later, he stood in front of her in a sunny spot in a big hall and he seemed to hover strangely and was trembling somehow and it took a long while before she realized he'd transformed himself into a giant bumblebee.

When she opened her eyes again, Arnold and Lilldolly were drinking coffee on the pelt next to her.

“You fell asleep in the sun,” Arnold said. He handed her a knife and a piece of dried meat he'd been carving from.

“Eat!” he told her. “It's salty. Good for you.”

She pulled herself up into a sitting position and cut off a small piece of meat.

“You see, we're talking about Mervas,” Arnold continued. “We're wondering if we should go on that excursion tomorrow. On the radio, they say the weather's going to be nice now. Lilldolly says it too; summer's here now, she says. So we're considering taking tomorrow off and heading up there.”

Marta nodded. She felt confused. Mervas, she thought. Would it become real now? For real? Perhaps she ought to go there alone? She wasn't sure. But if Kosti was there, if she was going to meet Kosti, did she want Arnold and Lilldolly to be there too? No, she wasn't sure.

She nodded again.

“It'll be fun,” she said.

Arnold laughed and looked from Marta to Lilldolly and then back at Marta again.

“Well, let me tell you, it's been a while since we went anywhere. There was the dental appointment last winter, of course, a couple of tooth extractions and such. The pharmacy, perhaps the social security office.”

“And the grave,” Lilldolly added. “We went to the grave.”

He seemed taken aback, paused for a moment.

“Yes, the grave. We do have the grave, Lilldolly and I.” He inhaled.

“Yes,” he said, focusing on Marta. “You see. That's how it is. It was a good thing that you got lost and ended up here. This way we get to go on
a little trip before we get stuck to this place like moss on the rocks.” He laughed again.

“We can go shopping too,” Marta said. “And to the grave, if you want. Now that we're going.”

“No, that'll be another day,” Lilldolly decided. “Mervas is in the opposite direction altogether. That'll be a whole other trip. No, let's go to Mervas. That'll be something else.”

She peered at Arnold.

“Yes,” he said. “It's another world. Mervas.”

After some discussion, it was settled that Arnold would drive. He was the one who knew the roads the best and was used to being on them, he argued. Lilldolly wanted to sit in peace in the back and have space for her own thoughts and Marta would sit in the passenger seat. She'd have a good view from there and that was important, Arnold reasoned, because she had to learn the way to Mervas. Tasso was also coming along, and he got to sit next to Lilldolly in the back, as he used to. They put sheepskins, food, and the coffeepot in the trunk. Then they took to the road.

Arnold was driving fast, Marta thought, but she didn't say anything to him about it. After Deep Tarn's road, they'd ended up on a narrow gravel road that wound through a steep, undulating forest and small ponds like hollows strewn everywhere in the landscape. The spruce trees were sparsely spread; no shrubs or low trees obscured the view. Here and there, a big boulder covered in gray moss rose from the ground. Small ridges pressed against the ground like the backs of animals. Without warning, the trees came to a halt at a gorge that led straight down to another kind of world. Here, everything seemed small and inviting. You wanted to enter among the trees and walk around in those woods. The ground seemed to be padded; perhaps the
huldra
*
moved there on her soft, springy paws.

But suddenly, the narrow road ended and Arnold veered right onto a wider gravel road that cut straight through a landscape that was completely different. Vast and endless, it stretched out with its enormous lakes resting in depressions between the mountains. It was mostly woods and no vistas, young trees and old growth, the sun like a golden caress over the carpet of berry shrubs between the trees. Sometimes they came upon clear-cuts, large, empty areas, but these areas were forests too – missing, petrified forests without trees, woods in waiting.

They didn't talk during the trip. It was still early in the day and night hadn't yet wholly left their senses. They sat focused, looking out the windows, and stayed silent while the road crunched beneath them and the landscape rushed past. The road continued straight and wide and they passed yet another big lake. Marta thought there was something odd about these large, desolate bodies of water; there were no houses around them. They just lay there as if undiscovered by man. Nowhere had they seen a single house or farm. Only in one place, in a small clearing by a little lake, was there an abandoned trailer. They traveled through the woodland as if they each had their own small part in it. Mile after mile it belonged to itself; trees and animals and people were nothing but visitors there.

The sky was a blue stream lined with the tops of scraggly fingered firs, floating above the road. Marta looked up, following the stream; it was easier than trying to look into the forest. The trees obscured the view, she thought; they were in the way. It takes time to discover that the forest is a place where the space between things matters more than the trees, that it is a swaying in-between world where light and shadows rule. Someone is playing an instrument in there, sometimes slow and gliding, other times jerky and bouncy, a bow of light and shadow slides across the strings of all the tree trunks and branches and twigs. If you want to see the forest, you
have to avoid looking at the trees; you have to learn how to look where there's nothing, to the side. That's when you hear the music.

Marta's internal view was also obscured today; inside her, the trees were also in the way. She saw the calf with its crushed, hanging head and thought about Lilldolly and Arnold, thought about what Lilldolly had said the first night she met them, that with this man she shared neither table nor bed. She was now sharing the place where she slept with Marta. But Arnold and Lilldolly seemed like a couple in any case. They didn't seem to be enemies. It was obvious they liked each other. But still, Lilldolly's story had pushed Marta into a place she couldn't escape; something tugged at her. She was caught up in scattered thoughts about the boy and Anna-Karin and the calf, about Mervas and Kosti. Caught up in sudden fragments of childhood memories that kept appearing – her father's spirit inside her, his constant, commanding presence, the fear of his voice raging through the mail slot. Then, her mother's austere features, immovable and stern, enduring it all. She remembered her own feeling of being on fire and freezing simultaneously, of being completely naked and walking powerless across the floor of the stage, of existing without form. She had to be there, had to be there. Caught up in all this, she desperately tried to see over the edge of her own life. But the blue canal above the road flowed through her like a ribbon of forgetfulness, a blue thoughtlessness, a blue oblivion free of longing. It told her she didn't have the strength to figure out what the chafing images and memories had to do with her. It told her she didn't want to know if they were about her life. Or about herself. She really didn't even want to know that they were now on their way to Mervas; she'd soon be there, very soon she'd actually be there.