The Woman Who Borrowed Memories

by Tove Jansson

  I didn’t understand. We walked on.

  He said, “You know your grandmother never painted anything but trees, and always trees in the same park. In the end she knew trees, the very essence of trees. She’s very strong. She never lost her passion.”

  Of course I had huge respect for these men who did nothing but search for their lost passion and cared about nothing else, but at the same time I was worried there wasn’t enough coffee and the house was a mess. And I started thinking about what was on our walls; maybe our pictures were completely unacceptable, just things we liked without having any idea why. Keke asked me if I was cold.

  “No,” I said. “One more street and we’ll be home.”

  “Your grandmother,” said Keke, “has she ever talked to you about her work?”

  “No, she never has.”

  “Good,” Keke said, “that’s good. They wrote her off in the sixties but she stuck to her guns. You know, my dear—I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

  “May,” I said.

  “Perfect. You know, it was all Informalism then, everywhere; everyone was supposed to paint the same way.” He looked at me and could see I didn’t understand. “Informalism means, roughly, painting without using definite forms, just color. What happened was that a lot of old, very talented artists hid away in their studios and tried to paint like young people. They were afraid of being left behind. Some managed to do it, more or less, and others got lost and never found their way back. But your grandmother stuck to her own style and it was still there when all that other stuff had had its day. She was brave, or maybe stubborn.”

  I said, very carefully, “Or maybe she could only paint her own way?”

  “Marvelous,” said Keke. “She simply had no choice. You comfort me.”

  We’d come to the door of our building, and I said, “Now we have to be quiet or the neighbors will complain. Jonny, you go up and get something out of the fridge—whatever you can find.”

  We got in. Jonny put out the red wine and glasses and our guests sat down and went on with their conversation. We didn’t turn on the lamp; there was enough light from the window.

  After a bit Jonny said he had something they might like to see, and I knew he wanted to show them his model ship. He’s been working on it for a couple of years, every detail handmade. So they went into the spare room and Jonny switched on the overhead light. I could hear a murmur of conversation but left them in peace and went to the pantry to put on some coffee.

  By and by, Jonny came out into our little kitchen. “They said I’ve got a passion,” he whispered. “A vision of my own.” He was very agitated. “But it’s not theirs, it’s not the one they’re searching for.”

  “Great!” I said. “You take in the coffee and I’ll bring the rest.”

  When I came out, Vilhelm was talking about the flowering bird cherry we’d seen on the way home. He said, “What can you do with something like that?”

  “Just let it flower,” said Keke. “Look, here’s our lovely hostess! Isn’t that right—shouldn’t we just let it flower and admire it? It’s one way to live. Trying to re-create it is another. That’s what it boils down to.”

  After the party broke up, Jonny was silent till we went to bed. Then he said, “Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it’s mine.”

  “It is that,” I said.

  Translated by Silvester Mazzarella

  THE SUMMER CHILD

  IT WAS clear from the very start that nobody at Backen liked him. He was a thin, gloomy child of eleven, who somehow always looked hungry. The boy should have aroused people’s most tender protective instincts, but he just didn’t. Partly it was his way of looking

  at people or, rather, of observing them, with a suspicious piercing stare that was anything but childlike. And then he would hold forth in his odd precocious way, and dear God the things he came out with!

  It would have been easier to overlook all this if Elis had come from a poor home, but he did not. His clothes and his suitcase were clearly expensive and his father’s car had delivered him to the ferry landing. It had all been arranged by advertisement and telephone: the Fredrikson family was offering a holiday home to a child for the summer out of the goodness of their hearts, and for a small fee, of course. Axel and Hanna had discussed it thoroughly—all the big-city children in need of fresh air, woods, water, and good food. They had said all the things people usually say to convince themselves that only one course of action would allow them to sleep easily at night. Meanwhile there was all the rest of the work that had to be done in June. Many of the summer residents’ boats were still in their slips and a couple of them hadn’t even been properly checked over.

  And so the boy arrived, carrying a bunch of roses for his hostess.

  “You really didn’t need to, Elis,” said Hanna, thanking him. “Or was it your mother who sent them?”

  “No, Mrs. Fredrikson,” Elis answered. “My mother’s remarried. It was my father who bought them.”

  “Very kind of him . . . But couldn’t he have waited a little before driving off?”

  “I’m afraid not, an important conference. He sends his respects.”

  “Yes, yes, right,” said Axel Fredrikson. “Well, let’s get aboard and get home. The kids can’t wait to meet you. That’s quite a suitcase you’ve got there.”

  Elis told them it had cost eight hundred and fifty marks.

  Axel’s boat was quite large, a sturdy fishing boat with a deckhouse, and he’d built it himself. The boy climbed awkwardly aboard and at the first splash of spray he grabbed hold of the seat and closed his eyes tight.

  “Axel, don’t drive so fast,” said Hanna.

  “He can go in the deckhouse.”

  But Elis wouldn’t let go of the seat or even once look out at the sea the whole way there.

  The children were waiting expectantly on the dock—Tom, Oswald, and little Camilla, whom they all called Mia.

  “Well,” said Axel. “This is Elis. He’s about the same age as Tom, so you should get on fine.”

  Elis stepped onto the dock, went up to Tom, took his hand, gave a short bow, and said his full name: “Elis Gräsbäck.” Then he did the same with Oswald, but just looked at Mia, who giggled uncontrollably and put her hands over her mouth. They walked up to the cottage, Axel carrying the suitcase while Hanna carried a basket of shopping from the local store. She put on the water for coffee; the sandwiches were already made. The children sat around the table staring at Elis.

  “Just help yourselves,” Hanna urged them. “Elis is new here, so he can go first.”

  Elis half stood up, took a sandwich with a sort of little bow, and said it was remarkably hot for the time of year. The children continued to goggle at him as if bewitched and Mia said, “Mom? Why’s he like that?”

  “Ssh,” said Hanna. “Elis, please help yourself to some salmon. We caught four on Thursday.”

  Elis stood halfway up again and observed that it was remarkable you could still find salmon when the water was so polluted. Then he told them what salmon cost in town, meaning of course for those who could afford to eat salmon outside of special occasions. Somehow he made them all uncomfortable.

  In the evening, when Tom went to empty the slop pail into the bay, Elis followed and saw what he did and talked on and on about the polluted oceans and how irresponsible people were destroying the whole world.

  “He’s weird,” Tom said. “You can’t talk to him. He just talks nonstop about pollution and how much everything costs.”

  “Ignore it,” said Hanna. “He’s our guest.”

  “Weird sort of guest! He follows me around all the time!”

  It was quite true. Wherever Tom went, Elis was right behind: the boathouse, the fishing beach, the woodpile, absolutely everywhere.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Making a bailer dipper, obviously.”

  “Why don’t you have plastic bailers?”

  “Just what we need,” said Tom cont
emptuously. “This dipper’s going to be a special shape, and it’ll take me a while to make it.”

  Elis accepted this and said seriously, “Of course. What with decorating it, as well. But it’s such a waste of good work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, since the world’s going to end, you might as well use plastic.”

  And then he’d start in again, the whole thing, nuclear war and God knows what, blah, blah, blah, nothing but endless blather.

  Their room was in the attic over the kitchen, with a sloping roof and a window that looked out toward the meadow. In the evening Elis would take ages folding his clothes and hanging them up, placing his right shoe properly next to the left and winding up his wristwatch.

  “Yes, but what’s the point of all that?” Tom said. “You said a nuclear war could happen any minute, even tomorrow. Then it’s all down the drain with Friberg’s gherkins.”

  “Friberg’s gherkins?”

  “It’s just a saying.”

  “Why? Who’s Friberg?”

  “Lie down and go to sleep and stop being stupid. I don’t feel like talking.”

  Elis turned to the wall. His silence was compact, but you knew very well what he was thinking, and you knew that little by little it would all come out, there was no stopping it, and come it did, a soft-spoken litany about the ruined sea and the ruined air and then all the wars and all the people who had nothing to eat and were dying everywhere all the time and what can we do, what can we do . . .

  Tom sat up in bed and said, “But that’s all a million miles away. Come on, what’s really up with you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elis, adding after a while, “don’t be angry with me.”

  Then, at last, silence.

  Tom was used to being the eldest and making decisions and giving orders to Oswald and Mia and sorting out the silly things they did; it was just what older brothers do. But for some reason it was different with Elis; totally impossible to get any sense into him even though he was the same age as Tom. You just got angry with him. It didn’t even feel good when he admired you. And it was all so unfair. Like that business with the grebe. It wasn’t Tom’s fault the bird got stuck in the net. These things happen. He threw it in the water and Elis made a big deal out of it. “Tom. That grebe took a long time to die. They can dive tens of meters deep. Did you know that? Think how she must have felt, how long she must have tried to hold her breath . . .”

  “You’re crazy,” Tom said, but it made him feel bad.

  Or he might say, “I know what you do with kittens, you drown them. Do you have any idea . . . ?” And on and on—it was unbearable.

  Elis buried the grebe up near the road to the town where there had been a forest fire and there was nothing left among the tree stumps but willow herb; trust him to find a spot like that. He put up a cross with a number on it. Number one. Other graves followed—rat-trap victims, birds that had flown into windows, poisoned field mice, all solemnly buried and numbered. Sometimes Elis would remark in passing about all the lonely graves that had no one to care for them. “And where is your own family graveyard? I’m interested. Do you have a lot of relatives buried there?”

  When it came to giving people a bad conscience, he was an expert. Sometimes all he had to do was just look at you with those gloomy, grown-up eyes and you would instantly be reminded of all your failings.

  One day, when Elis’s forebodings were even gloomier than usual, Hanna cut him off. “You’re very well informed about everything that’s dying and miserable, aren’t you, Elis?”

  “I have to be,” he answered seriously. “No one else cares.”

  For a moment Hanna was overcome by goodness knows what and wanted to take the child in her arms and hug him, but his stern gaze stopped her. “I shouldn’t be so hard on him,” she told herself later. “I must be kinder.” But before she had the chance, something terrible and unforgivable happened. Elis promised to give little Mia three Finnish marks to show him her bottom. “He wanted to watch me pee,” said Mia. And, almost as bad, Elis asked his landlord, “How much are you getting for me?”

  “What did you say?”

  “How much a month are you being paid for me? Is it over the counter? I mean, are you paying tax on it?”

  Axel exchanged a look with his wife and left the kitchen.

  On top of all this, Elis had a real talent for finding things that were broken. He was constantly dragging in damaged items and showing them to Tom. “Can you fix this? You can fix anything. Look, it’s been out in the rain and it’s gone all moldy. It was nice, once.”

  “Chuck it out,” said Tom. “I only make new things. I can’t be bothered with rubbish.”

  Elis collected the junk in a pile beside his cemetery. The pile got bigger and bigger and he seemed almost proud of his sad collection. No one else ever noticed all the worn-out, useless junk scattered on the hill. They simply didn’t see it. But Elis did, with his sharp, critical eye. Sometimes when he fixed the family with that look of his, they would suddenly become conscious that their work clothes were filthy, and their hands.

  One time Hanna spoke to him with a bit of authority: “Elis, please, just eat your dinner and stop agonizing about everything. Put a little flesh on your bones so your father won’t be ashamed of you when he collects you in the autumn.”

  Elis said, “You mean you’ll be able to put up with me until the autumn?” When no one said anything, he went on. “You waste an awful lot of food. Do you never think about all the people in the world who have no food at all? I’m sorry to have to say it, but I know what you throw away and how it all ends up in the sea.”

  “That’s enough!” Axel burst out and got up from the table. “I’m going outside to look at the boats.”

  Admittedly the Fredriksons were a bit spoiled. They didn’t like food unless it was absolutely fresh, whether fish or meat or Hanna’s home-baked bread, so a great deal did wind up down the drain with Friberg’s pickles, as the saying goes. Elis discovered this fact at once. He would go to the fridge and take out the leftovers that usually lay there until they were stale enough to be thrown away with a clear conscience. He would carefully rescue these remnants and eat them. He might say, for instance, “No meatballs, thank you. The old fish soup is fine for me.”

  “Ha ha,” said Oswald, who followed most of what was happening and thought about it, and who never had his brother to himself anymore because of the summer child. “Ha ha. You’re our new slop pail, aren’t you?”

  “We eat what we eat,” Axel said. “But it’s not good manners to comment on what our guests eat. Food is not something we discuss. It’s just a fact of life.”

  “It most certainly is not,” Elis objected. “Think of all the poor people who don’t—” But that was as far as he got, because Axel banged his hand on the table and said, “Now you be quiet! And the rest of you, too. There’s no peace in this house anymore.”

  Out of doors, though, all was completely at peace. It was a time of light breezes and soft summer rain; down in the meadow the apple trees were in bloom, and all of nature was at its loveliest. In previous summers, Tom had wandered the woods and along the shore through the bright summer nights, but it was no fun this year. He could never count on being alone.

  “Mom,” he said. “How long is he staying?”

  “People come and people go,” Hanna answered. “Relax. There’s a time for everything. This, too, will pass.”

  The worst part was that Elis was able to support all his arguments with incontrovertible statistics. Whenever the news came on, he glued his ear to the radio to collect new miseries or get the old ones confirmed. The news was the only program he cared about. But he would sometimes mix actual catastrophes with his own fantasies, which then wormed their way so deeply into his dreadful prophecies that Tom didn’t know which way was up.

  With Elis around, you had to be constantly ready for the worst. For example, Granny was a long-term patient in the local hospital, but when
Elis came in and said “She just died!,” it turned out it wasn’t Granny he meant, but a crow with one leg, for heaven’s sake, that he’d been caring for all week.

  One day when Hanna was taking the bus to go and see her mother, Elis asked if he could come along, and she thought why not. Of course he was a morbid child, but he did have great compassion for any creature in distress.

  The experiment was not repeated. Granny didn’t care for all the sighing and groaning at her bedside. He shook his head mournfully and pressed her hand as if saying a final farewell, and when he went out for a few minutes, she asked Hanna angrily, “Who’s this insufferable child you’ve dragged along?”

  There was no getting around the fact that the summer child was affecting everyone in the house. They were all a little afraid of him. Axel no longer smoked his pipe after meals but he stomped straight off to the boathouse. He’d grown sullen, and one day when Elis started interrogating him about his income and political views, he stood up and walked out in the middle of the fish soup. Little Mia was too small and innocent to understand, but she sensed the change and grew whiny and difficult. As for Oswald, he was openly jealous. Tom had no time for him anymore, and when they did go out fishing together it wasn’t in the nice old friendly, peaceful way. Oswald developed a biting irony: “Are you really going to murder that poor little cod?” or “Look how many corpses in the net today!” And so forth. The whole family had fallen on evil days.

  Axel and Hanna knew they’d put a terrible burden on Tom with this summer child, but what could they do? They had their hands full with their daily chores and the kids pretty much had to look out for themselves.

  One day, Axel said, “Tom, forget about splitting that firewood, please, and go keep an eye on Elis.”

  “I’d rather split wood. But he’ll be around my neck in any case, so what difference does it make?”

  “Well, do what you want,” said Axel helplessly and started to walk away, then turned back and said, “I’m so sorry about all this.”

  You think you’re taking in an underprivileged child from the city, but no, you’re saddling yourselves with an implacably critical observer who never lets up about the wickedness and sorrows of the world. Do people in the city all raise their kids to view the world with suspicion? Do they all burden them with a conscience they’re too young to understand or manage? Axel discussed it with his wife and she thought maybe they did. The boy needed a change. Why not take him out on the water a bit, now the weather was so calm and beautiful? Hanna could use the time to visit some of her relatives in Lovisa, and Axel had to take some gas canisters out to the lighthouses in any case. The Coast Guard office had phoned that very morning to say the beacon at Västerbåda had gone out. Axel thought it was an excellent idea, so he went off to fuel the boat and stow the canisters, and Hanna started packing a lunch.