The Quarry

Öland 1957

The flies are buzzing lazily and sleepily above the path, woken by the spring sunshine. The wind is soughing in the trees, and Vendela raises her stick and hits the three cows, over and over again.

‘Go on! Get a move on!’

She is walking barefoot along the path, wearing a white dress, and she hits the cows as hard as she can. Three blows each. She measures the distance and swings the stick sideways at their flanks, just above the back legs. When she hits them there, it goes smack! Further forward on their bodies the sound is duller, smock!

The blows can be heard in long, rhythmic sequences along the path between the meadow and the farm, where she and Henry and the Invalid live.

‘Go, go, go!’

The bell on a strap around the leading cow’s neck clonks rhythmically. It is hot, and hitting the cows is tiring. Vendela is only nine years old and the stick is heavy. She is sweating. Her dress is stuck to the skin under her arms, her hair hangs in her eyes and bluebottles circle around her and the cows. She blows her nose on some grass and raises the stick once again. ‘Get a move on!’

When she turned eight, Vendela was given the responsibility of moving the cows between the farm and the meadow. It was a proper job, but there was never any mention of Henry paying her — he doesn’t even have enough money for electricity, even though the cables were brought as far as the farm several years ago. Her only reward was to be allowed to name the cows, and she called them Rosa, Rosa and Rosa.

That made her father laugh. ‘We might as well just give them each a number,’ he said.

The cows’ names mean nothing to him; he has marked them with a clear snick in the ear so that anyone who comes across them on the alvar can see that they belong to him. But he must have found the idea amusing, because the names stick.

Rosa, Rosa and Rosa.

Vendela is not in the least amused. It doesn’t matter what the cows are called, because she can’t see any difference between them. To her they are merely three brown and white things that have to be driven back and forth between the meadow and the barn. It’s a daily obligation that begins with the start of the spring farming and the arrival of the sun in April. That is when Henry, in keeping with tradition, gives each cow a herring dipped in tar for its first meal outside the barn. Then he lets them out on to their spring grazing land and tells his daughter to take care of them.

The cow stick is smooth and beautiful, slender and flexible. Henry removed all the bark before he gave it to her. Use this to guide the cows, he said. Walk behind them and prod them in the side occasionally, just to make sure they’re heading in the right direction.

The cows are as big as great lumps of rock, and Vendela prodded them tentatively when she first started driving them between the meadow and the farm. For the first few days she was afraid they would turn on her, but the cows didn’t react at all. It was as if she didn’t exist. So she prodded harder and harder, and after a month or so she started hitting them with the stick.

Finally she took to beating them.

By now, hitting the nearest cow as hard as possible with the stick has become a habit. Rosa, Rosa and Rosa have such thick brown and white hide, as hard as leather, and she wants to penetrate it and see it bleed; most of all she wants to frighten the cows. But the Rosas just carry on lumbering along, their great heads swaying as Vendela’s stick swishes through the air. Occasionally the blows make them give a little skip or two along the gravel track. The cow bells lose their rhythm, then they settle back to their normal, lumbering gait.

The lumbering along, the swaying heads, the brown eyes with their indifferent expression — Vendela regards all this as part of the daily struggle. Rosa, Rosa and Rosa try to show her that she is of no significance, but they are wrong.

Last summer Henry gave her responsibility for the henhouse as well, and she thought she would start hitting the hens and chickens too, or at least kicking out at them when they got in her way. But the cockerel went mad when she tried. He crowed and flapped his wings and stabbed at Vendela with his beak, chasing her out of the henhouse and halfway across the farmyard.

She wept and screamed for help, but she had to look after herself. Henry was down in the quarry, the Invalid was in his room, and of course her mother, Kristin, was gone.

Henry no longer talks about his late wife, and Vendela barely remembers her — not her face, not even her perfume. All that remains is a gravestone in the churchyard at Marnäs, an oval photograph of her that hangs in the kitchen, and a box of jewellery in Henry’s bedroom.

There is an ache inside Vendela’s body too, but that is probably just a result of all the times she has raised the arm holding the stick.

Since her mother died, Henry always seems to be on the way out, both mentally and physically. In the mornings he sings on the steps as he sets off for the quarry; in the evenings he often stands gazing up at the stars.

He leaves most of the work on the farm to Vendela. She has to do the cleaning, and she washes her own clothes so that she doesn’t smell of cows when she’s at school. She has to carry food between the earth cellar and the kitchen, because they can’t afford electricity and a fridge. She grows potatoes, French beans and sugar beet. And she milks the Rosas and drives them back and forth along the track.

Every single day she walks along behind them, back and forth, before and after her lessons at the village school down in Stenvik. But before that she has another job to do: she has to go upstairs and give the Invalid his food.

That’s the worst job of all.

Vendela doesn’t remember exactly when the Invalid came to the house, just that it was an evening in late autumn when she was six or seven years old and Henry could still afford to run a car. He had been pacing up and down in the kitchen all afternoon, then suddenly he went out and drove off, without any explanation. Vendela went and lay down in her little room behind the kitchen.

Several hours later she heard the car coming back. It drove right up to the steps in the darkness and stopped. The front doors opened, first one, then the other. Vendela lay in bed listening as her father helped someone out, carried someone out of the car, marching up the front steps in his boots, opening the door and stomping upstairs with something heavy in his arms.

He was up there for quite a while, and Vendela could hear him talking quietly to someone. And she heard someone laughing.

Then he came back down and went out to the car again. He struggled with something large in the boot, and eventually managed to get it out and bring it into the kitchen. Vendela could hear squeaking noises, like some kind of heavy machinery.

She got out of bed, opened the door and peeped out. Her father was pushing a wheelchair across the kitchen floor. He had a blanket over his arm, and there was a transistor radio on the seat of the wheelchair.

He set off up the stairs, pulling the chair behind him. After a couple of steps he stopped to rest, and met Vendela’s gaze.

He looked embarrassed, as if he had been caught out, and mumbled something.

Vendela took a step towards him. ‘What did you say, Dad?’

Her father looked at her and sighed. ‘He couldn’t stay in that place,’ he said. ‘They tied them down with leather straps.’

That was the only explanation he gave. He doesn’t tell her who this relative is, this person he has brought to the farm.

And Vendela dare not ask. It doesn’t matter, because from now on Henry refers to the new resident upstairs only as the Invalid. Most of the time he doesn’t even say that, he simply nods up at the ceiling or rolls his eyes. But that first evening, when Vendela heard muted laughter from upstairs and glanced at the ceiling, her expression fearful, he asked her a question across the kitchen table: ‘Would you like to come up and say hello?’

Vendela quickly shook her head.

The new duties quickly become routine; there is no need to spell them out. Vendela has to look after the Invalid, just as she looks after the cows, but the difference is that the Invalid never shows himself. The door of his room upstairs remains closed at all times, but the sound of music and news bulletins on the radio can be heard through it from morning to night. She sometimes wonders if the Invalid has locked himself in, but she is never brave enough to reach out and check.

All she does before she sets off for school each morning is to walk slowly up the dark staircase with his breakfast tray and place it on the little coffee table outside the door.

Always knock when you bring the food, Henry said.

Vendela knocks, but never waits for an answer. She hurries back down the stairs.

It takes time for the door to open. Vendela has often managed to put on her outdoor shoes by the time the hinges up above her begin to squeak. Sometimes she remains standing in the porch, holding her breath; she hears the door open, followed by the sound of heavy breathing as the Invalid emerges from his room. Then comes the clink of china as the tray is picked up.

At that moment Vendela is always afraid that something will go wrong up there, that she will hear a crash as the tray lands on the floor. Then she would have to go upstairs and help.

The crash never comes, but with each passing day during those first months with the Invalid, Vendela grows more and more afraid that the door to his room will be open one day when she gets home. Wide open.

But it doesn’t happen; every afternoon, once the cows are in, she comes home and finds the empty tray back on the table. There is usually a chamber pot there too, which she has to empty.

From the room behind the door she hears the sound of quiet laughter.

Henry has few friends, and there are only two regular visitors to the farm each year: two days before Christmas, Aunt Margit and Uncle Sven arrive from Kalmar in their big car, the boot filled with food and presents. Vendela and Henry have cleaned and scrubbed the kitchen and put a fresh cloth on the table, but that’s about it when it comes to housework.

Henry makes coffee and tries to make small talk, then he and his sister go upstairs to see the Invalid, Aunt Margit carrying a number of small, wrapped packages.

Vendela stays at the kitchen table and hears them open the door of his room, then close it. Aunt Margit’s voice sounds shriller and more spirited than ever as she talks to the Invalid and wishes him Merry Christmas.

Vendela doesn’t hear any response.

The door is open only once when Vendela walks past, a few months after the Invalid moved in. It is standing ajar. She slows down, stops and cranes her neck to look inside. It is dark, but she is aware of a sour, closed-in smell, and she can see a cramped room with a bed and a small table. And an old blanket on the floor.

Someone is sitting on the blanket: a thin, shrunken person with uncombed grey or white hair sticking out in all directions. The figure is sitting there motionless, in a stooping position. Suddenly the shadow straightens up. It turns its head towards her and opens its mouth. And it begins to giggle.

Vendela hurries quickly past the room, as if the Invalid does not exist. She dashes down the stairs and straight out on to the grass.

She understands why the Invalid closes the door — of course you can’t let people see you when you are so old, and so ill. But still. Spending all your time in a room upstairs, never coming out into the sunlight? She can’t imagine what that would be like.

The winter passes and it is March, and the snow is melting out on the alvar. For a few weeks big pools form on the yellow grass, spring lakes, and when school is over and the cows have been shut in, Vendela sometimes sets off to explore. She sees the water reflecting the clouds in the vast, open sky, and she feels free, far away from the farm.

One sunny afternoon on the alvar she suddenly sees a large, unusual object among the juniper bushes on the horizon. It is a block of stone. It looks like an altar, leaning slightly to one side, and it is perhaps two or three kilometres from the farm. It is tall and wide, and it can be seen from some distance away. The juniper bushes stand in a circle around the stone, but seem to be keeping their distance.

Vendela doesn’t actually go up to it, because she is further out on the alvar than ever and is afraid of getting lost among the spring lakes. She turns around and runs home.

Spring passes and the school year ends, and Vendela doesn’t go back to the isolated stone out on the alvar. But one summer evening she mentions it to her father and asks if he has ever seen it.

‘The elf stone?’ Henry is sitting at the kitchen table polishing a round lamp stand. He has carved it from a piece of limestone, and as his emery cloth moves across the surface, it shines like polished marble. ‘The one on the way to Marnäs? Is that the one you mean?’

Vendela nods.

The elf stone. Now she knows what it’s called.

‘It’s from the Ice Age,’ says Henry. ‘It’s always been there. And people have always gone there to leave offerings.’

‘Who for?’

‘For the elves,’ says Henry. ‘It’s called the elf mill. Back in the old days, people believed the hollows in the stone were formed when the elves milled their grain to make flour. But these days, people go there to ask for things... you leave a gift for the elves and make a wish.’

‘What do you wish for?’

‘Anything you like. If you’ve lost something you can ask the elves to help you find it...’ Henry says, glancing out of the window towards the barn, ‘... or maybe you can ask for a bit more good fortune in life.’

‘Have you ever done it, Dad?’

‘Done what?’

‘Have you ever left a gift for the elves?’

Henry shakes his head and carries on polishing the limestone. ‘You shouldn’t wish for things you don’t deserve.’