Карин Тидбек - The Memory Theater

The boy wept as Nils cleaned his leg, but he made no noise, just gripped the bed frame until it creaked. When the wound was clean, Nils squeezed the edges together and covered them in cobweb, then wrapped the leg with the old bandages.

“There,” he said. “All done. Now let’s hope there won’t be an infection.”

He cleaned up the boy’s face. The cuts were many but shallow, and looked like they would heal on their own.

“I’ll need to feel your belly,” Nils said. “Make sure nothing’s broken in there.”

As he tried to unbutton the boy’s clothes, the boy resisted.

“Very well,” Nils said. “I understand modesty. Let me at least feel it.”

The boy lay back, eyes still fixed on the wall. Nils lightly prodded his abdomen and then his ribs. The boy wasn’t coughing blood and his belly wasn’t hard.

Nils nodded to himself. “You will be all right. We just need to make sure to keep that leg clean.”

He unfolded a blanket and draped it over the boy, then added a sheepskin.

“Where is my sister?” the boy asked.

Nils couldn’t bring himself to say it. “She’s outside,” he said instead, which was true.

“I need her.”

“I’ll tell her you asked for her.”

“Good,” the boy said, and promptly fell asleep.

The boy slept all day. Nils went about his daily tasks, mulling the whole thing over. He should really go down to the village right away, ask about the boy he had found. But he couldn’t just leave the boy alone. It could wait until tomorrow. And the girl wasn’t going anywhere.

In the evening, Nils bedded down on the kitchen bench and listened to the boy’s breath. Outside, the meadows and moors lay quiet save for the occasional small animal noise. This was the best time of year, the best time of day, when everything was alive but asleep; the sun just below the horizon, and the sky alight. It was the perfect light for dancing, had he been young. Nils hummed his song, one-two-three-four-five, one-two-three-four-five-six, tapping his knuckle on the wooden armrest, but he couldn’t fathom where he’d learned the tune.

The boy was sitting up in bed when Nils entered the chamber the next morning. There was nothing left but to tell the truth.

“I’m sorry, lad,” Nils said. “Your sister is dead.”

The boy stared at him. “You said she was on the mountain.”

“She was. I saw her,” Nils replied. “She didn’t survive.”

The boy’s eyes emptied of all life, and his face went slack.

“I couldn’t tell you yesterday,” Nils continued. “You were too weak.”

“Where is she?” the boy whispered.

Nils hesitated, then said: “She’s buried on the mountain.” It wasn’t a lie, after all.

“I want to see,” the boy said. “I need to see.”

“It’s too far,” Nils said. “Your leg needs to heal. Soon.”

The boy didn’t scream or cry; he sagged back against the pillow and stared into empty space.

He didn’t speak for a few days after that. He didn’t drink or eat on his own, but opened his mouth for the spoonfuls of gruel that Nils fed him. Nils sat by the bed and read to him from the books his sons had once enjoyed: Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils. If the boy listened, he didn’t show it, but Nils persisted.

Nils was true to his word. When the wound on the boy’s leg had closed, he brought him outside for the first time. They walked to a pile of rocks on the nearest hill, Nils supporting the boy on his arm. It was a tourist spot, really; hikers would place a rock at the top as a sign that they had been there. They had done so for decades, and the pile was high enough to look like a little cairn.

“This is where you can mourn your sister,” he told the boy.

The boy sat down by the rocks, face just as empty as it had been for the last week. He was motionless until the sun started to dip toward the horizon and a cold wind blew in.

After that, the boy showed no sign of wanting to leave; he showed no sign of wanting anything. He sat in the kitchen or on the bench outside the house. Nils knew that he should have reported the event to the authorities, but something stopped him. If he did, they would take the boy away. And Nils very much wanted to keep the boy. There was just something about him.

August segued into September. Nils didn’t mind the boy’s apathy. He fed him, made sure he was warm, made sure he bathed every now and then. The boy refused to let Nils see him without clothes, though, always keeping his sleeves rolled down and his shirt well tucked into the trousers Nils had given him. Nils let the boy wash himself in the bedchamber with the door closed. The boy wouldn’t shave, would in fact shy away from anything that looked like a knife, and grew a scraggly auburn beard.

He seemed to like the cows. He started following Nils into the barn in the mornings; at first, he merely stood by the wall and watched as Nils milked the cows. Then one day he put a hand on Rosa’s neck, and she let him. After that, whenever Nils had been in town or to see Johanna, he would come home to find the boy in the barn, quietly running a brush over a cow’s flank.

The boy wouldn’t talk about his past, or give his name, and Nils didn’t press the issue. He would talk when he wanted to. These things could take time. From the looks of it, he had been to hell and back.

In October the boy was still there, a quiet presence. Nils had put off checking on his sister’s body for so long that it by now seemed pointless. She would be devoured by birds and foxes. It was the way of things. Neither had he told Johanna or anyone else about the boy. He found that it wasn’t hard to keep that particular secret.

The day came when the boy sat down on a milking stool of his own accord. After that, he took over the morning milking. Nils showed him how to make cheese and filbunke from the milk. It turned out that the boy was a fast learner. He went from sitting by the stove for hours every day to spending just the evenings there. He still wouldn’t smile, but there was a different air about him, as if he had started to breathe properly.

But there were changes that came with the boy’s recuperation. Nils found a cache in the bedroom where the boy had squirreled away some things: a spare shirt, socks, a box of matches. As if he was planning to go somewhere. When confronted with this, the boy merely shrugged and said that they might come in handy. Nils put them back in their original places. But after that, when going into the room, he would find things: a rope under the mattress, clean socks in a corner. The boy merely watched as he took the things away. Nils had to do this again and again. It was like this with boys. You had to be consistent.

Temperatures had dropped dramatically in the past week, and the first snow lay in thick drifts around the house. Nils and the boy had potatoes and the last of the salted pork for supper, washed down with barley coffee. Nils pushed his plate away.

“I’m going into the village tomorrow,” he said. “We need to stock up for winter.”

“Take me with you,” the boy said.

Nils glanced at him. “Why?” he asked.

“I just thought it was time,” the boy replied. “I think my sister would have wanted me to go on.”

“Go on to do what?” Nils asked.

“There’s someone I need to find.”

“Who?”

The boy wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Someone,” he said.

“And do you think that this someone is in the village?”

“No, but it’s a start.”

“There’s nothing there to see,” Nils said. “Just some houses and a general store.”