The Forgotten Sister; a Tribute to the Late Stieg Larsson

The Forgotten Sister

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The Stieg Larsson trilogy that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has taken the popular fiction world by storm. Originally written in Swedish, the English translations are quirky and stylistically intriguing. The stories and characters are engaging and compelling so much so that three Swedish and one American movie have been made about these stories. I'm sure that we will see two more that will complete the trilogy before too long. The author, Stieg Larsson, who created these characters, died at a very young age. Perhaps there are outlines or unfinished sequels that will emerge in time? There are rumors to that effect. Time will tell.

In any case there are some loose ends that just beg to be tidied up. One such loose end is The Forgotten Sister, twin sister in fact of Lizbeth Salander. Her name is Camilla and she is mentioned several times in the trilogy. Since reading these books I have been haunted by the untold story of Camilla. She is described in passing but her character is not fully developed. The story that follows is my tribute to the genius of Steig Larsson and a little treat for his fans who, like me, hunger for more tales from his little world. I have placed it in my Hub Page devoted to my hypnotherapy practice because this tribute also serves to illustrate some of the guiding principles of hypnotherapy in story form. It is also the story of Camilla’s life as I imagine Stieg would tell it in a venue familiar to me. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1
Leaving Home
May 1st, Beltain

I haven’t seen my twin sister, Lizbeth, very much since the day she poured gasoline on our father and set him alight. He had just beaten our mother senseless and left her for dead and was getting ready to leave in his car when she doused him through his open car window and struck the near fatal match. The resulting fire didn’t kill him but he suffered the unique agony of the badly burned and disfigured. Our mother never fully recovered from her brain injuries after that or at least I don’t think she did. I don’t know because I haven’t seen her much either since that day.

I ran away from the horrors of my early years to keep my sanity. I ran away from everything and everyone I knew as a child. Above all I just wanted to have a normal, quiet life. I try not to think about it too much at least during the day but at night I have to sleep and I dream about my mother, my father and my twin sister Lizbeth. I dream about her most of all. I wish I didn’t. She scares me. I wake up shaking and covered in sweat. I dreamed of them again last night. Now I have to think about it for as long as it takes to shove it back into the dark corners of my memory.

That fateful, bitter day started out as any other. Our father had come home tipsy the previous evening. He sat at the kitchen table drinking vodka, Russian vodka, as was his custom whenever he was home which wasn’t often. He was Russian you see. “Don’t give me any of that Swedish crap,” he’d say. Mother kept several bottles handy just in case he’d show up. He was still sleeping when Lizbeth and I got up and ate our breakfast. Mother made up our lunch bags and got herself ready for work at the grocery. Lizbeth and I loved to visit her at work on our way home from school. She was always so friendly and cheerful to the customers and her fingers just flew over the keys on her cash machine. She didn’t even have to look at the numbers. Her fingers knew just where they were. We were so proud of her and she always had a snack for us after school. When we were younger we’d stay for a time at the store watching her work until her shift was over and then the three of us would walk home together. We didn’t do that so much when we got older like the day everything changed.

We did arrive home about the same time that day but not together. I didn’t walk home with Lizbeth after we got older. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t want to be seen with her. She embarrassed me. I got there first. I could hear shouting and furniture crashing inside right through the door and mother's cries. It was terrible. I ran for a neighbor's house for help. Lizbeth ran to wherever she had her little stash of gasoline and matches hidden. The rest you know.

That wasn’t the first time our father beat our mother but it was the last. It took a long time for things to get this bad. I lost count of the times the neighbor’s called the police. They would take father away in their cars but he would always come back later. Nothing ever changed. Sometimes Lizbeth would try to protect mother and father would beat her too. I tried to be the family peacemaker. Sometimes it worked if father was even a little bit sober. Lizbeth would just throw things at him. He would try to catch her but she was too quick for him most of the time. Lizbeth never stopped fighting him until they took her away. She was stubborn and feisty and smarter than me. Lizbeth hid her intelligence from everyone as she got older. She was a terrible student. I was a terrible coward. I see that now. I did the best I could then and so did she, I guess. Someone once told me that sometimes one twin, the stronger one, can steal nutrients from the weaker one in the womb. I don’t think that’s what happened to us.

Lizbeth and I are not identical twins. We are as different as chalk and cheese. I’m taller than average, well developed in every way. Lizbeth never really blossomed. She stayed very small with a boyish figure. People were always mistaking her for a boy especially with the short haircuts she preferred. The other kids at school teased her all the time. Lizbeth was not a happy child or teenager. She didn’t have much to be happy about and she was angry all the time. Angry with father, angry at me because I tried to calm him and angry at the world because nobody seemed to care enough to help us. I wasn’t all that happy either but she was worse, much worse.

After Lizbeth set father on fire social services finally did something. Lizbeth went away to a mental hospital and I was sent to a foster family. I didn’t see her again for several years. She found me there with my foster family after they released her from the hospital. She wanted to know where father was. I suppose she wanted to try to kill him again. I’m not sure. She didn’t say. I visited him several times when he was recovering from his burns but he left the country and I lost track of him. I tried my best to explain this to Lizbeth but she wouldn’t listen. I felt sorry for him because he was in such pain despite the bad things that he had done to mother and Lizbeth. She could neither accept nor understand this point of view. She said I was weak and disgusting. We had a big fight and I became very afraid of my twin. I asked to be moved to another family and requested that Lizbeth not be told of my whereabouts next time. I felt very alone that day. My mother in a nursing home, my father gone away and now I’m hiding from my twin sister. Something good did come of the move though. I found my vocation.

“My second foster family was a family of bakers. They owned a small bakery and everyone worked there. No one said I had to work there too. They even left me breakfast because they were all gone for hours before I got up. After a few days and a few lonely breakfasts I asked if I could come along. The bakery was a magical place. It smelled heavenly and because of the ovens it was always warm. I loved it there. It was the happiest time of my life. I learned how to make everything, cakes, cookies, rolls, all sorts of fancy pastries and bread. Bread was my favorite. I loved everything about baking bread. I loved the flour, the powerful electric mixing bowls, the traditional hand kneading that my foster Father insisted on and our own private yeast colony that we grew in the back room closet. The people of our town loved our bread. There would be lines of them waiting patiently outside the bakery door every morning. When we unlocked the door they would rush inside for their daily bread. We opened at 7am. By 8am all of our bread was gone. Why don’t we make more, I asked one day?”

“What? And give the leftovers to the pig farmers? I’ll not have pigs eating my bread!” said my foster Father. He was like that you see. He had his own way of doing things, his own logic. It all worked somehow.

“Do you dream of this nice foster family Camilla?” asked my therapist, Dr. Koenig.

“Occasionally, and I’m always baking bread and I hate to wake up. I’m always a little sad when I dream of them because it is a happy time that is done and gone. I just roll over and wish I could go back there again somehow.”

“This longing for good times past is entirely normal, Camilla. I often have similar dreams. You told my receptionist that you wanted help with your nightmares. Perhaps we could talk about them for awhile?”

“Yes, I suppose we must.”

“When did they start?”

“About a year ago. I’m from Sweden. I’ve lived in the United States for five years now and I’m always speaking English. One day I tried to say something in Swedish and it was very difficult. I even dream in English. I think in English. I was afraid that I was losing my native tongue altogether. So I began to download Swedish Newspapers and podcasts and reading Swedish aloud to myself since no one I know can understand it. One day I was reading a news story aloud and very happy that Swedish was rolling off my tongue once again when I saw her.”

“Saw who, Camilla?”

“My sister, Lisbeth. She was in the newspaper. They were saying horrible things about her. They said she had killed people and that the police were looking all over for her. I was totally shocked. I was shaking and sick to my stomach. I had to lie down. I cried and cried. That night the nightmares started. I tried to push it out of my mind but I read everything I could lay my hands on about her situation.”

“What happened with your sister, Camilla? Did the police find her eventually?”

“Yes, she finally located our missing father. She was obsessed with finding him.”

“What happened when she found him?”

“He shot her and he had another man bury her alive in a shallow grave. She dug her way out somehow and managed to hit him in the leg with an ax. Sometimes in my nightmares I wake up with the taste of dirt in my mouth. It’s horrible. I want it to stop!”

“I can certainly see how reading about your sister’s ordeal could produce nightmares. Did you say you were twins? Twins often have a mysterious emotional connection that defies space and time. Sometimes when one twin is injured the other feels it. There are many reports of this. The mechanism is not well understood.”

“We’re not identical twins.”

“It can happen with fraternal twins as well.”

“I don’t want to dream about my sister. I want to forget about her and everything I left behind in Sweden. I want to have nice dreams, sexy dreams, silly dreams, anything but what I’m having.”

“Apparently your subconscious mind has other ideas, Camilla, and until you do whatever it needs for you to do consciously it will continue to protest until you do it. Together we can figure this out, I’m sure of it and when we do your dreams will become more agreeable. I would be willing to bet that this process will start very soon. Your dreams will start to change as we continue therapy. They may even get more intense for a time as your subconscious mind begins to purge itself of the trauma that is creating this disturbing dream series.”

“I want to continue to work on this with you Dr. Koenig.”

“Good, I need to have you keep a dream journal. Dreams are very fleeting but they are rich in symbolism. Keep a pad of paper and pen by your bedside. Should a dream awaken you take a few minutes to write down some notes and bring it with you to therapy next week.”

“Ok, if that’s what it takes I’ll all for it. Hopefully I’ll bring you a pad of blank paper next week because the dreams have stopped!”

“Sometimes that’s exactly what happens but don’t be lulled by a short period of inactivity. We need to work on your issues anyway. See you next week.”

That was the day I started keeping a life journal. This is my first entry. It was supposed to be just a dream journal but it just grew from there. I wanted to get it all down. My thoughts, my feelings, the things Dr. Koenig and I discuss, everything, word for word if necessary. Perhaps somewhere in all of this my life would make more sense to me. It seems to me that up until now I’ve just been reacting to things. I want to take charge of my life and this seems a good way to start doing just that.

Right after I finished my appointment with Dr. Koenig I went downtown to the stationary store and bought myself a really nice journal book and a Cross fountain pen. I tried several pens at the store but I liked that one the best. It made a satisfying but faint scratching sound and the ink flowed smoothly in the gold plated nib. The journal cover has an image of a wolf on it. They had moose too but that seemed too male. The moose had massive antlers and an aggressive stance. There was also one with a puffin on it but that seemed too comical. Puffins look like clowns with wings to me. Cute, but not serious. This journal was part of a serious undertaking and seemed to demand a serious image to accompany it. So it was a wolf then. I hoped it was a she wolf but you couldn’t tell from the image on the journal. It doesn’t really matter. The wolf fits the occasion perfectly.

Legend has it that a she wolf found two abandoned human infants named Romulus and Remus and fed them from her breasts and saved their lives. They later went on to found the city of Rome or so the story goes. Utter nonsense on the face of it. A real wolf would probably have ignored or even eaten those children. At best they wouldn’t even be capable of speech let alone responsible for founding a city-state that ultimately became a great empire. Like all mythology, one has to look beyond the surface of this legend. The she wolf is representative of something. Something wild but generous and compassionate, an unexpected nurturing.

Perhaps this legend is telling a story, one lost in antiquity. A Dacian woman perhaps who had lost her own child and suckled the twin children of a mother who had passed away. It was a very long migration from the rugged mountains of Dacia (present day Romania) to central Italy and the seven hills of Rome. What drove them there through the territories of many other tribes, perhaps some of them probably hostile? Was the legendary she wolf who raised Romulus and Remus a female tribal leader who wore the pelts of a wolf? A shaman perhaps? Was she a donii woman of great stature? Did she and her band of migrants have to fight their way into Rome past the already established Etruscans? Why did they leave their home in the first place?

Why did I leave my own home and choose to live half the world away from Sweden? To escape my memories of the past or to create something entirely new here? Is my story reactive or proactive? I hope I can understand my own migration better someday as well as my dreams. This is my first step in a personal journey of enlightenment with my talisman, the she wolf, by my side.....
....to be continued http://robnpak.hubpages.com/hub/The-Forgotten-Sister-Chapter-2

Copyright © 2012 pending Day One Hypnotherapy All Rights Reserved

A delightful romantic mystery perfect for travel or leisure. First publication by a new author and fellow Hubber: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Leah+Van+Horn+This+Side+of+the+Flatirons