Elisabeth Rynell - To Mervas

With her mouth against his shoulder, she said:

“You wrote to me. Why?”

“Sometimes it feels like we’re getting old. I’ve thought about you, Mart. These last few years. I didn’t want to die without seeing you again.”

She opened her eyes. The sun was bright outside but Kosti wasn’t there. She was still bundled up in the car. Before her thoughts caught up with her, sleep pulled her into its arms again and she continued dreaming about Kosti. She was on a train and stepped off at a small, rural train station, one of those stations in the middle of nowhere under an open sky. Kosti stood at a distance. He raised his hand and waved to her. This time, he was beardless and his hair wasn’t gray. He now looked like the Kosti she had carried with her throughout her life. They weren’t in Mervas either, but on some big country estate in Russia. All around them, the freshly plowed earth shone brown, and the fields were endless.

I awoke from my dreams covered in sweat. The air inside the car was humid and dense, as if I were inside a big mouth, inside my own mouth, and I was inhaling the air I had just exhaled. Even so, I remained still. I didn’t crack the window. The best thing was to just lie still. I felt ashamed of my dreams, my head full of Kosti. I also had a vague and simultaneously persistent feeling of insecurity and infinity. I didn’t know for certain what I’d experienced during the night, wasn’t sure what had happened and what hadn’t. I felt pulled back and forth between dream and reality, and as the boundaries of the two worlds blurred, I couldn’t determine where one ended and the other began. The bearded man with gray-speckled hair who’d watched me at dawn, was he part of the dream? I lay remembering the way he’d gazed at me, and something wasn’t right, something about him ran against what I’d seen in my dreams; it was as if he were made of a different matter, rough and resistant. Perhaps it had been a dream, but I’d seen him stand there crying; he’d appeared grave, yet his presence had been almost ridiculously real.

Maybe I had actually seen him; it wasn’t impossible. For a fraction of a second, in a moment of clarity, I could’ve seen him, only to tumble back into my uneasy dreams again, holding him in my arms, the image of him in my embrace. I must have dreamt the rest; that I stepped out of the car and we held each other, held everything that would never come true. I was hopelessly stupid, blinded by delusion. Oh, why do I always have to be ashamed of myself? I had the unpleasant feeling that Kosti knew the rest of my dream, that he stood hidden from view and laughed at me, laughed at my image of us together, holding each other close.

My hands still smelled of smoked whitefish. An intense smell when you’ve just woken up, greasy and intimate. My feelings crawled through me like insects or crustaceans. My hands had an obscene smell, as if I’d done something during the night I shouldn’t have done. I tried to tell myself I had to get up and go to the lake and wash; I’d looked forward to greeting the morning down by the water. But the night weighed heavy on me. I couldn’t push it away. Instead, I had to follow the crooked paths toward it again, return to the dream images and the mirages. Everything had to be clear and certain inside me, those crustaceans had to stop crawling through me before I could get up. Without deluding myself, I also wanted to be able to feel that I’d come to Mervas for my own sake, and not to see Kosti.

I hadn’t dreamt only about Kosti during the night, I’d had other dreams too. One of them was about the boy, a nightmare. I recognized it; I’d had it before. It was one of those nightmares with different variations on the same theme. The most common dream was about animals, various animals that I’d neglected, that I’d forgotten to take care of.

This one had been about the boy. I’d completely forgotten that he existed and suddenly I realized with painful clarity that he was inside the decrepit shed outside and that no one had been in there for months. I knew I had to hurry, that I had to go out there at once, but different things kept interceding. People showed up, I had to go away on trips, and time kept passing while my awareness of his being out there became more and more impossible to endure. Finally, I stood before the crooked door where tall, sharp-toothed nettles grew. I had to take a big step over the nettles to push the door open. It was dark inside. The small aperture barely let in any light. The dirt floor was black and cold, and I knew it was a death room. The boy was tucked inside an old wood trunk attached to the wall, and it was utterly incomprehensible that I’d let myself forget about him. The last time I’d been there, I’d made the bed nicely and fed him. The room had been entirely different then. The whole winter had gone by and I hadn’t even thought about him, about his existence.

The lid of the trunk was open and I leaned into its darkness. There was still something inside it, I could see that. But if it was still the boy, he had become incredibly small, almost like a bird. He showed vague signs of life, a scent, a breath. He seemed to be disintegrating, and I didn’t dare touch him. I couldn’t; everything was revolting and disgusting. I didn’t understand how I could do this to him and felt afraid of what people would say if they knew. The only thing I knew was that I quickly had to find him some milk, that I had to feed him milk through a small tube.

When I came home again to fetch the milk, and perhaps a medicine dropper if I could find one, things, people, events blocked my way, and after a while, I’d forgotten what I was supposed to do. A long time passed and when I once again remembered the boy in the old trunk out there, all I wanted to do was press my hands against my eyes and ears and not know about it, I didn’t want to be part of it any longer. Shameful notions of “removing him” from there, of getting rid of him, burned through me, licked at me like tongues of fire.

As if walking against a hard headwind, I made my way to the shed, which was now even more decrepit. Part of the roof had collapsed, and daylight fell through the hole like through a large, ragged wound. The trunk was closed. I opened it slowly and immediately noticed something among the rags on the bottom, but this time it was barely moving.

I am always walking in my own shadow. My shadow falls on everything I see and everything I touch. My shadow is heavy with my presence, the way a rain cloud is heavy with water. I don’t understand how other people do it, how they manage to be human.

Yesterday it started raining, and that was just as well. I couldn’t do anything but stay on the sleeping pad in the car and stare out the window while the drops beat against the roof and my thoughts dug their paths and tunnels through me. I’m walking around with a longing in a constant state of alert, an impatient, chafing state of waiting. It is a longing for love and I don’t know what it wants with me, I don’t see how it could be useful. It is digging a hole through me, digging a hole to give my emptiness room to grow. I know my life cannot be shared by anyone; to burden another person with my issues would double the guilt and pain for me. If I can’t even be close to myself, how could anyone else? And still, this voice inside me is alive, this ripping longing for love so strong I’m beginning to think it’s bigger than me, bigger than my own life.

Today I emerged from my torpor and went outside. In the morning, I followed a path leading to the village. The path opened onto a small beach, which was clearly man-made with its gravel, sand, and pebbles. The natural shores around the lake consisted of bogs and impenetrable swampy areas. The lake was small, perhaps a hundred yards wide. But there’s something about water that makes you feel good just by looking at it. When I stepped out on the little beach and stood there looking at the surface, I suddenly felt moved. It is difficult for me to describe why, but small lakes like this one in the middle of the woods, they lie there like a caress, a soft caress. There’s something open and forgiving about them; they possess a quiet healing quality.