Eulalia Starwind

Eulalia Starwind

  Copyright: Niklas Aurgrunn 2012

  ISBN 978-1-4658-1419-7

  Eulalia Starwind

  - a fairytale for all

  Niklas Aurgrunn

  “If somebody is fond of a flower, which is the only one in its kind in millions and millions of planets, he only has to look into space in order to feel happy. He’ll say to himself: `My flower is out there somewhere...´” (The Little Prince)

  “That’s how you ought to start a new life, with a light burning at the top of the mast, the coastline disappearing in the darkness behind, all the world asleep. Travelling at night is better than anything else on Earth.” (Moominpappa)

  That summer when I knew Eulalia I probably wasn’t much older than seven or maybe eight years old, but no younger either – I’m pretty sure of that, although it’s a long time ago. I know it because it was one of my very first summer vacations and as always I had gone away with my mothers mother to that little windy island with rocky beaches and airy woods, hidden far off at sea.

  She had lived there when she herself was little, and now we stayed at the same house – a tired but nice old construction of limestone that lay all by itself below a slope full of bluebells and tall yellow grass and flat rocks covered with red moss. All around the house grew a hedge of lilacs that unfortunately always were dried up and withered by the wind and the sun before we even got there.

  A decayed flagpole was swaying with a beautiful scary cracking sound just outside the entrance through the hedge, and on the other side of a low wall of stones some soft and round lambs would always be crying for their moms who had wandered off in search of fresher grass elsewhere.

  At some distance from the house there was a cellar of mud and stone with grass and thistles on the roof and big black spiders between the rocks, and right next to it an old barn painted red. In the barn there was a whole lot of strange old stuff from forgotten ages, but no animals. In the stables where horses and cows once had stood, before Granny was even born, were dusty wooden boxes full of long forgotten things – and maybe a moped, or the kind of old tools that nobody nowadays knows how to use. Up on the loft some farmer had got permission to put his hay although the barn wasn’t his, and in return you could use it for laying down when you wanted to be alone, or you could dig tunnels through it – long and winding corridors into the mountain of dry grass until it got difficult to breathe or until you fell out on the other side.

  I liked the smell of hay a lot and often climbed up to the loft.

  There was something about that island: I never felt altogether lonely when I walked across the endless yellow moors or through the thin pine forest – even though I never met a soul. Behind each and every juniper bush there were sheep munching from the thin grass and here and there along the paths lay ruins of old houses – the remains of farms where people had lived and worked long ago - and somehow I could still feel them. And the sun would be shining most of the time and I could always talk or hum to myself.

  I had plenty of favourite places. They were places where I could stand and look around without having anybody looking back, or where I could sit down on a rock and know that I was exactly who I wanted to be. It felt like that, though I didn’t necessarily understand what it meant. I could be who I was born to be or wanted to be and didn’t have to explain it even to myself.

  My grandmother had shown me one of those places when I was very small.

  We had walked through the gate towards the meadow, and continued along a narrow trail into the woods. After a while we reached a clearing were the path forked and then we went to the right. A little later we passed a couple of those ruins I mentioned earlier, and even a house that still remained standing – but closed and desolate of course because there was nobody living in those woods anymore.

  Finally we had to climb a stone wall and fight our way through some dense shrubs of juniper to reach a long valley I had never thought much of before. Now the path was no longer a path, and the sheep that spotted us stared as if they thought us totally lost.

  Then Granny started climbing the hill on the other side, and she folded some bushes out of the way and lifted some twigs and said:

  “It should be around here somewhere - oh yes, here it is!”

  I followed her and went to stand next to her, watching. It looked like a ship of stones!

  “It’s a skeppssättning”, she said, “an old viking grave. Some thousand years ago a viking chief was buried here with ship and all.”

  I looked at the lines of stones that stretched along the ridge in two rows that distanced themselves from one another at the middle to join again at the ends. Where we stood at the stem or at the stern the stone was a little bigger, just like it was on the other side. The grass grew tall and there was a wild rose bush and towards a stump almost at the centre of the ship the ants had raised a little hill – but it still wasn’t hard to see the typical form.

  “But”, I said, “how? There’s no water here.”

  “In those days there actually was”, Granny claimed, “the sea covered most of the island and this ridge was the very first part of it that became visible.”

  I tried to imagine it but it wasn’t easy. Now the woods stretched for kilometres in all directions and you couldn’t even hear the waves. I looked at her instead, standing there with her white hair and her soft cheeks and those veiny hands that hang down at her sides or wrestled thoughtfully around each other. I said:

  “You mean to say that islands grow just like people?”

  “Yep, although they need a lot more time of course. Oh yes, islands are born and grow and get big and then they get old and wrinkled and wither and finally they die and fall back into the sea once more. That’s the way it goes with almost everything. Well, everything actually.”

  However, most of the time I was alone in the woods. I could go for a walk in the morning, trying to find some path I’d never followed before, and then I stuck to it – forcing myself between bushes or bowing beneath low-hanging branches of pine until I didn’t know where I’d gotten to. Then I would sit down on a boulder or some old pile of rotting wood, watching the lambs or an eagle swinging slowly across the sky almost without moving its wings. Maybe I had brought some paper and a pen in order to draw a tree or some forgotten barn showing at the other side of a pasture full of swaying blood-red poppies. Or else I just sat there.

  Knowing it was an island, I never really had to be afraid of getting lost.

  It was a day just like that when I first met Eulalia.

  It was on the old highroad with no traffic that winded through the woods. Green Street - as we called it - had been forgotten for so long that trees and bushes grew in the middle of it, and at a few places farmers had put their fences across it without meeting protests.

  I’d had lunch with Granny on the stone terrace outside of the kitchen entrance where swallows whistled into and out of their nests under the tiles and the sun strained with a warmth just right through the crown of the old plum tree. A tractor had puffed by up on the road and two sparrows had been fighting and throwing water at each other in the tub by the pump and we had eaten fried flounder, talking about life on the island when she was little. She had said:

  “You know, in those days everybody went along Green Street when they were headed out towards the northern strait. There were no cars and the horses wouldn’t hear about any detours so off they went straight into the woods. And there were people living there too, in all of those ruins you can see now...although they weren’t ruins then of course.”

  I said:

  “How come they disappeared?”

  “Who can tell... I suppose they got old and disappeared just like everybody does in the end. And maybe the children didn’t feel like sta
ying.”

  At that time, when I was little and went to the island with my grandmother, I still thought it very unpleasant that people just disappeared when they got old, and that you couldn’t do anything about it – so I kept silent.

  After finishing my lunch I dug out the football from under the cherry tree and took off to walk it in the meadow. I kicked it over the gate and climbed after, and spent some time dribbling around the junipers. Then I kicked it back over the gate, and continued out towards the Clearing.

  The Clearing is that place with the closed and deserted house I told about earlier. It stood all by itself under an ancient apple tree that had grown in beneath the tiles, and it was pretty gruesome. If you bent open the front door and went inside you had to stay for a while in the hallway while your eyes tried to get along with the darkness. If you then wanted to continue you had to walk carefully because of the broken glass, and also because of squeaking floorboards that might wake up the house. You would feel it strongly: the house was not to be disturbed.

  There was a big room to the left with an open stove and a small kitchen with unreadable old newspapers on the floor and mice or birds moving around in the attic. To the right there was another big room with