But no train came. Nothing came. If I’d had a bit of hay with me, I’d have left it in front of the old goods wagon. I resumed my walk. The clear sky was full of stars. I searched for some kind of movement, a shooting star perhaps, or a satellite, perhaps even a whisper from one of the gods who are alleged to live up there. But nothing happened. The night sky was mute. I continued as far as the bridge over the frozen river. There was a log lying on the ice. A black line in the middle of all the white. I couldn’t remember the name of the river. I thought it might be the Ljusnan, but wasn’t sure.
I remained standing on the bridge for what seemed ages. I suddenly had the feeling that I was no longer alone under those high iron arches. There were other people there as well, and it dawned on me that what I could see was in fact myself. At all ages, from the little boy who had scurried around and played on my grandparents’ island, to the me who, many years later, had left Harriet, and eventually the man I was now. For a brief moment I could see myself, as I had been and as the man I had become.
I searched among the figures surrounding me for one that was different, somebody I might have become: but there was no one. Not even a man who followed in the footsteps of his father and worked as a waiter in various restaurants.
I have no idea how long I stood there on the bridge. When I went back to the guest house, the apparitions had disappeared.
I lay down on the bed, rubbed up against her arm, and fell asleep.
I dreamt about climbing up the iron bridge in the middle of the night. I was perched on the very top of one of the huge arches, and knew that at any moment I was going to fall down on to the ice.
It was snowing gently when we set out the next day to find the right logging road. I couldn’t remember what it looked like. There was nothing in the monotonous landscape to jog my memory. But I knew that we were close by. The pool was somewhere in the middle of the triangle formed by Aftonlöten, Ytterhögdal and Fnussjen.
Harriet appeared rather better in the morning. When I woke up, she was already washed and dressed. We had breakfast in a small dining room where we were the only guests. Harriet had also had a dream during the night. It was about us, a trip we’d made to an island in Lake Mälaren. I had no recollection of it.
But I nodded when Harriet asked me if I remembered. Of course I did. I remembered everything that had happened to us.
The snow was piled up high on both sides of the road; there were few turn-offs, and most of them hadn’t been ploughed. Something from my youth came back to me without warning. Logging roads. Or perhaps I should say emotions connected with a logging road.
I’d spent a summer with one of my father’s relations in Jämtland, up in the north. My grandmother was ill, so I couldn’t spend the summer on her island. I made friends with a boy whose father was a district judge. We had paid a visit to the court archives, and when nobody was looking we’d opened a bundle of documents comprising records of proceedings and police investigations. We were fascinated by accounts of paternity cases, with all the amazing but compelling details of what had gone on in the back of motor cars on Saturday nights. The cars had always been parked on logging roads. It seemed to us that everybody had been conceived on the back seat of a motor car. We devoured case notes on the cross-examination of young men hauled up before the courts, who described reluctantly and laconic ally what had happened, or not happened, in the cars parked on the various logging roads. It was always snowing, there were never any simple and straightforward truths to rely on, there was always considerable doubt when it came to deciding if the young man was lying his way out of a corner, or if the equally young woman was right in insisting that it was him and nobody else, that back seat and no other back seat, that logging road and no other logging road. We gorged ourselves on the secret details, and I think that until reality caught up with us many years later, we dreamed about one day sharing the back seat of a car parked on snow-covered logging roads with desirable young women.
That’s what life was all about. What we longed for always took place on a logging road.
Without really knowing why, I began telling Harriet about it. I’d started to turn off automatically into every side road we came to.
‘I’ve no intention of telling you about my experiences on the back seat of motor cars,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do it when I was going with you, and I don’t do it now. There are always humiliating moments in the life of every woman. What most of us find worst is what happened when we were very young.’
‘When I was a doctor, I sometimes used to talk to my colleagues about how many people didn’t seem to know who their real father was. A lot of young men lied their way out of it, and others accepted a responsibility that wasn’t actually theirs. Even the mothers didn’t always know who the father was.’
‘All I can remember about those distant and hopeless attempts at erotic adventure was that I always seemed to smell so peculiar. And the young man crawling over me smelled funny too. That’s all I can remember. The excitement and confusion and the strange smells.’
Suddenly, we were confronted by an enormous monster of a combined log harvester trundling towards us. I slammed on the brakes, and skidded into a snowdrift. The driver of the monster jumped down and pushed while I reversed the car. After considerable difficulty, I managed to back out of the drift. I got out. The man was powerfully built and had chewing-tobacco stains round his mouth. In some strange way he seemed to be a reproduction of the enormous machine he’d been driving, with all its prehensile claws and cranes.
‘Is yer lost?’ he asked.
‘I’m looking for a forest pool.’
He squinted at me.
‘In t’woods?’
‘Yes, a forest pool.’
‘Dunnit ’ave a name?’
‘No, it doesn’t have a name.’
‘But tha’s efter it ollt’ sem? Thez a helluva lotta lakes round ’ere. Tha can teck yer pick. Where d’yer reckon yours is?’
I could see that only an idiot would be out in the forest in winter looking for a forest pool without a name. So I explained the situation to him. I thought that would sound so unlikely that it had to be true.
‘I promised the lady sitting in my car that she would see it. She’s very ill.’
I could see that he hesitated before deciding to believe me. Truth is often stranger than fiction, I reminded myself.
‘And that’ll meck ’er well, willit? Seein that there lake?’
‘Perhaps.’
He nodded, and thought it over.
‘There’s a lake at ender this muck road, mebbe that’s ’er?’
‘As I recall it was circular in shape, not large, and the trees came right down to the edge of the water.’
‘Mm, cud be ’er then — dunno if not. Woods fuller lakes.’
He held out his hand, and introduced himself.
‘Harald Svanbeck. Yer don’t often see folk on this muck road this time o’year. Scarce ever. But good luck. Is it yer mam in t’car?’
‘No, she’s not my mother.’
‘Must be some bugger’s mam, eh? Gotta be.’
He clambered back up into the cabin of his monstrous contraption, started the engine, and continued on his way. I got back into the car.
‘What language was he speaking, then?’ Harriet asked.
‘The language of the forest. In these parts, every individual has his own dialect. They understand each other. But they each speak their own language. It’s the best way for them. In these regions out on the edge of civilisation, it’s easy to imagine that every man and every woman is a unique member of an individual race. An individual nation, an individual stock with its own unique history. If they are totally isolated, nobody will ever miss the language that dies with them. But there’s always something that survives, of course.’