She shot the mess in the shed a last look, then picked up the rag that Marksson had thrown on the ground and deposited it back in the rubbish bag before she pushed the door shut and put the lock back on.
TWENTY-NINE
Lisen Morell sat with her back to the old fishing cottage. Her feet rested on a stool. Her clasped hands rested on her emaciated thighs. She was dressed in the same clothes she had been wearing when she had emerged from the forest by Frisk’s house: black jeans and a white jumper, but instead of sandals she was wearing a pair of rubber boots.
She stared out across the sea, which lay almost completely still. When Lindell came closer Morell turned her head and looked at her without showing any surprise or any of the confusion that she had demonstrated earlier. Her gaze was also different. Lindell could establish this when she sat down next to Morell. The wobbly wooden bench let out a groan and dipped.
‘It’ll hold,’ Morell said.
‘How are you?’ Lindell asked. ‘You were a little freaked out when we saw each other last.’
‘I’m still freaked out.’
‘By what?’
Morell smiled and posed a counter-question without lifting her gaze from the sea.
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘Getting sick,’ Lindell said. ‘Seriously sick.’
‘You think I’m a wreck, yes, I know.’ She raised a hand to silence Lindell’s protests. ‘Everyone does, not least out here on the point. They call me the Magpie, do you know that? Is there anything else that you’re afraid of?’
Lindell shifted a little. The bench underneath her moaned.
‘Getting sick,’ Morell said slowly and thoughtfully, as if testing the meaning of the words. ‘I am healthy, at least I think so. But to live in this paradise wears on my strength. You see me as a wreck,’ she repeated, ‘and in a way you and everyone out here are right. I am a ship that started to sink out here on the Sea of Åland, drifted into the bay, and was washed up as a wreck. And here I sit.’
Lindell studied her profile. A beautiful face, perhaps a little too thin. Lisen Morell would benefit from putting on a couple of kilos. A few crow’s feet at her eyes and around her mouth indicated that she was not completely young, but otherwise her skin was youthfully smooth. Her hair was gathered in a ponytail. She wet her thin lips with her tongue before she continued.
‘My hand doesn’t obey me any longer,’ she said, and held up her right hand. Long, slender fingers, well-groomed cuticles, and faintly cherry-coloured nails, no ring.
‘It shakes from time to time, just a little, but the most insignificant tremble is enough to crush me. I am an artist. It started a year ago, the trembling. I felt it in my heart first and then the movement spread outward to the tips of my fingers.’
‘What happened a year ago?’
‘Nothing. I came home from New York and was happy, very happy. I had met Watanabe again and I had sold well, was prepared to start saving for a new collection. But I felt at the same time that something was wrong. Not physically – I have always been fit and healthy – but that there was something else that caused my heart to tremble. An arrhythmia of the soul. I practise a method called mezzotint. There are not many of us. It demands years of training, patience, and above all a sure hand. The worst of it is that I don’t know what it can be.’
‘Maybe you have some idea?’
‘I reproduce nature, create small representations of buds, flowers, and animals. I don’t dare try humans. There I can’t measure myself against Watanabe. I do it with love, become drunk with the minute. A pine cone can make me smile.’
Then being out here should have you rolling on the floor, Lindell thought, but said nothing.
‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, a pine cone, rough against your hand and a little unfriendly, but with thousands of seeds, of future life, a pine cone is far more sensual than most of what we humans produce. That may be the source of my downfall. I creep down beside nature’s miniatures, breathe on them, breathe them in. I don’t touch them, but they touch me. When I stand up and look out over the world – that is when it happens. That’s when I feel the arrhythmia. The trembling. It is hard to explain and I don’t ask that anyone understand what I mean. Watanabe, perhaps.’
‘Who is this Watanabe?’
‘A Japanese artist I met for the first time in France. He is so exquisite. We have also met in New York when he had an exhibition at a gallery in Soho.’
‘What do you see when you look out over the world?’
Lindell sensed what the answer would be. She rarely or never looked at pine cones herself, much less breathed on them. But in a way she could understand the feeling that Morell described. She had Erik, he was her pine cone. To breathe him in was her greatest possible happiness.
‘War,’ Lisen Morell said finally. ‘War against all that is living. If we took as our starting point these pine cones or buds or the sea,’ her hand made an unexpectedly quick sweeping motion, ‘or the desert or glaciers, then we would be in better health. Simply put, if we did that we would feel better.’
Or Erik, if we took Erik as a point of departure, Lindell thought, unexpectedly moved by Morell’s words, which she in another context in another environment would perhaps have labelled the rantings of a confused person.
‘I will show you what Watanabe is capable of,’ Lisen Morell said, and stood up.
Lindell followed her into the cottage, which in contrast to the last time she was here was now clean and tidy. Lisen Morell walked over to the wall they had sat leant up against on the outside of the house and pointed to what Lindell at first took to be a photograph. The picture represented a lizard, so exact and detailed in its representation that it seemed alive.
On the opposite wall there was a painting that showed a woman’s body in motion, perhaps in water; the movement by the woman’s breast suggested rippling water.
‘I have many others,’ Lisen Morell said, ‘I change them out from time to time.’
Lindell looked around. She saw no other art.
‘What about your things?’
Perhaps it was the word ‘things’ that caused Lisen Morell to smile.
‘Nothing out here,’ she said. ‘It’s all back in town. Oh, one thing! But it isn’t a mezzotint.’
She walked over to a chest of drawers, pulled out the uppermost drawer, and took out a folder. She opened it and revealed a watercolour painting of a flowering branch.
‘Cherry,’ she said. ‘I love cherries.’
Lindell saw a delicate branch with a dozen flowers, some in full bloom, others still buds. The petals were white with a faint pink tone toward the centre. The insides of the flowers were – as far as Lindell could judge – reproduced to the most minute and exact detail.
‘This is fantastic,’ she said, and meant it. She wanted to touch the flowers, smell them. ‘What are these bits called?’
‘Stamens and pistils,’ said Lisen Morell, and smiled.
She closed the folder and put it back in the chest. Everything was done very quickly, as if she did not want to expose the cherry flowers to either light or eyes.
‘Have you shown your art to your neighbours out here?’
‘No. They think I’m completely batty.’
‘But if they could see…’
‘I don’t talk so much with them. They judged me from the start. Without knowing who I am, what I have done or could do. If you only knew how limited they are.’
‘Did you ever talk to Tobias Frisk?’
‘Sure, he sometimes helped me with the car. It’s as moody as I am. You see, I have to have a car to get here and back, I have to fill up on petrol and blow out a lot of pollution into the air.’
‘Was Frisk as judgmental?’
‘Maybe not. He sometimes dropped by with cinnamon buns. Sometimes I got the impression he was interested.’