Elisabeth Rynell - To Mervas

The days pass so slowly here I sometimes don’t know what to do with them. The days went by slowly at home too, but it was simpler there, I was sunk into a kind of meaninglessness in which I wasn’t expecting anything in particular, not from myself and not from life itself. I was in the apartment most of the time, walked around among the tracks and traces, through my dark, unlit city. I felt no real responsibility for how my days passed and what I did with them. My life was unmoored and I guess I thought I just had to accept that.

When I was about to be released from the mental institution, the counselor told me I ought to get a new apartment and move to another part of the city. She said I ought to start a new life and get away from the place where everything would remind me of what had happened, everything that bore witness and whispered of the past. There were neighbors who knew too, she hinted, neighbors with knowing glances I would have to greet on the stairs.

I’ve killed my own life, I’d wanted to say to the counselor, but in reality I just nodded to ward her off.

If I’d been able to speak then, if I’d had the words, I would’ve said that I’d killed my life and there is no new life, no other life, waiting for me. All I have are the traces and ruins from the past and that’s where I’ll be. That the neighbors know what I’ve done is nothing compared with the fact that I myself know.

When I returned to my life in what we call the real world, it was actually comforting that the neighbors knew. That they’d seen the rotating blue lights of the police cars and the ambulances, that they’d read about it in the paper. They also knew that I too had been a mother, they’d seen the boy with me, they’d witnessed our life together and held doors open, occasionally helped me carry things. What was hidden in the way they looked at me didn’t scare me much. The things hidden inside me were what frightened me most, my own story and everything lurking in the darkness where you couldn’t see anything, the hole where my story had been lost.

I’ve been thinking about Uncle Vanya again. About when everyone had left, when they were alone, Sonja and the uncle, when they sat there, afterward. That’s when they saw their lives again; they saw themselves and everything around them, the farm that needed to be cared for, the muddy road, and the light filtering through the treetops. Perhaps it was fall, I don’t remember when it was in the play, but let’s say that now, a flock of ravens lifted from the largest tree, everything was real in that inescapable and meticulous way, it couldn’t have been any other way. And they saw that this was their life. They saw that was where they were, that they existed. They bent down over it, they crouched over it, got hold of it; let the tips of their pens labor and scratch it down. Without even thinking the thought, they knew that’s how it was, how it had to be. And I know it too. Kosti’s note told me. I exist. This is my life that I’m living, letter after letter.

It’s been hot today. The heat here is unusual, a dry, pine-scented inland heat, a strangely stifling forest heat. Hardly a breeze in the air, just the bright light from straight above, the heat trembling in the reflections of the sun. There’s an alarming number of mosquitoes around and today the horseflies arrived too, everything is coming alive; I can feel it, in the midst of the silence and the solitude there is a sense of rush, of urgency.

I woke up far too early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep even though fatigue ached in my eyes. When my thoughts had cast me from one side of the bed to the other for nearly an hour, I still couldn’t sleep, so I got up. Outside, the sun was light yellow and already warm; I brought out my sleeping bag and sat inside it, leaning against the wall where the sun hit. Between the trees, a stone’s throw away, I could see the surface of the tarn; its colors were still deep and warm. Each morning, the world is new and untouched once more; it comforts me, the mornings are never old and worn. I sat there thinking of Kosti, wondering what he was doing down in the mine, what it was that he’d found down there. I also wondered when he was planning to come out again. Because I’m here waiting, all the time. At any moment, he could be here in front of me. At night, the sounds always come together to seem like his steps through the woods, his movements getting closer. Sometimes I imagine that he’s sneaking around the cabin and peeking in through the window and the cracks in the wall; I can almost hear his breathing and the sound of his hands against the plank wall.

But the sun shone on my face and it was bright and I closed my eyes and let it penetrate my skin to warm and thaw me. Behind my closed eyes, blacks and reds were dancing and I let the sun melt down my thoughts and heat them up until they simmered and became fluid, and like liquid copper could reach everywhere, into the narrowest pathways. I thought about my mother, I reached for her; it was her face I wanted to touch. But my older sister kept coming between us, obscuring my view. She stood there protecting Mom’s body, she blocked the entire image of her and I wanted to tear her out of the way. But everything was as if submerged in water and my sister slid away from me with the image of my mother like a shadow behind her.

I saw myself too, saw myself constantly heading straight into my father’s voice: the rumble, the barrage of gunfire, the heavy, lethal detonations. I’d been sent there because that’s where I was supposed to be, running along the front lines like open prey. Again, I tried to get rid of my sister, pry her out of the picture. We were in the kitchen now, in our first apartment. I pushed her as hard as I could, and she fell to the floor and began crying. But when I then looked at Mom, she had my sister’s face and with this mask over her real face she yelled at me and pushed me out of the kitchen and into the dark, scary hallway where Daddy came home at night and where the cleaning cupboard was and the carpet beater and the gloomy coats on their hangers. I now stood in the hallway of my childhood and it grew and grew; the coats hanging in it became a forest of dim green fir trees, the tall, bone-white closet doors became house walls in a big, insulated neighborhood of high-rises. Under my feet, the brown-speckled linoleum floor was about to collapse and open into a hole. Far, far away, I saw a door open; a rectangle of light fell across the floor and I tried to call out, tried to scream something, anything.

I woke up soaked in sweat. For a long while, I sat pinned to the dream images floating around in me. Then I remembered something from my childhood, an event I’d never thought of or remembered before.

This also happened in that first apartment we lived in. I couldn’t have been very old. I was in the bedroom and Dad sat on the edge of the bed with my older sister across his lap and he hit her bare bottom. Mom was in the kitchen, pacing back and forth. My sister wailed and Dad poured his enraged litanies over her as he hit. I stood in the doorway watching. Suddenly, I ran up to Daddy and started jumping up and down like crazy, yelling: Hit me too! Hit me too! You have to hit me too! You have to hit me too!

I then remember how Mom came rushing into the room and grabbed my ear and dragged me out of there.

“You ought to be ashamed!” she growled at me.

And I still curled up in shame when I thought about it. Beneath the deepest level of humiliation there is something else altogether that you’re searching for, that you need to live, yes, even to survive.

I know there is violence inside me. It is hidden in there, under my skin, behind the bone of my skull, in my nerves, in all the arteries of my body; it is the swelling, slippery muscle of violence itself, a secret animal inside me.