Elisabeth Rynell - To Mervas

Violence is inside me, naked and shiny, I can feel it, I have it in me, I’ve inherited it and it has survived and been reincarnated and when it awakens in me I rear up on my hind legs and beat the air with my hooves. I’ve entered into violence as if it were an ancient tongue, an old dialect that speaks to me and overtakes me. There is a passion inherent in the violence, a longing to be obliterated by it, a desire to become even more violated by giving in to it.

I’m not trying to excuse myself. I’m not defending myself and I’m not saying that the violence inside me is incurable, congenital, a handicap. All I want is to see, to see down into that dark kingdom where so much of my life has taken place. The film from the day of the boy’s death is down there too. It is still undeveloped and very sensitive; it cannot stand any kind of light. I know that the images have to be bathed first, and I think that’s what happening with me right now. The images are being bathed in my darkness in order to learn how to endure light. It’s odd. Before, I didn’t think a human life could be so rich. That it could contain so many layers. Now I feel a kind of softness inside, I want to bend, bow down to it.

Everything I’ve written here in Mervas ought to have begun with the words: Kosti isn’t here yet. But I don’t want the days here to be about Kosti, about his absence. They are about me. They are about what’s present. This morning I found his car. It was hidden on a small street behind the water-filled mining holes; I don’t understand how I could’ve missed going there, I’ve wandered through every corner of Mervas. It was a dark brown Fiat. Locked, of course. In the backseat was an old blanket and I suddenly got it into my head that I’d seen it before. Suddenly, I began to cry. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself,” spat a contemptuous voice inside me. And I agreed, I thought I was pathetic. But I still had to cry. I cried because there were no kind hands to hold my shoulders, no one I could lean my head against. I cried because the memories burned inside me, made me contract.

I’ve stood at the top of the stairs that lead underground several times, but I haven’t been able to make myself walk all the way down; my legs have gone weak each time.

Sometimes I wonder if the lilies of the valley have already faded in Deep Tarn. Lilldolly and I would walk around together picking big bouquets of them. There are no lilies of the valley here. I often think about the little girl they lost, about Lilldolly and Arnold, their world, into which I had been welcomed.

On the days before the boy’s operation, he had to be scrubbed clean each night with a special disinfectant soap solution. I was so afraid that he’d die during the operation; they were going inside his head after all, to cut him there. When I washed him with the strong-smelling soap, I thought that it was like a ritual cleansing before a sacrificial slaughter. The animal that was to be sacrificed had to be very clean and prepared before it was handed over to the sacrificial priests. The soap smelled of incorruptible ritual and was so alien on the small, soft baby body in my hands, so foreign to the boy’s own scent. Now I was following directives while I prepared to give him away. After doing this, I would, for better or worse, place his life in the hands of strangers who spoke a different language, a language that came from the outside instead of from the inside.

The operation did go well in the sense that he survived and stopped crying and twitching. But at the same time, it was as if they’d cut him off from himself, as if a connection had been severed. His spirit couldn’t find a place to rest in his body afterward, he had no way of expressing himself, there was no city that was his own city, not even the city of tears was left. But what I kept thinking of was those cleanings, that particular kind of cleansing, the preparation.

For once to wash yourself clean. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s not dirt that I want to wash off. But rather a sense of presence, of myself; an invasive feeling. A consciousness that never gives way, that isn’t about anything in particular but simply about being, about existing. It’s a feeling so intense and infringing it’s like being slowly grated into shreds, like being scraped against sharp holes, no part of me is spared, no surface left alone.

I’m supposed to be alive; I’ve understood as much. I have to keep living. All the deeds evident on my body, like fingerprints all over me, like dirty, inappropriate hands, Daddy’s hands, mostly Daddy’s hands in addition to my own, they will remain. I was Daddy’s girl. I was the apple of his eye and even though he beat and humiliated me as much as the rest of the family, I was somehow his, part of his sphere. My mom was inaccessible; she sat with my older sister and the younger siblings and I stood outside their sphere and looked at them as if they sat in a spotlight of some kind. I longed for my mom — or perhaps I should say that I longed for Mom since she wasn’t mine at all. At any rate, I stood outside and longed to be with them, with Daddy’s hands, his presence clinging to my entire body like a virus.

I think it was because I was standing there to the side that it became my responsibility always to watch, that I was the one who had to witness everything, not just how Mom was humiliated, or my siblings, or myself. I had to watch Daddy too, and not walk away when he gave in to his fury. Sometimes I think my sister is the kind of person who spared herself, and I can hate her for that. She protected herself from seeing and didn’t participate or feel guilty; she just sat there with Mom like some noble victim. I was already tainted from the start, my heart couldn’t release me from getting mixed up and dissolved and touched and I often think that this was my fate, exactly this. It was meant for me. I don’t claim that I’m any better than my sister as I write this, I just envy her. I will never be clean.

Inside me, the boy’s gaze and spirit and what I’ve done are preserved. It is now part of my life. You can’t run away from your deeds; they become hands on your body and you have to live with them, force yourself to remain human with a voice and a face. I knew this afterward, when I was rocking and mute. I was in the kitchen with the boy where he lay on the floor wailing in despair, I was there constantly and would never get out.

I’d made him a birthday cake, a lovely birthday cake. We admired it for a long time together before I cut into it. Then I had to witness how he couldn’t eat it. I fed him spoon after spoon, but the cake kept falling out of his mouth and down his chin and chest. I couldn’t stand it. I just couldn’t stand it. At first, I was overcome with sorrow. I couldn’t bear seeing that he couldn’t live. And those eyes of his. Trapped inside of him. In those eyes I glimpsed his own terrible sorrow of not being able to do anything. Of being so helpless. Something in me snapped. Rage welled up. A rage that told me to defend him, in some way defend him against all the frustration and impossibility he was experiencing. I began beating him, beating his body and everything that hindered him. I began beating the obstacles out of him that cut him off from life, beating the curse out of him that he’d inherited from me, everything but his gaze and his longing. I beat him. I wanted to break something inside me. I thrashed out with anything I could reach, chairs, bottles, I flung anything I could get hold of, flowerpots, plates, cups, spoons. I threw them at him. At the one I saw. At myself. At the world. At his inability to live. At myself. I was responsible. I had given birth to his misery. At the same time, I screamed. No! I shrieked. No, no, no! I screamed in a terrible voice.