To Mervas

November 7

A letter came. Just a few lines, jotted down on a piece of copy paper.

Marta, Mart! I’m in Mervas. It’s not possible to get any farther away. And no closer either. Your Kosti.

That’s all it said. And he hadn’t been in touch for over twenty years. Not that I’ve been counting the years; I stopped doing that a long time ago. But now he’d sent me this message and it was like being filled with air, like being hit in the face by a gale so strong it made me gasp for breath.

I read the letter again and again. My first thought was that it was fake, that someone wanted to taunt me. But who would want to do that? I have no friends; there’s no one who would know that such a cryptic little note would weigh on me. No one, except perhaps Kosti himself. And now he had written it. A faint cry from one end of life to the other, a cry straight through the years. And from Mervas. What kind of place was Mervas?

I wept. A sadness so vast washed over me I wasn’t sure I’d be able to contain it. In some ways, it was myself that I mourned. I mourned my own life; it was as if I’d been invited to my own funeral and now stood above the coffin, where everything had been completed and settled, where for the first time my life could be looked upon as something finished and concluded, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could be added to it. And I cried over everything that was lost, everything that had gone wrong and been led astray. My tears were unnaturally hot, they ran down my neck and onto my chest and I felt their entire path, felt how hot they were, strangely, remarkably hot, as if there’d been boiling, volcanic wells hidden inside me, and now they were overflowing through my eyes.

To keep from falling to pieces, I started pacing. I covered every room. The small, dismal apartment became a dreamscape. My tears made everything blurry, almost blotted things out, and in this intense and charged absence, I reached for objects like a blind person. I used my fingertips to see, my eyes were elsewhere.

I must have plodded for hours. The entire time, I thought I would implode from sadness, that I would break like a clay vessel in pressured heat. I touched potted plants, rocks, books, furniture, and lamp shades. It grew darker in the rooms, I could sense the gloam through my skin. The midday gray seeped inside and settled on the floor, the walls, and grew denser.

In my head echoed the idiotic little saying “A letter means so much.” I couldn’t get rid of it; the insinuating voice followed me wherever I went. I knew that the letter I’d received wasn’t much of a letter, but still, the few words he’d written were alive inside me, they’d awakened and shaken me, struck me with something I’d nearly lost. They’d reminded me of my life and the fact that I was still living it, that I was supposed to live it. I’d forgotten that. I’d stayed away from that truth. And a person can actually hide inside her own life, hide from life itself within the minutiae and everyday chores, hide from herself inside herself. She can do it, I know this, I knew it even then, but I didn’t pay it any mind.

Finally, I went to the bathroom and turned on the light. Avoiding my reflection in the mirror, I filled the sink with cold water and submerged my hot, tear-swollen face. I held it in the ice-cold water until it ached. Then I straightened slowly and met my image in the mirror. I have never liked my face; I’ve somehow never been able to pull it together. Here it was, large and unignorable, looming in the mirror like an approaching storm. It was an old face, I could see that. Ugly. The ugly face stared back at me and simultaneously, in an alarming maneuver, crawled inside me and stared out at itself. I was old and ugly and here I stood. A letter from the other end of time had arrived and the blind and complacent one-day-at-a-time existence I’d been living for so many years had instantly burst to pieces. Instead, I now held my entire life, my whole story, in my arms, and it looked like a skinned animal, a skinned yet still living, struggling animal. I shook from holding it, shook from the very core of my being. And as I stood there, the thought went through my mind that I’d waited for him my entire life. My whole adult life I’d longed for him, kept a small place ready, a little backyard, a secret, hidden place for him, for Kosti. I knew that this place had been the only one that mattered, the one thing that had kept me alive, even though I myself didn’t even know it existed. Now I’d discovered it. I’d caught myself in the act. I too had been carried along by a dream. Simply being alive isn’t enough. Perhaps that’s how it must be.

I stood captive before the bathroom mirror and stared into the face that was supposed to be mine. Once you get lost in your life, I thought, you just keep getting more and more lost. Meanwhile, the years close in on you like a thick forest. They tangle and grow denser, they become tangled forests of years.

The apartment now lay in darkness. Mervas, I thought dimly. What kind of place is Mervas? I stood in the kitchen and the lamp over the kitchen table was lit. His letter lay there, exposed. Written in blue ink. I’d avoided letting my tears fall onto it. He’d always used blue ink that tears could dissolve. Your Kosti, it said. Your Kosti, he’d written. How could he? Only those who are truly alone know what it’s like to be a lost child in the world, a lost child in a great war. But all of us are alone, more or less. Someone lost us along the way. With my hands still trembling slightly, I refolded the paper and put it back inside the envelope. No more tears were coming, no hot tears. The wells had evidently dried up. All I felt was a dry cramping in my chest, a feeling of something inconsolable draining me, feeding off me. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself, I think, not even then. I’m not worth pitying. But my life hurt inside me. It moved like a child, like a fetus inside me, a bundle of hammering, kicking willpower. This is unbearable, I remember thinking. Only that single word: unbearable.

Somewhere in my life is a city shrouded in darkness. It’s a big city, probably a capital. All roads lead to it, into the dark, where they dissolve. I know this city exists, that like all cities it has houses and streets, that a kind of living takes place there, stories are formed, meetings and scenes. But nothing can be distinguished in that darkness. It is like a mute weave that has been pushed into the center of my life, thread upon thread of silence. And I’m afraid of this darkness, I know that from it, anything can break through: a bright, blind violence, a rage like a forest fire igniting even the air. There are monsters living there that have courted me, monsters that hatch in darkness, and I don’t want to see them, don’t want to know about them. Sometimes I imagine that the city gulps down the darkness, that it greedily fills itself with more and more darkness and grows, swells — and in this way, it is active, a volcano in reverse. A crater that drinks and devours rather than spewing things out.

Standing there by the kitchen table looking at the envelope where I’d just put Kosti’s letter, I suddenly caught a glimpse of the dark city, as if it had been illuminated in a flash of light. A bright white sheen pumped through it like a heartbeat, and I realized I had to enter it, perhaps it wasn’t always sunk in darkness; light could blow into it, a wind of light.

Now it was really evening, and I felt I had to get out, had to leave my apartment, get away from everything that had settled in its walls, the sour breathing of years that felt as if it would suffocate me. I took a comb from the bathroom cabinet and pulled it lovelessly through my shoulder-length, nowadays thin gray hair. After that, I painted my lips red and dabbed some powder on my large-pored skin, swollen from crying. Have to get out of the apartment, I thought, perhaps down to the store to buy some food, anything.

It was after suppertime. November. The air had gotten cold and spots on the ground that used to be wet had turned into ice. There was a faint wind and I walked around the block. Three-story buildings were arranged around the yards like loaves of bread, and there were a few single-family houses on display. These were residential neighborhoods, the streets seemed bored; the whole area caught in a suppressed yawn. I walked on listlessly, and suddenly stood outside the front door of my building again. I had nowhere to go and the mere thought of the grocery store made me anxious, it was too bright in there for me tonight, I didn’t want to walk around with a basket on my arm and have to pick and choose; it seemed impossible, disgusting. So without actually making any kind of decision, I walked over to a small neighborhood restaurant that had recently opened, a place I’d never been before and never even considered going, because I don’t go to restaurants. I walked in and sat down at a table. I had the remarkable feeling that everything was an illusion, a liberating sensation of not being myself but someone else, perhaps someone in a movie, someone outside myself I could watch and perhaps pretend to be for a little while. I ordered food and a small carafe of red wine and a little later another glass of red wine and a pack of cigarettes. Except, it wasn’t really me, it was the woman in the movie who did all this. She was a tired middle-aged woman, just like me, but far more interesting and confident. She was now getting a little drunk sitting in the small, cozy space, its red dimness reflecting her life back to her like a crystal ball. She saw all the images and allowed them to emerge without resisting. She sat there gazing into the beautiful red wine in her glass while the thoughts and images in her mind drifted freely: it was as if she saw her life inside that glass and she leaned over it in order to take a close, careful look.

A letter has come, I thought, and a sudden fearlessness filled me: I wanted somehow to feel how time had passed, all those years after Kosti, how my life turned out, how everything turned out. I dared thinking about the fact that I had been a mother: even someone like me had become a mother by giving birth to a child, a boy, my deformed boy, unfit for life. And now I saw the years, months, hours, and minutes bound to him, the peculiar slowness, millimeter upon millimeter of the gray, faintly buzzing slowness I’d felt together with him. It was like a period of timelessness injected into my life, and when I looked into the glass, I saw those years, saw them moving faintly down there on the bottom. I’d been absorbed by timelessness back then; I’d let myself be nourished by it. I’d been a mother during those years after Kosti, a mother to a helpless child, and even though this child was no longer alive, I dared to think I’d gone on being his mother, and that I’d kept living with him in that timelessness. Perhaps that’s why I’d been hit so hard by Kosti’s letter; he’d jolted me into the present. And that hurt. Timelessness is a kind of death that attracts those who cannot or do not have the courage to live. But despite my pain, I also noticed that something had awakened in me during the day and it was calling me, there was something intriguing about the memories and images that flashed through me as I drank. It was as if I’d been missing myself for a very long time. As if I’d been standing abandoned for a very long time.

November 10

The boy’s face. Heavy and impossible to read. The mouth without control and constantly glistening wet, a mere cavity that had happened to end up in his face. He couldn’t reach his own mouth, couldn’t access it fully. It was as if a thread, the link that connected him to his own body, had been severed. His legs and hands were also half-asleep, somehow muddled. He couldn’t reach himself anywhere.

Except his eyes. He existed through his eyes. His gaze reached out from that big, lifeless body, found its way past an otherwise meaninglessly constructed face. From the moment he was born, his gaze had been the same. And it seized me. From the very beginning, there was an intimacy between us so profound that as soon as I recognized it, I knew I’d never be able to escape it. His gaze went straight into my life.

I remember the first few days after his birth as a quake. A quake that reached all the way to the center of the earth. I had just delivered, felt so recently opened. At the same time, I burned with a sense of presence. They left me alone with him for twenty-four hours. Then they came and tore us apart. They stole my boy.

It was at the radiology ward, you know, where there are lots of odd little booths with drapes covering the open doors. I sat in one of those booths and waited for them to return with my boy. The booths around me were empty: the whole place seemed deserted. Perhaps it was the weekend. During the night, my breasts had filled with something that felt like cement. They were enormous. Rock hard. So tender that even the light feeling of my clothes against my skin made me shiver with pain. I thought I was the one who had just been born. I was as newly born as my small child that they’d just carried away. And in this strange new world, nothing existed but him, nothing but the child, only his gaze, his smell, and the feeling of his small, eager mouth searching for my nipples.

I remember that it took a while. Then I heard steps, and voices far away in the maze of booths. I sat, alert, and listened. A man’s voice called out:

“I’ve found a space in ward nineteen!”

I’d already left the booth and ran like a blind person through the maze. Suddenly, I saw the doctor standing there, the one who’d called out, and I threw myself at him.

“Where’s my boy?” I screamed, my fists hitting his chest. “Where have you taken my child?”

“Calm down!” the doctor yelled, and grabbed my wrists. “Calm down a little, and I’ll explain.”

But I wasn’t calm. I tried to drag him in the direction where I thought they’d taken my boy.

“Give me back my child right now!” I screamed. “I want my child, I want my child, I want — ”

I burst into tears, and the doctor I had attacked a moment earlier put his arm around me and led me into a booth.

“Try and pull yourself together. I’m going to explain what’s going on,” he said formally and rather sternly. He took a pencil from the breast pocket of his shirt, and I hated him. Go on, talk, I thought. I know you’re lying. I know you’ve taken away my son to slaughter him. My hatred was so intense it ought to have made him dissolve like a fly in an acid bath.

“You’re going to slaughter my son,” I said.

“No, we’re not. We’re going to try to help him. Your son is gravely ill and I insist that you make an effort to listen to me.”

He drew something on the paper that covered the examination table inside the booth and explained how something was very wrong inside the boy’s head. I didn’t believe what he was saying, and listened with only half an ear since I was sure they’d taken the boy to slaughter him. I knew I was the only thing my boy needed, and it was up to me to save him.

“I want to go to ward nineteen, where my child is,” I said as soon as the doctor had finished talking.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “You have to go back to the maternity ward first. They have to discharge you there before you can come back to the children’s ward.”

“Then the police will have to come and take me back to the maternity ward. I’m going to my boy now.”

I felt strong enough to upend the whole hospital, if necessary.

The doctor thought I was being difficult and couldn’t hide his irritation. Finally, he gave in a little.

“You know, there’s no room for you in ward nineteen anyway. It’s an intensive care ward. You can’t stay there overnight.”

We then made our way in silence through the big hospital over to the remote children’s ward where they’d taken my child.

Entering the dimly lit room where the boy was supposed to be, I thought for a moment I’d ended up in Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell. Fetuses with tubes and hoses taped everywhere on their perplexing little bodies lay in their incubators, exposed in the strong lights like ancient relics or the crown jewels in a museum’s glass case. Around the room, between these incubators, were transparent carts with infants, and I immediately focused on a baby with shiny white pieces of tape on its face. The tape seemed to hold the unnaturally round cheeks together. I was filled with violent disgust at the thought that they had to tape the child’s cheeks to keep them in place, that otherwise they would fall away to each side like two loose lumps. My gaze searched the dim room and there, at the farthest end, I spotted the boy. The first thing I saw was that they’d taped his cheeks too. Narrow white strips appeared to tear his tiny face apart; it was as if they had marked him like a sacrificial animal.

At the sight of the boy, my breasts, which all day had been on the verge of exploding from the pressure of the hardening cement filling them, began to leak. I closed my eyes and leaned over the bed to finally inhale his scent, to feel his skin against mine. When I carefully folded the blanket aside to lift him up, I saw that the tape on his cheeks held a thin tube in place. It was placed inside one of his nostrils. A tube. A feeding tube. They don’t want me to feed him anymore, I thought. He would no longer get to lie in my arms and catch my nipple to drink with his whimsical, eager mouth. The doctors thought this boy was so sick he didn’t need a mother. He’d get a new, clinical mother; someone approved of, perhaps even a man.

I remember that I shook with a sense of injustice; it moved through every cell in my body. For a while, I stood and cried with the boy pressed against me. Then I put him back in the bed and went out to the nearby reception area. At a desk, a doctor was talking on the phone.

“Why have you given my child a feeding tube?” I asked, trying my utmost to remain calm, to not throw up, to not rush up to the man by the desk and start hitting him with the phone.

“Could you hold on a second?” he said. “As you can see, I’m on the phone.”

“I want to know why you’ve given my child a feeding tube!” I screamed. “He can eat on his own. I’m going to feed him. Me! You hear me? He’s my child!”

“Sorry,” the doctor said into the phone. “I think I’ve got a nursing-crazed mother on my hands.”

He turned to me. I saw the horns in his forehead.

“Which child are you referring to?” he asked.

The days that followed were like a slow descent into a warped underground realm, an abyss where faces in gaudy colors floated through the air, their voices snapping as if they had fangs. I searched for the boy everywhere, and everywhere he was taken away from me, following protocol after protocol according to regulations so sacred they couldn’t be questioned by anyone in heaven or on earth.

“We think the feeding tube is more practical because then we’ll know exactly how much he eats. We can send a breast pump to your room, so maybe eventually we’ll let you bottle-feed him,” someone said.

The first few days I tried to defend myself by transforming into a bear mother, a lioness, a tigress. But the high priests weren’t scared by any mother animals, they didn’t understand the meaning of words like mother, milk, mouths; they didn’t understand what thousands of years of deep dark knowledge and desire can awaken in a human being. They didn’t realize how close they were to driving me insane when they ignored the inner forces that threatened to tear me apart.

One evening when I sat in the little hospital room I had demanded, a nurse came to me and whispered:

“Don’t sit here pumping. Bring the baby in here and nurse him. Screw the doctors, they don’t understand anything.”

But by then it was too late; the claws of the tigress had already been trimmed, her teeth pulled out. The milk was drying up, and I didn’t dare try placing the child on my breast.

It would probably have been good for the boy to nurse. And for me too. When he was a week old, one of his arms began twitching strangely, and at the same time he started crying. And the crying never ceased. It went on day and night, every waking moment, and sometimes even when he slept. His cries were sometimes hoarse and exhausted, other times high and shrill.

But in the midst of this wailing, his gaze was alive, the boy’s gaze. It pierced through his tears. And it was insistent. Insistent that the world give him an answer.

November 14

Mervas existed. Yes, it exists. I found it in the index of a big Nordic atlas in the library. Mervas, it read suddenly, and I almost started with surprise. I’d found it! I got the strange idea that no one before me had ever looked it up in this atlas. Mervas was listed just for me; it had waited for me between the covers, waited to become a kind of sign, a secret pact between Kosti and me. If I came back later and looked it up again, it would no longer be there, having already served its purpose.

These were foolish thoughts, and as soon as they emerged I was filled with doubts. Perhaps the Mervas in the atlas wasn’t Kosti’s Mervas at all. His Mervas probably wasn’t in any atlas whatsoever. And even if this was the Mervas Kosti had referred to, nothing indicated that he’d be there. Or that he ever set foot there. That was what the grinding doubts in my head were saying.

I nevertheless searched the actual map to see where the place was. It was up north, way up north, in the middle of nowhere. Mervas, the map said, but there was no dot or square to indicate the place or reveal anything about it, just the six letters and something that appeared to be a road or possibly just a trail leading to it. I kept searching. At least Mervas was now a place in the world. Whatever it represented, it was a message from Kosti to me. Whether he really was there didn’t matter, I told myself. The important thing was that he’d sent me the name of this place after more than twenty years of silence. This place was marked on a map, it already carried the possibility of a story, even though it hadn’t been described as a village or mountain or with any other cartographic symbols used on a map. That was just as he’d written in his letter. Mervas was farther away than anything else; you couldn’t get any farther away.

Finally, after searching several encyclopedias and books about various municipalities, I found additional information in an older encyclopedia. Mervas, it said, former mining community in L., the mine closed in 1951, community abandoned and all buildings dismantled and removed in 1953.

So it was a nonexistent place. A former place. A ghost town. That’s where Kosti was. With the name of this place, he’d shaken and roused me from the sleep I’d allowed my life to sink into. I read the brief text several times, feeling oddly upset. It was somehow completely impossible for me to rationally and sensibly grasp these simple facts. I saw nothing but messages: hidden, intricate, subtle messages. Am I this shut-down mining town? I asked myself. If so, what did this mean: all buildings dismantled and removed? Was this former mining community our relationship, our love affair?

I tried to make sense of it but only became increasingly confused. It really wasn’t so surprising that Kosti was in a nonexistent place, considering that he was an archaeologist. I used to be an archaeologist too, once. Now I wasn’t anything, I’d been on disability, as it’s called, ever since I was locked up in the dark city during my time away from the world. Suddenly, I was struck by the notion that perhaps Kosti knew something about all that. The fact that Mervas was an actual mining town made my heart flutter with terror. “The Salt Mine” had been the patients’ name for the ward where I’d been locked up. I tried not to think about this, not to let my mind return there. After all, Kosti was an archaeologist, and it was entirely expected that he’d be in a place like Mervas, an existent but nonetheless shut-down and removed former place.

Our love, or our love affair, lasted for seven, almost eight years. Our meeting at the university was all to Kosti’s credit. We increasingly happened to sit next to one another during lectures and seminars. He always seemed to end up by my side. I was suspicious and grumpy. In my opinion, men only wanted one thing, and that thing was dirty and repulsive. But his smile was so open, he casually said hi, and sank down in the seat next to mine, his body boyishly relaxed and exuding a faint scent, a dry and grassy scent, which distracted me during the lectures. I was both attracted to and frightened by that scent. Before we became friends and started talking to each other, I sat stiff as a board next to him and avoided looking in his direction even when he spoke to me. But I couldn’t avoid his scent. Discreet yet clearly distinct, it surrounded him like a cloud, and I noticed how it did something to me, it sort of prepared a place for him inside me and made me expect his presence.

I truly never thought that another person would want anything to do with me. I’d always been alone, even in my own family; I was somehow the child outside the pack, the odd, lonely sibling viewed as “Daddy’s girl” in a home where Daddy was a monster. It was like collaborating with the Germans in Norway during the war. Or like being a German whore. Thus I was excluded from the pack right from the start. I felt as if I carried something around, a weight, a plague, an unforgivable guilt, and it tormented me; not so much while I was by myself, but as soon as I was among other people. That’s when I felt it; I was a burden. Just as you can never get away from yourself, you can never get away from your family. You’re steeped in its influence, sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot. My family had made me into someone who stayed away. I was ashamed; not just of being Daddy’s girl, but also because of all the despicable things my siblings and I had witnessed and suffered. We’d been made accomplices to something we couldn’t comprehend, and in addition to that shame, I’ve also always felt ashamed of being ashamed. Nothing on earth is as steadfast as shame. I’ve been thinking that if when I get old I feel like embroidering one of those wall hangings with a saying on it, it will say in red cross-stitching: A debt can be repaid, but shame lasts forever. Because that’s how it is.

Despite all this, Kosti stubbornly wanted to be close to me. He kept sitting down next to me and talking to me. My sharp edges and grumpiness never affected him. He often laughed at me, but I was more surprised and amazed than hurt by it. It was as if he freed me from everything difficult, released me from shame and set me free.

Since that time I have realized this: everything catches up with you eventually: your past, your fate, your sentence. It took seven, almost eight years. That’s how long my respite lasted. Sometimes I watch nature films on television. The moments before the lion catches up with the gazelle, the fox with the hare, the wolverine with the reindeer, those are the glowing moments, the moments of life’s ultimate freedom. Then come the claws, the teeth, the fall. It’s as if I already knew it, as if it were etched into me; I was the prey.

I remained sitting by the big table in the library with the map open in front of me. I tried to conjure up an image of Kosti and the way he might look now. I even tried to picture him laughing up there in Mervas, if that’s where he was. I wanted to know why he’d written to me, what had made him want to contact me after all these years. Could it be, I asked myself, almost petrified, could he be waiting for me?

Looking back at my life, I know I’ve ruined it. Sometimes I wake up at dawn to something that closely resembles a vision. I see what life is. With piercing clarity, I see it as the unbelievable miracle it is: a tiny bubble, shining in different colors, sailing all alone through a vast, encompassing darkness. It’s a bubble in time, a brief moment on a frequency quickly rushing past, a scene performed only for an instant. I awaken at dawn as if touched, as if burnt by this unfathomable truth. The next moment, I am filled with pain, a sorrow so powerful that it almost suffocates me. It’s not simply that I haven’t made the most of my life; I have also done violence to it.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve decided to go to Mervas. In some way, I already knew this when I went to the library to look through the atlases. I’m going to sell everything I can, get rid of my furniture, the apartment, all my possessions. Then I’m leaving. I’m going to enter my life, enter the shiny bubble. That will be my penance.

November 29

Mom died giving birth to my youngest brother, and with that, you might say our family was dissolved. The baby boy was put up for adoption, despite Dad’s protests, and the rest of us were placed with various friends and relatives. We weren’t even allowed to attend Mom’s funeral; the adults thought it would be too traumatic. It was better for us kids if everyone pretended that nothing had happened. I ended up with Dad’s mother, together with my sister, who is two years older. Our three younger siblings were taken in by Mom’s brothers, and they didn’t want anything to do with Dad’s family after what had happened, so I didn’t see the twins or my little sister again until all of us were grown.

I became obsessively organized in an effort to keep everything in place. Nothing could be changed or go wrong; my sense of order in the world depended on it. I was twelve years old and every paper clip and eraser had its own assigned place in my desk drawers. I devoted myself entirely to studying and being good and completed all my assignments, even the extra ones, according to instruction. I was so careful with my brand-new schoolbooks that I hardly dared open them; I sort of peeked in between the pages through a three-inch opening. I was also reluctant to erase anything in my pristine notebooks. Instead, I tried to train myself always to write correctly from the start. Everything in my life had to be at once transparent and impeccable; there could be nothing to remark upon or criticize. This applied to my hair, my thoughts, my schoolwork, my desk drawers, and my feelings; everything had to fit into the same mold of perfection. In a diary from this period, I’d made lists of “reasons to be happy” and “reasons to be sad.” I found the old diaries a few years ago when I cleaned out the upper cupboards in the hallway, and they made for miserable reading, which definitely belonged in the second category. Getting a perfect score on a math test was an obvious reason to be happy, but being second best or one point off was a reason to be sad. Overall, the reasons for being happy were few and rather vague: “nice weather,” “cabbage pudding for dinner,” “funny movies.” There were more reasons for being sad or upset, and they were more detailed. “A letter from Dad” was high on that list, along with “praise from people I don’t respect” and “stomachache,” which meant I was having my period. I’d also written down “nightmares,” but that was in parentheses, and later crossed out. Dreams weren’t reliable. Neither was my body.

I regarded my body as a repulsive feral animal, and I tried to keep it at a distance. I still remember how I tried different ways of moving so I wouldn’t feel my clothes against it; I couldn’t stand feeling how my body stuck to me and sort of groped me. When my classmates arranged dance parties, I never went; dancing seemed gross, and I wrote a lot about that in my diaries. Girls who wore makeup, miniskirts, or tight clothes I secretly considered sluts. If one of those girls addressed me in school, I turned away demonstratively. It was as if they carried a plague, those who danced and wore makeup and dressed up, a corporeal plague I had to stay away from at all costs.

It was harder to protect myself from my own body, and the plague that it spread. I got my period early, at twelve, when I’d just arrived at my grandmother’s, and the smell rising from my blood-soaked pad was enough for me to understand that everything originating in the lower regions of my body was appalling. To be neat and live secluded in the ordered world I’d created around myself was my protection. Black water lapped underneath that order, deep as an abyss one could fall headlong into. My life was either/or, order or chaos, so I had to be very stern and careful, and for years I kept refining my sense of order, all through high school. At twenty, I was firmly determined to live the rest of my life as a virgin. I would devote my life to study and perhaps later in life some big research project; marriage and children were something I never even considered. I was twenty-two when I met Kosti, and he just laughed at me when I explained my position. It wasn’t a scornful or mean laugh, but glittering, almost loving. I was completely disarmed and felt incredibly relieved.

“You,” he said. “You want to be loved. From all the way in here.”

He pushed his index finger deep into my belly button and I stood still as if paralyzed, drinking the joy that bubbled like sparkling water from his eyes. Later on, when we’d known each other for a while, he teased me and asked if I wasn’t willing to share my virginity with him.

“Just a tiny bit,” he pleaded, “so I can become a virgin too!”

He didn’t call me Marta, but Mart, and he said it with a pronounced “r” and a soft “t.” You might say that he made me into Mart, that he came and opened and released me from Marta.

We studied archaeology together. In the summers, we excavated and traveled. We were inseparable. Sometimes we got upset with each other and argued, sometimes we had nothing to talk about, but we were always together, we were meant to be together; it seemed our connectedness would never end. It was during the last year of our relationship that I became obsessed with the idea of having a child. I wanted a child with Kosti, immediately. But he didn’t, not yet.

“I want to turn thirty first,” he said. “Then we’ll have kids, plenty of kids.”

Even though he didn’t quite understand it, Kosti probably knew that our conflict was about something besides having children. It was the old fear, the fear of the plague that had risen inside me again. I wanted to protect myself against something, but I didn’t know what it was, and I grew desperate. We lost sight of each other, perhaps also got scared of each other; at any rate we were suddenly moving in different directions. I was twenty-nine, and so was Kosti. He went on the yearlong trip to the Orkney Islands by himself. It was a trip we’d planned to take together.

“I’m not coming with you unless you’re willing to at least try to have a child with me,” I’d said. Because I still didn’t think he was capable of leaving me and I didn’t want to accept the seriousness of what had come between us: my life, my entire life.

He left. And a year later, the boy was born. Kosti didn’t contact me that entire time. Not until he had returned from his trip did he call, and I told him about the boy. After that, he wrote and called a few more times, more and more rarely. Then, silence. I never went looking for him. He’d moved to another part of the country, that’s all I knew. The way I looked at things then, I viewed him as having mortally wounded me, first and foremost by not being the father of, I almost want to say, our child. He’d left me and my life now belonged to the boy, now it was the two of us who were inseparable. I often found myself thinking pointless things, such as that if Kosti had been the father of my child, he would have been healthy. It was as if my mind refused to complete the thought that if Kosti had been the father, the boy wouldn’t have existed at all. I knew, technically, that the boy had a father, and that Kosti wasn’t him. But I never truly accepted that reality. The way I saw it, the boy was fatherless. That was Kosti’s betrayal of both of us.

December 2

I’d become a mother, but my child was locked away in the hospital and couldn’t come home with me; he cried incessantly day and night; he almost wasn’t a real child, and I was his mother. That’s how it was. For one year my boy lived in the hospital and I was there with him, sleeping on a cot in his room the first few months, living inside his crying as if inside a cave of hoarse, exhausted crying. Back then, no other world existed except for the one contained inside the hospital’s red bricks. I had to subscribe to that world and its routines, routines that made the days so similar they eventually seemed like one, like a simple, rhythmic pattern repeated again and again, a ticking without variation that kept the world going. No suffering or pain can resist being swallowed by a hospital’s regulations and stubborn reasoning. An ingenious protective net of cleanliness and restraint is perpetually suspended over the abyss. It wasn’t until I was locked up inside this alien order that I began to understand what the pedantic rhythm in my own life had been about. You can think of order as a spine or a corset; that’s how I used to think about it myself. Now I know that its primary purpose isn’t to hold things together. It is to shut things out, to repel and shut things out. That’s what it’s for.

I sat there with my child, enclosed by the hospital’s vast order, surrounded by the small cell filled with my tears and the face of my child. I felt as if I were traveling on board a spaceship drifting off course through the universe. All connections to my old life — my history, my memories, my sense of context — had been severed. After three months, the doctors convinced me to move back home. I had to get some sleep, they said. I had to get my life back in order.

“I don’t have a life without the boy,” I said. “I have no life to take care of.”

Nevertheless, I staggered out of the hospital and my sister came to bring me home. She’d been watering my plants, opening my mail, and paying my bills while I was gone. Now she led me into town, led me out under the incredible, enormous sky, and all the way to my small apartment, where my old life lay wrapped up, waiting for me. She’d prepared a welcome-home dinner and bought wine. On the table was a bouquet of Easter lilies, and outside the kitchen window, the leaves were opening on the birch. At once, I became aware that it was spring, late spring. I sank down on a chair by the table and stared out at the birch, massive tears welling up inside me. A gray mountain of tears.

“I’m like the boy,” I moaned. “I just cry and cry — ”

I tried to laugh a little, but it wasn’t possible. Instead, my laugh turned into a bawl, a long bawl growing out of my mouth like a plant, the stem of a plant. I couldn’t breathe; it felt as if my bawling would suffocate me. It was a sea of sound filling every part of me; I ran from the table, threw myself on the balcony door, and tore it open. My sister was right behind me, yelling and pounding her fists against my back; she held me, and I felt the cramping subside; I could breathe again.

“It hurts so much,” I sobbed into my sister’s hair. “Everything hurts so much. I’m crashing to the ground. Every bone in my body is breaking.”

We let go of each other quickly, my sister and I. We weren’t used to that kind of intimacy; it made us uncomfortable.

From then on, I slept at home most nights. I made myself watch television and read the paper, tried to pretend that this was me, that this was my life. Outside, summer was in full bloom, but I took no part in it. There is a particular kind of white-hot anguish, a daylight anguish that can scorch you, make you thin and transparent like rice paper. That’s how I felt that summer. Seeing a wasp could mortify me to the point that I ran all the way home and crawled into bed struggling with the white-hot feeling. I scarcely had the courage to live.

Some days I couldn’t make myself visit the boy. I’d remain sitting in the kitchen or the hallway for hours, incapable of moving. Sometimes I called my sister.

“I can’t make myself visit him,” I whispered into the phone.

Then she’d come over and accompany me to the hospital. Or take me to the bus stop. If she set me in motion, I could keep going on my own.

But there were other obstacles, obstacles that had to be overcome. There was the very smell of the hospital. You had to submit to it. When I’d lived there, I must have gotten used to it; I guess I’d reeked of it myself. But now, the distinctive odor bothered me. It filled me with its order and regime. It’s a very particular smell, and you can sense it most inside the bathrooms, an odd brew of cleanliness and decay, topped off with rubber and ointments. Shivering, I’d allow myself to be filled with it once more, even though I’d rather have escaped. But I’d make it through the corridors and up to the ward. Stopping at the nurses’ reception desk, I could already hear the boy crying in his room, his tired, cracked cries mixing with the music box endlessly chiming “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” I’d take a deep breath, and go in to see the nurse, if she was there.

“Did he have a — ”

“Oh no, everything’s fine.”

I didn’t want to utter the word seizure. It was one of those harmful words no one was allowed to say. The nurses knew about it too, they made deliberate and complex efforts to avoid saying it. But the doctors used the word dispassionately, as if they were trying to normalize it.

“We can’t say for sure if he’s been damaged by the latest series of seizures,” they’d say.

What to them was simply a field of knowledge was for me nothing but suffering: penetrating anxiety, and deep terror. Most of the time it seemed as if they couldn’t see the great difference between them and me: to me, the boy’s condition would never be an interesting subject; it was a nightmare.

Most difficult was his crying. It never ceased; it was a saw slowly cutting through time. It was sawing through the bones, every bone in his body, and every bone in mine. The seconds got stuck in its path, bone shards, sharp as spears. His crying was hoarse but loud, somehow finding its strength, its source, somewhere inside his small infant body.

In the beginning, when I asked if he was in pain, no one could give me a straight answer. They said he wasn’t supposed to be in pain. That there was no obvious reason he would be in pain. That they’d done everything they could so he wouldn’t feel any pain.

“If that’s the case, why is he crying?” I asked.

But with time, I learned not to ask. I learned to sit next to his crying, to watch over it and hold his tormented little face under my gaze so that he’d be sure to know I’d never leave him, ever. I wanted his pain to become my pain, wanted to share this unbearable, difficult, unfair thing with him, it was to become my fate too; I’d make room for it in my life.

“I think I know why he’s crying,” I said once, during morning rounds.

“Is that so,” the ward doctor said, turning away from his colleagues for a moment to look at me.

“I think he’s mourning his life,” I said. “He’s crying out of grief.”

An awkward silence followed, and I immediately regretted what I’d said.

“Well, that’s possible,” the doctor said. “I guess you could look at it that way.”

The boy had brown hair and brown eyes. A nod, a greeting from the nonexistent father. Actually, it was a beautiful little face, in my eyes perfect. But with time this face more and more came to be obliterated. Little by little, it drowned in its own absence. During the first months, when I sat and more or less stamped his face within me, it was as if I understood that I had to bear witness to its existence, that I had to recognize its every detail and every last expression because later I would have to live with only the memory of having seen it, the memory of its existence. And then I would know that beneath the expressionless, vacant mask that illness had set on him, another face lay hidden, a wonderfully beautiful, living face had existed but was invisible.

Eventually, they operated on the boy and he stopped crying. The twitching in his arm also disappeared. Now he was a still and silent bundle. My child was a still and silent bundle with human eyes, and I could finally bring him home.

I often think about the boy these days. Ever since Kosti’s letter, he has occupied my thoughts. I think I was afraid of remembering before. But that didn’t protect me; it probably made me even more scared. I was walking around as if asleep, and all the animals on the savannah know that sleepwalkers are easy prey. I know that the boy is one of the roads leading into the dark city, one of the roads that dissolve in there. I’m now walking down that path trying to recall my time with him, to remember how it was when I took him home. I was a mother then, because I gave up everything else in my life for him; I can see that now, afterward.

But he wasn’t like other toddlers, my child. He never learned to sit or stand, never laughed or flailed his arms around when I leaned over him in his crib. He just was; he lived only through that strangely solitary gaze. His presence was without gesture or sign; it was more like a condition, a state of soul. And I allowed myself to disappear into it. I lived with him in a space that cannot be measured in minutes or years. It was a kind of eternity, like timelessness inside time itself. Sometimes, I can discern the shadow specter that used to be me, moving around in this apartment where I still live, moving around the child who was trapped inside his own body and refused to participate in life. I still have a few objects and a couple of photographs to confirm the actual existence of that period of time. But I don’t know; it’s as if they’re not proof enough.

Incomprehensibly slowly, the boy did change. He developed and regressed at the same time. As his face increasingly faded and seemed to grow remote, he finally learned how to sit, and even to stand up. At preschool age, he could almost walk. With great effort, he could force first one, then the other leg forward, take one step, two steps, three. But most of the time, he was falling. He fell and hurt himself and cried, then fell again. But I still thought I caught a glimpse of triumph in his eyes when he took his first steps on his own. It was a victory over a heavy, unyielding world, one I think he experienced consciously.

Actually, the first six, seven years with the boy weren’t so difficult. When he was still a small child, I could keep him on my lap, rock him, and sing him songs. When he was sad, I could comfort him, at least part of the time, and the few words he learned were enough for us; they were the important words in a world we shared. And for us, there was no other world.

As soon as we got to move home, what had been a despicable hospital transformed into a good and safe place. All our visits there comforted me, the checkups and the follow-ups, because in the hospital, people regarded my child as almost normal; they played with him and joked around, they even called him by his name. In some way, they created a context where I became a mother among mothers and he a child among children. Doctors, physical therapists, radiology staff, and nurses — they all related to the boy as if he was real, and they made it possible for me to feel the same way. He was a boy, a little boy. Sebastian. Yes, his name was Sebastian. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to think of his name; I always think about him as the boy. Perhaps names carry some kind of promise, and I’d named him Sebastian in the maternity ward, when he’d just been born. This was before I knew anything about his illness, I lay gazing at his amazing little face and thought: Your name is Sebastian.

When he was around three years old, he spent the days in a special needs day-care center, because I had to go back to work. I found a part-time position in a museum and was completely content there even though what I really wanted to do was research and excavations. I was responsible for the museum’s collections, and if nothing else, it gave me the opportunity to use my organizational skills. The job was a healthy kind of normality, a kind of plaster, filling in all the cracks and holes in my life.

No one could predict what would happen with the boy when the time came, but around twelve, thirteen, he entered puberty. Suddenly, pimples covered his increasingly swollen nose, and the smell of sweat that surrounded him was acrid, like that of a feral animal. He also started growing rapidly. His feet, his hands, his whole body grew. I felt he was growing away from me; it became very complicated to be his mother. I was quickly transformed into a hollow mother cocoon that had become too small and stayed on the floor with his toys. I felt insufficient, but I knew I had to keep going. He was completely helpless, and his dependency didn’t decrease when he became sexually mature. Rather the opposite. Suddenly, powerful urges that his half-sleeping body would never be able to satisfy raged through his body with full force, yet out of his reach.

It happened so fast. One day, he was a head taller than I. But when he walked, I had to support him. Crutches and walkers were too complicated for his uncontrollable body. Sitting still so much of the time and taking so many medications had also made him bulky; he was incredibly heavy and I barely had the strength to hold him upright. He could pronounce about ten words that I understood, and he had a series of gestures and sounds I’d learned to interpret. Sometimes he knew when he had to go to the bathroom, but most of the time, he didn’t notice the signals his body gave him, didn’t know what to do with them. It was as if a vast no-man’s-land separated his consciousness from his body. He was lonely somehow, inside his own body. When he was younger, I’d been both his consciousness and his body. Now everything was becoming much more difficult. I couldn’t assist him enough; he’d been trapped by his corporeal limitations.

I know they would have found a place for him in a home for the severely handicapped if only I had asked. But I never did; I never even inquired about the possibility. The boy and I had a pact. He was my lot in this world, my duty. He was assigned to me, and I to him.

out of the ashes

Mom sits on the couch, her face patchy red from being beaten, her arms and hands scratched. She stares vacantly before her. Her frizzy hair looks like foam around her narrow, tired face.

On the floor is a mess of books, knickknacks, potted plants, pillows, clothes, and toys. The window curtains are torn into shreds.

The only sound in the apartment is that of children crying. The twin boys, who haven’t yet learned how to stay away and keep silent, have been spanked with the rug beater. Next to Mom on the couch is my older sister. She puts her arm around Mom’s stiff shoulders, and cries softly. I’m sitting on the floor with my little sister on my lap. I am not crying.

It is evening. Dad has been visiting the “Exception,” as he calls the place.

“Have you finally learned what a strayed wife’s home looks like?” his thin lips ask, still trembling with rage, before he leaves us.

I go out to the kitchen. He has opened all the cupboards and swept all the glass and china from the shelves. First, I gather up anything that’s not broken or just slightly chipped and put it on the table. Then I sweep the floor and put the shards in a piece of newspaper. Finally, I mop until no trace of broken glass remains on the floor.

December 15

A cold insight woke me early this morning, long before dawn. I suddenly realized it would be completely crazy to travel to Mervas. I must have been living in some kind of dreamworld since I got Kosti’s letter. I now feel ashamed of my own childishness, my madness. If those thoughts of Mervas appear again, I’m going to call the psychiatric ward and ask them to lock me up for a while.

Kosti is calling me again. Once more, he wants to throw me off course. But this time I’m going to keep going in my own tracks; this time I’m not going to listen to his siren calls. I am old. I feel my life will soon be over. I don’t have the strength to live anymore; I’ve already been through too much. For years, I’ve struggled to accept the truth of that fact.

Growing old has been much harder than I’d imagined. Since I’ve never cared very much about the way I look, the way other women do, I didn’t think I’d care particularly about things like wrinkles, getting a potbelly, and gray hair. But I did. It was devastating. My body fell apart and suddenly became my great source of sorrow. It became a wound that wouldn’t heal, but instead grew larger and deeper. To undress and sink into the bathtub became painful; I tried not to let my gaze linger anywhere on my body, but I could still see, of course. The fine, pathetic pubic hair, which insisted on growing on my thighs instead of covering the mound, disgusted me. So too did the patchy, blue-veined legs. It was all too sad. Like being forced to watch your house fall into decay without being able to do anything about it. Like watching a plant wither. At once, my whole life seemed so wasted, as if I’d neglected to live it while I could. It hurt me so much to realize this. It caused me so much agony that I started hiding like a young girl when I had to undress. The very air wasn’t allowed to see me, neither was the light of day, barely even darkness — I had to hide my nudity at all costs. For some time, things went so far I started neglecting my hygiene; it’s quite difficult to keep clean without removing your clothes, so I hardly ever washed. Nor did I buy any new clothes, and I let my hair grow unkempt. Finally, I could sense that I smelled bad. I could smell it in my bed, and when I returned to the apartment after being out, my smell greeted me, stale and sickly sweet, putrefied. That’s when I made up my mind. I was supposed to be old. I was allowed to grow old. It was natural and obvious and nothing to grieve over, I just had to adjust to the new order of things. The threads of life had simply grown thinner, the weave had become sparse and brittle, and that’s what was visible in my body, that’s what my body was trying to tell me. The notion was almost liberating. I decided to allow life to run its course and told myself to stop hoping and fantasizing, to stop dreaming about change, mercy, and love — all those things that human beings cling to and refuse to let go. Now I was going to devote myself to concluding things, to folding up and sealing the past.

In the last year, that’s how I’ve adjusted my thinking. In some ways, I have had to conquer myself. But I’m taking care of myself again. I buy clothes, take baths, and cut my nails. You have to be able to tolerate your own life. Day after day, you have to carry yourself through it.

Kosti’s letter disturbed me. For the second time, he’s trying to disrupt my sense of order. Now I know. There’s nothing for me in Mervas. And I don’t want to see Kosti again. As far as I see it, he could just as well be dead. I mean, I haven’t known whether he was alive or not for the past fifteen, twenty years. He probably doesn’t know any more about my life after we parted than I do of his. He doesn’t know about the boy’s death. Most likely, he hasn’t a clue about the repercussions our love affair had on my life. How it threw me off course and into chaos.

When life has become too torturous, when it has been infused with pain the way water can be infused with salt, you no longer want anyone to witness it. You don’t want to be seen. No, true suffering doesn’t want to be witnessed. It hurts too much. That’s why I’m content being as lonely as I am. No one can see me. I’m glad that ever since the boy’s death, the contact with my sister has been limited to a few phone calls a year. I don’t want Kosti to see me. Only idiots think it’s necessary to drag everything to the surface for show. Many things can only heal in darkness, out of sight. If they can ever heal at all.

December 21

For the first few weeks after Kosti left for the Orkney Islands, I was at war with myself. The struggle between the Red forces, which wanted to swallow all pride and be reconciled at all costs, and the White forces, which refused to bend, was constant and ruthless. I was becoming an increasingly ravaged battlefield. Weeks could go by when I didn’t get out of bed in the mornings. I thought like the child I still was: He thinks I’ll come anyway. But I’ll show him. I’ll show him who he’s dealing with. I’m not going to come crawling back to him like a sorry dog and lick his fingers.

I wanted to be strong and proud. To defend my honor and let the White forces win the battle.

When the war was over and the Red forces had been conquered, I was powerless for a long time. A kind of fatigue that closely resembled an illness paralyzed me. I didn’t have the energy to think. If I even got close to completing a thought, I felt as if drugged with exhaustion. But I sensed, yes, I could sort of hear, that beneath this huge fatigue, my rage was whimpering. If I’d had the capacity to listen more attentively, I would have heard something else besides the rage. I would have heard my fear squeak. And the lamentation, the lamentation from someone who had just lost everything.

But it was my rage that one night led me to put makeup on my face and dress up in a way I never used to, that fortified me with a couple of glasses of wine and sent me out to explore the city’s bars. There, I soon got quite drunk since I wasn’t used to drinking, good girl that I’d always been. So when the man whose name I still do not know started caressing my buttocks during our dance, I pressed myself harder to him.

When we arrived at his small, messy dorm room, I found out that he was a couple of years younger than I. To my surprise, I also noticed that he was both shy and insecure in my company. As I’d always thought I’d be the one to be shy and insecure in a situation like this, I started feeling something I’d like to call a power high. I felt strangely cruel.

We sat on two chairs opposite each other, drinking instant coffee, and my irritation grew with each sip I took. In various ways, I tried insinuating that I hadn’t come home with him just to have coffee and chat, but he pretended not to hear my hints. Instead, I could tell from his face that he felt pushed further and further into a state of confusion and gloom. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me. I could tell that he wanted me, my callous eyes could see that. But he didn’t have the nerve.

I felt in some way clinically evil, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. Instead, I regarded him with a passionate severity. He was struggling to free himself like the wingless fly a little girl had placed on an anthill. Now that I had become someone I was not, now that I’d started the game, he too had to join. I wasn’t going to let him bail out like a kid when the game gets too scary, to bail out whining: I don’t want to play anymore.

When we’d finished our coffee and nothing happened and the clock was ticking toward three-thirty in the morning, I went and lay down on his bed. I was on my back, looking at him, and he sat glued to his chair, looking back miserably.

I could whip him, I thought, almost lustily. The notion caught me by surprise, I usually did not think or feel such things. At the same time, there was something oddly familiar about the feeling, an echo from far away. A quivering tension.

“Now that you dragged me to your place, you damned well better do something about it,” I hissed at last.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He finally came to me. We turned out the light and our clothes flew across the room. Naked in the dark, we turned into small animals. After a while, our hands and tongues and lips made all the insecurity and contempt vanish. We had sex over and over again until dawn became morning.

Waking up hungover the next day and realizing I wasn’t lying next to Kosti but a complete stranger, I felt terrible. I didn’t want to look at him and I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t want to see him wake up and I didn’t want to exchange a word with him ever again. I didn’t even want to get close to thinking of what had happened during the night; I just wanted to erase it from my memory. So I carefully snuck out of bed and gathered my clothes. I quickly showered him off my genitals, got dressed, and padded out.

Since then, I have never been with a man. And I doubt it will happen again. I don’t know why I say “doubt” — it will never happen again.

A few weeks later, I realized that my period had decided not to come. My relationship with Kosti was now irrevocably over. I had no thought of an abortion. I was going to show Kosti how serious my desire to have children was. To have a child now. How much he’d hurt me when he’d forced me to let our child be fathered by someone else. How badly he had wronged the child.

December 22

An odd thing happened upon receiving Kosti’s letter. I didn’t want it to happen, but I suddenly saw myself as part of a story. And it was about me, about Marta.

Everything inside me resists it, but it is as if the story presses itself against me and I can’t get away. It is as if the story itself is going to carry me. Out of this. At the same time, it has to move straight through me, like a child who needs to be born and on its way out ruthlessly opens up all the closed inner portals. The mother may burst from pain, but that doesn’t matter. The child has to come out.

The arrival of Kosti’s letter bothered me. It forced me out on a marsh, and when I try to find my way back to solid ground, I realize that the only way to go is straight through the memories, as if they were planks laid out for me to walk on. In some strange way, I think telling my story will bring me back to solid ground. The problem is that I’ve never enjoyed reminiscing. I have never devoted myself to telling or even cultivating my memories as some people do. I’ve never told anyone about my childhood, not a single person, not even myself. The reason for that is simple. There hasn’t been anything to tell, there hasn’t been a story. There have only been scraps. Bits and pieces.

Until now, I’ve lived according to my own order and taken refuge in it. I’ve been able to decide that this week I’m going to read this or that book and focus on this thing or the other. Because even though it has been a long time since I worked within my profession, I’ve continued doing a little research on my own. In this way, I’ve been able to live inside my own mind. I’ve looked for books and articles, read dissertations and research reports.

But for the last few weeks, my thoughts have constantly been elsewhere. Like flocks of birds, they’ve lifted from the pages and flown away. And my thoughts have not been fluffy daydreams or memories of the boy. No, they’ve been busy telling a story, assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing. I have been forced to realize there is an order to this also, but a different kind of order than what I’m accustomed to. It has even struck me that there are similarities between the writing I’ve begun and an archaeological excavation. The carefulness. You have to be so incredibly careful with the things you find down there. They may for example be positioned in a specific order in relation to one another that mustn’t be changed. Or they may be fragile and crumble at the slightest touch. A sudden shift of the hand (or the brush, or the pen), and the entire story could literally dissolve into dust.

You can have what appears to be a disorganized collection of bits and pieces. But the truth is that the position of each shard of vessel, its exact place in relation to the other pieces, is just as much a part of the puzzle as the shard itself. What I think, especially since I began to write, is this: every piece is part of the puzzle, of a story.

It is quite easy to lie without being a liar. All you need is a slight imbalance. Or the wrong internal order. One little bump in the road can overturn your cart, as the saying goes. One small, insignificant imbalance somewhere in the story may one day topple over and grow into a different story. You don’t have be false to lie; I actually think you can make up events and still tell the truth. Lying isn’t so much about a lack of truth but rather a lack of meticulousness and devotion. It is not about disturbing the sensitive balancing act that truth represents, but rather recognizing this frail order and sensing it inside you, just as the tightrope walker senses every muscle and tendon in her body before she steps out on the rope.

Something I’ve been thinking about is that for long periods of time, I’ve been imagining that Kosti was dead. It’s been a small, hard, tugging notion inside me. He could actually be dead without my knowing it. It’s been frightening to think about this. Like walking around with someone dead inside you. Secretly harboring a dead body.

Other parts of me have tried to convince me that I’d know if he were dead. That something inside me would change. This change would be noticeable but very slight, like when a petal falls from a flower and floats to the ground. There’d be a difference.

But that first thought has still continued to tug at me, no matter how hard I’ve tried to push it out of my mind.

You wouldn’t notice his death, it tells me. His death would alter less inside you than a flower petal. Reality is prosaic, it has no connection to the hereafter, the thought insists triumphantly.

I realized it was one of those thoughts that are out to get you, that want to crush you, want to shrivel the world. But now I know. He exists. He called me from somewhere. Through my life, through the ruins among which I’ve been moving, he called me. And that thought tugs at me harder than any other. It’s a thought that could turn the world on its head.

December 25

My dad had one passion. He wanted to populate the world with his offspring. At the very least, he wanted as many children as it’s possible to conceive in a monogamous marriage. The way he saw it, it was Mom’s duty to assist him in this mission. She was meant to give birth to all of his children. That was the sole reason for her existence.

After Mom’s third pregnancy, from which came twins, the doctors warned her that another pregnancy would put her health at serious risk and suggested sterilization. When Dad heard this, he became so enraged that he pressed a knife against her throat and said he would kill both her and us kids if she went through with the procedure. She was soon pregnant again.

Dad wanted to prove something with his big and healthy brood. It wasn’t simply to show that he was a virile and capable man. No, the main thing his offspring were supposed to prove by their quality and intelligence was something the world had so far neglected to acknowledge: that Dad was a genius.

But Mom’s fourth pregnancy became very complicated. She had to stay in the hospital for a month after the delivery. When she finally came home, Dad would spew his venom upon her at every turn.

“A woman who can’t bear strong and healthy children is utterly useless,” he declared at the kitchen table. “In the old days, women could give birth to twelve, fifteen children without suffering any damage. But the modern world has ruined motherhood. The sloppy lifestyle, the doctors’ coddling, the entire medical profession is false. Listen to me, modern women are spoiled. But I’ll tell you this, she can do it if she wants to!”

The color rose on his cheeks in a frightening way as he spoke, or rather, lectured. My dad didn’t speak, he lectured.

“Women who give birth,” he proclaimed, and gestured theatrically. “Women who give birth! There are no words, I repeat, no words as grand and beautiful as these!”

At first, he lowered his voice when he continued speaking.

“But modern women don’t want to give birth. They think it hurts too much. Ouch, ouch, it hurts! They can no longer stand pain. Can’t stand the pain that has sanctified women for thousands of years. Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m saying, children? Do you understand how important this is for me, for you, for the future? I want you to understand what I mean when I tell you that your mother is useless. She’s a useless woman because out of some kind of stubbornness, she refuses to bring children into this world. This makes her subhuman; genetically, she’s garbage! And this is my wife. Your mother.”

I don’t understand how Mother could stay quiet. How she could remain where she was sitting. But she did. When our eyes would meet, I would immediately avert mine. I was so terribly ashamed in front of her; I felt dirty and guilty and deceitful. And her gaze was somehow inquisitive. Do you believe what this man is saying? it seemed to ask.

Dad especially liked to lecture at the dinner table. The fact that his lectures often turned into loud, hateful rants of unbridled rage didn’t seem to have any effect on his appetite. He shoveled the food into his mouth between sentences, quickly and mechanically. The rest of us sat quietly trying to chew and swallow as best as we could while we carefully observed the characteristic and ill-boding quakes of anger that rippled through his thin body like an electric current.

But it wasn’t enough for Dad to hold forth alone in front of a gloomy, silent audience. He wanted both assent and participation. The dinner lectures were part of his educational mission to elevate Mom, and especially us kids, to his level.

“Can you understand this, Marta, that your mother, your own mother sitting there chewing her tough beef stew like a cow chews its cud, do you understand that genetically, she’s garbage? Do you grasp the meaning of these words, Marta?”

He always had to turn to me. In his eyes, I was Daddy’s girl, and also more gifted than my older sister. He was speaking in a very low voice and his lips were thin and taut like rubber bands. When he lowered his light blue gaze into my wide-open eyes and fixed it there, lashed it there, I hated him so much I wanted him to die. The hate burned inside me like a dry chemical fire.

“Yes, Daddy, I understand.”

“Well, then I’d like you to explain to me, and the rest of us, what it is you claim to understand. For example, what does the word genetic mean?”

The word “genetic” sounded like the crack of a whip when he said it. I could sense the vibration of the word inside him; it seemed to fill the whole kitchen. If he’d had whiskers, they would have vibrated like those of a cat spotting a small bird.

“Well, Marta. Genetic?”

The way he said “well” was forceful like a vise, and I often felt that I could kill him for the way he said it. It was also in conjunction with the word “well” that the rug beater would be brought out and used in explosions of uncontrolled rage. The word “well” was a dam that at any moment could burst from the water pressing against its walls.

“It has. . it has to do with inheritance,” I said. “It means hereditary, it’s hereditary.”

Animal breeding was one of Dad’s special interests. He worked at the Department of Agriculture and specialized in hog breeding. Sometimes, to the relief of the entire family, he had to travel to different parts of the country to inspect selected groups of breeding hogs. It was on one of these occasions that Mom packed up some linens, clothes, some pots and pans, and toys in big boxes. Then an uncle we’d never met before came over and put Mom, the boxes, and us into a Volvo station wagon and took us away. That’s how we ended up in the two-room apartment, which Dad later started calling the Exception.

Mom had evidently planned the move for some time, because the apartment was already furnished when we arrived. There was a worn sofa bed and a couple of plain beds, a kitchen table, some chairs and stools, a dresser, and a big brown radio with its green dial eye.

Mom probably hadn’t asked her family for help before because she felt ashamed. After all, she’d been lucky to enter a good marriage with a well-educated man from a better family than her own. The way everyone saw it, she ought to be happy and content. The marriage to Dad had distanced her from her family, and as the years went by, the distance kept growing, especially because Dad didn’t think Mom’s relatives were good enough for him and his children. It was probably the doctors she met in the hospital after my sister’s birth who pushed her to get in contact with her family and tell them what was going on. All of us siblings immediately fell in love with our uncle. He was very tall and fat and had lots of amiable lines around his eyes. He constantly made jokes and laughed more during the move than our dad had done during our entire childhood. And he was a father too, we found out. There were fathers like him in the world also.

December 28

It’s the Feast of the Holy Innocents today. Outside, it’s thawing and suddenly the snow has no resonance or sparkle. All afternoon, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at my face. Looking into it. I was searching for something in it, I don’t know what. Perhaps a bit of life, an ounce of longing somewhere in the depth of my eyes. But my face was indecipherable. It expressed everything and nothing. Most of the time it was ugly, but for brief moments it was beautiful. It never ceased to be invasive; painfully, embarrassingly invasive. Like someone who comes to bother you. A stranger at once mysteriously intriguing and revolting. I just stood there, unable to step away from the mirror.

Many artists have been known to paint their own portraits; some become obsessed with it. I can understand why. They’re trying to fix on the canvas the one face that always eludes us more than any other. Perhaps our own face isn’t really available to us because it eludes us. On the contrary, it turns away from itself and toward others. Way back in the past, when no mirrors existed except for the occasional shaky reflection in a body of water, it was the people surrounding you who became your mirror. They reflected your face back to you, responded to it. I sometimes wonder if people were different back then. You’re so alone in front of the mirror, alone with your own perplexing face. Perhaps our faces want to tell us that the person who lives unseen has lost his face. That our faces are there for others, it is a language, perhaps even everyone’s primary language.

I’ve probably lost my face. That’s what life has done to me; it has driven me deeper into loneliness. My face has become unreadable, not only to myself but also to everyone who sees me. It has become an extinct language. I thought of Kosti there in front of the mirror. I wondered if he’d be able to give me my face back.

My years with the boy made me think a lot about this, about faces. His great loneliness was hidden precisely because he was missing his own face; he couldn’t reach anyone through it, couldn’t reach outside himself and was forced to remain inside his own darkness. Like being born without a body, I sometimes thought. A diabolic impossibility. And I, the mother, who finally couldn’t endure his loneliness.

I had a terrible dream last night. I dreamt there was a war. My apartment was on fire and I stood on the street outside with a group of other people and together we saw the fire rising against the night sky and enveloping the entire neighborhood in worrying clouds of thick, brown smoke. Soon after this I found myself on a military airfield. It was early dawn. Muddy roads passed between big, depressing sheet-metal hangars. I was filled with an incredible anguish. Groups of soldiers passed me by and harsh voices gave orders all around me, commands, deadly words. Suddenly, Kosti’s father came up to me. He was dressed as an officer and he gave me a small piece of paper.

“Go to hangar G,” he said sternly. “You’re going to the front.”

Hangar G, the front. My legs felt weak and I stood there, confused, with my little piece of paper. I didn’t know in which direction to go. Then I found myself in a dilapidated locker room, where grim guards dressed me in a uniform and hung weapons, ammunition, and a pack on my back. They pushed me out to a giant hall where soldiers were lined up, and I understood that I’d come to hangar G. I was placed in the first row of soldiers, among those who’d be the first to leave. I’d never felt such intense fear before. When I looked around, I spotted Kosti’s father and right behind him stood Kosti, in civilian clothes. They both looked straight at me, and when I screamed that I didn’t want to go to the front, Kosti’s father appeared and said that I must behave myself, that I had no choice. I had to go to the front and the plane that would take me there was about to take off.

I woke up before boarding the plane. My anxiety was like a spear thrust through me and I was soaked in sweat. When I’d gotten out of bed and had my first cup of coffee, I knew that I had to get myself to Mervas. Not because it was “the front” or to escape “the front” — I wasn’t yet in any shape to analyze the dream. It was more of an insight that had come to me, a voice that the night had stripped bare, and this voice knew. I had to go to Mervas. I’ve known it the entire time; that’s how it has to be, that’s what has to happen.

December 31

We actually parted as enemies, Kosti and I. There’s no other way to describe it. Perhaps love creates in us an obsession of wanting to be loved completely and entirely, into every part of us, every corner of our being. But when I became increasingly determined to drag Kosti into my darkest, worst stinking nooks and crannies, he turned away from me. He immediately became hard and impenetrable. I had crossed a boundary and his otherwise mild demeanor changed, and he became dry and barren and harsh. A stony desert. And he forced me out of his life; there was never a way back. His very words pushed me away. He didn’t have to raise his voice, didn’t even have to scream. The harsh and dry way he spoke to me was enough. He drove me away from him with those words, out of the apartment, the little dorm room we had shared. That was all it took. I was already crushed.

I slept in my car that night, and the following day I moved to my sister’s. I didn’t dare return to him; I was afraid to hear that voice. To see the lack of love in his eyes. I couldn’t take it, not from him, from Kosti, who had seen me, received me, and renamed me. I was also afraid of being held accountable, of being reminded of the person I didn’t want to be, the one I wasn’t. To meet myself in meeting him.

We argued that night. It was worse than that; it turned into a scene. But before we started arguing we’d had a really nice dinner together. It was actually our celebration dinner, the last in the apartment. In a few days we were going to the Orkney Islands and before that we had to pack, move out, store our things. This was the last peaceful night at home before the big moving and traveling chaos would begin.

After dinner, we were sipping the last of the wine and fantasizing about the upcoming year we’d spend on Sanday, an island northeast of the Orkney Islands. We talked about the ocean and about the fall and winter storms, about the uninhabited skerries and the megalith burial sites we would study. Everything seemed so incredibly exciting. We hardly dared believe that we would be there in a few days and then stay there an entire year. We were both hopelessly romantic. We described images to each other of how the raging storms in a kind of violent act of love ravaged the flat, rocky islands with their sparse vegetation. Roaring, the storms would press and wail against the tiny houses, which mostly resembled orderly stone cairns. We described how the wind held the island landscape in its grasp out there, how it scraped and tore at the yellowing grass. The salt would penetrate the cracks in the small cottages, become mortar in the stone walls, and glisten like crystals in the curly wool of the sheep. We could see ourselves there, walking close together through the storm, struggling to stay upright and screaming to each other to be heard over the din from the sea. Finally, we’d have to throw ourselves down on our stomachs and lie there, pressed to the ground, with our lungs completely filled with air while the hard wind kept moving through grass and twigs.

Both of us started glowing as we talked. Everything we mentioned immediately became warm and alive, a hot fluid metal, which we shaped and melted down and reshaped again.

“Yes, and even you have to understand this,” I suddenly heard myself say. “In a place like that you just have to conceive a baby. I mean that’s where you make love to become pregnant!”

Kosti quickly seemed to sober up. He sighed, and his expression became harsh and edgy.

“Dearest Mart, not now. Not again. We decided not to discuss this until after the Orkney Islands. You promised, remember? Right? You promised to wait until I was ready.”

It happened so fast. The Orkney Islands drifted away from us and disappeared somewhere far out at sea. And there we were, Kosti and I, sitting opposite each other in the sudden calm, interrupted and lost. It was terribly quiet. The ticking of the battery-powered clock could be heard through the whole apartment: ticktock, ticktock.

I could have done something. For example, I could have gone and fetched the book about the Orkney Islands that we had just bought and said: Okay, let’s forget about that for now, let’s look at this instead. Or I could have spread the big detailed map on the floor for the hundredth time and said: I’m sorry, we should let it go, it just came out of me, I don’t know why. Come here!

Or I could’ve said that he was right, we had actually decided not to talk about it, we could discuss having children when we returned, and I wouldn’t nag about it anymore.

But inside my head, a small voice said: You have decided, not the two of us. You want to wait; I don’t. And I sat there silent, caught up in a strange, eerily quiet anger, which slowly spread inside me and filled me with its shadowy gray demons. I sat completely still and allowed thoughts to rise that I couldn’t reverse and didn’t want to have. A cruelty was coming from inside me that I couldn’t defend myself from.

Kosti didn’t do anything to change the gloomy atmosphere that had taken over the room either. An unpleasant smell seemed to have found its way in through the cracks in the windows. The very air between us had changed, but we didn’t know what to do to get rid of it. Kosti also remained silent, as if he were waiting for something. It was as if there were a secret director waiting in the wings, manuscript in hand, anticipating the next line. As if everything had already been entered into the great book of life, already decided. All we had to do was fill in the blanks with our voices.

I cleared my throat. The words had to come now, before they killed me; I could feel them inside, insisting I let them out. They had to come out into the light and be destroyed like vampires. Perhaps then they’d be gone forever.

“It’s a pity, really, that we’re not Catholic,” I began, noticing at once that my suppressed anger made my voice vibrate slightly.

Kosti gave me a stern look.

“If we were, we wouldn’t even have to discuss the subject of children, we wouldn’t have to. We’d just let the children arrive.”

“Come on, give it up,” I heard Kosti cry out, from somewhere far away, from the other side of the sea.

But I kept going, I had to get into it, it was an old dry wound that I had to scratch and tear at now, until it bled.

“Catholics are really the only ones who dare to speak the truth,” I said. “They come right out and say that contraceptives are a sin. That it is a crime, a crime to prevent conception! You have to agree with this at least; they come out and say it and even though I don’t think it’s a crime against God, it’s a crime against nature. It’s a crime against mankind, against women, yes, especially women. Oh, I don’t think you understand anything at all, we’ve spoken about this so many times but you’ve never heard the truth, you’ve never gotten to hear what I truly think and feel. You know why? Because you wouldn’t understand it. You’re lost inside your pretty little world where everyone’s just friends and the notion of men and women, instinct and differences almost doesn’t exist!”

I was aware of how agitated I sounded, half screaming, as if I were being attacked or held down by someone. As if I were afraid.

“That’s why I’ve never told you what I’ve felt when we’ve made love using contraception, without a thought of having children. You wouldn’t understand, you who live in your own sweet little fairy-tale world. But I want you to know that I’ve felt like a whore, like a cheap fucking whore every time you slept with me. And it’s you, Kosti — no one else — who’s defiled me, who’s made me dirty, who’s made me feel disgusted with myself, simply because you’ve denied me the right to be a woman. Do you get it? You’ve denied me my womanhood!”

Kosti had now demonstratively turned away from me, letting his gaze disappear into the darkness outside the window. It was actually quite odd that he didn’t leave the room or at least growl at me to shut up. But this was a one-person show and my words could not be stopped. I was a ditch full of sewage and the messy words gushed out of me.

“Your greatest flaw is that you don’t know what a woman is. No, you don’t, and you probably don’t know what a real man is either. You’d probably shit your pants if you met a real woman; she’d scare you, Kosti, because she’s not part of your worldview, she doesn’t exist in your pathetic, friendly teddy-bear world where every damned person is so smart and kind it makes me want to throw up. You know, a real woman, she is a mother, first and foremost a mother, and even if men can run around spreading their seed here and there — yes, spread it into the storm on the Orkney Islands, by all means, do that — women are made to carry, you understand, she wants to carry the heavy fruits, she wants to be fertilized and carry, fertilized and carry. You get what I’m saying? She simply doesn’t want to be some kind of fuck-buddy and have a good time between the sheets because that’s not what it’s about! No, she doesn’t want to be a worthless tramp, which you seem to want to reduce me to. That’s what you make me into when you humiliate me like this; you deny me the right to become a mother, you won’t make me feel like a real woman and give me a child even though I’ve asked for one. It’s the most revolting, cruel thing you can do to a woman, and that’s what I want you to understand, that’s what you have done to me with all your talk about contraceptives and wait until later and all that. That’s what you’ve done to me, that’s what you’ve done — ”

Finally, I ran out of words. There was simply nothing more to say and I remember that I felt emptier than I ever had in my entire life. It was as if an army had passed through me, an army that had plundered and burned everything and left nothing behind but bare, scorched earth. The room was once again quiet. It was quiet for a long time. Until Kosti turned to me and looked at me with those eyes in which no love was left.

“Leave,” he said. “I want you to leave. I don’t want to look at you. I no longer know you.”

Feeling completely numb and blank inside, I went out to the hallway and put on my coat. Then, without a word, I left the apartment. All night, I lay folded in the backseat of the car with my eyes open. I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t cry. And I remember that it felt terrible that I didn’t cry, that I couldn’t even cry.

January 19

It is a Saturday evening in the apartment we call the Exception. Mom, my older sister, my twin brothers, and I are in the big sitting room drinking tea and listening to the radio. My little sister is asleep in the smaller room, where Mom’s bed is.

When someone rings the doorbell around eight-thirty, Mom’s eyes get empty and distant. She buttons the lowest button on her muumuu and pulls her hand through her hair.

“Please, Mom, don’t open the door,” my little brother whispers.

Mom only looks straight ahead. The doorbell rings again, a longer tone this time.

“Take those things away,” she says absentmindedly, nodding at the tea tray. It’s my task to try to hide things that are easily broken. Fortunately, we no longer have a teapot that we care about. We’ve been brewing our tea in a regular pot on the stove for the past few months, and that’s been fine.

As I’m running to the kitchen with the tray, the pounding on the front door begins. Soon I’ll hear Daddy’s voice through the mail slot. He usually calls for me, telling me to open the door.

I hide as much of the china as I can in a small space I’ve discovered behind the kitchen drawers. The teacups don’t fit in there, but there’s room for tall glasses and coffee cups. We’ve kept all the plates in the drawer under the stove for some time now.

My hands tremble violently as I put away the glasses. I have to hurry now; pounding and ringing signals echo through the apartment. I carefully put the lower drawer back on its tracks and with some effort push it back into place. When I hear the squeak of the mail slot opening, I run in to the others again.

Mom is standing in the middle of the floor. Her chin quivers almost unnoticeably; the rest of her face is taut. Her back is very straight; in some way she seems large where she stands. My sister quietly comes out of the bedroom, where she has taken the twins.

“Soon the neighbors will call the police,” Mom whispers.

It happened once before. I don’t think Mom had ever been more ashamed. The police officer told her that in the future, we had to handle our family business without disturbing the neighbors. He didn’t want to hear any more complaints about “gypsy behavior” from our building. We ought to be ashamed and behave like everyone else. Mom stood there with her head bent, her face bright red. Dad had quickly disappeared.

“Marta!” he calls, his voice shrill with rage. “Come here immediately!”

He said my name hard and fast, made it sound like the crack of a whip. That’s why I’ve never liked my own name. It sounds beautiful in English, and in Finnish too. But in regular Swedish it sounds as though someone has slapped you in the face twice; I still think so. Kosti called me Mart. I loved him for that. He came up with it himself too; I didn’t have to ask him.

Mom gives me a look I’ve seen before. My knees are shaking and my skin stings when I stumble out to his voice in the hallway. I have to be the one who lets him in. Once again, I have to open the door and look into the terrifying face that is simultaneously rigid and dissolving.

As soon as I’ve cracked the door open, he forces it wide open and gives me a hard push so I fall backward onto the shoes under the clothing rack. He shuts the door with almost unnatural care; it makes me think of a lizard, some kind of reptile. With no apparent transition, he could always move from rest to immediate attack. He’s already reached Mom. I hear him calling her names, hear the sounds of him beating her, and I don’t want to see it but I have to, I have to. My older sister is in the bedroom with our younger siblings, trying to calm them down. They’re sobbing. Someone has to stay and witness this. If I close my eyes or try to hide, I’m abandoning Mom and then I can’t protect her with my gaze. In some odd way I have to when I wanted to close my eyes, when they closed even though I didn’t want them to, I forced them open with my thumbs. I have to protect Dad with my gaze too, because he can’t be left alone in this situation either.

God wants you to see this, said something in my head.

As a child, I believed in God even though both Mom and Dad called it superstition. I prayed to him every night before going to sleep, but no one knew except for my oldest sister.

“Dear God, make Daddy be good and make sure all children have food to eat. Let there be no more wars.”

I didn’t have to say it aloud; God couldn’t hear my voice, he heard my heart. I tried to speak to him with my heart. I tried to explain this to my sister but she never quite understood.

“The heart doesn’t have a mouth that can speak,” she said.

“The heart is a mouth,” I said. “Another kind of mouth.”

After Mom died and my sister and I moved into our grandmother’s, when I entered puberty, I killed my own faith in God. I started to despise it; I didn’t want it. In the years that followed, I was angrily antireligious and spoke like Mom and Dad about superstition. I agreed with Marx about religion being the “opiate of the masses.”

Now I don’t know what I believe. Except that my heart is mute, even petrified. Sometimes I wonder why there wouldn’t be a God when so many other seemingly impossible and unthinkable things exist. Life is so mysterious and I miss my heart, which has lost its strength. The heart is pure, they say. And I actually believe that, I’m almost sure it’s true.

I’ve put on my shoes and through the doorway I see Dad, who is out of his mind with anger, attacking Mom.

“Bitch!” he pants, trying to keep her head still by grabbing her hair in his fist while he hits her.

“You think a legally married wife can run away from her own husband? You think you own his children? You think you can take the children away from their own father? I’ll teach you! I’ll teach you how such a wife should be treated. I’ll show you, you sly, hypocritical bitch in heat! I’ll break you in until you can neither sit nor stand!” Mom is half-prostrate, bent over on the couch, and Dad is standing over her beating her rhythmically, synchronizing the blows with his words.

“Marta!” he yells suddenly. “Bring me the carpet beater!”

“Children!” he then screams. “Come out of the bedroom right now!”

The bedroom door slowly slides open. My sister is standing there, pale and tense, with the twins close by her side.

“Aren’t you even going to say hello to your father when he comes to visit?” He spits out the words. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you going to say hello?”

“Yes,” my sister whispers. “Good evening, Dad.”

I’m standing slightly to the side behind him with the awful carpet beater in my hand. I’m so terrified it’s as if I were standing in a highly charged electrical power field.

“And you?” he snarls at me. “Lost your tongue?”

I have lost it. I try to speak, but no sound comes from my lips; my tongue is like a piece of bark in my mouth.

“You naughty child!” he screams, and tears the carpet beater from me. He gives me a few blows on the legs with the handle.

I gasp from the pain and swallow several times.

“Good evening,” I blurt out.

I can’t say “Dad.” It’s impossible.

But this evening is apparently about Mom. She, not the children, is the one who will be disciplined.

“Sit down, children,” he says, in an unexpectedly friendly voice. “You see, I want you to know what a family father must do to a woman who has run away, and who also refuses to bring children into this world. Sit down!”

We sit down on the floor, as far away as we can, and now we see how Dad with his free right hand gives Mom a few more slaps in the face while his left hand gets a better grip on her hair. Mom whimpers, it’s a drawn-out sound; she’s whimpering something and I can finally hear what she’s saying.

“Don’t let the children see. . don’t let the children see. . don’t let the children see,” she repeats indistinctly.

“Silence! They’ll see. They’re going to see what you’re worth. They’re going to see who their mother really is underneath this robe. They’ll learn how a bitch like you should be treated.”

He pulls at her clothes and finally gets her garter belt to slide up until it sits like a belt around her belly while her blouse is inside out, covering her face and head. The words are still streaming out of her mouth, she’s half-crying and her voice is shrill and we hear her repeat:

“Don’t let the children see. . don’t let the children see. . don’t let the children see. .”

She struggles and fights back in a way we’ve never seen her do when Dad has hit her. But this is different. He’s never undressed her before, and now he also begins to whip her with the carpet beater, on her legs, wherever he can reach.

“Now shut up and be still, or I’ll tie you up the way you bind a sow,” he pants between the blows.

Then he forces her onto her stomach and I hear her sob and cry while the carpet beater hits her buttocks and thighs.

My youngest sister, who was only about one at this time, comes crying from the bedroom. She totters over to my sister and curls up next to her. This makes Dad pause for a moment.

“Turn off the ceiling light,” he orders. “Turn off all the lights!”

We do as he says. At once, the small apartment is filled with darkness and suddenly everyone’s breathing can be heard. Our shallow, terrified breathing, my little sister’s sobs, Mom’s soundless tears, and above all and over everything else, Dad’s panting, growing deeper. He has stopped beating her and in the dimness he and Mom look like one body there on the couch.

“What is Daddy doing now?” one of my brothers asks when the sounds and movements from the couch turn increasingly strange.

“Hush, hush,” I tell him, and my sister gets him to stay quiet. After this, the five of us sit motionless in the dark, letting everything happen. I join my hands as in prayer, but they’re cramping and I can’t pray; my heart feels paralyzed and I’m afraid of everything I don’t understand. Let it end, is all I can think. Let it end.

Dad groans. He groans again, louder. Then everything grows silent. Completely silent. It’s as if everything that’s alive has suddenly escaped from the apartment, as if nothing were left but the darkness and the occasional sounds from outside; a car starting, a door slamming, the sound of steps against asphalt.

Eventually, we hear Dad getting up and straightening his clothes. His white underwear glints like the sliver of a moon through the darkness. He clears his throat.

“You can turn the lights back on,” he says in a calm and steady voice. “The husband has fulfilled his duty. The degenerate sow got what she deserved.”

The room turns blindingly bright. Mom tries to pull her top back down with one hand, while the other gropes around her as if she’s searching for something. My older sister rushes toward the muumuu that has ended up on the floor, but Dad grabs her wrist and stops her from giving it to Mom.

“Behold your mother,” he says, and gestures dramatically at her where she sits half-naked on the couch.

After this, he forces us to get in line and go up to him one after the other and kiss him good night on the lips and say:

“Good night, Father dear.”

Right before he leaves us, he slams his heels together and bursts out:

“Order has been established.”

But Mom’s gaze moves straight through the walls. It rises from her beaten, black and blue swollen face and the room explodes.

February 11

One day when I went to the hospital to see the boy a few weeks after his operation, the nurse at the reception desk cheerfully told me that Grandfather was there to visit.

I just stared at her.

“Grandfather,” I said incredulously, as if I didn’t know what the word meant, as if it were as complicated to figure out as who somebody’s “partner” or “sister-in-law” was.

“You’re saying my father’s in there?” I asked.

The nurse laughed.

“Yes, I suppose so. From your looks, it’s obvious you’re related. Gosh, I didn’t do anything wrong now, did I?”

I said nothing, only shook my head a little and took a few steps out of her sight. At first, I felt empty inside, as if I’d lost my moorings and were drifting. Then my feelings swelled up inside me, hatred and anger mixed with an incomprehensible joy, and I was mortified. Would my dad be sitting in there with the boy? Was that even possible? I hadn’t been in touch with my father for ages. He had, however, been meticulously faithful in sending Christmas and birthday greetings every year, but I’d rarely responded to his little messages, particularly not when he’d been careless enough to write things like “Daddy’s own girl” or “my own favorite” on them. Those words made me feel things that would prevent me from sending Christmas greetings to him for years to come.

I walked slowly down the corridor. Underneath my coat I felt cold, as if I’d caught a fever, and my heart was pounding in my ears. It felt impossible that I could walk into the room and he’d be there, with the boy. What right does he have, I thought angrily, what right does he have to burst in here? Over and over I asked myself: What right does he have? With each step I repeated the question, probably because I was actually quite confused and because so many other words and voices were crowding inside me, complicated words, dangerous voices. By asking myself this question, I could keep the other voices at bay.

I paused when I reached the boy’s room. The walls facing the corridor were made of glass, and even though they were covered by drapes, you could look into the rooms through the openings between them. I stood still for a moment, barely breathing, and then I leaned forward a little and peeked through an opening right where the boy’s room began. I had to close my eyes quickly, because Dad was sitting in there, it really was him, and the sight of his familiar figure burned me like fire. I opened my eyes and took another look. Yes, he was sitting there; I saw him from the side and he was an old man, I could see he had some white hair on his head and he was thinner, more bent, as if he had shrunk. “You have to look,” something inside me said when I wanted to close my eyes again. At once, my whole past fell upon me; the memory moved like a hard gust through my entire nervous system. And I looked.

He was seated next to the bed, leaning forward, holding the boy’s hand. As far as I could see, his eyes were closed, while the boy was lying still in his crib with his eyes wide open, gazing at his grandfather’s face. I stood breathless outside the pane of glass and watched them, waiting for a motion, for something to happen. But nothing changed, nothing happened in there. Dad kept his eyes closed and held the boy’s hand and they were both completely still. It was like a tableau vivant, and I couldn’t help myself, I felt calm; it was a beautiful and strange image. It was also quite incomprehensible. Why had Dad traveled here, and who had told him about the boy? It couldn’t be my older sister; since Mom had died, she hadn’t spoken to Dad once. It really made no difference who’d told him; what I couldn’t understand was that he’d ventured to visit my boy. That he’d traveled here to visit a child who was neither healthy nor normal.

I couldn’t make myself enter the room. It wasn’t only the unpleasantness or fear of meeting him. I also didn’t want to interrupt the picture, to upset it, because there was something peaceful about it, something beautiful. It affected me somehow, like a miracle-making icon. My father’s slightly lifted face expressed a simple tenderness that I’d never seen before. I sensed more than I could see that he felt a deep concentration; something in his face flowed through his arm to his fingers, which clasped the boy’s small hand. The boy seemed focused too; his gaze exuded a pure and direct presence steadily directed at my father.

The tears running down my cheeks brought me back to the present moment. Annoyed, I wiped my face with the sleeve of my jacket and looked around, suddenly aware that anyone could pass by and see me. I didn’t want to stand there crying in the corridor. What I ought to do was go and ask my father what he was doing here with my son. What right did he have to be here, and why was he sitting there like an idiot with his eyes closed, holding the boy’s hand? But I couldn’t. I just wiped away my tears and stood there. I didn’t know what to do. You can’t love a father like mine. It’s not possible.

At last, Dad opened his eyes; he probably felt he was being watched. I quickly moved away from the window and half-ran to the bathroom. I closed the door behind me without a sound and locked it, but I didn’t turn on the light. Instead, I sat in the dark with my head in my hands and allowed everything that wanted to tear me apart to rise to the surface. Tear me into pieces, I thought, tear me into a million different pieces. I can’t hold myself together anymore.

I sat there for a long time before I turned on the light. Then I carefully washed my hands and face before I opened the door and went out again, firmly determined to go in to the boy whether my father was there or not.

But he’d already left. Perhaps there was something of him left in the room when I entered it; a scent, a presence, I couldn’t quite tell. Later, I thought that maybe everything I’d seen that day might have been a dream. I could have asked the nurse about it, but I didn’t. It felt best if it remained a dream vision.

The next time I found an envelope with my dad’s handwriting on the hallway floor underneath the mail slot, my first impulse was to throw it away. But instead, I put it unread in the drawer where I kept all my letters. Not until many years later, when I learned from my brother that Dad was dying of cancer, did I read it.

“Dearest Marta,” it began. “I don’t want you to be angry with your old father if he were to tell you that he has visited your son in the hospital without asking your permission.”

It was a real letter this time, not just a greeting on a note card.

“But I did it because I’d heard that your little boy was very sick. In a lecture on the radio, I’d heard the theory that a person can transfer their strength and health to another human being if only they want it wholeheartedly and if they hold the other’s hand and put all their energy into it when they meet. I don’t want you to think that your father has gone and lost his wits. Dear Marta, I wanted so much for your son to heal that I was willing to try everything! Perhaps this may seem to you like I’m trying to redeem myself too late, but I want my girl to know that her father deeply regrets the ill deeds he exposed his beloved family to. He understands fully that he can never be forgiven for such acts. But I want you to know, Marta, that I regret what I did, every day, all the time.” It would have been simpler if I’d been able to hate him completely and fully, if I’d been able to feel nothing but hate, the way my sister did. Nor did she ever understand what God had whispered in my ear when we were young — that I had to look, that I had to be a witness. That’s why I went to see Dad on his deathbed and sat with him for a few hours. I’m not entirely sure if he could see me, but I think he knew that I was there even though he lacked the strength to show it.

It was difficult to sit with him. I couldn’t make myself touch him. He died later that night, when I was on my way home on the train. My brother called and told me, the one brother who for some reason had kept in touch with Dad all those years.

April 11

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything. But now I’ve terminated the lease on my apartment. I know it’s crazy and I can barely admit to myself what I’m doing, but I think I have to respond to life in some way; it has held me accountable and I have to say something, do something, prove I take it seriously. Inside my head a voice whispers: You’re allowed to die. You can do it. And I’m trying to understand these cryptic words, the strong sense of relief they awaken in me. Suddenly, I’m no longer anxious. Life doesn’t have to be preserved at all costs. But it has to be lived, that’s what the words are telling me. I’ve found the door that leads to life, and to my surprise, I’ve discovered that it’s marked Death. You’re going to die, the voice tells me; therefore, you’re allowed to live.

With respect to practical things, I’m trying to be systematic. I’m going to sell or give away most of what I own. I’ll use the money to buy a car, a used but robust car that I can sleep in if I need to. I’m going to pack some books and papers, letters, photographs, and other memorabilia in the big, coffinlike trunk I inherited from Dad. I will have to ask my sister to keep it in her attic for a while. That’s the hardest part of all these preparations. We’ve barely communicated the last few years, mostly just called on each other’s birthdays. But I have to tell her I’m leaving, even if I won’t specify exactly where I’m going, or why. I’m not going to mention Kosti. Maybe I’ll say that I’m moving to the countryside, that I’ve rented a cottage somewhere, something like that. I know how she’ll look at me when we meet, how her eyes will move across my face while she thinks: My, she’s old. Or: Has she gone crazy again?

I can imagine how I will respond, with a stern gaze and controlled expression: No, I’m not going crazy; I just want you to keep my trunk for me.

When I’ve left, she’ll call some of our siblings that she’s in touch with and tell them:

“Marta’s moving. Somewhere in the countryside.”

Then they’ll talk about me. I’m not entirely sure why, but the mere thought makes me squirm; the fact that they’ll talk about me, mention my name, kind of touch me in my absence. As if by doing so they touched me intimately, touched something that ought to be kept hidden, that no one should deal with except me. My name. My life. My shame. It’s that creature inside me that doesn’t want to be seen. The one that wants to live without a face. I don’t want anyone to touch or poke that creature.

I’m not really leaving because of Kosti. It’s quite plausible he has already left Mervas. But if there’s anything in my life that isn’t broken and ruined, I want to find it and take care of it before I die. Last year, I turned fifty. Many people die in their fifties. It could happen to me. Perhaps I have to be taken off track to find my way, to find what’s right.

April 15

This was the feeling I had: that I was running out of time, that it was flowing away from me like blood from a wound. I felt this in the rooms where I had to stay, where I was locked up because my life was fused to the boy’s life. I had to stay where his muteness became my muteness and his immobility became my immobility. In this state, time was bleeding away from me; everything froze and stood still, became a cast of what life should be. It was like living without ever having been born.

I stood looking out the window. It seems to me now I stood there for years. The world outside was also frozen. The protected old fir trees on the grassy slope looked like ancient creatures that had gotten lost in the landscape. They were giant lizards and I was waiting for the moment when they’d break the spell of their inertia and take off. Sometimes when the wind blew hard through the treetops, I could feel a peculiar anticipation. Now, now, soon. .

But the world didn’t move. It was exact and unyielding and didn’t deviate an inch from its set course. I’d watch cars come and go; they occasionally left their places in the rows of parked cars, but they always returned obediently — red, white, orange, and blue cars. Seasons passed through trees and bushes, snow melted and snow fell, the leaf from a potted plant fell off, and dust settled on the windowsill. Time was moving relentlessly, always at work; it flowed and rippled like water under the blanket of snow, emptying itself. And the world stood still and allowed itself to be emptied, a still life, a skeleton, a meticulously assembled sculpture of dead time. I was part of that that sculpture, strapped to the great stationary wheel of frozen time. I had the slow gnawing sensation that this wasn’t where my life was. Somewhere beyond my reach, life was ongoing, my own life as well as everyone else’s. But I wasn’t invited to participate in it. I wouldn’t even have been invited to my own wedding, if I’d had one.

There is a quality of precision in life, an incorruptible order that cannot be made relative. Life is relentless the same way death is. Everyone has a place in their own story with a myriad of threads running forward and backward, upward and downward, like a web. If you want to cut yourself loose, you have to cut yourself off from who you are. You can’t just switch your life for another. The details of your existence may be unbearable, but they are nevertheless wrapped up neatly and connected to each other like the threads of the web. Now, afterward, I can acknowledge what I couldn’t see while it was happening: that those last few years with the boy were awful. If I’d been a better person, made differently, I would have asked for help; I would have screamed for help the way I raged and demanded it the day the boy was born and they tried to take him away from me. But I couldn’t speak. Dumbstruck, I believed that the boy was my life, that without him close to me, neither of us would survive. He was as helpless as a fetus, a big, shapeless fetus I nourished with my blood. I lived with him as if I were pregnant and waiting for him to finally be born. That’s how it was.

Yet I believe in free will. Theoretically, I think that even someone like me could have chosen a different fate for the boy and me. But a person’s will has many layers, and some of them may be buried under the earth. I believe in free will, but I also believe in darkness. In the great darkness that in all directions surrounds the tiny sphere of light where we live our lives. I think the dark is real even when we’re lost inside it, even when we can’t see it.

Spring is approaching. Suddenly, light has blown into the evenings and filled them, made them swell and lengthen. I heard such passionate birdsong from a tree behind the parking lot the other afternoon that I thought at least a hundred little birds were sitting among the branches singing and chirping. But no matter how I looked, I couldn’t see a single one. It was as if the birches themselves, still without leaves, were resounding with song.

I went to the boy’s grave today. A white wagtail sat on his tombstone, balancing, so I stayed a few yards away as not to frighten it.

“Welcome, white wagtail,” I whispered. “Are you bringing me a message?”

I couldn’t help myself. It was as if the boy had taken the shape of the bird and was addressing me, touching me. It had been a long time since I had visited his grave. I didn’t even go to the cemetery on All Saints’ Day.

When I walked up to the grave, the wagtail flew away, but it didn’t go far. The whole time I was there, it stayed close, nosily walking around in the grass behind the tombstone. It stayed with me, somehow.

Several crocuses had already come up in the wet, muddy ground, still just buds, but I could see which ones would be yellow and which would become purple. I had brought tulips in different colors and placed them in a vase, which I pushed into the soil.

I don’t usually smoke, but I’ve made it my habit to smoke a cigarette when I visit the boy’s grave. When I’ve arranged things, flowers and such, I crouch down, light a cigarette, and smoke. It’s my way to stay with time, to just sit with time for a little while and let it exist.

Kosti was a smoker. He mostly smoked a pipe, but sometimes cigarettes too. He taught me how to do it. I remember how he used to sit down on a rock or a tree stump while we were doing an excavation and he’d just disappear for a bit, into the clouds of smoke he created. Sometimes I’d walk over to him and ask him for a hit. We’d sit together for a while, in the space the smoke created.

When I’d smoked for a while, I pressed the still glowing cigarette butt into the ground as hard as I could. Down into the boy’s soil. Into the soil that was the boy.

“I can see you,” I whispered before I got up to leave. “I will carry you with me, all the way to Mervas!”

After I’d walked away some distance, I turned around and saw that the wagtail had returned to the top of the boy’s tombstone. This filled me with gratitude. Perhaps also with hope.

I was the one who’d killed the boy. I did it. Sometimes when I stumble around in the dark city that is my life, I find myself standing again in the room where it happened. And it happens again inside the darkness, I do it again and again, and it will never end.

It was on his birthday; on the day he turned fourteen. My sister arranged for the tombstone later. It says Sebastian, and then the dates show his birthday and the day of his death to be the same. At first, it tormented me so much, that the exact dates had to be carved into the stone too; why wasn’t it enough just to mention the years?

I wasn’t present at his funeral. I was wedged into a darkness that had frozen into stone. I was inside that darkness for many years, locked inside my deed. Locked in a moment.