School was the only secure place. Where Anja liked best to be was in the physics lab on the lower ground floor, with its dim light and metallic smell, or in the library, among the tightly packed shelves full of the past. When the library was closed, she hung around the school grounds until it grew dark. The worst weren’t the shouts or the blows. The worst was coming home, and no one there. The expectation, the certainty, practically, that they would arrive sometime in the night.
YOU HAVE TO LEARN to live without expectations, that’s the only way of getting by. Patience by itself isn’t enough, because in fact nothing happens. In the forest there is no future and no past, everything there is either instantaneous or takes place over periods that cannot be measured in mere years. Sometimes Anja imagines what it was like when the whole country was covered with forest. Then she climbs up the lookout tower, peers down at the city, and sees nothing but trees. She sees the trees in the parks and gardens and along the streets, envoys from a past or future time, and everything in between loses its brashness and its significance. Even the old town, the houses that are many hundreds of years old, seem no less provisional to her than her shelter of branches and canvas.
Eventually the ice will return and efface everything that people have built and made. Glaciers will lie over the land for thousands of years, rivers of ice miles deep, and what they will finally leave behind will be a new landscape; there will be new rivers and valleys, the moraines will form chains of hills, enormous piles of rubble that will soon be colonized by the first pioneer plants. Trees will grow on the humus, a thin forest to begin with, then ever thicker. Wild animals will come over the mountains in the south: insects, birds, deer and antelope, and with them their predators, foxes and wolves and lynxes and the first man. And then it will all be as though nothing had happened.
THEY WERE JOGGING through a residential district, past small detached houses. There were people working in the gardens, people walking their dogs, children playing on the streets. The gym teacher was out in front, along with the fast runners. A little way behind was the main group, followed by three or four slower girls, the overweight ones or the artsy ones, who didn’t care. Anja brought up the rear. She made an effort, she wanted to be quicker, but her legs felt leaden.
By the time they reached the edge of the forest, the others were out of sight. After a few hundred yards along a narrow footpath, she reached a dirt road, which led straight up. Way ahead she saw the others, heard the distant padding of their feet on the gravel, their shouts and laughter. Anja stopped. She had a stitch, and she was panting hard. Her T-shirt was sweated through, and now that she had stopped running, she felt a chill. She leaned down to touch her toes, took a couple of deep breaths, and slowly set off again. The others disappeared round a bend, and it was quiet.
Something has changed. To Anja it feels as though she’s considering the forest for the first time, as though the forest were turning to her. Her thoughts have stopped, and so too has time, everything is connected to her, becoming a single, exquisite feeling, the light, the smells, isolated sounds that make the sudden silence still deeper. She stands there, studying the play of the light in the treetops. She touches the trunk of a beech tree, its cool silvery bark. Later, whenever she is tempted to give up and return to her parents’ apartment, she will evoke this moment. And then time once more stands still, and nothing matters, and she can get through the night, the week, the year.
She had thought the class would take the same route back, but no one came down the hill toward her, and by the time she finally reached the lookout tower, there was no one there either. She climbed up the tower and stared out over the forest and down over the city, where the first lights had already come on.
The next day, Michaela asked what had kept Anja. I told the teacher you weren’t feeling well, and had stayed home. Thank you, said Anja. She had been home. Her parents weren’t in, and she packed a few things in a backpack, clothes and books and something to eat and a sleeping bag, and she left.
That was her first night in the forest. She wasn’t afraid, on the contrary, she felt freer than she had in a long time. In front of a fire she had built, she sat and thought until it started to get light. Over the weeks and months she thought less, and learned just to be there, in a state of alert indifference.
SNOW FALLS FROM A BRANCH, it’s like the opposite of a noise, this fall without acceleration that changes the depth of the silence and the configuration of space. Relieved of the weight, the branch rebounds upward in slow motion, and loose snow crystals drift through the air.
The deer sink deep into the snow on their thin legs. Anja watches them from the lookout, their strutting movements, their breath steaming with exertion. When it starts to get dark, she sees the lights coming on in the city. Now she yearns for a home, a room, a warm bed, and a fridge full of things to eat. It’s a yearning she is unable to satisfy. She knows too much about what life in the houses is actually like.
In the forest her dreams are different, more alive, even though nothing seems to happen in them. In these dreams, she crosses the terrain, quickly but without haste. Perhaps they are like animal dreams.
It is very quiet at night. If Anja happens to wake, it’s on account of the cold. There are some nights when she puts on all her clothes in layers and layers, and it’s still not enough. Then she lies awake for a long time, but it feels as though morning won’t come unless she falls asleep. Hours later, the quiet bleeping of her alarm wakes her. She quickly turns it off. Though she’s a long way from any street or footpath, she’s afraid someone could hear the sound and find her.
Anja has her clothes in the sleeping bag with her, so that they’re not quite so cold in the morning. She gets dressed in the dark and crawls out of her shelter. Outside, she stretches, cleans her teeth, drinks some water, eats a hard-boiled egg and a couple of slices of bread. She stole the food yesterday. She’s due to get her allowance in a week, her father has at least got it together to set up a standing order, but it’s never enough to last her through the end of the month. Carefully she wraps the eggshells in a napkin and packs it in her schoolbag. She doesn’t want to leave any traces.
AN HOUR BEFORE the beginning of classes, Anja was at school. Luckily, the sports hall was already open. It was cold in the girls’ shower room. Anja piled her clothes in a corner and walked right across the changing room, naked as a wild animal. She turned on the water and took a jump back, waited for steam to rise. She showered for a long time, but the hot water seemed only to warm her skin, the chill inside her would take all morning to thaw.
Once she was almost caught. She was just putting her clothes on when she heard the changing room door, footsteps, and the door of the shower room. She stood motionless in the corner, holding her breath. She heard a man clearing his throat and, shortly after, the door falling shut. She waited another fifteen minutes before daring to go out.
She had the afternoon off. Michaela asked Anja if she felt like coming back to her house to eat. She knew her friend had trouble with her parents, and often invited her back. Michaela’s parents treated Anja like a sick child, which she sometimes enjoyed and sometimes found unbearable. After lunch the girls sat on Michaela’s bed together, listening to music and talking, but at three, Anja said she had better go, she had some things to do.