What the Wolves Knew
After my husband’s death, I sold the apartment and moved into my old family home, which I had inherited from my mother, who had inherited it from hers.
The house stood at the edge of the village, almost right by the forest. From the front windows you could see the road and three other houses and the church steeple beyond the hill. From the back windows there was nothing but trees—dark spruce and old birch, packed close together, beginning twenty meters from the rear wall. My mother had never liked those windows. She kept the curtains drawn on that side of the house even in summer, even in daylight, the heavy dark curtains that smelled of the cedar sachets she replaced every spring. As a child I thought this was simply her way—one of those inexplicable habits adults maintain without explanation. Later I understood it as something else: the specific aversion of someone who has made a private agreement with herself not to look at certain things too closely.
My mother was a practical woman in most respects. But the forest-side windows were not a practical matter.
I had not been back in eleven years. Not since her funeral, which had been in winter, the ground frozen, the air so cold that the priest’s breath made small clouds as he spoke. I had stood at the edge of the grave and thought: I will deal with the house in the spring. Then spring came and I had not dealt with it, because dealing with a house meant returning to it, and returning to it meant confronting the extent to which I had let it gather dust and silence while I was busy with my city life. Then years passed. I was busy with the apartment, the marriage, the routines that accumulate around a person until they become the person themselves. And then my husband died, and the routines lost their shape overnight. They fell apart the way routines do when the person they organized around is gone—not all at once but gradually, first the morning habits, then the evening ones, then the middle of the day, until I found myself standing in the empty apartment on a Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to be and nothing that needed to be done.
