To Mervas by Elisabeth Rynell

another person in a place so devoid of human life.
    She was often so afraid she wanted to cry. Sometimes her legs shook so much it was hard to accelerate. The car jerked forward as in fear through the endless woods. She was leaning forward, her hands anxiously clutching the wheel, not wanting to admit what she’d gotten herself into.
    She was afraid, and her insecurity only grew the farther into this landscape she went. Everything was alien and indecipherable; she was a complete stranger in the landscape that surrounded her for miles and miles on all sides, she knew nothing about the things she saw, knew nothing about the rules that must govern in places like this. Sometimes, when the road brought her to a high point and she could look out over the trees, she saw that the place she’d come to was endless. She was imprisoned by that endlessness, captive in a network of nameless gravel roads, and the farther she drove, the more lost she got.
    Once, she stopped and stepped out of the car to look at the scenery. A long, low mountain range stretched in every direction. The silence was immense. It was as if for the first time she understood the true meaning of silence, the complete absence of sound. The silence pressed against her ears the way compact darkness can press against your eyes. She stood listening to the pounding inside her head while her eyes were gliding over the vast landscape, and in awe she let her gaze move gently along the shapes of the giant mountains that continued for as far as she could see. There were lakes out there too, calm, silvery gray sparks in the silence. Everything around her stayed where it was; it was there, it simply existed. Through her fear, she realized that this silence was a powerful language, a mighty voice louder than anything else. She’d never felt as terrifyingly small as she now did. She felt she could be obliterated here, the vastness of the landscape could dissolve her with just a whiff of wind; she’d have to beg the small, dim-green pines for mercy. At the same time, she feltherself growing in the vastness, felt herself being pulled and stretched and filled by it. It was as if she could contain it, could contain everything around her.
    While she stood there on the slope and let the silence and the vistas fill her up, the wind casually moved closer from the mountains on the other side of the valley. It traveled down into the woods below and kept moving from one forest to the next, from tree to tree, up toward the place where she stood. A sound grew slowly through the silence, slowly sort of snuck up on it, as if tiptoeing. The sound was at first slight and scattered but then grew denser and gathered in a herd of whispers and sighs. Suddenly, it was as if she were standing in the middle of an enormous chorus. All the forests in the landscape took several deep breaths and then they sang. Upper and lower voices washed over her, high and low notes like big boulders rolled through the silence, but the gale itself, the wind, still hadn’t touched her, she could see it tearing through the crowns of the trees below her for a long time before it suddenly reached her, grabbing hold of her hair.
    She ran to the car and sat inside it, gasping for breath. She had absorbed the performance outside feeling a mixture of pleasure and terror, she had stood as if petrified listening and watching and now she wanted to scream out loud, now she felt that the immensity of everything threatened to suffocate her. It would make her explode if she wasn’t allowed to use her own voice to resist and scream that she was here too, she existed and wasn’t going to let herself be obliterated by something huge, she was here and had the right to be.
    But Marta didn’t scream. She sat for a while, letting her breathing slow down. Then she started the car and kept driving. She’d stopped looking at the map on the seat next to her; it wasn’t right. No map could captureor describe a