Emmy takes another sip from her flask and hands it to Robert, who sees me looking and raises his eyebrows to ask if I want some. I almost accept, but then feel Emmy’s eyes on me and lose my nerve.
“No, I’m all right,” I say, a spark of irritation in my belly. “I’m running this thing, so I guess I’d better not drink while we’re here.”
“Smart,” says Emmy, and I’m sure I can make out a hint of mockery in her husky voice.
“I think so,” I say, as neutrally as I can.
Emmy doesn’t answer back. Instead she says:
“So there’s only one square in the village, then?”
Before I can get a word in edgeways, she goes on:
“This must be where they—”
“Yes,” I interrupt. “This is the main square. Where they found her. Birgitta.”
It was already dark when we finally got here, so there was no time to really explore the square. Still, I couldn’t resist doing a quick sweep of the cobblestones once Tone and I had put up our tent. To take in the scents; the silence; the soil. To picture it all.
I didn’t find the pole, but I hadn’t really expected to, either. They would have had to cut it down to remove the body, and in the unlikely event that they didn’t, a rough-hewn wooden pole would never have stayed standing for sixty years.
But I did find a hole.
“Where’s she buried?” Max asks, dragging me out of my thoughts with a jerk.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve looked, but I couldn’t find that information anywhere.”
“There was almost nothing about her in the packs you gave us,” says Emmy.
I shake my head.
“Not much was written about her,” I say. “Most of the information we have comes from my grandmother’s letters, and that’s hard to fact-check. I’ve checked the local records, and I found a Birgitta Lidman who was born to Kristina Lidman in 1921. But that’s it. No medical transcripts, no school records, nothing.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t expect her to have gone to school,” says Max. “Not if it was as bad as the letters suggest.”
“From the letters it sounds like she had some kind of autism,” comes Robert’s deep voice.
“Maybe,” I say. I’ve spent hours googling Birgitta’s symptoms. “Or some sort of chromosome abnormality.”
“You can’t just diagnose people like that,” says Tone. The firelight casts deep shadows under her eyebrows and nose, making her face look full of holes.
“No, of course not,” I say. “We’re not going to try to.”
The music has stopped; the only sound to be heard is the crackle of the fire. Most of the logs are already embers, seemingly glowing from within. It’s almost hypnotic.
“Did you try to find out what happened to the baby?” Emmy asks me.
“She was taken into care,” I say, hoping I sound just as matter-of-fact as when I was talking about Birgitta. “She was probably sent to an orphanage or foster home. That sort of information isn’t made public.”
“Did they ever test her to find out who her parents were?” Emmy asks.
“How, exactly?” I ask, only thinly veiling my sarcasm. “The sixties weren’t exactly CSI. It’s not like they had DNA kits lying around.” I shrug. “Besides, who would they have tested her against? Everyone had disappeared.”
“Well, your grandmother didn’t, did she?” Emmy retorts. “There must have been others like her. People who had relatives here. Next of kin.”
I do my best not to roll my eyes, and confine myself to saying:
“It’s not that simple.”
Emmy looks up at the school’s gaping window frames, ignoring my tone.
“Did they find her in one of the classrooms?”
“In the nurse’s office,” I say. “But she wasn’t there, of course. Just the baby.”
I can’t resist looking up, too. Searchingly, though I know it’s pointless. It’s not like the windows are going to speak.
“Pity you couldn’t find her,” says Emmy, her eyes back on me. “Would have been fucking cool to put her in the documentary. Made it more personal, you know.”
“You’re assuming she’d want to be in it,” I say. “She’d be almost sixty by now. She could be anywhere. Or dead, even.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess.”
“Plus it’s already personal,” I say. “It’s not like we don’t already have a connection to the village. Grandma’s whole family disappeared.”
My throat is dry, and the words catch as I speak. It makes them sound a little desperate.
I’m about to go on—that’s why we’re here, it’s all thanks to her and what she told me about Silvertjärn—when Robert interrupts.
“Who was it that wrote those letters to your grandmother, again?”
I’m about to answer when Emmy jumps in, her green eyes locked on me:
“Her grandmother’s little sister. Aina.”
November 13, 1958
Dearest Margareta,
How’s life down in the big city? And the new apartment? How I wish I could see it! Perhaps now that you and Nils have moved, I might finally be able to pay you a visit? I can sleep on your sofa! You know what a shrimp I am, and sadly it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any taller. I know what you’re going to say when you read this—the same thing you always do: “Don’t be silly, Aina, I was hardly taller than a boot at your age, and then I shot up!” Which might have been true if I were twelve, but I doubt it now that I’m sixteen. (I’m sure you think I haven’t aged a day since you left!) I haven’t grown a single inch since I last saw you, and seeing as that was almost fourteen months ago now, I think it’s time for me to give up hope.
I miss you terribly, Margareta.
Couldn’t you just …
I wish you could come and visit us a little more. It’s been so boring here since the mine shut down. At first it was almost exciting, as though every day were a Sunday: there were so many people out and about during the day, and Father was always at home. He said that something was sure to come up. But now it all feels rather
