“Of course I’m right,” he replied, and he grabbed the sword with both hands and snapped it in two.
I saw how the wheels were turning in Sausage’s head. Something had happened that couldn’t happen. Sausage and I were the only ones in the dorm. We were confined indefinitely. Sausage had been punished for causing a fuss when they dragged me from the mess hall.
“You’re the only one who knows,” I said to Sausage.
He didn’t really seem to understand it yet. He was trying to work out how a sword could be broken in two.
“You realize you can’t tell anyone about this?”
He nodded.
“That’s good, Sausage.”
“What are we going to do now?” he asked after a while.
“Make a new one,” I said. “Make a new sword.”
“But… you had that one for a long time.”
“A samurai can lose his sword in different ways,” I said. “I haven’t lost my honor. Not when it happened like that.”
“I guess.”
“You could say that I’ve already got a sword, even though I don’t actually have one. You see what I mean, Sausage?”
“I… think so.”
“I’ve always got a long sword with me—in my mind,” I said as I looked at the short one, my wakizashi, that I’d taken out of its hiding place under the floorboard. “In my mind’s eye, I’ve always got it with me, and tomorrow I’m going to make it real so that I can hold it in my hands.”
“Are they going to let you?” asked Sausage.
“They can’t keep me locked up all summer.”
“What’s going to happen with the castle?”
“We’ll keep building it, of course,” I said.
Sausage looked like he wasn’t convinced.
“Nothing can keep me in here,” I continued.
“What if they send you home?”
“They can’t. There’s no one at home. You know that.”
Sausage didn’t say anything more. We looked at the short sword. I carefully thumbed the edge of the blade. It was sharp.
Christian and Matron had made a big mistake when they didn’t look for this sword and destroy it too. They didn’t know what a samurai used it for. They would be surprised when they understood.
Sometime during the night I had a dream that was full of fire. I was standing in the middle of the flames and I saw no one else. I heard someone calling out, but I didn’t know who it was. Then I stood outside the fire and saw the flames rise all the way up to the sky. Only there was no sky, just fire. I was on my way back into the fire when I woke up covered in sweat. It was like I had really been in there in my dream. I still had the smell of smoke in my nostrils.
Everything was quiet. Then I heard a scraping noise outside. It sounded like someone was moving around on the playground. Then it went silent again. And then that scraping noise again. The window was like a panel of light on the wall. As I walked over to it, the floor felt cold beneath my feet. Sausage was rocking back and forth in his sleep as though he were trying to escape his own dream. Everyone in the dorm room was asleep. There were hours still to go until morning.
I lifted the blinds and looked down onto the grounds. I didn’t see anything except the grass that was more gray than green in the moonlight. Everything was grayer down there. All the colors seemed to have turned over in their sleep. I heard that scraping sound again and I realized what it was. I recognized the squeak of the merry-go-round. It was on the other side of the building, but the sound circled around and around the building too. It creaked again, a hollow scraping sound from the rusty metal.
Someone was sitting on the merry-go-round in the middle of the night slowly spinning around. It was a drawn-out sound that was barely audible. It wasn’t something that would wake you up.
I went back to my bed and sat down and thought. It didn’t take more than a few seconds. I pulled on my shirt and shorts but left my sandals underneath the bed. I strapped on my short sword. The blade felt cold against my leg.
When I sneaked down the stairs, the moon was shining into the mess hall, splitting it into two parts. One for the kids who behaved and one for the kids who didn’t.
As I stood on the stairs, I heard the creak and the scraping sound again from the turning of the merry-go-round. Whoever was sitting on it must be pushing off every so often with their foot. I continued silently down the stairs and then snuck outside.
The grass was wet beneath my feet as I headed cautiously around the corner. Even though the days were so hot, the nights were still wet. Or maybe that was why it was wet. It may have been moisture from the lake rather than rain. The nights had already started to get a little longer and there was more and more moisture. The summer would soon be over—and not just for me.
I could see the lake from where I stood at the corner of the building. The fog floated above the surface of the water and headed in toward land. I could see the merry-go-round. It was spinning very slowly, but enough that you could hear it. Someone was sitting on it. Someone who was just a shadow moving around and around. When the merry-go-round swung toward me I saw the surging glow of a cigarette in the face of the person sitting there. It was Christian.
I took a step back, but he didn’t see me. I don’t think he did anyway. His face was turned toward the main building. There was something over there that was holding his interest the whole time. I looked too. All I could see were the windows to the girls’ dormitories.
All of a sudden he put his foot down and the merry-go-round came to a stop with a little creak. The glow of his cigarette surged again, lighting up his face. It looked like a mask. He glanced toward the lake before he headed off in the other direction and disappeared behind the corner of the building. Then I heard a car engine start up. I ran to the other side and saw the red tail lights disappear through the front gate. Where was he going? It was still nighttime. He had a room here at the camp.
It hit me that Christian must have been here as a child. Matron had been the camp overseer for many years, and when Christian was little, he must have been here. How had it been for him? Had he been allowed to play with the camp children? Had he been alone out in the forest? I tried to picture him as a child among the others, but I couldn’t see him—not any more than I could see him now that the lights of his car had disappeared.
I didn’t see Christian the next morning, either, when I sat in Matron’s office. She wasn’t looking at me but was looking through the window like she was keeping an eye out for him too. Then she turned to me.
“We can’t find your mother.”
“She’s not home,” I answered.
“We know that.” Matron looked out the window again, this time as if she were looking for my mother. “But she doesn’t seem to be at the… other establishment either, the rest home.”
The es-tab-lish-ment. As if our home was an establishment, too, and the rest home was the other one. Like a castle. Only there was no castle in town. The castle was here.
“So we haven’t gotten hold of your mother.” She turned away from the window again. “Do you know anything, Tommy? About where she might be?”
I thought about the letter I’d gotten from Mama, the last one where the letters were a little smudged. She had written that she’d be away when I came home and that she’d explain when she got back. Everything’s been taken care of, she had written. You don’t need to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.
I shook my head.
“You must know something.”
I shook my head again.
“Kenny?”
So, it was Kenny now. She really wanted to know.
Then I started to worry. I hadn’t understood until now.
“What’s happened to my mother?” I asked.
“Nothing’s happened. Not that we know of. We just wanted to speak to her, but she wasn’t there.”
“What about?” I asked.
“What?”
“What were you going to talk to her
about?”
“You, of course. About your behavior here.”
I nodded.
“You do understand that, don’t you? You realize that you’ve been behaving badly?”
I didn’t answer. That wasn’t what I nodded about.
“We can’t keep you here. You do realize that, don’t you?”
She looked out the window again. I couldn’t see out, but I knew the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was just as hot as last week and the week before that. There was going to be another swimming trek around the lake today too. I knew that the children were being lined up outside the building right now.
“That’s what we were going to talk to your mother about.”
Matron ran her hand over her hair that was put up with pins at the back of her neck. They were like secret weapons. “But now we don’t know what to do with you.”
I almost felt happy that Mama wasn’t there to answer when they called. She had chosen the right moment to leave.
“The people at the rest home have to report it to the police,” said Matron. “She’s been missing for over twenty-four hours.”
The rest home. I saw Mama’s face in front of me but it was smudged like the letters in her note.
“Didn’t you receive a letter?”
My thoughts were interrupted. Matron looked down at me.
“You got a letter the other day, didn’t you?” she asked.
I nodded. There was no lying about that.
“Wasn’t it from your mother?”
“Yes.”
“What did she write?”
“Nothing.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s… gone.”
“Gone? What happened to it?”
“I dropped it in the forest.”
“I’ve never heard the like. You dropped a letter in the forest?”
I nodded again. She looked at me like she knew very well I was lying, but she couldn’t force me to say where I’d hidden the letter. In that sense, she knew me. And I knew her.
“What did she write?” asked Matron again.
“Nothing special. Except that she was gonna be gone when I got back.”
“That’s nothing special? What are you saying? I’ve really never heard anything like it. Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“And where were you supposed to go while she was away?”
Of course I wasn’t going to tell her that. I wasn’t going to let Matron send me to Mama’s friend and her stupid kid.
“She was going to take care of it,” I said.
“Take care of it? How?”
“She was going to let me know.”
“My God,” said Matron. “What a family.”
She got up. I got up, too, as a reflex.
“You can go join the others,” she said.
As I was on my way out the door, she called to me.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook,” she said from her desk. “As soon as we get hold of your mother, you’re out of here.”
One day passed and then a second. I gathered that an alert had been sent out for Mama, but that they hadn’t found her yet and that was why I was still at the camp. I wasn’t under house arrest anymore and could move around freely like before. I thought some police officer would come and question me about Mama but nobody came.
I was sitting behind the wall of the castle’s inner courtyard with the letter from Mama in front of me. The paper had gotten all crumpled and thin. It was about to fall apart into shreds. It looked old like parchment or something. The letters looked different—almost like they were from some other language.
Everything’s been taken care of. You don’t need to worry.
What did she mean by that? What had been taken care of? Why didn’t I need to worry? Because it had been taken care of? Because it would be fine?
I was worried, but she had written to me. She would write again when she got to wherever she was going. She’d be there soon. And why should she have to tell the people at that place where she was going? They couldn’t tell her what to do. Nobody could tell Mama what to do, and no one could tell me what to do either, not even Mama.
I heard the troop practicing with their swords outside the moat. Maybe it was Sausage’s new sword I heard. It was almost bigger than he was—like Musashi’s oar when he defeated Kojiro.
My own bokken lay next to me. It wouldn’t be easy even for Christian to break that in two.
I hadn’t seen him since he’d sat there spinning around on the merry-go-round in the middle of the night. He’d had a strange glint in his eyes when he’d looked at me in Matron’s office. It was something I hadn’t really picked up on last summer. Maybe it was more noticeable now that he’d grown up. Something frightening. I hadn’t been able to see how he’d looked when he was staring up at the girls’ window, and I was glad about that. He had driven off, and when I sat there in the castle, I hoped that he would disappear too.
11
I closed my eyes and the shouts from the sword practice seemed to be echoing in a dream. It was my dream. One day we would wake up once this summer was over. Would the ruins of the castle still be there, like the remnants of a dream? Something we knew we had experienced but couldn’t remember in detail?
I opened my eyes and saw the stones that made up the wall. They would still be there for others who came after us, but that wasn’t good enough for me. This was my dream and my castle.
“Wanna go into town? Have you got the guts?”
I had closed my eyes again and his voice was like a loudspeaker in my ear.
Janne was bent over me. He was still wearing his shoulder, knee, hand, and neck guards after the practice session. He looked like an ice hockey player. The only things missing were the skates. Even his helmet looked like an ice hockey helmet.
He was rubbing his shoulder.
“Are you hurt?”
“Micke really laid into me.”
“He always does.”
“This was worse than ever,” said Janne. “It was like he was angry about something.”
“He’s always angry.”
“So are you.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Aw, get out of here.”
“The question was whether we should go into town,” said Janne.
“You mean right now?”
“We’ll make it back for supper.”
“What supper?” I asked and Janne laughed.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”
The field overlooking the town was like an ocean as far as you could see. The wheat swayed in the wind like waves. We tried to stick to the edge of it so the farmer wouldn’t see us and come racing over in his tractor accusing us of destroying his crop. It had happened before.
“You could have a really big battle here,” said Janne. “The two biggest samurai armies in the land.”
“It’s a good spot,” I said.
“Our troop versus Weine’s,” said Janne.
“Weine’s aren’t samurai.”
“But we could fight them just the same.”
“The farmer wouldn’t like it.”
Janne looked around and then turned to me.
“Do you know what I think?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Before this summer’s over, we’re going to have to face them in a big battle. A real battle. A serious one.”
“Not only them,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“We have other enemies.”
“The counselors? Matron?”
“Them as well.”
“Who else?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “But I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
A hitchhiker was standing at the town line. He was on his way out at the same time that we were on our way in. His backpack was on the ground in front of him. As w
e passed him on the other side of the road, he raised his thumb at us like he was wishing us good luck.
“Do you think he’ll get a ride?” asked Janne.
“We’ll see if he’s still there when we go back,” I said.
“Wanna bet on it? I’ll bet you ten that he’ll still be there.”
“Okay,” I said, although I didn’t have any money. But I was sure he’d get a ride before we left town. He seemed pretty confident. He had a cap and sunglasses and looked pretty cool. Maybe too cool, in fact. Anyone ready to offer him a ride might want to see his eyes first.
Then he took off his sunglasses and squinted at us.
“He’s Japanese!” I said.
Janne took a good look at him over his shoulder.
“Nah, he’s just squinting.” He kept on walking.
The Japanese hitchhiker put his sunglasses back on. Did he just want to show me what he was? I wanted to cross the road and ask him, but I didn’t have the nerve. He would probably think I was an idiot.
“If he is Japanese, he might not get a ride,” said Janne turning around to look again. “He’ll still be there when we go back.”
In that case I would lose money, but it would be worth it. I knew there were people from foreign countries who hitchhiked their way around Sweden. I saw someone from Africa once. That was from a train as we were passing through another town. He looked pretty glum, that African, as if he knew he’d never get a ride. But I’d never seen a real live Japanese man before.
We continued walking toward the town center. It wasn’t a big town, but it was bigger than the one I lived in. There was a bridge over a wide river and a park on the other side. The park had a hot dog stand at one end, so we went over there and asked if they had any burnt hot dogs they wanted to get rid of.
“We throw them away,” said the lady behind the counter. She had to lean out of the window in order to see us. “It’s not good for you to eat burnt food.”
“Don’t you have any that are just a little burnt?” asked Janne.
The lady laughed, drew her head back inside, and started doing something behind the counter. Then she handed over two hot dogs in buns with mustard. There didn’t seem to be any burnt bits on either hot dog. They were brown and juicy.
Samurai Summer Page 10