The Lost Village(25)

Pastor Mattias said he’s going to set up a small Bible group for young people, and that it would be great if I could help out. Obviously I said yes! On the way home Mother said it was good I would have something to keep me busy, and that it might do me some good. Oh, Margareta, I’m all aflutter! You must come and visit over Christmas, so that then you can see what I’m talking about. But be warned: you might just fall for him, and then you’ll have to leave Nils, move back here, and marry the new pastor instead!

I have to go now, Mother is calling. Write soon! And lots!

Your little sister, Aina





NOW



Max throws back his head and shouts.

“Hello!”

His voice echoes off the vaulted ceiling and solid walls, as though sliced up, fragmented, by the broken glass in the windows. The station is small but strangely familiar; all Swedish train stations seem to have been built to the same standardized model, apparently even those in mining villages in the middle of nowhere. Tall windows and stone floors, with small benches in the middle of the room to sit and wait.

“Stop,” I say to Max, who looks at me in surprise.

“What?”

I can’t really explain why I want him to be quiet. Tone had understood intuitively in the school.

“Sorry,” I say. “I guess I’m a little tense.”

“No need to apologize,” he says. “Of course you are. I’m impressed at how well you’re keeping it all together.”

I let out a small laugh. If he thinks this is keeping it together then I can only imagine what he was expecting.

It hadn’t taken long for the alcohol to make Tone drowsy and muddle-headed, and she ate hardly any of the food that Emmy made for lunch. Once we’d finished eating, it was Emmy who assumed the role of leader again, posing the question. She directed it at the group, but her eyes never left Tone’s face.

“Do we cut and run?”

Max has walked over to the door leading out onto the platform. He waves me over.

“Come get a load of this,” he says. “You’ll probably want a few pictures.”

I stride across the dirty floor, feeling the rubble crackle under my boots as I step on the split flagstones. This afternoon light is softer than the sharp glare of morning.

Max has stepped through the doors and down onto the platform.

“Be careful,” I say.

The platform is made of concrete slabs, which, like the steps up to the school, have cracked and started to crumble. There are two cast-iron benches next to the station walls, both of which so rusted that they’re barely more than reddish-ocher husks.

I take a few pictures, the camera unfamiliar and unwieldy in my hands, then look up when I hear Max jump down onto the brushwood lining the tracks.

There’s something instinctively unpleasant about seeing someone standing on railway tracks, even though I know no train has pulled into this station in more than fifty years.

Still, it’s easy to picture the station full of people: bored kids bickering while waiting for the train; women dressed in their Sunday best to travel south to see relatives; my grandmother, impossibly young at eighteen, on her way to Stockholm to start a new life.

And, later: unemployed men with nowhere else to go, trying to drink away the uncertainty of their futures, only to wind up asleep on the hard station benches.

Raising his hand to shield his eyes from the sun, Max looks over at where the tracks disappear into the forest.

“Crazy to think this was their only way in and out of town,” he says.

I sit down on the edge of the platform. Max holds out his hand and helps me down, but I land clumsily even with his support.

“They did have the road, too,” I say, lifting the camera to my eyes again.

Through the lens the tracks look so distant, the forest almost an age away. The fading light makes the rust on the tracks shimmer, picking out the few pink buds that have started to shoot up amid the heather.

Max is wrong: it’s not pictures I want of this place so much as moving images; to attempt to capture the stillness of it all, the unnatural silence. To let the camera linger while the absence of any sound makes the viewer aware of their own breaths, their own heartbeats. To make them feel like they’re here in Silvertj?rn with us, give them the same prickle along their spines that I feel as I stand here.

I turn and take a few quick shots of the station fa?ade. With its rounded cornices and sand-colored stucco, it looks like a gingerbread house that’s been left to the elements.

“At least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about,” I add. “We can get out of here whenever we want.” The words leave a sour taste in my mouth.

Max hears what I want to say. He knows me that well, at least.

“Tone said she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” he says, his tone of voice clearly meant to sound calming. “She said she wants to stay.”

“Yeah,” I say. “So she said.”

But her eyes had been heavy from the tiredness, pain, and alcohol, and she had looked at me long and hard before she said it. I wish I could say that she hadn’t seen the tension in my face, the quiet prayer in my rib cage.

Truth is, this is the only chance we have at this. We’ve only hired the equipment for five days, and despite the money Max has invested, our budget is already being squeezed. Even if I stayed here, if Max were to drive Tone to the hospital it would mean losing two people for at least twenty-four hours. And going from five people to three would bring the production to its knees. We would never be able to keep to schedule.