Way of Escape (2 page)

Carl-Joran tried to say something and she pressed a firm hand into his back, ordering, “Be quiet, do as I say and you'll be safe. We're leaving. Come now. Taqi's waiting downstairs. We're going back to Haifa.”

Sneaking along the corridors, ducking out the employees' exit, quietly, unobserved, unnoticed. Taqi held the Mercedes's door open.

Halima was screaming at him…

“Hermelin! Hermelin! Wake up from the dream!”

Carl-Joran brushed at the air around him.

“You'll not be hitting me!” she warned.

He forced open one eye. This was his hotel room. He was at the Nof. He could see the swirl of gold and brown of Dr. Halima Legesse's full-length Ethiopian dress. That accursed bellboy had fallen to her wiles again and let her in. He moaned, “Go away. I was just asleep.”

Legesse had no mercy. Arms akimbo, large knobby hands splayed onto her hips, she bellowed, “It is noon.”

“No,” he insisted, putting a pillow over his head.

She grabbed it and smacked him with it. “Get up. We all are to meet in one hour. Get up.”

“At least let me put on my clothes!” he begged.

“You are awake? You are not going to go back to sleep?”

“Yes,” he half sat up, pulling the sheet around his nakedness. Halima may be a doctor and she may have seen and doctored most of his body at one time or another, but he did want to retain some modesty. He jerked back his pillow and laid it on the sheet in his lap.

“Yes, you will go back to sleep?” she queried snidely.

“No, no,” he shook his head emphatically and squinted up at her. The bright sunlight coming in the windows blinded him. “I'm getting up. I promise. Okay?”

“Okay. You be there.” She grabbed up the laptop from the table. “Are your notes in here? A little something we can make sense of?”

“Yes,” he ran a hand through his unruly hair, “yes, yes, take it with you. Then you can't accuse me of forgetting it later.”

She closed the small computer, put it under one arm, and slung around on her sandaled heels, her long skirt swishing noisily as she walked out of the room, and Carl-Joran heard the hall door close behind her.

“But I will eat breakfast first!” he shouted rebelliously at the door.

CHAPTER 2: FIFTY

Mrs. Bonnie Ixey looked in her bathroom mirror with studied and somewhat anxious appraisal to see if any great change had taken place at the arrival of a half-century of life.

To her delighted surprise, she discovered that the person she'd regarded in this mirror for years she'd not really appreciated. This face, which had never quite been pretty, had kept its cheery smile and thereby produced charming smile wrinkles. The thick and wavy mousy brown hair, so like in quality her father's shock of pale gold hair, had slowly become a pile of shining silver tresses, her pink skin glowed with health from her good diet, hours spent working in the garden, and her long hikes. Besides, she still had every one of her sparkling white teeth. The ugly duckling had transformed into a rather elegant though diminutive swan. What a nice birthday present!

Bonnie Mari (Seastrand) Ixey was one of those interesting people who had looked old from birth. Fully grown she was a frail hair's breadth under five feet, four inches tall. Her baby pictures showed a wrinkled elfin face with an expression of incalculable wisdom.

Her dear mother had said the premature baby Bonnie rarely cried, that the little pixie observed everything with great intensity and eerily, as if remembering lives lived before or not yet lived. Bonnie in her younger years considered herself to be her mom's descendent more than her father's and thought with utmost rationality that the mystic baby expression could well have been severe nearsightedness.

Fifty years ago today, Dell Drachet had given birth only moments after a dory from a Liberian merchant cargo ship put her and her new husband, Bo Pers Seastrand, ashore in a no-name fishing village on the eastern coast of Mexico. The black seaman in charge of smuggling them had been relieved to see the last of the strange couple and had motored the dory back to the big cargo ship as fast as it could go.

Bonnie, just after her tenth birthday, had found in an old sea chest in the attic, the yellowed, neatly folded transport papers for her parents slid into oversized Swiss passports. She had excitedly unfolded the papers. She could not read much of what was in them. She was able to recognize that they were official documents of some sort from what the English language portion said and this portion was repeated in Arabic and French and spoke of emigrant passage for two “Swiss undesirables” from Marrakesh. She had not asked her parents about the papers, knowing full well the emotions such memories could incite and the anger her father would most likely display. So, she had discreetly refolded the papers and put them away where she'd found them. They became a treasure for her, a bit of evidence of the reality of her parents as human beings with a history neither of them ever would admit.

When Bonnie was twelve, she and a girlfriend went to see
Casablanca
. Yes, of course, it all made sense!
Her
parents must have been just like Victor Lazlow and Ilse Lund from Rick's Cafe. Perhaps her father had been a famous resistance fighter and her mother madly in love with Rick Blaine…that would have certainly been preferable to her father!

It was shortly after this private determination that she had asked her mom quietly one evening about the papers and had received no more reply than a placid, “They were necessary because of the Cold War, dearest.” A couple months later, she bucked up the courage to broach the subject to her father, the tall and icy blue-eyed Bo Pers Sjostrand. The anger had not come. He had merely shaken his head and said, “Taking a freighter from Algiers was the only way your mother and I could escape and hide.”

Once her parents had been plunked down on that Mexican beach, Dell Bonnie Drachet Sjostrand began having labor pains. An old
bruja
, medicine witch, in the village had midwived Dell. With ancient skills she had saved the six-week preemie by wrapping the tiny Bonnie in a tattered, soft wool blanket and placing her in a warm potting kiln where she remained for three weeks, except to be taken out for cuddling and feeding.

Bonnie's birth wasn't officially registered until the Swedish-Scottish couple with Swiss passports arrived in San Luis Obispo, California, a month later as Mr. and Mrs. Bo Pers Seastrand. Bonnie was never sure how that had been accomplished, how they'd come across the Mexican-US border, how the Swedish name had been translated into English. No one ever spoke of that lost month or of how her father came so quickly after arrival to teach in the engineering college and her mother to work as a nurse in the local hospital.

Such opposites! Her mother, Dell Bonnie, was as dark and emotional as only a Drachet Celt from the Scottish Highlands could be. Her father epitomized the stoic and somber Swede from the heart of a cold country. A lot of history hung about them, little of which Bonnie grasped since both had remained secretive to the end.

Perhaps that's why in college Bonnie Seastrand chose to become a research librarian. Perhaps it was the need to find out things beyond the mysterious half-truths with which her parents had raised her. She, in contrast to both of them, had led a peaceful life for the most part. A long marriage, two grown daughters: Mari Dell, who had gotten married last year and was now a Williams, and the elder Trisha Svea still single, who would be coming to the house later.

Her daughters were beautiful. That had worried Bonnie during their childhood because her husband Ike had been downright ugly. But he was a sweet soul with whom she'd shared twenty-five good years. Ike had lived with flowers, farmed flowers, adored his way of life and his family. He was considerably older than Bonnie, and he'd died last year. Life went on. She sighed.

The clunk, clatter of the mail dropping into the box brought her out of the bathroom and out of her deep reverie. More birthday cards probably, what fun!

She was right. There was a handful. There was also a letter from a foreign country. Who did she know who was traveling in icy Sweden in the dead of winter?

No, this was not a wayward friend traveling. This envelope portended some bureaucratic function for it was a long, very official-looking brown thing with one of those suspicious transparent windows. The stamp read:
Sverige
. Yes, that was Sweden. The postmark was Norrkoping. The return address meant nothing to her. Swedish she did not understand. French she could manage, and Spanish and Italian and a teensy bit of German. No, she didn't understand any of the return address.

She forced herself to fix a strong cup of coffee, to sit at the kitchen nook and stir the honey and cream into her coffee, to take a bite of the breakfast smorgas sandwich she'd made. Then she searched around briefly for her reading glasses, finding them on the bedstead. She really must, she promised herself again, buy a couple more pairs of reading glasses so she didn't have to constantly search for the damned things. As she sat back down at the breakfast nook and took another bite of the sandwich, she laughed gently.

Bonnie had early in childhood learned to laugh at herself in a very healthy way. Take the whole business of being so nearsighted. In the fifth grade, a school nurse appeared one day to check for vision problems among the students. When put with her toes behind the taped line, Bonnie was asked, as had been the others, to read the chart. Bonnie had responded, “What chart?”

The nurse, a no-nonsense sort, had rather gruffly inquired, “How about the big E?”

To this day, Bonnie remembered answering, “What big E?”

Because she'd always been seated in the front row by the teachers, little smarty-pants, teacher's pet, the girl who couldn't see over the big boys, a very bright Bonnie had never had to read the chalk board beyond ten feet away.

Her elfish appearance was not improved by the coke-bottle-thick spectacles prescribed by the optometrist. As soon as she could overcome her parents' objections she got contact lenses, which, at the time, were heavy, made of glass, and extremely uncomfortable. The wonderful sense of freedom from spectacles though made up for any discomfort. Only lately, after her arms grew too short to read well any more, did she use glasses, but only to read.

Of course, at sixteen, she had had to put up with her mom's constant nagging about how those new-fangled lenses would cut her eyeballs or that she was sure to lose a lens up inside her brain or some other horrific disaster. After all, her mom had been a nurse. Her mother's concern was better than her dad's nonreaction, which consisted of a cold, hurtful, “Well, those expensive lenses haven't improved your looks enough to attract a boyfriend.”

Going off to college was the best thing that ever happened to Bonnie, and at Stanford were the biggest libraries she'd ever seen. It was there, in her senior year, she met Ike Ixey attending college on the Vet's Bill. He was studying horticulture and after their marriage, she put him through his PhD at California State College at Davis. Within months after his graduation, his father helped him invest in a piece of farm property just north of San Luis Obispo on the California coast which became their home, and Ike's flower farm.

But Bonnie could not stay content with her husband's flowers. She continued her schooling past her PhD, worked for the University of California library system and her world grew beyond books and old-fashioned research to the reference sources of an entirely new era of communication. She had become enamored with computers. Now, she was working out of her own home as a specialist in literary references for professors and students and anyone else who had to write papers or find obscure quotes or whatever.

Bonnie sipped her coffee and finished the sandwich. Today was Saturday. She would not work. She would relax and enjoy.

At that moment, the suspense could be held back no longer. She ripped open the mystery envelope and took out the flimsy airmail papers—two pages, precisely typed and stapled together. It was obviously a notice of some kind beginning with a heading that read something-something Norrkoping Pastorkirche, plus a form to fill out to return. A big official government emblem was impressed upon the whole thing. Near the middle of the first page was a crest of some sort next to the name: Hermelin. The spidery signature at the end was printed underneath:
Birgitta Algbak
.

Why in heaven's name would a very official looking document be coming from Sweden? And why was it addressed to: Bonnie Mari Ixey (Sjostrand) Hermelin? She had never known anyone named Hermelin, much less been close enough to any male soul to have acquired the name, although whoever sent this form had done considerable and thorough homework. Not only had this Birgitta Algbak gotten Bonnie's middle name right, they'd spelled her maiden name of Seastrand in the old Swedish—Sjostrand.

For the millionth time she regretted deeply that her father had never taught her Swedish, had made a point in fact to never even speak it in her presence. She remembered how, if he were on the phone to a friend he would switch to English when she came near, as if he wanted her to be clean of the language.

She tried to fathom some more of the words on the form. She got what was to be put in the lines headed by
mormor
,
morfar
and
farmor
,
farfar
, although she had no idea whose mother's mother, mother's father and father's mother, father's father they pertained to. She also recognized
barnen
, but whose children?

To be given such an intriguing puzzle was the best birthday present she could ever have received. Although unknown fates had delivered it, she was ready to believe it meant good things. Her book-loving mind was already into images of Strindberg and Ibsen,
Dream Play
and
Wild Strawberries
, and sleigh bells and little red wooden horses…no, it wouldn't be anything bad on her birthday. It couldn't be.

The front door swung open and Bonnie heard Trisha come bouncing in. Tall like her father and sturdy like Bonnie's father, Trisha had just graduated from college to a job as basketball coach at Morro Bay High School. The big feet made clumping noises all down the hall.

“Hi, Mom, you home? Dell and Lou will be arriving at two this afternoon. Mom?”

“In the kitchen, dearest.” Bonnie smiled at her red-haired Trisha, clattering across the linoleum to enthusiastically hug her with such strength it almost crushed her head. When she could catch her breath, after Trisha had poured her own coffee and sat down, Bonnie asked, “Who do we know that still reads fluent Swedish?”

“Huh?” Trisha reached for the letter which Bonnie gingerly let her have. Trisha, slightly dyslexic, struggled with the small print then said, “Looks like an official document of some sort.”

“I think it is.” Bonnie took it back, afraid that her ham-handed daughter would inadvertently rip it.

“Wouldn't be anything concerning farmor's family, would it?” she scowled. “If it is, it won't be anything good.”

“Trish. Shame. Just because we know so little about your Grandpa Seastrand's past doesn't mean there was shadiness going on.”

“I don't know, Mom,” Trisha continued, doubtful, “official documents always seem to demand payment of some sort at the bottom line.”

Bonnie tried to keep her cheeriness past the pessimistic assault. “Let's see it as a door to adventure, okay? It is my birthday after all.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Trisha leaned over and gave her another brutal head-hug. “Happy birthday, old lady.”

“I do love you,” Bonnie laughed from her daughter's armpit. “Do release me, dear.”

Trisha let go and leaned back to scowl again at the letter. “I don't know, Mom. I don't know. Aren't you a bit old for adventure?”

A shivery shimmer of…anticipation perhaps, went down Bonnie's spine. She had had only one instance in her life that could have qualified as an adventure. One itsy-bitsy adventure out of all her fifty years—and the memory of it would come forward unbidden every so often, vividly, like the brightest of lights in a foggy night, like an acrylic-colored painting that hung on a wall long enough its presence was taken for granted. Well, no, upon closer examination, more like a painting that had aged and needed cleaning. The colors of the time seemed to have faded like the tie-dyed T-shirts they'd worn.