The pictures would come and go.
At first she felt there were lots of them, but she gradually realized there were only three. More like film sequences than pictures, in fact, but it somehow always started with a still image. As if she was leafing through a photo album, stopped and let her eyes rest on one of the pictures, and as she did so, it started to move and come to life.
To come and go.
The first one was the sea. She was looking out over an immensely long sandy beach, over a calm, greyish-blue sea, and there was something small and white swirling in the air, almost like snowflakes, although they never landed; initially she didn’t know what she was seeing, but they must have been somewhere along Poland’s Baltic coast. Nad morzem. She was sitting on her father’s shoulders, which she hadn’t realized at first, but it must have been that way. He took her down to the water’s edge. She was about four or five, had not yet started school, and her parents were still together, at least from time to time.
It was summer, or early autumn rather, and they had taken the ferry from Nynäshamn to Gdansk – she had a clear memory of the ferry – then they carried on westwards by car and crammed themselves and their bags and baggage into a tall, pointy house set amongst others all the same in a beech forest at some kind of camp. That was how they would spend those summers. For a few brief seconds she saw the tall, triangular brown house, too, and the campfire they would light outside it in the evenings, and the other children at play, laughing and shouting, and funny fizzy drinks in garish colours with different tastes from those she was used to; and ice creams, lody, lody, dla uchłody, but then she tore her gaze from all this and turned it on the beach again. It was almost deserted and the sand was so white and fine-grained. Her dad was singing something as he walked and she held onto his ears so as not to fall off; they came to Mum, who was a bit further up, in the shelter of the dunes, lying on her stomach on a big red bath towel, sunbathing naked.
And her father lifted her down and they lay down beside Mum, one on each side, and she made a fuss because she wanted to be in the middle, but eventually, and because they give her a sweet to suck, she settled down. They lay there on their stomachs, all three of them, and Mum and Dad whispered to each other and it was lovely and warm. It makes you feel really happy, she thought, and after a while she fell asleep.
But then she suddenly sat up again with her knees drawn up, looking out over the sea at the air full of thousands of little white butterflies making for the shore. Thousands and thousands of them, she could see now that they were butterflies, they were tiny, so tiny, carried on the wind, and she woke her mum and dad who were still lying close together and seemed to be asleep although they weren’t, and she asked what kind of butterflies they were and where they’d come from.
Her father propped himself up on his elbow and looked out for a while at the featherweight invasion from the sea, then he said: don’t take any notice of them, Ania kochana, they are the butterflies of death and they’ve come over the sea from Sweden.
Butterflies of death from Sweden, he actually said that and she has never forgotten it. Even though she didn’t really understand what it meant she was going to remember it, she decided right there and then, on the beach.
The second film sequence was shorter. It had a sort of sepia tinge, as if the images were old or had suffered some kind of damage. She was sitting at her school desk, the school in Varberg that she went to for a term or a term and a half. They sat in twos, but because her desk-mate Julia from Argentina was off sick, she was by herself that day. The teacher’s name was Susanne but she was known as Snusanne because she used snus; maybe she’d popped along to the staff room to tuck a new one under her top lip – she did that every so often.
Things were fairly quiet in the classroom even though the teacher wasn’t there, because they were all doing exercises in their workbooks. But then one of the boys in the double desk in front of her turned round, the one with piggy little eyes and unnaturally white hair. He gave her a nervous sneer of a grin and whispered: ‘I know your cunt goes crossways, that’s the way they have them where you come from. My dad often goes over there to screw birds, so don’t try to tell me otherwise!’
He gabbled it all in one breath, as if he had sat there practising it first, and when he had finished he turned quickly back round again. Presumably only she and Pig-Eyes’ deskmate heard what he said, but she still picked up her pencil and jabbed it as hard as she could into his back. She pushed it in and gave it a twist, and he yelled his head off just as Snusanne came back into the room.
Jimmy – yes, that was his name – threw himself onto the floor and whimpered and generally carried on, bawling: She’s out of her tiny mind; She’s dead dangerous; She tried to kill me; She’s a fucking Polish retard; and Fuck, am I bleeding, am I?
But mainly he just yelped and moaned, and the teacher pulled his shirt out of his trousers and inspected the wound, and the whole time, because all this took quite a while, Anna just carried on calmly filling in her workbook. She was using a different pencil by then, because the point of the first one was stuck in the back of Jimmy Pig-Eyes.
And when she was asked afterwards to explain why she had done it, because Snusanne and the school counsellor in the sandals and the study advisor and all sorts of people wanted to know, she said nothing. Nothing; not a single word passed her lips. She didn’t even tell Mum, but seeing these yellowed images now, she couldn’t really comprehend how she had done that. She couldn’t have been more than ten, and she had no recollection of ever having been as tough as she was on that occasion. Neither before nor since.
And Jimmy Pig-Eyes kept well away from her at playtimes, as did his mates, and a few weeks after the incident she changed school, because Mum had once again found something that was both cheaper and better.
The third film was the strangest of all.
Her little brother was sick again, and lying in bed in a room she at first didn’t recognize, but she soon saw that it must be the cottage at Lograna. She had just finished painting the walls; for some reason it was important for her to finish the job so Marek could get well. He looked so small and pitiful lying there in the bed, and she realized he was changing size. Whenever she approached the bed, he shrank, but when she stayed at a slight distance he seemed more or less normal.
She tried to go right up to her brother, because she wanted to touch him, of course, but when she put out her hand he was suddenly so tiny that he was invisible, and she whispered to him not to be afraid, it was only her, his sister Anna, wanting to stroke him and help him get better, but not being able to see him frightened her out of her wits and she hastily retreated to a corner of the room. And then, although not right away, he grew larger and was visible again.
This film was the scariest and was a constant repetition of this one thing: she approached her little brother, he shrank and vanished and she backed away from the bed, terrified. Worst of all were those seconds after she got back to her corner and couldn’t be sure if he was going to appear again. Perhaps it was too late, perhaps she should never have tried to touch him one last time.
Sometimes, between the film sequences, she was awake. Or almost awake, anyway, because Valdemar was with her and he was neither a memory nor a dream. He was reality, sheer reality, and part of what was actually happening.
They were in the car all the time, he in the front seat and she in the back. Sometimes they stopped, sometimes they were on the move; from time to time he helped her out so she could pee beside the road, and she felt freezing cold as she squatted behind some bush, and afterwards she always got the headache.
He talked to her, said things to her, but she understood hardly any of what he was trying to say. It was simpler to go back to sleep and watch the dream sequences unfold, though she did wish there could be other pictures. But it was always just those three. The beach, Jimmy Pig-Eyes, Marek.
He listened to the car radio, too, and she could hear it. Usually just music, but now and then there was a news bulletin; she didn’t understand the language they were speaking, but it could be Swedish even so, she thought. She didn’t understand what Valdemar said to her, did she, but he must surely be talking Swedish? Maybe they’d soon be home.
Home. It was a strange word, meaning different things to everybody in the whole world, yet they all knew what it meant and for her part . . . no, wait, there was one person who didn’t know, and that was her.
It worried her for a few moments, but then it occurred to her that Valdemar was bound to know. Yes, he definitely would, and she wanted to say it to him, tell him she appreciated it, and that she liked him, and as soon as she got well, she thought, she would explain all that to him and play the guitar and sing to him so he really understood that she meant it.
Young girl, dumb girl . . . no, not that song, and anyway it wasn’t really a song but just a silly sort of chant. It had to be something else that he’d recognize and like. Maybe ‘Valdemar the Penguin’, that one she wrote for him.
But if she died instead, she would come and visit him in his dreams. So whichever way it turned out, there could only be a happy ending.
She could see the butterflies again now, it was amazing that there were so many of them and they could fly so far without having to touch down. She held on tightly to her dad’s ears so she wouldn’t have to get her feet wet, either.