The Lost Village(63)

Darkness has started to fall, the sky a velvety-soft shade somewhere between indigo and blue. The first stars have started to twinkle to life above us, pinpricks from another world.

We start walking up toward the church, going as fast as we can without running. I hug the papers to my chest like a security blanket, feeling the bite of the cold air against my cheeks. The blood is roaring through my veins.

Then something makes me stop short. Robert makes it a few steps down the overgrown road before he realizes I’m not beside him.

“Alice?” he says, his voice half an octave higher than usual.

“Did you hear that?” I ask.

Robert looks around, then shakes his head.

“Hear what?”

I scan the houses. The collapsed walls and peeling paint look soft and cuddly in the falling dusk. The windows seem to be calling out to us.

“It sounded like…” I can’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

Robert shakes his head.

“She isn’t there, Alice,” he says, in a tone that suggests even his apparently endless patience is beginning to wear thin. “And even if she is … Just come! We have to get back to the others.”

I don’t protest, simply nod and follow him. When Robert breaks into a jog, so do I.

The words I don’t say.

It didn’t sound like Tone.

It sounded like someone else.

It sounded like someone … singing.





SATURDAY





NOW



I can see through my eyelids when the light begins to change.

I don’t think I’ve slept at all. Dozed, yes, but I’ve barely slipped beneath the surface of my consciousness all night. Each time I have done, the delicate patter of drizzle on the roof has woken me up with a start.

It doesn’t help that the floor is cold and hard, or that the few blankets we’ve managed to find are scratchy and paper thin. All of me feels raw and tender. I’ve heard each of the others get up to take over at the lookout: we agreed to keep watch in shifts, and drew lots to decide who went when. I got the last one.

The silver-gray dawn light turns my eyelids into networks of thin veins. I open my eyes, and sure enough, darkness has started to recede. The rain has stopped, and the fragment of sky that’s visible from where I’m lying has that washed-out non-color that comes between night and morning.

I sit up, grimacing at the stiffness of my body and the rank taste in my mouth. Turns out a dinner of water, honey, and tinned fish makes for some pretty spectacular morning breath.

I look toward the doors. Emmy is sitting on the floor, her back to the pew that’s serving as our barricade. One leg is pulled in to her chest, and her hair is falling in stiff, red tufts over her head and collarbone.

“Emmy,” I say quietly, walking to her. “I can take over.”

Emmy looks up through her tousled hair. Her eyes are bright and focused.

“OK,” she says. She stands up and walks over to the bundle that is Robert, kneels down behind him on the blanket, and then curls up into his back. The pew isn’t any softer than the ground, but at least it’s marginally more ergonomic. I lean forward and grab the water bottle, which still has an inch or two left at the bottom. I hesitate for a second, but then drink the last of it, reasoning that I can go and refill it once the others have woken up. I savor the feeling of rinsing away the rank taste of night. Then I put the papers I’ve been holding onto my lap, lean back, and wait for the light. If I’m going to sit here awake, I’d rather do it with the papers from Grandma’s house than alone with my thoughts.

In the light of day, the top few pages turn out to be pretty much what I had expected. They’re bills. Someone has annotated them with a “paid” in a narrow, compact hand—that someone probably being Elsa—and I find myself staring at them longer than is probably reasonable. My great-grandmother.

I’ve only seen one picture of her before: a family portrait that Grandma took with her to Stockholm. In it, Aina is still just a sulky little girl on the verge of puberty, with straight, dark eyebrows and short, dark blond hair, wearing a checkered dress that makes her look younger than she probably is. She’s squinting at the camera defiantly, a stiff and unconvincing smile on her lips. Under her left eye she has a birthmark that almost looks painted-on, like a French lady-in-waiting or a silent movie star. It must have given her an air of glamour when she got older. Perhaps she filled it in to accentuate it—or else powdered it over so it wouldn’t be seen.

Grandma—sixteen or seventeen in the photo—is no surprise beauty, as elderly relatives can so often seem in photos of them from their youths. She has a square jaw and slightly flyaway hair, as well as that powerful, competent look that she would still have in her seventies. What always surprised me about that photo is that beautiful smile; how she seems to be laughing straight at the camera. She has the open aura of a teenager with boundless self-confidence and a future that seems to promise the world.

Staffan and Elsa stand behind them, in a classic familial pose. He is tall, with a fairly undistinctive face except for his wide, charming smile. His arm is wrapped around Elsa in a way that feels surprisingly affectionate, and his head tilts in toward her, as though his entire being is striving to be near her. He isn’t a handsome man, my great-grandfather, but he definitely has a certain charm. Elsa is the photo’s unmistakable axis, the person the entire family seems to be built around. Like my grandmother, she doesn’t seem a great beauty: a stout woman of just over forty, she is wearing a skirt and blouse which, with their girlish fifties silhouette and mismatched florals, make her look like a child playing dress-up. She looks as though she would be more at home in pants and practical shoes, clothes to help her where she had to be going.