The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

  Samantha Olofsson was around sixty and had white hair like an angel’s halo; she was wearing a substantial white tunic and was obviously eager to share her time and knowledge.

  Maya’s eyes were drawn to her earrings, a large ring of twined filament and leather hanging from each ear. A vulgar take on classic Sami handiwork, she thought.

  Samantha noticed her attention.

  “It’s pewter thread and reindeer hide,” she said, fingering one earring. “Sami crafted.”

  Maya smiled.

  “So, I’d like to begin by asking you a question,” said Samantha. “Do you know of a single culture in the history of the world that didn’t have a relationship to the spirit world?”

  “I guess that would have to be our own culture,” she said. “Since way back.”

  Samantha laughed out loud. “Not really—there is no culture we know of, no people that has lived completely devoid of any such relationship. Humans have always sought contact with another dimension in various ways. To differing degrees, humankind has been guided by the notion of a spirit world; we have made use of prayer and sacrifice. That’s one of the things that unites people through time. The museum’s goal with this display is to give examples of the ways this relationship may have manifested itself in our part of the world during the Iron Age.”

  The display was divided between two dimly lit rooms. A few objects said to be sacrificial gifts were on display in glass cases: a pair of hazel walking sticks, some crumbling ornaments and a clay vessel whose purpose was unknown. Large screens showed illustrations of how the Iron Age people and their surroundings might have looked.

  The Lingonberry Girl was presented in a large case in the far corner of one room. She wasn’t at all what Maya had expected. The body was a puzzle of loosely connected, blackish-gray parts, and it was slightly curled up in a hollow in what was supposed to represent part of a bog. The tissues of her face were practically non-existent. The only remains that were decently well-preserved were her hair, which was swept up on her head; a tattered medium-length brown wool dress with a braided leather belt at the waist; and an oval-shaped gold amulet she had once worn around her neck but which now lay in a case to the side.

  “When it comes to bog bodies, Sweden’s contributions to history are extremely limited,” said Samantha. “In comparison to other important European discoveries, the Lingonberry Girl is just a side note. But in Sweden, she is absolutely unique.”

  The other Swedish bog bodies were from a more recent age—the Bocksten Man in Varberg was from the Middle Ages—or else they were not considered “real” bog bodies, since in most cases only the skeleton was preserved. When the Lingonberry Girl was named, it was with a nod to one such example, the five-thousand-year-old Raspberry Girl who had been found during a peat harvest outside Falköping in 1943. The only surviving “soft parts” in that case were seeds from the sun-ripened raspberries that were assumed to have been her last meal.

  “The Lingonberry Girl was in good shape when she was found,” Samantha said, her face lighting up. “But unfortunately, too much time passed before she was handled properly. This type of find is destroyed by air, you see. The bodies can remain in the ground for thousands of years with no change, but up here they decay in no time. Quick action is crucial.”

  A sturdy oak pole ran through the clothing and remaining body parts, a reconstruction of how the girl was believed to have been pinned down in the earth.

  “It’s likely that poling served the practical function of keeping the body from floating up, but there are more superstitious theories as well,” Samantha said.

  “Such as?” Maya asked.

  “That the pole was meant to keep the buried person from haunting, for instance.”

  “Does that have anything to do with the belief that vampires can be killed by a stake through the heart?” Maya asked.

  “No, there’s nothing to suggest it does.”

  One illustrated image depicted a man and woman helping each other stab a large pole through a dead body that lay in a pit.

  “We’re extremely pleased and proud of our Lingonberry Girl, of course,” Samantha went on. “But as I said, she isn’t much in comparison to what our colleagues in places like Denmark have. Have you been to the museum in Silkeborg? Where the Tollund Man is?”

  Maya shook her head. Samantha sighed again and looked at the Lingonberry Girl.

  “Come on,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  She led Maya to a small office, pulled down the blinds, and turned on a projector. A square of light appeared on a screen on the facing wall.

  And then Samantha told her the stories of the Grauballe Man and the Huldremose Woman, her voice so full of passion that it could almost be mistaken for bliss.

  She told Maya about the Tollund Man, whose millimeter of stubble was still intact after more than two thousand years, and about the teenage Windeby Girl who had been found in a bog in southern Schleswig, Germany, in 1952. She had a band of braided wool over her eyes; it had been tied so tightly that it carved into the bridge of her nose and the back of her neck. At first it was believed that the left side of her head had been shaved by a sharp knife—a sign of shame, they assumed.

  “Many people felt that she had been killed following a crime of infidelity,” Samantha whispered in the darkness. “That this child was taken into the bog with her head shaved and her eyes blindfolded, and drowned there.”

  A few days after the Windeby Girl was dug up, another body was found just a few meters away—the body of a man. The discovery was thought to support the infidelity theory, that the two of them had been lovers whose story came to a brutal end. Part of the reason for this was that German archeology at the time was influenced by Nazi ideology. With SS commander Heinrich Himmler at the helm, the German bog bodies were held up as evidence that Germanic people had always purged socially deviant individuals.

  Later research showed, however, that the girl was in fact a boy, and the two “sinners” hadn’t even lived during the same century. Perhaps the blindfold was a hair band that had slipped down, and maybe the “shaved hair” had in fact disintegrated.

  “But exactly what makes it possible for so much to be preserved so well?” Maya wondered.

  “It’s partly because a bog is oxygen-deficient, which prevents bacterial decay. But a bog is also acidic. When sphagnum dies, it releases a substance that transforms into a brown humic acid, which binds calcium and nitrogen, among other things.”

  She brushed a silvery lock of hair out of her face.

  “When the calcium is leached out of a dead body, the bacteria that cause decay can no longer use it to reproduce. And in the long term, the binding of nitrogen causes the skin to be tanned in a series of complex chemical reactions. Beyond that,” she said, taking a deep breath, “we can say that there are basically three crucial factors: the temperature in the bog must not exceed four degrees Celsius when the body winds up there—if it does, the body will begin to decompose immediately. The body must also lie deep enough so wild animals can’t reach it, and it must immediately be covered with peat.”

  Samantha smiled and nodded as if to confirm the information she had just shared.

  “And then there’s the fact that the specific conditions are different everywhere. No one bog is exactly like any other.”

  “No, of course,” Maya said. “But why is the Lingonberry Girl a ‘side note,’ or whatever you called it?”

  “I suppose because she’s neither well-preserved nor restored, but there are other explanations as well.”

  Then she told Maya that most bodies had been discovered during the post-war period when the lack of coal and other energy sources led to the increased harvesting of peat. The bodies were often initially mistaken for current-day homicide victims: in one case in England, a man had confessed to murdering his missing wife when he was confronted with a body that had been discovered, though that corpse had later turned out to be over two thousand years old.

>   Later on, as peat became less important as an energy source, and as manual harvesting gave way to mechanical peat-cutting, the number of discoveries—and the interest surrounding them—dwindled as well.

  “By the time the Lingonberry Girl was found at the start of the twenty-first century, the interest in bog bodies had fallen off considerably.” Samantha’s voice grew deeper as she looked at Maya through the dim light. “But of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t more corpses out there. Maybe it just means that they haven’t been found yet.”

  Not much had changed in Göran Dahlberg’s home. It was bohemian and full of trinkets, but it was still neat and clean.

  The living room was open to the rafters and the walls were covered in books. Two fans turned lazily on the ceiling. One corner contained a sofa and a dark leather easy chair. The wooden blinds were lowered halfway down the large windows.

  “I always did like being here,” Nathalie said as she sat down in the chair.

  “I liked having you here.”

  They didn’t speak for a moment.

  “I missed you a lot,” Göran said. “I missed you the most.”

  “I thought about coming many times,” she lied.

  Göran waved this off with one hand. “I understand why you wouldn’t want to set foot here.”

  It felt like she was standing at the edge of an abyss. As if something had carried her here while she slept, and that she was only now waking up to see the depths before her.

  What am I doing here? she thought. How am I supposed to handle this?

  “But you stayed, all these years?” she said instead.

  “I’m the one who bought your house. Maybe you knew that?”

  She shook her head. Harriet had told her that eighty thousand kronor showed up in her account after the sale, but she had never bothered to find out who the new owner was.

  “Why? Why did you want the house?”

  “I just couldn’t imagine someone else living there. I decided I would rather watch the place fall down. Hope that doesn’t seem strange to you.”

  “I… I don’t care,” she managed. “I truly don’t care. I’ve moved on. I really have. I moved on right away.”

  “And yet I just found you in the car?” Göran said, with a gaze that saw right through her. “How are you doing these days?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I’m thinking about some stuff. Things I haven’t been able to let go of, after all.”

  It was a peculiar feeling, sitting in the home of her old neighbor as a grown woman. She would have preferred to find that everything was in the past, that it was all gallons of water under the bridge of her childhood. But now it seemed rather the opposite. As she sat there in Göran’s house, she realized that instead all the water had been frozen, just waiting to thaw, waiting for her to stick her feet into it again.

  She told him about her education in biology and the dissertation she was currently working on.

  “Wetlands,” he said with a small smile. “Interesting choice of subject for someone from these parts.”

  She smiled uncertainly, not quite sure she understood what he meant, but she told him about the cottage she was renting at Quagmire Manor.

  Somehow she could sense the question hanging in the air above them, invisible. Neither wanted to touch on it, because both knew what it might mean.

  “He’s not the first,” Göran said at last.

  “Who?”

  “You know who I mean. The man whose life you saved.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I talk to people, Nathalie. And I read the papers. I put two and two together. He’s not the first,” he repeated, his voice grave. “And you know it.”

  Nathalie looked at him.

  “He was lucky,” Göran said. “You found him. But there are a lot of people who have vanished here since you left.”

  He looked out the window without saying anything for a moment, then went on. “More than usual, in fact.”

  Just as Maya got in her car to leave the museum, her phone chimed. It was a text from Tom. He thanked her for the day before and quoted art critic John Berger.

  The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

  To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

  She closed the text and decided she would have to remember to answer later, when she wasn’t as tired.

  They had spent a few nights together—always the same set-up. He came to her house around six and left his car there, and they took a walk over to Slaughterhouse, a restaurant just beyond the factory area.

  The restaurant only had five tables, and it was in a newly renovated hotel that had previously been a slaughterhouse, which was how the restaurant got its name. The functional industrial style was reflected in every detail of the décor, and there was only one item on the menu: a vegetarian dish, as if in response to the history of the building.

  They stuffed themselves full and drank themselves drunk, became absorbed in some metaphysical discussion, walked home. He had spent the night each time. It had been nice, no question, but an invisible veil of expectation had begun to settle over everything. Their sexual encounters had become increasingly strained and uninspired.

  It pained her a little to see how much effort he was expending to keep what was happening from happening. How much he was struggling to stop their relationship from losing its spark, even though that only made everything worse. He had started to seem servile, and his intellectual sharpness lost its rigor as it turned into chewed-over bait he tossed out time and again with the aim of getting her to stay, keeping her from swimming to fresher waters.

  Yesterday’s conversation had revolved around Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism. She didn’t recall whether they had reached any substantial conclusions, but she was still a little exhilarated about the meal: a large bowl of roasted red sweetheart cabbage stuffed with goat’s cheese, deliciously spiced spinach and chopped walnuts. Dessert had been blackcurrant parfait followed by an aged cognac from France, which the restaurateur had purchased on a personal visit the summer before.

  Now she was driving home, her thoughts elsewhere. The radio was playing Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina. First came the dull tones of the prelude, then two minutes of notes composed with absolute perfection. The silence between the notes was the important part; the space between musical molecules, the fraught emptiness.

  Pärt’s music embodied what every form of gifted art sprang from: serene presence. Timeless being. The space deep down in every human—the part that found itself reflected in the silence between the tones in Pärt’s compositions.

  She thought of it as nothing.

  Of what was nothing, not what was nothing. A keen void that could be likened to openness rather than desertedness. Which was everything. And nothing. All at once. A single life-force of space that expressed itself through constantly shifting shapes in the physical world and which clearly possessed both humor and a fondness for variety—after all, there were three hundred and fifty thousand different types of beetle. Some of them rolled balls of dung with their hind legs as they moved forward; others had big horns on their foreheads or antennae that looked like feathers.

  So, as she saw it, these physical expressions were only the outermost layer of reality, a shifting veil of illusory variety that concealed the true, fundamental unity of reality. Within Hindu mysticism, this veil was called maya, and it was from this concept that she had chosen her artist name, which soon came to completely replace her given name, Magdalena.

  She thought of the physical forms she had just witnessed at the museum. The bog bodies. Which had lain there in layers of earth while eras shifted above them. Which were now on display in airtight cases, as empty of life as they were protected from mortality. It became so obvious
that this was not what a human was at the most basic level.

  That was how she felt every time she saw a dead body. And every time she met grieving family and friends, she wanted to shout: But wait, you don’t understand—only the body is dead! And at the same time, the care bestowed upon this particular body, this particular flicker in eternity, as holy as every other form around us that rises and falls, that flares up and goes dark.

  If only we knew how we shine.

  When she returned home, dusk was not far off. She stepped out of the car and walked slowly through the garden. Both chestnuts had dropped all their broad leaves in just a few days, creating an enormous golden blanket. She observed the ground for a long time, wondering whether she should let the leaves rot where they lay or ask someone to take care of them. Having a house and garden was a new experience for her. There were many things she wasn’t prepared for.

  She sat down on a long, worn wooden bench that stood along one side of the house, thinking of all the workers who had probably sat there throughout the years, maybe taking a break in the sunshine before returning to the workshop. She twisted the ring she wore on one middle finger, back and forth, back and forth. A friend had given it to her many years ago; it was a thin silver snake that coiled around her finger and then extended upward, toward her knuckle.

  The snake has bitten you, Maya. You’ll never be the same again. Now you will become who you are, who you have always been.

  She felt herself opening up, her brain starting to rest as impressions from the day began to flow through her, stories of soft ground and hard blows; she could almost hear the sound echoing through her without knowing why, where it came from, what it wanted to tell her. She just heard the blows ringing through her body.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  In the next instant, realization spread out like sunlight in a glade.

  The pole.

  When she was out taking photographs, she had tripped over something sticking out of the bog and fallen headlong into the dampness. It hadn’t quite seemed like a branch or a root; it had been more substantial.