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.