The Lost Village(73)

Elsa leans in over Birgitta again. How could she not have noticed? How could she not have realized?

Such a thing would have been impossible to imagine. Unthinkable. It can’t be.

Elsa puts her hand on Birgitta’s belly. Beneath her palm she feels those familiar contractions.

“Dagny,” says Elsa, and her voice sounds almost strangely calm to her own ears. It shouldn’t be audible over Birgitta, but somehow it reaches Dagny anyway. “Birgitta is giving birth. We must get her to Ingrid.”

Elsa hears Dagny inhale sharply behind her.

“But how…” she says, and Elsa just shakes her head. She reaches over and strokes Birgitta’s sweaty hair. Normally Birgitta would recoil at Elsa’s touch, but this time she doesn’t react.

Her voice has started to quiet again. How far apart were the bellows coming? Not long. Four, five minutes at the very most.

They don’t have much time.

“I don’t know,” says Elsa. “But her waters have already broken. We must hurry.”





NOW



I’m still sitting on the floor when Max comes in.

“Alice?” he says.

“Over here,” I reply.

I’m holding the photos. The top one now bears my thumbprint, which stands out on the shiny surface.

The light outside has started to change in character, grow softer, warmer. It rounds out the room’s corners and glistens in the shards of glass in the windows. When I look up at Max, he, too, is more beautiful than he was in the hard glare of the morning sun, despite his deep, sunken eyes, despite the cut on his jaw, despite the grubby clothes hanging from his slender frame.

“Look,” I say listlessly, spreading out the images like a fan in front of me.

There are four Polaroids. The child in them appears to be a newborn. Two of the images are sharp, and two are blurred. You can tell that the baby has been dried off, but there are still traces of something dark and sticky on her chubby arms. In one of them she is naked, shot clinically from above. In another she is lying in familiar arms.

Elsa’s face is visible up to the hairline. She looks like she has aged thirty years since the photograph Grandma left me; her eyes sit deep in her face, her mouth just a limp dash between her cheeks.

A bit like Max looks now, come to think of it.

Me too, I’m sure.

“What is it?” Max asks, a hint of confusion in his voice. He stops behind me, and I feel his shadow fall over me when he leans in to take a look.

“Kristina Lidman,” I say. “Birgitta Lidman was the mother of the baby they found here. Birgitta Lidman was Tone’s grandma.”

“Who…” he begins.

“Gitta,” I say quietly. “Look. It’s dated August 18, 1959.”

I look at the two blurry pictures. Though they aren’t in focus, I can still see what they show.

One of them is the same child again, shot from the side. The other shows her lying on a naked breast. The figure she is lying on is large and shapeless, and her face is turned away. Her long, dark hair winds down over her shoulders and chest.

“Where did you find that?” Max asks.

I nod at the desk.

“In the nurse’s records,” I say.

The folder is still lying open in front of me. The scrawls on the lined paper float in front of my eyes. I didn’t want to read them, but I couldn’t help myself. Anything to distract me from the throbbing, pulsating truth hanging over me like a red mist: Emmy is dead and it’s my fault. Tone is gone, lost, insane, and it’s my fault.

The scrawls don’t offer much. The birth weight and length. I don’t know what’s healthy for an infant, but it looks normal to me. And the name. Kristina Lidman.

So that was her first name. Before she became Hélène Grimelund.

I wonder what Tone’s mother would say if she could see her own baby pictures. What Tone would say.

Another note, jotted right at the bottom:

FATHER: UNKNOWN.

I shut the folder. It’s a breakthrough. Explosive. It would have made the documentary a success.

But that doesn’t matter anymore, none of it does. There will never be any documentary. No one will ever get to know.

And none of it matters because Emmy is dead.

“I really believed in the film, Alice. Just so you know. I think it would have been fantastic. We could have made something really special.”

“Have you found anything to cover her with?” Max asks quietly.

There it comes, barging in again. The truth. The real world.

“I was going to check the cabinet,” I say quietly, pointing limply at the one in the corner.

He doesn’t say anything, just walks over to it and looks at the doors.

“It’s locked,” he says.

I open the bottom drawer of the desk. There it is, neat and compact, a small brass key on a twisted string.

I pick it up and walk over to the cabinet. The key glides in and turns so effortlessly that it feels as though my hand is following the key rather than vice versa.

The cabinet is unbearably tidy, with bandages and Band-Aids sorted into small compartments. The lower section is taken up by towels and sheets. I pull out the top sheet and hold it for a second.

It’s white, cotton. It has yellowed slightly with age, and is stiff in that way that sheets only get from mangling. An embroidered trim of dainty white flowers lines its edge.