One of the small paths by the dance floor led into the woods and I soon ended up in a dense forest of young pines. In an instant, mosquitoes surrounded me like a wall; suddenly they were everywhere with their thin whirring sound and feathery touch. They danced around me and attacked me at the same time; their bites burned everywhere, on my neck, my scalp, my hands, throat, and face. I was seized by a deep, claustrophobic fear and walked faster until I was running, surrounded by a buzzing cloud. The cabin appeared before me without warning. A rough gray wooden wall materialized between the tree trunks. I stopped and heard my own breathing along with the whirring of mosquitoes while I angrily swung a leafy branch around me.
Here was the cabin. I gazed at the back of it; the trees were close together in front of the windowless wall. The fear the swarm of mosquitoes had produced in me grew larger, rose to the surface, and at once everything seemed ominous: the forest, the dull gray wall of the cabin, the notion that someone could be inside it. I turned around and, like a hunted animal, ran back through the woods.
Mervas in June
Marta, Mart!
This isn’t the first time I have sat down to write to you. But all the other letters I’ve either thrown away or burned. Some I’ve placed among my journal notes like memory plaques. The letters often got incredibly long; if I’d saved them all they’d be an entire autobiography. I guess I’ve tried to understand my life by writing about it, to understand and explain. As you can see, I’ve failed. That’s why I decided that this time my letter to you would be concise. It would still be a real letter, not just a note like the one I sent you last fall (and assume you received). My cowardly notion was that if you wanted to see me, you’d sooner or later show up in Mervas. If you do come, it will most certainly be in the summer, and then this letter would be here, waiting for you.
I’m a coward. I don’t know if I want to see you. I really don’t understand why I’m writing to you at all. Something in me has pushed me to do it, and I finally decided to go ahead.
Enough rambling. This was supposed to be a concise letter.
For many years, I’ve lived periodically in Zimbabwe, participating in the excavations of the old gold mines there. Seven or eight years ago, when I happened to be home for a while, I saw a story in the newspaper. It was a brief notice about a mother who had killed her severely disabled child. She’d been evaluated for mental illness, it said, and had been in such a state of shock she had to be hospitalized.
I knew immediately. I knew it was you, Mart. My body knew it, my muscles, my nerves, and my cells. I began shaking violently where I sat; it was as if an electric current were going straight through me. My tea spilled onto the newspaper. I screamed, just screamed without words. I felt so terribly sorry for you. But it wasn’t just that; without quite understanding it at first, I also felt responsible. I knew I was involved and responsible. I was part of this story. What I’d read in the newspaper was part of my own story, part of my own life. Isn’t that right, Mart? Isn’t it?
With time, I’ve understood that my actions also were part of this story, that they were part of it in a way that couldn’t be changed or erased. It was as if I had in some impossible way been with you. As if I had been present. It all flashed in front of me as in a dream sequence, a nightmare; everything that had happened was replayed in my mind over and over.
You might think that I’m barging into something I ought to stay away from, something that concerns only you and that no one else has the right to talk about or touch. But what I want you to know is that you weren’t alone when it happened. What we’d had together and what I did to you was part of why you did it.
It isn’t always simple to know what’s important or crucial in your life. I think it’s possible to miss it altogether. That’s probably the easiest way. When I came back from the Orkney Islands and heard that you’d had a child with another man, I thought all ties between us were cut. I wanted it to be that way. I wanted to be free from you. You were frightening, disruptive, and I felt swallowed and crushed by you. I thought I could let you disappear from my life. That is, until I read that notice in the paper. It hit me — all this time, I hadn’t really been part of my own life. I had escaped into something else, changed my name, assumed another fate.
But I never contacted you. I resisted the urge. I thought it would’ve been foolish, that my inclinations were sick. When you received my little note, I’d already written impossibly long letters that I’d thrown away.
I’m still not sure. I still don’t know why I’m writing to you. Perhaps I’m not writing to you as much as I’m writing to the part of my past tied to you.
I’ve been allowed to use this cabin, where my letter will be waiting for you, until the moose hunt starts on the first Monday in September. Mervas is an odd place, odder even than it may first seem. I’m down in the mine most of the time. I’ve found something down there that I can’t write about, an entire world.
You’re welcome to stay in the cabin so you don’t have to camp. I would like you to stay in it.
If you want to come down into the mine (and to everything else down here), the easiest way is through the tunnel that opens onto the village. It looks like an ordinary ground cellar. The other entrances have more or less collapsed or are underwater.
I’m a coward. Please forgive me.
Your Kosti
June 20
Slept in the cabin. Had a terrible night. I lay in the lower berth of the bunk staring at the grainy, thin twilight inside the cabin. The light was a shivering gray specter whose warm, enveloping darkness had been taken away from it. My thoughts moved around in the room like anxious shadow animals, sniffing and listening. I almost thought I could see them flickering over the walls. Herds of fear ran down the slopes as if they were being hunted, being egged on by the thoughts and visions spinning in my head. The terror seemed to hatch in new places all the time, one vision after another appearing in long, painful sequences. And I had to keep looking at them; I couldn’t avert my eyes.
I’ve secretly longed for Kosti the way someone may long for the warmth of a nice bonfire. But the pleasant and warming fire turned out to be a dry roaring pyre, the kind of blaze that can set the very air on fire with its electrically charged flames. The fire I had sought out suddenly wasn’t tame at all, it was reaching for me with glowing arms, wanted to pull me into it, wanted to consume me. Standing there, unscathed and cool, Kosti smiled sweetly while trying to pull me into the flames.
“Do you want me to tell you about The Day?” he asked with a whisper, his voice so eerily intimate that it made me hate him.
That’s when I saw the cabin walls contract and expand around me like the inside of a mouth. I had to breathe or else I would suffocate. A loud moaning woke me — it was coming from my own mouth. I leapt out of bed, flung the door open, and ran outside.
The sky was vast above me. I took a deep breath. Exhaled. A streak of silky, thin gray fog covered the blue and in the northeast the sun was pumping its sheen through the thin layers of clouds. The light seemed so pale and mild and birdsong was everywhere like thousands of tiny stitches of invisible patterns.
I drank some water from the bucket by the door and then sat down on the stairs feeling at once heavy and relieved. Perhaps things weren’t so bad, I thought. It’s all inside me already, it is not even sleeping. Deep down in that dark city, no one dares to sleep. The vigil goes on there day and night, guarded behind glass and minutes, in seconds and in years. It’s all inside me, I thought. And actually, everything is already afterward, it has already happened.