“What did you do to them?” I shouted. Eggert turned to me.
“A little gift.”
“They’re Edith’s dogs. She’s got nothing to do with the child.”
“My daughters don’t have anything to do with the child either, and yet they’ve disappeared,” he said. Then he got back in his car and drove off.
Edith didn’t say a word while she walked around the dogs. I barely dared to breathe. Meisis leaned against me; she didn’t hide her grief. Edith abruptly stopped walking.
“Damn Eggert,” she said, and I could hear how difficult it was for her to keep her voice from shaking. “If he dares come to our house again, I’ll drown him in the pool with my own hands.”
We buried the dogs in the garden where the brambles were. Edith wore a black silk dress under her rabbit fur coat and had given us black things to wear too.
Our sweat made them even darker. How Edith could bear it in her fur coat remains a mystery to me. After we had filled in the holes, she read several poems while standing in the blazing sun, her chin raised. More angry than sad.
“Do you remember how I told you that it wasn’t safe here anymore?” Edith asked me that evening. “Now you can no longer deny it. When the two months are up, they won’t treat us any differently than the dogs.”
“It’s only Eggert that’s lost his mind. He acted alone.”
“How do you know that?”
“Gösta would never agree to anything like that.”
“You’re so naive.”
I didn’t respond.
“We should leave the territory while we still can.”
“Meisis and I aren’t going anywhere.”
“You really think that it’s enough to just sit out the whole thing, don’t you?”
“As if we have any other choice.”
60.
SEAGULLS HAVE BEEN TUMBLING FROM THE SKY FOR YEARS, LOSING THEIR GRIP ON THE HORIZON, FALLING FEATHERS.
It was the first windy day in a long time. While standing in the garden, I stretched my hand into the air.
“Today we’ll go into the forest and look for seagulls,” I told Meisis. “Put your shoes on.”
I fetched a plastic bag from the kitchen.
We spent the whole morning looking through the undergrowth, but it wasn’t until around midday that we made a find. The gull had become trapped in a rose hip bush. Meisis cried out when she found it. It couldn’t have fallen that long ago; its body was still warm.
“Great,” I said to her, and stowed the bird in the plastic bag.
We roamed the forest for a while longer, but we didn’t find a second gull.
“Let’s go back,” I said to Meisis, “before it gets any hotter.”
Back at the house I laid the wax cloth over the table and showed her how to pluck a seagull.
Edith came and stood stunned in the doorframe. “What are you doing?”
“We found a seagull,” Meisis said proudly.
Edith looked at me. “What have I told you about seagulls?”
“It fell from the sky, we didn’t kill it,” I said.
“It really wasn’t alive anymore,” Meisis said, coming to my defense.
“I don’t give a crap,” shouted Edith. “In my house we don’t eat seagulls.”
“Do you really think we can still be picky? If you don’t want to eat them, fine, but Meisis and I aren’t going to starve.”
“You’re no different from the rest of the people here,” Edith said, and slammed the door behind her.
Later, after I had reassured Meisis and brought her to bed, I went to Edith, who was in the living room lying on the sofa.
I pushed a few clothes to one side and sat on the floor next to her.
“I consulted your books,” I said. “The seagulls come from the sea. And they can’t stay up in the air because they no longer have the strength. That’s obvious. But you want to go to the exact place where the seagulls are fleeing from? And you remember the animals that always end up here. Gösta says that they come from the sea too, she can taste it, their meat is saltier than our animals.”
Edith didn’t move. I carried on speaking: “Meisis and I are staying here. But if you want to hold on to the idea of getting away from here, we won’t stop you.”
I got up and left the room without looking back.
61.
The next day, Edith slaughtered all the rabbits. The kitchen was filled with the smell of blood. Edith sat hunched over the table. Before her lay the skinned white pelts. Using her knife, she removed the flesh and fat from the underside. The dead animals lay in the sink. The meat shimmered red. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
“You never forget how to butcher an animal,” Edith said.
“Is that all of the rabbits?” I asked.
Edith raised her head. “They weren’t coping with the heat. Three of them were already dead.”
I looked at her, aghast. “But what do you want the fur for?”
“I’m making a coat for the child.”
“You’ve gone crazy.”
Edith laughed. “I don’t know what’s so crazy about it.”
“No? Then please explain to me why Meisis would need a fur coat in this weather.” I was outwardly still very calm.
“It will be cold by the sea.”
“Don’t start that again.”
Edith made a stubborn face.
“What are we supposed to eat now?” I asked.
Edith’s movements became erratic. “For goodness’ sake, the pantry and the cellar are full. And we’ve still got the potato patch. I really don’t see what the problem is.”
“But that won’t last forever. We relied on the meat!” I was now shouting, but Edith still didn’t want to understand. I grabbed her by the hair and pulled back her head. “You only did this because Meisis and I ate the seagull,” I said, “you wanted to get back at me.”
“Let go, you’re hurting me.”
I wanted to throw something, wanted to shatter Edith’s skull, but what good would it have done?
62.
A few days later, Meisis and I were digging up the potato patch and covering the soil with mulch, when I heard a sound in the forest.
“Who’s there?” I shouted, pushing Meisis behind me.
“Only me,” Kurt said, coming out from behind the brambles. Hanging from his braids were leaves and twigs; maybe he had plaited them in.
“Is Edith home?” he asked, waving at Meisis.
“She’s sleeping,” I said.
“I have to talk to her.”
I told Meisis to let Edith know. She nodded and walked into the house.
I lit a cigarette. The smoke scratched my throat, and my eyes watered. “What do you want with Edith?” I asked.
“She wanted me to find out something for her.”
“When did you speak to each other?”
“The last time I was here. You’d driven to Eggert’s, remember? Shortly after you’d left, she came to me.”
I looked at him mistrustfully. “And what was it you had to find out for her?”
Kurt didn’t get around to answering me. Edith had appeared in the doorway and called out: “Thought you’d finally defected to the animals.”
He laughed. “I thought about it,” he said.
“Come in.” Edith waved him over.
I held Kurt’s arm tightly. “What plan’s she hatching?” I asked him quietly.
“I’ll tell you later,” Kurt said. “But don’t worry.”
He went to Edith and disappeared into the house with her.
It was only when I went into the kitchen to make soup from yesterday’s leftovers that Kurt and Edith came out of the living room.
“Do you want to eat with us?” I asked Kurt. He shook his head. I tried to talk him around, but he was already halfway out the door.
“I’m pleased to have met you,” he said to Meisis, and bowed in front of her. She laughed and waved at him through the window as h
e walked back into the forest.
Edith sat at the kitchen table, felt in the pocket of her coat, and pulled out her lipstick. While Meisis set the table and I served the soup, she painted her mouth. It was a glowing red that she hadn’t used for a long time.
While we ate, no one said a word. Edith ate so slowly that she still wasn’t finished after Meisis and I had already eaten two portions. I sent Meisis to bed, cleared away our dishes in the sink, and was just about to go upstairs when Edith said, “Kurt has discovered something.”
I didn’t say anything. Edith put her spoon down and handled a piece of potato with her fingers.
“He spoke to people in the territory, and two of them saw something very interesting. They told Kurt, completely independently of each other, that shortly before Eggert’s daughters disappeared, they saw them at the river. And both people concluded that it was as if they were teaching one another how to swim,” Edith said, wiping her greasy fingers down her coat.
“What are you trying to tell me?” I asked.
Edith pushed back a strand of hair that had come loose from her bun, lifted her dish to her mouth, and drank the rest of the soup. “Eggert’s daughters wanted to cross the river. And they did it, otherwise their bodies would have been found a long time ago, like with Ove and Nuuel. That means we could do it too.”
“We’ve got a roof over our heads, a garden. No one knows what’s left in the territories along the coast.” As I continued to speak, my voice got louder. “You fled from there.”
Edith looked at me, surprised.
“Yes, Kurt told me the whole story. How you climbed up the bank dripping wet. And you’ve not really concealed your origins, what with the pictures in your wardrobe.”
Edith shrugged. “It’s been many years since I fled. Who knows what it looks like there now?”
I couldn’t believe that Edith was being serious. She reached for my hand. I flinched.
“If something miraculous doesn’t happen, Pesolt and the others will come for Meisis. You won’t be able to stop it. But if we go now, there’s a chance that we three will survive.”
“We would be leaving everything behind.”
Edith’s expression darkened. “What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Gösta and Len, they need me.”
“They’re old women, they’ll be dead soon. That’s what you want to risk your life for? Meisis’s life?”
“They’ve always been there for me and took care of me. Unlike you.”
“You didn’t want me to look after you.”
“Because you couldn’t do it.”
“Now you’re exaggerating.”
“If Gösta and Len hadn’t been there I would have starved.”
“You were old enough. You had the rabbits, the potato patch.”
“And you still don’t get why I trust the territory more than you? You really have no idea about reality, and that’s why I will under no circumstances engage with your crazy idea about leaving. I know that you can’t comprehend it, but the territory is my home.”
Edith jumped up. Her stool fell with a loud bang.
“Your home,” she shouted. “Have you forgotten all the things people did to you here? All the injuries. And then there’s the loathing they show us here. Your home has treated you like the scum of the earth.”
I jumped up too.
“It’s about the land, not the people,” I yelled. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
Red blotches were showing on Edith’s face.
“Then stay in this godforsaken territory and perish,” she shouted, “but I’m getting away from here, and I’m taking the child with me.”
“You have my father on your conscience, and now you want to take the child away from me too?”
Edith stared at me, stunned. “What did you say?”
“You heard,” I replied.
“So that’s what you think of me?” Edith asked. “Then it really is better you stay here.”
She staggered out of the room. I kicked her chair with full force. It flew against the wall and splintered with a crash.
I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE MY MOTHER’S BODY, POSITION IT IN THE DUSTY SAND, AND GO FOR A SPIN OVER IT WITH THE PICKUP.
63.
The next morning I drove to Gösta and Len’s. It was oppressively hot; the sky was slightly hazy. I walked around the house and went into the garden. Gösta was wearing a tracksuit and was watering the onion beds, while Len was sleeping on a lounger in the shade. The hens were perched around as if guarding her.
“Len fell over in the kitchen this morning,” Gösta said, following my gaze.
“Is she all right?”
“All things considered. She’s very sullen about the weather. The warmer it gets, the more she’ll lose her balance. She feels like the whole world’s against her. More and more things she used to do alone she needs help for. It’s gnawing at her, of course it is,” Gösta said, adjusting her headscarf and reaching for the watering can next to her, yet her hand was shaking so much, she couldn’t lift it.
“Let me do that,” I said, picking up the watering can.
After the work we ate a dish of cold onion soup together on the terrace. Len had woken up and was sitting next to us, but when Gösta wanted to give her something to eat, she shook her head.
We talked about trivial things, and I tried to talk myself into thinking it was like it was before, a completely normal day, with nothing to fear. But the dark feeling didn’t go away.
Once we’d finished eating, they pushed a bag of onions into my hands.
I tried to talk them out of it: “You better have them.” But Gösta and Len insisted.
“For the child too,” they said.
I thanked them. They walked me to the pickup. Gösta had to support Len the whole way; it hurt me to see her like that.
“Don’t worry about us. We’re hardier than we look,” Len said, laughing, but I knew that her nonchalance was just a front.
“I’ll be back soon,” I promised.
Gösta nodded. I got in the pickup and drove off.
On the way back I saw three cherry plum trees heavy with fruit at the side of the road. In the last few years, they had only bloomed. I slowed down, drove up close to them, and made up my mind to come back the next day with Meisis to harvest the trees.
I WANT TO SEE THE FULL TREES AS A GOOD OMEN.
Cherry plums always remind me of a particularly wonderful day with Gösta and Len. They took me to two trees near the river. At the crack of dawn, we shook the fruit from the branches and gathered them in large baskets.
In the house we washed the plums and decanted them into all the available pots. While Len and I pitted the fruit and sorted them, throwing the worm-eaten ones into a bucket under the table, Gösta cooked jam. The sweet smell made the air sticky. We were busy well into the evening. When the sun began to set, I made a move to leave, but Gösta pushed me back down onto my chair.
“No child should walk home in the dark,” she said, “you’ll sleep here tonight.”
She fetched a blanket and a pillow and set up the sofa for me. For the first time in a long while, I felt looked after. I slept deeply and dreamed of rain watering the landscape.
For a long time, the memory of this day helped me in my darkest hours.
64.
Early the next morning, even before the sun had completely come up, Meisis and I drove back to the spot. The vibrant yellow and red of the plums was accentuated by the luminous blue sky behind them. I parked the pickup in a ditch, and we took the plastic buckets I’d fetched from the shed before we’d set off from the truck bed. We walked down the road toward the trees. The heavy scent of the almost overripe fruit hung in the air. I could hear the buzz of insects.
“Watch out for the wasps,” I told Meisis, as she climbed up the trunk of one of the trees. I went over to the other tree. A lot of the fruit was already lying on the ground and rotting. I began filling the bucket. Soon my hands were sticky f
rom the juice. When it was full, I took it over to the pickup and put it on the bed. I took another bucket and went back. Meisis had climbed right to the top and was picking them from up there. She grinned down to me, her mouth smeared with juice.
“Picking, not eating,” I called up to her.
I was just reaching for the second bucket when a shot rang out.
“Get away from those trees,” shouted Pesolt, who came running over the field. He was wearing only rough jeans, no shirt. Across his belly was a glinting red scar. Meisis dropped her bucket in fright. The plums spread all over the grass.
“They’re not your trees,” I shouted, and stood protectively in front of Meisis, who had quickly climbed down to me.
“The trees are on my land, I’m not letting the devil frolic in them,” Pesolt spat at us. He must have been drinking. I could smell the alcohol, and his movements were labored.
I gulped and remembered how he had once broken my nose after I had cut nettles on a field that was also on his land. He had taken my skull in both his hands and had slammed it multiple times against the hot hood of my pickup, so that the blood had shot right out of my nose and adorned a considerable part of the truck’s white paintwork.
He only seemed calmer now because he was so drunk he could barely walk straight. He screwed up his eyes and tried to focus them on us. “The plums stay here,” he slurred, pointing at the bucket.
I looked at him wrathfully and tipped the fruit into the ditch.
“You can pick them yourself,” I said.
He didn’t let me out of his sight. I threw the buckets back onto the truck bed and pushed Meisis into the passenger seat.
“We’re coming to get you soon,” Pesolt called, pointing at Meisis. “And woe be to you if anything happens to my trees.”
I got in behind the steering wheel. Pesolt leaned in toward us.
“I see that the child still has all its teeth. I’m counting down the days. If I catch you here again before then, I’ll shoot you right out the tree. Then our little party will happen a bit earlier than planned.”
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