CREATION
We were in the forest at this point. In a kind of twilight, but with no sun, a brownish rainy gloom settling over the scene. Could I have rung someone? No, I couldn’t, because even if there had been someone to ring, time would have run out. Now there was just the fading, submerged light and the huge trees and giant raindrops falling from the branches like the tears of grotesquely large beings and the two of us, he and I, and the feeling so intense of being the only ones left in the world, a feeling no reality could have changed, no cars we encountered on the roads, no lit-up telephone boxes we drove past, no voice on the radio gently purring, preaching, intoning like a devotional chant. The sound brought little scrapbook pictures to my mind. Of the Virgin Mary with the great menacing angel. Of Mary with the chubby little baby that was wheeling around at her breast in every painting, without wings but still beyond gravity’s pull. And finally of Mary alone, without her child, when he was gone from the earth.
* * *
I lay on the forest floor looking at the dark tree roots steadily pushing down into the lake water. Everything was so still even the most gradual of movements showed, the treetops swaying in slow motion high above, the insects crawling on the underside of every flower and the drops of water falling from the branches and breaking in a slowed-down splash against the earth, miniature pearls of reflection travelling through the air in an infinitely slow-moving arc. And now it was cold, and urine and blood and faeces ran down my legs. I was thinking that the trees must be suspended between man and God, stretching their crowns up to the heavens, their roots like dragons’ talons clawing into the earth where the dead reside and where soon I would be.
* * *
It was too late to ask for help now, too late for praying, time was irretrievably up. He said: “Get on your knees.” And I knelt in the black grass. He said: “I’m going to blindfold you now. It’ll be easier that way,” he said. “That’s good,” I said, wondering which of us it would be easier for. “Now I’m going to strangle you and you won’t be able to say anything else.”
“Do it,” I said. “I have nothing to say in any case.”
* * *
And now he cuts what is left of my body into seven pieces and stuffs the rest into two white suitcases. He throws my head into a slurry pit that has a surface the same pink colour as vomit. It is not very far from the lake, down a little path through the wood; he has worked everything out on an old orienteering map. He stands for a while staring out over the thick bubbling mass before he drops it carefully into the sludge. Green and black flies and shimmering dragonflies zigzag across the surface as my head sinks slowly to the bottom, not very deep, just a few metres. My dark hair spreads out like a black parachute above me until my head comes to rest where no-one will ever find it, for it will soon be eaten away by chemicals. That picture keeps coming back to me, my hair in the water, reaching upwards as my head strikes the bottom, before settling.
* * *
And then? He walks back along the path. The sun is on its way down on the far side of the lake. A gentle rain falls on the forest. I have always loved rain. Always – how brief that was. How brief life was.
I mean to let your world be, but suddenly I find myself looking in again. It has such beauty from a distance, the fragile, iridescent blue of the atmosphere surrounding your planet, slightly impaired but still there. Beneath it there are clouds drifting slowly over the sky that is yours and bare autumn trees reaching out for sunlight, and further down still the black water streaming into Stockholm from the sea, glistening dark and oily between the islands, just the odd fallen leaf dotted on the surface. A world as motionless as an old oil painting at the National Museum. Only when you come close do you see there is movement down there, the aeroplanes and birds in their sky, human beings on their earth, worms crawling through the flowers and the eyes of the dead.
* * *
I try to concentrate on things that don’t hurt. A child walking down the street, holding on to a balloon, unable to stop looking up all the time at its wondrousness. I watch rabbits playing in the grass at night outside the major hospitals. I often watch the light, at it constantly changing like refractions in a kaleidoscope. It affords me a kind of solace. Sometimes I watch two people making love; it is bad manners, there is no doubt, but nobody notices I am there and I think there is something beautiful in the way they cling to one another. I often look into hospital wards when a child comes flying in from eternity and alights at her mother’s breast. I always love that moment when everything is still perfectly intact between a mother and her child. The other day, at first light, I saw a youth stop to help an old woman who had collapsed in a drunken stupor in the park at Björn’s garden. When he lifted her up from the ground, she draped her arms around his neck like a child who had fallen asleep. Before he left her, they shared a cigarette and laughed about something I couldn’t hear. But I saw the fear in her lacklustre blue eyes gradually give way to a faint glow; I saw her worn-out old soul light up in the first rays of sun. I avoid looking at evil wherever possible. I have already seen evil.
* * *
Someday I too will be indifferent to what happens on earth, like everyone else. But that takes time, and there are so many voices not yet hushed. A distant hubbub from professors and criminologists and private investigators and journalists. They say you die three times. The first time for me was when my heart stopped beating beneath his hands by the lake, and the second was when what was left of me was lowered into the ground in front of Ivan and Raksha at Bromma Church. The third time will be the last time my name is spoken on earth. And so I am waiting for it to happen. I wish all the voices would hush soon. I don’t like hearing my name. It crawls like insects in the place where my heart once was.
* * *
If I were to say who did it, would the voices be silent then? I don’t think they would, and no-one would believe me anyway. And it is so difficult to distinguish the light from the dark, and even harder when you are alone and time has ceased to exist, and space too. So I make some attempt to understand the difference. I have always confused love with insanity, heaven with death. I believed for a long time that the drugs came from the powers on high as compensation for my little brother. I don’t believe that anymore. My little brother and I were blind alleys. Eskil walked into the river when we were children and didn’t come back and, much later, I walked out into the immensity of the night to find him. Although sometimes I think I only entered the darkness because I had nowhere else to go. Maybe I knew I would never find Eskil there, in those endless labyrinthine nights, but it didn’t matter, the other world was already closed to me. In any event, our family line stops here. That last part isn’t really true, our family carries on with Valle and Solveig, even though they don’t know where they come from. Sometimes I see Raksha’s features in them both, appearing in their faces like a fleeting ripple in the water.
* * *
It is strange that I fantasise so much about Solveig. I don’t know her and I never have. All I have is those two hours on the maternity ward when she was a tiny bundle of warmth in my arms. But it is easier to think about her than to think about Valle, because I never did her any harm. I kept her safe by making sure she would never need to be with me. For Solveig I did the only thing I could have done, even if Shane could never forgive me for it.
Copyright © 2018 by Sara Stridsberg
Translation copyright © 2021 by Deborah Bragan-Turner