Astrid and Veronika

by Linda Olsson

  ‘Wild strawberries,’ she said, turning the thin stem of the glass in her hand.

  10

  I walk on sun, I stand in sun.

  I know of nothing other than sun.

  Astrid

  There was a place in the forest, high up on the hills beyond the village, where I used to go. You had to know it to find it, there were no paths. A small clearing in the midst of the dense forest, with soft, silvery grass and wild strawberries. I happened on it when I was out looking for mushrooms in the autumn, and after that it became my secret hideaway. It was as if the dark firs around it stood guard — over the place itself, and over me. I sometimes came for a whole day, spread my blanket and lay down. I was alone in the world, and safe.

  The year I was sixteen, summer was late. But the week after midsummer it arrived abruptly, with day after day of still, hot weather. I had no direction, no one had talked to me about what to do after leaving school. I drifted aimlessly, usually heading for my secret place in the early morning and returning only when the sun sank below the firs and the entire space was slowly overtaken by shadow. Nobody missed me.

  It was a shock to discover someone there one day. He was kneeling, picking berries and threading them onto a timothy straw. I stopped in my tracks, well inside the shade of the trees. Although I made no sound, he must have felt my presence, for he stood up, holding the straw in one hand, like a strand of bright red pearls. He smiled and opened the palms of both hands, as if apologising. As if acknowledging that he was intruding, and surrendering to the rightful owner.

  I recognised him vaguely. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he came from the next village. He was tall and he looked strong, like someone used to hard work on the land. His skin was freckled from exposure to the sun and his fair hair bleached almost white. He had the clearest grey eyes with streaks of amber. But that, I only discovered later. He smiled and I cautiously left the safety of the shade, stepping into the bright sunshine. Turning my back to him, I spread my blanket and sat down, pulling my skirt down over my legs and hugging my shins. He stood for a moment, then sat down on the grass just to one side of my blanket. He turned to me and held out the straw. I hesitated, but he nodded, smiled and stretched his hand further forward until it became impossible for me not to accept the offering. We said nothing while I slowly pulled the berries off the straw, one by one. I offered him one for each that I put in my mouth.

  After that first day the longing for the safety of my secret place slowly grew into a longing to meet him. Or perhaps the place and the boy merged in my mind.

  His name was Lars. He was a year older than me, seventeen. He had further to walk, from the next village, and until the harvest was over he had little free time. I could never be sure whether he would be there when I arrived. On my way through the forest I used to pass a large granite block where I would stop, draw my breath and close my fists with my thumbs inside, then close my eyes and whisper: ‘Please, please, please let him be there today,’ before continuing. If he wasn’t, I felt it was because of something I had done wrong. That somehow I had to earn the right to such pleasure. And for me, the place itself was no longer enough.

  One day when I arrived I found him sitting on the grass, his hands cupped around something I couldn’t quite see. As I came closer I heard the smallest sound from inside his hands. When I sat beside him, he opened them a little and allowed me to peek inside. All I could see was a soft bundle of grey down.

  ‘It’s a little baby owl,’ he said. ‘I found it right here, on the grass. Must have fallen from its nest.’ He raised his gaze and scanned the solid wall of dark trees. ‘It shouldn’t be out and about in broad daylight.’ He looked into his hands. ‘A fox might find it. Or a falcon.’

  We sat silent, watching the small bird in his hands, our heads so close his hair touched mine.

  ‘I don’t think it’s injured.’ He gently stroked the downy head with his finger. ‘Just scared.’ He blew softly into his hands. ‘Perhaps if I put it in the shade under one of the trees it might survive until the evening and its mother will find it.’

  ‘Kill it.’

  I sat with my arms pressed around my shins, my forehead on my knees and my eyes closed. ‘Kill it now,’ I said.

  I knew he was watching me, but I kept my eyes closed.

  ‘The mother will never find it. Kill it!’ I could feel tears pounding behind my eyelids and I was fighting to keep them out of my voice. ‘Kill it for me.’

  After quite a while I heard him rise, then his steps on the grass. Only when the branches rustled as he passed through the wall of trees did I release my tears. I sat hunched, hugging my legs, and the sun was hot on my back. My tears wet the cotton print of my dress. It felt as if he was gone for a long time, and all the while I struggled to control my crying. When finally he returned, he was empty-handed. I was still sobbing as he sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. He said nothing. The air was still, the sun was high in the sky and we were the only people in the world. The skin of his arm was warm against my neck and his hand hugged my shoulder. I looked at our feet on the grass in front of us, his strong and tanned, mine slender and white.

  It is in the nature of things to change. Nothing can last beyond its given time. And I think that instinctively we know what that time is. What is it that makes us know when the summer turns? The smallest shift in the light? The slightest hint of chill in the morning air? A certain rustling of the leaves of the birches? That is how it is — suddenly, in the midst of the summer heat, you are overcome by a tightening of your heart. The realisation that it will all come to an end. And that brings a new intensity to everything: the colours, the smells, the feeling of sunshine on your arm.

  As we sat beside each other that day, the sun hot on our backs, everything around us was still summer. Yet everything had just shifted.

  We lay down close to each other, holding hands and looking up into the blue sky. He had picked the last strawberries for me — the sweetest, overripe ones — and the taste was still in my mouth. He turned to me and put his head on my shoulder. He whispered my name, and the sound filled the entire world. He put his hand on my cheek and I could smell the strawberries on his fingers. I pulled him towards me and held his face between my hands, looking into his eyes before I kissed his mouth. I felt as if all my senses were sharpened, as if my tears had washed me clean and I was able to see all that was good for the first time. The infinite sky above, the glistening grass underneath, the dark trees guarding us. Every secret detail of his young body. The chest where the skin was still milky white, and the sunburnt arms. The downy hair on his neck. When he opened my blouse and let his lips run over my breasts, I knew I was part of the goodness. That I was beautiful. That I was alive.

  I also knew absolutely that it would not last.

  The following weeks I came back most days, each time stopping again by the granite block, closing my fists. But he was never there. Still I kept coming, well into autumn. One day in September I sat on the dry grass, as usual with my arms around my legs, my eyes on the trees across the clearing. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a soft, soundless movement. I turned my head and thought I saw a grey shape sweeping through the air, disappearing between the dark trees. I thought of the little downy bird gently cupped in his strong, large farmer’s hands, and I knew with certainty that he had found a safe place for it.

  Later, I heard about the accident. He had fallen from the loft in the hay barn during harvest. Death had been instantaneous.

  The following spring I went back for the plants. I knew they would live, despite what people said.

  It’s more than sixty years ago, but my plants are still alive. I don’t know if the clearing in the forest is still there, or if there are still wild strawberries there. It may very well be that it’s overgrown, that the forest has reclaimed it. My patch may be the only place those wild strawberries still grow.

  I wish now that I had held on to the memories of that summer. Perhap
s things would have turned out differently if I had. Instead, I allowed what had gone before and what came after to overshadow it. I should have cared for it, the way I cared for my strawberry patch. Allowed it to develop new growth, new fruit. But perhaps they are one and the same, the strawberry patch and the memories of that one summer. Finally retrieved.

  11

  The heart must grow from dreams,

  or it is a wretched heart.

  The music had finished and when Astrid stopped talking the room was silent. Veronika blew out the candle and they were enveloped in the nebulous light that belonged to neither night nor day.

  ‘Time. I don’t understand it,’ Veronika said. ‘I think I have never grasped the essence of time. Memories seem to surface in no particular order, with no time attached. Yesterday can seem as distant as last year.’

  Astrid did not respond, but stretched out her hand to pick up her glass. She took a sip and looked at Veronika.

  ‘Some of my clearest memories are of the briefest moments,’ Veronika continued. ‘I have years of life that have left no traces, and minutes that are so ingrained in my mind that I relive them every day.’

  ‘Yes,’ the old woman said slowly. ‘I think I said the same that first day by the river. I remember looking at those new buildings. To me, they were mushrooms, surprisingly grown overnight. The flax fields of sixty years ago seemed more real to me.’ She sipped the liqueur, closing her lips tightly around a mouthful before swallowing. ‘Telling you about that summer has given it back to me.’ She bent forward a little, her hands on the table in front of her. ‘It was never lost, you see; I just refused to listen. And now . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  Veronika shifted on her seat, put down her glass and rested her elbows on the table, her chin on her clasped hands.

  ‘My life now consists of fragments’, she said, ‘where some are so blinding in their intensity that they make everything else indistinguishable. What shall I do with these glittering shards? There is no pattern; I can’t make them fit. With each other, or with the whole that should be my life. It feels as if my existence was extinguished in a flash, and afterwards my universe became incomprehensible. Just shards and particles, which I carry with me wherever I go. They are sharp and they still hurt to touch. And they are so heavy. I know there is more — there are less intense fragments that I need to make it whole. I want to remember everything. But perhaps I need to give it more time. Allow myself some rest. Distance myself a little, to see if I can make out a pattern. And face the truth about what is really there.’

  Astrid’s face was a white mask and her hair a halo, Veronika’s a wide triangle where the eyes were dark hollows, reflecting no light. The first stirring of the morning breeze rustled the trees outside the window.

  ‘When I met James it was as if a new time began. As if all that had been my life until then abruptly came to an end,’ Veronika said, looking out into the night. ‘And everything I had known before faded away. I was instantly transported into a world with brighter colours, sharper sounds, more intense flavours and smells. And for a time I thought it was mine.’

  12

  No, not you, not I, now just the one

  Tonight, tomorrow and in a thousand years.

  Veronika

  In hindsight it appears as if that is how it was from the very beginning. Of course, that cannot be true. My memory is playing tricks again. But he smiled at me across the bar, pushed a beer my way and the world shifted a little. Until then my life had been safe. I had lived in a slow, amicably indifferent world that allowed me time to consider my actions. And that was the kind of world for which I had a map. In James’s world I was forever lost.

  We met in London, at the pub in Hampstead where he worked. I went with Susanna, the Danish woman who owned the gallery where I worked, and three of her friends. I didn’t know the other people, but they seemed nice enough. A young woman, a freelance art reviewer; her partner, an IT consultant; and the third, Brent, who was one of the artists whose work Susanna exhibited. All four knew one another well, and perhaps I felt a little left out. When it was my turn to buy a round, I was glad to have a reason to leave the table. I walked up to the bar and ordered our drinks.

  Beside me a rather drunk man in a striped business suit started moving in. Before I had consciously registered that he was bothering me, the barman leaned across and put his hand on the other man’s arm. ‘Hey, she’s my girlfriend. Back off, will you.’ Which to my surprise, he did. That was how I met James. I sat down on one of the barstools and took a sip of my drink. I thanked him and he asked where I was from. When I said Sweden, he smiled and said, ‘Ah, as far away from my home country as you can get. I’m from New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand.’ His soft vowels seemed to caress the words. He had reddish-blond curly hair and grey eyes, and his smile picked me up and carried me off to places I had never been before.

  ‘I am too old for this,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For my OE. My Overseas Experience. I am thirty-one. I should have got it out of the way ten years ago.’

  He laughed, throwing his head back a little, then leaned across the bar and took both my hands in his. And that is how he began to tell me about himself. Or rather, about some factual aspects of his life. Not about the man that was him. That was for me to discover.

  I suddenly remembered my friends and stood to collect the filled glasses. But before I turned, he placed his hand on my arm and asked if I could wait until he finished.

  ‘I usually take a walk on the Heath after work.’ He smiled again. ‘It’s as close to nature as I can get here.’ I agreed.

  I returned to our table and it was another hour or so before my friends left. Susanna turned at the door and gave me a little smile and a wave. The pub emptied gradually, and just after midnight he came out from behind the counter and we went outside. The day had been hot and sticky, with the nauseous still air of a big city not built for heat. The night was warm, like velvety tepid water, and we walked onto the Heath.

  He told me he had been in London for a couple of months, after travelling from Auckland through South-east Asia, the Middle East, Greece and Italy. He was now working to save his passage home. He was a marine biologist with no prospects of a job in his line of expertise. He had left a poorly paid job on a fish farm in Tasmania to come to Europe. The future was uncertain, but he was on his way home. To New Zealand. I had only the vaguest idea of this land. The most far-flung country on earth. I had travelled almost all my life, but never been to New Zealand. When he talked about it there was an intensity in his voice, a warmth.

  His name was James McFarland.

  Nightly walks on the Heath, after his shift finished, became our regular way of meeting. I would come up to Hampstead from the gallery in Knightsbridge and spend the evening nursing a beer, watching him while he worked. Laughing at the sheer joy of seeing him, hearing him. It felt as if I had never laughed before. Never been happy before. Now it feels as if that was the laughing of my life. My quota.

  He told me he had promised his mother he’d be back for Christmas, so I knew it would soon be over. My own plans were vague. I had been in London almost a year, not giving much thought to the future. I knew my publisher was hoping for a second book, and I had been writing a little. Meanwhile, the work in the gallery provided an income. Susanna was generous and had put no pressure on me to commit myself to the job long term. Like me, she seemed happy to take life one day at a time. I had moved out of Johan’s apartment in Stockholm, but had left my books and my cat behind. I suppose I had liked to consider the possibility that I might return. Just not yet.

  James was house-sitting a flat on the top floor of a fivestorey building right on the Heath. The owners were overseas. The first time he took me there was on a wet Sunday afternoon in October. It was his day off, and we had been to the Jewish bakery in Golders Green to buy bagels. On our way back the skies opened. We stopped at the Spaniards Inn for a beer, hoping the rain might ease.
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  I don’t think I have a good memory, generally. My mother certainly used to tell me my memory was unreliable, that I could never remember anything correctly. But every day of those first weeks, months, has its own space reserved in my brain. I can pull them out and look at them and the colours are as bright and the resolution as sharp as ever. The exact look of his face across the table. His hands on the beer glass. My feet dyed bluish-black from my wet shoes when we got back to the flat. The skin of his arms rubbing against my face as he towel-dried my hair. We made love in the narrow bed in the small bedroom he used. It was gentle, not the passionate drama you would expect from such love. Sweet. With open eyes. As if this was the past, the present and the future, all at the same time, and we could not afford to lose even the smallest detail.

  Afterwards, he gave me his tattered red bathrobe, took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen. That was the first time I watched him cook. His hands as he expertly cracked eggs, chopped spring onions, sliced tomatoes. I could talk about his hands — give every finger time. Such good hands. Hands that would give my body such pleasure. Hands that handled food with such love, such instinctive love. Later, I would see them touch other people he cared about and animals. On the steering wheel of his car. But mostly I remember them on my body. Touching me.

  I knew he was leaving. He had told me from the start. Yet as the moment approached, we avoided the subject. We never talked about anything outside the world that contained the two of us. There. Then. We spent all our free time together, going to movies, galleries, museums. We walked in parks where the trees and lawns were shedding life, preparing for winter. We ate in small restaurants, but more often at his flat. We made love. The world went on its way without us.