Astrid and Veronika (6 page)

Two things occupied most of my time: the library, and the piano. My grandfather’s library smelled of dry paper and silence, and the walls were covered with books behind glass doors. Entire rows were dedicated to books with incomprehensible titles, written in letters I didn’t recognise. The doors were locked, but there would be books on the desk by the window and on the small table beside the chair. I would sit on the edge of the seat and slowly turn the pages of a book, making sure I kept one finger where it had originally been opened. There were framed photographs on the desk and on the walls, most of them of my mother and some of my grandmother. There was a large portrait of my mother in a silver frame at the centre of the desk. Her body was half turned away from the camera and she was looking over her shoulder, smiling straight at me. Her hair was gathered and held back with a clasp, but fell freely over her back. She looked very happy. I would take the picture in my hands, holding it so close to my face that my nose almost touched the glass, and look into her eyes. There were other photos of her, smaller ones. My mother in the saddle of a horse. With her graduation hat, arms full of flowers. In front of an easel, wearing a painter’s smock and holding a brush. Arm in arm with her parents, all three smiling from underneath wide-brimmed sunhats. But there were no pictures of her with me. Or with my father.

The piano was in the sitting room. Mrs Asp kept it dusted and polished, but I never heard anybody play. I would go and sit on the stool and let my fingers play imaginary songs on the lid. One day I looked up and my grandfather was standing in the doorway looking at me. I froze, but he said nothing, just turned and walked away.

Occasionally, Mrs Asp would take me shopping. We would go to the market and buy fish. Or to the butcher.

‘I wish I could buy pork. What’s pea soup without ham?’ she sighed one day.

‘Why can’t we buy pork?’ I asked.

‘Oh, well . . . we just can’t,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather won’t have it.’

One day we took the tram to the Royal Palace and the Old Town and watched the changing of the guard. It was very cold and when we got home Mrs Asp had me sit with my feet in a small washbasin with warm water while she made me hot chocolate. Mrs Asp had Saturdays off and I began to dread them. On Fridays she cooked soup and left it in the pantry for Saturday dinner. My grandfather would go out in the morning, leaving me behind. I spent most days in the apartment, but Saturdays were the loneliest. I never heard from my father, and slowly the village and the house faded from my mind.

One day as I was getting ready to go to bed, I heard Mrs Asp and my grandfather talking in the hallway.

‘She spends every day here on her own. It isn’t right. She’s a good child, and it isn’t right,’ Mrs Asp said.

There was a long pause, before I heard my grandfather’s voice. ‘I never asked to have her here. She is the image of her father and it pains me to look at her.’

‘She is just a little girl,’ Mrs Asp said. ‘Your grandchild.’

I couldn’t hear my grandfather’s answer, just the soft thud as the door to his study closed.

The day I left it rained. Mrs Asp walked me to the station. The snow had thawed, almost overnight, and large sheets of ice were falling from roofs. There were boards warning pedestrians to keep away from the pavement and in places it was cordoned off, forcing us to step into the street where dirty water ran in rivulets. At the station Mrs Asp came with me into the carriage and set my suitcase down in the luggage compartment. She bent over and hugged me, and the cold rims of her glasses cut into my cheek as she pressed her face against mine.

‘Goodbye, my dear child. Don’t think that your grandfather doesn’t love you. Don’t ever think that. It is just that . . .’ She straightened, opened her shopping bag and pulled out a paper bag. ‘Here, a little something for you to eat on the way,’ she said.

She stroked my cheek with her cold hand, then pulled on her glove, closed her bag and stepped off the train. She gave a quick wave before turning, and I watched her disappear in the crowd.

Afterwards, I sometimes wondered if it had really happened. I had no mementos, no witnesses. Nobody to share my memories with. And when I looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom at home I was surprised to find that I looked the same. Nothing had changed in the house, or in the village. I slotted back in. Unquestioningly.

I have never left this village again. You may find it hard to believe, but I have never even been to Borlänge. Or Falun, or Leksand. I have no idea what worlds lie beyond the forests and the mountains. Or where the river flows.

Veronika carefully returned her cup to the table, suddenly concerned about the safety of the fine china in her hands. Astrid’s cup sat on the table in front of her and she held both her hands around it, as if protecting it. She looked up.

‘Let me show you my house,’ she said. She stood and beckoned Veronika to follow. She crossed the spacious kitchen and continued out into the hallway, with Veronika following. ‘I live in there,’ Astrid said with a nod over her shoulder. ‘In the kitchen, and the small room beyond. I don’t even bother to heat the living room and I rarely go upstairs.’ She pointed towards the closed door at the end of the hallway. ‘That’s the living room over there.’ A wide staircase that turned halfway led to the second storey. Astrid paused on the first step and pointed to the closed door to the left. ‘My father used to have his study in that room. Now I just use it for storage.’ She continued up the stairs. At the top there was a large square landing with generous windows in two directions, four doors facing them opposite the top of the stairs, and one door immediately to the right. Veronika could see her own house through the window to the left and the road leading to the slope down the hill on the other side. A large weaving loom took up a good part of the space; a couple of wicker chairs and a small table stood by the window to the right. The most striking feature of the space was a number of rag rugs that crisscrossed the floor. Still more lay rolled up beside the loom.

‘When my father died, I cut up all his clothes and started to weave. When my husband was taken to the rest-home, I began on his.’ Astrid stepped onto one of the rugs and let the sole of her foot rub against it. ‘It gives me pleasure to walk on them,’ she said. She took Veronika’s hand and led her to one of the doors in front of them. ‘This used to be my room,’ she said, and opened the door. The air inside was still and dark; a blind was pulled over the window. ‘Later, when I was married, my father used it as his bedroom. He died in here.’ Astrid’s eyes swept over the narrow bed, covered with a white crocheted bedspread. ‘When I found him he was already dead. Curled up, with his eyes wide open. I closed them and covered his face.’

She turned and closed the door behind her. ‘This here is another bedroom,’ she said, but didn’t stop to open the door. ‘A guest room, I suppose you could call it, although there have been no guests for such a long time.’ She nodded towards the next door, told Veronika it was the bathroom, then walked across the landing. With her hand on the doorhandle of the fourth room she paused. ‘The room over there is just a small bedroom. I . . .’ She didn’t finish the sentence, just nodded in the direction of the room to the far right, her eyes on her hand. Then she opened the door in front of her.

‘This is the master bedroom,’ she said, and stood aside for Veronika to enter. A large double bed took up most of the space, and a small writing desk with a chair stood against the opposite wall, beside a large free-standing wardrobe. All the furniture was old, the wood dark. The air was cool and Veronika couldn’t pick up any smell. The impression was a little like a museum, a display of a distant past.

‘I air the rooms once a week, but otherwise I never come upstairs.’ Astrid walked through the room and opened the double doors to a balcony that ran the length of the house. Both women stepped outside and stood leaning on the bannister, looking out over the apple trees, still bare, across the fields, where the grass was still last year’s, dry and flat, and down over the village and the distant hills beyond. The air was chilly and a light fog was rising from the valley below, like softly rippling grey gauze. ‘Such a beautiful view. But, you know, it has never given me the slightest pleasure.’ Astrid turned and walked inside. She waited for Veronika to follow, then closed the doors.

Later, as Veronika walked back to her own house, she took a deep breath. Although the new grass had only just begun to penetrate last year’s dead groundcover, and the birch leaves still had a week or two to open, she could smell the budding growth. The days extended long into the evening now.

 

It was the week before Pentecost. Veronika wrote the note while she had morning coffee and put the envelope in Astrid’s mailbox when she walked past. Afterwards, it struck her that perhaps the old woman wouldn’t often check her box. She decided to give it a day or two. During the last few weeks she had seen Astrid outside, hard at work most days, weeding and clearing a small patch on the southern side of the house. Veronika hadn’t tried to approach her neighbour, but had gone about her own life, taking her daily walks and writing most afternoons and long into the light evenings.

She checked Astrid’s mailbox the following morning. The note was gone. Yet she didn’t hear from her that day. Nor did she see her at work in her garden. But the window was open when she walked past and she thought the old woman was inside, watching. Suddenly, Veronika was able to see how beautiful the house and the garden must once have been: large birch trees in the front, their buds now pale purple and ready to burst, and the wide slope down towards the village at the back. Several large bird cherry trees stood on the western side, and beneath them an unkempt old lilac hedge. Veronika could imagine how beautiful it would look in a couple of weeks’ time when the blossoms had opened. Along the back there was a small overgrown orchard with old apple trees, their trunks covered in grey lichen and with sporadic buds sprouting on bare branches. There must have been flowerbeds along the fence once — she noticed a few struggling daffodils among the weeds. It struck her that her own garden needed work. Her own garden? It wasn’t her house, or her garden. She still had moments when she was overcome by a sense of surprise at being there at all. In the village. In the house.

She spent time going through her journal, rereading notes and adding new ones. Each time she would be instantly transported to another world, curiously more present and alive with each passing day, as if time and distance functioned as a magnifier.

She dreamt of the beach and the sea every night, but most mornings only a fragment would remain when she was fully awake. Still, the memory of the feeling lingered all day.

It struck her that her memories seemed clear, alive, here in this unrelated environment. She watched her neighbour’s neglected garden slowly regaining life and preparing for summer, and the flax and budding pohutukawa of New Zealand intruded. Perhaps she had needed to get this far away in order to see clearly. To enable the memories to surface. But, although she was now beginning to touch the past, she wasn’t able to turn it into words. She would spend hours on the computer with nothing to show. The book she had set out to write seemed increasingly elusive. On the one hand, there were the invasive memories. On the other hand, everyday life in the village. And then the book. Somehow she lived with all three, but there seemed to be no connections between them.

The following day she received the note. It was in her mailbox in the morning, although she hadn’t seen Astrid deliver it. The envelope was yellowed and the glue dried out. The handwriting was elegant, but somehow gave the impression that the process of writing had been painful, a struggle with pen and words. But it was an acceptance.

‘Thank you, dear Veronika. I was intrigued to get your note. There is rarely anything in my mailbox and I often don’t bother to check. Imagine my delight at a personal letter. An invitation. Of course I accept. With all my heart.’

Astrid was coming to dinner.

Veronika had decided against meat in the end. It had been such a summery week, more suited to something light. She drove to the neighbouring village and bought three hot-smoked trout from the small smokehouse by the river. The first bags of new potatoes had arrived in the shop the day before, imported and overpriced, but she bought some.

It was all set. She had decided they would eat in the kitchen, by the window that was open to the light, early summer evening. Air wafted in filled with the smells and sounds of the approaching night: flowers folding, dew settling on the grass, insects of the day falling silent and those of the night stirring. The warmth of the kitchen added smells of wilting dill on steaming potatoes, sliced lemon, pungent cheese. She had opened a bottle of New Zealand chardonnay and poured herself a glass. She stood by the window, waiting, and she raised the glass to her lips and took a first sip, letting the familiar flavours linger on her tongue. Apple, grapefruit, pineapple, feijoa, butter, grass — even experts struggled to find words to describe it. She looked out over the landscape, still wrapped in sunshine but distinctly evening quiet, and took in the immense stillness. She pulled the window to, leaving only a small chink. A fine film of steam covered the glass, the condensation running like tears. She was playing a recording of Lars Erik Larsson’s
Förklädd Gud
,
God in disguise
. It was as if all her senses had come together to form a complete whole. The stillness of the evening, the smells from the stove, the taste of the wine, the sound of the music. She was surprised to realise that she was filled with a quiet, measured feeling of anticipation.