fleeting.
What do you want? he asks, and Mildred comes closer.
It’s just typical of her. Just when he’s sitting on the toilet with his trousers down.
I’m in the church all day, he says. You could have come to find me there.
And at that very moment he knows. The money in the foundation won’t be enough. But if the hunting permit is renegotiated. Either the hunting club can start paying the proper rate. Or they find a new lessee. And that money can go to the foundation.
He can feel her smiling. She knows what she’s asking of him. Every one of the men will be against him. There’ll be trouble, letters to the paper.
But she knows he can do it. He can get the church council on his side.
I’ll do it, he tells her. Not because I think it’s the right thing to do. But for your sake.
Lisa Stockel is out in the yard, tending a bonfire. The dogs are shut in, sleeping in their beds.
Bloody gangsters, she thinks lovingly.
She’s got four now. For most of her life she’s had five.
There’s Bruno, a short-haired pure brown pointer. Everybody calls him the German. It’s his air of self-control and his slightly military stiffness that have earned him the nickname. When Lisa gets out her rucksack and the dogs realize they’re off on a long trip, bedlam breaks out in the hallway. They scurry round and round like a carousel. Barking, prancing, yelping, whining, giving little yaps of happiness. Almost knocking her over, trampling all over the packing. Looking at her with eyes that say: We can come with you, can’t we? You won’t go without us?
All except the German. He sits there like a statue in the middle of the floor, apparently unmoved. But if you lean forward and look at him carefully, you can see a trembling beneath his skin. An almost imperceptible quiver of suppressed excitement. And if it all gets too much for him in the end, if he has to let his feelings out before he breaks in two, he might just stamp with his front paws as he sits there, twice. Then you know he’s really excited.
Then there’s Majken, of course. Her old Labrador bitch. But she’s slowing down nowadays. Gray muzzle, tired. Majken’s looked after them all. She really loves puppies. The newcomers to the pack have been allowed to sleep on her stomach, she’s been their new mummy. And if she didn’t have a puppy to look after, she had a phantom pregnancy instead. Until only two years ago Lisa would come home and find the sheets on her bed raked up and completely reorganized. Majken would be lying there among the pillows and covers, with her little pretend puppies: a tennis ball, a shoe, or one time when Majken had been really lucky, a soft toy she’d found somewhere in the forest.
And then Karelin, her big black Schaefer/Newfoundland cross. He’d come to Lisa as a three-year-old. The vet in Kiruna had phoned and asked if she wanted him. He was going to be put down, but the owner had said he’d rather see him re-homed. He just didn’t fit in in town. “I can well believe it,” the vet had said to Lisa, “you should have seen him dragging his master along after him on the lead.”
And finally Sicky-Morris, her Norwegian Springer spaniel. Show champion and award winning hunting stock. Talent completely wasted out here with the rest of the rogues. And Lisa doesn’t even hunt. He loves to sit by her side and have his chest stroked, plonks his paw in her lap to remind her he exists. A nice, gentle man. Silky coat and curly hair on his ears like a girl, suffers badly from car sickness.
But now all four of them are lying inside. Lisa is throwing everything possible onto the fire. Mattresses and old dog blankets, books and some furniture. Papers. More papers. Letters. Old photographs. It makes a real blaze. Lisa gazes into the flames.
It became such hard work in the end, loving Mildred. Creeping about, keeping quiet, waiting. They quarreled. It was like a bad sitcom.
They’re arguing in Lisa’s kitchen. Mildred closes the windows.
That’s the most important thing, thinks Lisa. That nobody hears.
Lisa lets it all out. All the words are the same. She’s sick of them before they’ve been uttered. That Mildred doesn’t love her. That she’s tired of being something to pass the time. Tired of the hypocrisy.
Lisa is standing in the middle of the floor. She wants to throw things around. Her despair makes her shrill and wordy. She’s never been like this before.
And Mildred is kind of cringing. Sitting on the sofa with Sicky-Morris pressed against her. Sicky-Morris is cringing too. Mildred is patting the dog as if she were consoling a child.
“What about the church, then?” she asks. “And Magdalena? If we were to live together openly, that would be the end of it. It would be the final proof that I’m nothing but a bitter man-hater. I can’t test people’s tolerance beyond their capability.”
“So you prefer to sacrifice me?”
“No, why does it have to be like that? I’m happy. I love you, I can say it a thousand times, but you seem to want some kind of proof.”
“It’s not a question of proof, it’s a question of being able to breathe. Real love wants to be seen. But that’s the problem. You don’t want that, you don’t love me. Magdalena’s just your bloody excuse for keeping your distance. Erik might fall for that, but not me. Get yourself another lover, I’m sure there’s plenty who wouldn’t say no.”
Mildred begins to cry. Her mouth tries to hold back. She buries her face in the dog’s fur. Wipes her tears with the back of her hand.
This is where Lisa wanted her. Maybe what she really wanted to do was hit her. She longs for her tears and her pain. But she isn’t satisfied. Her own pain is still hungry.
“You can stop crying,” she says harshly. “It means nothing to me.”
“I’ll stop,” Mildred promises like a child, her voice cracking, her hand still wiping away the tears.
And Lisa who has always accused herself of her inability to love delivers her verdict:
“You just feel sorry for yourself, that’s all. I think there’s something wrong with you. There’s something missing inside you. You say you love me, but who can open up another person and look inside and see what that means? I could leave everything, put up with anything. I want to marry you. But you… you’re incapable of feeling love. You’re incapable of feeling pain.”
Then Mildred looks up from the dog. A candle in a brass holder is burning on the kitchen table. She puts her hand over the flame, it burns right into her palm.
“I don’t know how to prove I love you,” she says. “But I’ll show you I’m capable of feeling pain.”
Her mouth narrows to a thin line of agony. Tears pour from her eyes. A horrible smell fills the kitchen.
In the end, it feels like an eternity, Lisa takes hold of Mildred’s wrist and pulls her hand away from the candle. The wound on her palm is burned and fleshy. Lisa looks at it in horror.
“You’ll have to go to hospital,” she says.
But Mildred shakes her head.
“Don’t leave me,” she begs.
Now Lisa is crying too. She leads Mildred out to the car, fastens the seat belt around her as if she were a child who couldn’t do it herself, fetches a pack of frozen spinach.
It’s weeks before they quarrel again. Mildred turns the inside of her bandaged hand toward Lisa from time to time. By chance, as it were, pushing her hair behind her ear or something like that. It’s a secret love sign.
It’s dark now. Lisa stops thinking about Mildred and goes to the henhouse. The chickens are asleep on their perches. Pressed close together. She takes them one by one. Lifts the chicken down from the perch. Carries it out to the fence. Keeps it pressed close against her body so it feels safe, clucking quietly. There’s a stump of wood over there that she uses when she’s chopping wood.
Grabs the legs quickly, swings it against the stump, a blow that stuns it. Then the axe, held with one hand right
