When she couldn’t make up her mind, her body made it for her. She slumped on to the floor behind the workbench in a gliding movement, as if falling into herself.
Then she rested her chin on the workbench crossbeam. The empty jam jars were in front of her on the sawdust on the floor. And so were her father’s legs. He had a hole in one trouser leg, a tear just below his knee, and she imagined his skin behind the hole. Would she be able to see it if she shone a torch at it? The beam from her tiny torch hit the hole and the skin, which looked like parched soil. It was full of small, thirsty wrinkles, and she wanted to touch it.
Suddenly the knees came towards her. A knee popped out of the tear, and she could see it clearly in the torchlight. It looked like a baby’s head coming out of its mum. Then her father’s hand reached down for a jam jar; he picked it up like a hook gripping it under water. And she heard his breath with wood shavings in it, and a sound like a knife going into a rabbit. And shortly afterwards the jam jar was lowered down on to the sawdust. Now it contained something dark. And his hand left dark imprints on the glass. Another jar was picked up and disappeared over the edge of the workbench, only to return with something in it. And so it went on. She stared at the full jars and remembered the rabbits and the stags. And she shone the torch at one of them and recognized what she was looking at.
At that moment Carl was back with her and took her hand.
She whispered for him not to be afraid. It was just their baby sister’s lungs in a jam jar.
Then her father came. No, first his knee moved forwards, then his upper body bent down, then one hand held on to the edge, then his head, which was tilted slightly, and with his head came his eyes looking at her over the crossbeam under the workbench. She switched off her torch.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked her quietly. His voice had changed. Perhaps his voice also had wood shavings in it now.
She could hear something drip from the workbench. At first several drops, then the intervals between them grew shorter before they turned into one sound, a spray.
‘Waiting, I think,’ Liv replied. ‘What are you doing?’
He sat very still. Just as still as Carl. Suddenly the spray became drops once more.
‘I’m getting your baby sister ready. So that we can take good care of her.’
‘OK.’
‘I think you should help.’
‘OK.’
‘Please would you stand up?’
‘Yes.’
Liv tried to stand up, but Carl refused. He pushed her down on to the floor as if she were a heavy sack of salt.
Her father became trouser legs once more.
‘So are you coming, Liv?’ he said from somewhere above her.
‘Yes,’ she said, without moving.
‘There’s nothing to be scared of,’ he said.
‘OK.’
Carl released his grip, and she stood up with his hand in hers. Together they held their breath.
Jens Horder didn’t remember the details; perhaps he had never known them. But preserved inside him were the outlines of knowledge, a rough skeleton of insight into the methods of ages past into which his father had once initiated him. And it was this knowledge which now guided his hands.
He didn’t want to preserve his newborn daughter in order to save her soul. He just wanted to preserve his daughter. To keep her.
Not have to lose her.
The small body was cleaned thoroughly on the inside and the organs removed so only the heart remained. It had to be there, he remembered, and it felt right. She was the most beautiful little girl. Just as beautiful as his Liv had once been.
And her twin brother.
He had to preserve this fragile human being so that she wouldn’t disappear into the ground, as his son had done seven years ago. He could no longer hold on to Carl in pencil sketches. The lines couldn’t retain the flesh; the perspective couldn’t embrace his shape. Carl was slowly being erased from the very same memory that so desperately tried to keep him there. And Jens Horder refused to lose yet another much wanted and loved child.
Jens Horder refused to lose anything ever again.
Something inside him told him that Liv had to be there. Liv’s presence was necessary to keep the dead newborn present.
The salt would extract all moisture from the body, her father explained while he looked for a basin the right size. Liv had never seen so much salt at once. She looked at the small face as the white sea rose around her baby sister. The small eyes were closed. Carl had also closed his and Liv would have liked to, but she couldn’t. She was supposed to help her father. She had to be a part of everything; he had asked her to. Together they would look after the little girl and make sure that she didn’t disappear.
Except that right now she was disappearing in a bath of salt, and her cheeks and her tiny nose were the last things to drown.
She would need to lie in the basin for a month until she had dried up completely, until there wasn’t a single drop of moisture left in her, he had said. Liv wondered whether you could cry when you were dead.
Carl certainly could. In fact, he had started to cry a great deal. He cried because their baby sister was dead, and he cried because their mum was upstairs in the bedroom and mustn’t know anything about the child in the salt, and he cried because their dad had started acting so strangely. He cried because they had to hide in the container whenever there was the slightest suspicion that someone was coming. Yes, even if they heard the tiniest sound. And perhaps he cried the hardest because he felt very alone, even when he was with Liv.
Maria Horder hadn’t had the strength to bury yet another child, and she had nodded gratefully from her overburdened bed when Jens came upstairs to tell her that the newborn had been burned and was gone. He had built a fine, tiny coffin for her in which she had gone on her way, he had said. Then he had kissed his wife’s forehead and stroked her hair.
‘She’s all right,’ he had whispered.
And Liv had listened from her mother’s bedside. She didn’t feel good. She knew that this was one of the times it was OK to lie. When you had to lie. She must never tell her mum that the little person who had come out of her hadn’t been burned but was buried in a basin of salt in the workshop. She must never tell her, never ever.
So Liv said nothing; instead, she read aloud to her mother. She had become incredibly good at it, Maria said, whenever she was able to get a sound past her soft lips. Usually she would grab one of her many notebooks and write something for Liv, who lunged at the sentences like a starving child.
I’m so proud that you know how to read and write so well already. It’s really wonderful, Liv.
And Liv smiled, sated with happiness for a moment before she read on.
Aloud.
From time to time she wondered whether she couldn’t just write down her secret and show it to Mum. In that way she wouldn’t actually have said anything but she would rid herself of her knowledge. Without having spoken a word.
But she didn’t dare. It was no longer just strangers who frightened her. Her father’s increasing moroseness was creeping up on her like a dark and ominous threat.
Maria Horder no longer left the bedroom. But even if she had been capable of doing so during the month her lifeless third child lay buried in salt, she wouldn’t have recognized her own home any more. She, too, was slowly being buried.
Dear Liv
The rabbits – what’s happening to the rabbits? Have we got more of them? I think I can hear them. Don’t they live in their hutch any more? And the animals in the barn… I can also hear the animals. Don’t you feed them?