by Ola Larsmo
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At first studying the job listings was merely a way of passing time. Ellen didn’t take them seriously; they were more like a window to other lives than her own. She would fantasize about the meaning behind an announcement like: Efficient and conscientious Swedish girl wanted to do housework for a traveling family. Travel experience necessary. Others were easier to imagine: A capable girl wanted to do cleaning at night for the Whitlock attorneys’ office. References and English proficiency required. But the job listings that truly caught Ellen’s attention were those farther down that were formulated more tersely, even though the space they took up was about the same: Unmarried women 18–20. Typist wanted. Must present work samples. Proficiency in English and Swedish. Apply to the Shelby law offices. That announcement appeared at least once a week, and its recurrence seemed to indicate that they were having trouble finding the right girl, or that no one managed to keep the job for long.
Whenever Ellen brought a newspaper home, she would scan the columns of job listings in the evening. On her way home from work, she often found the morning edition of the Swedish paper left behind at a streetcar stop, stuffed into a wastebasket or tossed on the street. She was ashamed to admit that once in a while, early in the morning, she would snatch a paper from a doorstep she passed on Margaret Street on her way to Klinkenfuer’s. After supper, she would sit down with the papers, mostly because she wanted some time to herself. But it was the classified ads that she read with the greatest interest, especially in the Svenska Amerikanska Posten. If she couldn’t get hold of the Swedish paper, she would read the St. Paul Daily Globe, but the two papers were not equally captivating. It wasn’t that the English was a problem, because after working for more than six months at Klinkenfuer’s, Ellen could read and speak the language well. It was the style of the Swedish announcements that seemed more vivid and garrulous, as if wanting to shout something important to someone who was heading off on a train: The Lindstrom home with two horses and shed in good condition offered for sale due to return journey.
Ellen’s hands had grown hard. On her wrist she had a callus that was just as thick as the kind you could get on the heel of your foot from wearing wet shoes too long. Her skin had adapted to the rough wood of the worktable and the needle’s attempts to nibble at her fingertips. During the first weeks on the job, her wrist and fingers had stung from a white crisscrossing of tiny little scars. Now she hardly noticed if she stuck herself. She still sat next to Liz under the ceiling beams in the corner. It was hot there, but she appreciated the older woman’s quiet companionship. And it was Liz she talked to during the breaks, when most of the Italian seamstresses resorted to their own language.
Everything had settled into place, yet she still read the columns of job announcements in the evening, mostly as a means of retreat. Maybe it was because Elisabet was always so eager to talk when Ellen came home, so she needed to withdraw. But she thought her life was bound to stay the same for the time being.
The following day everything changed. Ellen had actually noticed an odd mood in the room earlier in the morning. Some of the Italian girls had been whispering to each other, and now and then they would cast a glance in her direction. But nothing happened until the brief lunch break. Ellen and Liz had gone outside to the courtyard, as usual, and sat down in the shade of the entrance leading to the street. Suddenly they heard the sound of Italian shoes coming straight toward them. In front stood a dark-haired girl the others called Sophia, and behind her stood a shorter and slightly older girl named Maria. Ellen knew them only by their first names. They wanted to talk to her, so she stood up. Sophia said something in Italian, a long speech that Ellen didn’t understand at all, though her tone of voice was friendly and almost apologetic. Maria stepped forward, and Ellen realized it was her job to act as translator.
“We’ve been thinking about your sister,” she said. “The girl who, uh, was injured. Is she all right now?”
“She’s better,” said Ellen. “She’s looking for a new job.”
“But no job yet?”
Ellen shook her head.
Sophia handed her a little brown paper sack. “For her,” she said. “Prego.”
Maria also took a step forward and said eagerly, “We have taken up a collection. We know that life is hard down in the Hollow. Many Italians live there.”
Both girls curtsied, almost as if they were still in school. Ellen thanked them, not fully understanding. The two Italian seamstresses turned around and walked off, taking quick, resounding steps back to the other girls standing in the far corner of the courtyard. Liz had listened to the whole encounter with an amused smile. Holding her sandwich in one hand, she said, “What was that all about?”
The sack contained a handful of crumpled bills. Ellen counted eight dollars. She could feel heat quickly rise from the nape of her neck. The eyes of the Italian girls were fixed on her back. She turned to Liz and said, “I have to give this back. Right now.” She’d already taken a step away when Liz called to her.
“Don’t do that,” she said quietly. “That would be stupid.”
“But we’re not beggars,” said Ellen, and she could hear her voice quiver with indignation. “Father works. And I do too.”
Liz placed her hand on Ellen’s arm, which was unusual. Otherwise she never touched anyone and always managed to slip elegantly aside if there was a risk of bumping into someone while working. Now she gripped Ellen’s arm with her long, strong seamstress fingers.
“Listen to me,” she said in a low voice. “They always do this whenever anybody gets hurt. Usually it’s just for other Italian girls, but this is an exception. They collected money for your sister, and that’s something new. Accept what they’ve given you and take it home. The next time they collect money for someone, ask to be included. Okay? If you do something stupid right now, you’ll ruin things for others in the future. Do you understand?”
Ellen swallowed hard. In her mind’s eye she pictured herself striding across the courtyard and, with a determined motion, handing back the little crumpled sack to Sophia, who apparently would be insulted. But Liz was always right.
“Then I hope one of them gets hurt soon so I can give back some of the money,” she said crossly, but she instantly heard for herself how stupid that sounded. Liz responded to her outburst with a snort and then went back to her sandwich, taking elegant little bites, like a raccoon.
For the rest of the day Ellen felt the paper sack burning in the pocket of her apron. Time after time she found herself thinking about the long dead Horrible Hans and how, during his last days in the Hollow, he’d gone from one tavern to another, wherever Swedes gathered to drink. Cap in hand, Horrible Hans would bow and scrape to get a coin or two, which the mill workers would toss to him. Sometimes the coins would land on the ground so he had to bend down to pick them up. He always took whatever he could get, but as he left, he would raise his fist at those who had humiliated him. The men merely laughed, and the next time he came by, the same scenario would play out again, down to the smallest detail. Ellen had never seen this herself, but Leonard had talked about what he’d witnessed. In his telling, it became a joke: “Have you heard about how that man acts?”
But she always remembered what her mother had recounted a few years earlier about Lieutenant Gustafsson, the Salvation Army lady in New York. Ellen had to promise not to tell her father that she knew anything about it. Her mother had saved the embroidered handkerchief, hiding it among the towels and sheets, and she took it out to show her daughter, as if it were a precious treasure. Without putting it into words, Ellen knew why her father must never hear about it, and why the handkerchief had been hidden away, at the very bottom of their biggest suitcase.
That night she took the sack home, as she’d promised Liz she would do. She didn’t give it to Elisabet, but instead handed it to her mother, who accepted the money and the explanation with an impassive expression. But Ellen caught a glimpse of Anna’s face as she turned away with the bills
in her hand, and she thought she saw a look of pure relief. Then she thought to herself that by this time she had much more than eight dollars hidden in a tin box and buried in the sandy ground underneath the porch.
The next morning she went over to Sophia to thank her for helping her sister. She spoke in a loud, clear voice so that the others would hear. Then they shook hands. After that everything was back to normal. The Italians still kept to one corner during the lunch break, while Ellen and Liz sat in the other. But for the rest of the day Ellen felt as if she were under a glass dome in which the air was slowly seeping out.
That evening she did the cleaning as fast as she could. Liz had gone home, and Ellen was the only person on both floors of the factory. She went over to the cashier’s glass cage, holding the lantern in her hand, and lifted off the typewriter cover, which she set on the floor. Without glancing around, she took a new and untouched piece of paper from the stack next to the typewriter. Then she took an already typed document from the steel basket marked “out.” It was a note of credit to one of the larger shops selling work clothes on Seventh Street. Ellen began copying the document, typing slowly and carefully, line after line, paragraph after paragraph. It took a while before she figured out how the indentation tabs worked.
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At the front of the Baptist church there was a painting of Jesus as the good shepherd, which showed him lifting a lamb out of the briar bushes and holding a staff under one arm. Above him arched a sky of the clearest blue, extending all the way up to the curved ceiling. High overhead were painted golden stars, but they didn’t look real; they were more like specks of dirt against the blue. Anna didn’t usually pay much attention to what was said from the pulpit, but her gaze always got lost in the blue, which was the same color as a summer sky. If she concentrated and looked straight ahead, she could almost shut out everything on either side—the big, broad-leaved plants on the pedestals, the wooden columns painted to look like marble, the paintings, and even the pastor himself as he sat on his chair on the dais while the choir sang. She looked straight ahead and everything was the same, pale, sky-blue, with nothing in the way. At that moment she wouldn’t be thinking of anything else; she merely listened to the song surging around her, though she did not sing. Occasionally she would silently mouth the words. Then someone would poke her in the side because it was time to pass around the collection box. Usually she had nothing to give and would simply send it on to the wife of carpenter Nilsson. On the other side of her sat the two grown daughters, and there was no mistaking that they were sisters. When they sat still like that, side by side, it was hard to see which girl was healthy and which girl was not. They stared straight ahead, their expressions blank. Both had the same high forehead and clear brown eyes. The sister who was ill was named Kristina. Anna hadn’t known her name until she started going to church with the Nilssons, because normally no one in that family felt compelled to speak unless spoken to directly. Anna realized they’d become accustomed to keeping to themselves—as if for a long time so much of their life had involved turning their backs to the surrounding world, which didn’t understand. Everything centered on Kristina, who was the very hub of the family. Sometimes she’d talk to herself, keeping her head bowed as she muttered sounds that were probably actual words, though they were not comprehensible. If anyone spoke to her, she would smile in a friendly way and then shake her head, as if to signal she didn’t speak the same language. But in the church she was always silent.
Whenever Anna’s anxiety became too great, she would go to church with the family. On their way home, she would walk along as quietly as Mrs. Nilsson, maybe exchanging a few words about something they happened to see, though rarely was it anything important. Occasionally Anna thought she should stop attending church with the Nilssons. They didn’t really need her company, and aside from the pastor she didn’t know the name of anyone else in the congregation. But then a week or two would go by, and she’d begin to feel as if the very air was hard to breathe. She knew that something inside her would ease during that silent promenade up to the church at the corner of Payne Avenue and Sims Street, where she would listen to the music and stare intently at the summery blue. There she would feel at peace and for a time imagine herself outside of everything else.
Mrs. Nilsson and the girls never stayed afterward to have coffee in the church when it was served once a month. Instead, they would go straight home, and Anna was grateful for that. As they walked together back to the Hollow, she felt serene and would start thinking about her daily chores as she exchanged a few words with Mrs. Nilsson about the weather. They never spoke of God.
But one Sunday in early October something happened. Anna’s thoughts wandered as she sat in the church. She kept trying to look straight ahead and focus her attention on the sky-blue backdrop of the painting that rose up to the vaulted ceiling. But after a while the wall was no longer blue. It was white. A completely opaque white. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, she saw the blue color, as well as the briar bushes, the injured lamb, and the Savior’s thin hands. The pastor was sitting on his chair holding his Bible, and there were tiny beads of sweat on his brow. Even though the air had been frosty that morning, it was now quite warm in the big church where every single pew was occupied. Anna looked down at her hands resting on her lap, lightly clasped but not in prayer. Then she looked up at the painting and tried to relax.
Yet after a while the blue faded again and the white returned, enfolding everything. Her face was carried upward, into the white, as if toward a wall she had to go through, though that was impossible; the wall was hard and smooth, with no openings. In the distance she heard the pastor speaking, but she couldn’t make out any of his words. She noticed all of a sudden that she’d completely forgotten to breathe, and she drew in a lungful of air with what must have sounded like a slight shriek. Mrs. Nilsson gave her a nervous look and then went back to staring straight ahead.
During the rest of the church service, Anna sat looking down at her hands, which were trembling, but she couldn’t do anything to keep them still. She didn’t dare look up. The whole time, at the edge of her vision, she sensed the whiteness was ready to flood her whole world if she so much as glanced at it.
When the service was over, everyone stood up, chatting to each other as they headed for the door. Anna stayed where she was. She noticed Mrs. Nilsson and the girls sweep past, Kristina with that faintly unclean odor about her that never seemed to go away. All three then paused in the aisle, looking uncertain. Mrs. Nilsson came over to Anna and touched her shoulder. “I’ll have a word with the pastor,” she said and went over to the dais. To Anna, sitting with her head bowed, Mrs. Nilsson’s gray dress seemed like a blurry patch on the other side of the pew’s dark wood. She didn’t dare look up. The whiteness was there, hovering in her field of vision and ready to envelop her so she would no longer have a way out.
The man who sat down next to Anna was not Pastor Petersson, who had preached the sermon, but one of the assistant ministers. He was a very young man, with blond hair. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles, and he had on a dark suit. He introduced himself as Pastor Anderson, pronouncing his name the American way. For a while he didn’t say another word. The church emptied out, but Anna was aware of the Nilssons over by the doors leading to the vestibule. Then the pastor asked her politely if she would like him to pray with her. She shook her head. Again the pastor fell silent. After a while he sighed and began fingering his leather-bound Bible. Then he spoke.
“We’ve had the pleasure of seeing you here with us from time to time, Mrs. Klar. If there is something weighing on you, I want you to know that we often speak with members of our congregation and other visitors about matters they may find difficult in life. The Lord can help.”
Anna didn’t look at him, thinking this was what he said every day to all sorts of different people. But something was rising into her throat, words over which she had no control. At first she thought she was going to say somethin
g about Carl. Since his death she hadn’t talked about him to anyone other than Inga and Gustaf. Not even the girls. But those were not the words that now spilled from her lips.
“I’m frightened,” she said. “I’m frightened for my younger daughter. I’m frightened all the time.”
She heard that she was whispering, and the young man had to lean closer to hear what she said.
“You’re frightened, Mrs. Klar? Has something happened? Is there illness in your family?”
She shook her head. Images of Carl passed through her mind, unsummoned, when she closed her eyes. That happened often. She didn’t intend to say anything more; she had already said too much. Yet the words kept coming, as if being pulled by a fishing line and hauled into the close, stifling air inside the church.
“I’m so frightened,” she said again. “I’m frightened about how things will go. It’s hard enough as it is.” Then she added, “I’m frightened of what Gustaf will say.” And without saying the words aloud, she thought, And what he will do.