To Mervas

June 17

I awoke from my dreams covered in sweat. The air inside the car was humid and dense, as if I were inside a big mouth, inside my own mouth, and I was inhaling the air I had just exhaled. Even so, I remained still. I didn’t crack the window. The best thing was to just lie still. I felt ashamed of my dreams, my head full of Kosti. I also had a vague and simultaneously persistent feeling of insecurity and infinity. I didn’t know for certain what I’d experienced during the night, wasn’t sure what had happened and what hadn’t. I felt pulled back and forth between dream and reality, and as the boundaries of the two worlds blurred, I couldn’t determine where one ended and the other began. The bearded man with gray-speckled hair who’d watched me at dawn, was he part of the dream? I lay remembering the way he’d gazed at me, and something wasn’t right, something about him ran against what I’d seen in my dreams; it was as if he were made of a different matter, rough and resistant. Perhaps it had been a dream, but I’d seen him stand there crying; he’d appeared grave, yet his presence had been almost ridiculously real.

Maybe I had actually seen him; it wasn’t impossible. For a fraction of a second, in a moment of clarity, I could’ve seen him, only to tumble back into my uneasy dreams again, holding him in my arms, the image of him in my embrace. I must have dreamt the rest; that I stepped out of the car and we held each other, held everything that would never come true. I was hopelessly stupid, blinded by delusion. Oh, why do I always have to be ashamed of myself? I had the unpleasant feeling that Kosti knew the rest of my dream, that he stood hidden from view and laughed at me, laughed at my image of us together, holding each other close.

My hands still smelled of smoked whitefish. An intense smell when you’ve just woken up, greasy and intimate. My feelings crawled through me like insects or crustaceans. My hands had an obscene smell, as if I’d done something during the night I shouldn’t have done. I tried to tell myself I had to get up and go to the lake and wash; I’d looked forward to greeting the morning down by the water. But the night weighed heavy on me. I couldn’t push it away. Instead, I had to follow the crooked paths toward it again, return to the dream images and the mirages. Everything had to be clear and certain inside me, those crustaceans had to stop crawling through me before I could get up. Without deluding myself, I also wanted to be able to feel that I’d come to Mervas for my own sake, and not to see Kosti.

I hadn’t dreamt only about Kosti during the night, I’d had other dreams too. One of them was about the boy, a nightmare. I recognized it; I’d had it before. It was one of those nightmares with different variations on the same theme. The most common dream was about animals, various animals that I’d neglected, that I’d forgotten to take care of.

This one had been about the boy. I’d completely forgotten that he existed and suddenly I realized with painful clarity that he was inside the decrepit shed outside and that no one had been in there for months. I knew I had to hurry, that I had to go out there at once, but different things kept interceding. People showed up, I had to go away on trips, and time kept passing while my awareness of his being out there became more and more impossible to endure. Finally, I stood before the crooked door where tall, sharp-toothed nettles grew. I had to take a big step over the nettles to push the door open. It was dark inside. The small aperture barely let in any light. The dirt floor was black and cold, and I knew it was a death room. The boy was tucked inside an old wood trunk attached to the wall, and it was utterly incomprehensible that I’d let myself forget about him. The last time I’d been there, I’d made the bed nicely and fed him. The room had been entirely different then. The whole winter had gone by and I hadn’t even thought about him, about his existence.

The lid of the trunk was open and I leaned into its darkness. There was still something inside it, I could see that. But if it was still the boy, he had become incredibly small, almost like a bird. He showed vague signs of life, a scent, a breath. He seemed to be disintegrating, and I didn’t dare touch him. I couldn’t; everything was revolting and disgusting. I didn’t understand how I could do this to him and felt afraid of what people would say if they knew. The only thing I knew was that I quickly had to find him some milk, that I had to feed him milk through a small tube.

When I came home again to fetch the milk, and perhaps a medicine dropper if I could find one, things, people, events blocked my way, and after a while, I’d forgotten what I was supposed to do. A long time passed and when I once again remembered the boy in the old trunk out there, all I wanted to do was press my hands against my eyes and ears and not know about it, I didn’t want to be part of it any longer. Shameful notions of “removing him” from there, of getting rid of him, burned through me, licked at me like tongues of fire.

As if walking against a hard headwind, I made my way to the shed, which was now even more decrepit. Part of the roof had collapsed, and daylight fell through the hole like through a large, ragged wound. The trunk was closed. I opened it slowly and immediately noticed something among the rags on the bottom, but this time it was barely moving.

June 18

I am always walking in my own shadow. My shadow falls on everything I see and everything I touch. My shadow is heavy with my presence, the way a rain cloud is heavy with water. I don’t understand how other people do it, how they manage to be human.

Yesterday it started raining, and that was just as well. I couldn’t do anything but stay on the sleeping pad in the car and stare out the window while the drops beat against the roof and my thoughts dug their paths and tunnels through me. I’m walking around with a longing in a constant state of alert, an impatient, chafing state of waiting. It is a longing for love and I don’t know what it wants with me, I don’t see how it could be useful. It is digging a hole through me, digging a hole to give my emptiness room to grow. I know my life cannot be shared by anyone; to burden another person with my issues would double the guilt and pain for me. If I can’t even be close to myself, how could anyone else? And still, this voice inside me is alive, this ripping longing for love so strong I’m beginning to think it’s bigger than me, bigger than my own life.

Today I emerged from my torpor and went outside. In the morning, I followed a path leading to the village. The path opened onto a small beach, which was clearly man-made with its gravel, sand, and pebbles. The natural shores around the lake consisted of bogs and impenetrable swampy areas. The lake was small, perhaps a hundred yards wide. But there’s something about water that makes you feel good just by looking at it. When I stepped out on the little beach and stood there looking at the surface, I suddenly felt moved. It is difficult for me to describe why, but small lakes like this one in the middle of the woods, they lie there like a caress, a soft caress. There’s something open and forgiving about them; they possess a quiet healing quality.

The surface of the water was so still that the cloudy sky was reflected in it. It was as if the lake were calling me. Come inside, it said. Let me surround you. I took off my boots and my pants and took a few steps out into the water. It was icy cold; nevertheless I stood still in it and let the cold push and pull at my feet and shins. I rinsed my hands and wet my face, then I quickly ran out of the water and pulled off the rest of my clothes. Naked, I stepped into the water again and it was as if I were meeting someone in it, as if I were seeing a lover. The water had awakened a desire in me; I washed my armpits, my crotch, I rinsed my face again and again, pulling my wet fingers through my hair: I pulled and pulled so it felt like dull plow blades against my scalp. The water was so cold it hurt, but I had been seized by a thirst for it, I couldn’t get enough of it; the cold, soft water would make me come alive. It would awaken me, rinse the dirt off me. I would emerge hard and clean, shining like a pebble by the edge of the water. I stood there scooping up the water, splashing it over me, thinking that water really was the origin of life, everything was made from it, and I wanted every pore in my skin to drink and be full.

When I finally got out, both my arms and legs were numb from the cold and my fingers ached. But the depths of me felt remarkably warm, delighted in being alive. Something had begun stirring inside me, a desire to be part of the world.

But the euphoria I had felt by the lake in the morning quickly dissipated. I guess I can’t handle that much happiness. Little by little, the day filled me with gloom; darkness arose in me like an endless, gray December dusk. I walked around aimlessly searching for the cabin. It hadn’t been visible from the lake as I’d expected, but I knew it had to be somewhere close to the water west of the beach where I’d been.

In the birch forest I had seen when I came to Mervas were plenty of paths leading here and there, a tangle of tracks among the rubble and the ruins. This was where the outdoor dance floor had been; the little kiosk was still standing, its windows broken, garbage visible inside. Fifty years ago, Lilldolly had danced here with Arnold and the men from the bachelors’ barracks; it wasn’t difficult to see where the stage and the dance floor had been. It was as if the forest wanted to hold on to the memory; grass grew here, budding buttercups and red campion.

One of the small paths by the dance floor led into the woods and I soon ended up in a dense forest of young pines. In an instant, mosquitoes surrounded me like a wall; suddenly they were everywhere with their thin whirring sound and feathery touch. They danced around me and attacked me at the same time; their bites burned everywhere, on my neck, my scalp, my hands, throat, and face. I was seized by a deep, claustrophobic fear and walked faster until I was running, surrounded by a buzzing cloud. The cabin appeared before me without warning. A rough gray wooden wall materialized between the tree trunks. I stopped and heard my own breathing along with the whirring of mosquitoes while I angrily swung a leafy branch around me.

Here was the cabin. I gazed at the back of it; the trees were close together in front of the windowless wall. The fear the swarm of mosquitoes had produced in me grew larger, rose to the surface, and at once everything seemed ominous: the forest, the dull gray wall of the cabin, the notion that someone could be inside it. I turned around and, like a hunted animal, ran back through the woods.

Mervas in June

Marta, Mart!

This isn’t the first time I have sat down to write to you. But all the other letters I’ve either thrown away or burned. Some I’ve placed among my journal notes like memory plaques. The letters often got incredibly long; if I’d saved them all they’d be an entire autobiography. I guess I’ve tried to understand my life by writing about it, to understand and explain. As you can see, I’ve failed. That’s why I decided that this time my letter to you would be concise. It would still be a real letter, not just a note like the one I sent you last fall (and assume you received). My cowardly notion was that if you wanted to see me, you’d sooner or later show up in Mervas. If you do come, it will most certainly be in the summer, and then this letter would be here, waiting for you.

I’m a coward. I don’t know if I want to see you. I really don’t understand why I’m writing to you at all. Something in me has pushed me to do it, and I finally decided to go ahead.

Enough rambling. This was supposed to be a concise letter.

For many years, I’ve lived periodically in Zimbabwe, participating in the excavations of the old gold mines there. Seven or eight years ago, when I happened to be home for a while, I saw a story in the newspaper. It was a brief notice about a mother who had killed her severely disabled child. She’d been evaluated for mental illness, it said, and had been in such a state of shock she had to be hospitalized.

I knew immediately. I knew it was you, Mart. My body knew it, my muscles, my nerves, and my cells. I began shaking violently where I sat; it was as if an electric current were going straight through me. My tea spilled onto the newspaper. I screamed, just screamed without words. I felt so terribly sorry for you. But it wasn’t just that; without quite understanding it at first, I also felt responsible. I knew I was involved and responsible. I was part of this story. What I’d read in the newspaper was part of my own story, part of my own life. Isn’t that right, Mart? Isn’t it?

With time, I’ve understood that my actions also were part of this story, that they were part of it in a way that couldn’t be changed or erased. It was as if I had in some impossible way been with you. As if I had been present. It all flashed in front of me as in a dream sequence, a nightmare; everything that had happened was replayed in my mind over and over.

You might think that I’m barging into something I ought to stay away from, something that concerns only you and that no one else has the right to talk about or touch. But what I want you to know is that you weren’t alone when it happened. What we’d had together and what I did to you was part of why you did it.

It isn’t always simple to know what’s important or crucial in your life. I think it’s possible to miss it altogether. That’s probably the easiest way. When I came back from the Orkney Islands and heard that you’d had a child with another man, I thought all ties between us were cut. I wanted it to be that way. I wanted to be free from you. You were frightening, disruptive, and I felt swallowed and crushed by you. I thought I could let you disappear from my life. That is, until I read that notice in the paper. It hit me — all this time, I hadn’t really been part of my own life. I had escaped into something else, changed my name, assumed another fate.

But I never contacted you. I resisted the urge. I thought it would’ve been foolish, that my inclinations were sick. When you received my little note, I’d already written impossibly long letters that I’d thrown away.

I’m still not sure. I still don’t know why I’m writing to you. Perhaps I’m not writing to you as much as I’m writing to the part of my past tied to you.

I’ve been allowed to use this cabin, where my letter will be waiting for you, until the moose hunt starts on the first Monday in September. Mervas is an odd place, odder even than it may first seem. I’m down in the mine most of the time. I’ve found something down there that I can’t write about, an entire world.

You’re welcome to stay in the cabin so you don’t have to camp. I would like you to stay in it.

If you want to come down into the mine (and to everything else down here), the easiest way is through the tunnel that opens onto the village. It looks like an ordinary ground cellar. The other entrances have more or less collapsed or are underwater.

I’m a coward. Please forgive me.

Your Kosti

June 20

Slept in the cabin. Had a terrible night. I lay in the lower berth of the bunk staring at the grainy, thin twilight inside the cabin. The light was a shivering gray specter whose warm, enveloping darkness had been taken away from it. My thoughts moved around in the room like anxious shadow animals, sniffing and listening. I almost thought I could see them flickering over the walls. Herds of fear ran down the slopes as if they were being hunted, being egged on by the thoughts and visions spinning in my head. The terror seemed to hatch in new places all the time, one vision after another appearing in long, painful sequences. And I had to keep looking at them; I couldn’t avert my eyes.

I’ve secretly longed for Kosti the way someone may long for the warmth of a nice bonfire. But the pleasant and warming fire turned out to be a dry roaring pyre, the kind of blaze that can set the very air on fire with its electrically charged flames. The fire I had sought out suddenly wasn’t tame at all, it was reaching for me with glowing arms, wanted to pull me into it, wanted to consume me. Standing there, unscathed and cool, Kosti smiled sweetly while trying to pull me into the flames.

“Do you want me to tell you about The Day?” he asked with a whisper, his voice so eerily intimate that it made me hate him.

That’s when I saw the cabin walls contract and expand around me like the inside of a mouth. I had to breathe or else I would suffocate. A loud moaning woke me — it was coming from my own mouth. I leapt out of bed, flung the door open, and ran outside.

The sky was vast above me. I took a deep breath. Exhaled. A streak of silky, thin gray fog covered the blue and in the northeast the sun was pumping its sheen through the thin layers of clouds. The light seemed so pale and mild and birdsong was everywhere like thousands of tiny stitches of invisible patterns.

I drank some water from the bucket by the door and then sat down on the stairs feeling at once heavy and relieved. Perhaps things weren’t so bad, I thought. It’s all inside me already, it is not even sleeping. Deep down in that dark city, no one dares to sleep. The vigil goes on there day and night, guarded behind glass and minutes, in seconds and in years. It’s all inside me, I thought. And actually, everything is already afterward, it has already happened.

It’s odd, but just then the final scene in Uncle Vanya came back to me. It was a TV version of the play that was aired when I was young; I think I saw it a couple of times. Lena Granhagen played Sonja and Toivo Pawlo the uncle. In the final scene they sit by their desks with big ledgers open. It’s quiet and almost unnaturally still in the room; only the rasping of their pens can be heard. All the ruined love and rebellion, the dreams that blossomed and withered, the burning humiliation and almost annihilating disappointment — all this was contained in the scene but as if under a lid, perhaps like a seed, a small capsule — completely saturated with what has been and is now over. It’s like an exhalation, a long, blubbering exhalation. It is the very image of afterward.

In actuality, I’ve probably always carried that scene with me, I’ve heard that kind of silence and seen them in front of me, how they sit there sighing, dipping the tips of their pens into the ink, their hopeless calculations. It’s so painful, yet there is also a sense of relief in the pain. The sense that it’s now over. It’s over and at the same time, it will continue. Neatly, it will be noted down under the right heading, be over and continue for all time.

As I write this now, I think of Lilldolly and what she said about finding peace. That the greatest, most important thing we have to do is to stay at peace with life.

I can’t write anything about Kosti’s letter. I can’t see my own thoughts through the muck and sediment that have been stirred up.

June 23

The day before yesterday, I had to go shopping. My provisions were getting low and I longed for fresh things, for produce, bread, and milk. It became an excursion, a jaunt to a foreign galaxy. The closest store is in Storsel, about twenty miles away, beyond many winding gravel roads.

But there’s actually no way to leave Mervas. Or, it shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be so easy. All I had to do was get in the car and drive away. It didn’t seem fair. It was like cheating on an exam. The whole deal, the entire agreement seemed rigged. To remain loyal, which is what I want, I can’t diverge from the path, can’t turn my gaze away. I have to keep looking. That’s the first commandment of my childhood: you have to keep watching. It’s strange that a child can understand such things. But I just knew that not to look was to abandon something. And I think that’s how I have to respond to my life now too, by not diverging an inch from the solemn and serious situation I’m facing. That’s exactly how I have to respond. It’s not about penance or mortification, but about honesty. Because I don’t want to abandon myself.

Yesterday it was the equinox. I ate some pickled herring and new potatoes that I’d bought. For dessert, I had Belgian strawberries that were so shiny and deep red, so large and well shaped, I almost doubted they were real. Later in the evening, I took a walk on the wide-open plain below the mining shaft. That place doesn’t seem quite real either. A poisoned, emerald-green fairy-tale landscape, a big, hyperrealistic painting to enter. But in some way, I’m still attracted to it, as to some lovely pasture, the dream of a better life. Then, I would graze there, be a grazing animal on the green earth, on the vast river of flowing green grass.

But once I was out there, I felt a little scared. The wind howled so forlornly, and I could see it moving through the rough, sparse grass like a wind spirit, a strange creature without a body, out hunting. For some reason, I feel less frightened if I can walk along water, so I started following a creek with copper-colored, dead shores that ran along the other side of the gorge. Thick copper sludge rolled up against the water’s edge and the water itself, which looked brownish red, also seemed unnaturally clear. It signaled danger; I didn’t even want to dip my fingers in it.

The world is empty, I thought as I walked along. Just that: the world is empty. Here, on these flayed, meat-colored shores, it becomes visible; here it becomes true. The world is empty. The words ran through me repeatedly, although I didn’t quite understand them. I didn’t even agree; a few yards from the creek, the bare soil turned into sparse, sheared grassland. I saw tiny birch saplings fighting for survival; no taller than the blueberry shrubs, they stood there sort of burnt, tormented, trying to grow. The world isn’t empty at all, I wanted to think, and it’s populated by life and rage. But I couldn’t snap out of the feeling of meaninglessness. It really wasn’t a judgment about the world as much as a sudden and very clear experience of it. A sensation that it’s empty and incomprehensible. It was exactly as I had once learned in school: light doesn’t exist by itself but only through the reflection of everything else. Some thoughts are puzzling. Sometimes they fall on you with a kind of clarity that disarms all your objections. The world is empty and incomprehensible, yet we still have to believe in it.

The sun was still high in the sky even though it was late and the light, twinkling so brightly in all the greenery and glittering in the water next to me, it made me squint. Around me, the forest undulated on its mountains like a ship at sea, light green where there were birches, dark green where there were pines, and nearly black where spruce grew. The ground crunched lightly beneath me, it was flat and even, easy to walk on, and I felt like walking all the way to where the plain and the valley ended.

I had walked for maybe a mile or so when I saw a moose calf. It shone. It stood completely still on the other side of the creek, watching me. It was as if a secret heat radiated from it, a pulsating, vibrating heat rising from its fur. I too stood completely still, watching the shining creature, the long slender legs, the body they carried, and I was filled, filled with what I saw. The calf’s gaze seemed to move inside me and took me out of every familiar context into what is new and foreign. It was such a strong sensation of presence, of intense and strange presence, that I suddenly saw myself as someone I’m not. I was imprisoned in it, contained by it. It filled me with a peculiar joy. I can’t describe everything that twirled up inside me, but there were so many images; the moose calf hanging across Arnold’s shoulders, little Anna-Karin, who was now dancing here, and the calf, who wasn’t dead but trembled with life. It had returned and the boy would return, everything would come back to life here, in this brief passing moment, but that was enough, it was enough.

“The heart doesn’t have a mouth that can speak,” I suddenly heard my sister say.

“Yes, it does,” I said. “A different kind of mouth. When you’re speaking with God, you only speak with your heart.”

I wanted her to understand. It was of utmost importance that she understood. Because it wasn’t about my believing in God. God existed. Children only know what adults believe. Of course, I was no longer a child, and now, I knew nothing. The calf turned around in a flash and was gone without a sound.

Afterward, I knew I’d been touched, that something had happened. I started walking back with quick, light steps; my body felt electric, I floated across the ground, I ran upstream along the creek. My sense of time had vanished, my feeling of exhaustion was gone. I was soon sitting on the steps in front of the cabin with a small fire crackling in front of me. It was night; the light was soft and blurred. Kosti’s letter lay next to me, I had reread it now and his voice had reached me, I had allowed it. I could feel his presence, his eyes on me, his fingertips over my skin, his words marching through the streets of my city.

That’s how it has to be, I thought. You have to be forced out of yourself. You have to let it happen.

June 24

I see it as if through the opposite end of a pair of binoculars.

It’s me.

It’s me with my arms tightly crossed across my chest.

My hands closed around my shoulders.

My upper body rocking, rocking.

It’s me, rocking and rocking.

The police entered the apartment. My big, heavy child was lying dead in his own blood among the broken chairs, the potting soil, the shards of glass and china, the plant parts, the cake remains, the spilled soda. That’s how I sat, I’d been sitting like that for an eternity already, that’s how I had to stay, I turned to stone sitting like that.

It’s not I who remembers. It is my body. How I was in the hospital later, horrified, horrified. They tried to straighten me out, sometimes by force, sometimes with medications. But my body was a muscle that had twisted itself around my core of horror, my fingers dug into my shoulders as if they wanted to take root there and grow into my skin. The aides cut my nails short and bandaged my hands, but the wounds on my shoulders wouldn’t heal; in a frenzy, my fingers dug deeper into the ulcerated, aching flesh. Hungrily, they ate their way deeper into the pain, I wanted the pain, I wanted to reach it, I wanted to reach it more and more because I had nothing else.

I know that I was limp and barely conscious for long stretches of time because of the medications. But that clutch lived inside me like a memory; I used all my energy trying to reestablish the hold on my shoulder, I fumbled for it from deep inside my blurred state; nothing else was clear to me except that and the rocking, the rocking of my upper body back and forth, being part of a rhythm, a rocking hold, as if something held me, as if I were part of an order.

Sometimes I could hear a thin whine coming from my lips and it frightened me as if an alien lived inside me. I emitted no other sounds. I was mute. I was mute for a long time, months, a year, I don’t know, I’ve never wanted to know much about this. I was in my own world and there was no time in my world, there was no beginning and no end. I was in my place, imprisoned and unreachable, I was inside the boy’s voice, I was filled by it, I was the voice box for his voice to rage through. I was spared the images, I couldn’t see them, they were twisted, dissolved, hacked into something so awful and despicable I could not look at it. But I could hear, and my whole being absorbed sounds and echoes. I heard the boy’s voice, sequence after sequence, I was spit-roasted over his voice as if over a flame, was lowered into it as though into a scalding bath. I heard the boy as he sounded on The Day and I heard him as he sounded when he was newborn and wouldn’t stop crying. I knew I had to sit with my arm muscles tense and tightly crossed over my chest and my hands gripping my shoulders. I had to keep rocking and rocking; it was the only way I could maintain myself.

They couldn’t understand this at the hospital. There, they thought that it was the rocking alone and my stubborn grip that was the source of my insanity, and they put a lot of effort into making me stop. They didn’t understand that, to the contrary, it was the only way I could protect myself from insanity. It was my defense. When they used force trying to straighten me out and even tied my hands, one to each bedpost, I was obliged to defend myself as if they were trying to drown or strangle me. I wrangled and spat and kicked and wriggled, not to fight with the staff but to protect myself from the voice inside, to get rid of the boy’s voice inside me, because it was tearing me to pieces. His voice told me what I was.

There was no way out for me. I was mute. No conversations could save me from my entrapment. The medications they gave me made my horror blurry and dim and made me lose the crucial strength in my arms and legs, made me twitch and shiver uncontrollably. What finally happened, what after a very long time gave me the courage to stop defending myself, was a miracle.

One day, a new aide came to my ward. He came into the room where I sat curled up around myself, rocking. It was late morning and my breakfast tray was still on the table by the window, I suppose he came in to fetch it. He stood there just inside the door and looked at me for a while and I noticed him too, I saw that it was a new face and that he looked so young he was almost still a boy. He also had curly black hair and brown eyes, so just a glimpse of him stirred something inside me. That’s what my boy might have looked like if everything hadn’t happened as it had. Yes, it could have been my boy standing there looking at me, it could have been he.

That’s when the miracle occurred.

He came up to me and put his face close to mine. “Come on, Mommy, let’s go for a walk, you and I,” he said.

Mommy, he said. He’d called me Mommy and the word cut into me like a scalpel, like a razor blade, it cut through all the walls and defenses, straight through me, and everything stopped and for an instant I stopped rocking and sat completely still staring at him.

It was like a sudden thaw, I think, what then happened in me. As when, on a chilly February day, the sun suddenly makes the ice melt from the rafters, and the titmouse starts to chirp. It happens only for a moment, a brief moment in the afternoon, then the cold will once more turn the water into ice. Everything takes a long time, I didn’t immediately release my grasp and I didn’t stop rocking and I didn’t start speaking, but I’d experienced that sudden thaw, I had paused for a moment and seen that aide, that boy, I’d glimpsed his face and brought it into my world. Slowly, for days and months, he made porous the stone I’d become, so wind could blow inside me, water could trickle through, and he finally made me step out of my own frozen grasp, as if out of a building, and take a few steps across the floor. When he came to see me every day, he simply inserted his arm into my hard-pressed elbow and he whispered: Come on, Mommy, let’s go for a stroll. And we did.

June 26

The days pass so slowly here I sometimes don’t know what to do with them. The days went by slowly at home too, but it was simpler there, I was sunk into a kind of meaninglessness in which I wasn’t expecting anything in particular, not from myself and not from life itself. I was in the apartment most of the time, walked around among the tracks and traces, through my dark, unlit city. I felt no real responsibility for how my days passed and what I did with them. My life was unmoored and I guess I thought I just had to accept that.

When I was about to be released from the mental institution, the counselor told me I ought to get a new apartment and move to another part of the city. She said I ought to start a new life and get away from the place where everything would remind me of what had happened, everything that bore witness and whispered of the past. There were neighbors who knew too, she hinted, neighbors with knowing glances I would have to greet on the stairs.

I’ve killed my own life, I’d wanted to say to the counselor, but in reality I just nodded to ward her off.

If I’d been able to speak then, if I’d had the words, I would’ve said that I’d killed my life and there is no new life, no other life, waiting for me. All I have are the traces and ruins from the past and that’s where I’ll be. That the neighbors know what I’ve done is nothing compared with the fact that I myself know.

When I returned to my life in what we call the real world, it was actually comforting that the neighbors knew. That they’d seen the rotating blue lights of the police cars and the ambulances, that they’d read about it in the paper. They also knew that I too had been a mother, they’d seen the boy with me, they’d witnessed our life together and held doors open, occasionally helped me carry things. What was hidden in the way they looked at me didn’t scare me much. The things hidden inside me were what frightened me most, my own story and everything lurking in the darkness where you couldn’t see anything, the hole where my story had been lost.

I’ve been thinking about Uncle Vanya again. About when everyone had left, when they were alone, Sonja and the uncle, when they sat there, afterward. That’s when they saw their lives again; they saw themselves and everything around them, the farm that needed to be cared for, the muddy road, and the light filtering through the treetops. Perhaps it was fall, I don’t remember when it was in the play, but let’s say that now, a flock of ravens lifted from the largest tree, everything was real in that inescapable and meticulous way, it couldn’t have been any other way. And they saw that this was their life. They saw that was where they were, that they existed. They bent down over it, they crouched over it, got hold of it; let the tips of their pens labor and scratch it down. Without even thinking the thought, they knew that’s how it was, how it had to be. And I know it too. Kosti’s note told me. I exist. This is my life that I’m living, letter after letter.

It’s been hot today. The heat here is unusual, a dry, pine-scented inland heat, a strangely stifling forest heat. Hardly a breeze in the air, just the bright light from straight above, the heat trembling in the reflections of the sun. There’s an alarming number of mosquitoes around and today the horseflies arrived too, everything is coming alive; I can feel it, in the midst of the silence and the solitude there is a sense of rush, of urgency.

I woke up far too early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep even though fatigue ached in my eyes. When my thoughts had cast me from one side of the bed to the other for nearly an hour, I still couldn’t sleep, so I got up. Outside, the sun was light yellow and already warm; I brought out my sleeping bag and sat inside it, leaning against the wall where the sun hit. Between the trees, a stone’s throw away, I could see the surface of the tarn; its colors were still deep and warm. Each morning, the world is new and untouched once more; it comforts me, the mornings are never old and worn. I sat there thinking of Kosti, wondering what he was doing down in the mine, what it was that he’d found down there. I also wondered when he was planning to come out again. Because I’m here waiting, all the time. At any moment, he could be here in front of me. At night, the sounds always come together to seem like his steps through the woods, his movements getting closer. Sometimes I imagine that he’s sneaking around the cabin and peeking in through the window and the cracks in the wall; I can almost hear his breathing and the sound of his hands against the plank wall.

But the sun shone on my face and it was bright and I closed my eyes and let it penetrate my skin to warm and thaw me. Behind my closed eyes, blacks and reds were dancing and I let the sun melt down my thoughts and heat them up until they simmered and became fluid, and like liquid copper could reach everywhere, into the narrowest pathways. I thought about my mother, I reached for her; it was her face I wanted to touch. But my older sister kept coming between us, obscuring my view. She stood there protecting Mom’s body, she blocked the entire image of her and I wanted to tear her out of the way. But everything was as if submerged in water and my sister slid away from me with the image of my mother like a shadow behind her.

I saw myself too, saw myself constantly heading straight into my father’s voice: the rumble, the barrage of gunfire, the heavy, lethal detonations. I’d been sent there because that’s where I was supposed to be, running along the front lines like open prey. Again, I tried to get rid of my sister, pry her out of the picture. We were in the kitchen now, in our first apartment. I pushed her as hard as I could, and she fell to the floor and began crying. But when I then looked at Mom, she had my sister’s face and with this mask over her real face she yelled at me and pushed me out of the kitchen and into the dark, scary hallway where Daddy came home at night and where the cleaning cupboard was and the carpet beater and the gloomy coats on their hangers. I now stood in the hallway of my childhood and it grew and grew; the coats hanging in it became a forest of dim green fir trees, the tall, bone-white closet doors became house walls in a big, insulated neighborhood of high-rises. Under my feet, the brown-speckled linoleum floor was about to collapse and open into a hole. Far, far away, I saw a door open; a rectangle of light fell across the floor and I tried to call out, tried to scream something, anything.

I woke up soaked in sweat. For a long while, I sat pinned to the dream images floating around in me. Then I remembered something from my childhood, an event I’d never thought of or remembered before.

This also happened in that first apartment we lived in. I couldn’t have been very old. I was in the bedroom and Dad sat on the edge of the bed with my older sister across his lap and he hit her bare bottom. Mom was in the kitchen, pacing back and forth. My sister wailed and Dad poured his enraged litanies over her as he hit. I stood in the doorway watching. Suddenly, I ran up to Daddy and started jumping up and down like crazy, yelling: Hit me too! Hit me too! You have to hit me too! You have to hit me too!

I then remember how Mom came rushing into the room and grabbed my ear and dragged me out of there.

“You ought to be ashamed!” she growled at me.

And I still curled up in shame when I thought about it. Beneath the deepest level of humiliation there is something else altogether that you’re searching for, that you need to live, yes, even to survive.

June 28

I know there is violence inside me. It is hidden in there, under my skin, behind the bone of my skull, in my nerves, in all the arteries of my body; it is the swelling, slippery muscle of violence itself, a secret animal inside me.

Violence is inside me, naked and shiny, I can feel it, I have it in me, I’ve inherited it and it has survived and been reincarnated and when it awakens in me I rear up on my hind legs and beat the air with my hooves. I’ve entered into violence as if it were an ancient tongue, an old dialect that speaks to me and overtakes me. There is a passion inherent in the violence, a longing to be obliterated by it, a desire to become even more violated by giving in to it.

I’m not trying to excuse myself. I’m not defending myself and I’m not saying that the violence inside me is incurable, congenital, a handicap. All I want is to see, to see down into that dark kingdom where so much of my life has taken place. The film from the day of the boy’s death is down there too. It is still undeveloped and very sensitive; it cannot stand any kind of light. I know that the images have to be bathed first, and I think that’s what happening with me right now. The images are being bathed in my darkness in order to learn how to endure light. It’s odd. Before, I didn’t think a human life could be so rich. That it could contain so many layers. Now I feel a kind of softness inside, I want to bend, bow down to it.

June 29

Everything I’ve written here in Mervas ought to have begun with the words: Kosti isn’t here yet. But I don’t want the days here to be about Kosti, about his absence. They are about me. They are about what’s present. This morning I found his car. It was hidden on a small street behind the water-filled mining holes; I don’t understand how I could’ve missed going there, I’ve wandered through every corner of Mervas. It was a dark brown Fiat. Locked, of course. In the backseat was an old blanket and I suddenly got it into my head that I’d seen it before. Suddenly, I began to cry. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” spat a contemptuous voice inside me. And I agreed, I thought I was pathetic. But I still had to cry. I cried because there were no kind hands to hold my shoulders, no one I could lean my head against. I cried because the memories burned inside me, made me contract.

I’ve stood at the top of the stairs that lead underground several times, but I haven’t been able to make myself walk all the way down; my legs have gone weak each time.

Sometimes I wonder if the lilies of the valley have already faded in Deep Tarn. Lilldolly and I would walk around together picking big bouquets of them. There are no lilies of the valley here. I often think about the little girl they lost, about Lilldolly and Arnold, their world, into which I had been welcomed.

On the days before the boy’s operation, he had to be scrubbed clean each night with a special disinfectant soap solution. I was so afraid that he’d die during the operation; they were going inside his head after all, to cut him there. When I washed him with the strong-smelling soap, I thought that it was like a ritual cleansing before a sacrificial slaughter. The animal that was to be sacrificed had to be very clean and prepared before it was handed over to the sacrificial priests. The soap smelled of incorruptible ritual and was so alien on the small, soft baby body in my hands, so foreign to the boy’s own scent. Now I was following directives while I prepared to give him away. After doing this, I would, for better or worse, place his life in the hands of strangers who spoke a different language, a language that came from the outside instead of from the inside.

The operation did go well in the sense that he survived and stopped crying and twitching. But at the same time, it was as if they’d cut him off from himself, as if a connection had been severed. His spirit couldn’t find a place to rest in his body afterward, he had no way of expressing himself, there was no city that was his own city, not even the city of tears was left. But what I kept thinking of was those cleanings, that particular kind of cleansing, the preparation.

June 30

For once to wash yourself clean. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not dirt that I want to wash off. But rather a sense of presence, of myself; an invasive feeling. A consciousness that never gives way, that isn’t about anything in particular but simply about being, about existing. It’s a feeling so intense and infringing it’s like being slowly grated into shreds, like being scraped against sharp holes, no part of me is spared, no surface left alone.

I’m supposed to be alive; I’ve understood as much. I have to keep living. All the deeds evident on my body, like fingerprints all over me, like dirty, inappropriate hands, Daddy’s hands, mostly Daddy’s hands in addition to my own, they will remain. I was Daddy’s girl. I was the apple of his eye and even though he beat and humiliated me as much as the rest of the family, I was somehow his, part of his sphere. My mom was inaccessible; she sat with my older sister and the younger siblings and I stood outside their sphere and looked at them as if they sat in a spotlight of some kind. I longed for my mom — or perhaps I should say that I longed for Mom since she wasn’t mine at all. At any rate, I stood outside and longed to be with them, with Daddy’s hands, his presence clinging to my entire body like a virus.

I think it was because I was standing there to the side that it became my responsibility always to watch, that I was the one who had to witness everything, not just how Mom was humiliated, or my siblings, or myself. I had to watch Daddy too, and not walk away when he gave in to his fury. Sometimes I think my sister is the kind of person who spared herself, and I can hate her for that. She protected herself from seeing and didn’t participate or feel guilty; she just sat there with Mom like some noble victim. I was already tainted from the start, my heart couldn’t release me from getting mixed up and dissolved and touched and I often think that this was my fate, exactly this. It was meant for me. I don’t claim that I’m any better than my sister as I write this, I just envy her. I will never be clean.

Inside me, the boy’s gaze and spirit and what I’ve done are preserved. It is now part of my life. You can’t run away from your deeds; they become hands on your body and you have to live with them, force yourself to remain human with a voice and a face. I knew this afterward, when I was rocking and mute. I was in the kitchen with the boy where he lay on the floor wailing in despair, I was there constantly and would never get out.

I’d made him a birthday cake, a lovely birthday cake. We admired it for a long time together before I cut into it. Then I had to witness how he couldn’t eat it. I fed him spoon after spoon, but the cake kept falling out of his mouth and down his chin and chest. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand it. At first, I was overcome with sorrow. I couldn’t bear seeing that he couldn’t live. And those eyes of his. Trapped inside of him. In those eyes I glimpsed his own terrible sorrow of not being able to do anything. Of being so helpless. Something in me snapped. Rage welled up. A rage that told me to defend him, in some way defend him against all the frustration and impossibility he was experiencing. I began beating him, beating his body and everything that hindered him. I began beating the obstacles out of him that cut him off from life, beating the curse out of him that he’d inherited from me, everything but his gaze and his longing. I beat him. I wanted to break something inside me. I thrashed out with anything I could reach, chairs, bottles, I flung anything I could get hold of, flowerpots, plates, cups, spoons. I threw them at him. At the one I saw. At myself. At the world. At his inability to live. At myself. I was responsible. I had given birth to his misery. At the same time, I screamed. No! I shrieked. No, no, no! I screamed in a terrible voice.

It was when it was already too late and he’d fallen from his wheelchair and lay in a mess on the floor that I saw him looking at me — how his gaze burned, concise, relentless. That’s when I came to my senses. He wasn’t me, his eyes said, he was separate, his fate was his own. A wide gash in his head was bleeding and suddenly the whole apartment filled with his scream and I fell to the floor and slid my hands under his head and placed my cheek against his and I whispered I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but not a sound came from my lips and I could feel life leaving him, could feel how it stole away from him and was gone. I carefully removed my hands and sat up and prayed to the God that couldn’t possibly exist, prayed to him to let me die with the boy, to let it all end. I’ve broken the fundament of life, I’ve broken the covenant, so let me now die with the boy.

I’d cut him off, cut off his gaze upon the world, killed his gaze. Sebastian’s gaze. And his eyes weren’t mine, no, not even his pain or his disappointment was mine. There’s space between people, and it is necessary, it’s a boundary that must not be crossed, you have to stay behind it. There’s space between people, and it is necessary, it’s a boundary that must not be crossed, you have to stay behind it.

I must not say the words: I killed my boy whose name was Sebastian, I crushed his head the way Arnold crushed the head of the moose calf. Those words are unspeakable. How could I have told Lilldolly? Yet she’s the only one I’ve met whom I’d even considered telling.

“Be calm, my child,” begins a poem by –