Ane Riel - Resin

He didn’t want to preserve his newborn daughter in order to save her soul. He just wanted to preserve his daughter. To keep her.

Not have to lose her.

The small body was cleaned thoroughly on the inside and the organs removed so only the heart remained. It had to be there, he remembered, and it felt right. She was the most beautiful little girl. Just as beautiful as his Liv had once been.

And her twin brother.

He had to preserve this fragile human being so that she wouldn’t disappear into the ground, as his son had done seven years ago. He could no longer hold on to Carl in pencil sketches. The lines couldn’t retain the flesh; the perspective couldn’t embrace his shape. Carl was slowly being erased from the very same memory that so desperately tried to keep him there. And Jens Horder refused to lose yet another much wanted and loved child.

Jens Horder refused to lose anything ever again.

Something inside him told him that Liv had to be there. Liv’s presence was necessary to keep the dead newborn present.

The salt would extract all moisture from the body, her father explained while he looked for a basin the right size. Liv had never seen so much salt at once. She looked at the small face as the white sea rose around her baby sister. The small eyes were closed. Carl had also closed his and Liv would have liked to, but she couldn’t. She was supposed to help her father. She had to be a part of everything; he had asked her to. Together they would look after the little girl and make sure that she didn’t disappear.

Except that right now she was disappearing in a bath of salt, and her cheeks and her tiny nose were the last things to drown.

She would need to lie in the basin for a month until she had dried up completely, until there wasn’t a single drop of moisture left in her, he had said. Liv wondered whether you could cry when you were dead.

Carl certainly could. In fact, he had started to cry a great deal. He cried because their baby sister was dead, and he cried because their mum was upstairs in the bedroom and mustn’t know anything about the child in the salt, and he cried because their dad had started acting so strangely. He cried because they had to hide in the container whenever there was the slightest suspicion that someone was coming. Yes, even if they heard the tiniest sound. And perhaps he cried the hardest because he felt very alone, even when he was with Liv.

Maria Horder hadn’t had the strength to bury yet another child, and she had nodded gratefully from her overburdened bed when Jens came upstairs to tell her that the newborn had been burned and was gone. He had built a fine, tiny coffin for her in which she had gone on her way, he had said. Then he had kissed his wife’s forehead and stroked her hair.

‘She’s all right,’ he had whispered.

And Liv had listened from her mother’s bedside. She didn’t feel good. She knew that this was one of the times it was OK to lie. When you had to lie. She must never tell her mum that the little person who had come out of her hadn’t been burned but was buried in a basin of salt in the workshop. She must never tell her, never ever.

So Liv said nothing; instead, she read aloud to her mother. She had become incredibly good at it, Maria said, whenever she was able to get a sound past her soft lips. Usually she would grab one of her many notebooks and write something for Liv, who lunged at the sentences like a starving child.

I’m so proud that you know how to read and write so well already. It’s really wonderful, Liv.

And Liv smiled, sated with happiness for a moment before she read on.

Aloud.

From time to time she wondered whether she couldn’t just write down her secret and show it to Mum. In that way she wouldn’t actually have said anything but she would rid herself of her knowledge. Without having spoken a word.

But she didn’t dare. It was no longer just strangers who frightened her. Her father’s increasing moroseness was creeping up on her like a dark and ominous threat.

Maria Horder no longer left the bedroom. But even if she had been capable of doing so during the month her lifeless third child lay buried in salt, she wouldn’t have recognized her own home any more. She, too, was slowly being buried.

Dear Liv

The rabbits – what’s happening to the rabbits? Have we got more of them? I think I can hear them. Don’t they live in their hutch any more? And the animals in the barn… I can also hear the animals. Don’t you feed them?

It’s night-time now. They shouldn’t be making any noise.

While my baby sister dried out in the salt, I collected more gauze and cleaned more resin and Mum wondered at the smell that lingered about me. You smell of resin, you must be out in the forest a lot , she wrote. And I whispered: ‘It’s a scent, not a smell.’

Then she smiled.

One night I found a big sack of stale pastries behind the bakery, and we spent a lot of time enjoying them in bed. Carl got a little worried that Mum ate so many, at which point I sent him outside. He really could be a pain sometimes. Dad didn’t want any, and that made me a bit sad because I liked it best when we were together, the three of us. These days we hardly ever were.

But what was worse was that he was starting to lose his temper. Not with me, not directly, and not with Mum either. He always spoke nicely to us – when he did speak, that is. So I don’t really know who he was angry with, but at times I would hear him rant and rave when he was all on his own. Perhaps he too had an invisible friend to shout at.

Every now and then I would shout a little at Carl, but never enough to make him disappear from me… become a completely invisible twin brother, I mean.

And other things began to worry me. There really was a lot of stuff everywhere and although I liked all of it, especially the things Dad and I had found together, something felt wrong.

I would compare our house with those I visited, houses where it was much easier for me to move about the rooms. They weren’t quite so dusty and dirty either. And although the mice and the spiders were my friends, it was nice that there were no mouse droppings and cobwebs in the pub kitchen. The other houses seemed so different, and they smelled different too. They had a scent. Especially the pub.

I was old enough to remember that we hadn’t always had as many things as we did now. That we had once been able to use the kitchen and bathroom for their proper purposes, rather than just to store things in.

I think I would have liked it to have stayed that way. Not to have quite so many things. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be without any of the things we had. And Dad had said that we had to look after them.

So this was all weighing on my mind, only I didn’t know what to do about it. I found it harder and harder to talk to Dad, and I was scared of saying anything to Mum that might make her sad – or worse. Whenever I wanted to tell her something that I strongly suspected Dad wouldn’t want me to, I could hear his voice in my head saying: It would kill your mum .

Now, I had killed animals, and I was even quite good at it. But I desperately didn’t want to kill my mum.

I couldn’t imagine anything worse than her not lying upstairs in her bed, waiting for me. Waiting for me to bring her more food and a book to read to her while she stroked my hair and mimed that she loved me. These days it was my favourite thing, now that Dad no longer took me out in the dinghy or even into the forest. Ever since my baby sister had come out of Mum, he rarely went anywhere.