She lay up in the half-loft, and was woken by the sound of the stiff door scraping against the doorstep. With thumping heart she sat up in bed. Someone was moving across the floor below. She leaned carefully forward and peered down. A grayish, hunched figure stepped slowly through the room, looking from side to side. She thought it was a ghost and pulled the eiderdown close about her.
When the figure stopped by the ladder, she retreated with a start and cowered against the wall.
Still moving slowly, the thing came climbing up the ladder. She was holding her breath and heard every step.
Then its head appeared over the edge.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
“So you’re up here,” said the figure. She didn’t recognize the voice.
“Don’t come any closer,” she said.
“Can’t I step onto the loft?” said the voice. “After I’ve come all this way?”
She made no reply, and the figure climbed the last bit and squatted down just on the edge of the floor.
It was then she saw who it was. But that didn’t lessen her fear.
“It’s you,” she said.
“There’s something I want to show you,” he said. “Outside. Will you come?”
“In the middle of the night?” she said.
He nodded.
“All right,” she said. “You’ll have to wait downstairs.”
He smiled.
She waited until she could hear him standing on the floor below. Then she drew the eiderdown aside, got her dress from the chair at the end of the bed, pulled it over her head, rapidly arranged her hair in a bun at her neck, her heart pounding heavily in her breast. She moistened her index finger slightly on her tongue and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. Then she sat perfectly still for a moment and tried to collect herself. She heard him walking up and down below her.
She didn’t even know him.
Could she go out into the night with a stranger like this?
She clasped her sandals in one hand and clung to the ladder with the other as she climbed down.
She noticed he was looking at her as she bent forward to put on her sandals. She reddened. The blood surging into her face, her heart beating so hard, made her feel hot and heavy, while the constant tinglings of anticipation and suspense running through her filled her with lightness.
She straightened up, snatched her knitted jacket from the peg, and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“What were you going to show me?” she said.
“Come on,” he said.
The sky outside was bright and clear. A mist hung over the woods beneath them. The silence was total. They walked side by side down the hill. Neither of them spoke. Sometimes she glanced at him surreptitiously. He was shorter than she remembered, about the same height as her, perhaps a bit shorter. His eyes that had made such an impression on her, with their dark, almost somber attractiveness, were also different. Milder, kindlier, with an innocence about them that surprised her, but which she quickly found she liked.
“Where are we going?” she asked when they reached the forest.
“In here a little way,” he said.
Then he laughed and looked at her.
“You’re not frightened of me, are you?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s go, then,” he said.
The country was difficult, and he took her hand among the trees. It was warm and dry. They jumped a stream, they pushed through a belt of densely packed spruce trees, they crossed small hummocks and ridges, rounded a small tarn, and went into the forest on the other side, where at last he stopped, laid one hand on her shoulder, and brought the forefinger of the other to his lips.
He crouched down and motioned her to do the same.
“Can you see it?” he whispered.
She shook her head.
But then she did. Three fox cubs pushed their heads out of their earth and stared at them. They were quite motionless. Even their eyes were still.
“If we wait a bit, we’ll see them playing,” he said.
The sound made the cubs’ ears swivel. Anna had to laugh.
“Sshh!” said Javan, but he was laughing too.
They lay there a long time, with the pungent stench of the fox earth pricking at their nostrils, before the cubs felt confident enough to emerge. But then, as if to make up for it, their play was unconstrained. They chased each other back and forth, barked, rolled about completely entwined with one another, leaped up suddenly and stood motionless. Then they resumed. One of them began hopping around something they couldn’t see, time after time it jumped into the air, came down on the same spot, jumped again. While they were following it with their eyes, one of the others had approached them, and when they looked up, it stood by a tree only a couple of yards off, staring at them.
“Perhaps it thinks we’re beautiful,” said Javan.
If there was a decisive moment in Anna’s life, it was this. It was then that she decided that she’d have him, Javan.
There would be many times when she’d regret it. A single sentence was a poor foundation on which to base such a decision, she saw that herself, but she was only nineteen, and the thought opened up something else, which she hadn’t properly understood before. It was her life. She could make her own decisions.
These thoughts didn’t go through her mind, of course, as they lay there on the floor of the forest in the first glimmerings of dawn. She just turned to him and smiled, and the fox cub shot away like lightning. They got up, brushed away the odds and ends that clung to their clothes, retraced their footsteps, back up to the summer farm, which they reached just at the instant the sun topped the mountain behind them and dyed the forest on the other side of the valley red.
There was something indecisive about them when they stopped at the door. This was the start of something, they both realized that. Each time their eyes searched each other out, they looked down, each time a hand came near an arm, it stiffened. Anna felt almost sick as she stood there.
She’d removed her jacket and tied it around her waist. Javan put his hand on her bare shoulder. It was clammy, and when she met his gaze, she saw that his eyes were moist.
He swallowed. Spasms of nausea went through her stomach.
“Shall we see each other again?” he said.
“Won’t you sit here for a while?” she said. “The sun on the valley is so beautiful.”
He nodded.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “A glass of water?”
“Please,” he said.
When she emerged with a jug and two glasses, he’d seated himself against the wall. She sat next to him, put the jug and the glasses between them, folded her hands around her knees.
They both stared out across the valley.
“Where have you been this past year?” she asked after a while. “The last time I saw you was at the harvest festival.”
“I’ve been fishing,” he said. “Around the offshore islands.”
“Mmm,” she said.
There was another pause.
He couldn’t stay long, she thought. Soon everyone would be up and about, and if they saw him there at that time, tongues would begin wagging.
Maybe they’d seen him already?
She stole a glance at him. He sat with his glass cupped in both hands. They were large and beautiful. His eyes, too, were beautiful. He was half bald, his hair was dark, his chin short and broad. His neck powerful. His mouth and eyes seemed to go together in a way, she thought, they were a pair: if his eyes looked helpless, and she’d already seen that they could, his mouth would do the same. If his eyes looked jolly, as they did for much of the time, his mouth did the same. It was thin and a bit crooked somehow. She wondered if he affected this, or if it was natural.