by Maria Gripe
Was it Wise Wit’s eye?
Through her mind rushed everything she had ever heard about Wise Wit. He had lost his one eye when he had gazed too deeply into the well of wisdom, so people said. But she had never believed that.
They also said he had lost his night eye, the bad eye. And so he had only been able to see the light, the beautiful and the good. He hadn’t even been able to see his own shadow.
But this raven was busy studying his own shadow. He could really see it. And he saw more than that. He had an eye that had seen down into the depths of wisdom. Sofia knew that now. It was Wise Wit’s eye.
And that was why the ring had given her no peace. For who could wear Wise Wit’s eye on her finger? The thought made her feel dizzy.
The sun was about to set. It spread out its evening light with a sudden, mighty, bursting display that dazzled them. The whole sky suddenly blazed with light. The stone wall where Wise Wit sat turned red. The road glowed golden.
Stillness fell over the district. Even the commotion in the fairground was hushed. Only the same lonely person in the gypsy wagon went on playing. But his melody began to change, the tones fought a jumbled battle with each other, in which sadness and melancholy changed into a strong tune of joy.
The tune was neither beautiful nor particularly well played. It was plucked by dirty fingers on a simple fiddle, but it grew into a melody that nothing in the world could overcome because it was so truly happy.
Wise Wit felt compelled to follow suit. He lifted his wings and flew right up into the sky.
Albert took Sofia’s hand and pressed it tightly.
Because now they could see who was playing. He stepped out of the wagon and sat down on a stone among the blossoming hop vines in the hedge. It was a little old man, frightfully little, almost a dwarf. His hair and beard fringed his whole face and shone in the glow of the sunset. He was ancient.
It was the little old man who had sold Albert the ring for Sofia.
But he didn’t see them; he just went right on playing.
Then, in the middle of the golden road, Albert and Sofia saw two little children wandering along. Behind them walked Flutter Mildweather. They saw her billowing cloak and her fluttering hat silhouetted against the sun, but when she caught sight of them, she turned and disappeared.
The children went on walking by themselves. Albert and Sofia ran toward them. They were Klas and Klara. They were walking quite peacefully, not at all changed from when they had last been seen so very long ago.
Right there on the road they held the children close in their arms for a long time. Not a word was said, but after a while Klara took Sofia eagerly by the hand and led her away, just as she had done once before.
“We have to go look for the doll, mother,” she said. “Do you think she’s still there?”
And then Albert and Sofia realized that the children had forgotten everything that had happened to them while they were away. And they marveled how this could be.
For how could Albert and Sofia know that those who row across the River of Forgotten Memories never remember what happened to them on the bank they have left behind? They can only remember what happens on the other bank, the one they land on.
Klas and Klara would never remember the House; they would not remember the Lord, nor his Lady, nor even Nana.
It had all sunk forever in the River of Forgotten Memories.
But sometimes they would wonder why they were scared when they walked on high flights of stairs. Or why they sometimes ran up to a mirror with their hearts in their mouths, for fear they would find the mirrors empty. Why were they always so very happy when they could see their reflections?
Once or twice, out of the blue, they woke in the middle of the night and thought they were chained tightly to a giant. But then Sofia lit a candle and said that it was just something they had been dreaming.
“Dreams are like streams,” she would whisper gently in their ears. “Dreams flow away like streams. . . .”
And then they would forget again. . . .
It was a dream—nothing more.
But that evening, in the radiant sunset, they didn’t think of such things.
They walked with their mother and father around the fairground. They watched the dancing bears and the girls dancing on stilts. They rode on the carousel, and they were given presents.
All the dolls in the doll shop had been sold—except the doll with the golden braids, the satin cloak, and the lilac kerchief.
The old lady in the shop was bewildered. She was astonished. She hadn’t noticed that doll at all, she said. And she knew for sure that she hadn’t made a doll like that for this year’s fair. It was a mystery to her how it came to be there. But what did that matter to Klara and Sofia!
And so everything turned out as it was supposed to. When Klara felt the doll in her arms, everything was just as it should be. The circle was closed, and everything was back to normal again. No one needed to know more. And no one understood any more, either.
Of course Flutter Mildweather knew. It was her fate to know and understand more than other people did.
That evening she stood once again out under her apple tree. The blossoms were over now, but she saw that it would bear a great harvest of fruit that autumn, more than she would ever be able to count.
It would be a good year, she could tell.
“Wise Wit,” she called thoughtfully to the raven perched up in the tree. “Do you know now . . . or not?”
“Yes, I know,” replied the raven.
They looked at each other.
“Your eye turned green from lying so long in wisdom’s well. . . .”
“I know that,” said Wise Wit.
“What more do you know?”
The raven fell silent and then gave her a moon-gaze and answered, “Everything. Before the sun knew where it lived, before the moon knew what power it possessed, before the stars knew where they should shine, Wise Wit knew the whole of life.”
Flutter Mildweather listened thoughtfully and nodded at his words.
The raven was his old self again. He had his eye back, his dark eye of the past. Nothing would ever be hidden from him again. He could see ahead and backward in time the way he used to.
Now he looked at her with his other eye, the good eye, which she had not dared believe when it alone looked out on life. But now she could believe it, and it had a hopeful expression. She smiled . . . mint blue.
“So then I can get back to my weaving again,” she said, entering her cottage.
Wise Wit remained up in the tree. He was listening.
He listened to the clatter of her loom. To the murmur of time. To the dew that fell on the grass.
MARIA GRIPE (1923–2007) was born Maja Stina Walter in Sweden’s Stockholm archipelago, the daughter of an army captain. She attended Stockholm University, where she studied philosophy and the history of religion, and in 1946 married the artist Harald Gripe. Though she wrote stories from the time she was a child, Gripe did not publish her first book until she was thirty-one. Her first notable success came in the 1960s with a trilogy of books about Hugo and Josephine, and in 1964 she published Glasblåsarns barn, translated into English as The Glassblower’s Children in 1973. In 1974 she received Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious prize given to a writer of children’s literature. She adapted many of her books for radio, television, and film; in 1998 a movie adaptation of The Glassblower’s Children, starring Stellan Skarsgård, was released. Among Gripe’s books translated into English are The Night Daddy, Elvis and His Secret, and Agnes Cecilia.
HARALD GRIPE (1921–1992) was born and raised in Stockholm. Early in his career he worked as a set designer but later focused on painting and the illustrations he drew for his wife’s many books, working frequently in the style of white line etched into a dark background. His large collection of toy theaters is displayed at Gripe Model Theater Museum in Nyköoping, Sweden, where he and Maria lived for most of their married life.
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