by Ane Riel
There were few streetlights north of Korsted. Roald hesitated momentarily at the prospect of moving in the dark. But the moon hung like a golden sabre, reflecting the rays of a distant sun. There was light, a little light. Enough for him to see the small figure ahead of him. But what if the boy saw him? He really didn’t want to frighten the child.
It was a great stroke of luck for Roald that the road was winding and flanked by different types of shrubs. It gave him the chance to move faster when he was under cover and in no danger of being seen; he was forced to admit that he was unable to move at the same speed as the child. The boy had to be as strong as an ox.
After some time the landscape opened up again and further ahead, where the road passed a small cluster of houses, there were streetlights, but only a few. The boy, however, seemed to want to evade the light because he veered off across the field and ran left around the houses. Halfway across the field, Roald had to stop. Panting, he stared after the small figure that had disappeared into the darkness to the north.
Was the boy really heading out to the Head?
Dear Liv
The other day you were about to say something about some traps – when you suddenly stopped. You wouldn’t say anything more. You’ve got me worried.
What kind of traps?
What are you not telling me?
I wish you were here now.
I wish you were here to keep me company. I miss you.
Love,
Mum
Retention
Jens Horder carried the newborn baby outside. Outside the shrinking bedroom, along the narrow corridor, down the stairs that contracted with each step, through the rooms of the house, which dwindled to dusty airways. And he went out into the yard, where the sky tried to penetrate the forest of indispensable junk, but found the ground only when small passages criss-crossed the heaps like rabbit tracks in the grass. He reached his workshop and placed his newborn daughter on the workbench on the small quilted blanket in which he had carried her. She was a child who didn’t scream.
Jens Horder didn’t scream either, not any more. He was calm now, focused.
When Liv joined him, he had finished washing the child. Without asking questions, she carried the basin of water outside and emptied it behind the workshop, as he had asked her to. And she filled it again with water from the pump. For his hands, he had said. And she found the oils in the kitchen for him. And the empty jam jars. And she fetched the bags of gauze. And she helped him with the sack of salt. And she lit the camping stove outside and started cleaning the resin, as he had taught her. They would need it later, he said. Except for the jam jars and the salt; they were for now. She couldn’t see Carl anywhere.
Liv tried to stay calm, but she was scared and confused. And in that moment she was acutely aware that she was only a child.
Jens fetched a kitchen knife and held it over the flame while Liv sat next to him. She wanted to ask him, but couldn’t. She opened her mouth, but no air came in and no sounds came out. Then she followed him back inside the workshop. He walked as if he didn’t know that she was there; as if he didn’t see her. As if she were Carl.
Liv could see the edge of the quilted blanket hanging crookedly over the corner of the workbench, and she could see two bare feet which were so tiny, much smaller than hers. An oil lamp beside them caused the feet to cast woolly shadows. Only they didn’t look warm.
Carl had yet to turn up, and Liv didn’t know whether to stay or go. Her father was standing by the workbench and she could hear him breathe. The tiny toes lay very still. She walked closer, positioned herself on the other side of the workbench and looked up at him. He didn’t see her. He was looking down at the blanket.
Recently, his breathing had changed, as if there were wood shavings in the air he inhaled. Sometimes she wanted to help him breathe, breathe in unison with him or maybe breathe in while he breathed out. And at times she wanted to drag him out into the forest. They hadn’t been there for a long time now. The air in the forest was nicer than in the workshop … and far better than in the house and the container. She missed the forest.
And now she didn’t know what to do.
When she couldn’t make up her mind, her body made it for her. She slumped on to the floor behind the workbench in a gliding movement, as if falling into herself.
Then she rested her chin on the workbench crossbeam. The empty jam jars were in front of her on the sawdust on the floor. And so were her father’s legs. He had a hole in one trouser leg, a tear just below his knee, and she imagined his skin behind the hole. Would she be able to see it if she shone a torch at it? The beam from her tiny torch hit the hole and the skin, which looked like parched soil. It was full of small, thirsty wrinkles, and she wanted to touch it.
Suddenly the knees came towards her. A knee popped out of the tear, and she could see it clearly in the torchlight. It looked like a baby’s head coming out of its mum. Then her father’s hand reached down for a jam jar; he picked it up like a hook gripping it under water. And she heard his breath with wood shavings in it, and a sound like a knife going into a rabbit. And shortly afterwards the jam jar was lowered down on to the sawdust. Now it contained something dark. And his hand left dark imprints on the glass. Another jar was picked up and disappeared over the edge of the workbench, only to return with something in it. And so it went on. She stared at the full jars and remembered the rabbits and the stags. And she shone the torch at one of them and recognized what she was looking at.
At that moment Carl was back with her and took her hand.
She whispered for him not to be afraid. It was just their baby sister’s lungs in a jam jar.
Then her father came. No, first his knee moved forwards, then his upper body bent down, then one hand held on to the edge, then his head, which was tilted slightly, and with his head came his eyes looking at her over the crossbeam under the workbench. She switched off her torch.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked her quietly. His voice had changed. Perhaps his voice also had wood shavings in it now.
She could hear something drip from the workbench. At first several drops, then the intervals between them grew shorter before they turned into one sound, a spray.
‘Waiting, I think,’ Liv replied. ‘What are you doing?’
He sat very still. Just as still as Carl. Suddenly the spray became drops once more.
‘I’m getting your baby sister ready. So that we can take good care of her.’
‘OK.’
‘I think you should help.’
‘OK.’
‘Please would you stand up?’
‘Yes.’
Liv tried to stand up, but Carl refused. He pushed her down on to the floor as if she were a heavy sack of salt.
Her father became trouser legs once more.
‘So are you coming, Liv?’ he said from somewhere above her.
‘Yes,’ she said, without moving.
‘There’s nothing to be scared of,’ he said.
‘OK.’
Carl released his grip, and she stood up with his hand in hers. Together they held their breath.
★
Jens Horder didn’t remember the details; perhaps he had never known them. But preserved inside him were the outlines of knowledge, a rough skeleton of insight into the methods of ages past into which his father had once initiated him. And it was this knowledge which now guided his hands.
He didn’t want to preserve his newborn daughter in order to save her soul. He just wanted to preserve his daughter. To keep her.
Not have to lose her.
The small body was cleaned thoroughly on the inside and the organs removed so only the heart remained. It had to be there, he remembered, and it felt right. She was the most beautiful little girl. Just as beautiful as his Liv had once been.
And her twin brother.
He had to preserve this fragile human being so that she wouldn’t disappear into the ground, as his son had done seven years ago. He could no l
onger hold on to Carl in pencil sketches. The lines couldn’t retain the flesh; the perspective couldn’t embrace his shape. Carl was slowly being erased from the very same memory that so desperately tried to keep him there. And Jens Horder refused to lose yet another much wanted and loved child.
Jens Horder refused to lose anything ever again.
Something inside him told him that Liv had to be there. Liv’s presence was necessary to keep the dead newborn present.
★
The salt would extract all moisture from the body, her father explained while he looked for a basin the right size. Liv had never seen so much salt at once. She looked at the small face as the white sea rose around her baby sister. The small eyes were closed. Carl had also closed his and Liv would have liked to, but she couldn’t. She was supposed to help her father. She had to be a part of everything; he had asked her to. Together they would look after the little girl and make sure that she didn’t disappear.
Except that right now she was disappearing in a bath of salt, and her cheeks and her tiny nose were the last things to drown.
She would need to lie in the basin for a month until she had dried up completely, until there wasn’t a single drop of moisture left in her, he had said. Liv wondered whether you could cry when you were dead.
Carl certainly could. In fact, he had started to cry a great deal. He cried because their baby sister was dead, and he cried because their mum was upstairs in the bedroom and mustn’t know anything about the child in the salt, and he cried because their dad had started acting so strangely. He cried because they had to hide in the container whenever there was the slightest suspicion that someone was coming. Yes, even if they heard the tiniest sound. And perhaps he cried the hardest because he felt very alone, even when he was with Liv.
★
Maria Horder hadn’t had the strength to bury yet another child, and she had nodded gratefully from her overburdened bed when Jens came upstairs to tell her that the newborn had been burned and was gone. He had built a fine, tiny coffin for her in which she had gone on her way, he had said. Then he had kissed his wife’s forehead and stroked her hair.
‘She’s all right,’ he had whispered.
And Liv had listened from her mother’s bedside. She didn’t feel good. She knew that this was one of the times it was OK to lie. When you had to lie. She must never tell her mum that the little person who had come out of her hadn’t been burned but was buried in a basin of salt in the workshop. She must never tell her, never ever.
So Liv said nothing; instead, she read aloud to her mother. She had become incredibly good at it, Maria said, whenever she was able to get a sound past her soft lips. Usually she would grab one of her many notebooks and write something for Liv, who lunged at the sentences like a starving child.
I’m so proud that you know how to read and write so well already. It’s really wonderful, Liv.
And Liv smiled, sated with happiness for a moment before she read on.
Aloud.
From time to time she wondered whether she couldn’t just write down her secret and show it to Mum. In that way she wouldn’t actually have said anything but she would rid herself of her knowledge. Without having spoken a word.
But she didn’t dare. It was no longer just strangers who frightened her. Her father’s increasing moroseness was creeping up on her like a dark and ominous threat.
Maria Horder no longer left the bedroom. But even if she had been capable of doing so during the month her lifeless third child lay buried in salt, she wouldn’t have recognized her own home any more. She, too, was slowly being buried.
Dear Liv
The rabbits – what’s happening to the rabbits? Have we got more of them? I think I can hear them. Don’t they live in their hutch any more? And the animals in the barn … I can also hear the animals. Don’t you feed them?
It’s night-time now. They shouldn’t be making any noise.
Love,
Mum
My Baby Sister
While my baby sister dried out in the salt, I collected more gauze and cleaned more resin and Mum wondered at the smell that lingered about me. You smell of resin, you must be out in the forest a lot, she wrote. And I whispered: ‘It’s a scent, not a smell.’
Then she smiled.
One night I found a big sack of stale pastries behind the bakery, and we spent a lot of time enjoying them in bed. Carl got a little worried that Mum ate so many, at which point I sent him outside. He really could be a pain sometimes. Dad didn’t want any, and that made me a bit sad because I liked it best when we were together, the three of us. These days we hardly ever were.
But what was worse was that he was starting to lose his temper. Not with me, not directly, and not with Mum either. He always spoke nicely to us – when he did speak, that is. So I don’t really know who he was angry with, but at times I would hear him rant and rave when he was all on his own. Perhaps he too had an invisible friend to shout at.
Every now and then I would shout a little at Carl, but never enough to make him disappear from me … become a completely invisible twin brother, I mean.
And other things began to worry me. There really was a lot of stuff everywhere and although I liked all of it, especially the things Dad and I had found together, something felt wrong.
I would compare our house with those I visited, houses where it was much easier for me to move about the rooms. They weren’t quite so dusty and dirty either. And although the mice and the spiders were my friends, it was nice that there were no mouse droppings and cobwebs in the pub kitchen. The other houses seemed so different, and they smelled different too. They had a scent. Especially the pub.
I was old enough to remember that we hadn’t always had as many things as we did now. That we had once been able to use the kitchen and bathroom for their proper purposes, rather than just to store things in.
I think I would have liked it to have stayed that way. Not to have quite so many things. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be without any of the things we had. And Dad had said that we had to look after them.
So this was all weighing on my mind, only I didn’t know what to do about it. I found it harder and harder to talk to Dad, and I was scared of saying anything to Mum that might make her sad – or worse. Whenever I wanted to tell her something that I strongly suspected Dad wouldn’t want me to, I could hear his voice in my head saying: It would kill your mum.
Now, I had killed animals, and I was even quite good at it. But I desperately didn’t want to kill my mum.
I couldn’t imagine anything worse than her not lying upstairs in her bed, waiting for me. Waiting for me to bring her more food and a book to read to her while she stroked my hair and mimed that she loved me. These days it was my favourite thing, now that Dad no longer took me out in the dinghy or even into the forest. Ever since my baby sister had come out of Mum, he rarely went anywhere.
It’s hard to talk to someone when you can’t say what you want. Especially when the person you’re talking to doesn’t say very much, whether they’re your mum or your dad or your invisible twin brother. I think that’s why I loved reading aloud to Mum so much.
That way I could be sure that I still could. Speak, I mean.
But I still wasn’t allowed to mention certain things. And outside the bedroom I was expected to be quiet the whole time so that no one would hear me.
So it seemed odd that Dad sent me down to the main island alone, given how scared he was that someone might see me. He said the same thing every time: For God’s sake, don’t let anyone see you. And don’t tell your mum that I’m not with you.
I didn’t understand why God, who we didn’t believe in anyway, kept getting mixed up in everything. And it made even less sense that Dad stayed at home and looked after the things rather than coming with me so he could watch out for me. I didn’t work out until later that he was even more scared than I was. Of all sorts of things, I think. A little bit like Carl.
And there was another
thing I had started to wonder about. Carl had started to feel pain at night, in the darkness. When we walked home across the Neck and our feet got blisters. Or on the night we burned our hands on a wood-burning stove in someone’s living room. Or the night we bumped into an old steel sink someone had leaned against a wall.
Carl had really hurt himself. And I had bled. And perhaps I had hurt myself a bit too.
I was starting to think that the darkness probably couldn’t hold much more pain, and so the pain had to stay inside Carl and in me. The darkness was full to bursting with pain. Just like our house.
Perhaps Dad could feel it too. Perhaps he was also hurting in the dark. But perhaps he didn’t think that I was. And I didn’t know how to tell him.
★
The body that came out of the salt was totally different to the one I saw disappear into it. My baby sister, who was very small to start with, had grown even smaller. She was so thin, so thin. But perhaps that was what happened to you if you didn’t eat for a month? I wondered whether the same thing might happen to Mum, if she tried it.
Dad put her on the workbench again. It was still very dark from the blood that had run out of her last time – through the quilted blanket and into the wood. There was also a big dark stain on the floor. Now there wasn’t a drop left in her; exactly as he had hoped.
We needed the oils and the resin now. My job was to melt clean resin on the camping stove outside the workshop. I used the saucepan from the pub. The resin must be liquid, Dad said. Not boiling, just liquid. When I came inside with my first batch he had smeared my baby sister in oil. One of the big bottles of grapeseed oil was almost empty, and she lay glossy on the workbench.
I thought it was nice that there was no more blood and that he had closed up the hole in her stomach. He took the saucepan from me and poured liquid resin all over her, and afterwards he spread it with a brush, making sure to cover everything.