In the Distance

4.

Summer came to an end. The ragged blankets they gave him were insufficient, but he was used to being cold. The landscape remained impervious to the freezing temperatures. Nothing changed. Looking through the window, Håkan imagined that it was cold only in his room and that if he were to stick his hand out, he would find it to be blazing hot, just like the day he arrived.

It was getting harder to get into his clothes. His feet dangled over the edge of the bed. Some of his guards started to look at him with apprehension.

Linus was all Håkan could think of. At times, he imagined him prospering in undefined yet extravagant ways; he pictured him working various indeterminate jobs, resolved to succeed spectacularly and rise to a prominent position, not out of ambition or greed but only to be easier to find when his young brother came looking for him. His triumph would be a beacon. Håkan would arrive in New York, and the name of Linus Söderström would be on everyone’s lips. Any stranger would be able to direct him to his door. At other times, Håkan’s fantasies were more restrained, and he saw his brother toiling and struggling, roaming the hostile streets of that gigantic city (which he still envisaged through Linus’s whimsical descriptions), and returning every single evening, after the work of the day was done, to the port to ask the newly arrived passengers and seamen for his brother. In either case, Håkan was convinced that Linus would not fail to find him.

The warm weather returned, and Håkan felt that he had gone back in time one year.

On the first truly hot morning of that new summer, shortly after sunrise, one of Håkan’s keepers came into his room to deliver a mauve suit he recognized from a few weeks ago, a pair of exaggeratedly buckled shoes he was often asked to wear, and a short top hat that was new to him. It was the first time they brought him clothes in the daytime. He was told to get dressed at once. Håkan was surprised to find himself smoothing out his shirt, pulling down his jacket by the lapels, brushing his sleeves, and tending to other small details in the exact same way in which the woman would go through his outfit after dressing him up. The guard, who had been waiting impatiently, took him down to the barroom and then out through the back door. Half a dozen armed men on horses clustered behind the dragoon and the tidy fat man. Right next to them, in the only patch of shade, stood the carriage, harnessed to its plumed and arrogant horses. He was shown into the cab. It was like diving into a vat of black syrup. The woman ignored him as he sat across from her. The door was shut; darkness took over. The coach set off in an unknown direction, rocking on its squeaking belts and springs, its velvet curtains bulging out and curving in like membranes.

It was nearly impossible to breathe in the overused, viscous air. Soaked in sweat under his velvet coat, Håkan shivered from the heat. Even in the complete blackness of the cabin, he could feel the woman actively not looking at him. He fell asleep.

Silence woke him. They had come to a stop. The door opened, and when his eyes adjusted to the razor-edged light, he saw he was being asked to step out. They had been traveling for at least half a day, but were he to judge from the landscape, they had not moved an inch—the same unbroken expanse of level ground, the same oppressive monotony. The coachman had dismounted to water the horses, which were foaming with heat. The rest of the men stood in line relieving themselves, except for the fat man, who leaned into the carriage, presumably offering the woman his services. Without ever sitting down, the men ate soda crackers and black pudding. The woman remained unseen. With their mouths still full, the riders got back on their horses, and the driver returned to his seat. Håkan got into the carriage, hoping they were headed east. Nothing else mattered to him.

It got cooler. The sun was probably setting. Suddenly, branches started rattling against the coach on either side. The unvarying steppe seemed to have come to an end. After a long, tortuous ride through uneven terrain, the coach finally stopped. Once again, Håkan was shown out. This time, the woman alighted after him, pulling down a black veil that covered her eyes and brushed her chin.

The pale evening sunshine came streaming through the conical summits of spruces and firs, was sifted by the feathery leaves of junipers and the white-green boughs of aspens, and lastly settled, like mist, on foxtails, moss, and lichen. These were the first plants Håkan had seen in a long time, aside from the ever-present sagebrush. In a clearing at the foot of a knoll stood a small village of six or seven houses that were, each in its own way, angular versions of the forest surrounding them—the sturdiest building was a log cabin; there were some flimsy shacks with clay mortar between timbers; others, like cubic rafts, combined coarse irregular planks with tarpaulin, joined with hemp rope. In the center of the hamlet, there was a heap of saplings and branches curled with dry leaves. It looked like a pile of dead twigs waiting to be burned, but it was propped up by pillars and planks. Underneath this shaggy shelter, a group of children, sitting on stumps, held their slates and books while staring at the newcomers. By the makeshift school, one woman had stopped churning butter, while another wiped her hands down on her apron, having just taken a Dutch oven off the fire, and yet a third, in the back, slowly and mechanically went on dyeing her yarn. All three women had their eyes fixed on the recently arrived group. Despite its precariousness, it was, as far as Håkan could see, a harmonious and prosperous colony. The hides neatly hung to dry around the small tannery, the patterns taking shape on the weaving loom, the smoke welling softly through the leaves from a clay stack, the healthy white pigs in their pen, the burlap sacks brimming with grain—everything spoke of the industriousness and purposeful orderliness of the settlers. The women and children conveyed a sense of calm decency. Håkan felt ashamed to be in his costume.

As usual, the fat man started to activate his inner mechanism (shirt bosom flattened, necktie straightened, hair swept, throat cleared), which resulted in a smile that could only emphasize the impatience it was supposed to conceal, and then proceeded with one of his pompous addresses. He had uttered only a few solemn words, which he seemed to pin into the air with his pinched thumb and forefinger, when the woman took a step forward and raised her palm without looking at him.

“Caleb,” she ordered through her barely open mouth, glaring at the colonists from behind her veil.

Håkan realized that he had not heard birds in an eternity. Now, in the tense expectation that followed the woman’s single word, the grove swelled with unknown songs.

The dyer stepped forward, drying her blue hands, and said that Caleb was not there.

“Well, I’ll call him,” the veiled woman responded, and then whispered something to the fat man, who, in turn, gave the dragoon a brief command.

The old soldier went behind the carriage and quickly reappeared with a wobbly leather sack. The lady pointed to the wood and tarp dwelling farthest from the school. The dragoon sauntered over to it, opened the bladder, poured its liquid all around the walls, lit a match, and threw it into one of the puddles he had just made. The air rippled, the ripples became blue waves, and the blue waves yellow flames. The women rushed to the children and removed them from the shrubby school building, which was now nothing but a pile of kindling the smallest spark from the neighboring fire would set alight. Following the veiled woman’s directions, the dragoon led the settlers and their children to the log cabin, safely removed from the fire, and placed two sentinels at its door. The burning house, in the meantime, had become a smooth fiery sphere that seemed to spin in place, the crest of the flames curling over to reignite themselves from underneath in an ever-intensifying circle. Håkan looked around for water, walking back and forth with desperate eyes. He found a tub with clothes soaking in it, and started dragging it toward the fire, but was soon apprehended by one of the men, who brought him back to the woman. She smiled, as if touched by Håkan’s despair and goodwill, and briefly caressed his cheek. The flames whistled in the air. Above the ball of fire, like a black mirror image of the blaze, spun a ball of smoke. A gust of wind turned the whistling into a roar and dissipated the smoke, which first coiled up and then was drawn out and twisted into ringlets, whirling in a succession of grim convolutions that finally dissolved in the darkening sky.

A group of riders smudged by the conflagration came galloping down the hill. The leader wrenched at his bridle and, with a furious pull, stopped the horse next to the woman. Both animal and man were breathing hard. With his index finger, he told his friends to spread out. Then he looked down at the woman.

“You came,” she said with a smile, not unlike the one she had just given Håkan.

Caleb, who seemed to find each breath suffocating, curtly asked for the children. The woman nodded toward the log cabin. He dismounted and walked in short circles, his face disfigured by desperate thoughts, and then stopped to look at the woman with ireful eyes. Something like tenderness filtered through the woman’s veil. After screwing up his mouth and his brow, Caleb managed to calm down and, in a tone that demanded all his might to pass as sensible and reasonable, started to explain himself. The woman remained silent, still wearing a gentle smile that did not correspond to Caleb’s earnest plea, as if she were looking beyond him, into another time. With a supreme effort, Caleb changed his tone. In an attempt to match his cadence to her mien, he now seemed to be recalling pleasant memories or invoking a promising future. He even managed a smile himself. Then, out of nowhere, she produced a small ornate pocket pistol. Caleb stared at it with the expression of someone being shown a gigantic insect. He looked back up at the veil, and the woman shot him between the eyes. His head flung back, followed by the rest of his body.

From the log cabin came the screams of women and children. Caleb’s men were quickly rounded up and disarmed by the dragoon and his party. Håkan could not look away from the shot man’s face, already bleached by death. He was stunned by the suddenness with which the man had ceased to be. It had been like magic.

Next to Håkan, the veiled woman inhaled in short segments, as if able to take in only broken pieces of air. Her eyes were on the man she had destroyed. She took her trembling hand to her mouth, and soon her barely audible moans swelled into a wail, a long ululation interrupted only to breathe in those small, hacked-up portions of air that grief somehow managed to reconstitute within her so that they could then come out as a sustained utterance of despair. The children kept crying. The women kept screaming. They started to bang on the cabin door. After many unrelenting howls, the veiled woman’s bawls became as broken as her breathing, so that each brief inhalation was followed by an equally brief cry. Finally, as if she had made a sudden decision, she stopped. Still staring down at Caleb, the lady muttered a few words to one of her men, who, in turn, signaled to two of his companions. Together, they carried the body away. Lowering her head and burying the heels of her hands in her eye sockets, the woman regained command of herself and the situation. She stood erect, taller than before, and slowly rolled up the veil, fastened it to her hat, and opened her eyes, inset with glowing rage.

“You!” she roared, pointing at the fat man. “Come here.”

He approached and stood penitently a few steps away from her. They faced each other in silence. The men who had taken the body away were now piling up dry branches they had taken from the school’s roof. Unable to endure the silence, the fat man swept his hair, cleared his throat, and started talking. With his first word, however, the woman launched the most vicious assault Håkan had ever witnessed.

Gelatinous words of hate came spewing out of her rotten mouth. Every care she had ever shown in hiding her gums disappeared. In fact, the decayed black hole seemed to be displayed as the ultimate insult and threat, more intimidating than the rumbling, slobbering, malformed words that gushed out of it along with her dribble and spit. She still held her gun and used it to point repeatedly at the corpse and then at the fat man. The connection between both was the main argument of her diatribe. She appeared oblivious to the fact that her pointer was a gun, which made the weapon even more frightening—as if once she remembered its true nature she would be obliged to give it its true function. The women in the cabin had redoubled their screaming and were ramming the door with some massive object. The children kept crying. Taking a step forward and leaning over so that her face was inches away from the fat man’s, the woman covered him in insults and saliva. Håkan understood the last words, underlined by the gun pointing at the rotund waistcoated chest—“your fault.” She ground her black gums at him and hissed. Rather than from the woman, the hiss seemed to come from the pair of shiny slugs in her mouth.

Caleb’s body was placed on the disorderly pyre next to the ruins of the schoolhouse.

“Gently,” the woman commanded and rolled down her veil. With a nod, she ordered the sentries to make the women stop their pounding. The children kept crying. With another movement of her chin, she directed the dragoon to light the pyre. All the men, the invaders and their victims, took off their hats. The fire caught on quickly. The crackling branches yielded, and the body suddenly sank into the flames, emitting a smell of sinister roast.

After a moment of silence, the woman, back in full possession of her usual coldness, turned once more to the fat man and gave him a brief order. With quivering lips, he attempted a response but, before a word was uttered, decided it was best to comply. He took off his coat, waistcoat, bosom plate, and shirt. All eyes were on him. The evening was bleeding out—some stars shone in the darkening blue. His shoes came off, and after them, his trousers. The woman showed her impatience. Hesitantly, he removed his underpants, and stood there, blubbery and milky, with only socks and garters on. Someone laughed. A barely visible gesture of the woman, and his clothes were thrown into the embers of the burning house. Another brief nod, and all the women and children were set free. Their husbands ran to meet them, but one woman remained alone with her child. She looked around, confused, and then, seeing the pyre, fell to her knees and wept. The veiled lady examined her with interest. All the Clangston men got on their horses, except for the fat man, who was left standing among the homesteaders while the dragoon led his gray away. The fat man’s mouth bubbled with stuttering pleas. Håkan was told to follow the woman into the carriage. They drove away with the convoy. The abandoned man’s moans and sobs were soon inaudible.

The second night after their return, Håkan was summoned to the woman’s room. She was sitting at a small table and pointed to the chair across from her. Håkan sat down, taking notice of a leather tool wrap. As she sometimes was inclined to do, she ignored him in a careful, studied way, looking impatient, as if his presence—which she had requested—were delaying someone else’s arrival. Finally, after a long time, she untied the wrap and unrolled it on the table. It was divided into sections that contained scissors, tongs, flasks, clippers, small daggers, and other instruments Håkan did not recognize. The lady tapped her finger on the table. Håkan was confused. Irritated, she indicated that he was to place his hands on the table, which he did. She held down his left wrist against the table with a force that Håkan’s docility did not merit, took the largest clippers out of their compartment, and applied them to his fingernails. His hands had softened during his captivity, but his nails remained as rough and angular as ever—some grew until they broke, others he trimmed with his teeth or the knife he was given for his meals. Once she was done with the clipping, the woman moved on to filing, and then to cutting and pushing up the cuticles with a flat, sharp-edged tool, which made Håkan wince and instinctively withdraw his hand. The woman clasped his wrist tighter and stabbed his hand with the tool. She did not break the skin, but her firmness made it plain that she would drive the whole instrument through his hand and pin it to the table if he offered further resistance. After the procedure was completed, she retouched and buffed his nails. From one of the flasks, she poured a greasy rose-scented unguent and rubbed it into Håkan’s hands. Perhaps because the woman had never caressed his hands like that before, Håkan decided to speak to her for the very first time.

“I must go,” he said.

She looked up from his hands with an expression that briefly acknowledged an event that, although extraordinary, did not surprise her. She smiled at him.

“I can’t,” she responded. “I can’t let you go.”

She put out the light and did something she had never done before—she kneeled down and placed her head on Håkan’s lap, just like Håkan used to be asked to kneel and put his head on her lap, and then took one of his limp groomed hands and stroked her own hair with it, as if playing with a rag doll.

After those events, life sank back into its unaltered routine. Although unused to violence, Håkan started to hatch an escape plan that vaguely involved the blunt knife he used for his meals. He was encouraged by his own size, which an increasing number of his captors found intimidating. However, what happened a few nights later relieved Håkan from carrying out his half-formed designs.

It was during the quiet hour between the time the bar closed and the two guards came to take him to the woman that Håkan heard someone stealthily sliding the bolt of his door open. The cautious slowness of this operation was unusual, and even more remarkable was the fact that he had not heard, as he always did, two pairs of boots coming up the stairs. A whistling wind had whirled around Clangston all night, and now windows and walls rattled and creaked under its growing force. The bolt slowed down as it slid through the guides, clearly to prevent the click at the end of its trajectory. Silence. Håkan picked up a book, just to hold something solid.

The door opened, and there, badly scarred, scabbed, and still naked, stood the fat man. His left cheekbone had swollen to meet his inflamed eyebrow, submerging his eye in a mass of lustrous purple flesh. There were cuts, burns, and bruises all over his body, and his feet had been disfigured by the hot desert. He looked at Håkan with his single eye and smiled, revealing some newly broken teeth. Then, crossing his index finger over his cracked lips while softly shushing Håkan, he stood away from the door and pointed to the staircase.

“Go,” he whispered.

Håkan looked at him, perplexed.

“Go,” he repeated. “Go now. Go. Fast.”

Håkan picked up his shoes, walked by the fat man, whose malicious grin had become a grotesque silent laugh, tiptoed down the stairs, across the bar, and through the door, briefly paused on the threshold, and, as soon as he set foot on the plain, ran.