from Caesaria

 

When I was a small child, I often asked myself why Doctor Eldh kept me out at Lilltuna, though he did do his best to explain. Now I no longer ask.

During his visits he would sometimes take me around the countryside in the cabriolet with the top down for fresh air, he would clamp the gold-framed pince-nez to the bridge of his nose and read aloud to me from the Flora so that I would learn to identify plants and animals. The coachmen from the city were always new, they never turned to look at me, I watched their shoulders move under their thin box coats or shirts as they handled the reins: the blue, pink, white summer skies. The doctor sat next to me, the book open on his lap. The sun’s glare fell upon that big face of his, his ice-gray whiskers casting talon-like shadows around his collar: I could have reached out and touched that high, true-hearted forehead. I repeated the names of the plant parts, I immersed myself in the books’ illustrations while the doctor dozed under his top hat on the way back, I let the breeze cool my face. From the woods across the ditch-bank rose the sweet scent of withered plants and dead roe deer. Sometimes we saw people in the distance, children on wattle fences, hay carts. Then Doctor Eldh would tap the coach box with his walking stick, and we’d turn around.

I suppose the doctor thought that Lilltuna would remain unchanged. The clouds scudding above the bird cherry trees. The cows in the pasture. The lambs in the pen. The child, who was me, sleeping or playing in the nursery he had furnished on the top floor of the big white-plaster house.

He came and he went, he laid his frock coat on the back of the recliner and took a seat across from me at the walnut desk under the wall clock with his readers spread out on the tabletop. He allowed me to lie on the Persian rug and make charcoal drawings on the rose-scented paper he brought me from town, while he worked by the light of his desk lamp late into the evening, and the little flame behind the green cylinder glass began to flicker and die.

I often asked him about things I had never seen.

What are cobblestones, Doctor Eldh? I asked.

The stones are laid to support the movement of carriages, draft animals, and people traveling by foot, he replied.               

How do the lanterns shine in the city, Doctor Eldh? I asked.

Like fireflies in the dark, replied the doctor.

I always wrote down the unfamiliar words in the notebooks he brought to Lilltuna, I recorded each new word, and when they had been repeated often enough and had become imprinted on my mind, I crossed them out one at a time so that the knowledge he imparted became one with my nature. I sat in the chair opposite the doctor at the table, I was a pearl or a well, a treasure, a pit.

Sometimes I heard his voice inside my head in the evening when I was lying upstairs in my bed, it mingled with that of Miss Fanny reading to me about the Lord Jesus Christ as I drifted off: the voice in my head was bright and piercing, an otherworldly sound, it belonged to Doctor Eldh.

 

*

My first years at Lilltuna: I sat among the neglected bushes in the English park, eating their berries until the red juice darkened my hands and dress. I learned to walk right away. I fell, I climbed, I ran, I was fastened to a long leash that either Krantz or Miss Fanny was in charge of so that I would not run away in the park. Between the small moss-covered paving and the archways grew unpruned fruit trees, their branches growing heavy and more gnarled. I climbed atop the pavilion’s roof without a ladder, I watched the clouds race and the sky break open, the leash slid through the brushwood behind me, I stuck my tongue into the pearlescent rain until my face ached and the big hard drops unraveled my braids. Krantz would retrieve me from the roof and bring me out of the park’s nooks and crannies, sometimes my leash would snag in the thickest of shrubberies or I’d fall asleep under the giant poplars: afterward I’d hold out my hands so that Fanny could reprimand me with the little cane she wore on her key belt.

Then I sat on the glass veranda with hot milk in the jug in front of me and watched the evening come. Bright blue turned to red then black. The smell of myrtle and overripe apricots wafted from the park. At the end of the day I lay on the bed, eyes tracing the transparent map that the old damp stain had traced across the orchid wallpaper by the headboard, while Fanny read to me about the angels and the Lamb and the fire of dragons over on the rattan armchair. I always pretended to be asleep when she got up and opened the little green-stained chamber pot cupboard and took its contents downstairs, with the twilight outside Lilltuna narrowing until sleep came for me.


The first sign of my morbid disposition appeared in the summer. After it had passed, I took my position with Miss Fanny on the front steps to greet the doctor when his cab arrived from town, I smiled with my mouth closed so that the smell of what was new would not rise up and give me away. Doctor Eldh was rosy-cheeked as he stepped out of the cab, he had a lot to say, his arms were full of toys and a new evening dress, made of light blue half-silk for my piano recitals. He gave me a curious look as I tugged at my blouse, its sailor collar tight around my flaming neck, before he went into the library and sat down to work beneath the wall clock.

It was not until the evening that he called for me. He leaned back in the armchair, as was his custom, and cast an appraising glance over the rim of his pince-nez, then read:

During the monthly discharge the whole uterus swells, becomes more succulent and loose in its texture, without inducing a new formation of tissue. The mucosa thickens quite considerably, sometimes measuring 2–3'' in cross-section; it becomes loose and porous and settles into large, bulging folds. The glands, which widen and elongate, secrete mucus in profusion. The shedding of epithelial cells in the corpus uteri is abundant, causing the mucosa to lose its smooth appearance and, by contrast, become rough and uneven. The blood dilates and distends these vessels, with small extravasations occurring early on, by means of which the departing mucus turns red in color. Later on, the blood inflow increases and vessels can tend to rupture, which may at times cause quite a significant hemorrhage: thus woman embodies an organism ever attacking itself. It is, so to speak, subject to its own invasion, and the art of healing is needed to provide protection and relief, in the same way that musical activity and aesthetics can relieve a darkened mind—

 

*

The doctor always brought treats from the city when he made his visits. He would bring out the shimmering amber pieces of rock candy, which he kept in a small brown paper bag in one coat pocket, other times it was dried plums, marzipan confectionery. I hunched over my notebook, quill clasped between index finger and thumb, sticky from the sugar, my tongue slightly numbed by the sweetness, I let it run imperceptibly along the back of my rough teeth. But before this he stepped out of the cab with his silk hat tucked under his arm, as was his custom, I always greeted him on the front steps, he always lit up at the sight of me. The candy bag rustled in his coat pocket when he reached out to stroke my hair. Clouds of whiskers billowing around his face.

He walked in and took a seat under the wall clock, he tossed his coat over the recliner and undid his galoshes, he loosed his shirt from his vest and leaned back in the chair. Papers and manuscripts and drafts lay in thick bundles wedged in the shelves. He came for my tuition, he came to work in peace for a few days or to try out his remarks to the committee on me, and the writings he was composing for the future. Sometimes he came only to doze on the ottoman in the library, the sound of blackbirds and wind in the witch hazel outside the window. The rays of sunlight slowly crossed his sleeping face. When it was time for dinner, Fanny would call us by pinging the little silver-plated dinner bell she kept on the mantelpiece in the kitchen and only ever touched when the doctor was visiting, and we were served the meal in the drawing room. Only on those occasions was I allowed to eat in there; directly Doctor Eldh had returned to town, back I went to the servant’s table in the kitchen with Miss Fanny and Krantz and the housemaids. But each time he came with the cab, I was once more given rock candy and taking my seat in the library, or lying on the large rug drawing horses on the fragrant papers he supplied me with from town, whereafter we sat together and ate at the cracked drawing-room table. The doctor then unbuttoned his pale yellow silk vest and ran his hands through his leonine, pomaded mane. Thereafter he helped himself in silence to chicken and turnips or veal shank as dusk fell. When he set aside his silverware, it was my turn. I’d had to drag the swivel stool from the piano to the table because the dining room furniture was incomplete, lacking chairs. Lilltuna was sparsely furnished, most of what populated the rooms was inherited from the previous owner, who, due to his imprudent lifestyle, had first sold off large parts of the surrounding land, thereafter objects and furniture, and finally Lilltuna in its entirety, to Doctor Eldh. The East Indian wall clock was a replica and had been left behind. The wallpaper on the ground floor was still emblazoned with blank squares from paintings that had been removed, sometimes I imagined landscapes running across them and portraits of people I did not know and places I’d never seen. I always saved a piece of the brown shimmering sugar in my pinafore pocket after the doctor’s visits. Once the doctor had left, I’d take the sugar out and lick off the lint, then I took a seat in the nursery window and held the piece of sugar up to the sun, squinting at the tiny bubbles and irregularities within, past its rust-yellow crystal surface.

If the doctor had announced his arrival, Fanny always ran to the barn or the park to get me so I could wash. If there was not enough time, I had to make do with a tub of cold water in the kitchen and Krantz trudging in and out of the vestibule with the buckets he filled over at the well. Fanny scrubbed the front of my neck and ears with the brush, she took the soaked linen handkerchiefs and wiped the pits and folds of my face clean, she placed her finger on my eyelids and wiped the dirt and grime out of the corners of my eyes. She lifted my upper lip and ran the edge of the handkerchief across my teeth. I helped her with my lip so she could better reach, I lifted my chin so she could scour the pit of my neck, I soaked my hands under water to be sure the dirt around my cuticles dissolved. Sometimes she stroked her cheeks with the back of her hand while she was washing me as if she were wiping away an invisible tear. While Doctor Eldh was away in town, she’d always let me walk barefoot or in my wooden clogs out in the pastures, but if I neglected my hands she would reprimand me with the cane. On the occasions that the cab appeared without warning in the distance atop the hill, she would dash through the park with a fresh pair of socks and the black patent leather shoes, into which I had to stick my grubby feet, whereupon she tied tight knots with the laces before we ran hand in hand to our position on the front steps. As the cab swerved into the courtyard, I snuck a glance at her other face, the face that belonged to Doctor Eldh.

On my birthdays, the doctor would read to me from his old well-thumbed report to the Health Collegium:

Although within the previous 2 years of that point in time, I had successfully performed my first 2 ovariotomies and was thus not entirely unaccustomed to operating within the peritoneal cavity, I must confess that it was not without apprehension that I attempted the work of the parlous operation, which I had previously only known from books. The woman—a maid of delicate build and lean, though faultless in bone structure excepting the malformed pelvis—informed me that she had ever been in robust health and had first felt fetal movements in April. Her pulse was a steady 80 beats per minute. So however to explain the protracted bleeding from the placental site and the flatus, which defied all our efforts after the procedure and increased rapidly until the abdomen ballooned and the pressure led to death? I was momentarily tempted to puncture the distended intestinal coils, the outlines of which could be traced across the woman’s abdomen. I can only conjecture how intestinal gases arise in such nervous states: from where comes the distended abdomen of the hypochondriac and the trumpeting winds of the hysterical woman, and why certain affections of the mind risk being accompanied by an accumulation of gas.

30 hours after the cutting, the patient’s consciousness went dark, and the maid expired by asphyxiation at 4 o’clock in the morning. The fetus was of the female sex and fully matured, cord cut immediately upon arrival and baptized post haste; apparently healthy, but very small and delicate, much like its mother.

 

*

When I was a small child, old Miss Fanny and Krantz would take me down to the lake to bathe. Krantz would lift me into the wheelbarrow and then we paraded down the rugged forest paths. This was before Hulda and Gustava entered into service and when the two black-haired sisters from Stockholm were helping Fanny in the kitchen and Krantz with the milking at dawn, when the day was but a gray shred above the treetops. The sisters limped, each with the opposite leg, and looked rather alike, although one was in the habit of wearing a blue apron and the other a brown one. It happened that they would switch clothing simply to confuse Fanny. Other times they sat under the linden trees at the back, cuddling and twining their hair into a single braid, later they let me touch the long black snake writhing and flinging its way across the grass. I never did find out their names.

Fanny simply called the black-haired sisters The One and The Other, or Them. I sometimes think that had I stayed in the city all those years ago and had never been brought to Lilltuna by Doctor Eldh and been given his name and the name of the cut through which I was brought into life, I might have had a name like theirs. Frida or Gunn. Karlotta or Elin.

Sometimes the black-haired ones visited my nursery at night, sneaking silently up the stairs in spite of their limp and without waking Fanny downstairs in the housekeeper’s quarters. The door creaked softly and they sat down on my bed and hushed me and kissed the tears from my face, and let me rest my head in their laps as they stroked my hair with their sooty fingers until I fell asleep. By morning they’d be gone again, and when I came down to the kitchen, there they were as usual, standing over the wheat dough or fish scraps and smiling at me, their freckled faces streaked with ash and dirt.

The black-haired ones liked the forest lake as well, walking alongside the wheelbarrow with their particular limping gait, each their own picnic basket in hand and humming songs I didn’t recognize. Wasps crawled over the bottles of elderflower cordial sticking out of their baskets. I sat in my walking jacket and the pale turquoise bonnet, a gift to me from Doctor Eldh on my birthday, bonnet strings chafing and the air thick with aspen fluff, white specks that would be sailing well into June. A yellow parasol was lowered over my face to shield me from the sun. I played with the frogs in the clear brown water that flowed between the reeds beneath the maps of leaves and pollen that lay on the surface, I caught woodlice in a canning jar by the decaying jetty. I climbed down from the rocks and waded right into the water in my pantalettes until the leash tightened around my body and I was hauled back in. On the bank Fanny sat under a straw hat, the leash knotted to her key belt, chewing dark tobacco. That was before she started tying the leash around me mostly for the sake of appearance, and still had it neatly tied to the belt. I let the lake rise to my chin and my mouth be rinsed through with the fresh cold water, I floated on my back with the black-haired sisters’ hands at my neck and ankles while the pantalettes ballooned around my legs. Sunlight flashing through the canopy of pines. When I came out of the water, I was immediately wrapped in the flannel blankets that had been brought along and sat shivering under the birch trees next to the sisters as they tore off the petals from flowers they had picked along the way and rattled off rhymes they had carried with them from town. Beyond the reeds and rows of trees lay what was no longer Lilltuna, mires and homesteads hidden behind dense forest. I could have stood up and pulled the sunken rowboat out of the mud and rowed over there, toward the edge of it all, and if the rowboat sank along the way I would at least have touched the border, like a brittle dying insect when winter comes. The black-haired ones squinted in the bright sunlight and giggled and put their fingers over my eyelids and tickled my forehead with the daisies and buttercups, I never had a sweetheart to name for their flower rhymes and games.

And so it went with the black-haired sisters, until the day they disappeared after one too many trips to town with Krantz for groceries and supplies. And Doctor Eldh had caught wind of their chatter and claims about Lilltuna and me over there in those streets. And Miss Fanny said to the doctor when she was called into the library (and I was sitting with my drawing pencils under the piano outside the door, which was ajar) that she had seen this coming from the very start: the likes of the black-haired ones were not to be trusted, and had she not tried to tell the doctor so?, and as recently as today she had mulled over her suspicions about the black-haired ones having attracted other tatterdemalions and rascals to the forest lake last summer, for Fanny had indeed thought that someone had been roving around us in the woods by the bathing spot, watching us, as it were.

After that I never made it to the lake again.

And Krantz sat alone in the cart when he was back from town with baskets full of fruit and flour and kerosene. And the pull-out sofa in the maid’s room stood empty. Some time later Gustava and then Hulda arrived in the cab with Doctor Eldh to replace the black-haired ones. By then it was already winter at Lilltuna, the kind of winter that would lead to a late spring, and the heavy snow shimmered on the tree branches under the golden solar haze that would pierce the blanket of sky at midday, only to withdraw in the afternoon gloom.

Sometimes I thought of that clear brown water down at the lake back in the summer, and the water spiders jumping around the surface and the cool sweetness I filtered into my mouth and the lightness of my body underwater, and the woodlice in the jar unceremoniously tossed out. When it was summer again, I sat on the veranda with the readers while Gustava worked the dasher in the butter churn on the bench below, and from the small lake Krantz came with his fishing rod and wet trouser hems and two bunches of young pike hanging at his belt. I didn’t ask about the lake, I never went further than the edge of the park. I no longer thought about what lay beyond Lilltuna. Out there, the wattle fences cleaved the landscape, and the wood pigeons soared above the marshes, and at the long table I sat between Fanny and Hulda, eating turnips and egg soup and the fried fish Krantz had pulled out of the brown water. I mashed their salty pale flesh against the roof of my mouth. I could have walked through the park, the leash trailing behind me in the grass, and taken the shortcut across the meadow down to the lake and waded to the other side. I could have run across the field straight out onto the highway, shouting to attract the attention of the hay carts and the droves of children playing outside the farms in the distance. The tangled wall of bird cherry and hawthorn that framed Doctor Eldh’s property was never pruned. As time went by, Fanny let me play ever longer in the park or behind the barn, where I sat with the dolls and the carved wooden horse Doctor Eldh had given me for my birthday, because she had noticed that I never stole away. The leash was slack around my waist and muddied by the sodden ground, hours could pass before she’d ask Krantz to bring me back in, she knew I’d always be back by dark. 

 

*

For a long time, I wondered why Doctor Eldh kept me out at Lilltuna, why I was kept away from the hay carts passing by in the distance and the children playing on the wattle fences. I no longer question such things. Daddy longlegs swaying over the lamp’s green glass. The steely eye of the wall clock turned in on its own eternity. I had brown hair, I had open palms, I sat in the red, the yellow, the forest-green woolen dress and played in the evenings or fastened by my leash in the park’s untended green grass. Above Lilltuna wandered the sun, coloring the house purple and yellow. Gnats swarmed above the animals in the pasture.

Sometimes the doctor was already in a temper when he arrived in the coach, and once upon the front steps, he’d give my head a hasty and indifferent pat before going inside. I pressed my ear to the library door, listening to him open the wall clock, as was his custom upon arrival: he’d open the little window to the clock face and then shut it with a snap. I often imagined that time itself began in the doctor’s library, at the very moment he spun the hands around the dial and set the clock in motion, and each of his absences made time retreat and I’d be back in the park under the trees among the broken dolls where all events were drawn out into one long moment.

Sometimes Doctor Eldh appeared irate during my lessons, sometimes he sat and stared out the window at length and I would jot aimlessly in my notebook so as not to attract his attention while the sound of the nib scratching against the paper filled the room. Then he might suddenly fly out of his chair and set off pacing back and forth across the rug, as if impatient or far away, and start talking and shaking his fist in the air as if he were arguing with someone only he could see: the damn upstart, he might exclaim, what is he thinking? or that sycophant thinks he knows about uterine prolapse, and sometimes a simple bastard!

I would sit in the underwood in the park licking my arms just to taste my body’s salt, I would bite my fingers and watch the grooves made by my teeth darken, I did not see how one thing led to the next, things kept falling apart. I was waiting for Doctor Eldh, and when he returned I parsed his face and gestures as one does an unpredictable current. He often tried out writings on me there at the walnut table, glancing across the paper at regular intervals while reading aloud to observe my reaction. I would always light up. Then from behind the pince-nez would come a glow of satisfaction and he’d proceed:

Of the Caesarean section we can state, without risk of exaggeration, that ever since Trautmann performed the first scientifically recorded sectio caesarea in 1610 it has since been performed at least 2,000 times. On each occasion, a representative of our profession has found that a fetus could not be brought forth alive or dead and dismembered per vias naturales and thus was emboldened to reach for the scalpel. Upon my first case of cutting, in which I found the fetus wedged in the upper left corner of the maternal cavity, as if in a sack and robbed of sight, it was instinct rather than deliberation that enabled me to place my hand underneath the abdomen of the fetus at the critical juncture and force its back through the cut: whereupon it exited the womb doubled, the child’s life saved in the same breath it lost its mother. In our guild we witness life’s burdens as well as its miracles: I venture that the Caesarean section’s virgin-birth-in-reverse is not among the lesser. Thus the fortunate surgeon himself becomes the author of the human partus per excellentiam, which has hitherto been reserved for womankind.

As far back as I can remember, I would sit in the library listening to Doctor Eldh read his drafts and remarks for Society meetings, after which he would smile gratefully as if he had been relieved of a burden unbeknown to me. Sometimes he would burst into tears and bury his face in the crook of his arm, at which point he wished for me to reach across the table and put my hand over his mighty skull. Forgive me, kitten, the doctor might then murmur into his shirtsleeve, say you forgive me.

Sometimes when the crying stopped he looked up at me with his red-rimmed eyes and said my name. His eyelashes were lank with tears and his cheeks as pink and mottled as a small child’s. Once he had wiped away his tears, he would once more tell the story of my Creation, how he had saved me from the road to perdition and given me a name. He would say that I reminded him of something, but just couldn’t think of what: a taste on his tongue, thunderheads from childhood. The scent of wood and skin in the bed he shared with his siblings in the summers. The strange sounds of animals as they moved through the forest outside the house where he grew up, he returned to the feeling that they were beckoning him.

I lay my hand over his head as he wished, and asked:

How are the little ones put to bed out there in the city, Doctor Eldh?

He looked at me with those tearful eyes, and replied:

They are tucked into the darkness of the world, girl, into its wretched cold.