voices that had disappeared, and she was the one who had to interpret the silence they emitted.
'Silence has the loveliest voice,' he had said once. She had never forgotten those words.
'Do they have names, these dogcats of yours, or catdogs?'
'The only name I'm satisfied with is yours.'
They penetrated deeper into the forest, paths crisscrossed, birds took off and fluttered away. Suddenly – it was not his intention – they found themselves in the hollow where he had carved Heidi's face. The sorrow he still felt weighed heavily down on him. Every year he carved her face and his sorrow anew. Her face became more and more frail, more elusive. The sorrow delved deeper and deeper into the trunk as he dug his chisel into himself as much as into the tree.
Louise caressed her mother's face with the tips of her fingers. Heidi, Artur's wife and Louise's mother. She continued stroking the damp tree. A strip of resin had stiffened over her eyebrows, as if Heidi had a scar on her face.
He knew that Louise wanted him to speak. So much had remained unsaid about Heidi. They had pussyfooted around each other all these years, and he had never been able to bring himself to tell her what he knew, and at least some of what he didn't know, but suspected.
It was forty-seven years since Heidi had died. Louise was six at the time, and Artur had been up in the forest logging, at the foot of the mountains. Nobody could know what Heidi had been thinking, but she was certainly unaware she was about to die when she had asked her neighbour, Rut, if the girl could spend the night at her place while she went out to do what she loved doing more than anything else: skating. The fact that it was minus nineteen degrees did not worry her: she set off with her kick-sledge without telling Rut that she was going to the tarn known as Undertjärn.
What happened next could only be surmised. Having arrived at the tarn with her sledge, she strapped on her skates and ventured out onto the black ice. It was almost full moon, otherwise it would have been too dark for skating. Somewhere out there on the darkness she had fallen and broken her leg. When they found her two days later, she was curled up in the foetal position. The sharp blades of her skates looked like strange talons on her feet, and they had considerable difficulty in working her cheek free from the ice.
There had been many unanswered questions. Had she cried for help? What had she shouted? To whom? Had she appealed to some god or other when it became clear that she was going to freeze to death?
Nobody could be blamed, apart from herself who had not said that she was going to Undertjärn. The locals had searched the Vändsjön lake, but it was not until they had contacted Artur and he had come home that he suggested she might have gone to the tarn where she used to go swimming in the summer.
Artur did everything he could to protect Louise from the horror of it all when she was a child. Everybody in the village had done their bit to help, but nobody could keep the sorrow at bay. It was like wisps of smoke, or little mice seeking refuge in the autumn: it penetrated everywhere, no matter how well protected a space might be.
Sorrow was like mice, it always found a way in.
For a year she had slept in his bed every night – that was the only way she could cope with the dark. They had looked at photographs of Heidi, laid a place for her at table, and sworn that they would always be a threesome, even if only two of them turned up for meals. Artur had tried to learn how to cook like Heidi: he had never managed it, but young though she was, Louise thought she had understood what Artur was trying to do for her.
They grew up together over subsequent years. He continued his work as a lumberjack, devoting the little time he had over to his sculptures. There were those who thought he was mad, and unsuitable for taking care of the girl. But as he was polite and never got into fights or swore, he was allowed to keep her.
But now Heidi, the German, was by their side once more. And Henrik had passed away, the grandchild Heidi had