I hesitate, but my curiosity overcomes my bad conscience. I support Tone as we walk over to the little hut. It’s more out of the way than I’d first thought, and I imagine how it must have felt to come out here every day with a basket on my arm, seeing the closed curtains, knowing who waited inside.
The front door isn’t locked. In fact, it’s ever so slightly ajar, but that’s only visible when we’re standing right by it. I give the door a careful nudge, and it swings open on a creaky hinge.
The hut is even smaller than it looks from the outside; the three of us will barely be able to get in without difficulty. Despite the broken windows and the bright, clear morning, the inside is also dark and dim: the windows are small, the slant of the roof blocks much of the sunlight, and the dead tree casts a large shadow from the west.
The bed is small and shabby, and has lain unmade for sixty years. One small, lone pillow lies at its head, and it’s strewn with blankets in drab, clashing colors. There is no sheet on the faded, striped mattress, which is marked in a few places by indistinct light brown stains. The bed can only be two and a half feet wide, but it takes up almost half of the room.
“You’ll need to move in a little,” Emmy says behind me.
Tone squeezes past me, hobbles over to the table with its two Windsor chairs, and sits down on one of them. I would have stopped her, but she does it before I can say anything. Despite a creaking protest from its uneven legs, however, the chair holds.
With the three of us in here there’s hardly any space to move. Emmy looks around the room.
“No tap,” she says. “Or toilet.”
I wonder if we’re all thinking the same thing. Standing here, in this tiny, dark space, the distressing reality sinks like a weight on my chest.
“What a life,” says Emmy, quietly, making my own thoughts echo between the narrow walls. “What a fucking life.”
I’m surprised she cares. On the other hand, I guess she’s always enjoyed taking care of people, so long as it comes at no cost to her. It’s easier to sympathize with dead people, tragic victims long gone. They aren’t nearly as demanding. As compassion goes, it’s cheap.
Or perhaps it’s just that, when standing here between these four closed walls, it’s almost impossible to remain cold to how bleak Birgitta Lidman’s life was.
Tone’s breathing has calmed. Sitting down seems to be doing her good. She leans over the table and runs her fingers across it.
“There’s something here,” she says. I edge my way over to the table, lean in, and squint at the dark wood.
It looks like a finger painting, as though someone has scrawled something in thick, clumsy streaks with their fingertips. The color has dried and faded with age, sunk down into the bumpy wooden surface, but I can still see what it is. Stick figures: uneven, clumsily drawn scribbles, like the restless doodles of a child. The figures’ mouths are furious, like black holes, and the crayon has been pressed so hard it has crumbled.
Suddenly I can’t take it anymore.
I don’t say anything, just push past Emmy and out of the door. The outside air should make me feel better. I look over to the forest’s edge, try to breathe in the fresh air and make that dark, distressing hut leave me alone. I try not to think about the innate naïvety of those small scrawls on the tabletop; about that child trapped in a grown woman’s body, a grown woman’s strength; about how scared she must have been, the anxiety of not knowing what was happening as she was bound to that pole; about that first stone.…
Someone puts their hand on my shoulder, and I turn around.
I’m expecting Tone, but it’s Emmy who’s standing there behind me. I know the look on her face; I’ve seen it a thousand times: every late night I came to her dorm with anxiety gasping at my lungs, every time the black spilled over and she would sit there, taking it in with calm, unyielding eyes, holding my gaze until my heartbeats started to settle, until my breathing calmed.
“We should get Tone back to camp,” she says. “Get some breakfast in her.”
This throws me.
“Yes,” I say, once the words sink in. “Yes, of course.”
I look back at the hut. Tone’s still bowed over the table. Her hair is hanging forward, covering almost all of her face, and her bad leg is stretched out in front of her.
When I step back over the threshold, I can hear her muttering something. But it doesn’t sound like she’s talking to herself; it’s as though she’s responding to something, a disjointed piece of a longer conversation.
“Tone?” I ask. My uncertainty makes her name shrink in my mouth.
She doesn’t look up. Her gaze is glued to the tabletop, where she jerks her hand once, and then again, as though re-creating some sort of pattern. It’s only when I take one step more that I realize what she’s doing.
Transfixed, she’s tracing the outline of one of the small figures on the table, over and over again.
“Tone?” I say again, louder this time, and she stops and looks up.
She blinks repeatedly, as though forcing her vision into focus. Her eyes, normally steady as flint, have the look of an autumnal fog. Out of focus. Like Grandma’s toward the end: half-blind and veiled by cataracts.
My skin starts to prickle. I clear my throat.
“We thought we’d head back for breakfast now,” I say, conscious that I sound like I’m talking to a child. “Are you hungry?”
Tone nods and makes to stand up, but grimaces when she puts weight on her foot.
“Shit,” she says, and it’s as though something clicks. She looks normal again—a tired, wet-haired normal.
“Here, you can lean on me,”
