Elisabeth Rynell - To Mervas

For the first few weeks after Kosti left for the Orkney Islands, I was at war with myself. The struggle between the Red forces, which wanted to swallow all pride and be reconciled at all costs, and the White forces, which refused to bend, was constant and ruthless. I was becoming an increasingly ravaged battlefield. Weeks could go by when I didn’t get out of bed in the mornings. I thought like the child I still was: He thinks I’ll come anyway. But I’ll show him. I’ll show him who he’s dealing with. I’m not going to come crawling back to him like a sorry dog and lick his fingers.

I wanted to be strong and proud. To defend my honor and let the White forces win the battle.

When the war was over and the Red forces had been conquered, I was powerless for a long time. A kind of fatigue that closely resembled an illness paralyzed me. I didn’t have the energy to think. If I even got close to completing a thought, I felt as if drugged with exhaustion. But I sensed, yes, I could sort of hear, that beneath this huge fatigue, my rage was whimpering. If I’d had the capacity to listen more attentively, I would have heard something else besides the rage. I would have heard my fear squeak. And the lamentation, the lamentation from someone who had just lost everything.

But it was my rage that one night led me to put makeup on my face and dress up in a way I never used to, that fortified me with a couple of glasses of wine and sent me out to explore the city’s bars. There, I soon got quite drunk since I wasn’t used to drinking, good girl that I’d always been. So when the man whose name I still do not know started caressing my buttocks during our dance, I pressed myself harder to him.

When we arrived at his small, messy dorm room, I found out that he was a couple of years younger than I. To my surprise, I also noticed that he was both shy and insecure in my company. As I’d always thought I’d be the one to be shy and insecure in a situation like this, I started feeling something I’d like to call a power high. I felt strangely cruel.

We sat on two chairs opposite each other, drinking instant coffee, and my irritation grew with each sip I took. In various ways, I tried insinuating that I hadn’t come home with him just to have coffee and chat, but he pretended not to hear my hints. Instead, I could tell from his face that he felt pushed further and further into a state of confusion and gloom. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me. I could tell that he wanted me, my callous eyes could see that. But he didn’t have the nerve.

I felt in some way clinically evil, and I enjoyed it. I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. Instead, I regarded him with a passionate severity. He was struggling to free himself like the wingless fly a little girl had placed on an anthill. Now that I had become someone I was not, now that I’d started the game, he too had to join. I wasn’t going to let him bail out like a kid when the game gets too scary, to bail out whining: I don’t want to play anymore.

When we’d finished our coffee and nothing happened and the clock was ticking toward three-thirty in the morning, I went and lay down on his bed. I was on my back, looking at him, and he sat glued to his chair, looking back miserably.

I could whip him, I thought, almost lustily. The notion caught me by surprise, I usually did not think or feel such things. At the same time, there was something oddly familiar about the feeling, an echo from far away. A quivering tension.

“Now that you dragged me to your place, you damned well better do something about it,” I hissed at last.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

He finally came to me. We turned out the light and our clothes flew across the room. Naked in the dark, we turned into small animals. After a while, our hands and tongues and lips made all the insecurity and contempt vanish. We had sex over and over again until dawn became morning.

Waking up hungover the next day and realizing I wasn’t lying next to Kosti but a complete stranger, I felt terrible. I didn’t want to look at him and I didn’t want to know his name. I didn’t want to see him wake up and I didn’t want to exchange a word with him ever again. I didn’t even want to get close to thinking of what had happened during the night; I just wanted to erase it from my memory. So I carefully snuck out of bed and gathered my clothes. I quickly showered him off my genitals, got dressed, and padded out.

Since then, I have never been with a man. And I doubt it will happen again. I don’t know why I say “doubt” — it will never happen again.

A few weeks later, I realized that my period had decided not to come. My relationship with Kosti was now irrevocably over. I had no thought of an abortion. I was going to show Kosti how serious my desire to have children was. To have a child now. How much he’d hurt me when he’d forced me to let our child be fathered by someone else. How badly he had wronged the child.

An odd thing happened upon receiving Kosti’s letter. I didn’t want it to happen, but I suddenly saw myself as part of a story. And it was about me, about Marta.

Everything inside me resists it, but it is as if the story presses itself against me and I can’t get away. It is as if the story itself is going to carry me. Out of this. At the same time, it has to move straight through me, like a child who needs to be born and on its way out ruthlessly opens up all the closed inner portals. The mother may burst from pain, but that doesn’t matter. The child has to come out.

The arrival of Kosti’s letter bothered me. It forced me out on a marsh, and when I try to find my way back to solid ground, I realize that the only way to go is straight through the memories, as if they were planks laid out for me to walk on. In some strange way, I think telling my story will bring me back to solid ground. The problem is that I’ve never enjoyed reminiscing. I have never devoted myself to telling or even cultivating my memories as some people do. I’ve never told anyone about my childhood, not a single person, not even myself. The reason for that is simple. There hasn’t been anything to tell, there hasn’t been a story. There have only been scraps. Bits and pieces.

Until now, I’ve lived according to my own order and taken refuge in it. I’ve been able to decide that this week I’m going to read this or that book and focus on this thing or the other. Because even though it has been a long time since I worked within my profession, I’ve continued doing a little research on my own. In this way, I’ve been able to live inside my own mind. I’ve looked for books and articles, read dissertations and research reports.

But for the last few weeks, my thoughts have constantly been elsewhere. Like flocks of birds, they’ve lifted from the pages and flown away. And my thoughts have not been fluffy daydreams or memories of the boy. No, they’ve been busy telling a story, assembling, comparing, sorting, and memorizing. I have been forced to realize there is an order to this also, but a different kind of order than what I’m accustomed to. It has even struck me that there are similarities between the writing I’ve begun and an archaeological excavation. The carefulness. You have to be so incredibly careful with the things you find down there. They may for example be positioned in a specific order in relation to one another that mustn’t be changed. Or they may be fragile and crumble at the slightest touch. A sudden shift of the hand (or the brush, or the pen), and the entire story could literally dissolve into dust.

You can have what appears to be a disorganized collection of bits and pieces. But the truth is that the position of each shard of vessel, its exact place in relation to the other pieces, is just as much a part of the puzzle as the shard itself. What I think, especially since I began to write, is this: every piece is part of the puzzle, of a story.