They didn’t talk during the trip. It was still early in the day and night hadn’t yet wholly left their senses. They sat focused, looking out the windows, and stayed silent while the road crunched beneath them and the landscape rushed past. The road continued straight and wide and they passed yet another big lake. Marta thought there was something odd about these large, desolate bodies of water; there were no houses around them. They just lay there as if undiscovered by man. Nowhere had they seen a single house or farm. Only in one place, in a small clearing by a little lake, was there an abandoned trailer. They traveled through the woodland as if they each had their own small part in it. Mile after mile it belonged to itself; trees and animals and people were nothing but visitors there.
The sky was a blue stream lined with the tops of scraggly fingered firs, floating above the road. Marta looked up, following the stream; it was easier than trying to look into the forest. The trees obscured the view, she thought; they were in the way. It takes time to discover that the forest is a place where the space between things matters more than the trees, that it is a swaying in-between world where light and shadows rule. Someone is playing an instrument in there, sometimes slow and gliding, other times jerky and bouncy, a bow of light and shadow slides across the strings of all the tree trunks and branches and twigs. If you want to see the forest, you have to avoid looking at the trees; you have to learn how to look where there’s nothing, to the side. That’s when you hear the music.
Marta’s internal view was also obscured today; inside her, the trees were also in the way. She saw the calf with its crushed, hanging head and thought about Lilldolly and Arnold, thought about what Lilldolly had said the first night she met them, that with this man she shared neither table nor bed. She was now sharing the place where she slept with Marta. But Arnold and Lilldolly seemed like a couple in any case. They didn’t seem to be enemies. It was obvious they liked each other. But still, Lilldolly’s story had pushed Marta into a place she couldn’t escape; something tugged at her. She was caught up in scattered thoughts about the boy and Anna-Karin and the calf, about Mervas and Kosti. Caught up in sudden fragments of childhood memories that kept appearing — her father’s spirit inside her, his constant, commanding presence, the fear of his voice raging through the mail slot. Then, her mother’s austere features, immovable and stern, enduring it all. She remembered her own feeling of being on fire and freezing simultaneously, of being completely naked and walking powerless across the floor of the stage, of existing without form. She had to be there, had to be there. Caught up in all this, she desperately tried to see over the edge of her own life. But the blue canal above the road flowed through her like a ribbon of forgetfulness, a blue thoughtlessness, a blue oblivion free of longing. It told her she didn’t have the strength to figure out what the chafing images and memories had to do with her. It told her she didn’t want to know if they were about her life. Or about herself. She really didn’t even want to know that they were now on their way to Mervas; she’d soon be there, very soon she’d actually be there.
They’d just passed another lake and come up on an elevated plateau when Arnold suddenly, in the middle of a steep upward slope, slowed down and almost stopped the car.
“Here’s the road up to Mervas,” he said. “It’s easy to miss. You can barely detect it.”
“We’re here?” Marta asked, newly awake. “We’ve arrived?”
“No, we’re not there yet, but this is the road. It’s about two kilometers, as I recall. A lousy road.”
That’s when she saw that they were just about to pass an almost illegible sign that leaned toward the low birches behind it. She surmised the name more than read it; the sign was flecked with rust, half-eroded and erased, but it burned inside her like a branding iron. One by one, the letters of this name burned their way inside her and now she held the letter in her hand again where she’d first read it; now she felt the triumph she’d experienced when these same letters had appeared in the right order in the index of the big Nordic atlas in the library.
“I can’t do it,” she said at once with such determination that Arnold immediately hit the brakes and stopped the car.
“I can’t do it, I have to go there by myself,” she continued. “I have to do it alone.”
Arnold turned and looked at her with his iridescent blue eyes and she thought she’d corrode under his gaze.
“So we’ll have our excursion somewhere else today,” Lilldolly called quickly from the backseat. “We’ll go to Reindeer Head Rapids today!”
“I’m sorry,” Marta said.
“You don’t have to apologize. I thought you’d have us step out here in the middle of nowhere while you’d go up to Mervas by yourself. All right, let’s go to Reindeer Head Rapids. Absolutely. We used to do that all the time in the old days, Lilldolly and I, when our little Opel was still running. Yes, we’d go to Reindeer Head Rapids every spring.”
He backed up a little too fast from the road to Mervas and then pressed so hard on the gas that Tasso started barking with excitement.
“Hush, silly,” Arnold shushed. “You’re frightening the girls!” He peered at Marta and smiled a little. “I say, you’re a difficult one,” he said.
A week later, Marta found herself again in her car before the sign that had once pointed toward the mining community Mervas. Now it pointed mostly toward the low shrubs, down toward the ground.
She’d stepped out of her car and stood there staring. The solitude pressed against her, the silence pounded in her ears. The only sounds beyond her own were the wind and the hum of bird voices. The road to Mervas was very narrow, saplings crowded the edges and soon they’d start growing in the middle of the road. The budding green birch trees arched like a tunnel above her and light glittered through the braided branches.
She took a few loudly crunching steps onto the road and discovered that she was walking on asphalt, on cracked, shrinking asphalt. She shivered as if someone had touched her unexpectedly and could imagine what the road must have looked like once, before the woods started closing in from both sides, before the frost from below could freely gnaw it to pieces and partly swallow it. It had been blank and glossy and wide, with a demanding parade of yellow lines running down the middle, and like a general it had brought people through the desolate forests and wilderness into the new and neatly organized place that Mervas had been.
Now the silence was incomprehensible. Trucks and buses and cars had driven here, clusters of children and teenagers had biked down this road, Vespas and mopeds had sputtered down it. In some strange way, it felt as if all these things were still there, as if they’d been preserved and were still occurring somewhere below everything, hidden. Marta kicked the gravel a little as if to resist the impulse to shout to the past, to call out a sorrowful greeting, a lonely hello. She realized that her present was shared by a past that had, in a sudden gust, breathed on her.
Saturated, she walked back to the car, got behind the wheel, and began driving toward Mervas. Branches scratched the car’s paint with sad, faint sounds. She didn’t take her eyes off the unreliable road, riddled with potholes and rocks and fallen branches. She was forging a track, and she could feel it within herself. It had always been there, a creek, a flowing body of water inside of her; now it had surfaced.
Something large suddenly appeared in front of the car. Startled, she slammed the brakes before she had time to see what it was. It was a reindeer, nearly white, standing but a yard away from her. For some reason it refused to move; it stood glowering at her for a while and then started an easy trot up the road. Marta had to follow slowly behind.