The Summer Book Page 5

  Later, Grandmother remarked on the curious fact that wild animals, cats for example, cannot understand the difference between a rat and a bird.

  “Then they’re dumb!” said Sophia curtly. “Rats are hideous and birds are nice. I don’t think I’ll talk to Moppy for three days.” And she stopped talking to her cat.

  Every night, the cat went into the woods, and every morning it killed its prey and carried it into the house to be admired, and every morning the bird was thrown into the sea. A little while later, Sophia would appear outside the window and shout, “Can I come in? Have you taken out the body?” She punished Moppy and increased her own pain by means of a terrible coarseness. “Have you cleaned up the blood?” she would yell, or, “How many murdered today?” And morning coffee was no longer what it had been.

  It was a great relief when Moppy finally learned to conceal his crimes. It is one thing to see a pool of blood and quite another thing only to know about it. Moppy probably grew tired of all the screaming and fussing, and perhaps he thought the family ate his birds. One morning when Grandmother was taking her first cigarette on the veranda, she dropped her holder and it rolled through a crack in the floor. She managed to raise one of the planks, and there was Moppy’s handiwork – a row of small bird skeletons, all picked clean. Of course she knew that the cat had continued to hunt, and could not have stopped, but the next time he rubbed against her leg as he passed, she drew away and whispered, “You sly bastard.” The cat dish stood untouched by the steps, and attracted flies.

  “You know what?” Sophia said. “I wish Moppy had never been born. Or else that I’d never been born. That would have been better.”

  “So you’re still not speaking to each other?” Grandmother asked.

  “Not a word,” Sophia said. “I don’t know what to do. And what if I do forgive him – what fun is that when he doesn’t even care?” Grandmother couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Moppy turned wild and rarely came into the house. He was the same colour as the island – a light yellowish grey with striped shadings like granite, or like sunlight on a sand bottom. When he slipped across the meadow by the beach, his progress was like a stroke of wind through the grass. He would watch for hours in the thicket, a motionless silhouette, two pointed ears against the sunset, and then suddenly vanish … and some bird would chirp, just once. He would slink under the creeping pines, soaked by the rain and lean as a streak, and he would wash himself voluptuously when the sun came out. He was an absolutely happy cat, but he didn’t share anything with anyone. On hot days, he would roll on the smooth rock, and sometimes he would eat grass and calmly vomit his own hair the way cats do. And what he did between times no one knew.

  One Saturday, the Övergårds came for coffee. Sophia went down to look at their boat. It was big, full of bags and jerry cans and baskets, and in one of the baskets a cat was meowing. Sophia lifted the lid and the cat licked her hand. It was a big white cat with a broad face. It kept right on purring when she picked it up and carried it ashore.

  “So you found the cat,” said Anna Övergård. “It’s a nice cat, but it’s not a mouser, so we thought we’d give it to some friends.”

  Sophia sat on the bed with the heavy cat on her lap. It never stopped purring. It was soft and warm and submissive.

  They struck a bargain easily, with a bottle of rum to close the deal. Moppy was captured and never knew what was happening until the Övergårds’ boat was on its way to town.

  The new cat’s name was Fluff. It ate fish and liked to be petted. It moved into Sophia’s cottage and slept every night in her arms, and every morning it came in to morning coffee and slept some more in the bed beside the stove. If the sun was shining, it would roll on the warm granite.

  “Not there!” Sophia yelled. “That’s Moppy’s place!” She carried the cat a little farther off, and it licked her on the nose and rolled obediently in the new spot.

  The summer grew prettier and prettier, a long series of calm blue summer days. Every night, Fluff slept against Sophia’s cheek.

  “It’s funny about me,” Sophia said. “I think nice weather gets to be boring.”

  “Do you?” her grandmother said. “Then you’re just like your grandfather, he liked storms too.” But before she could say anything else about Grandfather, Sophia was gone.

  And gradually the wind came up, sometime during the night, and by morning there was a regular southwester spitting foam all over the rocks.

  “Wake up,” Sophia whispered. “Wake up, kitty, precious, there’s a storm.”

  Fluff purred and stretched warm sleepy legs in all directions. The sheet was covered with cat hair.

  “Get up!” Sophia shouted. “It’s a storm!” But the cat just turned over on its broad stomach. And suddenly Sophia was furious. She kicked open the door and threw the cat out in the wind and watched how it laid its ears back, and she screamed, “Hunt! Do something! Be like a cat!” And then she started to cry and ran to the guest room and banged on the door.

  “What’s wrong now?” Grandmother said.

  “I want Moppy back!” Sophia screamed.

  “But you know how it’ll be,” Grandmother said.

  “It’ll be awful,” said Sophia gravely. “But it’s Moppy I love.”

  And so they exchanged cats again.

  The Cave

  THERE WAS A DEEP BAY ON THE LARGEST of the nearby islands, and at the far end of this bay, the grass grew right in the sand, short and very green. Grass roots are extremely strong, they twist and tie themselves into a knotted mass that can stand up to the heaviest seas. Great ocean waves roll straight in over the sandy bottom, but once inside the bay, they meet the grass and flatten out. They dig away at the sand – they can do that much – but all that happens to the grass is that it sinks or rises, adjusting to new hills and gullies. A person could walk far out in the water and still feel the grass underfoot. Up towards shore, it grew out of the seaweed, and still farther up it made a jungle with the spiraea and the nettles and the vetch and all the other plants that like salt.

  This jungle was very thick and tall and lived mostly on dead seaweed and rotten fish. It grew as high as possible, and where it stopped it was met by sallow, rowan and alder branches that bent down as far as they could reach. Walking between them with your arms outstretched was like swimming. Bird-cherry and rowan, especially rowan, smell like cat piss when they’re in bloom.

  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 t
ied 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

  IT 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

  THE 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.