The Quarry

by Johan Theorin

  She wept and screamed for help, but she had to look after herself. Henry was down in the quarry, the Invalid was in his room, and of course her mother, Kristin, was gone.

  Henry no longer talks about his late wife, and Vendela barely remembers her – not her face, not even her perfume. All that remains is a gravestone in the churchyard at Marnäs, an oval photograph of her that hangs in the kitchen, and a box of jewellery in Henry’s bedroom.

  There is an ache inside Vendela’s body too, but that is probably just a result of all the times she has raised the arm holding the stick.

  Since her mother died, Henry always seems to be on the way out, both mentally and physically. In the mornings he sings on the steps as he sets off for the quarry; in the evenings he often stands gazing up at the stars.

  He leaves most of the work on the farm to Vendela. She has to do the cleaning, and she washes her own clothes so that she doesn’t smell of cows when she’s at school. She has to carry food between the earth cellar and the kitchen, because they can’t afford electricity and a fridge. She grows potatoes, French beans and sugar beet. And she milks the Rosas and drives them back and forth along the track.

  Every single day she walks along behind them, back and forth, before and after her lessons at the village school down in Stenvik. But before that she has another job to do: she has to go upstairs and give the Invalid his food.

  That’s the worst job of all.

  Vendela doesn’t remember exactly when the Invalid came to the house, just that it was an evening in late autumn when she was six or seven years old and Henry could still afford to run a car. He had been pacing up and down in the kitchen all afternoon, then suddenly he went out and drove off, without any explanation. Vendela went and lay down in her little room behind the kitchen.

  Several hours later she heard the car coming back. It drove right up to the steps in the darkness and stopped. The front doors opened, first one, then the other. Vendela lay in bed listening as her father helped someone out, carried someone out of the car, marching up the front steps in his boots, opening the door and stomping upstairs with something heavy in his arms.

  He was up there for quite a while, and Vendela could hear him talking quietly to someone. And she heard someone laughing.

  Then he came back down and went out to the car again. He struggled with something large in the boot, and eventually managed to get it out and bring it into the kitchen. Vendela could hear squeaking noises, like some kind of heavy machinery.

  She got out of bed, opened the door and peeped out. Her father was pushing a wheelchair across the kitchen floor. He had a blanket over his arm, and there was a transistor radio on the seat of the wheelchair.

  He set off up the stairs, pulling the chair behind him. After a couple of steps he stopped to rest, and met Vendela’s gaze.

  He looked embarrassed, as if he had been caught out, and mumbled something.

  Vendela took a step towards him. ‘What did you say, Dad?’

  Her father looked at her and sighed. ‘He couldn’t stay in that place,’ he said. ‘They tied them down with leather straps.’

  That was the only explanation he gave. He doesn’t tell her who this relative is, this person he has brought to the farm.

  And Vendela dare not ask. It doesn’t matter, because from now on Henry refers to the new resident upstairs only as the Invalid. Most of the time he doesn’t even say that, he simply nods up at the ceiling or rolls his eyes. But that first evening, when Vendela heard muted laughter from upstairs and glanced at the ceiling, her expression fearful, he asked her a question across the kitchen table: ‘Would you like to come up and say hello?’

  Vendela quickly shook her head.

  The new duties quickly become routine; there is no need to spell them out. Vendela has to look after the Invalid, just as she looks after the cows, but the difference is that the Invalid never shows himself. The door of his room upstairs remains closed at all times, but the sound of music and news bulletins on the radio can be heard through it from morning to night. She sometimes wonders if the Invalid has locked himself in, but she is never brave enough to reach out and check.

  All she does before she sets off for school each morning is to walk slowly up the dark staircase with his breakfast tray and place it on the little coffee table outside the door.

  Always knock when you bring the food, Henry said.

  Vendela knocks, but never waits for an answer. She hurries back down the stairs.

  It takes time for the door to open. Vendela has often managed to put on her outdoor shoes by the time the hinges up above her begin to squeak. Sometimes she remains standing in the porch, holding her breath; she hears the door open, followed by the sound of heavy breathing as the Invalid emerges from his room. Then comes the clink of china as the tray is picked up.

  At that moment Vendela is always afraid that something will go wrong up there, that she will hear a crash as the tray lands on the floor. Then she would have to go upstairs and help.

  The crash never comes, but with each passing day during those first months with the Invalid, Vendela grows more and more afraid that the door to his room will be open one day when she gets home. Wide open.

  But it doesn’t happen; every afternoon, once the cows are in, she comes home and finds the empty tray back on the table. There is usually a chamber pot there too, which she has to empty.

  From the room behind the door she hears the sound of quiet laughter.

  Henry has few friends, and there are only two regular visitors to the farm each year: two days before Christmas, Aunt Margit and Uncle Sven arrive from Kalmar in their big car, the boot filled with food and presents. Vendela and Henry have cleaned and scrubbed the kitchen and put a fresh cloth on the table, but that’s about it when it comes to housework.

  Henry makes coffee and tries to make small talk, then he and his sister go upstairs to see the Invalid, Aunt Margit carrying a number of small, wrapped packages.

  Vendela stays at the kitchen table and hears them open the door of his room, then close it. Aunt Margit’s voice sounds shriller and more spirited than ever as she talks to the Invalid and wishes him Merry Christmas.

  Vendela doesn’t hear any response.

  The door is open only once when Vendela walks past, a few months after the Invalid moved in. It is standing ajar. She slows down, stops and cranes her neck to look inside. It is dark, but she is aware of a sour, closed-in smell, and she can see a cramped room with a bed and a small table. And an old blanket on the floor.

  Someone is sitting on the blanket: a thin, shrunken person with uncombed grey or white hair sticking out in all directions. The figure is sitting there motionless, in a stooping position. Suddenly the shadow straightens up. It turns its head towards her and opens its mouth. And it begins to giggle.

  Vendela hurries quickly past the room, as if the Invalid does not exist. She dashes down the stairs and straight out on to the grass.

  She understands why the Invalid closes the door – of course you can’t let people see you when you are so old, and so ill. But still. Spending all your time in a room upstairs, never coming out into the sunlight? She can’t imagine what that would be like.

  * * *

  The winter passes and it is March, and the snow is melting out on the alvar. For a few weeks big pools form on the yellow grass, spring lakes, and when school is over and the cows have been shut in, Vendela sometimes sets off to explore. She sees the water reflecting the clouds in the vast, open sky, and she feels free, far away from the farm.

  One sunny afternoon on the alvar she suddenly sees a large, unusual object among the juniper bushes on the horizon. It is a block of stone. It looks like an altar, leaning slightly to one side, and it is perhaps two or three kilometres from the farm. It is tall and wide, and it can be seen from some distance away. The juniper bushes stand in a circle around the stone, but seem to be keeping their distance.

  Vendela doesn’t actually go up to it, because she is further out on th
e alvar than ever and is afraid of getting lost among the spring lakes. She turns around and runs home.

  Spring passes and the school year ends, and Vendela doesn’t go back to the isolated stone out on the alvar. But one summer evening she mentions it to her father and asks if he has ever seen it.

  ‘The elf stone?’ Henry is sitting at the kitchen table polishing a round lamp stand. He has carved it from a piece of limestone, and as his emery cloth moves across the surface, it shines like polished marble. ‘The one on the way to Marnäs? Is that the one you mean?’

  Vendela nods.

  The elf stone. Now she knows what it’s called.

  ‘It’s from the Ice Age,’ says Henry. ‘It’s always been there. And people have always gone there to leave offerings.’

  ‘Who for?’

  ‘For the elves,’ says Henry. ‘It’s called the elf mill. Back in the old days, people believed the hollows in the stone were formed when the elves milled their grain to make flour. But these days, people go there to ask for things … you leave a gift for the elves and make a wish.’

  ‘What do you wish for?’

  ‘Anything you like. If you’ve lost something you can ask the elves to help you find it …’ Henry says, glancing out of the window towards the barn, ‘… or maybe you can ask for a bit more good fortune in life.’

  ‘Have you ever done it, Dad?’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Have you ever left a gift for the elves?’

  Henry shakes his head and carries on polishing the limestone. ‘You shouldn’t wish for things you don’t deserve.’

  16

  Vendela weighed the cow stick in her hand. Was it really the same one? It looked shorter now than when she was little, but it was still unpleasantly long. She thought she could hear the faint sound of cow bells in the distance.

  Go, go, go!

  After forty years she can still remember the swishing sound of the stick, but not why she had hit the cows so hard. Was she a sadistic child?

  She put the stick back in the shed and walked through the empty garden, in amongst the trees next to the house.

  A narrow path led to an open space. Now she was standing in the pasture where the cows used to graze in the summer, but it was no longer a meadow; it was overgrown with tangled bushes. There were no cowpats in the grass. No cows had grazed here for many years.

  Rosa, Rosa and Rosa, she thought, and started to run.

  The alvar began beyond the stone wall on the other side of the pasture. It had been almost completely devoid of trees and bushes when Vendela was little, but now she could see low-growing birches and spindly hawthorns in front of her. The bushes were in the way, but she managed to maintain as straight a line as possible as she moved across the flat ground.

  When she could no longer see the farm behind her, she focused on a bush straight ahead and kept on running, increasing her speed. The sun would not remain in the sky for more than a couple of hours now, and she had no wish to be out on the alvar in the dark.

  Ten minutes later she was out in the wilds – the distance seemed shorter than in her childhood. A couple of hundred metres ahead of her she could see a tall, dense group of juniper bushes and slowed her pace. Her legs were shaking; she inhaled the cold air and concentrated. Then she made her way through the thicket and stopped in the little glade inside. Any visitor was completely hidden from view in here.

  The stone was still there.

  It was rough and unpolished, just as she remembered from childhood.

  It’s all about being in the right place at the right time, she thought.

  She moved slowly closer to the rectangular stone. It was solid, sunken firmly in the ground.

  The elf mill, where the elves once milled their grain in the twilight. The gateway to their kingdom.

  The stone seemed a little smaller now; perhaps it had sunk further down over the past forty years. But it was probably just that Vendela had grown up.

  There were things in the hollows.

  No, not things, money. Old coins.

  Made of bronze or gold? She wasn’t brave enough to pick them up and take a closer look, but now she knew that other islanders believed in the power of the elves too.

  She remained a few feet away from the stone, listening. The wind soughed in the trees, and far away she could hear the faint roar of traffic from the main road.

  But there were no rustling noises. No footsteps.

  Vendela walked up and placed her hand on the stone. It was just as cool as she remembered, even though the sun was shining.

  She lay down behind the elf stone, where it was less windy. The ground was cold but not damp, and she closed her eyes. She could feel the big stone beside her, emanating solidity and a protective sense of calm.

  When Vendela was thirty she had travelled to Iceland, where people still believed in elves. She had met elderly people who said they had seen them, and had accompanied a group of tourists up to Snaefjellsjökull, the glacier north of Reykjavik where the elves evidently appeared from time to time. She had spent one bitterly cold night sitting waiting in a cave by the glacier, but she hadn’t seen them.

  Five years earlier she had seen an advertisement in a magazine about a course on the island of Gotland, where you could learn to see and communicate with elves. Vendela secretly booked a place on the course, and flew to Visby one sunny Friday at the beginning of May. (She told Max she was going to do a pottery course.)

  The course leader was about thirty, and had long brown hair in a pony tail. His name was Adam Luft, and he lived in a crofter’s cottage south-west of Visby; the area was flat, but with plenty of trees, and several elf paths met there. Adam did not cut the grass around his house, because he said it was important to leave nature untouched as far as possible.

  ‘The paths often lead between hazel or juniper bushes,’ he said. ‘That’s where we find the gateways into their world.’

  Adam could sit cross-legged talking about elves for hours on end. He was particularly interested in their private lives, which according to him were free and open. Vendela wasn’t quite so sure about that, and sometimes when he talked about sex between elves and people, she had the feeling it was more a case of wishful thinking on Adam’s part – but when he left that particular topic alone, he often said sensible things. Such as: ‘It’s important to embrace new ways of thinking. When the Europeans first came into contact with white tufts of cotton during the Middle Ages, they had no idea what kind of material it was, or where it came from. They guessed that the cotton came from small flying sheep and lambs, who built their nests up in the trees.’

  Adam had paused to let his students finish laughing.

  ‘So when today’s scientists hear that people have met elves,’ he went on, hands outspread, ‘what are they to think? How do they interpret this information? Just like almost everyone else, the scientists are helpless when faced with the inexplicable.’

  Adam told her so much about elves. For Vendela the weekend course had been a fantastic experience. The little group had gone for long walks in the spring countryside, and had sat down to sing to the elves when the sun went down. After a while, several of the participants said they began to see them. One of the youngest, a twenty-year-old girl from Stockholm who also worked as a medium, saw elves so frequently and so clearly that she started to recognize them and gave them beautiful names, such as Galadriel and Dunsany.

  Vendela was slightly envious, because she never saw any elves, but the course was still brilliant. The landscape on Gotland seemed timeless and tranquil, just like Iceland. She had returned home with a new-found belief in elves, and a powerful desire to find them on Öland, the island of her childhood. And now here she sat by the elf stone. Nobody knew where she was. Out here the rest of the world was of no importance.

  Adam Luft had said it was easier to see the elves if you had faith but lacked hope. Then you were ready for them. And you could only glimpse them out of the corner of your eye. Elves didn’t like
it if you stared straight at them, according to Adam; they couldn’t cope with our intense scrutiny.

  The countryside had suddenly grown still around her; not a twig was moving on the juniper bushes around the stone. Vendela slowly opened her eyes and thought that the alvar, with its vernal yellow grass, looked frozen, faded like an old photograph. If she looked at her watch now, she knew the hands would be standing still.

  The kingdom of the elves.

  She suddenly heard a rustling sound in the grass beyond the bushes, as if someone was moving along, light as a feather. She got up cautiously, but saw no one. And yet she still had the feeling that someone was watching her through the bushes.

  Her tracksuit was damp, and she shivered. All her energy was gone, chased away by a sudden sense of anxiety. She wanted to go up to the dense thicket of bushes and look on the other side, perhaps ask if anyone was there, but she remained standing by the stone.

  They’re creeping up on me, she thought. The elves … or the trolls?

  She didn’t dare go over and look. Her legs were taking her in the opposite direction; she moved backwards around the elf stone so that it was between her and the muted noises.

  Then everything fell silent once more. The rustling stopped.

  The wind began to blow, and Vendela breathed out. She felt stiff and cold, but had one thing left to do. She rummaged in her jacket pocket and placed a coin, a shiny new ten-kronor piece, in one of the empty hollows on the stone.

  It was risky to wish for things in this place; nobody knew that better than her. But she needed help.

  She was going to ask for one thing, no more.

  Please don’t let Aloysius go blind, she thought. Give him a few more healthy years … That’s all I wanted to ask.

  She put the coin down and backed away from the stone.

  As she left the glade tucked away among the juniper bushes, she felt time begin to move once more. Her watch was ticking, and it was evening. The sun in the west had lost its yellow glow and was sinking down towards the horizon, the light reflected as red stripes in the spring lakes around her.