“When are you going to show me the castle?” she answered.
I heard shouts and hits coming from the burnball field again. It sounded like a war.
“We can go this way,” I said, and I pointed toward the forest on the other side of the beach. We could follow the edge of the lake for a bit and then take a left into the forest and reach the castle from the other direction.
There was a smell in this part of the forest that I didn’t recognize. It was like a different forest. The trees looked different. Maybe it was because you could glimpse the lake through the trees like a reflection from a mirror. It was darker here than in the other forest.
“What’s that smell?”
“I don’t smell anything.” Kerstin looked around. “I guess it’s just the forest.”
“There’s something else.”
She looked around again. Almost everything was shrouded in half-darkness despite the reflections from the lake—or because of them.
“Must be gloom then,” she said.
“The gloom?” I saw how it covered the path we were walking along.
It seemed to move with us. “Gloom doesn’t smell, does it?”
“When it gets darker, it smells different,” she said.
“Have you noticed that it smells different at night? When the sun goes down?”
“Yeah.”
“There are other smells that come out then.”
“Yeah. And other colors.”
There were already other colors on this path. Shadow colors.
“And in the end no colors at all,” she said.
“Black,” I said. “The black’s still there.”
“That’s not a color,” she said.
“What is it then?”
“It’s a… nothing. I don’t like black. It’s what you wear to funerals. And I don’t like funerals.”
“Who does?” I asked.
“I don’t know what the point is of having them.”
“Well… I guess the dead sort of have to be sent away somewhere.”
“Sent away?”
“You can’t exactly have them sitting at the kitchen table at home, can you?” I pictured my dad sitting in front of me with a cup of coffee. Or a glass of whiskey. “Or in front of the TV.”
“Maybe they have a favorite show,” said Kerstin.
Now we were in the other part of the forest—my forest. The shadows lifted and disappeared among the branches. It got lighter and it smelled lighter too.
“What do you think a dead guy’s favorite TV show would be?” Kerstin continued.
“Could be anything,” I said. “It’s all crap anyway.”
“How do you know? Do you watch them all?”
“Not a single one.”
“But you still know that it’s all crap?”
I didn’t know anything, but I didn’t want to talk about that right now. We didn’t have a TV at home. A lot of people had started buying TVs when they first came out a few years ago, but Papa had said that it was just a bunch of crap, and then… well, then we couldn’t afford one.
“I thought you had seen some samurai movies on TV,” said Kerstin.
“Do they show movies like that?”
“I don’t know. But I guess they should. They show Ivanhoe and William Tell. And Robin Hood.”
“They’re not samurai,” I said. “They’re from England.”
“William Tell’s from Switzerland.”
“Well, they’re not from Japan anyway,” I said.
“How far away is Japan?”
I looked down at the path.
“All you have to do is start digging and eventually you’ll get there.”
Like at a funeral, I thought as soon as I’d said it. Kerstin looked like she was thinking the same thing, but she didn’t say anything.
Funerals were also meant to make people remember. Everyone had to remember for as long as possible. I hadn’t liked it when I’d been forced to sit in church with Mama and her sisters and all the others. I didn’t want to go to any more funerals. I didn’t want to remember that way. I wanted to remember in my own way without having to follow all those rules. I didn’t like graves, either, or cemeteries. You were supposed to stand in front of a gravestone and remember, but it was just a stone. It had no soul. It was an unnecessary weight lying on top of the one buried below.
The glade opened up. The shadows were all gone now. We were there.
“It’s not finished yet,” I said.
“You already told me that.”
She walked toward the wall. Somehow, it seemed lower than it was. It was the same with the towers. I looked at them through different eyes now. They had become unfamiliar—like they had been built by others.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“It could be one day,” I said.
She looked around. I thought the whole area looked smaller now. I shouldn’t have shown her the glade and the castle with its courtyards and walls. I didn’t feel proud of the castle anymore.
“It’s really nice,” she said and smiled.
“You think so?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a lot left to do,” I said.
“I can help you.” She held up her hands. “Many hands—”
“Spoil the broth,” I said. But I immediately regretted having said that.
“That’s not how it goes,” she said and smiled again. She didn’t seem to take offense. “And you’ll need help here if you’re going to be finished this summer.”
“We won’t be finished this summer.”
“But you’ve got to, don’t you?”
“We’ll continue,” I said.
“Continue? After the summer?”
I nodded.
“I don’t understand,” said Kerstin.
It wasn’t something I could explain, exactly. I didn’t even understand it myself. Not yet.
The burnball tournament was still underway when we got back to the camp. The shadows along the path were longer. There was a smell coming off the lake. Mud and reeds and murky water. They were screaming louder than ever at the burnball field.
There was a man standing by the thick branch that reached out over the water. On the grass in front of him was a black box. I knew what it was. So did Kerstin.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I forgot about that.”
“Me too.”
The man was there for the summer photo. We were all supposed to gather beneath the tree, everyone was supposed to look happy, and then the man would press a button at the end of a wire.
In last year’s photo I stood behind the tree. Just when the man shouted, “Cheese!” I hid.
I had stood in approximately the same spot where the man was standing now. When everyone was looking at him and he was looking at everyone through the camera, I had slipped behind the tree. But I was still in that photo.
He saw us coming. It was the same man as last summer wearing the same hot blazer.
“Well, it’s that time again,” he said. “Isn’t this fun?”
“What’s fun about it?” I said.
“Getting your picture taken, of course.” He laughed as though the idea that it might not be fun was really hilarious. “Don’t you like photos, kid?”
“Not of me.”
“A good-looking kid like you,” he said and winked. “Of course you should have your picture taken.” He nodded at Kerstin. “And your girlfriend too.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said quickly.
“Oh she isn’t, huh?” he asked and laughed again.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Kerstin.
“I see,” said the man. “So you just happened to bump into each other, eh?”
He winked again like he had gotten a speck in his eye or had a nervous tick. Maybe photography made you nervous.
Mama took me to a photographer once when I was two, I think. I don’t remember it, but he must have tricked me into laughing because I was laughing in the pictu
re. I was sitting in a wicker chair. There was a curtain hanging behind me. There were no colors—just black and white.
A few years later it was time again, but then I didn’t laugh. I remember that I was there and that the photographer told me to laugh but I didn’t want to. Papa was supposed to have come along to the photographer’s, but we couldn’t find him when we were about to leave.
At home there was a photograph of Mama and Papa standing in some square and laughing into the camera. That was before I came into the world. Maybe that was why they still looked happy. Maybe if I hadn’t been born, they would be as happy now as they were then, standing in that square laughing and baring their white teeth like they were in a toothpaste ad. I was there too. I was in my mother’s stomach, which was sticking straight out.
It was summer in that picture—eternal summer. The picture was black and white. It wasn’t big, but it had a thin silver frame that made everything look even more black and white. For as long as I could remember, the photo had always been standing on the chest of drawers in Mama and Papa’s bedroom, but when Papa died, Mama moved everything out to the living room, including the chest of drawers. I used to see her standing there looking at that photo for ages as if she were trying to remember something that she’d forgotten.
As if she were looking for something in the photo.
The mailman’s motorcycle sounded like a jet rumbling through the forest when Kerstin and I walked back to the camp. The rumbling lingered like the sound of the jet that Janne and I had seen.
I had received a letter. It was from Mama, of course. I had been thinking about not writing to her anymore so I wouldn’t get any more of her letters, but at the same time, I wanted them. I didn’t want to read them and I did want to read them. It wasn’t actually the words I wanted to read; it was more the fact that something made it into the camp from outside. That there was another world out there. The mailman on his Triumph boneshaker was proof of that. A Triumph Bonneville. He had brought something for me. Just the envelope would have been enough.
I sat on the steps. The courtyard was silent. Everyone was mostly just sitting in the shade waiting for the sun to set. It was a strange summer. The sun had almost become an enemy. Your whole head started to hurt if you stood in the sun in the middle of the day, and there were fire warnings everywhere.
On the radio they had talked about forest fires up north. A few days ago two transport planes had flown over us with huge sacks of water. I had followed the planes with my eyes but I couldn’t see when they dropped the water. It must have been like a waterfall. But the fire hadn’t been put out.
“Is the fire going to come here?” Sausage had asked when he stood next to me as the planes were flying over us.
“It depends on which way the wind’s blowing, I guess,” I had said. “If it’s blowing from the south, you just don’t know.”
“What’ll happen then?” Sausage had asked.
“The whole camp will burn up,” I had answered.
“Don’t you say burn down?”
“First it burns up and then it burns down.”
“What does?”
“The whole damn thing. The camp. Everything.”
“How about the castle?”
“We’ll save that.”
“We don’t even have a moat with water in it,” Sausage had said.
“The fire’s not gonna come from the forest.”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t actually know what I meant. It was just something I felt—or thought. That there was a fire that was coming. Like a dream while you’re awake.
The letter from Mama was shorter than usual. There were smudges on the paper; or maybe she had been eating supper while she was writing and spilled something she was drinking. Some of the letters were fuzzy. An F could look like a B.
But I could still understand what she’d written.
She was going to be away when I came home after the summer. She would explain when she got back.
I was supposed to go stay with a friend of my mother’s who was not my friend. She had a boy who was three years younger than me who wasn’t my friend either. They lived about half a mile from us on a really boring street where there were no shops.
Everything’s been taken care of, wrote Mama. You don’t need to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.
Not the way you think, I said to myself, and I crumpled up the letter and stuffed it into my pocket.
“Is it bad news?”
Lennart had sat down next to me on the steps.
“My mom,” I answered.
“Bad news, then.”
“I can’t go home,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody’s going to be there in the fall, so I can’t go home.”
“Well, that isn’t good news.”
“Just like Janne,” I said and nodded toward Janne.
He was standing in the middle of the playground throwing a ball against the wooden fence—boink-boink-boink-boink-boink.
“But he’s going to a foster home.”
“It makes no difference.”
“What are you gonna do then?”
“I’m not gonna go where they want me to go!”
“You’re not?”
“I’m gonna show them.”
“What are you gonna show them?” asked Lennart.
“What I can do. Where I can go.”
“And where’s that?”
“It’s a secret. For now.”
Micke wanted to speak to me behind the woodshed, where there hadn’t been any wood for a long time. There was still an ax in the chopping stump. Some grown-up with the strength of five men had buried it in the stump last summer. I had tried to pull it out but hadn’t succeeded.
“Are you all right?” asked Micke.
“Sure, thanks to you and your help.”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to Weine? Huh? What did you do to him?”
Micke looked around to see if someone was listening to us, but most of the kids were standing outside the mess hall waiting for supper.
“We had to consult with you first,” said Micke. “We couldn’t just go after him.” He looked around again. “Or the others. He’s not alone, you know.”
“Maybe there are more of them than there are of us,” I said. “Or will be soon. Before long they might outnumber us.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re stronger.”
Now he looked like someone you could rely on. I became unsure again. I hadn’t liked that smile, but maybe he had just gotten nervous when Weine tripped me.
“If it comes down to a fight, we’re stronger,” said Micke.
“They’re not the ones we should be fighting,” I said.
“Who is, then?”
A counselor opened the main doors to the mess hall.
Everyone poured in. I could hear another counselor shouting inside. The windows were open and her shouts were carried off across the lake.
“Sit STILL! Be QUIET! Stop all that RACKET!”
I nodded toward the mess hall. It was an answer to Micke’s question.
“Soon they’ll come out looking for us,” he said.
“I wonder what’s for supper,” I said.
“I wonder what’s for dessert,” said Micke.
I laughed.
10
Matron seemed twice as big as usual. The counselors had dragged me off to her office since I had refused to eat my supper. It wasn’t something I had planned on doing, but when the plate was standing there in front of me, I couldn’t even get myself to lift the spoon.
Matron wasn’t alone.
“You’ve met Christian, haven’t you?”
She nodded at her son like it was the first time he’d been there, but he came every summer. Maybe he was going to take over after Matron.
“I don’t know what to do with you anymore, Tommy.”
Christian didn’t say anything. He seemed twice
as big as Matron. He was a giant who filled most of the room. That made me think of the ax that was buried in the chopping stump in the woodshed. It must have been Christian who planted it in the stump. It would have taken incredible strength. A frightening strength.
She turned to him.
“What should we do with him, Christian?”
“What’s he done?” Christian smiled. He was getting a kick out of learning about all the terrible things I had done. He looked like a film star. His golden-yellow hair was thick and wavy, combed into an Elvis-style pompadour, and his teeth were big and white when he smiled. He wore a white shirt tucked into a pair of jeans that looked like they’d come straight from America. He himself looked like he’d come straight from America. There was a silver chain hanging from his neck and he was tanned in a way that made his teeth look even whiter and his hair even more like gold.
“He picks fights,” said Matron. “He doesn’t eat. He tells lies. He incites the other children against us.”
“This little shrimp?” Christian took a few steps forward. I flinched.
“See that? He’s afraid of his own shadow.”
“He’s pretty cocky out there, I can tell you,” said Matron. “He thinks he can do as he pleases when no one’s watching.”
“Feeling cocky now?” asked Christian. He took another step and grabbed hold of my arm like I was a fly and he could pull my wing off with one little tug. “Think you can do as you please, huh?”
He let go of my arm and grabbed my sword as though it was my arm—which it was, of course; it was just an extension of my arm—and he yanked the sword from my belt.
“What’s this, huh?” He held up my sword. It looked like a matchstick in his hand. “What kind of crap is this?”
“That’s his sword,” said Matron and laughed. “He’s always got it with him. Says he’s a samurai.”
“Sam… samurai? What’s that? Some kind of Chinese crap, huh?” Christian looked down at me. “Are you Chinese, kid? What did you do, get lost? Dig in the wrong direction?”
He laughed just like Matron. They laughed together. Then he looked at her and held up the sword again.
“You let them go around with things like this? He could poke somebody’s eye out.”
“You might be right,” she said.
Samurai Summer Page 9