The boat chugs off among the fjords, into the evening.
Marita isn’t afraid. She’s waiting for the expulsion, the blood. Darkness shuts the porthole and sends the gulls home.
Now there is only the sea.
The cabin is cramped. Two bunks and a table bolted down.
Marita is lying in the bottom bunk with half a metre of cheesecloth underneath her. The fabric is sticking to her thighs. The nappy, soaked in sweat, is gnawing at her groin.
At Ingrún’s hotel the towels are thick and snowy white, with embroidered initials. She stole a couple of the small ones, ripped them up and stitched them into narrow pockets. Now they’re ready in the darkness of the bunk, underneath the blanket, stuffed with the shreds of a torn-up pinafore, two pairs of woollen socks, a discarded vest. A little crocheted tablecloth.
The foetus is the size of a walnut. 65
She’s imagined it like a luminous brain in the flesh, a thistle of blood, a woodlouse that unfolds. Twitching. Hard, small legs.
The nausea is heavy as panic.
In the upper bunk, a young housewife is snoring. Marita pictures the schnapps-laden breath slipping greasily out of the open, vulnerable mouth. There had been something pony-like about the housewife. That practised way of sticking out her thin gold ring. Now she’s rattling blind drunk through the nose and occasionally giving a long, wet groan. Couldn’t hope for grander company, Marita thinks.
Her womb contracts, lazily. An icing-over in her coccyx. The woodlouse is heavy now, rolling with the boat back and forth across her soft organs. She’s tried lying on her side. Her little passenger swooped with the movement, distending her belly towards the mattress.
A dull pain clenches its fist around the base of her spine, twisting every now and then.
‘The infection does the work. The body empties itself.’
Ragnar said so. He didn’t wave goodbye. Crumpling almost, back-lit, as the boat slid away. Around her on the quarterdeck the travellers stood in clusters, some with their arms full of luggage and children, others with one stupid hand flapping in the air. A few geese, doubled in the water, vanished beneath the shadows of the low rowing boats. Marita was happy. At that moment she was. 66
Later, on deck, she thought the boat seemed a large and friendly insect, climbing over something glass-green past islands and rocks. She heard a golden plover call across the fjord, two long jabs from its throat, the comical puu-yii, puu-yii.
Turning her face upwards, she let the sun into her mouth. Thought of the country that lay ahead, soft and warm as an egg. Its yellowish smile, billowing with corn, humming with insects.
The first pang stabbed into her back, short and sharp as a crow’s caw. She gasped for breath. The crow pecked at her urethra, grabbed hold and gave a black, spastic jerk of the head. Her jaw twitched. The sun fell out. She fumbled after the pain, following it below deck.
The situation with Ragnar, how can she explain it?
The sky had twinkled, it was a night in June. There had been a dance in the next village south. The green of the mountain hovered above the stones. Stumbling homeward together, they fell and stayed lying where they were. He cast off his age for her, his earnestness.
Afterwards he lay like a naked hermit crab in the moss. She put her fingers on his round stomach. It glowed palely through the black hair, it jumped in alarm, and they giggled. His beard smelled dark, a little of train oil. She scraped it off and smeared it over her face. 67
There was one time, and then a second time, a little bewildered, which only half counted, because they broke down laughing and gave up midway through. Their friendship grew deeper, lighter.
One morning they found a puffin chick in the stream. Ragnar was in the middle of a long story when she caught sight of it rolling around in confusion, a tiny little steamboat slipping on the stones. Ragnar laughed into his beard. Tucked the feathery blob into his jacket pocket. They carried it down the path. Its heart beat in woolly chirrups all the way down to the sea.
Birds are wiser than people, he likes to say. Gulls especially; he calls them the proletariat of the sea. When he stands on the quay or by the rocks in a cloud of filthy white wings, he agitates for the prisoners of want.
Death can be something one slips into. A long friendship.
The pain is more intense. The wool scratches at her groin. In this cabin, in this pillbox, this oven. The heat under the blanket.
At first she behaved as though nothing had happened.
The date of her departure was approaching.
She went home and saw her own family. On her way back she called on Ingrún at the hotel.
‘You must be looking forward to seeing our Fritz again.’
It was an order. Ingrún splashed coffee into the whiteness of the porcelain with a big, bony hand. 68
Fritz. Was she? Yes, she was.
Marita was wasting away, the hotel proprietress decided with barely concealed satisfaction, offering her the sponge cake.
Marita let a slimy dollop of fondant slide down her throat while Ingrún briefed her on the various tribulations of hotel management. A girl in the laundry had run away. Another ran around with any old Tom, Dick or Harry.
Ingrún had plenty to get off her chest. All Marita had to do was chew and nod.
From the dining room, the sound of cutlery against porcelain.
A chair scraped across the floor.
The scent of boiled potatoes, of meat, small bunches of heather on the tables.
One cheery gentleman launched into a few verses of Danish song. Another shushed him. The lively mood of business and pleasure found its way into the kitchen like a draught.
Ingrún was right, she was losing weight. In the beginning the tension had filled her stomach with nervous quicksilver. Later she’d thought she could starve herself empty. But the woodlouse would grow, it would, she sensed it. The way it licked the sponge cake down. The coffee came washing up, sour, and filled her mouth, while Ingrún’s hoarse stream of words continued, and she nodded and nodded. In the middle of a nod she made her choice. 69
Marita coaxes one arm free and feels around on the top bunk with her fingertips. If she hits her head during the night? If she faints? It’s four short steps from the bunk to the cabin door. At the end of an angular, windowless corridor is the washroom. The white-scrubbed enamel tubs.
The death of a child can be purifying, it says so in the Bible; it’s written in sour milk in human nature. She has seen her face in the scratched mirror, the lines around her mouth. Wonderful how fearsome.
Ragnar made her knee disappear in his hand; he called her little soldier.
At first he’d been so pleased. He’d shown a man’s idiotic pride in his own ability to breed. She had to say the obvious out loud. That it had to happen, that it had to be this way. Then they sat for a while in silence. Jointly they studied his large hands.
At last he got up, slung his grief over his shoulder and muttered that he thought he probably had a book. If it had to happen.
The cervix was drawn like the stem of a glass. Lines on the paper connected the stem and the triangular womb with small Latin words. They read them together. Later, among the pine trees, she eased the steel wire up, clenched her teeth, scraped. Prayed for the soft tissue.
The cramps are dry, grating at the mucous membrane.
The boat throbs through the blackness. 70
The woodlouse is wandering around inside.
The blood still isn’t coming. Minutes fall to the ground in loose seconds. The night picks them up one by one.
Now, with each spasm, a languid apathy pours poison into her limbs. Something dark is prowling around the cabin, noiseless and alert, like a cat waiting for milk. She’s sweating. The housewife in the upper bunk turns, creaking, and empties her bowels of air. The sea holds the boat trapped between massive thighs, squeezing the hull and mumbling.
A line from one of Fritz’s letters:
Small islands can be born in a night, and they can vanish in a night. What came next? Deep under the sea, all land masses meet. There was more, but it’s vanishing before her now. He lectures, Fritz, acts the intellectual in his letters, stuffs them with what he’s learned at the teaching college. She can smile about it. Now she tries, and seems to manage, more or less.
The letters are in a bundle in her suitcase, dated, from the first ones all crumpled and brittle-worn to the last, which she barely read. His handwriting is neat, each letter planted faithfully on the paper. There is a year in those letters. An ache. A childhood faith.
Home, once, when she was a child: gleams of silver running cold among the flat stones on the beach. She raced down to the harbour with the basket of coffee. Her body was light and hollow, like a tin can. She remembers the silver in a wet fish scale. 71
The oil in the blood on practised hands.
A black-rimmed thumb split the fish’s belly with a plop.
The village lies at the bottom of the deep fjord.
The mountain river cuts straight through.
Redcurrant bushes grow in the gardens behind the low stone walls, snagging on the wind. The view over Mykines. The island is feigning sleep at the end of the fjord. She pictures it. It grows slowly smaller against the horizon, gliding, then jerkily.
At first the blood is ridiculous, like she’s wetting herself.
The warmth seeps into the nappy, greasy in her pubic hair. She laughs fiercely with her teeth clenched. It’s the relief. Now all she has to do is live or die.
Time’s pouring now. A stream of black and warm.
She’s conscious but scattered. Small tussocks, which emerge glistening from the breakers, are sprinkled, go under, rip themselves free and become one with flesh-coloured foam. There are tufts of the flesh-colour between the labour pains. The blood and infection flow out of her. The nappy is getting heavy and wet.
Marita bares her teeth in the dark. Bends her knees. Lifts the small of her back and pulls off the nappy. The small pockets are bundled into the tablecloth.
Saliva trickles from her lips. She vomits into her mouth. Swallows. The cramps jab in all directions, white and stiff, then orange. Small explosions on the inside of her eyelids, evil berries bursting. 72
Keeping her limbs under control beneath the blanket.
Calling her muscles to her like dogs.
A sea bird gleams past in the blackness above. The sky is woollen, the sea still. It’s that hour, that deepest hollow of the night, when land is a question of faith.
Marita stands doubled-over in the raw air and lets the fever drip off her skin. The bundle slips noiselessly over the railing, splattering dark and grey against the boat until it disappears.
Nor are they any wiser, the birds. Some of them are bound to miscalculate and flop into the sea. She pictures the seabed like that. Strewn with small white bodies.
Marita feels the blood, only trickling now. She feels the warmth from within, stamping and trudging in her muscles. That the fever is like hot wine, that her legs will bear her.