The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  Elsa leans against the basin and, for the first time, allows herself to feel her exhaustion. Her knees are almost shaking, her hands are sore and tender, and tears she doesn’t remember crying have left salty trails down her cheeks.

  “Here,” says Ingrid. Her voice sounds just as flat as Elsa feels, and when she walks over to the basin to fill a chipped pewter mug with water, Elsa notices that her skin is sallow and droops from her face. Her normally so neatly curled hair is straggly and damp with sweat, and all she is wearing is a vest and slip.

  It’s only when Elsa looks down at herself that she notices that she has taken off her cardigan and shoes, too. It must have happened at some point in the last few hours. Bruises have started to blossom down her left arm. During the worst of the labor pains Birgitta had started to flail and struggle; she must have hit Elsa when she tried to hold her to calm her down.

  Elsa drinks in large gulps. The water tastes flat and metallic.

  The twilight that has started to sneak in through the windows colors everything a mild blue. Birgitta is still curled up on her side on the bed. Her face is turned away, and her hair is a bird’s nest of dirt and sweat. She isn’t making any noise now; perhaps she has fallen asleep.

  Dagny is standing over by one of the windows. The light behind her throws her silhouette into sharp relief. You can barely see the baby in her arms.

  She’s beautiful; a perfectly formed little girl with thick, dark hair, albeit slightly smaller than what Elsa remembers her own as being. She has the cloudy blue eyes and strangely shaped head of a newborn, and she had showed off a good set of lungs when Ingrid had clapped her on the behind.

  Elsa had held her while Ingrid cut the umbilical cord. Neither of them are doctors, but in the past Ingrid has helped Silvertjärn girls in childbirth, if the doctor wouldn’t make it in time. Elsa has never been present at any other deliveries than her own, and had she imagined being at one, she would have thought it would be Margareta’s, or even Aina’s, one day.

  A bustling sound swells outside the window. At first it’s so quiet that it scarce seems real, but then, slowly but steadily, it grows. Words begin to emerge from the mass, from the hymn rising over the village. It breaks the flat spell that has settled over all of them.

  Dagny looks up from the baby. The girl has started to whimper slightly at the sound of the congregation’s evensong. Perhaps, tiny as she is, even she understands the danger.

  Dagny looks terrified, as though she’s been caught out. From the look on her face, Elsa can tell she won’t be of much help.

  Ingrid straightens up. Her glasses have started to slide off her nose, but she pushes them back up with the back of her hand. She looks Elsa in the eye, then at the curled-up figure on the bed by the far wall.

  “What shall we do?” Ingrid asks.

  The helplessness that hits Elsa in that moment is like nothing she has ever felt before. The apparently unending hymn seems to be whispering, intimating to them that it’s hopeless, that there’s nothing they can do. The congregation is so great, and they are so few, and Birgitta can’t even help herself. Even less so the tiny, new human lying in Dagny’s arms.

  “We must try to get them out of here,” says Elsa. “Away from the pastor and his congregation. Away from Silvertjärn.”

  Ingrid nods. She doesn’t ask how they will manage any such thing, nor does she need to; she knows Elsa is wondering the same thing.

  Dagny looks back down at the girl she is holding in her arms. Her face has relaxed slightly, and she is rocking her gently, lulling her softly to quieten her down. In her eyes Elsa thinks she can make out a trace of a longing that Dagny has buried deep within.

  “We must give her a name,” says Dagny.

  Ingrid looks over at Birgitta again.

  “Do you think she can name the child?” she asks Elsa quietly.

  Elsa shakes her head. “I’m not even sure if she understands it’s her daughter,” she says with a heavy heart.

  “How about Kristina?” Dagny asks suddenly. “Isn’t that what her mother’s name was?”

  “Yes,” Elsa says, “it was.”

  Elsa mostly remembers Kristina as she was in her final days, tired and bloated. The fear in her strained, red face, and then the relief once Elsa had promised to look after Birgitta.

  But she has failed her. Just as she has failed her Aina.

  “Kristina Lidman,” Elsa says quietly to herself. She puts the mug down next to the sink and walks over to Dagny. The cold water has lifted some of her flatness.

  “Kristina,” she repeats to the little one.

  The baby has settled slightly, and now her cloudy eyes look up at Elsa. There’s something about looking into a newborn’s eyes that’s like nothing else. Elsa isn’t a superstitious woman—not even a particularly religious one, truth be told, though she wouldn’t dream of saying that out loud—but yes, newborns do have a look that suggests they know something. That they have seen something others can’t see.

  “It’s a good name,” Elsa says to Dagny.

  “The next train leaves tomorrow at three, no?” says Ingrid behind her back.

  Elsa doesn’t need to look at any schedule to be able to nod in confirmation. With two trains a week it isn’t hard to remember the departure times.

  She knows what Ingrid is thinking, and remembers the half-written letter lying buried in her underwear. There’ll be no time to finish it or send it now. Elsa will just have to hope Margareta understands. She will; she has to. Once they’re in Stockholm they can try to make a plan.

  They just have to get out of Silvertjärn first.

  NOW

  When we race into the room, Robert is standing stock-still at the window. He doesn’t turn when we enter.

  “Robert?” I say cautiously, and then he turns his head.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but this isn’t it. His face is still, and his index finger is raised to his lips.

  My first thought is that he’s lost his mind (him too), but that passes just as soon as it comes. He doesn’t look crazy.

  Max starts to walk over to the window, and Robert nods slowly. I follow him, creeping across the floorboards. My heart is pounding.

  Max reaches the window before I do. Then Robert lowers his finger. He doesn’t point, but makes a subtle nod straight ahead.

  The window looks out onto the road running down to the river. From up here I can see the houses’ gabled roofs stretching down and away from the square, these set in a slightly more organic way than the poker-straight lines of the row houses further out of town. At first I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be looking at, but just as I’m about to ask I see it, and the words die in my throat.

  Something moving.

  I only catch a glimpse of it. Something peeks out from behind the corner of a house, then disappears again.

  “She’s been doing that for a while,” Robert says quietly, without moving his lips. “Peeking out and then disappearing.”

  There it is again. A head; a flash of sunlight on blond hair.

  Perhaps she can sense our eyes on her, because suddenly she disappears—there one second, gone the next.

  “Is it…” says Max, peeling his eyes from the window. He stares at me.

  I nod.

  “She’s been moving around between the houses a little, but no further than that. It’s her,” says Robert.

  “What is she doing?” asks Max.

  “It looks like she’s hiding,” says Robert. “Or looking out for someone.”

  Max looks out of the window again, and I do the same, try to pick her out.

  Then he straightens his back and looks at me, and something in his face changes.

  I know what he’s thinking; not so much because I see it on his face as that the same thought hits me simultaneously. But everything in me balks at the idea. I shake my head.

  “No,” I say. “No.”

  “What?” Robert asks.

  “Robert…” Max begins, a
nd I see him falter at the thought himself, then try to swallow it down. But he goes on anyway.

  “We looked at … at Emmy.”

  How much time has passed? How long has Tone been out there for?

  Forty minutes? One hour?

  How can it be that Emmy was alive an hour ago but not anymore?

  “We were going to cover her with something, a sheet, and when we were adjusting her we saw she—she had bruises. On her neck. They looked like handprints.”

  Robert’s eyes look like black-and-white marbles. In the light of the window, his pupils are no more than pinpricks.

  “Someone must have done it while we were trying to get upstairs,” Max goes on.

  “Tone…” He licks his lips and goes quiet.

  I shake my head, tossing it from side to side like a defiant child.

  “No,” I say.

  Robert turns to me. His eyes are blazing, but I can’t tell if it’s from grief or rage. Maybe even hate.

  “You,” he says, swinging that single syllable like a weapon. “You said she wasn’t violent, that we had to come and get her, that she was sick. She…” His voice sticks. “… she wanted to stay there, where it was safe. But you forced us here anyway. To save her.” He nods at the window, out at the being that was Tone.

  Then he looks straight at me. His eyes are wide, vast and bottomless.

  “And now she’s lying out there,” he whispers. “She’s out there lying on the floor, and she’s dead.”

  His eyes narrow and focus on me again. The impact of his rage feels like I’ve stuck my hand in an open flame.

  “Don’t try to defend her again,” he says, biting off each word. “Don’t say that again, don’t tell me she isn’t violent. Don’t. Tell. Me.”

  I stand completely still. The air prickles against my skin. I think he’s about to fly at me. Hit me, kick me. Hurt me.

  As though he hears what I’m thinking, he turns abruptly and walks out the door.

  Max and I are left alone. He doesn’t look at me, but stares out of the window as though hypnotized.

  My hands are shaking. I want to sit down, but I can’t persuade my knees to obey me.

  It’s all falling apart.

  I want to try to do what she would have done, but how? How do I even start to come to grips with this? What do rationality and pragmatism help when the world is turning itself inside out, and none of the old rules still apply?

  “We should probably go after him,” says Max, and I look up.

  “What?”

  “If he goes after Tone now, I don’t know what he might do,” Max says. His lips are pale and his face is flat.

  “Oh God,” I say, and start running to the doors, feeling a stab in my back every time my feet hit the floor.

  I throw open the doors.

  There he is, sitting by Emmy’s body, kneeling as though in prayer. His head is bowed.

  He has covered her in the sheet we left beside her, and she looks so small under the white, no more than a silhouette. The only thing not covered is her small, thin hand, with its short fingers and bitten-down nails. Both of his hands are clasped around it in a tender, delicate hold, as though not wishing to hurt it.

  He doesn’t look up straightaway. It takes him a few seconds to come back to us.

  Then he puts her hand down, slowly and carefully, and pulls the sheet over it.

  NOW

  As we round the school toward the road, it takes me a few seconds to orient myself: I’ve only seen the houses from above, and I’m not completely sure which one she’s hiding behind.

  “There,” says Max behind me. He isn’t speaking quietly enough. She could hear him and get scared.

  “I can’t see anyone,” I whisper to him. It’s a little red house he’s pointing at, one with a black roof and black trim.

  “She could have moved,” he says. “Maybe she heard us coming.”

  He takes a few slow steps forward, but I grab his arm.

  “Wait,” I say, then turn to look at Robert.

  “I won’t hurt her,” he says.

  His face has lost something of its flatness—deadness—but I’m still not sure I can believe him.

  I go first. I don’t want to let him take the lead. No matter what happens, I want my face to be the first one she sees. Perhaps that could calm her, somehow.

  I make straight for the front of the house, then creep toward the corner, keeping close to the peeling red clapboard. I stop at the corner, the blood pumping in my ears.

  I step out.

  She isn’t here.

  The narrow, cobbled passageway between the houses is completely empty. There’s nothing there but shadows and heather.

  But then I see a flash of movement at the corner ahead of me.

  “Tone!” I say, taking a few steps forward. “Tone, it’s me. Alice.”

  It’s too fraught, too loud. The little glimpse I caught of her instantly disappears.

  “Shit,” I hear Max mutter, and there’s too much adrenaline in my body for me not to react instinctively. I take off after her.

  The passage is so narrow that my shoulders scrape against the walls on either side. It almost feels like I’m elbowing my way through them, and I practically fall out onto the street on the other side. But now I see her.

  She’s running as fast as she can down toward the river, but that isn’t quick. There’s something wrong about the way she’s moving—it’s a lumbering, hobbling gait, and one leg drags behind her.

  Of course. Her ankle.

  “Tone!” I call after her again. I can’t help it, pointless as I know it is.

  I keep on running toward her, and it doesn’t take me long to catch up. Her breathing sounds strange, too; it’s more than a pant, it’s like a muffled hum. I hear Max and Robert running behind me.

  I close the last of the distance between us with a few powerful strides and grab her arm, feel her skin and bone under the sleeve of her dirty knitted cardigan.

  She erupts. With a loud, moaning wail of sheer panic she wrests her arm free, then flings it out as she twists, knocking me square on my temple and throwing me off balance. I manage to break my fall, but the blow is so powerful that I see stars, and I bite a gash into my lip on impact.

  I lie there for a few seconds, trying to make my head stop spinning. I’ve never been hit before. I roll onto my side and blink away the spinning and the pain, and see that Max and Robert have managed to get hold of her.

  Tone is struggling like a wounded animal, kicking and trying to bite at them. Her eyes are flitting around, unfocused. I try to meet her gaze, but there’s no recognition there, only mindless anxiety and rage.

  Her hair is ruffled and stiff with dirt, and her lank, blood-encrusted fringe is stuck to her forehead by a dirty, smeared scab. She can’t put any weight onto her bad foot, but time and again she tries to step on it. Finally she kicks out and yelps in pain when it hits Max’s thigh. I shudder—as much from Max’s gasp as from the sight of the abnormal bend in her ankle.

  “Stop!” says Max. “Tone, stop, try to calm down, we won’t hurt you, we don’t want to hurt you, we want to help you.”

  I want to tell him he sounds too angry, too worked up, too agitated; to tell him to try to speak calmly, softly; that she might not be reacting to his words but his tone; that he has to show her he means her no harm. But I can’t get a word out.

  “She can’t hear you,” Robert says thickly, then, linking his arms around her, he just sits down.

  Tone is slight in build, with narrow shoulders and hips, and however hard she flails and fights, she can’t escape his firm grip. She gives up after a few seconds, stops kicking and squirming, and drops that awful, raw moan. It turns into a heavy pant.

  It’s only then that I realize my entire body is shaking.

  I squat down in front of them, partly to be at Tone’s level, and partly to hide the fact that my legs can’t hold me.

  “Tone!” I say, trying to meet her eyes. “Tone, it’s m
e. Alice.”

  She doesn’t look at me. She’s staring down at the ground, still panting breathlessly.

  The blood on her forehead has run down to her eyebrow, clumping her fine strands of hair into strange, lumpy forms. I try not to let my eyes drop to her hands, but I do.

  She’s too sick, I think, trying to convince myself over the pounding of my heart in my ears, over the taste of iron on my tongue and her raspy, panting breaths.

  Emmy’s much stronger, it wouldn’t have been possible, Tone could never have overpowered her.

  But the voice of logic is impossible to turn from.

  And if her ribs were broken?

  If Tone was out of her senses, like now, and she had no means of escape?

  I think the tears are about to start again, but they don’t. That blessed, welcome blurriness never arrives. Tone’s contours remain sharp, and I stare at her in the dirt and sunlight with dry, swollen eyes, unable to escape the recognition growing within me.

  NOW

  At first I suggest taking Tone back to the church—which seems like the most obvious thing to do—and neither of the others make any objections. But as soon as Tone catches sight of the place, she starts going wild again, kicking and struggling enough to almost topple Max. It’s only when we back off into a side street that she calms down again.

  “What is it about the church?” Max asks. He directs the question at me; we have all given up trying to communicate directly with Tone.

  “I don’t know,” I say, completely drained. All I want is to sleep. “But we probably won’t get her in there.”

  There’s something horrible and disturbing about the sight of skinny little Tone suspended between the two bigger men, something that triggers a sort of primal fear in me—not for her, but for them. I want to tell them to let her go, to leave her alone. Despite having just seen her swinging, roaring, and kicking; despite her unfocused gaze and that awful, bloody mask she’s wearing.

  And those hands. Those thin, dirty fingers that my eyes keep being drawn to, that I can’t stop staring at.

  I’ve reached some sort of limit. I’m so tired I don’t even feel heartbroken anymore, just resigned.