To Mervas (3 page)

Our love, or our love affair, lasted for seven, almost eight years. Our meeting at the university was all to Kosti's credit. We increasingly happened to sit next to one another during lectures and seminars. He always seemed to end up by my side. I was suspicious and grumpy. In my opinion, men only wanted one thing, and that thing was dirty and repulsive. But his smile was so open, he casually said
hi,
and sank down in the seat next to mine, his body boyishly relaxed and exuding a faint scent, a dry and grassy scent, which distracted me during the lectures. I was both attracted to and frightened by that scent. Before we became friends and started talking to each other, I sat stiff as a board next to him and avoided looking in his direction even when he spoke to me. But I couldn't avoid his scent. Discreet yet clearly distinct, it surrounded him like a cloud, and I noticed how it did something to me, it sort of prepared a place for him inside me and made me expect his presence.

I truly never thought that another person would want anything to do with me. I'd always been alone, even in my own family; I was somehow the child outside the pack, the odd, lonely sibling viewed as “Daddy's girl” in a home where Daddy was a monster. It was like collaborating with the Germans in Norway during the war. Or like being a German whore. Thus I was excluded from the pack right from the start. I felt as if I carried something around, a weight, a plague, an unforgivable guilt, and it tormented me; not so much while I was by myself, but as soon as I was among other people. That's when I felt it; I was a burden. Just as you can never get away from yourself, you can never get away from your family. You're steeped in its influence, sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot. My family had made me into someone who stayed away. I was ashamed;
not just of being Daddy's girl, but also because of all the despicable things my siblings and I had witnessed and suffered. We'd been made accomplices to something we couldn't comprehend, and in addition to that shame, I've also always felt ashamed of being ashamed. Nothing on earth is as steadfast as shame. I've been thinking that if when I get old I feel like embroidering one of those wall hangings with a saying on it, it will say in red cross-stitching:
A debt can be repaid, but shame lasts forever
. Because that's how it is.

Despite all this, Kosti stubbornly wanted to be close to me. He kept sitting down next to me and talking to me. My sharp edges and grumpiness never affected him. He often laughed at me, but I was more surprised and amazed than hurt by it. It was as if he freed me from everything difficult, released me from shame and set me free.

Since that time I have realized this: everything catches up with you eventually: your past, your fate, your sentence. It took seven, almost eight years. That's how long my respite lasted. Sometimes I watch nature films on television. The moments before the lion catches up with the gazelle, the fox with the hare, the wolverine with the reindeer, those are the glowing moments, the moments of life's ultimate freedom. Then come the claws, the teeth, the fall. It's as if I already knew it, as if it were etched into me; I was the prey.

I remained sitting by the big table in the library with the map open in front of me. I tried to conjure up an image of Kosti and the way he might look now. I even tried to picture him laughing up there in Mervas, if that's where he was. I wanted to know why he'd written to me, what had made him want to contact me after all these years. Could it be, I asked myself, almost petrified, could he be waiting for me?

Looking back at my life, I know I've ruined it. Sometimes I wake up at dawn to something that closely resembles a vision. I see what life is. With
piercing clarity, I see it as the unbelievable miracle it is: a tiny bubble, shining in different colors, sailing all alone through a vast, encompassing darkness. It's a bubble in time, a brief moment on a frequency quickly rushing past, a scene performed only for an instant. I awaken at dawn as if touched, as if burnt by this unfathomable truth. The next moment, I am filled with pain, a sorrow so powerful that it almost suffocates me. It's not simply that I haven't made the most of my life; I have also done violence to it.

Perhaps that's why I've decided to go to Mervas. In some way, I already knew this when I went to the library to look through the atlases. I'm going to sell everything I can, get rid of my furniture, the apartment, all my possessions. Then I'm leaving. I'm going to enter my life, enter the shiny bubble. That will be my penance.

Mom died giving birth to my youngest brother, and with that, you might say our family was dissolved. The baby boy was put up for adoption, despite Dad's protests, and the rest of us were placed with various friends and relatives. We weren't even allowed to attend Mom's funeral; the adults thought it would be too traumatic. It was better for us kids if everyone pretended that nothing had happened. I ended up with Dad's mother, together with my sister, who is two years older. Our three younger siblings were taken in by Mom's brothers, and they didn't want anything to do with Dad's family after what had happened, so I didn't see the twins or my little sister again until all of us were grown.

I became obsessively organized in an effort to keep everything in place. Nothing could be changed or go wrong; my sense of order in the world depended on it. I was twelve years old and every paper clip and eraser had its own assigned place in my desk drawers. I devoted myself entirely to studying and being good and completed all my assignments, even the extra ones, according to instruction. I was so careful with my brand-new schoolbooks that I hardly dared open them; I sort of peeked in between the pages through a three-inch opening. I was also reluctant to erase anything in my pristine notebooks. Instead, I tried to train myself always
to write correctly from the start. Everything in my life had to be at once transparent and impeccable; there could be nothing to remark upon or criticize. This applied to my hair, my thoughts, my schoolwork, my desk drawers, and my feelings; everything had to fit into the same mold of perfection. In a diary from this period, I'd made lists of “reasons to be happy” and “reasons to be sad.” I found the old diaries a few years ago when I cleaned out the upper cupboards in the hallway, and they made for miserable reading, which definitely belonged in the second category. Getting a perfect score on a math test was an obvious reason to be happy, but being second best or one point off was a reason to be sad. Overall, the reasons for being happy were few and rather vague: “nice weather,” “cabbage pudding for dinner,” “funny movies.” There were more reasons for being sad or upset, and they were more detailed. “A letter from Dad” was high on that list, along with “praise from people I don't respect” and “stomachache,” which meant I was having my period. I'd also written down “nightmares,” but that was in parentheses, and later crossed out. Dreams weren't reliable. Neither was my body.

I regarded my body as a repulsive feral animal, and I tried to keep it at a distance. I still remember how I tried different ways of moving so I wouldn't feel my clothes against it; I couldn't stand feeling how my body stuck to me and sort of groped me. When my classmates arranged dance parties, I never went; dancing seemed gross, and I wrote a lot about that in my diaries. Girls who wore makeup, miniskirts, or tight clothes I secretly considered sluts. If one of those girls addressed me in school, I turned away demonstratively. It was as if they carried a plague, those who danced and wore makeup and dressed up, a corporeal plague I had to stay away from at all costs.

It was harder to protect myself from my own body, and the plague
that it spread. I got my period early, at twelve, when I'd just arrived at my grandmother's, and the smell rising from my blood-soaked pad was enough for me to understand that everything originating in the lower regions of my body was appalling. To be neat and live secluded in the ordered world I'd created around myself was my protection. Black water lapped underneath that order, deep as an abyss one could fall headlong into. My life was either/or, order or chaos, so I had to be very stern and careful, and for years I kept refining my sense of order, all through high school. At twenty, I was firmly determined to live the rest of my life as a virgin. I would devote my life to study and perhaps later in life some big research project; marriage and children were something I never even considered. I was twenty-two when I met Kosti, and he just laughed at me when I explained my position. It wasn't a scornful or mean laugh, but glittering, almost loving. I was completely disarmed and felt incredibly relieved.

“You,” he said. “You want to be loved. From all the way in here.”

He pushed his index finger deep into my belly button and I stood still as if paralyzed, drinking the joy that bubbled like sparkling water from his eyes. Later on, when we'd known each other for a while, he teased me and asked if I wasn't willing to share my virginity with him.

“Just a tiny bit,” he pleaded, “so I can become a virgin too!”

He didn't call me Marta, but Mart, and he said it with a pronounced “r” and a soft “t.” You might say that he made me into Mart, that he came and opened and released me from Marta.

We studied archaeology together. In the summers, we excavated and traveled. We were inseparable. Sometimes we got upset with each other and argued, sometimes we had nothing to talk about, but we were always together, we were meant to be together; it seemed our connectedness
would never end. It was during the last year of our relationship that I became obsessed with the idea of having a child. I wanted a child with Kosti, immediately. But he didn't, not yet.

“I want to turn thirty first,” he said. “Then we'll have kids, plenty of kids.”

Even though he didn't quite understand it, Kosti probably knew that our conflict was about something besides having children. It was the old fear, the fear of the plague that had risen inside me again. I wanted to protect myself against something, but I didn't know what it was, and I grew desperate. We lost sight of each other, perhaps also got scared of each other; at any rate we were suddenly moving in different directions. I was twenty-nine, and so was Kosti. He went on the yearlong trip to the Orkney Islands by himself. It was a trip we'd planned to take together.

“I'm not coming with you unless you're willing to at least try to have a child with me,” I'd said. Because I still didn't think he was capable of leaving me and I didn't want to accept the seriousness of what had come between us: my life, my entire life.

He left. And a year later, the boy was born. Kosti didn't contact me that entire time. Not until he had returned from his trip did he call, and I told him about the boy. After that, he wrote and called a few more times, more and more rarely. Then, silence. I never went looking for him. He'd moved to another part of the country, that's all I knew. The way I looked at things then, I viewed him as having mortally wounded me, first and foremost by not being the father of, I almost want to say, our child. He'd left me and my life now belonged to the boy, now it was the two of us who were inseparable. I often found myself thinking pointless things, such as that if Kosti had been the father of my child, he would have been healthy. It was as if my mind refused to complete the thought that if Kosti had been the father, the boy wouldn't have existed at all. I knew, technically,
that the boy had a father, and that Kosti wasn't him. But I never truly accepted that reality. The way I saw it, the boy was fatherless. That was Kosti's betrayal of both of us.

I'd become a mother, but my child was locked away in the hospital and couldn't come home with me; he cried incessantly day and night; he almost wasn't a real child, and I was his mother. That's how it was. For one year my boy lived in the hospital and I was there with him, sleeping on a cot in his room the first few months, living inside his crying as if inside a cave of hoarse, exhausted crying. Back then, no other world existed except for the one contained inside the hospital's red bricks. I had to subscribe to that world and its routines, routines that made the days so similar they eventually seemed like one, like a simple, rhythmic pattern repeated again and again, a ticking without variation that kept the world going. No suffering or pain can resist being swallowed by a hospital's regulations and stubborn reasoning. An ingenious protective net of cleanliness and restraint is perpetually suspended over the abyss. It wasn't until I was locked up inside this alien order that I began to understand what the pedantic rhythm in my own life had been about. You can think of order as a spine or a corset; that's how I used to think about it myself. Now I know that its primary purpose isn't to hold things together. It is to shut things out, to repel and shut things out. That's what it's for.

I sat there with my child, enclosed by the hospital's vast order, surrounded by the small cell filled with my tears and the face of my child. I felt as if I were traveling on board a spaceship drifting off course through the universe. All connections to my old life – my history, my memories, my sense of context – had been severed. After three months, the doctors convinced me to move back home. I had to get some sleep, they said. I had to get my life back in order.

“I don't have a life without the boy,” I said. “I have no life to take care of.”

Nevertheless, I staggered out of the hospital and my sister came to bring me home. She'd been watering my plants, opening my mail, and paying my bills while I was gone. Now she led me into town, led me out under the incredible, enormous sky, and all the way to my small apartment, where my old life lay wrapped up, waiting for me. She'd prepared a welcome-home dinner and bought wine. On the table was a bouquet of Easter lilies, and outside the kitchen window, the leaves were opening on the birch. At once, I became aware that it was spring, late spring. I sank down on a chair by the table and stared out at the birch, massive tears welling up inside me. A gray mountain of tears.