The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  Maya had pondered what it was about preserved bodies that struck a chord in her, whether the embalming was natural, as in the bog, or done by man, as with Rosalia. In the first instance, it was the mystique surrounding historical events and the fascination of a place that wouldn’t let go of her.

  With the latter, perhaps it was the act of preservation itself that interested her, an act that rose out of the desire to make sure those we love don’t disappear.

  In the United States an industry had sprung up out of preserving house pets; she had once watched an interview with a previously devastated master who had got his dog back. Once again he could see his companion lying in her basket like always, her head resting on her paws. His voice was full of joy as he talked about how alive she looked, how he could almost see her peeking at him out of one eye when he walked by.

  There was something about that despair, Maya thought, that demonstrated how humans elevate the physical body to a status it doesn’t deserve and was never meant to have. That reveals our inability to see who we truly are, beyond the bodies we inhabit. Our inability to let go, in life and in the face of death.

  She thought about the art of photography, which was, at once, a melancholic reflection over the past and a manifestation of the present. A click of her finger stopped the flow of change. Crime scene photos, in their own way, embalmed the dead. The image as evidence. This happened. This existed. This is what it looked like. A body on the floor in a kitchen. In the sink, a plate that never got washed. On the table, a well-used cast-iron casserole with what remained of dinner—meat stew. Details that usually passed unnoticed.

  It was always the everyday details of a crime scene that worked their way into Maya and made her feel dizzy. If there had been a showdown in the underworld, it was never the bills or the cocaine or the weapons that affected her: it was the observation that the man in the pool of blood on the floor had put on mismatched socks that morning. She would imagine him sitting on the edge of his bed or looking in his drawer, probably without the slightest clue that it would be his last morning.

  “I’m planning to take you with me next time I visit the bog, whether you want to or not,” she said to Ellen.

  “I’d love to come too,” said Oskar.

  “Sure,” said Maya. “Please do.”

  At that moment, the studio doorbell rang. Oskar went to answer it. After a moment he returned, a vague plea in his clear, blue eyes.

  “It’s a journalist. Tom Söderberg. He says he wanted to return a few books. Should I just take them, or…?”

  “No,” said Maya. “I’ll get it.” She rose and continued: “What do you say, isn’t it time for a little wine?”

  Maya welcomed Tom with a big hug and effusive words about how much she liked the text he’d written—she had been allowed to read a first draft. The others seemed a bit self-conscious about having a journalist among them, but Maya invited him in without hesitation.

  He wore a tentative smile on his lips, and he ran his hand through his messy, longish hair. She didn’t know if it was the wine, but he seemed to be radiating eroticism more strongly than last time they met—that sinewy, trim body, relaxed and comfortable in its own skin. She could picture it without clothing, the skin taut over his chest and legs.

  She put on “Crosstown Traffic” and felt the energy level in the room rise. Jimi Hendrix was a force of nature, she thought, or an element all his own. It was beyond good or bad. You couldn’t declare fire to be good or bad, or water. It was what it was.

  “Will you send out some texts, Vanja? It would be fun if a couple more people came over,” Maya said, placing her arm around Tom and leading him out of the studio and into the sitting room.

  “Come on, let me show you something,” she said in a low voice, as if to emphasize that the words were meant for his ears only.

  She didn’t actually see the looks Oskar was sending her way, but she could feel them burning on her back. It was a pleasant sort of pain. It was like good whisky or strong liquor; it intensified the feeling of now and made her look forward to a really nice evening.

  Vanja’s texts got things moving. One person after another showed up, and the night turned into an impromptu inaugural party for Maya’s new studio.

  Tom knew several of the new arrivals, and this seemed to help him feel at home. He conducted himself with ease, Maya thought; he didn’t appear to have to make an effort to fit in among the artists.

  A few people, Oskar and Ellen among them, continued to discuss aspects of Maya’s art and her latest touring exhibition—a series of head-on photographs of everyday objects and beings. A stone, a tree, a house, a dog. A person, plain and simple; a gate, a wall. Straightforward clips lifted from the physical world. The exhibition was called No Thing and what Maya had attempted to do was depict each object’s underlying unity and eternity. To focus not on the describable, distinguishing features of each motif, but on the transcendental power that united them.

  “It’s probably your strongest work,” Ellen said. “As I wrote in the foreword to the exhibition catalog: It’s as though a breeze has swept through all the pictures and blown away everything but the impression of being and dignity that unites them deep down.”

  “I saw that exhibition in Oslo,” Oskar interjected, “and I agree. I still think about those photographs pretty often. There’s something free about them.”

  Maya gave him an appreciative look.

  “It’s fascinating,” said Vanja. “There’re so many levels to it.”

  Tom turned to Maya and placed a hand on her back.

  “There’s something about the way you describe reality,” he said in a lower voice, right next to her ear, “that makes me think about longing. Longing to unite with someone on a deeper level. To come together.”

  She felt the warmth of his body. The presence of her other guests only made the spark stronger.

  “When lovers unite,” she whispered back, her lips to his ear, “it might generate such strong feelings because it is a glimpse of the ultimate unity: between our inner nature and eternal being, when we die.”

  He pressed gently against her.

  “That sounds tempting.”

  “Which part?” she whispered.

  “Death can wait. The other part.”

  He let his gaze rest on her own. She didn’t respond, just looked at him. This was the best phase. When everything was still undone, and all roads open.

  In the morning, when the worst of her hangover had dissipated and she had said good-bye to Tom with the promise of seeing each other in the next week, she sat down on the sofa with her laptop and a big cup of strong coffee.

  She visited the website of the Museum of Cultural History and looked up contact information and opening hours, but purposely avoided images of the Lingonberry Girl.

  I want to see the real girl, the first time, she thought.

  Nathalie had taken a few hesitant steps earlier, but now she was ready to go all the way. She was going to head westward on the path along the bog. She would follow those electrical poles back to the place where it all started. She would follow those wires backward. There could be no return; this was something she was driven to do. It wasn’t even a choice any more.

  Her backpack was full of food and drink. If everything went according to plan, she would be back in the cottage early this evening.

  She didn’t want to rush. She wanted to linger for once. Make room, create space to exist in. That scared her too, but in some strange way it felt like she wasn’t alone. It was as if some new sort of consciousness was following her. A presence that followed her like a shadow. Or perhaps the opposite—it was leading her.

  At the edge of the woods on one side of the path, the trees were mostly pine, but there were also some aspens, crab-apples and heather. The ground was scattered with half-rotten apples that had been stabbed by what appeared to be sharp beaks. They often flocked here, jackdaws and crows going about their vociferous business.

  On the other s
ide, the bog spread its yellowed panorama under the pale gray sky; shades of color gradually melting into and away from one another. In between, the sharp reefs of dark silhouettes: fir trees in the distance.

  Like a sea of grass and moss.

  At this stage, in the beginning of its development, it was so clear that a bog was no more than an overgrown lake; there were still few trees and the ground was covered in hard, high tussocks and treacherous pools of water. It was a challenge, to say the least, to travel across such wilderness—but from a distance, the landscape appeared dreamy, almost seductive.

  She had probably been expecting to find that more growth had occurred in the vegetation, although she knew that processes moved particularly slowly in pine bogs of this sort. Nothing seemed to have grown much at all, in all these years. It looked just as she remembered from back when she visited so often.

  A bit further on, the bog gave way to open water. Once, as a child, she had found an old object on the lake bottom. It turned out to be an Iron Age fibula, a type of clothing fastener that had been replaced by buttons a few centuries later.

  Her discovery had sparked her interest in the people of that time. She remembered feeling as if she had something in common with those people—just by virtue of living in the same place as they had, because they had walked the same ground, seen the sun travel the same path in the sky, followed the changes of each season in the same, changing landscape.

  She felt a pang deep down inside.

  She closed her eyes and let the memory float up to the surface. Her biological mother, Jessica, had noticed Nathalie’s awakening interest. She had borrowed a book from the library about a boy in the Iron Age and began to read it to her. In the story, the children were warned about the dangerous wetlands, which were said to be a refuge for different kinds of mystical spirits.

  Her voice. Her mother’s voice as she read. She liked it. She liked it as much as I did.

  The Iron Age boy lived in a small village with several farms, in what was called a longhouse. In one part of his home there was a large fireplace and people shared that space with piglets, chickens and the dog and cat; the animals helped keep everything warm. Even larger animals like cows, horses, sheep and pigs lived under the same roof, in an attached room.

  Nathalie had begun to beg her parents to keep pigs in their own house. Or at least chickens. In the end she was given a budgie. It was pale blue with a white breast and she named it Jackie. “Now we’re a family of four,” she’d said happily. She had always wanted a fourth family member. She had always wanted a sister. An older sister.

  After a few days, the bird bit her right index finger badly. After two weeks, it flew out of the open kitchen window and was never seen again. Nathalie was never able to shake the feeling that it had fled.

  The story about the Iron Age people ended with a sacrifice to the gods for good harvests or success on the battlefield—or to give thanks for having already received it. They put food, tools and beautiful objects into the nearest carr.

  Sometimes they sacrificed people.

  She was almost there, the place where they had lived their lives together, she and her parents. Jessica, Jonas and Nathalie.

  Was the house even still there? Did someone else live there now?

  She passed the enormous fallen oak that lay alongside the path; the roots rose from the ground like a wall, knobbly tubers pointing in every direction. She had been so happy the first time she managed to climb up and sit on its trunk; it had felt like she was sitting on top of the world.

  She was close; she kept walking.

  Until suddenly, there she was.

  The windows gazed emptily past her. Some were still whole; others were broken and had jagged edges.

  She had never had any expectations about this moment, because she had never been able to picture it. She hadn’t even approached it in her mind; never thought she would find her way here.

  The house was deserted.

  Leaves everywhere.

  Her parents had always worked best together in the autumn. Her mother could rake for hours. She dressed in loose, comfortable clothing and sang “Billie Jean” and “Man in the Mirror” as her dad stood by the barrel, legs planted wide and cap on backward, laughing at her. With her. She recalled his sun-bleached hair, combed back and falling to his shoulders. How he seemed to enjoy standing there and poking at the fire, watching the garden piles vanish into the barrel and up to the sky. As if each autumn brought fresh opportunities for something better.

  And the house. The pale gray, horizontal wood siding, which had been newly painted back then. She remembered the scent of turpentine in the evenings that last summer; now a layer of grime covered everything and there was a damp smudge of filth under each window. The gravel path they had laid before her mum lost her job at the beauty salon and the money began to run out—shining whitish-pink stones, swallowed by the ground, eaten up, gone.

  Nathalie gasped for breath. She had forgotten to breathe. Her vision went black for an instant, and she collapsed, falling into a crouch; she was forced to steady herself with one hand. She sat like that for a moment, perfectly still, as the blood returned.

  As everything returned.

  She stood up again on shaking legs. She pressed on, in.

  No one lived here, apparently. And no one seemed to have inhabited the house after them. She didn’t know if that felt natural or just sad. An ash tree had twisted its fingers in through Nathalie’s old bedroom window; the blackberry bush in front blocked the entire kitchen window. And out in the garden—could it be?—was the family’s old Volvo, the black one.

  She cautiously approached the car. One window was broken. The seats were ripped up and full of trash and twigs; apparently feral cats had used it as shelter from the wind and weather.

  She was bombarded by fragments of memories. Mum and Dad, it was like they were still here, like they still existed here. She could see them moving through the garden. Pale and light as air, like weightless figures, but still present. In and out of the house, a window opening, a door closing.

  She thought about her old life; it felt so foreign and yet so close. She thought of winter, skis on the roof of the car. Summer, with sweaty, sticky legs and a melting popsicle in her hand, on the way to the swimming spot. The expanse of the backseat, and her longing for a sister to sit beside her. Her dad at the wheel, her mum constantly turning around to check on her. Her short blonde hair. Her lively eyes.

  The car was still here. Had always been here. As if it were waiting for her.

  It was to the car she had fled when everything happened. First she called the emergency number and then she went out to sit in the Volvo, where the police eventually found her.

  Now the back door gave a screech and dropped from its mountings when she opened it; it fell to hang askew.

  Each movement ached inside her; every breath carved deeper and deeper down. She cautiously got into the car, brushing away a few twigs, and sat down with a hard thud.

  The buzzing in her ears. The present, drained of air; time, leaking, struggling for breath. She fell against the backrest, closed her eyes, and let her surroundings inspect her. The cats prowling around, the insects crawling over her legs. The wind nosing at her.

  She must have fallen asleep, because the knocking woke her up. Knocking, blessedly real, from living hands against solid material in the physical world.

  A face. She recognized him immediately.

  “Göran,” she whispered.

  He had his hand on the roof of the car and nearly had to bend over double to see in. His hair had gone gray and his face was furrowed, but his eyes were the same. Sharp, warm. Welcoming.

  “Nathalie,” he said. “I’ll be damned. I wondered when you would be coming back.”

  THREE

  Bog bodies, that’s what they were called—people who had been buried in bogs during the Iron Age, and whose skin, hair, fingernails, innards and clothes had been spared, to varying degrees, from decompositi
on.

  Back in those days, it was typical for the dead to be burned. So the question was, why were some people apparently exempted from that norm? One common theory was that they had been sacrificed to the gods to bring prosperity in some form, or at least to keep bad luck at arm’s length. Other theories said that they had committed a crime or a sin against the values of the time—infidelity or perhaps homosexuality. But the science was insufficient and in certain cases these assumptions were based more on guesswork and biases than on research.

  What was certain was that bogs had, throughout time, been surrounded by an enigmatic, mystical air and thus made a natural site for rituals and communication with the spirit world. In more recent times, bogs were considered the perfect burial place for outcasts—a nutrient-poor, unusable place at the edge of both society and the public consciousness, and, more importantly, a place people seldom had reason to visit.

  One priest in medieval Germany even spoke of the marshy wetlands as hell itself and consequently refused to bury a man who had drowned in a bog. He who is taken by the bog stands hand in hand with the devil, he argued.

  After doing quite a bit of research on her own, Maya arranged to meet Samantha Olofsson, an archeologist at the Museum of Cultural History in Karlstad where the Lingonberry Girl rested. Maya had introduced herself on the phone and told it like it was: she was an artist who was interested in the bog as a site of mystery, and especially in bog bodies as a historical phenomenon.

  The museum was down by the water and consisted of a Falu-red addition beside the severe, temple-like original building. It wasn’t far from the former dance restaurant Sandgrund, where, these days, the artist Lars Lerin exhibited his own work and that of others.