The Summer Book (7 page)

Sophia made a path through this jungle with a pair of shears. She worked at it patiently whenever she was in the mood, and no one else knew about it. First, the path circled the rosebush, which was large and famous and had a name,
Rosa Rugosa
. When it blossomed, with its huge, wild roses that could take a storm and fell only when they wanted to, people came from the village to look. Its roots were high, washed clean by the waves, and there was seaweed in its branches. Every seven years,
Rosa Rugosa
died from salt and exposure, but then her children sprang up in the sand all around, so nothing changed. She had only moved a little. The path led on through a nasty patch of nettles, through the spiraea and the currant bushes and the loosestrife under the alder trees, and up to the big bird-cherry at the edge of the woods. On the right day, and with the right wind, you could lie down under a bird-cherry and all the petals would fall at the same time, but you had to watch out for aphids. They held onto the tree if left alone, but if you shook the branches the least little bit they fell right off.

After the bird-cherry, there are pine trees and moss, and the hill rises up from the beach, and every time the cave is just as much of a surprise. It is so sudden. The cave is narrow and smells of rot, the walls are black and damp, and at the far end there is a natural altar covered with green moss as fine and dense as plush.

“I know something you don’t know,” Sophia said. Grandmother put down her murder mystery and waited.

“Do you know what it is?” asked Sophia sternly.

“No,” Grandmother said.

They rowed over to the island in the dory and tied up to a rock. Then they crept around the rosebush. It was a good day for the secret path, because Grandmother was feeling dizzy and would really rather crawl than walk.

“These are nettles,” she said.

“I told you that,” Sophia said. “Crawl faster, it’s only a little way.” They came to the spiraea and the loosestrife and the bird-cherry, and then Sophia turned around and said, “Now you can rest a while and smoke a cigarette.” But Grandmother had left her matches at home. They lay down under the bird-cherry and thought, and Sophia asked what went on an altar.

“Something elegant and unusual,” Grandmother said.

“Like what?”

“Oh, all sorts of things …”

“Say really!”

“I don’t know right now,” Grandmother said. She wasn’t feeling well.

“Maybe a pile of gold,” Sophia suggested. “Though that’s not specially unusual.”

They crawled on through the pines, and Grandmother threw up in the moss.

“It could happen to anyone,” the child said. “Did you take your
Lupatro
?”

Her grandmother stretched out on the ground and didn’t answer.

After a while Sophia whispered, “I think I can spare some time for you today.”

It was nice and cool under the pine trees and they weren’t in any hurry, so they slept for a while. When they woke up they crawled on to the cave, but Grandmother was too big to get in. “You’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” she said.

“It’s all green,” Sophia said. “And it smells like rot and it’s very pretty, and right at the back it’s holy because that’s where God lives, in a little box maybe.”

“Is that so?” said Grandmother and stuck her head in as far as it would go. “And what are those?”

“Some old toadstools,” Sophia said.

But Grandmother could see they were good mushrooms, and she took off her hat and sent her grandchild in to pick them, and they filled it up.

“Did you say He lived in a little box?” she said, and she took out the little sacred box,
Lupatro
, because it was empty now, and Sophia crawled back into the cave and put it on the altar.

They followed the path back around
Rosa Rugosa
and dug up one of her children to plant by the guest room steps. The roots came out easily for once, along with a lot of soil, and they packed the whole thing in a
Gordon’s
Gin crate that was sticking up out of the seaweed. A little farther on, they found an old Russian cap for the mushrooms, so Grandmother could have her hat back.

“Just look how everything works out,” Sophia said. “Is there anything else we need? Just say whatever you want!”

Grandmother said she was thirsty.

“Good,” Sophia said. “You wait right here.” She walked down the beach until she found a bottle in the sand, under water. It didn’t have any label. They opened it and it fizzed. But it wasn’t Vichy water, it was lemonade, which Grandmother much preferred.

“There, you see?” Sophia cried. “Everything works out! Now I’m going to find you a new watering can.”

But Grandmother said she liked the old one fine. Moreover, she had a feeling that they shouldn’t press their luck. They rowed home stern first. That sort of rowing is peaceful and pleasant, and it doesn’t upset the stomach. It was after four o’clock when they got home, and the mushrooms were enough for the whole family.

The Road

I
T WAS A BULLDOZER: AN ENORMOUS
, infernal, bright yellow machine that thundered and roared and floundered through the woods with clanging jaws. The men from the village scrambled on and around it like hysterical ants, trying to keep it headed in the right direction. “Jesus Christ!” Sophia shrieked without hearing what she said. She ran behind a rock with the milk can in one hand and watched the machine pluck up huge boulders that had lain in their moss for a thousand years, but now they just rose in the air and were tossed to one side, and there was a terrible cracking and splintering as pine trees gave way and were ripped from the ground with torn and broken roots. “Jesus, help! There go the woods!”

Sophia was trampling down the moss and shaking from head to foot in dread and rapture. There went a bird-cherry tree without a sound. It sank like a sigh, and up came shiny black earth, and the bulldozer took a new hold and bellowed on. The men shouted to each other nervously, which was no wonder since they were renting the machine, and it would cost them over a hundred marks an hour, including the trip from town and back. The machine was headed for the water, that was clear. It paid no attention to the path but pushed right on as straight as a herd of lemmings, for it was building a road to the sea.

It wouldn’t be any fun to be an ant now, Sophia thought. A machine can do anything it wants! She went and collected the milk and the mail and walked back again, not on the path but on the broad, unprecedented road, which was suddenly very quiet. It was bordered on both sides by a sprawling chaos, as if huge hands had pressed back the forest, bent it and folded it like some soft grass that would never rise up again. The splintered white trunks of the trees were running with pitch, and farther from the road there was an immovable green mass; not a single branch and not one leaf was free to move in the wind. It was like walking between stone walls. The stones were drying and the soil that clung to them was turning grey. There were large grey patches on the new road, too. Severed roots stuck up everywhere. In places they formed a thin lacework filled with tiny clumps of earth that trembled on invisible wires as they dried in the sun.

It was an altered landscape – breathless, like the silence after an explosion or a scream – and Sophia studied everything as she walked on down the new road, which seemed much longer than the old. The woods were silent. When she got down to the bay, she saw the bulldozer outlined against the water in all of its shapeless bulk. It had pushed its way down to the meadow by the beach and had then slid sideways into a hollow and kicked up a lot of sand. The grassy bank had given way, softly and treacherously, quite inexplicably, and the forest-eating monster lay there in silence at an unnatural angle, a picture of thwarted force. Beside the machine sat Emil Ehrström, smoking a cigarette.

“Where did everyone go?” Sophia asked.

“They went back to get some equipment,” Emil said.

“What equipment?” Sophia said. And Emil said, “As if you knew anything about machines.” Sophia walked on across the meadow, through the strong green mat of grass that storms can’t kill – it only settles a bit and goes right on weaving its tight little roots. Grandmother was waiting by the boat out on the point. What a machine! Sophia thought. She’ll be so surprised. It’s like when God smote Gomorrah. It’ll be a lot of fun to ride instead of walk.

Midsummer

T
HE FAMILY HAD ONE FRIEND WHO
never came too close, and that was Eriksson. He would drive by in his boat, or he would think about coming but never get around to it. There were even summers when Eriksson came nowhere near the island and didn’t think about it either.

Eriksson was small and strong and the colour of the landscape, except that his eyes were blue. When people talked about him or thought about him, it seemed natural to lift their heads and gaze out over the sea. He was often unlucky and was plagued by bad weather and engine trouble. His herring nets would rip or get caught in his propeller, and fish and fowl would fail to turn up where he had expected them. And if he did have a good catch, the price would go down, so it was always six of one or half a dozen of the other. But beyond all these routine troubles that can spoil a person’s livelihood, there were other, unexpected possibilities.

The family had long realised, without ever discussing it, that Eriksson didn’t especially like fishing and hunting and motorboats. What he did like was harder to put your finger on, but perfectly understandable. His attention and his sudden wishes raced here and there across the water like ocean breezes, and he lived in a perpetual state of quiet excitement. The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness. It takes a good
nose
, to put it simply.

The big events always take place far out in the skerries, and time is often of the essence. Only small things happen in among the islands, but these, too – the odd jobs that arise from the whims of the summer people – have to be dealt with. One of them wants a ship’s mast mounted on his roof, and another one needs a rock weighing half a ton, and it has to be round. A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he’s looking, he’s free, and he finds things he never expected. Sometimes people are very predictable: they want a kitten in June, for example, and come the first of September they want someone to drown their cat. So someone does. But other times, people have dreams and want things they can keep.

Eriksson was the man who fulfilled these dreams. No one knew exactly what he found for himself along the way – probably a lot less than people thought. But he went on doing it anyway, perhaps for the sake of the search.

One of the mysterious and attractive things about Eriksson was that he didn’t talk about himself. He never seemed to feel the urge. Nor did he talk about other people; they didn’t interest him very much. His infrequent visits might occur at any time of the day or night, and they never lasted long. Depending on when he arrived, he might have a cup of coffee or a meal or even take a drink just to be polite, but then he would turn quiet and uneasy, he would start listening, and then he would leave. But as long as he stayed, he had everyone’s undivided attention. No one did anything, no one looked at anything but Eriksson. They would hang on his every word, and when he was gone and nothing had actually been said, their thoughts would dwell gravely on what he had left unspoken.

He might pass by early in the morning and throw ashore a present – a small salmon or some cod, a wild rose with roots and soil in a paper carton or a nameplate that said “Captain’s Cabin”, a pretty metal box or a couple of glass floats with the glassblower’s mark. Many of these gifts were appreciated later in the form of trivial sums of money. It was the only chance the family had to try and put a price on their dreams. And dreams burn a lot of petrol.

Sophia adored Eriksson. He never asked her what she did or how old she was. He greeted her just as solemnly as he greeted the others and said goodbye the same way – with a short nod and no smile. They would all go down to his boat to see him off. The boat was big and old and hard to start, but once it was running, it ran. He didn’t take very good care of it. There was all sorts of rubbish washing around in the bilge water and the gunwale was cracked. But all the equipment was in good condition. He fried his fish on the engine block, and he slept in a sealskin sleeping bag the way his grandfather had done. Earth and seaweed and fish scales and sand went with him everywhere. He had his nets and decoys and his shotgun neatly arranged in the stern, but God only knew the significance of the sacks and boxes piled in the bow. He would slap the painter on board and shove off. The prop, which was used to rough treatment, would strike the shallow bottom several cheerful blows, and Eriksson would be off. He never waved as he headed out. His boat didn’t have a name.

Just before midsummer, Eriksson landed at the island and heaved a box up on the rock. “It’s some fireworks I picked up in an exchange,” he said. “I’ll drop by on Midsummer Eve, if that’s all right, and we’ll see how they work.” He kept the motor running while he talked, and then backed off as soon as he was through. The box was pretty damp, so they put it by the stove.

Midsummer became even more important than usual. Grandmother blacked and polished the stove and painted the stove doors silver. They washed all the windows and even the curtains. Naturally, no one thought Eriksson would notice – he never noticed anything indoors. But they cleaned the house anyway, just because he was coming. The day before the great event, they gathered birch and rowan and lilies-of-the-valley, and the mosquitoes were awful on the big islands in towards the mainland. They shook the aphids and the ants off in the sand and went back home. They turned the house into a green bower, inside and out. Every birch stood in its own pail of water. And because it was June, almost all of the wildflowers they had picked were white.