The Forbidden Place

by Susanne Jansson

“So, what’s it like to be a student here?” she asked.

  “It’s just fine. Good teachers. Nice classmates. There’s lots of peace and quiet, so it’s easy to get work done.”

  “But doesn’t it get a bit lonely? If you get sick of just studying?”

  “Maybe, a little. But it’s not hard to find stuff to do if you feel like getting out. There are concerts and parties and things.” He turned to her as if to shift the focus away from himself. “But tell me. How are you planning to go about your work? Measuring greenhouse gasses—how do you do that?”

  She told him about the samples she would be collecting over the weekend. He listened with interest.

  “I don’t suppose you’d like company?” he said afterward. “It sounds exciting. I’d really like to see how it all happens. I could help you, and… carry stuff. Or something.”

  Silence.

  Something twisted inside her; that sinuous desire entwined with a blunt, harsh sense of danger. And, on top of that, the thought of the advantages it would bring to have two more hands.

  “You want to?” She looked straight ahead. “Sure, why not. It would definitely make things easier.”

  She would have to go out in the bog on her own first, she thought, without Johannes. She needed to subject herself to the bog all by herself, with no one else around. She also needed to prepare the sampling stations. She would insert sawn-off sections of drainpipe into the ground at twelve different locations. Next time she would attach lids with small rubber corks into which you could insert a syringe and withdraw gasses.

  She had woken up unusually late this morning. The knocking in her head seemed milder than before. But the worry was pounding; it seemed to wander around her body, from her chest to her head and then down into her stomach. Now it was occupying her whole body. She felt like an abstinent junkie, but her drug of choice was repression and denial. What good will this do? asked the devil on her right shoulder. What is there for you here? Go back home. There was no angel on her left shoulder, only emptiness. A spot that had been erased. Her eyes burned behind their lids as she heard herself think: Me.

  She lingered over breakfast, propping the door open to feel the lovely autumn weather, walking back and forth between the rooms, writing a list of things she must not forget once it was time to head out to take measurements.

  Below her was the path that led into the bog. All she had to do was follow it, place one foot in front of the other. It was no more difficult than that. Shouldn’t be.

  And at last she did it, without thinking, like when you go for a swim even though the water is cold because somehow it’s the right thing to do, and because it almost always feels good afterward.

  Her feet on the path. Her flesh on this earth, again. The time between now and then, compressed into the fragile wing of a butterfly, obliterated in a few fleeting wing-beats.

  She followed the path for a bit. Then she turned to head into the bog at the point where five well-worn boards, side by side, cut through the landscape in a long and angular line. They didn’t seem to have done much to the walkways since she’d seen them last, but she assumed repairs of some sort must have taken place.

  After all, it had been fourteen years.

  The light was dim and the air chilly. The terrain was vast and yellowing, graying. The trees, which she had always thought to be hunched, squatting—now she felt as if they were bowing down in reverence. Curtsying and nodding. As if they were saying hello.

  She greeted them in return, cautiously opening herself up, relaxing. Letting herself be carried forward. Time came loose from its framework and collapsed, bit by bit, until she felt like a part of everything around her. It was like she was moving within a mosaic and the pieces that made up her body were melting into the pieces that were the surroundings.

  She walked slowly and for a long time before she gingerly stepped out onto a few sturdy tussocks and sat down to lean her back against a small pine.

  Then she just sat there, enveloped in the rhythm of her own breathing. A light rain began to fall. The drops ticked as they landed on her raincoat, like drizzle against a canvas tent in the morning. It smelled like an evergreen forest. Her wet boots were full of half-yellowed bog-myrtle leaves; they were beginning to drop from the stems by now. She took a few leaves in her hand and rubbed them gently between her fingers, inhaling the sharp, spicy scent and closing her eyes.

  A few minutes passed. A quarter of an hour, maybe. Then the mist crept toward her like a curious animal with unclear intentions. It licked its way across the wet ground, reached her feet and swept around her.

  As though it were saying: You. It’s you. It’s been a long time.

  She didn’t move; hardly breathed. She just sat perfectly still with her eyes half closed and waited for the moment to pass.

  She didn’t notice it, but words came whispering out of her mouth. I know. It took some time. But now I’m here.

  When the clock struck nine on Saturday morning, she was waiting for Johannes outside the cottage, dressed in work trousers, a windbreaker and sturdy boots. Her backpack was full of coffee, lunch and equipment for taking measurements. Johannes leaned his bike against the cottage and walked toward her in his jeans and sneakers, with a hoodie under his denim jacket. He threw up his hands as she eyed his clothing.

  “Isn’t this okay?” He laughed. “Sure,” he answered himself. “It’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  “It’s pretty wet out there,” she protested.

  “Then it will feel even nicer to come in and warm up afterward.”

  They each carried some of the equipment and took the same path she had walked the day before. She oriented herself with her GPS and soon they came to the first station where she had sunk a sawn-off drainpipe. She took six black plastic lids from her backpack, each two decimeters in diameter with a rubber cork in the center.

  “Watch this,” she said, pointing at the cork. “I’ll insert a needle in here to extract the gasses that rise from the ground. Then I transfer the gas from the syringe to these bottles.”

  She opened a case of small sampling bottles in neat rows. “At each station we’ll take four measurements—after five, ten, fifteen and twenty minutes. Are you with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “We’re measuring the amounts of nitrogen, nitrous oxide and methane the bog gives off. Nitrous oxide and methane are actually more potent greenhouse gasses than carbon dioxide. They have a greater effect on the climate.”

  “Evil stuff, then?” he said.

  “Not really. Without greenhouse gasses, we wouldn’t be able to survive on earth. It would be too cold. The problem is, as the average temperature rises, the processes in the ground increase as well, which means that more greenhouse gasses are released than is necessary, which in turn makes the planet get even hotter… which causes even more gasses to be released. And so on. It becomes a self-intensifying cycle.” She began to walk toward the sample site. “I’ll show you the first time, and then you can try it.”

  Johannes nodded and smiled in amusement. “Okay! Got it.”

  She attached the first lid, hurried to the next, ran back and stuck the needle into the cork on the first lid, and then did the same on the other. Then she started her stopwatch.

  “In five minutes it will be time for another measurement,” she said, squeezing the contents of the syringes into the small bottles in the case. “Then you can take the sample from the one over there while I do this one.”

  “I feel nervous,” Johannes said, his jaw tense.

  “Understandable,” she said. “You could screw up my whole study.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Just kidding. It’s fine. It’s super-simple; you can handle it, no problem.”

  She gave him a syringe. “You’ll have to keep control of your fingers. Things get pretty bloody sometimes, especially if it’s cold and you get stiff.”

  When five minutes had passed, they stood ready at their respective lids.

 
“Let’s go,” she said, sticking the needle into the cork as she glanced over at Johannes. He performed the entire task with a smile of concentration on his lips.

  “Brilliant,” she said when he was done. “You’re a natural.”

  He clasped his hands together and raised them in the air in a triumphant gesture. “I knew it.”

  “Five minutes until the next one. Shall we have some coffee?” she said.

  She poured the coffee into two mugs and watched him shyly as he drank. His shoes were already dark with moisture.

  “What is the actual definition of a bog?” he asked, gazing out at the scenery.

  “Well, first and foremost, a bog is a type of wetland,” she said as she handed Johannes the folding chair she’d brought. She sat down on a sit pad. “A wetland is an area where water is present for most of the year, at or just above ground level. We usually say that half the vegetation has to be hydrophytic.”

  “Hydrophytic?” Johannes said with a laugh.

  “Water-loving.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve learned a new word. Sounds a little… dirty.”

  “Right? And there are lots of types of wetlands—one type is a mire, which we can divide further into bogs and fens. A bog is completely dependent on precipitation because it is isolated from the groundwater. No running water passes through it, which means that only species that don’t need much nourishment can live there, primarily various types of sphagnum.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’m just rambling; I’m sure you’re not really interested in this.”

  “No, I am.”

  She gave him a skeptical smile.

  “I’m not being sarcastic,” he told her. “Go on.”

  “Okay, sphagnum has” she said, picking some up, “sort of like tiny holes in its leaves where it stores water. This way it creates its own reservoir above the groundwater level. As it dies, it turns into peat, which piles up and slowly raises the bog up over its original level.”

  Johannes was listening with interest.

  “In general, wetlands are sort of like nature’s kidneys,” she went on. “They filter out excess nutrients from the water that passes through them; they slow down the flow when, for example, the snow melts or there’s heavy rain. That’s why it’s a pity that so many of them have disappeared.”

  “Why did they disappear?”

  “Partly because the climate used to be more full of moisture, and partly because the industrialization of farming led to people draining and drying out large swaths of wetlands.” She brought her coffee cup to her lips and looked at her watch. “Shit, it’s time for the next measurement!”

  He seemed to have an almost insatiable interest in everything she said. It was a little suspicious, she thought on Sunday as they repeated the procedure on the north side. She had never experienced this before, being asked so many questions by someone outside the university.

  Over and over they lost track of time and had to jump up to collect the samples.

  “Something I’ve always wondered about,” Johannes said once she thought he’d asked every possible question about mires and wetlands. “The stuff we usually call bog moss, like you use to decorate Advent candleholders or the space between windowpanes, it doesn’t look like this at all. Why is that?”

  “Good question,” she said. “The plant that’s sold in stores as bog moss around Christmas-time is actually a lichen. Saying that lichens and peat moss are the same thing is like saying that wood anemones and elephants are the same thing.”

  Johannes laughed. “How do you mean?”

  “A lichen is two organisms, algae and fungus, living in a symbiotic relationship. The algae provides energy in the form of carbohydrates by way of photosynthesis; the fungus contributes water and nutrient salts it takes from rocks and so forth. Peat moss, on the other hand, is a single organism from the start.”

  “I’ll have to tell Mum when she gets out the Christmas decorations,” Johannes said. “She’s going to feel duped.”

  When their work was done on Sunday, they went back to the cottage. Nathalie made dinner. She had bought the ingredients for the meal she always made on special occasions, the only one she knew by heart—lamb stew with mustard, peppers and potatoes.

  “I’ve never eaten lamb this way,” Johannes said. “It’s really good.”

  They’d opened a bottle of red wine, and they talked about how Nathalie came to be a biologist.

  “Actually, it all started with bang gas,” she said. She told him about a chemistry lesson in junior school when she poured a little hydrochloric acid and magnesium into a test tube and put a match near the opening. And poof! It had formed hydrogen gas.

  “I think that was the first time I felt like school could be fun,” she said.

  Later, when it was time to choose a course of study for secondary school, the obvious choice was the natural sciences. She liked working in the lab; she liked the white coats, the order and cleanliness, making sure that all the safety equipment was close at hand. She loved the weighing and measuring, counting molecules—how many moles of an element you needed, how many grams that equaled.

  On the first day of spring that year, as everyone else turned their faces toward the sun and enjoyed their coffee, Nathalie was gazing down at her cup instead—not just to feel satisfied by the way the milk and coffee truly blended, or the way the cube of sugar dissolved and vanished, but because she once again recalled the quiet joy she had felt when she understood for the first time exactly why this was.

  In time, her entire life became setting up experiments, delving further and further into processes and sequences, deeper and deeper into the research that had already been done. It didn’t make her feel exhilarated or even excited; she just felt calm. And slowly but surely, in a way that was as inexorable as it was unconscious, this scientific structure truly became her new home. A safety net woven of fundamental axioms and delightfully diverse complexity that captivated her after the incomprehensible things that had left their mark on her childhood and eventually brought it toppling down.

  But she didn’t tell Johannes about that.

  He said that his father, who was no longer living, had collected butterflies and other insects. He’d had a whole room full of identification guides and Latin dictionaries, just like Nathalie. Johannes had loved to spend time in that room as a child.

  “Maybe that’s why I’m”—he gestured towards her—“drawn to you.”

  “Because I remind you of your dad?” she said carefully, with a skeptical smile.

  “Because you make me feel at home.”

  She fended off his words by pretending not to notice their significance.

  “What about you?” she asked. “What’s your story? Why do you want to become an artist?”

  “I’ll tell you about that some other time. But it’s getting late,” he said, rising.

  “I’ll sleep on the kitchen sofa,” she said. “You can take the bed.”

  “I’ll bike home.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a great idea.” She laughed.

  “It’s fine. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  And then he held her close for a moment, kissed her on the forehead, and left.

  The next day, Nathalie got up early and cleaned frantically all morning. She swept, dusted, mopped and did laundry with the sense that she had to get something out of her body—a restlessness, an itch. Around lunchtime, her phone beeped.

  Want to do something today? You got lots done over the weekend, so maybe you can take some time off? Hugs

  Her brain hesitated, but her fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Sure, that’d be nice. But don’t you have stuff you need to do?

  I can get out of it.

  OK. Any idea what?

  Yup. I’ll be over in a bit. Tell you then.

  She was sitting on the steps and eating when he came pedaling up on his bike. It was a lovely, clear September day, and the sight of his gangly fig
ure and his dark hair fluttering in the sunshine made something inside her feel buoyant.

  “Hi there.” He stopped next to her and put down one foot. “This weather!”

  “I know,” she said. “Nice day for some time off. I don’t exactly feel like staying inside and studying diagrams.”

  He laid his bike on the grass, bent forward, gave her a hug, and sat down next to her on the steps.

  “What’s your plan?” she asked.

  “I heard there’s a little lake in the woods,” he said. “I thought we could bike there.”

  Bytjärn, she thought, naming the lake silently. She pictured the thick old forest, large boulders and dark water. A body of water you could never see the bottom of, something she’d always thought to be normal and natural until she got to the west coast and realized that was just about the worst thing imaginable to people who liked the sea.

  “Have you eaten, by the way?” she asked. “There’s some food left inside.”

  “Just ate. But thanks. What do you say? Doesn’t it sound nice?”

  “Definitely. Let’s do it. Should we bring anything with us?”

  “Screw it, let’s just go.” He threw up one hand. “Unless you want to bring something, of course.”

  “I’ll grab a couple of things. Be right back.”

  She went in and packed a backpack with coffee, water, nuts and what was left of her lunch, just in case they were gone for a while. A roll of toilet paper, a sweater and extra socks. It might well be wet where they were going.

  “There!” she said when she came back out. “Now I’m ready.”

  An instant later, she caught something out of the corner of her eye, something disappearing around the corner of the house. What was that? Like a shadow passing by. She followed it. Her eyes searched the garden and the hedge that surrounded it, but… nothing.

  But I could have sworn…

  “What is it?” Johannes said. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Come on, let’s go.”

  Side by side they jolted along the gravel path on their bikes. The smallholdings they passed rose out of Nathalie’s memory like forgotten islands: that’s where Julia and I spied on the angry farmer; that house used to be falling apart, and now it’s a middle-class dream home with picture windows and a huge porch. Right there I saw a tiny cat with a huge rat in its mouth. I was in the backseat of the black Volvo, Dad was at the wheel with his cigarette halfway out the window. “Look, Natti, that’s a fat one!”