To Mervas (17 page)

I drank some water from the bucket by the door and then sat down on the stairs feeling at once heavy and relieved. Perhaps things weren't so bad, I thought. It's all inside me already, it is not even sleeping. Deep down in that dark city, no one dares to sleep. The vigil goes on there day and night, guarded behind glass and minutes, in seconds and in years. It's all inside me, I thought. And actually, everything is already afterward, it has already happened.

It's odd, but just then the final scene in
Uncle Vanya
came back to me. It was a TV version of the play that was aired when I was young; I think I saw it a couple of times. Lena Granhagen played Sonja and Toivo Pawlo the uncle. In the final scene they sit by their desks with big ledgers open. It's quiet and almost unnaturally still in the room; only the rasping of their pens can be heard. All the ruined love and rebellion, the dreams that blossomed and withered, the burning humiliation and almost annihilating disappointment – all this was contained in the scene but as if under a lid, perhaps like a seed, a small capsule – completely saturated with what has been and is now over. It's like an exhalation, a long, blubbering exhalation. It is the very image of
afterward.

In actuality, I've probably always carried that scene with me, I've heard that kind of silence and seen them in front of me, how they sit there sighing,
dipping the tips of their pens into the ink, their hopeless calculations. It's so painful, yet there is also a sense of relief in the pain. The sense that it's now over. It's over and at the same time, it will continue. Neatly, it will be noted down under the right heading, be over and continue for all time.

As I write this now, I think of Lilldolly and what she said about finding peace. That the greatest, most important thing we have to do is to stay at peace with life.

I can't write anything about Kosti's letter. I can't see my own thoughts through the muck and sediment that have been stirred up.

The day before yesterday, I had to go shopping. My provisions were getting low and I longed for fresh things, for produce, bread, and milk. It became an excursion, a jaunt to a foreign galaxy. The closest store is in Storsel, about twenty miles away, beyond many winding gravel roads.

But there's actually no way to leave Mervas. Or, it shouldn't be possible, shouldn't be so easy. All I had to do was get in the car and drive away. It didn't seem fair. It was like cheating on an exam. The whole deal, the entire agreement seemed rigged. To remain loyal, which is what I want, I can't diverge from the path, can't turn my gaze away. I have to keep looking. That's the first commandment of my childhood: you have to keep watching. It's strange that a child can understand such things. But I just knew that not to look was to abandon something. And I think that's how I have to respond to my life now too, by not diverging an inch from the solemn and serious situation I'm facing. That's exactly how I have to respond. It's not about penance or mortification, but about honesty. Because I don't want to abandon myself.

Yesterday it was the equinox. I ate some pickled herring and new potatoes that I'd bought. For dessert, I had Belgian strawberries that were so shiny and deep red, so large and well shaped, I almost doubted they were
real. Later in the evening, I took a walk on the wide-open plain below the mining shaft. That place doesn't seem quite real either. A poisoned, emerald-green fairy-tale landscape, a big, hyperrealistic painting to enter. But in some way, I'm still attracted to it, as to some lovely pasture, the dream of a better life. Then, I would graze there, be a grazing animal on the green earth, on the vast river of flowing green grass.

But once I was out there, I felt a little scared. The wind howled so forlornly, and I could see it moving through the rough, sparse grass like a wind spirit, a strange creature without a body, out hunting. For some reason, I feel less frightened if I can walk along water, so I started following a creek with copper-colored, dead shores that ran along the other side of the gorge. Thick copper sludge rolled up against the water's edge and the water itself, which looked brownish red, also seemed unnaturally clear. It signaled danger; I didn't even want to dip my fingers in it.

The world is empty, I thought as I walked along. Just that: the world is empty. Here, on these flayed, meat-colored shores, it becomes visible; here it becomes true. The world is empty. The words ran through me repeatedly, although I didn't quite understand them. I didn't even agree; a few yards from the creek, the bare soil turned into sparse, sheared grassland. I saw tiny birch saplings fighting for survival; no taller than the blueberry shrubs, they stood there sort of burnt, tormented, trying to grow. The world isn't empty at all, I wanted to think, and it's populated by life and rage. But I couldn't snap out of the feeling of meaninglessness. It really wasn't a judgment about the world as much as a sudden and very clear experience of it. A sensation that it's empty and incomprehensible. It was exactly as I had once learned in school: light doesn't exist by itself but only through the reflection of everything else. Some thoughts are puzzling. Sometimes they fall on you with a kind of clarity that disarms
all your objections. The world is empty and incomprehensible, yet we still have to believe in it.

The sun was still high in the sky even though it was late and the light, twinkling so brightly in all the greenery and glittering in the water next to me, it made me squint. Around me, the forest undulated on its mountains like a ship at sea, light green where there were birches, dark green where there were pines, and nearly black where spruce grew. The ground crunched lightly beneath me, it was flat and even, easy to walk on, and I felt like walking all the way to where the plain and the valley ended.

I had walked for maybe a mile or so when I saw a moose calf. It shone. It stood completely still on the other side of the creek, watching me. It was as if a secret heat radiated from it, a pulsating, vibrating heat rising from its fur. I too stood completely still, watching the shining creature, the long slender legs, the body they carried, and I was filled, filled with what I saw. The calf's gaze seemed to move inside me and took me out of every familiar context into what is new and foreign. It was such a strong sensation of presence, of intense and strange presence, that I suddenly saw myself as someone I'm not. I was imprisoned in it, contained by it. It filled me with a peculiar joy. I can't describe everything that twirled up inside me, but there were so many images; the moose calf hanging across Arnold's shoulders, little Anna-Karin, who was now dancing here, and the calf, who wasn't dead but trembled with life. It had returned and the boy would return, everything would come back to life here, in this brief passing moment, but that was enough, it was enough.

“The heart doesn't have a mouth that can speak,” I suddenly heard my sister say.

“Yes, it does,” I said. “A different kind of mouth. When you're speaking with God, you only speak with your heart.”

I wanted her to understand. It was of utmost importance that she understood. Because it wasn't about my believing in God. God existed. Children only know what adults believe. Of course, I was no longer a child, and now, I knew nothing. The calf turned around in a flash and was gone without a sound.

Afterward, I knew I'd been touched, that something had happened. I started walking back with quick, light steps; my body felt electric, I floated across the ground, I ran upstream along the creek. My sense of time had vanished, my feeling of exhaustion was gone. I was soon sitting on the steps in front of the cabin with a small fire crackling in front of me. It was night; the light was soft and blurred. Kosti's letter lay next to me, I had reread it now and his voice had reached me, I had allowed it. I could feel his presence, his eyes on me, his fingertips over my skin, his words marching through the streets of my city.

That's how it has to be, I thought. You have to be forced out of yourself. You have to let it happen.

I see it as if through the opposite end of a pair of binoculars.

It's me.

It's me with my arms tightly crossed across my chest.

My hands closed around my shoulders.

My upper body rocking, rocking.

It's me, rocking and rocking.

The police entered the apartment. My big, heavy child was lying dead in his own blood among the broken chairs, the potting soil, the shards of glass and china, the plant parts, the cake remains, the spilled soda. That's how I sat, I'd been sitting like that for an eternity already, that's how I had to stay, I turned to stone sitting like that.

It's not I who remembers. It is my body. How I was in the hospital later, horrified, horrified. They tried to straighten me out, sometimes by force, sometimes with medications. But my body was a muscle that had twisted itself around my core of horror, my fingers dug into my shoulders as if they wanted to take root there and grow into my skin. The aides cut my nails short and bandaged my hands, but the wounds on my shoulders wouldn't heal; in a frenzy, my fingers dug deeper into the ulcerated, aching flesh. Hungrily, they ate their way deeper into the pain, I wanted the
pain, I wanted to reach it, I wanted to reach it more and more because I had nothing else.

I know that I was limp and barely conscious for long stretches of time because of the medications. But that clutch lived inside me like a memory; I used all my energy trying to reestablish the hold on my shoulder, I fumbled for it from deep inside my blurred state; nothing else was clear to me except that and the rocking, the rocking of my upper body back and forth, being part of a rhythm, a rocking hold, as if something held me, as if I were part of an order.

Sometimes I could hear a thin whine coming from my lips and it frightened me as if an alien lived inside me. I emitted no other sounds. I was mute. I was mute for a long time, months, a year, I don't know, I've never wanted to know much about this. I was in my own world and there was no time in my world, there was no beginning and no end. I was in my place, imprisoned and unreachable, I was inside the boy's voice, I was filled by it, I was the voice box for his voice to rage through. I was spared the images, I couldn't see them, they were twisted, dissolved, hacked into something so awful and despicable I could not look at it. But I could hear, and my whole being absorbed sounds and echoes. I heard the boy's voice, sequence after sequence, I was spit-roasted over his voice as if over a flame, was lowered into it as though into a scalding bath. I heard the boy as he sounded on The Day and I heard him as he sounded when he was newborn and wouldn't stop crying. I knew I had to sit with my arm muscles tense and tightly crossed over my chest and my hands gripping my shoulders. I had to keep rocking and rocking; it was the only way I could maintain myself.

They couldn't understand this at the hospital. There, they thought that it was the rocking alone and my stubborn grip that was the source of my insanity, and they put a lot of effort into making me stop. They
didn't understand that, to the contrary, it was the only way I could protect myself from insanity. It was my defense. When they used force trying to straighten me out and even tied my hands, one to each bedpost, I was obliged to defend myself as if they were trying to drown or strangle me. I wrangled and spat and kicked and wriggled, not to fight with the staff but to protect myself from the voice inside, to get rid of the boy's voice inside me, because it was tearing me to pieces. His voice told me what I was.

There was no way out for me. I was mute. No conversations could save me from my entrapment. The medications they gave me made my horror blurry and dim and made me lose the crucial strength in my arms and legs, made me twitch and shiver uncontrollably. What finally happened, what after a very long time gave me the courage to stop defending myself, was a miracle.

One day, a new aide came to my ward. He came into the room where I sat curled up around myself, rocking. It was late morning and my breakfast tray was still on the table by the window, I suppose he came in to fetch it. He stood there just inside the door and looked at me for a while and I noticed him too, I saw that it was a new face and that he looked so young he was almost still a boy. He also had curly black hair and brown eyes, so just a glimpse of him stirred something inside me. That's what my boy might have looked like if everything hadn't happened as it had. Yes, it could have been my boy standing there looking at me, it could have been he.

That's when the miracle occurred.

He came up to me and put his face close to mine. “Come on, Mommy, let's go for a walk, you and I,” he said.

Mommy, he said. He'd called me Mommy and the word cut into me like a scalpel, like a razor blade, it cut through all the walls and defenses,
straight through me, and everything stopped and for an instant I stopped rocking and sat completely still staring at him.

It was like a sudden thaw, I think, what then happened in me. As when, on a chilly February day, the sun suddenly makes the ice melt from the rafters, and the titmouse starts to chirp. It happens only for a moment, a brief moment in the afternoon, then the cold will once more turn the water into ice. Everything takes a long time, I didn't immediately release my grasp and I didn't stop rocking and I didn't start speaking, but I'd experienced that sudden thaw, I had paused for a moment and seen that aide, that boy, I'd glimpsed his face and brought it into my world. Slowly, for days and months, he made porous the stone I'd become, so wind could blow inside me, water could trickle through, and he finally made me step out of my own frozen grasp, as if out of a building, and take a few steps across the floor. When he came to see me every day, he simply inserted his arm into my hard-pressed elbow and he whispered:
Come on, Mommy, let's go for a stroll.
And we did.

The days pass so slowly here I sometimes don't know what to do with them. The days went by slowly at home too, but it was simpler there, I was sunk into a kind of meaninglessness in which I wasn't expecting anything in particular, not from myself and not from life itself. I was in the apartment most of the time, walked around among the tracks and traces, through my dark, unlit city. I felt no real responsibility for how my days passed and what I did with them. My life was unmoored and I guess I thought I just had to accept that.