The Hand that Trembles

TWENTY-NINE

Lisen Morell sat with her back to the old fishing cottage. Her feet rested on a stool. Her clasped hands rested on her emaciated thighs. She was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing when she had emerged from the forest by Frisk’s house: black jeans and a white jumper, but instead of sandals she was wearing a pair of rubber boots.

She stared out across the sea, which lay almost completely still. When Lindell came closer Morell turned her head and looked at her without showing any surprise or any of the confusion that she had demonstrated earlier. Her gaze was also different. Lindell could establish this when she sat down next to Morell. The wobbly wooden bench let out a groan and dipped.

‘It’ll hold,’ Morell said.

‘How are you?’ Lindell asked. ‘You were a little freaked out when we saw each other last.’

‘I’m still freaked out.’

‘By what?’

Morell smiled and posed a counter-question without lifting her gaze from the sea.

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Getting sick,’ Lindell said. ‘Seriously sick.’

‘You think I’m a wreck, yes, I know.’ She raised a hand to silence Lindell’s protests. ‘Everyone does, not least out here on the point. They call me the Magpie, do you know that? Is there anything else that you’re afraid of?’

Lindell shifted a little. The bench underneath her moaned.

‘Getting sick,’ Morell said slowly and thoughtfully, as if testing the meaning of the words. ‘I am healthy, at least I think so. But to live in this paradise wears on my strength. You see me as a wreck,’ she repeated, ‘and in a way you and everyone out here are right. I am a ship that started to sink out here on the Sea of Åland, drifted into the bay, and was washed up as a wreck. And here I sit.’

Lindell studied her profile. A beautiful face, perhaps a little too thin. Lisen Morell would benefit from putting on a couple of kilos. A few crow’s feet at her eyes and around her mouth indicated that she was not completely young, but otherwise her skin was youthfully smooth. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail. She wet her thin lips with her tongue before she continued.

‘My hand doesn’t obey me any longer,’ she said, and held up her right hand. Long, slender fingers, well-groomed cuticles, and faintly cherry-coloured nails, no ring.

‘It shakes from time to time, just a little, but the most insignificant tremble is enough to crush me. I am an artist. It started a year ago, the trembling. I felt it in my heart first and then the movement spread outward to the tips of my fingers.’

‘What happened a year ago?’

‘Nothing. I came home from New York and was happy, very happy. I had met Watanabe again and I had sold well, was prepared to start saving for a new collection. But I felt at the same time that something was wrong. Not physically – I have always been fit and healthy – but that there was something else that caused my heart to tremble. An arrhythmia of the soul. I practise a method called mezzotint. There are not many of us. It demands years of training, patience, and above all a sure hand. The worst of it is that I don’t know what it can be.’

‘Maybe you have some idea?’

‘I reproduce nature, create small representations of buds, flowers, and animals. I don’t dare try humans. There I can’t measure myself against Watanabe. I do it with love, become drunk with the minute. A pine cone can make me smile.’

Then being out here should have you rolling on the floor, Lindell thought, but said nothing.

‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, a pine cone, rough against your hand and a little unfriendly, but with thousands of seeds, of future life, a pine cone is far more sensual than most of what we humans produce. That may be the source of my downfall. I creep down beside nature’s miniatures, breathe on them, breathe them in. I don’t touch them, but they touch me. When I stand up and look out over the world – that is when it happens. That’s when I feel the arrhythmia. The trembling. It is hard to explain and I don’t ask that anyone understand what I mean. Watanabe, perhaps.’

‘Who is this Watanabe?’

‘A Japanese artist I met for the first time in France. He is so exquisite. We have also met in New York when he had an exhibition at a gallery in Soho.’

‘What do you see when you look out over the world?’

Lindell sensed what the answer would be. She rarely or never looked at pine cones herself, much less breathed on them. But in a way she could understand the feeling that Morell described. She had Erik, he was her pine cone. To breathe him in was her greatest possible happiness.

‘War,’ Lisen Morell said finally. ‘War against all that is living. If we took as our starting point these pine cones or buds or the sea,’ her hand made an unexpectedly quick sweeping motion, ‘or the desert or glaciers, then we would be in better health. Simply put, if we did that we would feel better.’

Or Erik, if we took Erik as a point of departure, Lindell thought, unexpectedly moved by Morell’s words, which she in another context in another environment would perhaps have labelled the rantings of a confused person.

‘I will show you what Watanabe is capable of,’ Lisen Morell said, and stood up.

Lindell followed her into the cottage, which in contrast to the last time she was here was now clean and tidy. Lisen Morell walked over to the wall they had sat leant up against on the outside of the house and pointed to what Lindell at first took to be a photograph. The picture represented a lizard, so exact and detailed in its representation that it seemed alive.

On the opposite wall there was a painting that showed a woman’s body in motion, perhaps in water; the movement by the woman’s breast suggested rippling water.

‘I have many others,’ Lisen Morell said, ‘I change them out from time to time.’

Lindell looked around. She saw no other art.

‘What about your things?’

Perhaps it was the word ‘things’ that caused Lisen Morell to smile.

‘Nothing out here,’ she said. ‘It’s all back in town. Oh, one thing! But it isn’t a mezzotint.’

She walked over to a chest of drawers, pulled out the uppermost drawer, and took out a folder. She opened it and revealed a watercolour painting of a flowering branch.

‘Cherry,’ she said. ‘I love cherries.’

Lindell saw a delicate branch with a dozen flowers, some in full bloom, others still buds. The petals were white with a faint pink tone toward the centre. The insides of the flowers were – as far as Lindell could judge – reproduced to the most minute and exact detail.

‘This is fantastic,’ she said, and meant it. She wanted to touch the flowers, smell them. ‘What are these bits called?’

‘Stamens and pistils,’ said Lisen Morell, and smiled.

She closed the folder and put it back in the chest. Everything was done very quickly, as if she did not want to expose the cherry flowers to either light or eyes.

‘Have you shown your art to your neighbours out here?’

‘No. They think I’m completely batty.’

‘But if they could see…’

‘I don’t talk so much with them. They judged me from the start. Without knowing who I am, what I have done or could do. If you only knew how limited they are.’

‘Did you ever talk to Tobias Frisk?’

‘Sure, he sometimes helped me with the car. It’s as moody as I am. You see, I have to have a car to get here and back, I have to fill up on petrol and blow out a lot of pollution into the air.’

‘Was Frisk as judgmental?’

‘Maybe not. He sometimes dropped by with cinnamon buns. Sometimes I got the impression he was interested.’

‘In you?’

Lisen Morell nodded. ‘But he was shy.’

‘Were you interested?’

‘No, I didn’t encourage it at all. And it got better. At first he looked at me as if I… well, you know.’

‘When did it get better?’

‘Last autumn. It seemed like he relaxed. I thought he realised I wasn’t interested.’

‘Maybe he met someone else?’

‘No, but he smelt differently.’

Lindell laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you noticed? When they are like males in rut they stink, but when they are satisfied the smell is not as sharp.’

‘Is that because they put more effort into their hygiene when they meet a woman? Wash themselves, put on a little deodorant, and splash on a little of this and that?’

Lisen Morell smiled. Lindell liked her smile, especially since it contrasted so completely with the woman she had met earlier.

‘Okay, when did his smell change?’

‘About a year ago.’

‘And then?’

‘Until early this autumn. Then he went back to his old self, if you can say that. Clumsy in a way I had never noticed before. I almost felt sorry for him, though he stared at my breasts. He also drove into the ditch, I think he was drunk. Not that that is unusual out here. Regular laws don’t apply in Bultudden.’

‘When was that?’

‘Perhaps a month ago.’

‘Was he hurt?’

‘No, I met him shuffling along the road. He was probably on his way to get Lasse Malm or someone else to get help to tow the car. It was stuck in the ditch. But he didn’t want any help from me.’

‘Did you hear the shot?’

‘Probably everyone out here did.’

The fact was that only Lasse Malm and Sunesson had reported that they had heard anything. The others denied hearing the double salvo just before eight o’clock in the evening – that was the time both Malm and Sunesson had given.

‘What did you think?’

‘That someone was shooting a wolf.’

‘Are there wolves here?’

‘There was one a year ago. That was also a lone male.’

‘But hunting a wolf at night,’ Lindell said. ‘Is that sensible?’

‘No, but there’s so much activity around here that is not sensible, day or night.’

Lindell dropped the theme of the wolf and tracked back to the change in Tobias Frisk after the summer.

‘But you never saw a woman arrive or leave?’

‘No.’

‘And the change happened in late summer?’

‘Yes. I remember that he came over the first week of September. I was going to have the car inspected on the tenth and he was going to help me with some small things. And then he smelt like that again, somehow raw. I’m sensitive to smells. You wash with Dove, don’t you?’

Lindell nodded.

‘And there’s jasmine, too.’

‘You’re right,’ Lindell said, and felt a blush spread over her cheeks.

‘So for three months he has smelt of lone male,’ she summed up, as she bent over to fish out a pen and pad from her bag, not wanting Lisen Morell to notice her embarrassment.

‘Like a prowling wolf,’ Lisen Morell said.

‘And it wasn’t the case that a man came into your life last autumn and disappeared in summer? I mean, that Frisk…’

‘I understand what you’re getting at. No, it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t seeing anyone, then or now.’

Morell looked at the floor and drew a breath as if she was bracing herself.

‘I’ve had men,’ she said. ‘Many men. I mean, not like that, that makes it sound worse than it is, but I am not exactly a virgin. But now, the past two, three years – nothing. I can’t bring myself. Even though I love pine cones, which are a result of reproduction, I can’t bring myself to reproduce myself. Even though I love flowers, stamens and pistils, the delicate and beautiful in their construction and whole function, despite this I myself am wilted. Isn’t that ironic? Or sad, perhaps? I don’t know. Perhaps I am a sterile bloom, like the white outer blooms of the Snowball tree. Or a hybrid, a false flower, beautiful and long-flowering but not fertile. A flower for looks but not for seed. Sometimes I long for a child, but I don’t want to bring one into the world. I don’t trust the men who are in power. My stigma will never swell up.’

She finished and stared into the floor again, before she gathered herself and anticipated Lindell.

‘Yes, I know what you want to say, but if you live with a man the question of children always comes up in the end. To deny a man children is to deny him, isn’t it? A man can’t take that. It upsets him. The male wants to reproduce himself, sire offspring. It is the proof of his virility.’

Lindell sensed that she was speaking from her own experiences. There was much to say, but she chose to nod and mumble something about how she understood. Continuing the discussion might cause Lisen Morell to go off-kilter, to revert to the state of mind she had been in the other day, and Lindell wanted to prevent this at all costs.

They said goodbye outside the cottage. Once she reached the car, she opened the door and tossed her bag onto the passenger seat and looked back. Lisen Morell was still standing outside. She was moving her right hand in what looked like a wave.

Lindell hesitated for a second before she quickly walked back over.

‘What do I smell of other than soap and jasmine?’

‘Loneliness,’ Lisen Morell immediately answered.