Excerpt from Inner China

by Eva Sjödin
Translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida

Here it smells stiff, and of mold, stiff

But if you open the books a fire shoots out, and strange sentences like: "In the törnebete1 of the desert where the ground is covered with salt and soda the camels find new strength."

"far away in a corner of the world between two deserts, of which Gobi in the north is one fo the earth's largest, while few, on the other hand, have heard of Ordos in the south," I read in the book with the dingy cover deep among the shelves at Noea.2

I put the book under my shirt right away, press it against my stomach.

*

Everything fits, everything is about us, Edith and me, but in the book we have become two orphaned boys in inner china:

"They were named Tehseng and Laiseng, which means Receive Life and Come to Life."

At home we play Tehseng and Laiseng.
I put Tehseng in a box with some newspaper on the bottom and pull her on a cart to the orphanage.

Tehseng wails.
— Quiet, I say. Remember that you have been saved! That you were thrown to the wolves outside the city walls but that I saved you. You are a little troll, a changeling. You should be happy.

*

I pull Tehseng to the orphanage.

She gets strong medicine because her mother was an opium-smoker, and she is in a deep sleep for three days.

When I wake her up she does not want to have anything to do with me.

*

The rocks, the fir trees, the black dirt see us play Tehseng and Laiseng.

Laiseng pulls Tehseng on the cart to the orphanage.
Laiseng tips Tehseng out of the cart into the frozen blueberry bushes.
Tehseng roars.
Tehseng gets three dog biscuits and the blanket to sleep on.

The rocks, the fir trees, the black dirt listen, close.

*

Laiseng carries a dark wet bundle: Tehseng. Carries it into the house.
Pulls off all the wet rags, wraps the blanket around.
Laiseng kisses Tehseng.
Stains appear.

Laiseng rocks Tehseng on the couch, between the cushions there are cookie crumbs, kernels of corn, comatose cockroaches.

If you try to wake them they become even harder even deader.

*

— What are you doing, Mother asks.
— Playing.

They rush out to the Yellow River. To the dog blanket's stench of dog hair, love.

*

— Give me love, damn it. Love

At night the others come into our yard. The woman with white-blond hair and a bathing suit. A deer. Two dirty children. They know about our orphanage: that it is open to all. The woman with white-blond hair sits leaning against the alder tree most of the time and reads a book. Marilyn is her name. The deer and the children dare to get close to her. The deer places its slender head in her lap, breathes.

Notes:

1 Törnebete: Grazing ground for animals vegetated by thorny bushes.

2 Noea: Within the Swedish library classification system, the subject matter cataloguing code for texts dealing with the geography of China.

© Litmus Press. All rights reserved.