CHAPTER TWO
The second time this sort of thing happened to me, I was a few years older and could no longer blame my mother’s stories for giving my gift fire. She had stopped telling them many years ago. It was the first time my special sight caused loss – I no longer had that closeness with my mother.
I had started going to school in Ullapa, the closest town and would get a ride in every morning with our neighbor Arstand and his son St?va. As you may recall, Arstand was the goat farmer who found me, along with my mother, floating in the lake when I was six. That explained why Arstand was always a bit jumpy with me, as if I was going to pop up and say “boo!” at any moment.
But he tolerated me enough to fit me in his new vehicle and take me to school. My parents were still behind the times and my father shunned motor vehicles as being unnecessary idols and symbols of gluttony. I suppose he was right, but it was still a convenient way to get around.
St?va had ended up being my only, and, by default, closest friend. He was a bit strange and funny to look at but strange suited me just fine. He was small for his age and had ears that stuck out. Arstand called him “elefant.” It didn’t seem to bother St?va much though. He had a sunny personality and loved to listen to me prattle on about this and that. He was also quite the adventurer and when we first started playing together we would explore the farm he lived on, climbing up into the haylofts and jumping onto the piles below or feeding the baby goats (when we weren’t chasing them around). My parents weren’t too happy that I was spending so much of my time away from home, but I suppose my mother felt she was in debt to Arstand and after a while they didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps it was a relief to them that someone else was taking care of me.
It was at St?va’s that I was introduced to more modern conveniences, aside from the car of course. Being a goat farmer was more profitable than being a minister and they had things such as a library and a radio. The library was a great place for me to sink my teeth, especially as I had learned to read at that point, but the radio trumped all. When I was there after school, his father, mother and two younger brothers would sit around the giant radio and listen to broadcasts coming out of Stockholm. I found the news to be boring, except when it touched on the troubles in Europe, but I lived for the plays and radio shows that played after. It was then that I fell in love with acting and the theatre. I couldn’t see the show of course, and I had never seen a performance in my life as church singing didn’t count to me, but I could envision it all in my head like I was there with the actors.
“I’m going to be on the radio one day,” I remember whispering into St?va’s funny ear. We were sitting on the braided rug in his living room, a place that smelled like a mix of manure, sour milk and home baked bread. It doesn’t sound like a winning combination but it’s funny now how that smell makes me think of home, even though it wasn’t my home. It’s not that St?va’s parents were particularly nice to me. Like I noted, Arstand was always watching me carefully. His wife Else was a nice woman but she seemed lost in her head more often than not and spent most of her time working with the goat cheese or doting on St?va’s younger siblings. I wasn’t a pest to them but I wasn’t loved either. Yet I still had a sense of freedom and hope in their peculiar-smelling place.
With the idea of being an actress in my head, I focused solely on that. I mentioned it once to my parents and ended up getting a belt across my thigh. It didn’t hurt. I was too angry for it to hurt. I was angry at my father for being so close-minded about his daughter’s dreams (for what were we without dreams) and at my mother for never sticking up for me. Ever since the lake incident, when she stopped with her stories, she stopped being my friend as well. It hurt more than anything, more than all the belts, more than the feeling of drowning in that ice cold lake.
So I never mentioned it to my parents again but that did me no good. I should have known they’d investigate where the sinful idea came from and when they found out I’d be listening to the radio I was banned from going to St?va’s. They didn’t care enough to ban me from seeing him in particular, just that I couldn’t listen to the radio. My ears couldn’t be polluted by foreign ideas. They even had a talk with his parents and to keep peace as neighbors, they agreed. What was it to St?va’s parents anyway? They didn’t care if I couldn’t listen to the radio. One less child crowding their house.
It didn’t break me, however. I merely became more resolved in my determination that I would be an actress one day. I’d find a way, somehow.
But since I wasn’t allowed to spend too much time in St?va’s home anymore, we were left to our own devices in the great outdoors. Playing in the hay and harassing goats became tiresome by the time I was nine, so we started going on after school jaunts into the woods.
There was a part of me that was a little chicken over the tall trees and dark paths and I was forever on the lookout for a man with no face. He didn’t show up. But something else did. Something much more horrific.
It was a cool, grey day in early fall. The leaves had just gone from crisp red to the color of soggy wood as they clung helplessly to the branches.
St?va was walking ahead of me as he did, leaves crunching beneath him. He was two years older and only lately did he start to grow into his age. He often walked ahead, pretending he was a woodland hunter, or perhaps a wily prince, and kept me behind him. I didn’t mind the protection, even if it was from an 11-year old.
I also didn’t mind when he stopped on our walk at one point and took my hand in his. It was the first time I remember feeling the difference between us. He was a boy and I was a girl and that little thrill shot up my arm, the same feelings I imagined when I had listened to the more romantic parts of the radio shows.
I suppose I was so awed by the simple gesture of hand holding that I didn’t hear the howl first. Suddenly St?va’s grasp tightened on mine and his bright eyes searched the greying woods.
“What is it?” I asked, not used to seeing panic on his face.
“Did you hear that?”
I tensed up and listened.
I heard it. A howl, like a wolf or a wild dog. It came from our left and seemed to fill the trees like a blanket.
I looked back at him with frightened eyes.
“We should head back,” he said.
I nodded but just as we turned on the path I heard a child’s cry mixed in with the canine’s.
I stopped and pulled hard on St?va’s hand as he tried to keep walking.
“Listen!” I whispered hoarsely.
“We can’t be out here with wolves!” he yelled back, struggling to keep his voice down. All Swedish children were likely to have been told tales of vicious wolves in the wild woods. I had heard mine from my mother. But the human sounds made this story different.
“There’s a girl out there!” I told him as I heard another whimper coming from the same direction. I wasn’t actually sure if it was a girl or not, but they were young like us and needed our help.
“I don’t hear anything, come on,” St?va said pulling at me again.
“No!” I yelled and ripped my hand out of his sweaty grip. “Listen again, you can hear it.”
The wolf howled first. Then fierce, drooling growls swarmed us. And finally, the child’s cry.
“Daddy” I could hear the child yell.
But St?va was immune.
“I don’t hear anyone but wolves. We have to get out of here.”
“You go!” I said and then I turned around and took off at a gallop into the darkening trees, toward the horrendous sound of snapping jaws.
I was aware of St?va yelling behind me and perhaps for a bit he may have given chase. I certainly don’t blame him for letting me go, or if it was a case of him not being able to catch up. He was older but I was the same height as him and my legs were born to run. Within a few minutes of tireless scampering through the birch trees and overgrown roots and berry patches, I was alone.
Alone and cursing myself with the only bad words I knew.
I waited with my hands on my knees, my socks splattered with mud, breathing heavily. I had lost the path at some point, so it didn’t help that I was lost along with being completely alone.
Another howl and another human cry.
Of course I wasn’t completely alone.