Lungs and Legs

Chapter 5

He comes as winter is nearing its end, crossing frozen mud under a pale sky. He is dressed in black, rigid clothes that probably should not have left the city. There is a smile on his face and just a hint of sorrow buried in the corners of his mouth. People say he is a writer and he has come here for me. He has heard rumors of a village where a mute girl can wrestle grown men to the ground and tells the most extraordinary of tales and he has come to look at me with his own eyes.

Everyone is very excited. Berta has told Greg to kill a pig. Me and Rosa have spent the day making dinner. Ian has been invited too, and a few other people. A fresh tablecloth has been spread and a special set of plates has been dug out of the belly of a cupboard.
The meal is splendid. I have not eaten this well for months. And all through the meal Berta is chattering, telling and retelling how she has found me and nursed me back to health. I do not think I have ever heard her say so many words at once. But our guest seems less interested in that than he is in me. His intense gaze is on me constantly. He directs all his questions straight to me and gently but firmly silences those who try to answer in my place. Rosa at first translates my signs for him, but he catches on very quickly. After a few questions he puts his hand on hers and says "Thank you, dear" without even turning his eyes away from me. Like Rosa, he nearly instantly takes the habit of saying what he understood out loud for me to confirm. After an initial discomfort, I find his attention flattering and end up enjoying the dinner very much. The little notebook is lying next to his right hand on the table and from time to time he writes down some of the things I tell him. Each time, everyone at the table falls silent while he scribbles. This silence makes me feel good. It makes me feel significant.

So when the next day he asks whether I could tell him my whole story in detail, I am happy to oblige. I feel excited even, still drunk on the sense of importance.

In the cold of the morning we walk to the barn. The courtyard is frozen over, the ground uneven and littered with hard lumps of dirt mixed with the remains of snow. He is wearing a coat, dark and long, with gray and brown fur around the collar. He looks like an enormous bird, long wings, massive body, and a frail neck. I have hardly had the time to grab my own coat, as he seemed eager to go and I did not wish to risk discouraging him.

My drawings in the barn are still there and nobody seems to have touched them since my conversation with Rosa. They are clumsy – dark smudges of charcoal on the uneven wooden planks, and I suddenly feel embarrassed by them. He walks over and examines them closely. I stand by the wall and wonder if this is how Rosa feels before a play. But when he asks me to tell him what the drawings mean all the nervousness fades away. His voice in kind and he is watching me intently as I gesture my way trough the story. He nods, and scribbles, and exclaims at the right moments. I like the way he puts my tale into words: round sentences and ringing syllables.

I tell him about the human prince whom I watched from afar and his eyes look past me for a moment. "Doomed love" he says, scribbling. "It is, yet it cannot be" he mutters under his breath and I feel it would be impolite to interrupt his thoughts, although I no longer find this part of my story that interesting. Then again, I suppose it is quite unusual and it felt important enough at the time to make me leave home. In all honesty, I now sometimes wonder if there was not more to it, a deep undercurrent of restlessness which I could not quite name, pushing me away, out of my well known life, and towards an elsewhere. But I don't know how to explain those half-formed thoughts and in any case, the writer seems content with what I have told him.
"And then?" he asks avidly and I continue. I like the way his eyes light up, the curiosity and eagerness radiating from his slender features. When I describe, the best I can, the short time I lived in the prince's court, voiceless and out of place, he instantly guesses the meaning of all my gestures and I briefly wonder if he too had sometimes felt a stranger among his fellow humans.
I get to the night on the ship and I do my best to convey the anguish of the choice I was given, but as I gesture my way through my jump into the sea and my swim through darkness, he suddenly stops writing. As I keep telling him of the night the frown on his face grows until he waves a hand at me impatiently. "No, no, no. This is all wrong" he says. "You don't just walk away from impossible love".

I stare at him, failing to understand. This is the way it happened. But he no longer seems interested in what I have to say. He starts pacing back and forth, muttering to himself.
"You don't get away with forbidden love. No. With love like this, it is your soul at stake. Do mermaids even have a soul? Probably not. If they did, they'd know better than to love people who are not for them".

I feel surprisingly hurt by this, even though I have yet to understand all the ways humans use the idea of a soul. Some of those ways seem unnecessarily twisted to me. But being just outright denied a soul seems a bit cruel. I wave my hands to try to get his attention, but it is no good. He is entirely lost in thought.

"A feeling like this, it dooms you" he muses. "No, to be saved, you have to give it away. But what if you cannot? Self-sacrifice! That is the only option! Yes, she self-sacrifices!" visibly happy with himself, he starts scribbling again. "Self-sacrifices and gets a soul!" he writes, frantically now. I try to tap him on the shoulder but he brushes me off. It's not until he closes his notebook that he notices me again and gives me a wide smile.

"This is such a beautiful story" he tells me, grabbing my hand and squeezing it. "Thank you". He is looking me in the eyes now, serious and kind, and I suddenly feel uncertain of what just happened. I just stand there, shaken, trying to figure out what exactly shook me.
As we walk back to the house, he still seems elated. We meet Berta in the door and he beams at her happily. I try to smile too. After all, it doesn't matter much what he ended up writing and if he is satisfied with the story, why should I care? Still, there is a knot in my stomach that I cannot seem to get rid of.

I find Rosa in the kitchen, washing dishes. She looks up at me, puts away the bowl she was holding and dries her hands on a cloth. "What happened?" she asks, taking my hands with a worried look on her face. So apparently my attempts at smiling had not been successful. But I have no idea what to tell her, nor how to even begin telling it. The simple answer, the obvious one, is that nothing much happened. And so no matter how many times she asks, nothing is what I end up telling her.

As I go about the day, the knot I was feeling unties slowly. By the time the sun sets and we all settle in for the evening, it is nearly gone. Whenever the unease creeps back in, I tell myself I will talk to the writer again and this time get the story right. But there is work to be done, and people around, and before I manage to catch him he goes out for an evening walk, and then it is night-time. I promise myself to talk to him in the morning and I count my breaths to ease myself into sleep, although I keep waking up throughout the night.

Which is probably why I wake up a little later than usual. I jump to my feet, throw a shawl over my shoulders and go look for the man with the notebook. A run into Rosa in the hallway and ask her about him.
"The writer?" she says. "He's going back to the city. He only just left". I race past her, as she calls after me, and run into the courtyard just in time to see the horse and its rider disappear in the distance on the road to the city. I feel the knot tying itself up again, stretching tentacles all the way to my throat, and this time I know I will not get rid of it easily.