She walked up the long slope again, back to the village. The atmosphere was a little gentler up there, the sun was warm between the trees and the grid of the narrow streets gave her a feeling of comfort. It made her feel that the world was an organized place after all, at least if she behaved herself and remained in the background. Kosti must have come in a car just as she did, but there was no other car here. Besides, it had been six months since he had written her; it was highly unlikely he was still here.
She took one more turn around the foundations before she sat down on the schoolhouse stairs with her sandwich and the thermos of coffee, which Lilldolly had prepared. She couldn’t see the reindeer any longer; now she was all alone. The birds were still there of course; amid the chirping she could distinguish the chaffinch’s particular string of sounds. She was actually free to go, she thought. Whenever she wanted, she could get in the car and drive back to Arnold and Lilldolly’s. She could leave here at any time, nothing was forcing her to stay in Mervas, she didn’t have to stay. She hadn’t traveled here to see Kosti. She’d come to face herself.
She had the right to be in Mervas. The place was singing around her; it resounded with song. All of Mervas surrounded her like an unusual, gently sung song emanating from between the withered stones and the light filtered through the trees. Maybe she wouldn’t be afraid here. Some people can be connected to a place, a certain place, the kind of place that gives itself to you and allows you to hear its song. Marta thought she heard something peculiarly familiar in that song; she recognized it as if it were her own life singing her story, her own voice crawling out from everything that had been left behind and forgotten. It wasn’t that she belonged here; she’d never felt she belonged anywhere. But there was a trace of something, a kind of recognition. Perhaps the traces of things are what’s most real, the fragments of something, the scent. You can’t get any closer to what’s real; if you do, it dissolves.
It was at that very moment, right when she was thinking this, when she bent forward to pour more coffee from the thermos, that she saw something on the ground. It was a pipe cleaner, brown from tobacco juice and bent in the middle. It lay next to the base of the stairs and beside it was a small pile of ashes and half-burnt tobacco. She lifted the pipe cleaner, smelled it, examined it with her fingers. Her hand was trembling. Kosti, she thought, and the notion was somehow inconceivable. He was here. There was no way this thing could have been here since the previous winter.
* A huldra is a creature in Scandinavian folklore, a beautiful naked woman with a hollow back and a fox tail who lures men deep into the woods then abandons them to their deaths.
~ ~ ~
“You should spend the night here! Why would you want to stay overnight in Mervas? No, you go up there and have a look and then you’ll come back to Deep Tarn. You can do whatever you want, of course, just know that you can come back anytime. I’ll say, you are being secretive. Incredibly secretive. When you return you’ll have to tell us. Something. You have to promise to tell us something.”
The words had streamed from Lilldolly’s mouth in the morning when she was making sandwiches for Marta. It was now evening. A blackbird was lecturing from the top of a fir tree behind the school. The air had cooled; there was an icy edge to it, something cold and hard left behind from winter. The blackbird was speaking to Marta with Lilldolly’s voice. In the evening, when all other birds have gone silent, the blackbird speaks in a particularly serious tone. Come back, it said. You should come back to Deep Tarn. Don’t stay there in Mervas, Lilldolly urged, in the slow, deep voice of the blackbird.
The evening breeze swept some leaves from one place to another on the gravel in front of Marta. The branches of the blooming sallow in the school’s largest room stirred in the wind. She sat on the stairs struggling with her doubts, trying to grasp what she wanted. Cold, she buried her hands in her jacket pockets. She had wrapped the pipe cleaner in some toilet paper and put it in the glove compartment before moving the car up to the school building, where she felt most at home.
There was one place in Mervas she’d rather not have known about. She sat pondering it. It was at the far end of the village, and all streets led there. She’d noticed an arched, slanting roof over a door opening. At first, she figured it was an ordinary ground cellar. But then she’d looked through the gaping door frame. A stale wind had hit her face, a strangely strong, cool and damp breeze that seemed to come from below, from the dark depths. She’d seen a long stairway, and something was shimmering down there, probably water. Beyond that, everything was black. But that wind told her something. It was no ground cellar, it was bigger than that, much bigger. Probably a path leading down to the mine.
The fact that she was in a mining town where roads and paths led down and into the mountain felt natural. However, this opening into the dark had filled her with fear and rage. The burning, short-fused anger she felt reminded her of something, reminded her of being forced to obey. Where she now sat curled up on the front stairs of the school, she could clearly recall how the gaping door frame became a mouth breathing its dark, powerful presence into Mervas. The odd feeling seized her that this mouth would suck up everything outside it, that it would pull everything unmoored and movable toward its shapeless internal darkness, would swallow anything light, kind, comforting, and warm. In there, down there, she thought, everything would dissolve; leaves, people, pieces of wood, stones, everything would dissolve into darkness.
She was freezing, and tried to shake off her thoughts. But the mere knowledge of that opening with its stairs leading down to the shiny water made her shiver with discomfort and also robbed her of the feeling of freedom that was so precious to her. The feeling that she was free to leave whenever she wanted to, that nothing forced her to stay in Mervas.
No, nothing is up to you, the chasm hissed.
She was meant to be forced, such were the rules of her life no matter how much she tried to resist.
She tried to listen only to the blackbird, who was still singing, tried to stay with the warm, low voice chanting such wise and simple things, balanced things, about life. It had found a place beyond everything, where there were no demands. A song without rage. He was free.
The blackbird sings the Song of Songs, Marta told herself. The blackbird’s song is great, she tried thinking; the greatest thing is love — and the song of the blackbird.
But other voices insistently crowded in on her and said other things, the wrong things. She felt their hard grasp burn around her wrist, felt the strength of that grasp, how she’d been dragged around, forced.
She had initially planned to explore a bit during the rest of the evening. From studying the map, she knew there was a small lake right behind the school, a little ways through the woods. At the lake, she would find a hut, the map said. But she’d become too scared now. Obstacles had been raised inside her, she had to stay on the school stairs tonight, and she couldn’t leave. She could sleep in the car later, the tent seemed unpleasantly thin-walled. If she slept in the car she could also easily escape if she had to.
A black circle on the ground in front of the stairs showed where people had lit bonfires. Marta pushed her anxiety aside and gathered a sizable pile of dry branches, leaves, and some birch bark. Then she started a fire. The sun was low in the sky and it slowly rolled north from the west. In a few more hours, it would momentarily dip below the horizon. The sky would never get completely dark, the sun would never sink that low.