Karolina Ramqvist - The Bear Woman: A Moving and Powerful Exploration of Motherhood and the Female Experience

Contents

Judging from your words, said Simontault, it would seem that men delight in hearing evil spoken about women, and I am sure that you reckon me among men of that kind. I therefore greatly wish to speak well of one of your sex, in order that I may not be held a slanderer by all the rest.

I give you my place, said Ennasuite, praying you withal to control your natural disposition, so that you may acquit yourself worthily in our honour.

Forthwith Simontault began

Tis no new thing, ladies, to hear of some virtuous act on your part which, methinks, should not be hidden but rather written in letters of gold, that it may serve women as an example, and give men cause for admiration at seeing in the weaker sex that from which weakness is prone to shrink. I am prompted, therefore, to relate something that I heard ...

Marguerite de Navarre, Tale LXVII, Heptamron, 1559

I ve realised that this story has neither a beginning nor an end. Ill write that it begins with death because its all Im sure of. Her father dies, and she is left alone. This is all I know.

I n those early days, I would imagine a drawing whenever I thought of her. Little did I know that a drawing of her on the island did in fact exist. The one in my minds eye was different: sloppily rendered in black ballpoint pen on a wrinkled piece of paper. It would visit me along with the thought of her the island a crooked little circle, and alongside it a curved line marking the border between the surrounding water and the mainland.

Presumably this had to do with the incredible nature of the whole story, or at least how I interpreted it the first time I heard it. A friend had recounted it for me, a brief summary. Maybe the two of us werent alone, but I cant remember. Its been a while now. When I look up from the computer and over at my children, fast asleep in another room while Im out here writing this, I can tell by their faces and bodies just how many years have passed since then. I notice it every day in the words they use, the games they play and how their fingers move across their screens; and how they no longer shout when they need something, but rather they come to me.

Anyway. My friend had found this story in a book shed had for ages, an anthology about female survivors throughout history. We were sitting in a caf we used to go to, and she took it out of her overstuffed handbag and showed me. I dont remember if it was light or dark outside, and I dont remember what I said or thought right then. My memory is unreliable, and I think this applies to others too we remember what we want to remember, as we want to remember it, and allow ourselves to forget the rest. We forget the people who arent important to us, we forget things weve done and said that other people will remember forever, and we forget what others have said and done to us.

I remember my friend talking about Marguerite de la Rocque, but I dont think she was calling her by name the name I would give her myself didnt come to me until later, when I was walking home through the snow. I remember looking down at the table between us, at the cups and water glasses and phones wed put there. Thinking about it now, its possible that one of us might have taken a paper and pen and sketched out the island and its geographical location on earth, or perhaps that drawing had never existed. I could have constructed my memory of it in retrospect. Maybe it was there on the table, maybe not, but for a long time that drawing was the first thing I saw when I thought of Marguerite, before what was in my minds eye became a kind of representation of reality as I was imagining reality had been before I started on this: the island and its surroundings, with its vast estuary which then, as now, was known for being the largest on earth. And beyond it the ocean, landmasses and frozen seas, all the other islands and islets freezing together during the winters, where there was no one else around for thousands upon thousands of miles. Endless white vistas as barren and empty as the rest of that part of the world, stretching from Mexico to Alaska, a vast continent spanning tens of thousands of miles from north to south and east to west populated by one single solitary human.

Or so it has been described.

L ater, I stood in the snow at the crossing on our street as the traffic thundered past, the wide twin pram like a nylon and black plastic ship in front of me. It was snowing, but the weather hadnt quite hit yet. It was barely below zero that day and yet I was freezing. It was as though the cold were coming from within, as though my very flesh were deep frozen. Recently Id noticed that I no longer had any defence against the cold and the dark that autumn had laid across our part of the north and which lingered from winter far into spring.

My son was a little over one year old, and his sister, lying beside him in the pushchair, was only a few months. My oldest daughter had just started school. I was thirty-five. In some ways, my having three children was cause for surprise. I was often asked how it felt and what it was like to have had two kids in such quick succession, and mostly Id say it was easy. I think Id say this because it was actually how I saw it; perhaps the love I felt for these children had made me unable to see my reality for what it was. But I know I harboured a wish for it to be easy; a notion that it had to be, that I wasnt allowed to cast a shadow on what should be light: creating new life, another persons existence.

The cold and dark were entrenched inside me, and they intensified each other. It felt cold in the flat as well, because the heating system in our building couldnt really keep up when the temperature dropped. The constant freezing paired with the lack of daylight fatigued me. Every day I was utterly exhausted, even though Id hardly exerted myself. I wore thick sheepskin slippers around the apartment and wherever I sat down to read or write or breastfeed my youngest daughter there were blankets to wrap myself in; when I went out I wore woollen long johns under my regular clothes and a horrible ankle-length down coat Id bought cheap online. Still I couldnt keep warm.

I found out it had to do with my endocrine system, a gland that influenced my metabolism and a bunch of other processes and which could cause any symptom at all, really, if it was off-kilter. The doctors at the hospital said it was harmless and very common among working women my age with young children. It was common for it to get worse after multiple pregnancies, difficult or back-to-back births; it was common for it to get worse if there were several children in the family; and the condition could be further exacerbated by trauma and stress. All you could do was take the prescribed pills and try to minimise strain, physical as well as mental.

I didnt know how that was supposed to happen.

The children were tucked into their padded pushchair muffs, silently gazing into the black afternoon sky. The sky was so deep and unreachable it made me think of space, which was up there somewhere as I was down here looking up at it while waiting for the light to turn green looking up so that I could see what they were seeing from the pushchair, and because I liked the idea of glimpsing the infinity that begins not far from here.

The crossing light turned green. All I had to do was cross the street, then wed almost be home, but I didnt have it in me. I couldnt take another step through the slush with that wide carriage. I thought of the entrance to the bicycle room around the corner from our front door, where the pushchair had to be stored due to fire safety regulations; it was an iron door almost entirely covered in graffiti, and when I caught sight of it, I could already feel its weight against me. I could see myself trying to open the door and then hold it open to get the pushchair into the corridor, which was so narrow that Id have to back out again if someone came walking from the other direction. I would unsnap the five-point harnesses and pick the children up so that I could guide the pushchair into the pushchair area, which had recently been built as there were so many small children in the building, so many couples in their thirties buying apartments, moving in and making babies as soon as they arrived. Wed done that too.