Elisabeth Rynell - To Mervas

Marta once more arrived at the small intersection and now she decided to take the road that sloped down the hill, the one the white reindeer had walked away on. To the left were the remnants of another large building, otherwise nothing but forest surrounded her, denser and more rugged.

After a sharp turn, the woods cleared somewhat to her right. At the bottom of a steep slope lay a big, still lake surrounded by smaller pools and rocks. The water was green and dim, waiting, watching her; it was still, bottomless, and its clear, wide-open center showed how incredibly deep it was. A high fence, made by thick wires, had been erected along the edge of the slope, but the road continued downward and after yet another turn, the woods opened onto hills and sky.

Bright, magnificent space was all she could see. A broad unbroken expanse of piercing green wound its way toward the mountain ridges. It was like a wide river running through the valley, like shining green water. Stunned, Marta gazed out over the landscape, which seemed to go on for miles inland. Somehow, it was incomprehensible, more at home in dreams than reality. Dancing on the sacred meadows of bliss, she thought, and in her mind’s eye, she could picture bears dancing with reindeer. But she understood that the beauty was probably a mirage, the valley was most likely poisoned. This plain was like a discharge of the old mine, which had once flowed out of the bowels of the mountain in a river of slag and toxins.

Something else caught her attention. In the foreground, right where the road ended and the plain started, stood a huge stone monument. It could have been the mining tower, a solitary, heavy concrete creature frozen in silence. She walked down to it. Four solid pillars carried an arched ceiling. It was a sad arch of triumph, a call from the past, a disintegrating, cracked memory of something. When she stepped in between the pillars, she saw two paintings on the inside, pictures of Mervas as it had once been: a picture of the community and its houses, and another of the mining site with the tower soaring in its center. “The Mervas of my childhood as I remember it,” someone had written below the picture.

Marta suddenly felt very tired. It was the feeling of not belonging anywhere. A pendulum had started swinging inside her, back and forth, back and forth. Did she really have the right to be here? Shame ran through her body again. How could she have been so stupid to travel all the way to this strange, distant place just because Kosti had mentioned it in a note that wasn’t even a real letter? She felt more afraid of Kosti than of anything else in Mervas. He might be standing somewhere, watching her, at this very moment. He’d be shaking his head and thinking: She came. How crazy!

Perhaps he was here with someone. It could be a woman. His woman. Now he was going to her, to tell her that the loony woman Marta, whom he’d been with for a few years in his youth, was here. She’d followed him all the way here.

However, he had written “your Kosti” in the letter. How did he dare? Was he trying to make fun of her? Marta stepped away from the monument. The ground was covered with sharp stones and iron scraps. The wind from the plains was picking up and it was dry and cold. She shivered. What are you doing here? she imagined Kosti saying. He sounded annoyed, accusatory. What are you doing here?

She walked up the long slope again, back to the village. The atmosphere was a little gentler up there, the sun was warm between the trees and the grid of the narrow streets gave her a feeling of comfort. It made her feel that the world was an organized place after all, at least if she behaved herself and remained in the background. Kosti must have come in a car just as she did, but there was no other car here. Besides, it had been six months since he had written her; it was highly unlikely he was still here.

She took one more turn around the foundations before she sat down on the schoolhouse stairs with her sandwich and the thermos of coffee, which Lilldolly had prepared. She couldn’t see the reindeer any longer; now she was all alone. The birds were still there of course; amid the chirping she could distinguish the chaffinch’s particular string of sounds. She was actually free to go, she thought. Whenever she wanted, she could get in the car and drive back to Arnold and Lilldolly’s. She could leave here at any time, nothing was forcing her to stay in Mervas, she didn’t have to stay. She hadn’t traveled here to see Kosti. She’d come to face herself.

She had the right to be in Mervas. The place was singing around her; it resounded with song. All of Mervas surrounded her like an unusual, gently sung song emanating from between the withered stones and the light filtered through the trees. Maybe she wouldn’t be afraid here. Some people can be connected to a place, a certain place, the kind of place that gives itself to you and allows you to hear its song. Marta thought she heard something peculiarly familiar in that song; she recognized it as if it were her own life singing her story, her own voice crawling out from everything that had been left behind and forgotten. It wasn’t that she belonged here; she’d never felt she belonged anywhere. But there was a trace of something, a kind of recognition. Perhaps the traces of things are what’s most real, the fragments of something, the scent. You can’t get any closer to what’s real; if you do, it dissolves.

It was at that very moment, right when she was thinking this, when she bent forward to pour more coffee from the thermos, that she saw something on the ground. It was a pipe cleaner, brown from tobacco juice and bent in the middle. It lay next to the base of the stairs and beside it was a small pile of ashes and half-burnt tobacco. She lifted the pipe cleaner, smelled it, examined it with her fingers. Her hand was trembling. Kosti, she thought, and the notion was somehow inconceivable. He was here. There was no way this thing could have been here since the previous winter.

* A huldra is a creature in Scandinavian folklore, a beautiful naked woman with a hollow back and a fox tail who lures men deep into the woods then abandons them to their deaths.

“You should spend the night here! Why would you want to stay overnight in Mervas? No, you go up there and have a look and then you’ll come back to Deep Tarn. You can do whatever you want, of course, just know that you can come back anytime. I’ll say, you are being secretive. Incredibly secretive. When you return you’ll have to tell us. Something. You have to promise to tell us something.”

The words had streamed from Lilldolly’s mouth in the morning when she was making sandwiches for Marta. It was now evening. A blackbird was lecturing from the top of a fir tree behind the school. The air had cooled; there was an icy edge to it, something cold and hard left behind from winter. The blackbird was speaking to Marta with Lilldolly’s voice. In the evening, when all other birds have gone silent, the blackbird speaks in a particularly serious tone. Come back, it said. You should come back to Deep Tarn. Don’t stay there in Mervas, Lilldolly urged, in the slow, deep voice of the blackbird.

The evening breeze swept some leaves from one place to another on the gravel in front of Marta. The branches of the blooming sallow in the school’s largest room stirred in the wind. She sat on the stairs struggling with her doubts, trying to grasp what she wanted. Cold, she buried her hands in her jacket pockets. She had wrapped the pipe cleaner in some toilet paper and put it in the glove compartment before moving the car up to the school building, where she felt most at home.

There was one place in Mervas she’d rather not have known about. She sat pondering it. It was at the far end of the village, and all streets led there. She’d noticed an arched, slanting roof over a door opening. At first, she figured it was an ordinary ground cellar. But then she’d looked through the gaping door frame. A stale wind had hit her face, a strangely strong, cool and damp breeze that seemed to come from below, from the dark depths. She’d seen a long stairway, and something was shimmering down there, probably water. Beyond that, everything was black. But that wind told her something. It was no ground cellar, it was bigger than that, much bigger. Probably a path leading down to the mine.