The Lost Village(62)

He nods and steps back into the hall, but I don’t follow him. Instead I get up and walk further into the room.

The desk is calling me to it. It’s small and dainty, with carved wooden knobs on its oblong drawers, and slender white legs. I slowly open each of the drawers, afraid that they might stick.

There isn’t much inside: blank sheets of paper, an almost completely used-up pencil. Not the diary I now realize I’ve been subconsciously fantasizing about—the slender volume filled with Aina’s neatly handwritten musings.

“Alice,” Robert says quietly, a clear request.

“Coming,” I say, though I can’t quite tear myself away. I want to stay in here, soak up the house. Sleep on these mattresses, and wander these rooms.

They’re like mythical figures to me, Elsa and Staffan and Aina. I’ve grown up with them like with a fairy tale. Even in the midst of everything else, it’s almost impossible to believe I’m actually here.

I lift one of the mattresses. It breaks in my hand, spilling hard stuffing out onto my fingers.

“Alice,” Robert says again, slightly louder this time. I nod, let go of the mattress, and follow him out.

I think he’s going to tell me off, but instead he just puts his hand on the other door handle and pushes it down.

The other bedroom is larger. The windows in here have shattered inward, spewing glistening shards across the floor. The wooden planks around them are rotten and splintered. There are two narrow beds beside one another in here, too—no double bed—which strikes me as strange. I wonder if that’s just a fifties thing, or if the drinking and the joblessness drove Elsa and Staffan apart. Or if Elsa was just as cold and distant as Aina describes her in her letters. I find it hard to know what to make of Elsa. Grandma always said she was strong and driven, tenacious in a way that wasn’t always the norm for a woman of those times. The sort of person—and mother—whose love was brusque and pragmatic, but also sincere, and deeper than most people’s.

But that image doesn’t fit with the woman in Aina’s letters.

I’ve always believed Grandma’s version, seeing Aina as a confused teen, but perhaps that’s wrong of me; perhaps Grandma’s memories were just muddied by time and loss.

I’ll never know. They’re all long gone, and with them the truth.

“Tone?” Robert says.

Not a sound.

He looks at me.

“There’s no one here.”

The desk in here is bigger and clearly more expensive, made in a dark, lacquered wood with a green leather inlay. The lacquer has developed an ugly white sheen from exposure, but it clearly must have once cost a lot of money. Elsa’s pride and joy, surely. Or Staffan’s. A first step toward a life that never came.

“Seems not,” I say, opening the desk drawers.

It’s full of papers I don’t immediately recognize. I don’t know what they are, but their official appearance makes me think they’re some sort of bills, important documents that mean nothing to me. Still, I pick them up.

I should turn around now. We should go. But instead I walk to the wardrobe on the other side of the room and open the doors. They’re stiffer than the drawers, must have set in their frames, and I have to give them a good pull to get them open.

Inside, damp-stained clothes lie in disarray, in crisp fabrics that have slipped from their hangers and been soiled by time and water.

“Did you think she’d be hiding in there?” Robert asks. I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. In any case, I start opening drawer after drawer, rifling through coarse wool and thin underwear in horrible, synthetic fabrics, feeling around for something, anything—

And then I feel it.

Sheets of paper at my fingertips.

I pull them out, and for a split second I think the sound I’m hearing is the rustle of old paper on dry fabrics, but then it continues, gains in volume. Confused, I turn around to see Robert pick up his walkie-talkie.

It’s a strange, dissonant noise that sounds like interference yet isn’t. It rises and falls, then ascends in key until it starts to sound both cleaner and rougher at once. I almost think I can make out words—babbling, distorted words—but then it intensifies to a bellow, one so loud and so unexpected that it makes me shrink away and Robert drop the walkie-talkie.

It thuds to the floor and goes abruptly quiet.

Robert and I stand rooted to the spot, staring at the innocent yellow-and-black device in the shards of glass between us.

When it crackles to life again, I instinctively want to cover my ears, but the voice that comes out of the speaker is Emmy’s. It sounds tinny and shaken.

“What the fuck was that?” she asks.

Robert picks up the walkie-talkie and presses the talk button, his pale fingers trembling slightly.

“You mean that wasn’t you?”

“No,” she replies, almost before he’s even released the talk button. “We thought it was you.”

Robert looks at me, his eyes dark holes in his white face. I just shake my head.

“I have no idea,” I say. “Not a fucking clue.”

Robert raises his walkie-talkie again.

“We’re on our way,” is all he says.

We take the steps quickly and carelessly, faster than is safe, but my heart’s rattling in my chest, and suddenly I want nothing more than to be back behind the church’s heavy brick walls with the others. The sheets of paper are still under my arm, and Robert grabs his rucksack as we go. We race out onto the porch and down onto the street.