She counted to 200, just like the day before. It was five o’clock again today and she wondered if that was his regular routine. He would come at about half past nine in the morning, stay all day and leave about five.
But if so, why? Why didn’t he stay overnight?
She didn’t take the rucksack and guitar straight back inside with her. Retrieving the key from its usual place above the door, she went in to see whether anything had changed. Whether he had read her note and reacted to it in any way. Or simply thrown it away.
He had all but spotted her out in the forest, she realized. She’d spent the morning wandering round a bit aimlessly, mainly to keep from losing too much heat. She’d sat down to read a couple of times in sunny clearings, but only for ten or fifteen minutes on each occasion. Even though she was better dressed than the day before, it was cooler today. As she walked she made sure to remember some landmarks, so she didn’t get lost. The huge glacial boulder. The anthill. The road, of course, the rise up to the three tall spruces, the marshy area clogged with tree shoots and thickets down on the other side – and suddenly she saw him coming, making almost straight for her. He was still quite a long way off, and she dived for cover behind a curtain of young spruces. He passed her at a distance of only ten or fifteen metres, and to be on the safe side she stayed there flattened to the mossy ground, her eyes shut, long after he had gone.
What I can’t see, can’t see me either, that was a good old rule and not to be laughed at.
There was a sheet of paper on the table. She held her breath as she picked it up and read:
My name’s Valdemar. If you stay until tomorrow, we can talk to each other, all right? I’ll be there about nine thirty as usual.
Warm wishes
V.
Valdemar? she thought. What a strange name, she’d never met anyone called that in her entire life. She didn’t think she’d even heard of the name.
She went out to get her rucksack and guitar. She lit a fire in the hearth; it was easier now, but the first time she’d used up half a box of matches before it got going. He had fetched in more wood, stacked it in a pile under the window, as if he wanted to make sure she’d be nice and warm overnight.
She made coffee on the stove and put a big saucepan of water to boil on the bigger hotplate; it was a new pan, so he must have brought it with him today. She found a plastic bowl and a packet of washing powder under the sink and spent half an hour washing and rinsing dirty clothes. Socks and underwear. She looked for a line to hang them out on, but couldn’t find one. They wouldn’t dry outside in any case, she thought; it would be better to hang them over the backs of chairs in front of the fire.
There was a solitary pork chop in the fridge, but she didn’t like pork chops. She made herself a packet soup instead, and put liver paté and gherkin on two slices of bread.
Four days, she thought as she sat at the kitchen table working her way through the bread. I’ve only been here four days, but I feel as though I actually live here. Some of the time I do, anyway.
Right now I do, at any rate.
It was strange, but maybe that was the way of things: there were certain places where you felt at home, while in others you never had that sense of contentment, no matter how long you stayed there.
Yes, but then I’m just a fucking loner, she thought. Sonja at Elvafors was dead right about that. My type doesn’t fit in with people, and that’s my big problem.
That was true, wasn’t it? She’d been in the forest two whole days now, seven or eight hours each day, and in a way it didn’t bother her. As long as she had the right clothes on and something to eat, she liked wandering around amongst the trees, the moss-covered rocks, the tussocks of twiggy lingonberry, with no plan beyond doing just that. She felt safe. Calm and contented.
And that was even stranger, really. She was born and raised in an urban setting, and had never spent much time in the country. Those summers at Julek’s house in Poland, of course, and at Grandmother’s. A few school trips, but that was about it.
Well there’d been a couple of nights camping with Jossan and Emily too, she remembered. They’d hitchhiked their way south for a week one summer a few years back; the idea had been to get to Denmark but they’d ended up by a lake in the forest in Småland instead. It had been so totally different to here and now, she thought. It felt like a hundred years ago and she couldn’t help smiling about it. They’d drunk beer and smoked hash the whole time and Jossan had been so scared of the dark and freaked out that they’d had to stay awake and hold her and talk to her all the time.
She wondered how things had turned out for Jossan. She got pregnant and had a baby before she was nineteen. Then she moved to Stockholm with the father and their baby daughter. Hallonbergen, wasn’t it? The father was from Eritrea and his family was still there. Maybe Jossan had found her feet thanks to the baby, thought Anna, but things could just as well have gone in the other direction.
At any event, she wouldn’t have fitted in here. Living alone, in a little cottage out in the forest, no, that was an existence most people wouldn’t leap at the chance of. Or at least, not if they happened to be a girl and only twenty-one.
Though I don’t actually live here, was her next thought. This is just temporary. If I had somewhere else to head for, of course I wouldn’t stay in a place like this. She went outside and smoked her last cigarette. As she stubbed it out, a great sense of desolation descended on her. She was on the verge of tears, but managed to pull herself together. This is also the way of things, she observed to herself. The needs of body and soul. I shall have to leave here simply because I need to get hold of some cigarettes.
Five minutes later she found his pipe and tobacco where he’d left it, on the shelf above the bed.
That night she dreamt about Marek, her little brother. It was more of a memory than a dream, really, but in the dream, things went far worse than they had done in reality.
The dream was about that time he was in hospital. He was only four, Anna sixteen. Marek had been getting peculiar pains in his stomach for a while, not every day, but they recurred at irregular intervals. No one was sure if they were real or he was just pretending, and that was almost the hardest thing about it, Anna thought.
Why should a four-year-old boy invent pains in his stomach?
It always happened when he was feeling upset, too. Anna’s mother had to fetch him from nursery several times, Anna also had to help out, and in the end they took him to hospital for a proper examination. Anna didn’t know why they had kept Marek in overnight, but they did. And Anna was the one who had to stay with him, sleeping in the other bed in the brilliant-white room up on the tenth floor. Her mother wasn’t able to stay, for some reason Anna couldn’t remember either.
He was so scared, her little brother, and in the end she climbed into his bed; it simply wasn’t enough for her to be half a metre away, holding his hand.
And he asked her such strange questions.
Why am I so stupid and unkind?
Are you going to give me away when I’m a bit bigger?
Why does Daddy say such horrible things?
I’m never going to be a white angel, am I?
Was it normal for four-year-olds to ask questions like that? She didn’t know, but she found it hard to believe. And what were the horrible things that his dad, who wasn’t Anna’s dad, had been saying? Well, Marek didn’t want to talk about it.
Don’t tell Mum what I said, he begged. And not just once, but twice.
She did her best to console and pacify him, of course. Just before he finally went off to sleep, he asked her if he was going to die during the night, if that was why he was here, and she had assured him he would wake up the next morning as hale and hearty as a little foal.
A foal? Marek asked.
As lively and happy as a little horse, she promised. He thought about this for a long time.
I’d really like to be a little horse, he declared in his most earnest voice. Horses don’t have hands that can do awful things.
That was how it had been in real life. She had stayed awake for a long time, close beside him, listening to his snuffling breaths and wondering about his questions, and in the morning a doctor and a whole flock of nurses had come round and told her there wasn’t anything in the least wrong with Marek, and then the two of them had gone home. She never told her mother about her conversation with Marek in the hospital bed and Marek never returned to the subject either. His stomach problem recurred a few times in the weeks that followed, but then it stopped.
In the dream, things developed differently. When she woke up in the hospital bed the next morning, Marek wasn’t there. She tried to find out – from all these people in white – where her little brother had gone, but no one could give her a sensible answer. She ran round the big hospital, asking everywhere, but most people didn’t have time even to listen to her. She made her way through long corridors and dark tunnels, but nowhere was there a four-year-old boy who had come in the day before with stomach pains. And nobody knew anything.
In the end she found him in a big room down in the basement, a kind of storeroom, in fact; it was full of little white coffins and in every coffin lay a dead child. There really was an immense number of coffins, and it wasn’t until she opened the very last one that she came across her little brother.
He wasn’t just dead, he also had a noose round his neck, and on his chest was his favourite teddy, its head cut off.
She was woken by her own tears. When she realized it was only a dream, she felt a surge of relief of course, but her tears continued flowing for a long time.
Why do I have dreams like that? she thought. How is life going to turn out for Marek and why do things always get so horrible when we aren’t on our guard?
She checked the time. It was twenty to eight.
High time to get up. Have some breakfast and decide whether she was going to leave or stay.
When she came out of the house – to go for a pee, over by the earth cellar – she found it was raining.