Карин Тидбек - Amatka

“How are you doing?”

Vanja frowned at her list. “Not sure any of this is useful. You only use the commune’s products. Are there things you don’t stock? Things you might need?”

Nina sucked her front teeth. “Don’t think so.”

Vanja put a bottle of lotion back on the shelf. “I’m done. Let’s move on.”

“There are only a few more units left to see. This way.”

They went down a set of stairs and into yet another white corridor, where a pair of double doors were marked DOORS TO FERTILITY UNIT. Nina pushed the doors open, releasing a fresh puff of disinfectant smell. The stink crept into Vanja’s nostrils and down into her stomach, sending it into a new spasm. Nina paused with a hand on the right door and looked over her shoulder.

“What’s wrong?”

Vanja shook her head. “We don’t need to go in there,” she said.

“Why not?”

“How about we just say we’re done.”

Nina gazed at Vanja and then at the sign on the door. “All right.”

She turned back and headed in the opposite direction. Vanja followed her. They were alone in the corridor; the sound of Nina’s shoes echoed against the walls.

“Do you have children, Vanja?” Nina’s voice was low.

“No.” The word sounded harsh.

Nina’s voice softened further. “You’ve been to that kind of unit quite recently, haven’t you?”

Vanja glanced sideways. Nina’s face didn’t have the expression of sickly pity that her sister’s and Marja’s had had. On the contrary, she looked a little weary. Vanja nodded and squeezed her lips shut so they wouldn’t quiver. Her eyes stung.

Nina sighed and ran the back of her hand down Vanja’s arm. “It’s hard.”

“Yes.” Vanja pulled away.

“I’m sure they did everything they could for you. Sometimes that’s just how it is. It happens more often than people think.”

Vanja hummed and crossed her arms over her chest.

“I should warn you, our children are visiting this weekend,” Nina said as they reached the end of the corridor. “If that’s too difficult, then… we could find some other solution.”

“No. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“Uh.” Vanja’s face was warm and tingly. The words wouldn’t quite get into sequence. She breathed in and out a few times. “It’s not that. I don’t care about your children. It’s… I don’t care about them.”

Nina stood still, studying her with a deep frown.

“I’ll be going now. Thank you,” said Vanja. “I can find my way to the dressing room.”

Nina nodded slowly. The frown didn’t disappear. “You’re welcome.”

Vanja walked back the way they had come, fighting the impulse to run. As she walked past a set of double doors, they opened to let through an orderly pushing a wheelchair. The woman in the wheelchair was dressed in a paper gown. Her temples were shaved and scabbed over. She stared blindly into the air. The orderly gave Vanja a sharp glance and moved past her.

The woman had been taken care of, like Lars had been taken care of, like everyone who spoke out of turn were taken care of. There was no death penalty in the colonies. Dissidents had to be stopped from endangering the community, however. The procedure that destroyed the brain’s speech center was an elegant solution. Vanja ran the last few steps to the exit.

The cold air in the street rinsed the clinic’s stench out of Vanja’s nostrils. Few people were out at this time of day, but she still felt claustrophobic. The whole colony and its buildings crowded her. She went home to pack her satchel.

Vanja followed the fat water conduit eastward. To her right and left the plant houses marked Amatka’s perimeter. Beyond the plant houses there was only the tundra and a narrow path along the irrigation pipeline. The lake was visible as a broad gray band on the horizon. It separated ground and sky, made them two distinct units.

It was a longer walk down to the bay than Nina had said. A slight breeze blew across the tundra, and Amatka’s sounds gradually faded behind her. The silence made her ears ring.

She had been outside a colony once before, beyond the protective shell of civilization or a vehicle. Leaving the colony wasn’t forbidden as such, but straying outside the narrow safe zone was intensely discouraged. Good citizens kept inside the plant-house ring. Only eccentrics ventured farther out willingly.

East of Essre, out on the steppe, there was a place about which everyone knew, but of which it was inappropriate to speak. Lars had spoken about it sometimes, only to Vanja and in whispers, when Vanja and Ärna came for their weekend visits.

When the pioneers arrived, Lars said, they discovered they weren’t the first. Out on the steppe, east of what would become Essre, they came across a cluster of empty buildings. Whoever had once lived there had left no other trace. The architecture was alien, the proportions inhuman: huge, lumbering houses with odd angles. And despite the fact that the buildings lacked anything resembling markings or letters, they were completely solid. The place was off-limits, but everyone knew that this was where they put criminals: far away from everyone else, in a place they couldn’t ruin. One wonders who the builders were , Lars would breathe, and why we can’t go there. Nobody knows where we are. But we’re not allowed to speak of it.

Then Vanja came home on a weekend visit, and Britta told her that Lars had been taken away. He was disloyal and had to be contained. Vanja knew where they had taken him. She snuck out of the house and ran out onto the steppe. She walked for what felt like hours before Essre’s lights finally faded behind her. The sky had begun to brighten into gray when she reached the top of a low hill. Ahead of her, the ground sloped down into a flat valley. And there they were, the strange buildings. She approached not completely knowing what she would find.

Now beneath Amatka’s silence, there was the gentle surging of waves lapping against the rocky shore. A gentle breeze brought with it the scent of something wet and somehow bright; it must be what lakes smell like. A little ways to the south along the beach rose an angular and broken silhouette: the first Amatka, the one that was never finished.

Vanja found a large, flat rock by the water’s edge. She dropped her satchel on the ground and took out two blankets; she spread one of them over the rock, then wrapped herself in the other and sat down to watch the fading of the light.

The process was so quick she could see it happen. A whiteness appeared at the water’s edge, and spread like a web across the lake with a crackling noise. The water underneath was dark at first, then grew cloudy as if fogging over. After an hour or so, the ice had cleared into a pure, bottomless black.

Vanja left her blankets and satchel behind and tested the ice with her foot. The surface was uneven and firm. Getting traction was easy; the ice received Vanja’s footsteps with a blunt, scraping sound. The sky above her had darkened, but the glow it reflected from Amatka’s lights reached all the way to the lake. Vanja took a few more steps out onto the ice and looked back over her shoulder. Far away, the plant-house bubbles shone in yellow and white. She turned toward the lake again, Amatka’s light warm against her back. No civilization this way, no human life; just the ice and the tundra and the devouring darkness. For a moment, she thought she saw a flickering reflection from across the lake, so faint it might as well have been one of those flashes the eye creates in darkness.

Vanja rubbed her eyes with her mittens and returned to the beach. The darkness pulled at her back. She packed her blankets into the satchel as quickly as she could and walked, almost ran, toward the warm glow of the plant houses.