There, on the mountainside, between two rocks, Matti bent to examine a small stone, a curled stone that reminded him of a picture of a snail, or maybe this was a fossilized snail. Meanwhile, Maya climbed farther up the mountainside toward what seemed to be the murmur of the river. Suddenly, Matti couldn't see her anymore, couldn't even hear the sound of her steps, but he was afraid to raise his voice and call her. And when Maya turned to look, she didn't see Matti either. He had vanished among the trees, and she too was afraid to call him because they both had the feeling that they mustn't shout here because they weren't really alone; someone was waiting for them in the depths of the forest. Or hovering above them. Or perhaps just standing silently, unmoving, among the shadows of the dense forest, never taking his eyes off them. Within the deep silence that lay heavily on everything, Matti suddenly thought that he wasn't the only one listening to the pounding of his heart, but whatever was standing in the shadows and watching him could hear it as well. And when he put the curled, snail-like stone down on the flat rock and looked for Maya but couldn't see her, another snail, not a fossilized one, crawled near his shoe. But by the time Matti looked back at it, the snail had vanished as if it had never been. Swallowed up in a crack.
17
After some hesitation, Matti decided that he should stay and wait for Maya there, at the foot of the rock that looked a bit like a large ax, because what would happen if he went to look for her? She might come back on a different path while he was gone. And if she didn't find him there, she might start wandering around the forest looking for him and get lost among the hills, and they'd be looking for each other like that until darkness fell. So he sat leaning against the ax-rock and waited, trying to listen as hard as he could to pick up every rustle and murmur.
From so high up, the expanse of forest looked like a large, dark screen dotted with illuminated spots that were green: mottled green and gray-green and yellow-green and a green so dark that it was almost black.
Matti's eyes searched the distance, far below him, for the tiled roofs of the village, but the village had disappeared. Matti conjured up a picture of Almon the Fisherman's fruit trees. In his imagination, he saw the vegetable garden clearly and even the scarecrow standing in its beds. And he could describe to himself how the old fisherman walked slowly past, sighing, limping his way among the beds toward his wooden table, missing his dog Zito, and the finches and the fish and even the woodworms that used to gnaw away at the innards of his furniture every night. He was probably scolding the scarecrow now or arguing with himself as he walked. He always had the last word, muttering some unanswerable response from under his thick gray mustache. And there, not far from the ruins, Emanuella the Teacher was standing alone hanging laundry on the line in the backyard of her small house. Matti knew from the gossip — the whole village knew — that Emanuella the Teacher, not a young woman, had been trying for years to win the hearts of the men of the village, single and married, young and not so young, but not one of them gave her a second glance. Sometimes, Matti would join those who made fun of her and called her Emanu-no-fella. But now he regretted that: her loneliness and desperation seemed almost painfully sad to him now. When he thought about the narrow street under his parents' house, Matti pictured Danir the Roofer and his two young helpers sitting astride the beam of a tiled roof, hammering away and laughing because they'd managed to match the beats of their three hammers to the rhythm of a jolly marching song.
And he pictured Solina the Seamstress stopping in the middle of her walk and bending over her invalid husband's pram, maybe to straighten his blanket or change a wet diaper, or maybe just to stroke his head covered with its sparse gray hair, while from the depths of his lost memory, Ginome bleated thinly, heartbreakingly, because he thought he was a kid and his wife was a surrogate mother sheep.
And maybe at that very moment, as he sits there imagining life in the village, Lilia the Baker, Maya's mother, is on her way from the bakery to the village's only grocery store in the square. And maybe she meets Solina there, wheeling her husband in the pram. Lilia stops as she always does to exchange a few words with Solina, to tell her how hard it is to raise a stubborn child like Maya who is as cheeky as a devil, yes, but definitely not cruel. The whole problem is that my little girl has an overly strong and spirited nature. She knows everything better than I do and much better than everyone else, so everything always has to be exactly, but exactly, the way she wants it. Then Lilia will probably brush off her apron, apologize — because, for no reason at all, she always lowers her eyes and says she's sorry — and she'll say goodbye to Solina and Ginome and continue on her way down the narrow alley, push-rolling her old bread cart, whose wheels need to be oiled or maybe even replaced.
And actually, why shouldn't I oil them for her myself? Matti thought. Who cares if people talk. Let them talk. They can make fun of us as much as they want. After all, Maya and I saw something they never even dreamed about. And when we come out of this forest, maybe we'll know something the village doesn't know… or has been trying very hard not to know. Or maybe the whole village knows and is just pretending, the way Little Nimi pretends to have whoopitis on purpose so he can stay free?
If only we get out of this forest in one piece. It should be nighttime already and the whole world should be dark, but strangely, it doesn't come, it's holding back, as if under a spell.
And what if Maya has gone very far away?
What if she gets lost?
What if we both lose our way inside the cobweb of the dense forest?
And how long do we have, if we have any time at all, before it gets dark?
Maybe they haven't started worrying about us at home yet. But they'll start soon.
Matti sat that way for a long time, looking down at the valley from high up on the mountain, sunk in thoughts and imaginings. But he was actually trying to push away the fear that kept growing sharper every minute, creeping under his skin and making chills run down his spine: because Maya didn't come back and she didn't come back afterward, and even after that, she still hadn't given a sign. He was getting more and more cross with her: Where had she vanished to like that? Could she have gone back down to the village without him? And you know what, it would serve her right if I take off too and run back home right now before it gets dark.
Then his anger at Maya turned into cold fear as he listened to the rustling of the tall trees, the silence, and the wind. He could already sense in the air the faint smell of the end of afternoon or the onset of evening, and the twilight wind began a whispered conversation with the rustle of the trees in the forest. Matti had already stood up and was planning to run home as fast as his legs could carry him when, through the whirring and whooshing of the wind in the pine needles, he thought he heard the barking of dogs again, coming from far, far away. For a moment, he also seemed to hear Maya calling faintly to him again and again all the way from the thick forests on the mountain above him: Matti, Ma- a- tti, come he-e-ere, co-o-ome Ma-a-atti, co-o-o-ome, co-o-o-ome…
And he didn't know which was the most terrifying choice: to ignore the cry that might be a desperate call for help, or to go bravely up into the forest toward the voice that might only be a trick to lure him into a dangerous trap, a voice that was coming not from up on the mountain, but from inside his head, born of the fear and desperation that had already begun to darken his heart and choke his breath like a foot in a heavy shoe pressing on his chest…