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 calclass="underline" 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.”