Ice Flower Herbarium

@ Excerpt from the Novel written by Džena Andersone, 2024

@ Translated by Žanete Vēvere Pasqualini, 2025

Ice Flower Herbarium

There was something about the contours of the hessian sack dumped at the side of the snow-covered road that spelled trouble. Vincent saw this immediately which was why he stood stock-still, frozen to the spot at this ungodly hour despite a wind which was so bitterly cold that it burnt his skin. The snow gave off a silence which rang in his ears and above his head the sky spread its blue and black arms with the promise of yet another January day relentless in its biting cold.

Vincent could simply have feigned not to have noticed the enormous bundle over the road. He could have returned to his warm house, still in darkness, and quietly got back into bed next to Eden. He could even have tried to go back to sleep for a couple of hours until such a time as the bedroom would flood up to the ceiling with cold, northern sunlight. Today was, after all, the last day of his annual leave. No one would think of calling him before lunchtime.

But if he were to take that course of action, he would then spend all day worrying that, despite the icy rawness of the day, Eden would suggest going out for some reason and then she would come across the mysterious bundle lying on the roadside.

Vincent glanced back at the house; drifts of snow rose up its walls as high as the window ledges. The panes of glass above them seemed to leer at him, offering him neither understanding nor solace.

The time for going back on himself had disappeared the moment Vincent had got groggily out of bed and gone over to the window in an attempt to erase the memory of the recurring dream he had just had. He was often visited in his sleep by his late father who would sit, perfectly immobile on his bed, just looking at him. The dream always caused Vincent to wake filled with a sense of anxiety, compressed somewhere around the area of his heart. It was not that Vincent hadn’t loved his father or had been frightened of him in some way. No, not at all. Quite the opposite in fact. His father had been a figure of authority, one he had never ceased to admire and look up to, the sort of man he strived to be like. All the same, his father appearing to him like that always left Vincent feeling agitated and restless. It was the way he just stared without ever saying a word. In the dream, Vincent would always ask him something, call out to him, beseech and implore him, sometimes even reaching out with his hand. But his dad would just sit there, staring at him with cold, motionless eyes like sort of inert statue.

Vincent had the feeling that his father was trying to tell him something but, being rather stubborn in nature, had thought better of it and instead simply sat there in silence. In the dream, Vincent experienced the same awkwardness and immature timorousness of the fifteen-year-old boy he had been when his mother told him about the car crash. Vincent’s relationship with his father froze at that precise moment in time, like a drop of molten metal falling into the snow. The bond between them had no time to flourish to its full potential, instead it was fixed like a collection of dried plant specimens, a herbarium preserved between sheets of paper and unable to change or develop further. Nothing could change that now; not the fact that Vincent had followed his father into the police force, not the twenty-five years which had elapsed since his passing, not his mother’s constant reminders that Vincent’s main purpose in life was to make his father proud, not the photograph from 1968 in a heavy silver frame in his mother’s sitting room of his father shaking the hand of President Nilsson. None of these things brought Vincent any closer to his father or replaced the sort of relationship most men have with their fathers as adults. As far as his family was concerned, Vincent was and always would be the same gauche teenager who didn’t know how to behave in the presence of his silent and now also dead father; his death not actually constituting the greatest fissure separating them.

With every reoccurrence, the dream became increasingly unbearable and consequentially Vincent would try to tear himself out of sleep as early as possible, get up and go over to the window.

Without turning on any of the lights so as not to wake Eden, Vincent would go to the kitchen, get himself a mug of water then open the curtains and stare out into the darkness, waiting for the memory of his dream to dissipate.   

That morning had been no different. Only today his eye had been caught by something unusual over the road. Maybe his dad was playing a trick on him – switching up the dream he was trying to chase away for an old hessian sack. 

Processing what he saw through his professional eyes, Vincent’s curiosity was sparked. Forgetting that it was actually his last day of leave, he pulled his uniform jacket over his pyjamas, slipped his feet into his boots without lacing them up and went outside.

Shoving his freezing hands into his pockets, Vincent picked his way across the road which lay buried helplessly beneath a layer of snow. It was as thick, white and solid as the semolina porridge made so ineptly by Eden and that, most days, fell in a solid block from the saucepan onto their breakfast plates. 

‘You could do with a knife to cut through this!’ The words just escaped Vincent’s lips one morning.

Eden feigned deafness and continued cooking as she saw it fit, totally disinterested in Vincent’s likes or dislikes as far as her culinary skills were concerned.

Vincent had seen correctly. There was indeed a largish hessian sack bulging out of the snow, carefully tied up with a windlass rope. He went closer, glancing back at his house as he did so, before squatting down and dragging the sack towards himself. It must have weighed about as much as he did – more, possibly. A longish length of rope hung down one side of the sack, ripped off at its end possibly as a result of the sack being dragged along the ground for some distance.

After some exertion, he managed to get the sack back onto the road. It must have been dragged behind a car before the rope snapped and it got left where he had found it. God alone knew where the damn car might have come from.

Innumerable tyres had left furrows through the snow but there was one unusually wide track which stood out from the rest. Vincent stood looking at it for a moment, stamping his feet in the cold before bending down and trying to untie the rope. Rather like tackling Eden’s porridge, he could do with a knife here, too. But Vincent was not the sort to keep a pocket knife tucked under his belt or down one of his boots as many did those days. And besides, Eden loathed all forms of violence and would not tolerate weapons of any kind, knives included, in the home, meaning that Vincent kept all his service weapons in a safe at the police station.  

‘I know that nowadays everyone in this small town of ours, children and cats included, walk around armed, but I would prefer to remain faithful to the old-world order and the times when a bullet-proof vest was not part of a school teacher’s attire,’ Eden had once said. Vincent had agreed with her. More to keep the peace than anything else.

The knotted rope refused to yield under Vincent’s frozen fingers. Every so often he put his hands back into his pockets in an attempt to warm them up a little. While his fingers fiddled with the knot, Vincent eyed the sack with a glassy stare. The hessian was not worn through; the snow had probably protected it somewhat. If it had been autumn with the roads full of puddles and deeply rutted there would not have been much left of the fabric after having been dragged along the ground.

Mmm, Vincent thought. The driver of the vehicle must have been in such a hurry that the sack coming away hadn’t even been noticed. He didn’t have the impression that it had been dumped there intentionally.

Vincent was losing patience. With the icy cold biting cruelly at his hands, he decided to give up on trying to untie the knots binding the sack and instead grabbed the hook on the windlass rope and with one quick slice, ripped the hessian fabric open. The sack parted and a human hand, fingers open, unfolded from within. Vincent leapt to his feet, backing away.

But he quickly returned and bent back down over it, needing to make sure that his eyes had not deceived him. No, there was no mistake. The sack plainly contained a body which, to all intents and purposes, was clearly no longer living.

How he wished that he could call the police, emergency services, a rescue team of some sort. But no, in this small town which had shrunk to no more than a village-sized hole, he was the one and only police officer.

Vincent just stood and stared at the hessian sack lying there in the snow as if denying it had anything to do with him and the line of work he had inherited from his father. He started to feel irritated as it dawned on him that it was because of that damned dream that he now found himself standing there in the snow today, his last day of leave, in the blue-black light of early morning in the middle of a snow-bound road, feeling as bewildered as a young cadet entrusted with guarding a crime scene all on his own.

Nothing could stop the day from dawning. Vincent felt it rolling across the ice-covered forest, the eastern edge of which was already tinted violet. There was no time to waste. Vincent felt in his pocket for his phone and called the man he trusted with work-related matters. He had no other option.  

‘Hello?’ came a sleepy voice. ‘Who is this?’

‘Doug! I need your help. Sorry to call so early. I’ve got a body, right in front of my house. Can you come over?’ Vincent said all in one breath.

‘Hang on there, wait …’ The man called Doug clearly didn’t want to wake up.

‘Get over here quick! It can’t wait! I don’t want Eden to see it! There …’ Vincent could hear his own voice sounding as childlike as it had in his dream. As he might sound to Eden’s ears. Or his mother’s. It was odd and unpleasant at the same time. Eden was five years older than him but it had never before crossed his mind to compare her to his mother. But for some reason he was now seeing the similarities between the two. Something in his belly clenched and he felt a strange, nauseous feeling rising.

‘Alright, that’s enough!’ Doug finally grunted. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

Vincent shoved the phone back into his pocket, his eyes flicking nervously between the sack on the ground and the windows of his house at which the moon, like a metallic bow, was now maliciously shooting with shining quicksilver. He hopped from foot to foot, hoping that Doug’s bearded frown would appear as soon as possible. Doug had been his father’s best friend since childhood. They had grown up together, gone to school together, joined the police together and worked alongside each other for years. Vincent had taken over as district chief when Doug had retired.

Standing in the middle of the road, Vincent no longer felt the cold but instead was overwhelmed with regret at everything that had happened, might happen and was yet to happen. He wished he hadn’t looked out of the window that morning. Better still, that the morning had never come into existence, nor that winter, that road. He wished that he had never returned to this village after graduating from the police academy, that he had never met Eden, that he didn’t live this life day in day out. This life which seemed so alien, so incomprehensible to him but yet was his. For a moment, Vincent even wondered what it would be like if he had never been born. Or if he had been born at another time, on the other side of the world, to different parents. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t see Doug approaching and was only roused from his reveries when his frost-covered face, framed by his black trapper’s hat, was right under his nose. 

Interrupted….

Jens lifted the heavy watering can and began his round of all the plants growing on the school premises. They seemed to smile up at him with understanding and intent as he trickled water onto each of them. Jens smiled back at them as if sharing some naughty secret they should each keep forever.

Watering the plants was one of his daily duties, stated in his job description as Head of Maintenance. Jens liked this title and was proud of it despite the fact that it extended to include just about everything; janitor, cleaner, guard, heater-maintenance man and just about anything else that might arise in the running of a building as old as Ebbfleet Middle School.

Jens always went in to work at five in the morning before anyone else arrived and he could go about his tasks undisturbed. He would do a round of the basement, ensuring that all was well with the water pipes and electrics, checking that none were leaking or frozen, broken or in any way damaged. Then he would head up to the first floor, opening all the doors, checking for the umpteenth time all the windows, feeling the radiators and the one surviving stove, opening desk drawers, testing the dried-out blackboard sponges, picking up bits of chalk and dipping a finger into the classroom pot plants to make sure that the librarian, whose name he could never remember, had not taken it upon herself to water the various specimens of flora and thereby encroaching on one of his duties Satisfied that all was well, just as it had been the day before and the day before that, and a couple of months before that, he would then go down to the ground floor.

Here he did his round of the canteen, cloak room, toilets and assembly hall before finally going into the staffroom at the far end of the building, next to the library and the Head of Teaching’s office, which always seemed to smell of her.

Of course, Jens had never intentionally sniffed Miss O’Leary but she had a very similar smell about her as his Aunt Erika. It was a smell he didn’t like and he found it annoying that Miss O’Leary smelled that way, as if she did it on purpose. Aunt Erika used lavender soap and lavender-scented sticks were dotted all over her house. If that weren’t enough, her wardrobes were also full of purplish lavender bags. Only the room Jens shared with Mother was free of the stuff, mainly because every time Aunt Erika tried to smuggle anything lavender-smelling in there, Jens would make a terrible fuss, claiming that just the sight of lavender gave him a headache and made him feel sick. It invariably ended with Aunt Erika telling him he was an absolute dimwit who could wallow in his own stink and dust for all she cared. 

Jens stopped by the office door and studied the plate reading ‘Head of Teaching’. It struck him as odd that he was not the only Head around here but also this woman who gave off the horrid lavender smell. Jens shrugged.

Besides, he didn’t like people who were filled with false pretences and Miss O’Leary was one such person. At school she swanned about as Head of Teaching in her long, black dress, her hair in a tight bun on the top of her head. But after school hours, as evening fell and she would go off to meet that dreadful scoundrel of a driver, Billy, she would take the pins from her carefully arranged hairstyle and shake it out in a very vulgar manner. Her hair, Jens saw, was long and very dark red in colour, rather like that of a witch. It was so unnatural-looking as to be rather creepy and Jens felt ill just thinking about it. 

Jens had witnessed all this by chance when he had happened to pass in front of that wicked woman’s house. Aunt Erika had sent him to get some painkillers for her from the pharmacy over the road from the hospital. At first Jens was quite bewildered at the sight of the Head of Teaching lounging seductively in the front yard of that unfamiliar house until it dawned on him that it must be where she lived.

This version of Miss O’Leary was quite different from the one he saw at school. She laughed loudly in a way he found most unseemly for a lady  and flung her arms round Billy’s neck as soon as he appeared. Jens found the whole scene utterly repellent; the most repelling thing of all being the fact that Billy had been at school with Jens. He was a fair bit older than him, probably about six years or so. He was the one that used to bully Jens, take his school bag off him and kick it about like a football. He was the one who had once lifted Jens off his feet by the scruff of the neck, holding him up so high and for so long that Jens thought he was going to choke and ended up wetting himself. And he was the one who still taunted him in his sleep, coming to him in his dreams and sniggering so close to his face that he could feel his slimy spit squirting in his eyes.

Of course, that was all quite a long time ago now but the feeling of revulsion remained strong. Every time Jens clapped eyes on Billy, he could feel his stomach churn and twist into a tight knot. It took all his strength not to wet himself as he had back then, fifteen years ago.

Jens had got a good look at the Head of Teaching. Yes, he certainly had. When he had purchased the painkillers and emerged from the chemist’s, they were just getting into a car. Billy was on the street side of the car, just finishing off a cigarette, and Miss O’Leary was click-clacking across the pavement in stiletto heels like long, thin pencils.

The door to the chemist’s clicked shut and she turned to look as Jens walked towards her along the pavement. She must have seen him but instead chose to pretend not to, or not to know him, and didn’t say hello. She just walked straight past him without a word and got into the car next to that blockhead, Billy.

Jens didn’t have a car so had to walk everywhere or go by bike when the weather was fine. He didn’t have a car because he couldn’t get a driving license. It was all that doctor’s fault, that bloody Messerchmidt, who had refused to give him a medical certificate saying that he was fit for one.

He hated Messershmidt for that. He hated him as much as he hated Billy. Well, perhaps a little less than he hated him, but he hated him nonetheless. When Jens figured out a way to pay that snake in the grass back, that Messerchmidt would have it coming. It was not something Jens could or would drop, it was impossible to forget about it.

He still hadn’t worked out how he was going to get his own back on the doctor and now he also had to contend with the thought of what he was going to do about that haughty witch who shook out her red mane and didn’t say hello to him when he walked past.

Jens had to think about all these things and it took time. But time was something he had plenty of.

Time was a tricky thing, Jens thought to himself. You couldn’t trust clocks, or time as such, because it wasn’t entirely clear how time happened. How could it be that time sometimes passed so quickly and at others it dragged painfully slowly, like a snail crawling across the top of a toadstool?

Aunt Erika took care of the clocks, ensuring that each one always told the correct time, and Jens would follow them meticulously. Jens was good at that. He did everything on time, at exactly the right time as read on the face of a clock. At such and such a time, at so many minutes past such and such an hour. Seconds were not so important. As far as Jens were concerned, seconds were something of a useless invention. The trickiest thing of all was that time and these clocks were absolutely everywhere. They ticked away, counting the minutes, reproaching him and making him do things he didn’t want to do.

At times, Jens wanted nothing more than just to lie on his back on his bed and do nothing. Not always be on time. The only place where there were no clocks or ticking time was in Mother’s room. Mother always lay there immobile, never made any noise or hurried. Mother was calm and smiling. Jens lay next to her staring up at the ceiling and there was no time, no nothing. It was all so serene, so lovely when there was nothing, Jens thought.

But Jens was never able to lie undisturbed on the bed doing nothing as Aunt Erika was always coming in wanting him to do something. He had to go to work, go to the shops, go to the chemist’s, buy her some painkillers or milk, carry, lift, wash, eat, clean, repair. On and on and on it went. And so Jens had to get up and go and do all the things that were demanded of him.

Although he did like going to work at the school. He was needed there, he felt useful. Everyone was nice to him and they paid him, too. He was paid – that was important. Aunt Erika said so, too. Jens gave Aunt Erika half his wages, the other half he kept for himself. They had agreed on that. ‘It’s almost fair and square that way,’ his aunt had said, and she was right. Jens liked things to be fair and square. He used what was left of his wages to buy albums for dried flowers, special glue that didn’t turn the pages yellow, cardboard, envelopes, folders and glass plates. His dried flower album, or herbarium, was extremely important to him. The second most important thing in his life after lying next to Mother. This he knew without a doubt.

Any money left over, he saved. His dream was to buy a special device for drying mushrooms. Mushroom were extremely tricky, almost as hard as algae and other water plants to dry. In order to do it properly, you needed a special appliance which cost a fortune. Aunt Erika had told him so. Jens didn’t have a fortune so he kept saving, putting money aside each week. One day he would have enough put by to purchase the drier and then he would be able to create his own fungarium – his own private collection of dried fungal species. Just thinking about it made Jen feel emboldened and strong, his heart beating faster.

For the time being, Jens was growing mushrooms in sacks. He took enormous pleasure in the living,  fragrant mushrooms, observing as they poked their way out between the warp and weft of the fabric, scattering their spores around themselves and generating more and more new mushrooms. Mushrooms had the very best smell in the world, Jens was sure of that. They were so pleasantly cool, moist, silent, still and fragrant; they were the best thing Jens had ever seen. So calm and good-natured. Just like Mother.

Pleasant, right smells were of great importance, Jens knew that. It was for this reason that he put his heart and soul into fighting unpleasant odours. He did his utmost to combat nasty smells at school, too, despite the fact that the place was brimming with children and teachers, each with their own scent. Jens would set about his cleaning with vigour, trying to erase every last vestige of foreign odours.

When Miss O’Leary was finally gone, Jens felt greatly relieved and hopeful that her smell would depart with her. At the beginning, he aired her office frequently and at length, leaving the windows open for hours on end despite the cold. This caused the librarian to protest loudly, although she always seemed to be so bunged up with rhino sinusitis that she probably couldn’t smell anything at all. Jens wasn’t sure what rhino sinusitis was exactly; he had just read it on the little bottle that the elderly librarian was forever squirting up her nose. 

Although Jens was uncertain whether the librarian knew for sure that it was him who opened all the windows, making the temperature in the school building drop considerably, he could nonetheless feel the waves of recrimination rolling off her as she sat in the reading room in her snow boots and outdoor coat, covered in a carpet-like blanket. Jens would do his best to ignore but still the old bat would fix him with an icy stare.

Jens scrubbed the entire ground floor with hydrochloric acid, waxed the floor, splashed some of the tea tree oil he had nicked from Aunt Erika into the corners and even used up all the citrus-scented air fresheners he found in the school toilets. And yet that odour which induced in him a sense of hopelessness did not disappear. Then the nice smells he had introduced vanished bit by bit; first the smell of hydrochloric acid and the wax cleaner, then the air-freshener and finally also the ethereal smell of essential oil. Only the lavender smell lingered on, insistent and uncontrollable like a ghost, resistant to the vanquishing effects of holy water, burning incense and other rituals, returning time and time again  to the debris of his burnt down manor house. Every time Jens smelled it, it made his heart beat off kilter.

Jens’ enthusiastic airing routines were brought to a halt when, opening one of the windows rather forcefully in the Head of Teaching’s office, he accidently broke one of the panes of glass. Jens secured a double piece of cardboard over the gaping hole, locked the door to the office and carefully taped over the gap beneath the door.

Despite all his best efforts, and even when he was up on the first floor, Jens could still smell the hateful odour of lavender. It exerted pressure as it crept inside his nostrils, wormed its way into his brain, getting stronger with every day that Jens was exposed to it, dripping down into his body like a liquid into a barrel. It was a horrid feeling, one that caused him as much physical discomfort as wearing shoes two sizes too small.

Thoughts of the indestructible smell began circling in his mind like a record constantly spinning on a turnstile. Jens had no idea how to get the hateful brain worm out of his head. It distracted him from his work and, setting off on his morning rounds, he felt incredibly isolated and alone as no one knew or even cared about what he was going through. Jens had no one to confide in, no one to share his secret fears with.

Aunt Erika was no good, being too loud and talkative. She could not be trusted. And besides, Aunt Erika was in the habit of brushing off anything Jens said, dismissing it all as nothing but nonsense, absolute balderdash, asking why he had nothing better to fill his brain with.

It was better with Mother. When Jens whispered his secret fears and worries in her ear, she would simply lie there immobile, smiling and silent. As a general rule, Jens was  quite unbothered by the fact that Mother remained silent but at other times he was filled with a longing, an absolute yearning for her to say something to him in reply, or at least nod in acknowledgement and glance at him out of the corner of her eye. But she never did and then Jens would choke on a stifled cry, unable to shed any tears and instead produce a strange lowing noise. He would stick his face deep into his pillow so Aunt Erika wouldn’t hear him and make this deep moaning noise until either he grew too tired to continue or he fell asleep.

Jens had no recollection of when it was exactly that he somehow detached from everybody else in the world, not counting Aunt Erika and Mother, of course. It might have gone back to the day when, at the age of seven, he had come back from Sunday School to find himself locked out as he had lost his latch key. He had crossed the road to their neighbour’s house and gone into their kitchen, only to find the neighbour’s husband sitting at the table with a gun in his mouth. Not noticing the figure in the doorway but hearing a noise outside the window, the man had gone ahead and pulled the trigger. Jens could never recall what made him jump the most – the noise of the gun going off or the splatter of warm blood across his face and shirt.

Or it might have been after that day about eighteen months later when Aunt Erika got held up at work and wasn’t there for him at home time, and his teacher led him home by the hand. Only as they were crossing the road at the junction, a bus thundered out of nowhere and hit his teacher; Jens luckily being plucked out of harm’s way in the nick of time by a passerby.

Or it might have happened much earlier. It might have accrued slowly; minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day as he lived in that house belonging to Aunt Erika, sharing a room with Mother so small that his sofa bed was pushed right up against her bed. For his whole life, so twenty-seven years in all, he had slept in the same room as Mother; back-to-back with his paralysed, slowly aging parent. Every night for as long as he could remember her had listened to her heavy breathing, inhaling the smells her body gave off as they mingled with kitchen odours and that distinctive, unchanging smell of lavender which permeated every corner of his aunt’s house, laying like a heavy pall of leather over his bed, preventing him from breathing either in or out.

Somewhere along the line, at an unspecified point in time, Jens had got stuck; not knowing if things were really bad or just not that great. As a child he had never been in touch with his own feelings or what he thought about things, mainly because he had got used to only thinking and feeling what Aunt Erika told him he could. As he got older, Jens came to realise that his feelings could be divided into two different sorts. There were the good feelings, like the one he felt when he was around his mushrooms, in the bedroom with Mother or some other place where no one else could see him. And then there were the not good feelings; the ones he felt when he was bothered by something, usually other people wanting Jens to do something. He had no other way of feeling.

The world outside Mother’s bed where she lay slumbering was threatening. There was too much space, too many people, too much noise. It all built up, layer upon dense layer, none of it drying out but instead creating a thick covering like sticky oil paint inside Jens’ head. He would get stuck in it. He could feel something growing inside him, something rather like Kombucha fungus which spread throughout his body. It had now reached his brain where it was threatening to make his skull explode. 

Standing there with the watering can in his hand, Jens closed his eyes and saw inside his head a light rather like that given off by an oil lamp. The light had dimmed and, as he looked at it more closely, he saw that the lamp was actually upside down and the oil had run out of it. The tiny flame that should have lasted through winter was about to go out.

Jens opened his eyes. The hands on the large, round clockface had already ticked their way round to seven o’clock. He needed to hurry up, get all the plants watered before the building was flooded with people. Jens abhorred the children. The smaller ones, up to third grade, were just about manageable, but all of the older ones were pure evil. Extreme caution had to be exercised at all times around the little monsters, nothing good could ever be expected of them.   

Jens knew the school and the order within it as well as the back of his own hand. He had been a schoolboy there himself, after all, and when he had finished as a student, he had started work there. First as janitor and then, after ten years on the job, he had been promoted to Head of Maintenance. All thanks to Aunt Erika, of course. A fact that he was reminded of constantly as she frequently reiterated how she had gone to great lengths to get her dimwit nephew some sort of gainful employment.

Putting his watering can down, Jens headed downstairs. Silence hung in the air, soon to be broken. He leaned his forehead against the window pane and looked out at the swing in the frozen yard. Soon it would be springtime. A real spring when he would come into work earlier in the morning and have a really good swing on it himself. Yes, that’s what he would do. For now it was still too cold. Jens stood a little longer, just looking out of the window, before quickly backing away. Here they all came. A great horde of schoolchildren. Jens turned on his heel and disappeared down into the basement where the Head of Maintenance office was, closing the heavy metal gate behind him just moments before the lovely silence was shattered. 

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