There is no light, there is no time, but there is room, and the room is warm. She sways and swirls to her own rhythm, in waves. The edges stretch and shrink, she strikes the wall and spins in a soft shell. It is the beginning, it is the beginning of the beginning, it is not yet her time, but she already has a place, she is in play, she has sanctuary. She spins in time with different beats, in time with all beats there have ever been and are and ever will be.
She has no name, she has no words. Everything is still true and clear.
BEGINNING
At first there is a whisper. A whisper in the nape of the neck, a throbbing behind the temporal bone, the restlessness between the ribs. It has been that way for years, now it breaches the surface, seeks space, shape, language. Who are you?
A good child has many names.
This flight is now boarding.
BEGINNING
That’s when it began, is what they’d say later. It began, they say, but they know that it’s not the beginning, that there is no beginning, the beginning is only letters in a line, three empty syllables, a forgotten, bewhiskered ball at the bottom of a basket that gathers strength and bides its time until one day it falls out and rolls. Sometimes it spins, into a corner or behind a door or a cupboard, until it is found and returned to the basket, sometimes it seems that a tower is rising from the beginnings and will provide a clearer view. But then the tower sinks and is scattered, the ruins glow, smoulder, smothered in soot, they acquire a story and a name.
One day a child climbs into the cinders. She squats, scrabbling among the ashes, and hooks something out, takes it home. Time passes, and the find begins to buckle, the beginning hatches from the shell, and suddenly it is fresh, suddenly it is newborn, for one moment it is an innocent beginning.
And the end? There are springs, summers, autumns, winters.
1
‘When are you going to die?’ the child asked.
And Grandmother answered, ‘Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.’
The paper rustles as it turns.
When am I going to die? asks the child.
And Grandma answers, you are only just at the beginning.
The child sits on the rug in Grandma’s room – Grandma is really Great-Grandma – and for the first time in her life sculpts the word die with her lips. Death is not part of the child’s days. Her thoughts are of sledging slopes and swings, books about Satan, her thoughts are of the cheese sweating on the kitchen table and the wolf sticker under the chair. Sometimes they are of Grandma’s Bible and its fancy, curlicued lettering. But the child has never before thought about death.
The room smells of motherwort and camphor. The Bible is lying on the cupboard ledge. There are books on the shelf. Grandma’s dark-spotted, wrinkled hands are the softest thing the child knows. They stroke her head, help her with her clothes, pull her on to her lap, turn pages.
Grandma’s world: a bed and a bedside table, a lamp with a golden switch, a box of peppermints. A flower-stand. A bookshelf, a rag-rug, a chair. An aloe pot. A wardrobe. A clematis dangling over the cupboard edge. The door to the room is open, unless Grandma has decided that it should be shut. A squirrel is in the treetop through the window. The tree is a rowan.
The door opens with a whisper. The rug feels rough to bare feet.
The two of them are in charge here: Grandma and child.
*
In the room there are myths and fairy tales, psalms and a Bible, an album and a medical dictionary. Grandma dozes, a book on her lap. The child gives the edge of the cover a tug. Grandma doesn’t move. Now the book is in the child’s hands, now it’s on the floor. The Bible on the night-stand drops down next to it with a thud. Then the child moves to the armchair. She climbs on to the armrest, stretches on tiptoe. The book with the blue cover is on the edge of the topmost shelf. The child’s fingers touch the rough spine, the book inches nearer and falls into her hands.
The child lies face down on the floor, opens the books, tugs the lid off the box and fishes out the pencils. She colours the ‘p’s in yellow (Pontius Pilate, Pappa Moomin, podagra), the ‘t’s in red (Testament, Tove, typhus) and the ‘o’s in pink (Moses, sclerosis, psychosis). She picks light blue for the page in snowy Moominvalley where the squirrel looks at the Lady of the Cold and freezes solid, and draws a big black cross above the squirrel. Underneath she writes her name. The last letter brushes the squirrel’s marvellous tail.
*
The child doesn’t colour in the book about the dog and the girl. It teems with words. The child traces them with her finger. The lines are swimming before her eyes. If you go down to the kw … kway? … the child reads, that’s what it looks like, you’re right, encourages Mum, but this is a tricky one, it looks like kway but we say kee, quay, that’s right, well done, says Mum in Stock that’s it, next bit, in Stock hollum Stockholm Stockholm on a summer morning good, says Mum, next line. If you go down … her finger slides over the paper, we’ve read that bit already, says Mum, look, from here, the child puts her finger next to Mum’s and see a little white boat called Seacrow lying there, that is the right boat to take, and all you have to do is to go on board, good, carry on, For at ten o’clock pre … prek … pressiss … the child sounds out the letters and snorts prekissully … She falls silent. A droplet falls on to the paper.
Precisely, says Mum. For at ten o’clock precisely she will ring her bell for departure. Now the drops are streaming down. Mum puts her arms around the child, her cheek brushes a damp forehead, a dripping nose. Oh, sweetheart. The child slides down off the chair. The door to Grandma’s room slams.
Mum sighs, settles back into the chair and takes an apple out of the bowl, feels its waxy skin. She pulls the book closer. Runs the back of her hand over the yellowed page, wipes the tears off the book. If you go down to the quay in Stockholm on a summer morning, she reads as she bites into the apple, and see a little white boat called Seacrow lying there, that is the right boat to take, and all you have to do is to go on board. Time whistles past. It is winter, and she is eight and lies face down on her bed absorbed in the world of Seacrow Island and can’t get Uncle Melker’s cottage out of her head. And then she is in the garden on a bright June day, and Uncle Melker is haplessly trying to clear up the knee-deep flood in the kitchen that he’s caused, and Mum laughs, she laughs so hard that the child comes to the kitchen door and is stunned into silence.
The tears leave holes in the paper.
*
In the Bible it says that good people go to heaven, but bad people burn in hell. The thought unsettles the child. She is a good girl, she’s not scared of hell, but the thought of the devil dancing among the lip-smacking tongues of flame – somehow she knows that that’s the devil’s natural way of moving – sends a shiver of fear down her spine. In the child’s mind the devil dances amid the burning flames, he leaps very high and brandishes a red trident; the devil is thin and hairy; the devil’s hair is long and black, his tail alone is bald, tipped with a forked tuft that lashes the earth and burns like coal. The child does not like the heat; she is afraid of the sauna at her great-aunt’s in the wilds with its fiery iron bowls and hissing hot tap that sprays scalding water. That’s where they boil sinners in hell, the child is sure of it; the devil has bowls just like them, too, with gleaming silver handles. But hell is very far away, and they only send bad people there. The devil won’t get her, he won’t put her on to boil.
*
The radiator hums, and the child picks at the buttons of her great-grandma’s blouse on her lap. Books have Grandma’s voice, her pauses and her coughs, the rustling and rhythm of her page-turning. One line gives way to another, it chimes with the next, and when Grandma turns the pages, the world stands still. The next day she goes sledging with Mum, and Grandma reads aloud. The day after, she goes sledging with Mum, snow falls non-stop, more, shouts the child, and Mum tugs the sledge, laughing, and in the evening Grandma reads aloud. Grandma, book, Mum, sledge, Grandma, book, Mum, sledge. The evenings are very cold. The windows sparkle with frost flowers.
A wooden swing hangs in the doorway. It is strong and red. Help! orders the child, and Grandma lifts her into the swing. Push! shouts the child. Grandma’s hands grab the frame of the swing. Again! the child commands, everything is silent, the only sound is from the clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and then the swing flies. Further and further flies the child, and higher and higher climbs the swing. Legs dangle, toes reach down, then heels, then slipper soles. Grandma stands behind the child. The swing flies.
*
Fairies live in the forest. Water sprites live in the lake. A snake lives in the Garden of Eden. People speak the language of birds. The people building the Tower of Babel don’t understand each other. Põhjakonn, the Northern Frog, eats people. The king parades around, naked, and no one says a dicky-bird. The devil is scared of thunderstorms. On moonlit nights the forest fairies’ daughters climb into the treetop sauna and whisk themselves with leafy twigs.
How high up were they? the child asks. Were they right at the top?
So I believe, says Grandma. She searches for the correct place. The silver whisks were in the tree-tops, and the silver water buckets were ready on the bathing benches, she reads.
Were the treetops higher than the Tower of Babel? asks the child.
That I don’t know, says Grandma. But I think they were both fairly high.
The child nods, wretched. And God hovered over the fairies and made sure they didn’t fall. And when one of them was scared, God told her come here, listen to me, the child thunders, what is it you’re waiting for, fairy, sit on my knee. Come here, come here.
The child also knows the sea god, the fire god, the god of beauty, the god of wisdom. There are lots of gods. That’s good, the child thinks, lots is better than one, because it means one of them is always awake and keeping an eye on people. Just one god might get tired. Or ill. Or break a leg, or get a burst appendix. Old people are sickly, they get ill easily and stay in bed for ages. If God gets the flu, he will have to have mustard plasters on him, frets the child; in the high heavens it is definitely cold, it sleets, and snow whirls down your neck. And then the doctor comes and puts a cold pipe on your bare back! Do they even have doctors in heaven? And what if God dies? wails the child.
He won’t die, says Grandma. But I can’t say that I know how they work those things out either. God is in nature, too. He’s in the trees and the birds and the stones. Grandma pats her quilt. The child climbs on to her lap. Her dress is warm.
A crow caws outside the window. The child runs over. The bird is gnawing the berries left at the top of the rowan tree. Lying on the windowsill on her stomach, the child’s toes almost reach the floor.
Translated by Susan Wilson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kairi Look (b. 1983) is a writer with a background in medical and scientific publishing. She worked for many years in Amsterdam, a city she calls her second home. Her books for children have received several awards and been translated into a number of languages. The excerpt published here is from her first novel for adults, Tantsi tolm põrandast (Dance the Dust from the Floor, 2025).