But enough! I can’t keep it in any longer—I must tell you the big news! (Unless Mother has already told you? No, I’m sure she wouldn’t have, she never writes about anything interesting.)
We have a new pastor!
I’m sure your first question will be why that would ever be news: everyone knows Einar’s a drunk, and it’s actually rather odd that he’s been able to stay on as long as he has here. Mother gets angry at me whenever I mention it, says that he’s a man of God and that we shouldn’t speak ill of others, but it’s only gotten worse these last years. Lena told me her father saw Einar asleep on the road a few weeks ago, and he’d forgotten to put on any pants! Surely it can’t be speaking ill of someone if it’s the truth?
But that’s beside the point. What makes it such big news is not only that we have a new pastor, but that no one knew he was coming! Up here everybody normally knows everything about anything (a few days ago, Albert at the pharmacy asked me how you’re doing in your new apartment!), but this came out of nowhere!
I’d already heard about him from Mother, who met him last week, but I thought the new kid she was talking about was some sort of assistant, not a new priest. Everyone was whispering and murmuring as they came into church. Last Sunday Einar had done the sermon, hissing and grumbling like a smokestack as usual, but for the advent service yesterday he just sat there nice and quiet in the front pew, while Pastor Mattias took to the lectern.
He’s so dashing! Oh, forgive me, Margareta, can I say such a thing about a priest? It’s the truth! He looks like a film star, with thick blond hair and light eyes. They’re gray as fog, and his eyelashes are long and dark like a girl’s. He isn’t so tall—Mother’s almost taller than him—but nor am I, so that suits me rather well.
Anyway, he said that he’s been sent here from Stockholm, to help Einar serve the parish in these difficult times, and that he’s looking forward to getting to know Silvertjärn. When he started his sermon, it was so beautiful. You know I’ve never been so good at listening when Einar talks (nor are you, for that matter!), but today I was completely mesmerized. His voice was so beautiful, soft and smooth as silk, and he spoke calmly and quietly, so everyone had to concentrate to hear him. You could have heard a pin drop! He spoke about the kingdom of heaven, but not like Einar usually does—about flappy angels and golden gates—but about heaven as a feeling. About creating heaven here on earth. It was so wonderful it gave me goose bumps.
And then he even came up to greet us afterward, when we were on our way out. (That was when I noticed his eyelashes!) He and Mother had something to discuss about some sick old lady, but he said hello to me, too, and looked into my eyes as he took my hand. And oh, Margareta, it had me blushing from head to toe! It was so embarrassing. But he didn’t mention it, he just smiled and told me he thinks Aina is a beautiful name. He said it means “beauty” in Hebrew, can you imagine? I felt like I could have fainted!
Pastor Mattias said he’s going to set up a small Bible group for young people, and that it would be great if I could help out. Obviously I said yes! On the way home Mother said it was good I would have something to keep me busy, and that it might do me some good. Oh, Margareta, I’m all aflutter! You must come and visit over Christmas, so that then you can see what I’m talking about. But be warned: you might just fall for him, and then you’ll have to leave Nils, move back here, and marry the new pastor instead!
I have to go now, Mother is calling. Write soon! And lots!
Your little sister, Aina
NOW
Max throws back his head and shouts.
“Hello!”
His voice echoes off the vaulted ceiling and solid walls, as though sliced up, fragmented, by the broken glass in the windows. The station is small but strangely familiar; all Swedish train stations seem to have been built to the same standardized model, apparently even those in mining villages in the middle of nowhere. Tall windows and stone floors, with small benches in the middle of the room to sit and wait.
“Stop,” I say to Max, who looks at me in surprise.
“What?”
I can’t really explain why I want him to be quiet. Tone had understood intuitively in the school.
“Sorry,” I say. “I guess I’m a little tense.”
“No need to apologize,” he says. “Of course you are. I’m impressed at how well you’re keeping it all together.”
I let out a small laugh. If he thinks this is keeping it together then I can only imagine what he was expecting.
It hadn’t taken long for the alcohol to make Tone drowsy and muddle-headed, and she ate hardly any of the food that Emmy made for lunch. Once we’d finished eating, it was Emmy who assumed the role of leader again, posing the question. She directed it at the group, but her eyes never left Tone’s face.
“Do we cut and run?”
Max has walked over to the door leading out onto the platform. He waves me over.
“Come get a load of this,” he says. “You’ll probably want a few pictures.”
I stride across the dirty floor, feeling the rubble crackle under my boots as I step on the split flagstones. This afternoon light is softer than the sharp glare of morning.
Max has stepped through the doors and down onto the platform.
“Be careful,” I say.
The platform is made of concrete slabs, which, like the steps up to the school, have cracked and started to crumble. There are two cast-iron benches next to the station walls, both of which so rusted that they’re barely more than reddish-ocher husks.
I take a few pictures, the camera unfamiliar and unwieldy in my hands, then look up when I hear Max jump down onto the brushwood lining the tracks.
There’s something instinctively unpleasant about seeing someone standing on railway tracks, even though I know no train has pulled into this station in more than fifty years.
Still, it’s easy to picture the station full of people: bored kids bickering while waiting for the train; women dressed in their Sunday best to travel south to see relatives; my grandmother, impossibly young at eighteen, on her way to Stockholm to start a new life.
And, later: unemployed men with nowhere else to go, trying to drink away the uncertainty of their futures, only to wind up asleep on the hard station benches.
Raising his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, Max looks over at where the tracks disappear into the forest.
“Crazy to think this was their only way in and out of town,” he says.
I sit down on the edge of the platform. Max holds out his hand and helps me down, but I land clumsily even with his support.
“They did have the road, too,” I say, lifting the camera to my eyes again.
Through the lens the tracks look so distant, the forest almost an age away. The fading light makes the rust on the tracks shimmer, picking out the few pink buds that have started to shoot up amid the heather.
Max is wrong: it’s not pictures I want of this place so much as moving images; to attempt to capture the stillness of it all, the unnatural silence. To let the camera linger while the absence of any sound makes the viewer aware of their own breaths, their own heartbeats. To make them feel like they’re here in Silvertjärn with us, give them the same prickle along their spines that I feel as I stand here.
I turn and take a few quick shots of the station façade. With its rounded cornices and sand-colored stucco, it looks like a gingerbread house that’s been left to the elements.
“At least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about,” I add. “We can get out of here whenever we want.” The words leave a sour taste in my mouth.
Max hears what I want to say. He knows me that well, at least.
“Tone said she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” he says, his tone of voice clearly meant to sound calming. “She said she wants to stay.”
“Yeah,” I say. “So she said.”
But her eyes had been heavy from the tiredness, pain, and alcohol, and she had looked at me long and hard be
fore she said it. I wish I could say that she hadn’t seen the tension in my face, the quiet prayer in my rib cage.
Truth is, this is the only chance we have at this. We’ve only hired the equipment for five days, and despite the money Max has invested, our budget is already being squeezed. Even if I stayed here, if Max were to drive Tone to the hospital it would mean losing two people for at least twenty-four hours. And going from five people to three would bring the production to its knees. We would never be able to keep to schedule.
Tone knows that, too. And I know she knows. So the razor-sharp relief I felt when she said: “It’s a sprain. Let’s stay,” was tinged with something shameful and ugly.
“It’s just a few days,” says Max. “Tone’s an adult. If it gets any worse, she’ll say.”
“I hope so,” I say, not entirely sure if I mean it.
I climb back up onto the platform and go back inside the station. From here I notice a big clock hanging over the doors out into the village. The hands have stopped at nine minutes past three, and an ugly crack has cleaved the clock face in two. I automatically take a look at my watch—seventeen past five—before taking a picture of the clock on the wall.
“That production girl seems kinda bossy,” says Max behind me, and I turn to look at him.
“Emmy?”
“Yeah,” he says. He squats down on the dusty stone slabs, gets his water bottle out of his rucksack, and takes a big gulp.
“It felt like she was trying to take over,” he goes on, wiping his mouth.
“Really? I thought I was just imagining things,” I say, and Max shakes his head.
“Nope,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
“She’s always been like that,” I can’t help adding. “She just … she likes to be the one calling the shots.”
“Always?” Max asks. “I thought she and the camera guy were just people you’d found for this project?”
Hearing the surprise in his voice, I hesitate. I haven’t talked about Emmy to anyone but Tone—not for many years, at least. But the creeping discomfort I feel in my gut makes me swallow any resistance and say:
“Yeah. Or, they are, but we—I know Emmy from before. That’s how I could get her for this. She’s overqualified, really, she’s done loads of great projects. She has some drama series for C More lined up after this.”
“How do you know each other?” Max asks.
I sigh, rub my forehead with the back of my hand, and sit down on the floor next to him. My pants are going to get filthy, but right now I don’t care.
“We studied together,” I say. The words are sluggish, reluctant. I take a swig out of his water bottle to try to make it easier, to wash the resistance back down.
“She was my best friend,” I say.
The unwelcome, overpowering memories come flooding back. Late nights and early, hungover mornings, in-jokes and peals of laughter. I used to always paint her nails, despite her complaining that she’d only ruin them. And she’d mix drinks for us to take to pre-parties: sour, foaming potions that tasted nothing of alcohol but had me soaring off into the stratosphere after only a few sips.
“You’ve never mentioned her before,” says Max.
“No,” I say. “I guess I haven’t.”
In my first and second years at college, I slept on Emmy’s sofa more than my own bed.
But the third year I don’t remember so well. What I do remember are blackened lights, darkness outside; silent tears streaming down onto the pillow; Emmy making toast and tea, rubbing my back with unpainted nails until I’d fall asleep, exhausted.
“We were very close,” I say, slowly. “I more or less lived with her in the first two years. We were always talking about what we’d do after we graduated, about how we’d work together, revolutionize the Swedish film industry. You know. As you do.”
I swallow again.
“You know that I had … problems … when I was at college.”
I look at him, and he gives a quick nod.
“That I had depression—severe depression.”
The word seems to hulk in my mouth. I hate saying it, hate how it sounds. It’s a shapeless, gray word that implies something sad and pathetic. Someone who’s lost control.
“When it started Emmy was there for me, but she got bored pretty quickly. I guess it can’t have been much fun having a friend who just lay around crying instead of wanting to go out and party. After a while she couldn’t take it. And then…”
The memory tastes bitter, a hum behind my forehead. My eyes start to burn, but I refuse to let it out.
The water coursing under the bridge.
My phone pressed against my ear.
“Please.”
The laughter, the music in the background—“Hjärta,” by Kent:
And by the riverbanks I left my tracks
Wrote my name in the water
So you’d know where I am.
I still can’t listen to that song.
“I tried to kill myself,” I say, quietly, so quiet it’s barely more than a whisper. “I tried to jump off a bridge.”
“Shit,” says Max, softly. He reaches for my hand, but I move it away.
“I called Emmy,” I say, “when I was up there. I called her and asked her to come get me. It was a Friday night. I guess she was at some party.”
I swallow again. My throat is dry as sand.
“She said—” I begin, but then my throat constricts. I force it out, regardless:
“She said she didn’t have the energy anymore,” I say. “That I ‘couldn’t go on like that.’ And then she hung up.”
The last part is virtually a sigh. The tension is still there in my chest, but it feels nice to have gotten the words out, like the lightness you feel in your arms after dropping a dead weight.
Max shakes his head. I shrug.
“So what’s she doing here?” he asks, quietly, without accusing me.
I shake my head.
“We had no other choice,” I say. “We needed someone with Emmy’s skills, someone with production experience. Emmy’s good at editing and directing, and she has contacts. They’re what we need.”
“No, I mean … why did she show up?”
I open my mouth but then close it again.
“I don’t know,” I eventually say. “I assumed she’d turn me down. I’m still surprised she didn’t.”
Max spins a blade of grass between his fingers.
“You could have asked me, you know,” he says, looking at me with wide, shiny eyes. I’m surprised by how thick and dark his eyelashes are. When we first met he used to wear glasses. I guess he must be wearing contacts now. At times I find myself missing those glasses, thick-rimmed and ugly as they were, in the same strange way I find myself missing the traces of acne across his forehead. It’s a sense of loss that isn’t anything to do with him: it’s about me, about that time in my life. About who I was back then—peppy and fresh out of college—and who I am now.
“I know,” I say. “But I didn’t want you to find someone. I can’t come running to you for more money as soon as anything goes wrong. I wanted someone with real skills, someone I knew was good, and whatever my personal feelings about Emmy are, this project is more important. This film is everything to me.”
Grandma’s story, my retelling; Silvertjärn is both my past and my future. I’ve lived with it since I was a child, and it’s going to be my breakthrough. No more receptionist jobs, no more temping. No more sofa-surfing with friends, no more humiliating conversations asking my parents for money to pay my phone bill, even though I’m almost twenty-nine, even though all my old classmates are being offered promotions and raises, getting married and having kids.
The Lost Village is my ticket out of all of that.
Max nods slowly.
“I guess I just don’t get how you can trust her after that,” he says.
“I don’t need to trust her,” I say. “I just need to know that she’ll do her job. And she will. She’s a
pro.”
I swallow down the sudden sourness in my mouth. The languid light is shimmering in the brushwood.
I just wish I could believe what I’m saying myself.
NOW
Night falls soft as a sigh over the village. When Max and I get back to camp sunset has already started to lick its fiery tongues across the sky, and by the time I’ve transferred the photos from the cameras to the laptop the sun is already half-buried under the horizon.
I’m going through the pictures on the laptop while Max gets some food ready. Robert seems determined to help him out; I can hear them mumbling about boiling points and lead levels in food tins. With their red and blond heads hunched over the alcohol stove, they look like two bashful boys sharing their toys in the sandbox.
I smile to myself, then turn my eyes back to my laptop. I’m not expecting to get through all the shots now—I’m saving the bulk of that work for postproduction. I expect I’ll have to work much closer with Emmy then. Before we got here that prospect hadn’t seemed so unworkable, but now, less than twenty-four hours in, I’ve started to wonder if we could outsource some of the more technical stuff. Having her here is triggering things I hadn’t anticipated.
Unfortunately, Emmy is a great director. A little too sure of herself, perhaps, a little too convinced of her own genius, but her belief in her own methods is often well-founded and she’s extremely well-read. The first time I really noticed her was during our second seminar in Dramaturgy I at Stockholm University of the Arts. I’d seen the petite girl with the green eyes, tousled hair, and rocker clothes before, but I hadn’t given her a second thought until I made a comment in class that I felt was both thoughtful and well-reasoned, only to watch in shock as it was cut to shreds by that very same girl. She had a dab of tobacco under her lip and looked as though she’d just rolled out of bed, but she went through what I’d said point by point, making mincemeat of my arguments against the conventional three-act structure.
The Lost Village Page 8