"No," he said. "That was very clear."
"Why didn"t you say anything?"
"Because..." His hand moved slowly over her body. "...because I didn"t know if you wanted to know. I mean, you"ve made a life for yourself. Adapted to the world of human beings. There"s a great deal you don"t know. A great deal you might not want to know. If you"re going to carry on living as you have done up to now."
"I don"t want to carry on living the same way."
"No."
She thought he was going to continue. Tell her something. Instead he sighed deeply and folded his body into an uncomfortable position so that he could rest his head on her stomach. After a while he started shaking, and she thought he was cold. She leaned forward to pull the covers over him, then realised he was crying. She stroked his hair. "What"s wrong?"
"Tina." It was the first time he had used her name. "There aren"t many of us left. It"s better for you if you...forget about this. Don"t let it influence your actions from now on."
She carried on stroking his hair as she gazed at the ceiling. The cottage wasn"t well insulated; the candles flickered and flared in the draught, making the shadows move across the ceiling. Life everywhere.
"You"ve had a child in here." His body stiffened on top of hers. "Haven"t you?"
"Yes."
"Who was it? Where is it now?"
He raised his head and slid down onto the floor by the bed; he knelt there gazing searchingly into her eyes.
She could just get up and leave right now. Go back into the house, have a hot shower and drink several gla.s.ses of wine until she fell asleep. Tomorrow he would go away. Roland would come back. On Monday she would go to work. She could carry on living within this- lie -security that had been her life up to now.
Vore got to his feet and opened the wardrobe. Moved the pile of hand towels on the top shelf. Reached in and pulled out a cardboard box, about the size of two shoe boxes. Tina pulled the covers over her. Vore"s head almost reached the ceiling, he towered over her holding out the box. She closed her eyes.
"Is it...dead?" she asked.
"No. And it"s not a child."
She felt the bed dip under his weight as he sat down. She heard the lid being lifted off. A faint whimper. She opened her eyes.
Inside the box on a bed of towels lay a tiny baby, only a couple of weeks old. The thin chest was moving up and down, and Vore caressed the child"s head with his forefinger. Tina leaned forward.
"It is a child," she said. It was a girl. Her eyes were closed, her fingers moving slowly as if she were dreaming. There was a little blob of dried milk at the corner of her mouth.
"No," he said. "It"s a hiisit. It hasn"t been fertilised."
"But it is a child. I can see it"s a child."
"I was the one who gave birth to it," said Vore. "So I ought to know, don"t you think? It"s a hiisit. It has no...soul. No thoughts. It"s like an egg. An unfertilised egg. But it can be shaped into anything at all. Look..."
He prodded one eyelid and the eyes opened. Tina gasped out loud. The eyes were completely white.
"It"s blind," said Vore. "Deaf. Incapable of learning anything. It can only breathe, cry, eat." He picked off the white blob at the corner of the child"s mouth. As if to reinforce what he had just said, he added, "A hiisit. That"s what they"re called."
"Is that what the...larvae are for? Food?"
"Yes." He was rubbing the white stuff between his fingers. "I thought you"d seen it. When you came in here."
Tina shook her head. A slight feeling of nausea was growing in her stomach, crawling up into her throat. She tore her gaze away from the child"s milky white eyes and asked, "What do you mean... shaped?"
Vore pushed his finger hard against the spot where the child"s right collarbone should have been, but the finger simply sank right in, leaving a dent behind. The child did not react. "It"s like clay."
Tina stared at the hollow, which showed no sign of springing back, the shadowy dent in the child"s chest, and she had had enough. She crawled out of bed, leaving Vore sitting there with the box on his knee. He made no move to stop her. She gathered up her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and bundled them up in her arms.
"What...why have you got it?"
Vore looked at her. Where she had seen warmth and love just minutes before there was now only the loneliness of a tarn in the depths of the forest where no one ever goes. In a thin voice he said, "Don"t you know?"
She shook her head and took a single step to the door, opened it. Vore was still sitting on the bed. She walked out onto the porch and the wind showered her naked body with light rain. The candle flames flickered wildly inside the cottage, cascading patterns over the big man on the bed with the little box on his knee.
I was the one who gave birth to it...
The white eyes opening, the finger pushed into the chest.
She slammed the door and ran over to the house. When she got inside she locked the front door. She dropped her clothes on the hall floor and went straight into the kitchen where she knocked back the last of the wine straight out of the bottle. Then she opened another and went into the bedroom, put on a CD of Chopin"s piano sonatas, turned the volume up high and crawled into bed.
She didn"t want to know. She didn"t want to know anything. When she had drunk half the bottle she ran her fingers over her s.e.x. She could feel a sticky wetness, and brought her fingers up to her nose. They smelled of germinating sprouts and salt water. She caressed herself. Nothing happened. She had another drink.
When the bottle was empty and the pattern on the curtains was beginning to move, wriggling around before her eyes, there was a knock on the door.
"Go away," she whispered. "Go away."
She staggered over to the stereo and turned up the volume until the piano was reverberating off the walls. There might have been another knock at the door, there might not. She crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
I don"t want to. Don"t want to don"t want to...
The pictures in her head became confused. Big hands grabbing at her. A forest of enormous tree trunks that disappeared into shadow, then everything was white, white. White hands, white clothes, white walls. Hands that seized her, lifted her. She travelled along a sloping chute down into the darkness, and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes and knew nothing. Grey light was pouring into the room, and her mouth was stuck together. She had a splitting headache, and her belly was hurting because she was desperate for a pee. She managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom.
When she was sitting on the toilet letting it all go, she remembered. She looked down to where the urine was pouring out of her in a jagged stream, tried to imagine what things looked like inside her. It was impossible. An ill.u.s.tration from her school biology lessons flashed through her mind.
It"s not true. I"m a freak.
She leaned against the washbasin, turned on the tap, half pulled herself up and drank. The sharpness of the water was real. She clung onto it and drank until her stomach was cold. When she straightened up and walked into the kitchen, the water began to reach the same temperature as the rest of her body. The contours blurred once more. She sat down on a chair, thought: there"s the coffee machine, there"s the magazine rack, there"s the clock. It"s a quarter past eleven. There"s a box of matches. All of these things exist. I exist too.
She took two painkillers out of the medicine drawer, swallowed them with another swig of cold water from a gla.s.s that was hard and round in her hand.
Quarter past eleven!
For a moment she panicked, thinking she was late for work. Then she remembered she was off sick. She went back to the bedroom, looked out of the window. The white car had gone. She lay down on the bed, gazed up at the ceiling for an hour.
She thought she understood everything. But she had to know.
At a quarter past one she was standing at the stop waiting for the bus to Norrtalje.
Her father wasn"t in his room. She asked one of the care a.s.sistants, and was told he was in the dayroom. The carer"s eyes flicked down to her feet as if to check that she hadn"t brought any dirt in with her. No doubt she looked like s.h.i.t.
He was alone in the room, sitting in his wheelchair facing the window. At first she thought he was asleep, but when she walked around him she saw that his eyes were open, looking out towards the spa.r.s.e pine trees outside the window. He quickly rearranged his features into a smile.
"h.e.l.lo, love. Another surprise visit!"
"Hi, Dad."
She pulled over a chair and sat down.
"How are things?" he asked.
"Not so good."
"No. I can see that."
They sat in silence for a while, looking into one another. Her father"s eyes had acquired the transparency of old age. The clarity, the wisdom were still there, but somehow diluted, like blue water colour. Tina"s mother had had brown eyes, so she had never thought about it. But she was thinking about it now.
"Dad," she said. "Where did I come from?"
Her father"s gaze sought out the pine trees. After a while he said, without looking at her, "I presume there"s no point in..." He frowned. "How did you find out?"
"Does it matter?"
Back to the pine trees. In spite of the fact that he lived in a nursing home, in spite of the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair and that his hands, once so capable, could no longer even wave away a fly, Tina had managed to disregard his age. Now she was aware of it. Or perhaps it was just that old age had taken hold at this particular moment.
"I"ve always loved you," he said. "As if you were my own daughter. You are my daughter. I hope you realise that."
The lump in her stomach was growing. It was the same feeling as when Vore held out the box. The moment before the lid is opened. When you can still run away, close your eyes, pretend there"s nothing to see. She had thought she would have to coax her father, hadn"t been prepared for the fact that they would reach this point so quickly. But perhaps he had been ready since the day she asked about the scar. Perhaps he had been ready for many years. Ever since he...took her in.
He said, "I see you didn"t bring any juice."
"No, I forgot."
"You will still come and see me, won"t you...in the future?"
She placed a hand on his arm, then on his cheek, and held it there for a few seconds. "Dad. I"m the one who should be afraid. Now tell me."
He leaned his cheek almost imperceptibly against her hand. Then he straightened up and said, "Your mother and I couldn"t have children. We tried for many years, but it never happened. I don"t know whether you ever thought about the fact that...well, we were ten or fifteen years older than your friends" parents. We"d started the process of applying to adopt a child three years before...before they found you."
"What do you mean, found?"
"You were...two years old at the time. When they found this couple deep in the forest. Only five kilometres into the forest from where we lived. Where you live now.
"I think people knew they were there, but it was only when it turned out they had a child that...steps were taken."
He closed his mouth, opened it again with a sticky sound. "Could you get me some water, please?"
Tina got up, went over to the tap, filled a feeding cup with water- deep in the forest -went back and gave it to her father. She watched him as he drank, the wrinkled neck moving as he swallowed tiny, tiny amounts. He was thin now, but he had been fine-limbed even in his heyday, just like her mother. She had seen photographs of her grandparents on both sides- She gave a start. A little water spilled onto her father"s chin, dripping down onto his chest.
Everything is disappearing, she thought. Her maternal grandparents, her paternal grandparents. The family home. The alb.u.m of black and white photographs, the house built by her great-grandfather, the whole line stretching back through time was erased. It didn"t belong to her. Tall, sinewy people in fields, standing next to houses, swimming. An unusual farming family. To which she did not belong, of course.
"Steps..." she heard herself say.
"Yes," said her father. "I don"t know how much of this you want to hear, but it was a serious case of...neglect, if I can put it that way. You were crawling around without a st.i.tch on even though it was October, and they didn"t really have any food. No electricity, no water, and you couldn"t talk. Nothing. They weren"t even living in a house, it was more a kind of shelter. Just walls. They built a fire on the ground. So you were...taken into care. And eventually you came to us."
Tears welled up in her eyes. She dashed them away, covered her mouth with her hand and stared out of the window.
"Darling girl," said her father, his voice expressionless. "I can"t reach out and touch you. As I should do right now."
Tina didn"t move.
"And my parents? What happened to them?"
"I don"t know."
She caught his eye. Refused to look away. Her father sighed deeply. "They ended up in a mental inst.i.tution. Died. Both of them. Quite soon."
"They were killed."
Her father flinched at the harshness in her voice. His face aged a few more years. "Yes," he said. "I suppose you could look at it that way. That"s what I think, looking back." His eyes sought hers, pleading. "We did what we thought was best. It wasn"t us who decided you should be taken into care. We just welcomed you...as our child. When it had already happened."
Tina nodded and stood up. "I understand," she said.
"Do you?"
"No. But perhaps I will." She looked down at him, sitting there in his wheelchair. "What was my name?" she asked. "Had they given me a name?"
Her father"s voice was so weak she thought he said "Eva". She leaned closer to his mouth. "What did you say?"
"Reva. They said Reva. I don"t know if it was a name or just... just something they said."
"Reva."
"Yes."
Reva. Vore.
On the bus home from Norrtalje she peered out of the windows as they drove along. Beyond the fences, into the forest. The significance of the nondescript ma.s.s of fir trees had deepened. She had always felt that she belonged to the forest. Now she knew it was true.
Reva.
Had they called out her name, locked inside white rooms?
She imagined padded cells, heavy iron doors with peep holes. Saw her mother and father hurling themselves at the walls, screaming to be let out, to be released back into the forest, to be given back their child. But there were only rigid, closed inst.i.tutionalised faces around them. Not a trace of green, of greenery.
Not a st.i.tch on even though it was October. Didn"t really have any food.
She had never really needed a great deal of food, and she didn"t like the food that was served in cafes, in the cafeteria at work. She liked snails, sushi. Raw fish. She was almost never cold, however low the temperature fell.