To Mervas

~ ~ ~

She finally arrived, Marta did, but not in Mervas. Instead, she came to a small village called Deep Tarn, which really wasn’t much of a village since there was only one farm there. Nevertheless, that’s where the sometimes winding, sometimes dead-straight gravel roads finally led her. To Deep Tarn. None of the roads she’d tried to follow led to Mervas. No matter how she’d tried, none of them had let her in, had ever let her reach it by the right road. She was close to Mervas, not there, but she knew it must be close.

It was the third day of her journey and she’d been driving around in the county she hoped was the right one ever since morning. She’d driven on bigger roads and small side roads, she’d passed bogs and empty open places and come into sparse, rolling pine forests with a tarn in every little hollow. She’d come out on clear-cut areas where devastation spread as far as the eye could see; she’d crossed creeks and driven along bubbling, rushing rivers in a seemingly endless wilderness. One single car was all she’d seen the entire day, a grayish black car that had swerved through the gravel and disappeared in a cloud of dust before she had the time to decide whether it was good or bad to meet another person in a place so devoid of human life.

She was often so afraid she wanted to cry. Sometimes her legs shook so much it was hard to accelerate. The car jerked forward as in fear through the endless woods. She was leaning forward, her hands anxiously clutching the wheel, not wanting to admit what she’d gotten herself into.

She was afraid, and her insecurity only grew the farther into this landscape she went. Everything was alien and indecipherable; she was a complete stranger in the landscape that surrounded her for miles and miles on all sides, she knew nothing about the things she saw, knew nothing about the rules that must govern in places like this. Sometimes, when the road brought her to a high point and she could look out over the trees, she saw that the place she’d come to was endless. She was imprisoned by that endlessness, captive in a network of nameless gravel roads, and the farther she drove, the more lost she got.

Once, she stopped and stepped out of the car to look at the scenery. A long, low mountain range stretched in every direction. The silence was immense. It was as if for the first time she understood the true meaning of silence, the complete absence of sound. The silence pressed against her ears the way compact darkness can press against your eyes. She stood listening to the pounding inside her head while her eyes were gliding over the vast landscape, and in awe she let her gaze move gently along the shapes of the giant mountains that continued for as far as she could see. There were lakes out there too, calm, silvery gray sparks in the silence. Everything around her stayed where it was; it was there, it simply existed. Through her fear, she realized that this silence was a powerful language, a mighty voice louder than anything else. She’d never felt as terrifyingly small as she now did. She felt she could be obliterated here, the vastness of the landscape could dissolve her with just a whiff of wind; she’d have to beg the small, dim-green pines for mercy. At the same time, she felt herself growing in the vastness, felt herself being pulled and stretched and filled by it. It was as if she could contain it, could contain everything around her.

While she stood there on the slope and let the silence and the vistas fill her up, the wind casually moved closer from the mountains on the other side of the valley. It traveled down into the woods below and kept moving from one forest to the next, from tree to tree, up toward the place where she stood. A sound grew slowly through the silence, slowly sort of snuck up on it, as if tiptoeing. The sound was at first slight and scattered but then grew denser and gathered in a herd of whispers and sighs. Suddenly, it was as if she were standing in the middle of an enormous chorus. All the forests in the landscape took several deep breaths and then they sang. Upper and lower voices washed over her, high and low notes like big boulders rolled through the silence, but the gale itself, the wind, still hadn’t touched her, she could see it tearing through the crowns of the trees below her for a long time before it suddenly reached her, grabbing hold of her hair.

She ran to the car and sat inside it, gasping for breath. She had absorbed the performance outside feeling a mixture of pleasure and terror, she had stood as if petrified listening and watching and now she wanted to scream out loud, now she felt that the immensity of everything threatened to suffocate her. It would make her explode if she wasn’t allowed to use her own voice to resist and scream that she was here too, she existed and wasn’t going to let herself be obliterated by something huge, she was here and had the right to be.

But Marta didn’t scream. She sat for a while, letting her breathing slow down. Then she started the car and kept driving. She’d stopped looking at the map on the seat next to her; it wasn’t right. No map could capture or describe a place like this, she thought. She drove without direction, and it was already evening. She was so worked up that when she saw a small, beat-up, pale yellow sign with the words Deep Tarn, 4 km, she immediately turned onto the road simply because it had a name, because there were letters.

It was a very bad road, narrow and full of potholes. In some places, large, sharp rocks poked through the gravel like sharks’ teeth, and in other places, it was so wet and muddy that she had to press the gas hard and swerve forward. Here and there, thin saplings grew out of big holes in the road, as out of the holes of a lake covered in ice. She regretted that she’d taken this road, but it was too late now, there was no place to turn around. Fear kept her going, a compact wall of anxiety that had pressed out of her the sheer will to survive. She had to keep moving along this road, there was no other option.

When she spotted a small barn, propped up among big stones in a spacious and tall gathering of pines, she felt an almost overwhelming gratitude. The small, simple barn appeared to her a symbol of gentleness and goodness. Some of her tension subsided, something softer revealed itself among everything that was harsh and rigid. Then the woods opened up a little more and there was a clearing with lots of open sky above, a house and a couple of barns, little lodges and sheds and lavvus. Some buildings were on the edge of the sparse forest, others among the trees. Some were right on the boundary between the woods and the meadow opening up behind it all. The meadow, with its yellowed last-year’s grass and two small barns in the middle, seemed so friendly, surrounding the entire area with its light.

Marta turned off the engine some distance away from the hamlet. This too might be a ghost town, inhabited only by its own memories. She wasn’t sure if she preferred a farm where someone lived or one that was empty; both alternatives seemed equally frightening. But there was something about the way the houses were so beautifully placed around her. She felt a touch of longing for a home, and this was almost like coming home. She felt that she could be here, maybe she could rest here overnight and then, the next day, she’d look at the maps with a little more focus, and find the right road up to Mervas.

It was at that moment the dog appeared. A ragged, gray, wildly barking projectile came running along the road as if it were a missile someone had aimed at Marta’s car. When it reached her, it proceeded to run around the car in circles, all the while barking loudly and ceaselessly. Marta grabbed the steering wheel; she wanted to leave, didn’t want to sit here confined by a barking dog. But the dog moved so quickly around the car, in an instant it seemed to be everywhere, and she sat there squeezing the wheel until her knuckles turned white, helplessly watching the animal dutifully jumping around the car, barking all her thoughts to pieces. Her feeling of unease soon turned to panic. No one may pass here, no one, she thought the dog was barking. Soon my master will come, my master, she heard. And he’ll shoot you with his gun, his gun.

“Shut up!” she screamed in falsetto to the dog. “Get away from here!”

But the dog only seemed to get excited by her voice. With a growl, it curled its upper lip and bared its teeth and Marta didn’t want to see any more. She leaned forward over the steering wheel and pounded her head against it, pounded and pounded. The thoughts were screaming in her head. I’m too old, they screamed, I can’t do this, can’t handle things like this, I’m a fool, they screamed, a fool, I want to go home, I don’t want to do this anymore, don’t want to, I’m a fool and I want to go home.

She was pounding her head against the wheel so frenetically that she didn’t notice that the dog gradually grew quiet and that someone was insistently knocking on the window. No, she didn’t even notice that someone was standing out there looking at her. It took a while before she became aware of the sound of knocking over her own pounding. At last, she calmed down and looked up, taken aback.

A man was leaning forward, peering through the glass with surprise. Beside him sat the dog looking obedient and good. The man gestured to her to do something, open the door, roll down the window, speak to him, anything. She rolled down the window a bit. But she couldn’t find anything to say. She just looked at him through her confusion, and he looked back. He had an old hat on his head, which he pushed back a little. His eyes were shining; they were blue and gleaming strongly like lamps, like lighthouses.

“Did you get scared?” he asked at last. “I mean, did the dog scare you?”

He placed a hand on the dog’s head while he studied Marta carefully.

“Not at all,” she said foolishly.

“Okay,” he said. “You didn’t get scared. Well,” he continued, drawing out the words and clearing his throat, “I thought my dog here scared you and that’s why you. .”

He nodded at the steering wheel, but didn’t say anything.

“I was on my way to Mervas,” Marta said. “I got lost. Or rather, I couldn’t find it.”

He stared at her for a moment.

“I see,” he said, emphasizing each word. “I see. You’re going to Mervas, you say.” He pushed the hat farther back on his head. Then he smiled.

“Well, you were lucky to come to Deep Tarn instead!” he said with gusto, straightening himself. “You know, in Mervas,” he continued, “there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. And what might happen to be there, no one wants to know about.”

He was silent for a while and looked away, past her. “Are you from there?” he asked.

Marta shook her head.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “But there are those who were. And they want to go there and see the place.” He laughed. “The only problem is: there’s nothing to see in Mervas! Nothing! There’s nothing in Mervas but blueberries, we always say. And bears. There are bears in Mervas.”

Marta listened to what the man was saying as if under a spell. The entire time, he spoke in a very loud voice. It was almost as if he were yelling. Or as if he were making a speech. And he had a thick accent; he didn’t say “bear” but “beear” or even “bearn.” She couldn’t stop watching him. There was so much life in this man, more than she could recall ever having seen in anyone.

Yet he was older than she was, probably almost seventy.

“Yeah, well,” he said, straightening up again. “Now that you’ve ended up here in Deep Tarn, you might as well step out of the car and have some coffee. You drink coffee, don’t you?”

“Certainly. Thank you,” Marta said.

She glanced at the dog and the man smiled a little again.

“Just come on out,” he said. “No need to be scared of Tasso, not at all. He’s a damned good hunting dog, that is all. And he’s always on alert!”

Marta had to support herself against the car as soon as she stepped out. Her numb legs felt dead underneath her; she thought they wouldn’t carry her.

“I’ve been driving all day,” she said apologetically.

He drew in some air between his front teeth. Then he took her hand.

“Arnold,” he said.

“Marta,” she answered.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps it was for real, she wasn’t quite sure, but she followed close behind the man with the shining eyes. They were heading for the residence about fifty yards away. The present moment suddenly had a tinge of fragility. She couldn’t rely on it; it seemed that at any time it could spill onto the ground where she walked and disappear forever. Nor did she know if what she saw was entirely clear, if she saw it in the right context. The little courtyard she now moved across — didn’t she recognize it from a dream, from a very different kind of dream? She shivered. She’d said only yes, she did drink coffee, and that wasn’t really very much to say. Most people drink coffee, if only to be polite. She supposed it was possible that anyone could step into a house and get the vague feeling they’d been there before, perhaps in a dream or through a book, or in the distant past of childhood. The man ahead of her walked with such determination, with long, easy steps. He didn’t even turn around to make sure she was still there; he knew she was. His entire being watched with those luminous eyes and he didn’t doubt for a moment that she wanted to come and have coffee with him. Marta got it into her head that she had somehow taken a step in the wrong direction, that she’d taken one step to the side and slid into something she did not recognize, one tiny faux pas that had brought her into other worlds, other orders. It struck her that this had already begun that day in the library back home, when she found Mervas in the atlas. That’s when the first false step took place. It was impossible to change that now, to undo what was done. This is what everything had turned into; it wasn’t what she’d previously decided but where she helplessly found herself. Here. She was here; she was actually following the man up ahead. She knew she was here, a strangely new feeling.

Just as she placed her foot on the landing by the front door she noticed the birdsong, and it was decidedly real. It rose from every treetop and every shrub, from the sky and from the ground so that she was closely surrounded by tones, submerged in a bath of bird voices. Only then did the man turn around to look at her, making sure she was there. He then turned his gaze to the vista below the house, toward the mountain curling its back away from them toward the sky, which was bright even though it was evening.

“Yes,” was all he said as he looked at her again.

After this, he slid through the door, which was half-open, and she followed him uncertainly. Two steps through the vestibule, the kitchen was on the left, and its door was open.

“We’ve got a visitor,” the man called with a loud voice as he stepped over the threshold.

Relieved, Marta discovered a woman standing by the stove. She was short and had frizzy gray hair and wore a greenish wool sweater that went down to her knees.

“Well, I can see that,” the woman said in a soft voice. She smiled a little at Marta. “I saw you coming,” she said, nodding at one of the three windows. Marta’s car was out there, left in the middle of the road as if it were still on its way to the house.

The woman poured some coffee onto the lid of the pot, and then poured it back.

“Sit down now,” she said. “I’m Lilldolly of Deep Tarn and we don’t have guests here very often.”

She had set the table with two cups and saucers, bread, butter, and cheese. She poured the steaming hot coffee and returned to the stove.

“Well, I’ll have my coffee over here,” she said. “I share neither table nor bed with Arnold over there, even though I’m married to him,” she added with a wink, and chuckled.

“No, that’s right,” Arnold muttered. “One’s been shown to the gate, or whatever it is people say.”

He gave Marta a mischievous glance and slurped some of his coffee.

“Now, have some cheese and bread,” Lilldolly said from over by the stove. “And drink your coffee.”

After this, silence settled on the kitchen. Marta spread some butter on a piece of the soft bread and cut into the cheese, which looked homemade and had a tart, sharp smell of milk and stable. The dog was curled up in an old armchair in the corner and was looking at them with its head between its paws. Sometimes Marta looked at the dog and sometimes out the window. She didn’t dare look at Arnold or Lilldolly. Everything was too quiet; it felt as if they all were naked, as if they didn’t have as much as a rag to cover themselves with. No words could protect them. It felt as if time were holding its breath and soon would implode from the effort, from the pressure. But she couldn’t break the silence herself; she didn’t trust her voice to carry itself. She was also afraid her voice would burst through the room like something foreign, something outside herself.

“You know, Lilldolly, she was on her way to Mervas, this woman, so I told her it was lucky she had come to Deep Tarn instead.”

Arnold broke the silence as if it had never existed. As always when he was speaking, the words rang out. It was beautiful, Marta thought. She saw the landscape and the heavens when she heard his voice, it belonged out there in the sea of air, it moved easily through the vast and the spacious.

Lilldolly’s voice was low and quiet.

“Was there something you needed to do in Mervas?” she asked softly, and Marta squirmed under her gaze for a while before she figured out what to say.

“No, nothing in particular. I just wanted to see it.”

“I see. Well, everything’s gone up there,” Lilldolly said, without taking her eyes off Marta. “But in the old days it was like going to town when we went to Mervas, there were lots of people, an open-air dance floor and a movie theater and everything. And barracks full of bachelors!”

She laughed her funny little giggle and shot Arnold a playful glance.

“But now there’s not a house left up there. Not a single one. That’s right. And it’s quiet.” Lilldolly bent down to get a stick of firewood and put it in the stove.

“All that’s left up there is blueberries,” Arnold added. “I told her already, nothing but blueberries and bears.”

What about Kosti? Marta wondered. Is Kosti still there?

“They just dismantled the houses and took them away on big trucks. They left the cellars behind, of course, couldn’t remove the cellars, so you can see where everything used to be, where the houses were placed along the streets. The cast concrete stairs and the foundations, those’re still there.”

“There’s the little kiosk over by the dance floor,” Arnold interjected. “It’s still there.”

“True, it’s still there. The little kiosk by the dance floor is there because the mining company didn’t build it. I think it was the young people who put that up, I guess they got permission to do it. Otherwise, no one was allowed to build in Mervas except for the company, that’s how it was, people couldn’t build anything because nothing was allowed to remain. That was the plan for Mervas. That nothing would be allowed to remain.”

Lilldolly was quiet. They all looked out the window at the evening sky. It was growing darker at last; the shadows were long. Marta felt worried. They probably wanted to go to bed soon, as it was already past eleven.

“Well, look at that,” Arnold said. “It’s night already.”

“Yes,” Lilldolly said, “there’s still a little darkness left for the night.” She yawned before she continued: “But what shall we do with our guest? Where shall our guest sleep tonight?”

“Marta!” Arnold called out so the whole kitchen resounded. “Her name is Marta!”

“I’ll sleep in the car,” Marta said quickly. “That’s what I do every night.”

“No, no, no,” Arnold said.

“Out of the question,” Lilldolly agreed.

“But. .”

“No.”

“She’ll sleep in the lavvu with me.”

“She won’t sleep in the lavvu with you when we’ve got a whole house full of beds!”

“Well, she shouldn’t have to sleep alone in the house with an unknown man, that’s for sure! She’ll sleep in the lavvu.”

“This woman is so goddamned difficult you almost have to scream for her to understand,” Arnold roared, banging his fist against the table so the cups rattled.

Marta stiffened and stared straight into the opposite wall without a thought. Now, was all she thought. Now.

“Watch it, you’re scaring her,” Lilldolly whispered. “Now she’s afraid.”

Arnold instantly turned to Marta, pinched her arm lightly, and looked at her with those eyes that were still luminous in the dim evening light.

“You don’t actually think I’m scary, do you?” he asked, smiling sweetly, as if at a child. “I’ve got to,” he said in dialect. “I’ve got to rile her up a bit, this one here, so she knows she was once married to a real man. Right, Lilldolly?”

“Very true. Exactly.”

She’d been sitting on her stool by the stove the whole time while they were drinking coffee, but now she got up and went over to the table.

“Good night, Arnold,” she said, and stroked his hand. “We’re going down to sleep in the lavvu now, Marta and I.”

~ ~ ~

Long before the arrival of morning, while it was still supposed to be night, the birds began singing. It was the end of May, the time of light. For a few months, the world was coming out of its dark hiding place, radiant and prominent. It was also the time of birds. Everything breathed hot and fast, had light rapid heartbeats, and pulses as quick as moving wings. It was the time of light, of birds, of water; everything was released and rinsed clean and each morning was supposed to be like the very first one, new and translucent blue under thin skin.

There was a smell of water in the air. All of Deep Tarn and the land around it smelled of fresh water. Marta smelled it inside the lavvu — the smell of melted and dissolved ice, of soil that water had flowed through. She’d been awake for a while. Inside her sleeping bag on top of the reindeer hide, she was watching the light through the opening in the roof. A good distance away from her, on the other side of the fireplace and kitchen area, Lilldolly was still sleeping deeply, wrapped in her sheets and blankets.

But none of the things outside, the birdsong, the smells, the sound of the wind through the trees that filtered into the lavvu, could help Marta get away from herself. She lay listening to her heart beating in her chest like a small, evil, sharp hammer. Arnold and Lilldolly’s faces danced in front of her, grotesquely enlarged, sometimes bobbing and floating around as in an aquarium, other times in pulsing flashes. They actually didn’t appear threatening; there was nothing angry or dangerous about the faces, but they came so close that they filled her entire field of vision and there was no way she could get rid of them. She could see them, but she couldn’t see herself, couldn’t see that she had a face just like them. She was nothing but a growing field of darkness. Now, when for the first time in years she was among other people, she found that she had no idea who she was. She lost herself in the company of these people. It was as if she had been blinded by their attention. She stumbled over everything in her way, had to feel the walls to orient herself. It was almost impossible for her to move naturally, or be herself, as we say, because she couldn’t see clearly or relate to anything around her.

Over the years, being watched or spoken to had come to feel invasive, like a violation. She’d wrapped layer upon layer of solitude around herself to protect her from a gaze, yet she wasn’t exactly sure whose. If she was really honest with herself, she knew it was her own eyes watching her, but she nevertheless kept wrapping that solitude around her; there was nothing else to do.

She tried to sit up a little in the bed to calm down. It can be scary to lie on your back, stretched out and vulnerable. She tried to think of how she’d come to Deep Tarn, how she’d come to Arnold and Lilldolly. This was unknown territory for her, all the trees and the great solitary lakes watching over everything. She contemplated that she’d arrived in a place of still, ancient mountains and loud, winding, gouging rivers and that it was a landscape you couldn’t grasp. It was both open and closed, it was din and silence and emptier than anything she could have imagined. This was where she’d come, to this little pocket called Deep Tarn and to the two people who lived here. She tried to think that she was with them now; they’d been here for a long time and they’d let her in, invited her into their world as if that were completely normal. As if her neighbors back home would’ve opened their door and said: Just come on in and sit down, and then just let her be part of their life. As if there were space for her. As if it were possible, and people didn’t have to stick to their own schedules and their own lives.

She tried to stay as present and alert as possible. But something kept telling her she’d misunderstood the situation and made a mistake by staying. Arnold and Lilldolly had probably expected her to decline firmly everything they’d offered and to sleep in the car again. They probably expected her to leave for Mervas, or wherever it was she was going, as early as possible in the morning. They’d insisted on her staying only to be polite, all the while hoping she’d say: No, no thanks, you’re so kind but I have to go.

The strange thing was that she’d never felt that they thought she should have said no and left quickly, and this made everything feel blurry and complicated in the early hours of dawn; their generosity confused her, made her lose track of herself. It would have been easier if she’d been turned away, if they’d sullenly muttered: Well, you can’t stay here, that’s for sure. Or if they’d at least established some firm boundaries so she’d know exactly what was going on. But to just invite her in — it was like falling and sinking into something bottomless. Who was she to receive this hospitality? Did she exist other than as a cast of herself, the remains of something that had long been in ruins? She didn’t have a sense of herself other than as a dead weight, dead weight and patches of darkness. Her thoughts pecked at her: how could she let herself be exposed to this? And then the other thoughts: she had to respond to life, she had to find an answer to her life. Then again: how could she be so mindless, so stupid?

She sat very still in bed and stared at the dark timber on the walls. She tried to breathe with long, slow breaths, tried to breathe herself free from the shapeless burden, the weight of being herself. It wasn’t possible to know if she, with her past and her actions, could be accepted among human beings, if she could move among them as if she were one of them.

But even on this morning, she found ways of escaping her anxiety for a little while. They were brief, these moments, small breaks from the ribbon of worry winding through her mind. During these moments, she felt present, almost happy. Then, she almost wanted to head into the dark city and, like an old-fashioned night guard, walk around and light the streetlights one after another.

Her own mother was locked up in that dark city. In there, she was faceless — large and frightening. The darkness had dissolved her features a long time ago; it was too late for Marta to assemble them into a whole again. It was as if her mother’s face had been scattered in the dark and the different pieces would never find each other again.

She now longed for that face, longed for it the way you may long for a place, a town, a room. In the short moments when she escaped her anxiety, she felt a deep longing. As a small child she’d never really felt that she’d had her mother, but her mother’s face had once been all she’d known. It had been the very firmament of life, and through it, she had come into the world. She’d lived with the scattered and blurred image of that face almost her entire life. Why she’d come to think of it so intensely now, here in Deep Tarn, she didn’t know. Something about the landscape had seized her and now it held her. The landscape was breathing, it was a pulse that she could feel, and it was heavy and monotonous and beautiful.

Perhaps the landscape was also a face; perhaps it resembled the first face she’d known. It was a gate, an entrance, to something.

~ ~ ~

Whenever Marta mumbled something about setting out for Mervas, Arnold and Lilldolly would interrupt her.

“Mervas will be there,” they’d say. “No need to be in a rush to Mervas.”

They’d show her the way there when it was time, they promised. They’d take a day trip there together in Marta’s car since Arnold and Lilldolly no longer owned one, at least not one you could drive. They were content to stay around Deep Tarn now that they were retired and didn’t have to chase after money. They had the whole world here, they said. Sun, moon, stars, and forests. Birds, fish, and all the animals. The water and the earth. They had food delivered to them once a month and got their milk, butter, and cheese from their two cows. They grew their own potatoes and got meat from the forest, from their calves and their sheep.

“But Arnold is the one who needs the meat. I’m a peaceful person, I don’t eat humans or animals,” Lilldolly declared, and emitted her little giggle.

“She’s sensitive, that one,” Arnold said. “She has looked too deep into the animals’ eyes, so to speak. Saw herself in there.”

She was an extraordinary person, Lilldolly. And she looked like a little girl, but with wrinkles. Her eyes were small and brown, with a razor-sharp gaze. Her movements were also like those of a girl, light and bouncy. She was like a squirrel. Next to her, Marta felt old and slow, even though she was many years younger.

Since Marta came to Deep Tarn, it had been windy, and the rain from the north had been cold. All the snow had melted, and there was water everywhere. It was an in-between time, a time for waiting. Everything was waiting for warmer weather to arrive and drive every shoot of grass up from the cold, wet ground, and lure the birch leaves out of their casings.

“All this water will blossom and grow green,” Lilldolly said. “When the early summer drinks its fill.”

Most of the time, Marta followed Lilldolly at her tasks. Arnold was busy with the firewood. They dug holes and spread manure on the potato field and they took care of the animals. When the sky cleared, they walked together from one farm building to the next, over wet paths in last year’s grass, zigzagging between rusty old farm equipment and broken-down cars, troughs, and graying wooden constructions. Everything was sinking into the grass, into the ground, moving down into the underground.

“Soon, the wind will be the only thing left here in Deep Tarn,” Lilldolly said. “Nothing but the wind, opening and closing doors and windows. It will be the only thing following the forest paths and visiting the houses. This place will become something else. Everything will change, will go back to what it used to be. Nature, she’s strong, my daddy used to say. She can conquer cities. This little place will be nothing but a morsel to her. She’ll swallow it whole without even bothering to chew.”

Lilldolly’s laughter rippled through the woods. It was always there, even when she was quiet. Suddenly, at a turn or behind a corner, it would appear again. Or when you stumbled a little.

Marta walked around breathing in the scents. There was the scent of water, of melted ice, and then the scent of burning wood and the odor of soil and dung and decomposing plants. The lavvu smelled of sharp wood smoke; the house had a sweet cottage aroma. Around some of the huts and barns there was a faint aroma of tar in the air and arching over all the other scents was that of forest, of conifers and pine needles, of turpentine and wind filtered through branches. Marta let the scents fill her like wine, like a young and vibrant wine. They made everything around her, the light, the deep yet muted colors, become visible as if they’d been created and shaped by them.

Sometimes when she felt tired, she went to the lavvu by herself to rest or to write in her journal. The lavvu wasn’t a simple traditional one, which was what she’d imagined the first night she heard about it, but a wooden structure without windows or chimney that looked like a little cabin or a fort with a cone-shaped roof. She liked to sit in its dim half-light, smelling the wood smoke and hearing the sounds outside as close as if she were out there. She felt protected inside there, childishly safe. She didn’t feel the same anxiety she’d had on the first morning; at any rate it was weaker, sort of diluted. All the roads and paths she walked down with Lilldolly were now being sewn into her life and although these paths might have been made with fast, simple stitches, they attached her to something, they kept her in the world. The fact that Deep Tarn was a place on the edge of things, and that Arnold and Lilldolly were outsiders, seemed significant somehow.

One morning, Marta went with Lilldolly to the tarn the farm had been named after. It looked like a big eye and was situated in the woods not more than a hundred yards from the house. They followed an often-used path along the edge of the water and came to a small cabin at the farthest end of the tarn. Lilldolly explained that she lived there during the summer. Once the goats and the cows had been let out to roam the forest for the summer, she’d stay there, that’s what she’d always done. A short distance from the cabin was the summer barn, a shelter with a roof and three rough walls. Lilldolly would milk the animals there, where they could also escape the gnats. Gnats don’t like roofs, Lilldolly said. Under a roof, their bites are useless.

Together, Marta and Lilldolly started organizing the cabin for the summer. They swept and scoured the floors, aired out rugs and mattresses, cleaned the chimney, and cleared out the woodstove. They placed bunches of budding blueberry branches in glass jars around the hut. Marta felt light and happy, as if she were a child again, puttering about in her playhouse, making it nice. During some summer vacations, Marta and her sister had stayed on farms and at one of them there’d been a playhouse where they could spend as much time as they wanted. It was as if they’d been given their own kingdom to rule, a kingdom where they were the king and queen and their rules were the only ones that applied.

“By midsummer, lilies of the valley will be blossoming here by the tarn,” Lilldolly said when they carried blueberry branches inside the cabin. “Tons of lilies of the valley. Then you have to come and visit and pick some!”

Marta never felt as lightheartedly chatty as Lilldolly. In some way, she was speaking the wrong language, and she felt everything she said sounded artificial and stiff, like a newscaster on television. Arnold and Lilldolly spoke as if they were in love with every word and expression they used; as if they caressed them inside their mouths and shamelessly enjoyed using them.

“My, it’s fun to have company,” Lilldolly now exclaimed. “Even to haul out the sour dung to the potato field! Now, let’s see if we can get the woodstove here going, so we can make some coffee.”

She’d already started a fire that was snapping and crackling behind the stove door and the coffeepot jerked suddenly from the heat on the burner.

“Yes, out here, we’re on our own,” she continued contently. “Just you and me.”

They were sitting on two small stools by a little table attached to the wall right by the stove. Lilldolly took out a piece of the tart-smelling cheese, a vat of butter, and bread cut into triangles. There were cups in the hut and she’d brought sugar in a little bag. They were quiet for a moment while waiting for the coffee. The low door was open toward the water, and on the other wall, the only window in the hut looked out over the forest. It was too early for mosquitoes, and the only sounds came from the birds outside and the low murmur of the woodstove.

Lilldolly settled her searching, vibrant gaze on Marta, carefully studying her, sort of feeling her way across her face little by little.

“This is a good place to talk,” she said. “After all, we haven’t told each other very much over these last few days. You don’t say much, do you? You keep things close to yourself.”

She turned the stool around and dealt with the coffee, pouring it into cups and continuing:

“I can see you’ve got your own story. It’s the story that brought you here, and that will take you up to Mervas. I’m not blind, but I’m not going to question you about it. Anyone has the right to keep as quiet as they like. I’m a curious person, of course, but not so much that you have to tell me. You can keep quiet if you want. If you want to talk about yourself, you’re welcome to. But stories have to come on their own accord, they’re alive like everything else. If they’re going to come out, they’d better come out alive, otherwise there’s no point.”

Marta felt hard and mute during Lilldolly’s speech. When she lifted the coffee cup to her lips, she noticed that her hand was trembling; from the corner of her eye, she saw that Lilldolly had noticed too. She desperately tried to think of something appropriate to say, but there was nothing to say, she found nothing. Somewhere inside her, there was a small rupture, a faint desire to place her life in Lilldolly’s hands, to simply let her receive it.

“But if you don’t want to talk, perhaps I can tell you something? It’s something I’ve never told anyone before, not in its entirety at least. It’s not a secret I want to share with you; it’s just that it so rarely happens that someone I can talk to comes here. I really feel the urge to tell you, if you want me to, if you want to hear it.”

Marta nodded. Of course she wanted Lilldolly to tell her, she wanted it very much. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone told her something important, had it even happened before? Yes, of course it had, but a very long time ago. She now sensed something resembling undernourishment. Her life was arid and gray, lacking in stories, people, and fairy tales. This meager existence had made her thin and weak, sort of translucent.

“Yes, please tell me,” she said at last, smiling uncertainly at Lilldolly. “I mean it. Tell me. It doesn’t happen often to me either. I mean, I’ve lived alone most of my life.”

Lilldolly chuckled, placed a lump of sugar in her mouth and let it dissolve as she sipped her coffee. After this, she put butter and cheese on the bread and chewed and ate for a while. Outside, an osprey shrieked high in the sky, and Marta sat with her hands in her lap letting the stillness envelop her. She had made the right decision setting out on this journey, she thought. She had not been brought off track.

~ ~ ~

Humans are so careless. That’s the worst thing about them. They’re so impatient, so rough. Why are they in such a rush? What drives them? Why are they grabbing things so angrily, always causing harm? They push and pull their poor animals instead of sitting down, listening to them, and talking to them so they can feel at ease. It’s as if everyone is walking around with a constant storm inside; there’s always a headwind inside them, always pouring rain and hail. They trample gentle flowers, tear up moss from the ground in big chunks. They clear-cut the forests as if there were a war going on and everything had to be obliterated. They are so harsh, everywhere and with everything. Children get slapped and banged around. The very earth itself gets skinned and dismembered as if it were a slaughtered animal, nothing but a dead, numb, lifeless body. All this brutal ravaging has made me afraid for life; it has somehow injured and hurt me deep in my heart, at my core. It’s as if everything that’s beautiful, wise, and simple has been stepped upon, stomped upon. You know, everything beautiful in the world goes straight to your heart as surely as the birds come flying here in the spring. Beauty is reflected in the heart, it places its reflection in our hearts as true and as real as you see the forest reflected here on the lake. Of course you think I’m being childish. But I’m old too, I’ve lived a long, long time and have been able to think these things over so many times that I know they’re true. I’ve also experienced how all the mean and ugly things in the world have argued with my heart, pierced it so I’ve had to defend myself with all my might. Yes, I’ve learned, I’ve learned that the only thing worth listening to is the longing, my own longing, my heart, you see. That beautiful call inside me is the only thing worth listening to.

Lilldolly’s a bit weak for the animals, isn’t she? That’s what they said when I was a girl and didn’t want to come into the woods and watch the reindeer be slaughtered. Or when I ran away at the mere sight of my father returning home from a hunt with quails and rabbits hanging dead from his belt. The rabbits were hung on the wall, their big black eyes staring empty, and their long soft ears now useless. I used to sneak out to them at night and tell them I was sorry they’d been shot and cut open, their bellies filled with prickly spruce needles. I’ll help you, I told the rabbits. When I grow up, I’m going to help you, I said, still believing that when a person grows up, they can do whatever they want.

But I did eat the meat after all, it was like that in those days, you ate what was put on the table. Sometimes there wasn’t much of anything. No. But that wasn’t what I was going to tell you about; this was mostly an introduction of sorts because what I was going to tell you happened when I was a married adult.

You see, Arnold and I, we couldn’t have children. It was as if fate had decided we weren’t going to have any, we were forced to live without little ones even though we longed deeply for them and sort of had waited for them during the years we’d been together. We were already living here in Deep Tarn, it was where Arnold grew up and his mother was still alive and lived upstairs in her chamber like a spider guarding her web. God Almighty, that woman blathered so much nonsense. She said that Arnold ought to find himself another woman so that there’d be children on the farm. She said worse things too, things that made me say no when she wanted me to bring her food upstairs when her legs were too weak to come downstairs. And let me tell you what I think. I think Arnold’s mother was a real witch. She put the evil eye on me because I’d taken her sweet boy away from her. As long as that hag was alive, no children were conceived in Deep Tarn. She lived for a long time too. Goddamned stubborn she was, almost rotted completely before she stopped breathing and died. She rotted both inside and outside, her body and soul. Yes, curse her! But finally, she was dead and then she was buried and after that it didn’t take long until I got pregnant. I was right, I said to Arnold. I couldn’t help myself, I had to tell him. Now you see that I was right, it was that mother of yours who kept us from having children! Arnold said there was no way of knowing if that’s how it was. Children come of their own accord and there’s no way we can know what they think, he said, and then we didn’t speak about it anymore. She’d been his mother, after all, and he didn’t like anyone but himself to be speaking ill of her. She was also dead and gone now, the room where she’d lived was scoured clean and repainted and all her old rags had been burned.

The spring after that old hag died, our little girl was born. We named her Anna-Karin, Arnold and I did, because those were the two most beautiful names we knew and together they became even more beautiful. Every morning when little Anna-Karin woke up and opened her eyes, Arnold would call: The sun’s coming up! It didn’t matter if it was in the dark of winter because she was our sun and we danced around her and she shone and spread her light around us so that. .

I can barely speak about her. Still. It’s as if an entire lifetime isn’t enough for me to mourn that girl. No. But now I really have to try to tell the story I was going to tell you. It’s about Anna-Karin, everything is about Anna-Karin. If you don’t know about Anna-Karin, you simply don’t know Arnold or me, that’s just the way it is. When we had Anna-Karin with us, we didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have a lot of food either, they’d recently shut down the mine in Mervas and plenty of men were looking for work in the area, fighting for whatever jobs there were. Arnold only had work once or twice a week; in between, he’d mostly be at home making tar or going into the woods to fish or hunt. It wasn’t always legal to do that during that time, you know, he took what he could get and what we needed. I preferred when he brought fish home, but times were hard and there was Anna-Karin to think of. I had to take care of the meat from the rabbits and the wood grouses, it was food too, and we needed all the food we could get.

And then. Then came the evening during our second summer with Anna-Karin when Arnold came home carrying a calf on his shoulders like an empty sack. It was a female moose calf, you see, a tiny baby, so young you could almost see the remains of her mother’s milk around her mouth. Yes, dear God, what a terrible sight it was; I thought my heart would break. I just took Anna-Karin in my arms and ran straight out to him and screamed: “What have you done, you miserable man? What on earth have you done?” I looked at Arnold and saw that he was scratched and bloody and dirty and then I saw the little calf hanging there lifeless on his shoulder. The pretty little head was crushed to a pulp and I just screamed and Arnold told me to bring the little one inside the house so she wouldn’t have to see this. But I felt absolutely crazy from what I’d seen and when he pushed me aside to go down to the meadow with the poor calf, I followed with Anna-Karin crying in my arms and I howled and yelled that he was a beast to have killed a child, he’d killed a nursing baby, and did he know what he’d done, did he truly know what he’d done? Arnold screamed at me again to go inside the house with the little girl and stay away, and if it hadn’t been for Anna-Karin he’d probably have hit me. I no longer recognized him, it was as if he’d turned into someone else in the woods and something of that evil streak of his mother had appeared in him. And then it was as if I woke up and became hard and silent inside. I thought I would just walk away with Anna-Karin and never have anything to do with that man ever again. Back in the kitchen, I tried to comfort her and give her some wild strawberries mashed with milk, but she just screamed and screamed as if someone were stabbing her with a knife and after a while I noticed that she had a fever and was sort of touching her ear with her hand.

When Arnold came in a little later he immediately asked about our little girl and I told him she had a fever and seemed to have an earache but that she’d finally fallen asleep. Now I wanted to hear the entire story about why he’d come home from the woods with a battered baby moose because I wanted to know if this was really my husband and the father of my daughter or if something had happened out there in the forest that had taken the other Arnold away from me. He sat down, put his head in his hands, sighed, and let out a moan. “There were no fish in the nets this morning,” he said. “Then, I tell you, I didn’t see a single sign of an animal in the woods all day. So when that female moose with her calf showed up within range, I just shot at the calf, I didn’t have time to think, my gun went off and the calf fell but then it got up and the mother probably thought it was dead because she ran away and the little calf followed because wretched me had wounded it. It ran up on the Great Swan Bog and I followed but I was worked up and shaking after that shot and I fell into a deep hole in the bog and half drowned both the gun and myself. Then I ran like a maniac, chasing that calf, cursing and railing at myself. It took an hour or more before I caught up with it over by the saplings past the tarn; it was on the ground, shivering. It was such a miserable sight I wanted to cry when I saw it, it was so frightened and so small and the blood was running from the wound on its side. You won’t understand this but it enraged me and my gun was useless so I grabbed a rock and rushed up and crushed its head. I thought I’d leave it there in the forest and just walk home, but that didn’t seem right to either it or us after all that, to not bring it, so I gutted it and brought it home.”

Arnold told me all this almost without a breath between the words. And I, I’d been sitting there staring at him the whole time while he was talking and it was as if his face gradually transformed into something ugly and foreign and unapproachable. More and more, he ceased to be my Arnold. Instead, he became something large and terrifying and unfamiliar and I became scared of him, scared of the kitchen where we sat, and scared of the bright, quiet summer night outside. I became scared of life itself, I’ll tell you, scared of how it can be and what it can do to you. And this fear was so intense that when I heard Anna-Karin whimpering from the bedroom I couldn’t move but sat there as if frozen to the chair and I saw Arnold get up and run over to her. I heard his voice as if there were a great distance separating us and he was yelling that she was having fever cramps, but I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t move my arms or legs or get my mouth to speak. When Arnold came out with the girl in his arms and I saw how sick she was it was as if a great darkness closed in on me and I couldn’t find my way out of it, all I remember is how frightened I was in there. Images flashed through my head. I saw the moose calf and Anna-Karin, razor-sharp images that merged and became one. Anna-Karin with her head crushed, her broken little face belonging to the moose calf body dangling against Arnold’s chest. And as you must know, that night when I sat in my darkness on that chair, our little girl died from fever cramps while the ear infection moved inside her brain and extinguished her.

When the taxi arrived to take her to the nurse’s station, she was already gray and dead and I don’t even remember how they transported the three of us in the taxi, I didn’t come out of my darkness and I couldn’t say a word until we came into the doctor’s room and I looked at Anna-Karin where she lay incomprehensibly stiff and still on the table.

He shot her, I said then. He injured her, I said to the doctor and pointed at Arnold. He had to kill her with a rock.

~ ~ ~

Everything stopped when Lilldolly finished her story. There was nothing more to follow. But a slight breeze slipped into the cabin, swirled around, and left. It seemed to want to remind them of the shiny new world the sun had painted for them outside. The clear, bright air hovered, trembled. The sky that had hastily been swept clean proudly announced its blue color. In the sharp sunlight, the budding, still-naked branches sparkled with crystal raindrops while the conifers, like cattle, seemed to drink the light in long, deep sips.

Inside the cabin, the two women sat within the silence that arched over them. Marta shivered and felt cold from hearing Lilldolly’s story. Her hands were stuck in each other’s grasp, tightly clenched, like icy clumps. She had wanted to say something after Lilldolly’s long story, but she stumbled on the words, they stuck in her throat. She felt as if she were bursting with things to say, but at the same time she knew her voice wouldn’t obey her. Instead, it would turn into rapidly spinning blades that cut everything around her into bits and pieces until nothing but the terrible and unrecognizable remained, nothing but bloody pulp.

A bumblebee awakened by the sun paused and buzzed for a moment outside the open door. Outside, the tarn reflected everything in its gaze: trees, sky, birds. It was an open eye, and the only thing that would make it blink quickly was the wind. It’s always watching, Marta thought, and she felt the burning sensation, the effort it took not to close her eyes, to force her eyes to see.

Marta bent her head and peered up at Lilldolly, but she was in her own world. Her hands were like two small animals curled up on her lap and she looked out the door with calm, heavy eyes. Quickly and clumsily, Marta got up from the table and rushed out of the cabin. When Lilldolly ran after her, she found Marta leaning against a thick willow, vomiting.

“My dear child, what’s happening?” Lilldolly asked. She leaned over Marta and touched her neck and hair.

“What’s going on? Did you get sick?”

Marta eventually stopped throwing up but started sobbing and weeping instead. Lilldolly fetched some water in an old coffee can and wiped Marta’s mouth and face and let her drink from her cupped hand. Marta was on all fours with her hair hanging over her face. She didn’t want to look up. It struck her that she wanted to be nothing but an animal from here on; it would be a relief. She wanted her mouth to be a muzzle and she wanted to keep drinking from the cupped hand. She wanted to be an animal and hold her face toward the ground and never again stand upright with her breasts and belly and eyes exposed. Now she wanted her sounds to be loud, deep, and hollow; she wanted every sound that left her mouth to be a roar or a bellow.

“Dear child,” Lilldolly mumbled, and stroked Marta’s back slowly where she was planted firmly on her hands and knees, shaking with tears. She wouldn’t let herself be pushed into a sitting or lying position. Lilldolly stroked her as if she were an old sheep, groaning from contractions.

“You can stay like that if it feels good. I’m not going to force you to move. You just stay there and finish crying.”

“Oh, oh,” Marta moaned after a while, her tears pushing and pulling inside her. “It’s not me; it’s not me, not me. .”

“That’s right,” Lilldolly said, leaning her cheek against Marta’s head. “It’s not you; of course it’s not.”

“It’s not me,” Marta tried again. “I shouldn’t be the one crying. You should be crying, not me,” she whimpered. “This is about you, Lilldolly.”

“It doesn’t matter who does the crying, dearie. If it’s you or me. It doesn’t matter.”

“But I don’t want to take it away from you, don’t want to take anything away from you with my own troubles and stand here and. . You having to comfort me.”

Marta had to force the words out between her sobs. It was as if she were pushing them through a perforated wall, which made them come out in mangled, deformed threads.

“You’re the one,” she continued without making much sense. “I’m the one who, I mean, you’re the one — who should be comforted.”

“You cry and I’ll tell the story. It’s as it should be. The one who tells the story can’t cry. The one who tells the story has to find her way past the tears if she’s going to get anywhere. You go on crying. You can cry for me.”

“Yes, and you, you. .”

“I’ve had my share of crying, I’ve cried enough for you too.”

“But I can’t, can’t. . I can’t tell you, Lilldolly. I have. . but I can’t, can’t tell you — ”

“No, you do the crying and I’ll do the talking. That’s how it’ll be. Now you’re the one crying.”

Lilldolly’s hands kept working Marta’s back and shoulders while she talked, they pinched and kneaded and stroked and pushed and Marta closed her eyes and let it happen. She was an animal now, she could allow herself to be stroked, she was an old, ugly animal who had nothing left of shame or pride to defend. It didn’t matter that she was sobbing and drooling, that some vomit was stuck in her hair. She could stay here and be without a soul and let her tears stab her apart.

“Let go of your shoulders now,” Lilldolly said. “It feels like you have a sack of taters under your skin. There you go. We agreed that you’d do the crying and I’d do the talking. That’s what we said. But I can’t help but wonder what kind of journey got started. No, don’t answer me, you don’t have to say anything, I understand it was something you had to do. You’ve left everything behind, that’s obvious, you’ve got nothing to return to. God have mercy, what don’t we humans have to do to be at peace. I want you to know that it’s the greatest and most important thing we have to do in life, to find our peace. To stay at peace with life. That was the agreement, the promise we made when we first came into this life. To honor that promise you’re allowed to make whatever journeys and do whatever crazy things you have to do. There’s nothing to stop you from that, nothing at all. You’re allowed to cry, as much as you need to. You can throw up too, go on, throw up as much as you can.”

Lilldolly went on talking while she stroked and kneaded Marta’s body. But with an unexpected twist, she suddenly and decisively flipped her over so she wound up sitting on her behind. For an instant they looked at each other, a little surprised. Then Lilldolly grabbed Marta’s chin and held her face.

“But you can’t hide any longer,” she said. “That’s cheating.”

“And you have to watch,” Marta said absently. She wrenched her face loose and began rubbing it with her palms. She looked up, present again, cleared.

“I’m sorry, you have to forgive me. I don’t want to be like this. Your story was so. . intense. I hadn’t expected it to be such an important story. Such a dangerous story, dangerous for me. I’ll carry it here in my heart, like you said, inside what’s beautiful. I’m happy, you see, I’m happy even though it doesn’t make sense and I’m sitting here like an idiot, like a. .”

Lilldolly started laughing her clucking, sparkling laughter, sounding like a lively creek between rocks and suddenly Marta began laughing too; she couldn’t help herself. She just flowed along with it, floated on the laughter itself. She was sucked into it and twirled around inside it; it was like dancing, swimming, playing in water. All she needed to do was look at Lilldolly and see how her laughter made her jerk and jump and that same bliss moved through her as well.

“Oh dear,” Lilldolly said at last. “Dear, how crazy things can be.”

Afternoon had come and the sun penetrated and warmed everything. It moved through the top layer of the soil, into the tree trunks and the timber of the houses. It also penetrated the birds’ soft down, the fur of animals, the anthills, and the stones. It penetrated your skin, your eyes, placed its sweet, warm sun muzzle in your hand.

Arnold had spread sheepskins on the ground in front of the house and was resting with his hat over his face when Lilldolly and Marta returned.

“Well now,” he said from underneath his hat when he heard them. “I’m getting some company here in the sun. At last.”

Then they lay there, the three of them, and let themselves be covered in sun. Marta fell asleep almost immediately and dreamed of the boy. He was calling her as she ran from room to room in a big building looking for him. She had to find him; there was something she had to tell him, something important. Good news. Once, he ran ahead of her in a stairway, he was young and held something in his hand, a piece of fabric. Later, he stood in front of her in a sunny spot in a big hall and he seemed to hover strangely and was trembling somehow and it took a long while before she realized he’d transformed himself into a giant bumblebee.

When she opened her eyes again, Arnold and Lilldolly were drinking coffee on the pelt next to her.

“You fell asleep in the sun,” Arnold said. He handed her a knife and a piece of dried meat he’d been carving from.

“Eat!” he told her. “It’s salty. Good for you.”

She pulled herself up into a sitting position and cut off a small piece of meat.

“You see, we’re talking about Mervas,” Arnold continued. “We’re wondering if we should go on that excursion tomorrow. On the radio, they say the weather’s going to be nice now. Lilldolly says it too; summer’s here now, she says. So we’re considering taking tomorrow off and heading up there.”

Marta nodded. She felt confused. Mervas, she thought. Would it become real now? For real? Perhaps she ought to go there alone? She wasn’t sure. But if Kosti was there, if she was going to meet Kosti, did she want Arnold and Lilldolly to be there too? No, she wasn’t sure.

She nodded again.

“It’ll be fun,” she said.

Arnold laughed and looked from Marta to Lilldolly and then back at Marta again.

“Well, let me tell you, it’s been a while since we went anywhere. There was the dental appointment last winter, of course, a couple of tooth extractions and such. The pharmacy, perhaps the social security office.”

“And the grave,” Lilldolly added. “We went to the grave.”

He seemed taken aback, paused for a moment.

“Yes, the grave. We do have the grave, Lilldolly and I.” He inhaled.

“Yes,” he said, focusing on Marta. “You see. That’s how it is. It was a good thing that you got lost and ended up here. This way we get to go on a little trip before we get stuck to this place like moss on the rocks.” He laughed again.

“We can go shopping too,” Marta said. “And to the grave, if you want. Now that we’re going.”

“No, that’ll be another day,” Lilldolly decided. “Mervas is in the opposite direction altogether. That’ll be a whole other trip. No, let’s go to Mervas. That’ll be something else.”

She peered at Arnold.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s another world. Mervas.”

~ ~ ~

After some discussion, it was settled that Arnold would drive. He was the one who knew the roads the best and was used to being on them, he argued. Lilldolly wanted to sit in peace in the back and have space for her own thoughts and Marta would sit in the passenger seat. She’d have a good view from there and that was important, Arnold reasoned, because she had to learn the way to Mervas. Tasso was also coming along, and he got to sit next to Lilldolly in the back, as he used to. They put sheepskins, food, and the coffeepot in the trunk. Then they took to the road.

Arnold was driving fast, Marta thought, but she didn’t say anything to him about it. After Deep Tarn’s road, they’d ended up on a narrow gravel road that wound through a steep, undulating forest and small ponds like hollows strewn everywhere in the landscape. The spruce trees were sparsely spread; no shrubs or low trees obscured the view. Here and there, a big boulder covered in gray moss rose from the ground. Small ridges pressed against the ground like the backs of animals. Without warning, the trees came to a halt at a gorge that led straight down to another kind of world. Here, everything seemed small and inviting. You wanted to enter among the trees and walk around in those woods. The ground seemed to be padded; perhaps the huldra* moved there on her soft, springy paws.

But suddenly, the narrow road ended and Arnold veered right onto a wider gravel road that cut straight through a landscape that was completely different. Vast and endless, it stretched out with its enormous lakes resting in depressions between the mountains. It was mostly woods and no vistas, young trees and old growth, the sun like a golden caress over the carpet of berry shrubs between the trees. Sometimes they came upon clear-cuts, large, empty areas, but these areas were forests too — missing, petrified forests without trees, woods in waiting.

They didn’t talk during the trip. It was still early in the day and night hadn’t yet wholly left their senses. They sat focused, looking out the windows, and stayed silent while the road crunched beneath them and the landscape rushed past. The road continued straight and wide and they passed yet another big lake. Marta thought there was something odd about these large, desolate bodies of water; there were no houses around them. They just lay there as if undiscovered by man. Nowhere had they seen a single house or farm. Only in one place, in a small clearing by a little lake, was there an abandoned trailer. They traveled through the woodland as if they each had their own small part in it. Mile after mile it belonged to itself; trees and animals and people were nothing but visitors there.

The sky was a blue stream lined with the tops of scraggly fingered firs, floating above the road. Marta looked up, following the stream; it was easier than trying to look into the forest. The trees obscured the view, she thought; they were in the way. It takes time to discover that the forest is a place where the space between things matters more than the trees, that it is a swaying in-between world where light and shadows rule. Someone is playing an instrument in there, sometimes slow and gliding, other times jerky and bouncy, a bow of light and shadow slides across the strings of all the tree trunks and branches and twigs. If you want to see the forest, you have to avoid looking at the trees; you have to learn how to look where there’s nothing, to the side. That’s when you hear the music.

Marta’s internal view was also obscured today; inside her, the trees were also in the way. She saw the calf with its crushed, hanging head and thought about Lilldolly and Arnold, thought about what Lilldolly had said the first night she met them, that with this man she shared neither table nor bed. She was now sharing the place where she slept with Marta. But Arnold and Lilldolly seemed like a couple in any case. They didn’t seem to be enemies. It was obvious they liked each other. But still, Lilldolly’s story had pushed Marta into a place she couldn’t escape; something tugged at her. She was caught up in scattered thoughts about the boy and Anna-Karin and the calf, about Mervas and Kosti. Caught up in sudden fragments of childhood memories that kept appearing — her father’s spirit inside her, his constant, commanding presence, the fear of his voice raging through the mail slot. Then, her mother’s austere features, immovable and stern, enduring it all. She remembered her own feeling of being on fire and freezing simultaneously, of being completely naked and walking powerless across the floor of the stage, of existing without form. She had to be there, had to be there. Caught up in all this, she desperately tried to see over the edge of her own life. But the blue canal above the road flowed through her like a ribbon of forgetfulness, a blue thoughtlessness, a blue oblivion free of longing. It told her she didn’t have the strength to figure out what the chafing images and memories had to do with her. It told her she didn’t want to know if they were about her life. Or about herself. She really didn’t even want to know that they were now on their way to Mervas; she’d soon be there, very soon she’d actually be there.

They’d just passed another lake and come up on an elevated plateau when Arnold suddenly, in the middle of a steep upward slope, slowed down and almost stopped the car.

“Here’s the road up to Mervas,” he said. “It’s easy to miss. You can barely detect it.”

“We’re here?” Marta asked, newly awake. “We’ve arrived?”

“No, we’re not there yet, but this is the road. It’s about two kilometers, as I recall. A lousy road.”

That’s when she saw that they were just about to pass an almost illegible sign that leaned toward the low birches behind it. She surmised the name more than read it; the sign was flecked with rust, half-eroded and erased, but it burned inside her like a branding iron. One by one, the letters of this name burned their way inside her and now she held the letter in her hand again where she’d first read it; now she felt the triumph she’d experienced when these same letters had appeared in the right order in the index of the big Nordic atlas in the library.

“I can’t do it,” she said at once with such determination that Arnold immediately hit the brakes and stopped the car.

“I can’t do it, I have to go there by myself,” she continued. “I have to do it alone.”

Arnold turned and looked at her with his iridescent blue eyes and she thought she’d corrode under his gaze.

“So we’ll have our excursion somewhere else today,” Lilldolly called quickly from the backseat. “We’ll go to Reindeer Head Rapids today!”

“I’m sorry,” Marta said.

“You don’t have to apologize. I thought you’d have us step out here in the middle of nowhere while you’d go up to Mervas by yourself. All right, let’s go to Reindeer Head Rapids. Absolutely. We used to do that all the time in the old days, Lilldolly and I, when our little Opel was still running. Yes, we’d go to Reindeer Head Rapids every spring.”

He backed up a little too fast from the road to Mervas and then pressed so hard on the gas that Tasso started barking with excitement.

“Hush, silly,” Arnold shushed. “You’re frightening the girls!” He peered at Marta and smiled a little. “I say, you’re a difficult one,” he said.

A week later, Marta found herself again in her car before the sign that had once pointed toward the mining community Mervas. Now it pointed mostly toward the low shrubs, down toward the ground.

She’d stepped out of her car and stood there staring. The solitude pressed against her, the silence pounded in her ears. The only sounds beyond her own were the wind and the hum of bird voices. The road to Mervas was very narrow, saplings crowded the edges and soon they’d start growing in the middle of the road. The budding green birch trees arched like a tunnel above her and light glittered through the braided branches.

She took a few loudly crunching steps onto the road and discovered that she was walking on asphalt, on cracked, shrinking asphalt. She shivered as if someone had touched her unexpectedly and could imagine what the road must have looked like once, before the woods started closing in from both sides, before the frost from below could freely gnaw it to pieces and partly swallow it. It had been blank and glossy and wide, with a demanding parade of yellow lines running down the middle, and like a general it had brought people through the desolate forests and wilderness into the new and neatly organized place that Mervas had been.

Now the silence was incomprehensible. Trucks and buses and cars had driven here, clusters of children and teenagers had biked down this road, Vespas and mopeds had sputtered down it. In some strange way, it felt as if all these things were still there, as if they’d been preserved and were still occurring somewhere below everything, hidden. Marta kicked the gravel a little as if to resist the impulse to shout to the past, to call out a sorrowful greeting, a lonely hello. She realized that her present was shared by a past that had, in a sudden gust, breathed on her.

Saturated, she walked back to the car, got behind the wheel, and began driving toward Mervas. Branches scratched the car’s paint with sad, faint sounds. She didn’t take her eyes off the unreliable road, riddled with potholes and rocks and fallen branches. She was forging a track, and she could feel it within herself. It had always been there, a creek, a flowing body of water inside of her; now it had surfaced.

Something large suddenly appeared in front of the car. Startled, she slammed the brakes before she had time to see what it was. It was a reindeer, nearly white, standing but a yard away from her. For some reason it refused to move; it stood glowering at her for a while and then started an easy trot up the road. Marta had to follow slowly behind.

She thought she’d been driving forever when the dense old-growth forest suddenly cleared around her. The reindeer was still running ahead of the car when she came into a birch forest with a patch of grass in the middle, almost like a rotary. The reindeer went to the right, down a slope. Marta stayed in the intersection, trying to figure out where she’d ended up.

A very sparse pine forest surrounded her and soon she discovered, both straight ahead and to the left, a residential area; except there were no actual houses. The foundations were lined up in neat rows, partly overgrown by moss and berry bushes. Staircases and basement windows were still in place. Since no houses obscured the view, the grid pattern of the streets was visible between the trees. A small flock of reindeer was grazing among the remains of the foundations. The scene was so still, so strange. Marta parked on the nearest street. Then she opened the door, but stayed in the car. This silence, would she ever get used to it? It was so serious, so demanding. Each and every little sound had to be let through it, nothing could escape, and the world seemed as close as skin against skin; everything was laid bare.

Mosquitoes flew inside the car; they had hatched in the recent heat. She shut the door. It felt difficult to step outside; the solitude ached inside her. Sooner or later she’d have to go out. Her fear battled her curiosity; she had to go out. The reindeer probably wouldn’t attack her; she’d never heard of that happening. If they weren’t afraid of walking around here, she shouldn’t be afraid either. There couldn’t be any bears around if the reindeer were here. Arnold had talked about bears and blueberries, but he’d never mentioned any reindeer.

She took a deep breath, and then stepped out of the car, closed the door, and turned her back to it. Her heart pounding, she looked out over the abandoned community. It appeared to her as idyllic as the neighborhoods of nicely decorated wood houses common in Swedish small towns. But the place also exuded something else. Like a piece of dynamite ready to explode, something was constantly threatening the village’s idyllic sense of sleep and stagnation. She sensed a presence, a very strong presence, palpable like a wall — the sensation of a body, a voice.

She forced herself to start walking. To avoid disturbing the reindeer, she walked straight ahead for a block and then turned onto the first street to the left. After about a hundred yards, she came upon the remains of a big building where surprisingly many of the walls were still intact. A cracked staircase led her down to the basement floor and she stepped through a door hole into the largest room. A great willow tree was in bloom there. The corridor behind the room had door frames that all opened to the woods. All floors and ceilings were gone and the ground inside the building was covered by last year’s leaves. On a wall in the corridor, someone had written: I went to school here from 1946 to 1952. There was an illegible name underneath, Astrid something, and a date from an earlier year. Others had written and scratched things on the walls too, but the text had faded.

She continued her walk up and down the streets. Everywhere were signs of habitation, moss-covered columns stood silent among the fir trees, foundations and collapsed basements, small houses and larger buildings. Right where she’d left the car she found the communal laundry room and its cast-iron washtubs. Here, the roof was intact, but a pile of rocks and mortar had sealed the front door. She stood looking in through a window, an oblong, square opening in the moss. The sun had found the same opening and illuminated the floor and the walls with its warm yellow light, a stream of honey on the gray stone. Shards of mortar and concrete covered the floor, and the cracked walls were covered with mold. But no objects were to be found, not a single thing had been left behind. You could tell that this place, this little town, had been abandoned in a very organized way. Even in its deterioration, the precise, businesslike order that had once ruled here was still very much present. A sort of bottomless rationality, an organized decay, seemed to surround her. All appendages had obviously been cleared away before the houses were disassembled. Windows and doors with frames had been removed; furniture, toys, buckets, and kitchen appliances had been carefully cleared out. Only the foundations that would eventually wither away had been left behind, the remains of stairs, the window frames. Mervas was a skeleton that had been picked clean.

Marta once more arrived at the small intersection and now she decided to take the road that sloped down the hill, the one the white reindeer had walked away on. To the left were the remnants of another large building, otherwise nothing but forest surrounded her, denser and more rugged.

After a sharp turn, the woods cleared somewhat to her right. At the bottom of a steep slope lay a big, still lake surrounded by smaller pools and rocks. The water was green and dim, waiting, watching her; it was still, bottomless, and its clear, wide-open center showed how incredibly deep it was. A high fence, made by thick wires, had been erected along the edge of the slope, but the road continued downward and after yet another turn, the woods opened onto hills and sky.

Bright, magnificent space was all she could see. A broad unbroken expanse of piercing green wound its way toward the mountain ridges. It was like a wide river running through the valley, like shining green water. Stunned, Marta gazed out over the landscape, which seemed to go on for miles inland. Somehow, it was incomprehensible, more at home in dreams than reality. Dancing on the sacred meadows of bliss, she thought, and in her mind’s eye, she could picture bears dancing with reindeer. But she understood that the beauty was probably a mirage, the valley was most likely poisoned. This plain was like a discharge of the old mine, which had once flowed out of the bowels of the mountain in a river of slag and toxins.

Something else caught her attention. In the foreground, right where the road ended and the plain started, stood a huge stone monument. It could have been the mining tower, a solitary, heavy concrete creature frozen in silence. She walked down to it. Four solid pillars carried an arched ceiling. It was a sad arch of triumph, a call from the past, a disintegrating, cracked memory of something. When she stepped in between the pillars, she saw two paintings on the inside, pictures of Mervas as it had once been: a picture of the community and its houses, and another of the mining site with the tower soaring in its center. “The Mervas of my childhood as I remember it,” someone had written below the picture.

Marta suddenly felt very tired. It was the feeling of not belonging anywhere. A pendulum had started swinging inside her, back and forth, back and forth. Did she really have the right to be here? Shame ran through her body again. How could she have been so stupid to travel all the way to this strange, distant place just because Kosti had mentioned it in a note that wasn’t even a real letter? She felt more afraid of Kosti than of anything else in Mervas. He might be standing somewhere, watching her, at this very moment. He’d be shaking his head and thinking: She came. How crazy!

Perhaps he was here with someone. It could be a woman. His woman. Now he was going to her, to tell her that the loony woman Marta, whom he’d been with for a few years in his youth, was here. She’d followed him all the way here.

However, he had written “your Kosti” in the letter. How did he dare? Was he trying to make fun of her? Marta stepped away from the monument. The ground was covered with sharp stones and iron scraps. The wind from the plains was picking up and it was dry and cold. She shivered. What are you doing here? she imagined Kosti saying. He sounded annoyed, accusatory. What are you doing here?

She walked up the long slope again, back to the village. The atmosphere was a little gentler up there, the sun was warm between the trees and the grid of the narrow streets gave her a feeling of comfort. It made her feel that the world was an organized place after all, at least if she behaved herself and remained in the background. Kosti must have come in a car just as she did, but there was no other car here. Besides, it had been six months since he had written her; it was highly unlikely he was still here.

She took one more turn around the foundations before she sat down on the schoolhouse stairs with her sandwich and the thermos of coffee, which Lilldolly had prepared. She couldn’t see the reindeer any longer; now she was all alone. The birds were still there of course; amid the chirping she could distinguish the chaffinch’s particular string of sounds. She was actually free to go, she thought. Whenever she wanted, she could get in the car and drive back to Arnold and Lilldolly’s. She could leave here at any time, nothing was forcing her to stay in Mervas, she didn’t have to stay. She hadn’t traveled here to see Kosti. She’d come to face herself.

She had the right to be in Mervas. The place was singing around her; it resounded with song. All of Mervas surrounded her like an unusual, gently sung song emanating from between the withered stones and the light filtered through the trees. Maybe she wouldn’t be afraid here. Some people can be connected to a place, a certain place, the kind of place that gives itself to you and allows you to hear its song. Marta thought she heard something peculiarly familiar in that song; she recognized it as if it were her own life singing her story, her own voice crawling out from everything that had been left behind and forgotten. It wasn’t that she belonged here; she’d never felt she belonged anywhere. But there was a trace of something, a kind of recognition. Perhaps the traces of things are what’s most real, the fragments of something, the scent. You can’t get any closer to what’s real; if you do, it dissolves.

It was at that very moment, right when she was thinking this, when she bent forward to pour more coffee from the thermos, that she saw something on the ground. It was a pipe cleaner, brown from tobacco juice and bent in the middle. It lay next to the base of the stairs and beside it was a small pile of ashes and half-burnt tobacco. She lifted the pipe cleaner, smelled it, examined it with her fingers. Her hand was trembling. Kosti, she thought, and the notion was somehow inconceivable. He was here. There was no way this thing could have been here since the previous winter.

* A huldra is a creature in Scandinavian folklore, a beautiful naked woman with a hollow back and a fox tail who lures men deep into the woods then abandons them to their deaths.

~ ~ ~

“You should spend the night here! Why would you want to stay overnight in Mervas? No, you go up there and have a look and then you’ll come back to Deep Tarn. You can do whatever you want, of course, just know that you can come back anytime. I’ll say, you are being secretive. Incredibly secretive. When you return you’ll have to tell us. Something. You have to promise to tell us something.”

The words had streamed from Lilldolly’s mouth in the morning when she was making sandwiches for Marta. It was now evening. A blackbird was lecturing from the top of a fir tree behind the school. The air had cooled; there was an icy edge to it, something cold and hard left behind from winter. The blackbird was speaking to Marta with Lilldolly’s voice. In the evening, when all other birds have gone silent, the blackbird speaks in a particularly serious tone. Come back, it said. You should come back to Deep Tarn. Don’t stay there in Mervas, Lilldolly urged, in the slow, deep voice of the blackbird.

The evening breeze swept some leaves from one place to another on the gravel in front of Marta. The branches of the blooming sallow in the school’s largest room stirred in the wind. She sat on the stairs struggling with her doubts, trying to grasp what she wanted. Cold, she buried her hands in her jacket pockets. She had wrapped the pipe cleaner in some toilet paper and put it in the glove compartment before moving the car up to the school building, where she felt most at home.

There was one place in Mervas she’d rather not have known about. She sat pondering it. It was at the far end of the village, and all streets led there. She’d noticed an arched, slanting roof over a door opening. At first, she figured it was an ordinary ground cellar. But then she’d looked through the gaping door frame. A stale wind had hit her face, a strangely strong, cool and damp breeze that seemed to come from below, from the dark depths. She’d seen a long stairway, and something was shimmering down there, probably water. Beyond that, everything was black. But that wind told her something. It was no ground cellar, it was bigger than that, much bigger. Probably a path leading down to the mine.

The fact that she was in a mining town where roads and paths led down and into the mountain felt natural. However, this opening into the dark had filled her with fear and rage. The burning, short-fused anger she felt reminded her of something, reminded her of being forced to obey. Where she now sat curled up on the front stairs of the school, she could clearly recall how the gaping door frame became a mouth breathing its dark, powerful presence into Mervas. The odd feeling seized her that this mouth would suck up everything outside it, that it would pull everything unmoored and movable toward its shapeless internal darkness, would swallow anything light, kind, comforting, and warm. In there, down there, she thought, everything would dissolve; leaves, people, pieces of wood, stones, everything would dissolve into darkness.

She was freezing, and tried to shake off her thoughts. But the mere knowledge of that opening with its stairs leading down to the shiny water made her shiver with discomfort and also robbed her of the feeling of freedom that was so precious to her. The feeling that she was free to leave whenever she wanted to, that nothing forced her to stay in Mervas.

No, nothing is up to you, the chasm hissed.

She was meant to be forced, such were the rules of her life no matter how much she tried to resist.

She tried to listen only to the blackbird, who was still singing, tried to stay with the warm, low voice chanting such wise and simple things, balanced things, about life. It had found a place beyond everything, where there were no demands. A song without rage. He was free.

The blackbird sings the Song of Songs, Marta told herself. The blackbird’s song is great, she tried thinking; the greatest thing is love — and the song of the blackbird.

But other voices insistently crowded in on her and said other things, the wrong things. She felt their hard grasp burn around her wrist, felt the strength of that grasp, how she’d been dragged around, forced.

She had initially planned to explore a bit during the rest of the evening. From studying the map, she knew there was a small lake right behind the school, a little ways through the woods. At the lake, she would find a hut, the map said. But she’d become too scared now. Obstacles had been raised inside her, she had to stay on the school stairs tonight, and she couldn’t leave. She could sleep in the car later, the tent seemed unpleasantly thin-walled. If she slept in the car she could also easily escape if she had to.

A black circle on the ground in front of the stairs showed where people had lit bonfires. Marta pushed her anxiety aside and gathered a sizable pile of dry branches, leaves, and some birch bark. Then she started a fire. The sun was low in the sky and it slowly rolled north from the west. In a few more hours, it would momentarily dip below the horizon. The sky would never get completely dark, the sun would never sink that low.

When the fire crackled and burned, she felt calmer. Suddenly, she understood why humans had once needed to master fire. It was when they’d been driven from the Garden of Eden, when they were alone with themselves and the immensity of the world. With the help of fire, exiled and abandoned ones sought to protect themselves from the gnawing and ultimately crushing fear. The god of fire now protected her too; she and the fire had a pact against what lurked underground.

She took a piece of smoked whitefish from the lunch box and began eating it with her fingers. Carefully, she removed the thick skin and pinched the tender fillets lightly and gently so they came off the bone. Her fingers dripped with fat, and the aroma from the fish, heavy as it was, made her feel full. Imagine that, I’m here, she thought, and briefly felt elated. I’m sitting here by a small fire in the vast sea of trees, I made it out of my apartment, yes, I broke free and came all the way here.

Someone else now lived in the gray rooms where she’d been shut in for so many years. Those rooms didn’t exist any longer, the rooms where she’d lived alone, and with the boy. They were now repainted, refurnished, all traces of her were gone, all traces of the boy, and the traces of her own catastrophic reaction on the day he turned fourteen.

Embers pulsed faintly among the last logs on the fire and the sun disappeared behind the treetops in the north. Marta forced herself to stop ruminating and spread a thick sleeping pad in the back of the car. She arranged her things so that only the driver’s seat was empty and accessible. She really wanted to wash the strong smell of whitefish from her hands, but it would have to wait until morning. Then, she’d go down to the little lake and greet the day by the water. If she’d had a little more foresight, she would’ve gotten some curtains for the car before she left. Now she had to sleep in the light and hope that she’d made the right calculations so that in the morning the car would be in the shade, away from the sun.

~ ~ ~

A flock of geese floated across the tin-colored sky. Night had fallen on Mervas and the surface of the lake rested without a ripple. Supernaturally green, the white night light that seemed to come from nowhere rose from the plains behind the mine. Around it the mountains lay sphinxlike, guardian animals in the silence.

Marta fell asleep as soon as she lay down inside the car. The visions that had filled her head and danced behind her eyes as soon as she closed them swelled and grew like sails filled with wind. They carried her into a dream where the images melded and separated and transformed while she moved deeper into the sometimes familiar, other times foreign dreamscape.

The morning had come creeping into what was actually still nighttime. A couple of mosquitoes had entered through the small crack of the window that she had left open and they now clung to the walls, gorged with her blood. She opened her eyes. The light was mild, fuzzily gray, and she had time to think that it would probably be an overcast day when she spotted the man who stood looking at her a little ways from the car.

He was large and bearded, and his hair was speckled with gray. He was wearing a shapeless green jacket and had a slight stoop. Marta didn’t get scared when she saw him. She knew it was Kosti and it was somehow very natural that he was out there. His gaze was completely focused, and he kept looking into the car as if his eyes were searching for something to hold on to in her features. She felt his gaze fumble over her, searching.

Perhaps he didn’t recognize her. Maybe he couldn’t see her real face. It was hidden beneath a thick skin of years, settled behind a mask of tired middle age. She now saw that he was crying. It hurt him to see her, hurt him to see what life can do, how harsh it can be. He stood so heavy and stooped out there in the gray light, and she saw his tears running down his cheeks and into his beard. He’d also gotten old. His face was grooved and darker than she remembered. It was more rugged, burdened; all of his quick and sensitive boyishness was gone. She wanted to cry like him, let the tears flow. But she just lay still watching him. Neither of them moved. Something had happened to time itself; they had both stepped out of it and stood to the side, watching. They calmly looked at each other, looked through all the years gone by, everything that had been their lives. It was like a photograph in developing fluid slowly taking shape out of white nothingness. Shadows and lines appeared, darker, sharper. Each waited for the other, called soundlessly to the other.

She sat up at the same moment he took a step forward, and gasped for breath. His face was so deeply and wrenchingly known and beloved; now, at this distance, she suddenly felt how much it had always been part of her life, how close it had always been, how frighteningly close. She untangled her legs from the sleeping bag and unlocked the door. She was trembling all over when she opened the door; her hand trembled, her arms and her legs trembled. She stood in front of him, he was still staring at her, and they took each other’s hands and then held each other hard, very hard.

With her mouth against his shoulder, she said:

“You wrote to me. Why?”

“Sometimes it feels like we’re getting old. I’ve thought about you, Mart. These last few years. I didn’t want to die without seeing you again.”

She opened her eyes. The sun was bright outside but Kosti wasn’t there. She was still bundled up in the car. Before her thoughts caught up with her, sleep pulled her into its arms again and she continued dreaming about Kosti. She was on a train and stepped off at a small, rural train station, one of those stations in the middle of nowhere under an open sky. Kosti stood at a distance. He raised his hand and waved to her. This time, he was beardless and his hair wasn’t gray. He now looked like the Kosti she had carried with her throughout her life. They weren’t in Mervas either, but on some big country estate in Russia. All around them, the freshly plowed earth shone brown, and the fields were endless.