Maria Eleonora had refused to let go. She visited the body again and again, keeping it company the entire length of the journey from Germany. When she was eventually pried away she had managed to acquire the heart (it irritated Elvy greatly that Grimberg never explained how she acquired it) and threatened them with it in order to gain access to the body once again…
‘Which she ponders, showers with marks of honour and caresses, with no regard for the fact that it blackens and decays, almost beyond the point of recognition,’ as a Swedish diplomat wrote during the funereal journey.
Elvy had lowered the book and reflected on this. The difference of views. If the king had arisen from his coffin the jubilant queen would most likely have taken his rotting flesh into her arms. Why was it so different? Was it Elvy who was heartless?
A kind of explanation was to be found several pages on. Maria Eleanora had had a double coffin prepared, with spaces for the dead monarch and herself. Her motive for this was that she had ‘so little enjoyed’ the king during his life. Now that he was dead she wished to take full advantage.
This was a problem that Elvy did not share. She had been able to ‘enjoy’ Tore plenty during his life. This man ten years her senior who had been kind enough to take a hysterical woman in matrimony, to care for her and lead her through life without ever understanding her-she had simply seen enough of him by the time he gave up the ghost. She harboured little animosity-he had done the best he could-but she was done.
Calmed by this thought, she put the book down and tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t come. At half past four she had to get up and sit on the toilet for
half an hour and when she lay down again the bedroom was getting light. She let the blinds down, took a couple of sleeping pills and finally managed to nod off. She floated in and out of sleep until it was past eleven, at which point she woke up properly, energetic and full of anticipation.
Until she looked at the news.
Hardly a word was said about anything of significance. It was as if it did not exist. From time to time, some minister or bishop was allowed to say a few words, and what did they speak about?
Anxious relatives, the church hotline, the anguish many people felt in this kind of situation, blah blah.
Elvy felt no anguish. She was furious.
Statistics, images of the night’s exhumations. They had dug up almost all of the relevant graves by now, and some extras (people who had been dead longer than two months and had predictably remained dead); the number of reliving was close to two thousand.
The Prime Minister had landed a little while ago and was accosted immediately at Arlanda by the reporters. In order to stress the gravity of the situation, he removed his glasses, stared nakedly into the cameras and said:
‘Our nation. Is in a state of shock. I hope that everyone. Will help. Not to make the situation. Worse than it already is. I. And my government. Will do everything. In our power. To give these people. The care. That they need.
‘But let us not forget…’
His index finger went up and the Prime Minister looked around with an expression that approximated sorrow. Elvy tensed her entire body and leaned closer to the television. It was coming. Finally. The Prime Minister said, ‘We shall all go down this road one day. Nothing separates these people. From us.’
He thanked everyone and a path was made for him to get to the waiting car. Elvy’s jaw dropped.
Not even him…
She knew that the Prime Minister knew his Bible, he liked to borrow sayings from it. So the disappointment that now, in this hour of need, he hadn’t so much as nodded towards the Holy Book was all the worse. When it was actually appropriate.
We shall all follow this road one day…
Elvy snapped off the TV and spoke out loud. ‘What a damned… clown!’
She paced through the house, so upset that she didn’t know what to do with herself. In the guest room she took out the copied psalms, spotted with Tore’s fluids, crumpled them up and threw them in the bin. Then she called Hagar.
Of all her friends from church, Hagar was most on the ball. Over the past twelve years the two of them, along with Agnes, had done the coffee for the Saturday meetings and taken turns providing the cake. Since Agnes had been stricken with sciatica and become less active, it had mainly been Elvy and Hagar who kept things going these last three years.
Hagar picked up on the second ring.
‘612-1926!’
Elvy had to hold the receiver away from her ear since Hagar, who
was slightly deaf, was almost screaming into the telephone.
‘It’s me.’
‘Elvy! There has been something wrong with your…’
‘Yes, I know. Have you…’
‘Tore! Has he…’
‘Yes.’
‘Come back…’
‘Yes. Yes.’
There was silence for a moment. Then Hagar said, a little lower, ‘I see. Home to you, then?’
‘Yes. But they came for him. It’s not that. Did you see the news?’
‘Of course. All morning. It’s completely incredible. Was it awful?’
‘With Tore? Yes, a little in the beginning perhaps, but… it went well. It’s not that. Did you… did you see the Prime Minister?’
‘Yes,’ Hagar said, sounding as if she had bitten into something sour. ‘What about him?’
Elvy softly shook her head, forgetting that Hagar could not see her gesture. She stared at a little icon hanging in the hallway, and said slowly, ‘Hagar. Are you thinking what I’m thinking about this?’
‘About what?’
‘About what’s happening.’
‘The Resurrection?’
Elvy smiled. She had known she could count on Hagar. She nodded at the icon-Jesus as the ruler of the world-and said, ‘Yes, exactly. They aren’t even talking about it.’
‘No,’ Hagar’s volume went up again. ‘It’s despicable! To think it’s come to this!’
They spoke for several minutes in complete accord and hung up with a vague promise to do something, without having discussed what that was.
Elvy felt a little better. She was not alone in what she was thinking. There were probably others. She walked up to the balcony window and looked out, as if searching for them, the others who realised what all this was about. She caught sight of something else, something she had not seen in several weeks: clouds.
These were not the fluffy summer clouds that serve only to emphasise the blueness of the sky. No, these were strong thunder clouds, gliding so slowly in dark banks that they appeared immobile. She felt a tingle in her stomach. Was this it? Was this how it was going to look?
She wandered around over the house for a while, yawning and trying to prepare herself. She did not know how to prepare.
Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.
There was nothing to do. She sat down in the reading chair and looked up Matthew 24 since she had forgotten the rest of the passage. She became frightened by what she read.
For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.
She saw concentration camps, she saw Flora.
But for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.
There was no mention of pain and suffering in a regular sense. Only tribulation greater than what has come before. A way of suffering that we have not yet experienced. But perhaps that was the Swedish translation. The original might speak unequivocally of purely physical, unbearable pangs. Elvy’s lids grew heavy.
Perhaps in the original translation… Septuagintan… forty monks in forty rooms… one hundred monkeys at one hundred typewriters for one hundred years…
Elvy’s thoughts drifted away in an unruly mishmash of images and she nodded off where she was sitting, her chin on her chest.
She was awakened by the television tur
ning on.
The insides of her eyelids turned orange and when she opened her eyes the light from the TV screen was so blinding that she had to close them again. The television glowed like a small sun and she opened her eyes tentatively, squinting.
As she grew accustomed to the intense light she saw that there was a central figure around which the brightness billowed. Or else the rays were streaming out from the figure itself. The woman. Elvy recognised her immediately; trepidation welled up in her chest.
The woman wore a dark blue shawl over black hair, and in her eyes one could discern the grief of someone who had just seen her child die. Who had stood at the foot of the cross and seen them prise the nails from her son’s hands with a crowbar. The curved, stiffened fingers that had once been small, and eager for her breast. The grinding of metal pressed through wood, the hands shredded. And everything lost.
Elvy whispered, ‘Holy Virgin… ‘ and did not dare to look. Because suddenly she understood what it meant, tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world. It was what could be read in Mary’s eyes. The suffering of a mother confronted with her dead child-and that child the sum of all goodness. Not simply the pain of watching the child that you have nursed and cherished be tortured and executed, but the suffering, too, that there is a world in which such things happen.
From the corner of her eye Elvy saw Mary spread her arms in a gesture of welcome. Elvy was on her way up out of the chair in order to kneel on
the ground but Mary said, ‘You can sit, Elvy.’
The voice was light, almost a whisper. No great thundering voice from beyond the heavens; rather a beggar girl’s shy plea for a spare coin, something to eat.
‘You can sit, Elvy.’
Mary knew her name, and in the words there was a hint of the knowledge that Elvy had been running and working all her life, that she now deserved to sit for a while. Elvy dared to glance quickly at the screen and saw that tiny stars glittered on the tips of Mary’s fingers. Or drops of water, tears wiped from her eyes.
‘Elvy,’ Mary said. ‘A task awaits you.’
‘Yes,’ Elvy whispered, without any sound being heard.
‘They must come to me. Their only salvation is to come to me. You must make them understand.’
This had occurred to Elvy, and even in the gravity of the moment she saw her neighbours-people, hard eyes, her approaches rebuffed-and she asked, ‘How? How will I get them to listen?’
For one second she stared straight into Mary’s eyes and was filled with terror. For in them she saw the suffering that would befall mankind if it did not repent, seek redemption in her arms. Mary held out her hand, said, ‘This shall be your sign.’
Something touched Elvy’s forehead. The television went off. She fell sideways on the chair and her head exploded.
The edge of the glass table was pressed against her forehead when she opened her eyes. Her head hurt. Dizzy, she straightened up on the chair, looking at the table. There was a smear of red on the corner. Several drops of blood had fallen on the rug.
The television was dark, quiet.
She stood on shaky legs and walked out into the hall, looked in the mirror.
A cut, completely level, three centimetres long but shallow, ran like a minus sign across her forehead above her eyebrows. Blood still welled thickly from the wound and she wiped a drop from her eye.
She blotted the rest of the blood away in the kitchen with a wad of paper towel. She could not bring herself to throw it away, so she placed it in a glass jar, screwed on the lid.
Then she called Hagar.
While the phone rang, she closed her eyes and saw Mary before her. There was one thing she did not understand. When Mary reached out her hand to touch her forehead, Elvy had momentarily glimpsed what it was that glittered on the tips of her fingers. It was hooks. Tiny, thin ones, no larger than ordinary fishing hooks were sticking out of her flesh.
In a way that she could not fully articulate she was convinced that Mary was only an image, created for her human eyes. She was a representation in the form of the Holy Mother. But the hooks? What did the hooks mean?
When Hagar answered, Elvy pushed these questions aside and began to relate the greatest moment of her life.
Koholma 13.30
Anna lifted the bags out of the boot as Mahler disappeared into the house. She carried them across the yard, past the pine tree where Elias’ swing was wrapped around the trunk, past the outdoor table that was dry and cracked from having been out in the weather all year. She stopped there and put the bags down. She stood still, taking stock of the situation.
How had this happened? How had she been reduced to some kind of servant while her father took care of what had been her child?
The heat was oppressive in a way that foretold thunder. She looked up at the sky. Yes. The sky was covered with a paper-thin white membrane and from inland a dark mass of clouds was moving toward the coast. It was as if all of nature was trembling with anticipation. The grasses conferenced in whispers about the mercy that was about to pour from the heavens.
She felt dizzy, almost nauseated. For over a month she had lived in a vacuum, restricting her movements, her speech, to a minimum so as not to attract attention from life and allow it to start tearing and clawing at her. For over a month she had been as good as dead.
And then, suddenly: Elias back, the police poking around, flight and action, talk and decisions. She could not decide. Her father made her decisions. She had slipped out of the picture.
Anna left the bags where they were and walked into the forest.
Last year’s dried leaves crunched underfoot, the shallow roots of pine trees protruded out of the turf, pressed up into the bottoms of her feet. The rumbling from Kapellskar hovered in the forest like an anxiety. She walked aimlessly down toward the boggy areas closer to the sea.
There was a tangy smell of sun-cooked pine needles and thickly layered sludge when she reached the open, moss-covered expanse. Even the moss, which was normally a bright green from the moisture of the wetland
had dried up and become light green, beige in places. When she walked on it, it crackled until her foot sank into the mossy underlayers, as if she was walking on crusty snow.
She waded out toward the centre. The deciduous trees that encircled the bog raised their crowns into a cupola, pierced in places by the sun. She lay down when she reached the centre. The moss accepted her, welled up around her. She stared up at the lazy movements in the lattice of foliage, and disappeared.
How long had she lain there? Half an hour? An hour?
She would have stayed longer if her father’s voice had not called her home.
‘Anna… Aaannaa!’
She stood up from the bog’s embrace, but did not answer. She was too preoccupied with the feeling that had taken up residence in her body, especially her skin. She looked back at the place where she had lain. The contours of her body were clearly visible in the moss, which was now-with an almost audible groan-resuming its old form.
She had changed her skin. That was how she felt. What she was looking for was her old skin which should be lying there wrinkled and used up in the mossy depression.
It wasn’t to be found, but the feeling was so strong that she had to pull up the sleeve of her T-shirt and check if the tattoo was still there.
Yes. Bad to the bone was still etched on her right shoulder in tiny block letters. Some kind of pride had forced her to keep it instead of having laser removal, even though it was twelve years since she had severed contact with the world to which the tattoo belonged.
‘Aannaaa!’
She walked to the edge of the bog and cried, ‘Here I am!’
Mahler stopped where the moss began, as if it were quicksand. He put his hands on his hips.
‘Where have you been?’
Anna pointed out to the centre. ‘There.’
Mahler frowned and looked out at the depression in the moss. ‘I’ve carried everything inside,’ he said.<
br />
‘Good,’ Anna answered and walked past him towards the house. He walked behind her, his hand brushing off her back.
‘Look at you,’ he said.
She didn’t answer. Her steps across the roots were feather light. There was something delicate and precious in her that might shatter if she spoke. They walked silently toward the house and she was grateful that he did not start to explain her own behaviour to her, as he had done when she was younger; that he let her be.
On the table next to Elias’ bed there was a packet of dextrose, salt, a jug of water and a measuring cup, two syringes.
Anna could not see any change. Mahler had spread a clean, white sheet over Elias whose old-man hands rested at his sides, two shrivelled bird claws. She was looking at a corpse. The corpse of her son. Maybe something could be changed if only he wanted to open his eyes and look at her. But under the half-closed lids there was only that hint of lifeless plastic, like a dried contact lens. Nothing.
Maybe there was a way back. Her father seemed to think so. But in that case the way was so long that she could not imagine its start, far less its
end. Elias had died. A shadow of him lay here, but nothing of the boy she had loved, of whom she held memories she wanted to cherish unspoiled.
Mahler came in and stood next to her. ‘I gave him sugar solution with the syringe. He drank some.’
Anna nodded, and crouched down next to the bed.
‘Elias? Elias? Your mummy is here.’
Elias did-not move one millimetre. Nothing indicated that he heard her. The delicate stuff inside her contracted, became dislodged, and the black grief towered up inside her chest. She quickly got up and left the room. The kitchen smelled of freshly brewed coffee and everything fell back into place.
She would take care of him. She would do what she could. But she was not going to entertain for one second the notion that she was going to get her boy back, did not intend to imagine in any way that her son was buried inside that mummified form somewhere, struggling to get out. That would break her for sure; that would hurt too much.
Handling The Undead Page 15