They had doubtless known how to look after their own child. But the early sixties, the art of social engineering-smiling mothers in floral ap.r.o.ns, record years, the building project known as the Million Program. Lighting a fire on the ground and no food in the larder, if they even had a larder. Such things couldn"t be permitted.
Tina had heard that people were sterilised well into the 1970s. Was that what happened to her parents?
A mental inst.i.tution.
She couldn"t get away from the image of those white cubes, her mother and father each locked in their own s.p.a.ce, screaming themselves hoa.r.s.e until they died of grief. She tried to think that perhaps it was for the best. That otherwise they would have neglected her until she died. But she had survived at least one winter, hadn"t she? The most difficult winter, a baby"s first winter. They had brought her through that.
Tears blurred the view as she looked over towards the fir trees along the side of the road, enclosed by fences, wire fences keeping the wildlife away.
Keep the forest away from us. Tame it. Enclose it.
Vore. How much did he know about all this? Had he always known what he was, or had he also had a moment like this when everything came crashing down on him and he was forced to reinterpret his entire life?
She rubbed the tears from her eyes with her fists and rested her forehead on the window, following the forest with her gaze.
The cottage was empty. The furniture was still there, of course, but his suitcase, the hatching box, his camera, his binoculars and his books were gone. She lifted up the towels on the top shelf in the wardrobe. The cardboard box had gone too.
He had left her without a word of farewell.
No. His notebook was still lying on the desk. She picked it up to see if there might be a note underneath. When she didn"t find anything, she flicked through it. It fell open in the middle, revealing a small pile of photographs. She looked at the top one. It was a picture of his... hiisit.
She went through the book page by page to see if he had written her a message. Nothing. Only the lists of times, the illegible notes. She sat down at the desk and tried to decipher them. They were worse than a doctor"s prescriptions; they looked like something written by someone pretending he could write.
After a while she managed to identify a number of consonants, and with their help she was able to guess at others. It took almost two hours before she had a comparatively legible alphabet, and was able to put the letters together to work out longer words: 0730 man leaves 0812 window open 0922 post 1003 dishes. asleep?
1028 outside. raking leaves.
1107 wakes up?
She turned to other days, saw the same schedule repeated. She closed the notebook, rubbed her eyes and looked out of the window. What she saw made her heart flutter.
No...
She picked up the photographs, looked at them one by one. At first she was convinced they were pictures of his hiisit, but in the later photographs she could see a woman"s hands holding it. And in the last picture, the woman was there.
Elisabet.
She was standing in Tina"s kitchen holding her child, a beaming, slightly strained smile on her face. The child was identical to the child that had lain on a bed of towels in a cardboard box. The child that was not a child. The child that was a hiisit, that could be- shaped -that could be made into an image of anything whatsoever. As long as you had something to go on, a model. Like photographs.
Tina looked out of the window again. Saw the neighbours" house. The cottage was the perfect spot if you wanted to spy on them. If you had a pair of binoculars, made notes on their movements...
Why have you got it?
Don"t you know?
She knew now.
Suddenly she threw back her head and laughed. A coa.r.s.e, terrible laugh that sprang from the same original source as rage, as tears. She laughed, she screamed. It was all so obvious, so simple. The only thing that had stopped her from seeing it was that it had been right in front of her nose.
She slapped her head with the palms of her hands.
"Idiot!" she yelled. "Idiot! Every single person knows what we do, after all!" She laughed again, panting. "We swap children! We steal their children and leave our own in their place!"
She didn"t want to do it, but she had to.
There was a strange car parked outside the neighbours" house. A dark blue Volvo 740 with the same ominous authority as a police car, an undertaker"s car.
She knocked on the front door. When no one came she pushed it open slightly and called out "h.e.l.lo?" Elisabet appeared in the living-room doorway. She looked like a hiisit herself: her face was grey and empty, her body somehow soulless, heavy.
"What"s happened?" asked Tina.
Elisabet made a vague movement with her head in the direction of the room, and moved back inside. Tina walked in, took off her shoes. She walked across the rag rug on sensitive feet. She was a living lie, she was a remnant of a tribe, a traitor. She had become all of these things in just a few hours.
Goran was sitting on the sofa, talking quietly to a man who was presumably a doctor. Elisabet sat down on an armchair and gazed vacantly into s.p.a.ce. The cot was standing next to her. She was holding on to one of the bars. Tina walked over to her.
The child was lying there naked, with no nappy or blanket. Presumably the doctor had just examined it. As it lay there now in a child"s natural environment, Tina could see how...unalive it was. The hiisit. Its skin was waxy, it looked neither soft nor warm, and lacked the flowing blood of a child. The face was immobile, closed, with only the lips moving a fraction. The eyes were closed, fortunately. She wondered if Elisabet had seen the white eyes. She probably had.
"I..." Elisabet said in a dead voice. "I just went up to the mailboxes to fetch the post. When I got back..."
She made a feeble gesture towards the child. Tina walked around to the other side of the cot and crouched down. The child was lying on its side. Even though the light in the room was subdued, as if they were keeping vigil with a corpse, she could clearly see the small appendage beginning to grow at the bottom of the back. The tail.
Vore hadn"t mentioned it, but Tina had a feeling that was confirmed by the resolutely neutral expression on the doctor"s face: a hiisit didn"t live for very long. Not long enough to have to grow up in the world of human beings.
Human beings who didn"t believe in trolls. And if they found any, they locked them up in mental inst.i.tutions, operated to remove their tails, sterilised them and forced them to learn the language of human beings. Tried to forget that such a thing even existed.
Until we come and take your children.
She murmured a few words of sympathy that grated in her mouth like rusty metal, and left the house. Left something else behind her at the same time. She went over to the cottage, crawled into bed and let the hours pa.s.s. She could lie there as long as she wanted. n.o.body was going to come. Ever again.
When Roland got home on Sunday evening, she told him she"d had enough. He could find somewhere else to open his kennels. She locked herself in her room and communicated via a series of terse messages through the door. It took a few days before he realised she was serious. And a few more days before he gathered up his possessions, along with some of hers.
When she checked the house after his departure, she also went through her jewellery box, not really thinking he would stoop so low. She was wrong. A couple of diamond rings and a heavy gold chain were missing. He probably thought she wouldn"t bother to contact the police, and he was right. She didn"t care.
That"s one thing the fairy stories have got wrong, she thought. He could have taken the whole box as far as she was concerned. This particular troll didn"t collect treasures.
She spent November searching the forest. She had signed herself off sick for the foreseeable future, and as she wasn"t claiming any benefits she didn"t need a doctor"s note.
No more doctors, no more hospitals.
It was hardly surprising that she had been afraid, even panicstricken. They had s.n.a.t.c.hed her out of the environment in which she had grown up, the entire world of smells and light that her two-year-old brain recognised. They had shoved her in a hospital, operated on her, spoken to her in a language she didn"t understand and tried to press her into their mould, reshape her into one of them.
They make us into their image. We make ourselves into their image.
A few days before the first snow fell, she found what she was looking for.
She was a long way from home, and if she had a been a human being she would probably have thought she was lost. She had been walking at random for hours without bothering about landmarks; she simply relied on her own internal compa.s.s.
There was nothing to see at first. A dense, nondescript part of the forest with moss-covered rocks and tall, straight fir trees with needles only at the very top. Hardly any undergrowth, because the light didn"t reach the ground. Odd trees that had fallen down because of age rather than the wind, and had been caught by their peers to rot away in their embrace. The ground covered in an undisturbed layer of pale brown needles. No one had walked here for a long time.
It wasn"t something she saw, it was something she felt.
In a small glade she was suddenly aware of the trees soaring up into the sky, of everything growing bigger around her, then shrinking and growing smaller, all at the same time. She spun around. Once. Twice. The tree trunks appeared to flicker. She closed her eyes.
There, she thought, extending her arm and pointing. There"s an anthill right there.
She opened her eyes and walked in the direction her arm was pointing. Thirty metres away there was indeed an anthill so immense that from a distance she had a.s.sumed it was a hillock. She laughed out loud.
It was the biggest anthill she had ever seen. It reached the top of her head. As it should. She was seized by something similar to dizziness, and leaned against a tree. Everything around her was exactly the same, but smaller than she remembered. Only the anthill had kept up with her, distorting all sense of perspective.
This is where I crawled to, she thought. She smacked her lips, recalling the bitter sting of the ants" jaws against her tongue before they were crushed by her teeth, filling her mouth with an acidic taste. The house was no more than a square of logs overgrown with moss. When she dug in the needles around it she found a few rough, half-rotten planks. She went and stood in the middle of the square. Knelt down. Lay down on her stomach.
The shifting light among the trees. The number of trunks and the way they stood. She hid the view to the sides by cupping her hands. Yes. She was looking out through the door.
"Reva!"
The voice filled her world, the voice was arms embracing, fingers smelling of earth and moss. The voice was come to me, softness in her mouth, warm milk.
She was breastfeeding me. She was still breastfeeding me.
What had they given her instead, in hospital? What had they done to force their food into her mouth?
Reva, Reva, sisimi...
She lowered her head to the needles, pressed her forehead against the ground, rubbing it back and forth until it hurt.
"Mommi...Mommi..."
For several days she went to the glade that had been her home. One day she took a sleeping bag with her, but realised she didn"t need it. When she woke up in the morning with her head resting on a clump of moss, she was covered in a thin layer of snow.
She started doing some research. It took three weeks of telephone calls and papers being sent here and there before she managed to find out where her parents were buried.
The graves in the churchyard in Norrtalje were like no others. It was the first time she had seen a grave without a name. Just two wooden crosses and the words Rest in Peace. Like a memorial marking an unidentifiable ma.s.s grave, or an ancient monument.
She emptied two plastic bags full of earth from their home onto the graves, placed a branch of fir on each.
How should they have been buried? She didn"t know. She knew nothing about her own race. If she were to believe the fairy stories and her own feelings, the crosses were wrong. But that was all she knew. There was nothing she could do.
From the churchyard she went to the supermarket and bought a bottle of organic strawberry juice. Then she went to the nursing home. She and her father drank almost the entire bottle as they sat talking for hours. She promised to bring another bottle next time she came. Soon.
January came and went with plenty of snow and water that shone like oil and never froze. She walked in the forest, tracking animals and trudging through the snow to her tree. She sat there trying to understand what she should do. The tears froze on her cheeks. She was the spoils of war in her own country, an unpleasant reminder.
In the middle of February the letter arrived. It was postmarked St Petersburg, and the handwriting on the envelope looked like a child"s. Big, sprawling letters, laboriously printed to make them legible.
The beginning of the letter was written in the same painstaking style, but after just a few lines the hand holding the pen began to slip into its natural routine, and by the end it was just about illegible for anyone who was unfamiliar with it.
Tina I knocked on the door. You didn"t answer. Do you still feel the same?
My job was selling children. If I had been a human being, I would have been evil. I don"t know how you judge. But the law would put me in prison for life. I"ve stopped now.
I am carrying our child. A hiisit is an unfertilised egg. A child is a fertilised egg. It will grow up to become a creature like you and me, if all goes well. I am intending to give birth to it and let it grow up as it should. Perhaps in the northern forests. I want you to be with me.
I will come to Kapellskar on February 20.
Vore She went back to work on February 16, and was welcomed with a cake, which she took home and left in the fridge until it went off. Too much cream. Her colleagues had never been nicer to her, and she had never felt more alienated from them. Her instincts were on full alert, and every false note grated on her ears.
On February 20 she pulled in every minor smuggler who came in on the morning ferry, and was rewarded with a plethora of dirty looks and muttered imprecations. There was a kind of pleasure in it.
I do not belong here.
He arrived on the afternoon ferry.
As soon as he appeared she knew he had something to hide, and this time she knew what it was.
A child. Their child.
She lifted the desk flap and went to meet him.
Village on the hill.
"So you"re walking along between the buildings, and you just feel that...no. No, no, no. You shouldn"t be here. It"s wrong here, you see?"
Let the Right One In.
The first time Joel Andersson became aware of the problem, he felt nothing more than a vague unease he couldn"t quite put his finger on. He was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets looking up at the building that had been his home for twenty-three years and four months.
It was a quarter past six, and the sun was so low that the entire block, except for the apartments on the top floor, lay in shadow. As he watched the shadow moved further up, nudging at his kitchen windowsill.
Seized by a sudden desire to see the sun before it disappeared, Joel dashed inside and found the lift waiting on the ground floor. As he pressed the b.u.t.ton for the eighth floor he realised he was stiff after gazing upwards for such a long time. He rubbed the back of his neck and the ligaments crunched beneath his fingertips as the ageing lift moved upwards.
He didn"t know what it was. He"d stood outside for a long time looking at the st.u.r.dy rectangle of the apartment block, dotted with windowpanes, experiencing something like seasickness: a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were about to lose his balance.
"Midlife crisis," he muttered to himself as he unlocked his door-one of four on the top floor. He ignored the post and junk mail and went straight over to the kitchen window, where he was rewarded with the sight of a bright red sun waving goodbye to Sweden before continuing its world tour across the Atlantic, via Ha.s.selby.
The sun went down, its rim notched by pine trees, and the feeling of nausea returned. A subway train the size of a toy train slid into Blackeberg station and Joel tried to focus on it, to visualise the straight, familiar tracks, the timetable that was being followed, everything in its place, but the feeling of unease grew so strong that he had to move away from the window and sit down.
What"s going on? What"s wrong?
He didn"t suffer from vertigo, of course not, otherwise he wouldn"t have been able to live here. He"d had the odd moment of dizziness when he moved in twenty-three years ago, but there had been other reasons for that: Lisbeth had decided she wanted a divorce after two years of marriage, she and the twins had stayed on in the apartment in Vallingby and Joel had taken the first decent place he could find nearby. Which turned out to be in Blackeberg.
In those days when he stood by the kitchen window feeling dizzy, it was mainly due to the immediate possibility of suicide. Just open the window and jump. Like sleeping with a razor blade under the pillow, but even more straightforward.
As time went by he got used to his role as a weekend dad, but swore solemnly that he would never be tied down again-a promise he had had no difficulty in keeping, since he had never fallen in love again.