To Mervas (15 page)

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.

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.