Excerpts from
Beaten Tracks
By Peer Hultberg
She was the last of one of those brusque puritanical sects where they
lived like brothers and sisters and could not marry, could not have
children, how she had come into the world at all was beyond her. She
had been raised among people she no longer remembered and brought
when she was five, to a village with strict houses, where brothers and
sisters were strictly segregated. It was only much later that she realized
that one of those sisters might well be her mother and one of the brothers
her father. They all died out, and even the new blood that came in
vanished. She herself was of the new blood, but at the same time she
knew that she was set apart from the new by really belonging to the old.
At last there were just a few elderly folk, walking around their enormous
fields and ruined buildings, and then she was the last and there was
nothing left for her there and she was removed, diplomatically but firmly,
because the whole of her home and her early years was to become an
open-air museum. She was never sure if she was the product of love or
of sin, and every evening she went out to the churchyard where she
would not be buried because it was now classified as a national
monument. Anonymous under the wide expanse of grass lay two people,
one of them her father, the other her mother, and she had known them
both but had not know who they were. She had often wondered, had
watched for outward signs, but found none, so perhaps they had both
died before she had started thinking about it at all. Or perhaps those
who had been most strict with her had been the ones who had most
loved her. Or perhaps none of them had loved her, not even enough to
be strict with her. Had her mother ever stroked her hair after she had
come to the village, had her father been one of those who had given her a
smile of kindly approval when she was showing her work in the
needlework room at the age of six. Or had he simply turned his back in
shame and self-hatred on woman and all her doings. No, she knew he
had not: he had respected the woman because he had respected the
sister, but had he also respected the daughter, born in fear and sin. And
had her mother been forgiven only on condition that she did not make
herself known to her child? Perhaps her mother was one of the grave
distant women in the little group of silent brothers and sisters in the
autumn sunshine who reaped more industriously than the rest and apart
from them all? She stared out over the green turf which was now point
nine on the proposed three-quarters-of-an-hour tour and point seven for
those who had the whole day at their disposal, and even on frosty days
with snow it seemed warm to her down there. Nobody knew where
individual people lay and probably none of those who lay there had had
children, except for her parents. She knew that she would never get
permission to lie there with them. Perhaps she could apply to have her
ashes scattered on the grass, but then her faith forbade cremation, and
the dry ashes, the cold ashes that the wind would play with as they lay
down there, were themselves a sin and exacted seven times seven the
wages of sin. She looked out over the greensward where she would have
lain had she but died sooner, and even if strangers would have buried
her, now she was excluded, never would she belong, they had thrust her
away, even in death, because she had not been able to die.
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