by Ola Larsmo
All was quiet as Gustaf and Jonathan walked the last part of the way up to their own homes. The only sound was the wind in the trees on the slope up toward Dayton’s Bluff and a faint trickling that they heard as they passed the creek, invisible in the dark.
The windows were dark in Gustaf’s house, but in spite of his weariness, he noticed that something was different. He opened the door and went in.
Anna and Elisabet were sitting at the table in the dark. He didn’t see Ellen and assumed she was already asleep up in the loft. The two women sat in silence, waiting for him, and he realized they’d heard the news. The train wreck had probably been the big topic of conversation in the neighborhood all day. The Rossi family had never lived in the Hollow, but they had relatives among some of the Italian newcomers farther down the hill.
Anna looked up when Gustaf came in and took off his boots. His eyes weren’t yet accustomed to the dim light indoors, so he couldn’t make out her expression, but her eyes were shiny in the faint moonlight coming through the window. Even though he was exhausted, he sat down at the table across from his wife and daughter. They were saving on candles and also didn’t want to disturb Ellen. But clearly there was something they wanted to say. The very air in the room felt as if it had already absorbed far too many words.
“How did it go?” asked Anna at last. She leaned forward and whispered the words.
“We got him out. A Catholic priest came over instead of the family and took Rossi away. We couldn’t finish taking care of the engine tonight. That’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
He didn’t say any more about the subject, but he was thinking about what Jonathan Lundgren had muttered as they put their tools back in the shop. He said that a couple of days’ interruption of service on the train line wasn’t going to help matters for the Great Northern, and the men could probably count on yet another wage cut before the month was out. But right now Gustaf didn’t want to brood over that or even mention it to his wife and daughter.
“Would you like to tell your father what we’ve been talking about?” said Anna quietly as she placed her hand on Elisabet’s arm. Her daughter swallowed hard. Up in the loft, Ellen turned over, annoyed but only half-awake, prompting loud creaks from her bed, which had been made for a much smaller girl.
“There’s been so much death,” said Elisabet, speaking in a voice that suddenly sounded more grown up than Gustaf had previously noticed. Her voice seemed stronger. He thought maybe that had happened because she was pregnant, but he didn’t really know.
Elisabet went on: “I think the baby is a boy. I’m almost positive about that. And I thought—if Father doesn’t think it’s terribly stupid of me—that I’d like to name him Carl. Leonard says he’s happy with the name.”
Then she fell silent, waiting for Gustaf to reply. He felt her nervousness streaming toward him in the dark. She inhaled deeply, stifling a sob. For a moment he wasn’t sure what he thought. Anger surged to the surface, swerving like a fish. It’s not possible to replace somebody like that. But then he felt a sense of calm settle over him, maybe because he was so tired. The image of his own son sped past, as if Carl had silently run by, little more than a swift movement seen out of the corner of his eye. Like a gust of wind blowing through the room, though he knew he’d only imagined it because he was half-asleep. But there was no pain afterward. He waited for it, but he continued to feel calm.
“Let’s wait till he’s here,” Gustaf said then. “Let’s see if he looks anything the same. If he does, that’ll be fine.”
None of them wanted to be the first to get up. They sat at the table for a while longer without speaking. Up in the loft, Ellen was now breathing quietly, sound asleep. It must have been close to midnight, and everything was about to start over again, exactly where it had all once ended.
:: :: ::
Ellen didn’t like her workmates. She sat in the same room with five other girls. Three of them were Swedes, and as soon as the door closed to the bigger office, they would begin chatting with each other, whispering from behind their typewriters. Even though they spoke Swedish, Ellen rarely heard what they said. Once again she was the new person, and she knew from her experience at the Klinkenfuer factory that it meant she had to start at the very bottom. The other girls didn’t pay much attention to her. Sometimes but not always they would give her a slight nod when she arrived in the morning. During the first weeks she didn’t know anyone’s name, and they didn’t bother to introduce themselves. Gradually she learned their names from the papers she typed and from hearing them talking to each other. The Swedes were Cecilia Clara, Hilda Maria, and Karolina. The American girls answered to the names of Pearl and Mabel and mostly kept to themselves.
In the beginning Ellen didn’t have time to wonder what the other girls thought of her, the newcomer. She was dealing with her own fear, until eventually it resolved into something else. She began each day feeling so scared that she shook all over, although she didn’t think anyone else noticed. It took a couple of weeks before her fear was transformed into an all-absorbing focus on the task at hand. Sometimes she would get so immersed in her work that she saw only what was right in front of her on the worn wooden surface of the desk.
She loved the double-page documents on certificate-size paper with deckle edges and the way they sounded when she unwrapped them. Sometimes they were tied with violet cloth ribbons when they arrived. It was much more satisfying to translate and type a contract written on that sort of paper than to take pages of lined writing paper from a pad on which Mr. Lundquist—his first name turned out to be Ferdinand, but no one in the office called him anything but Fred—had scribbled various notes while speaking with a client. It was her job to bring order to his notes.
On certain days it would get quite stuffy in the long and narrow typing room if the door was kept closed, and the other girls always reeked of perfume. Ellen felt a sorrow mixed with panic when she realized she could no longer compete with the cleanliness of her workmates. When she got her first wages, she went out at lunchtime to the slightly nicer drugstore on the other side of Fourth Street and bought three bars of expensive lavender soap wrapped in crepe paper. She left the little parcel on her desk all afternoon, hoping the strong scent would mask any other odors she might have brought with her from the Hollow or the streetcar. Or, in the worst-case scenario, the smells streaming from her own pores, impossible to stop.
Nobody said anything. Nobody offered a single critical remark about her clothes or her person. But what scared her and formed a muted backdrop to her whole day was that someone might notice how she smelled. And she was fairly certain that it was not something she could get rid of entirely, no matter how much she scrubbed her skin and washed her clothes. She counted her coins and went to see Liz to buy another secondhand blouse so she would have one to wear and one to wash.
Those first weeks Ellen sat as far away from everyone else as she could, which was no doubt perceived as embarrassment on her part. Gradually she realized that the three other Swedish girls, who shared a rented room in Minneapolis, used their perfume as a way of masking any other odors. They all smelled the same every day and could probably get away with not changing their blouses for several weeks in a row.
After a while they began talking to her, offering casual remarks, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “Have you seen the paper from Lundstrom’s, Ellen? Do you have any envelopes left, Ellen? Ugh, what awful weather today, and I didn’t bring my umbrella—could I borrow yours, Ellen, when I run across the street with a letter?” Although she had no umbrella to lend, of course.
After a month or so, everybody took her presence for granted. The three other Swedes stuck together, arriving and leaving at the same time. But they still hadn’t seen through her. She no longer hated them, but she avoided them as best she could. Ellen sat at her place in the corner, spoke only if necessary, and nobody sniffed knowingly at the air whenever they passed her. When asked where she lived, she merely replied, �
�St. Paul.” The address she listed on the employment contract was for Larson’s grocery store. Nobody would ask any questions if a letter arrived for her there, since no one in the Hollow had a proper address. They all went to Larson’s to get any mail that came for them. Mr. Larson didn’t like it, even though it caused him no trouble, and it did force people to go to his store.
In general, little was said in the office other than a few polite comments to Mr. Lundquist and brief exchanges with the other girls. It was always late by the time Ellen got home. For her, Minneapolis was still nothing more than a long, low tunnel of darkness and slush. And the Hollow was always dark when she got back.
On certain nights Elisabet didn’t want to sleep alone in Leonard’s house. Ellen knew she was scared because Leonard’s mother had died there when Leonard was out working on the line. Elisabet didn’t need to say it out loud, because Ellen knew what was going on in her sister’s mind. She also knew that on those evenings Elisabet would sit and wait for her, longing to chat. She wanted to talk about the baby she was expecting and what it would be like. But when Ellen got home, she didn’t have the energy to talk for more than a short time. A wall seemed to come down inside her, and she saw her sister’s face, but she couldn’t take in what she was saying. She excused herself by explaining she was tired, but Elisabet wouldn’t always let her get away with that.
One evening Elisabet grabbed Ellen’s arm so hard that her fingernails sank into her skin as she hissed, “It feels like you don’t even live here anymore, so why don’t you just move out?”
Ellen couldn’t think of anything to say, but the remark followed her into her dreams. But where? Where was she supposed to go?
She was neither here nor there. It felt as if she spent most of her spare time sitting on the hard bench in the streetcar, enveloped in the smell of damp wool, tobacco smoke, and melting snow. Her sole task was to follow the slow procession of the streetlamps on the other side of the windowpane that was coated with ice and the steam created by the breathing of hundreds of strangers. Sometimes Ellen would fall asleep, but she always awoke with a jolt, terrified that she might have missed her stop. After Maria Avenue, where she had to get off, the streetcar continued on, heading for the great unknown, and it wouldn’t stop until it reached faraway Wildwood. She spent the entire year and some months afterward wrapped in a glass globe of silence, typing other people’s words.
Ellen felt a certain peace in not belonging here or there but in between. At home in the Hollow she was always on her way to work, and once she arrived at the office, she was invisible, or nearly so. That was not where she belonged. The seat in the streetcar was hers, along with the darkness outside. That was all. Until one evening when she came home and found Elisabet sitting on the front steps wrapped in the worn red quilt their mother had brought from her parents’ home. Ellen saw her sister from far away, as she came up the slope. A hunched figure in the shadow of the covered porch. She realized Elisabet was waiting for her, so she walked a little slower, uncertain what to expect. Finally she reached the house. Elisabet looked up, her eyes swollen from crying, which was so often the case these days. Her whole body was swollen from the pregnancy, and she cried easily. But right now she had something on her mind.
Elisabet got up and stood as erect as a statue as Ellen came toward her. When they met on the steps, Elisabet took her big sister’s hand and said quietly, “Promise me you won’t move away until after the baby is born and everything has settled down. Promise me.”
Elisabet’s hand was ice-cold. She must have been sitting there for a long time. Ellen got worried, thinking she needed to get her indoors before anything happened to her. She put her arm around her sister’s shoulders and tried to turn her around toward the door, but Elisabet refused to budge. “Promise me,” she said again. Ellen thought to herself, Where do you think I would go? Aloud she said, “I promise.” Elisabet nodded and sighed with relief. Then they both went inside.
Spring was late in coming. Down in the Hollow it was usually somewhat warmer than up on the street, and the hazel trees along the creek began sprouting buds while the trees on Seventh Street were still completely bare. Elisabet’s due date was getting closer, though Ellen wasn’t sure exactly when it was supposed to be. They didn’t talk about such things. Yet she knew that Elisabet did talk to Inga about all those kinds of matters, as if Inga knew everything, as usual, even though she was also expecting her first child shortly after Elisabet.
When the last of the snow drifts disappeared, Ellen’s shoes were dry when she got off the streetcar on Fourth Street in Minneapolis. Only in the alleyway, where the sun never reached, did a dirty yellow layer of snow linger next to the brick wall. The first fly to appear in the bay window made her look up from her work as if awakened from a dream. She watched the buzzing insect for a long time as it kept flying against the glass, as if it were carrying out some urgent task. In the mornings she began worrying about where to get different shoes. When it got too warm for Liz’s worn high-button shoes, they would attract the attention, and ridicule, of the other girls.
She typed. The papers passed more quickly across her desk than anyone else’s. She didn’t care about the occasional sharp comment from the other girls, like the day when Mabel walked past and behind her back snapped, “By all means, don’t wait for us.” At first Ellen didn’t realize that the American girl was speaking to her. She glanced up and smiled, but Mabel looked away.
When Ellen was focusing on her typing, she was able to leave everything else behind. With reference to the verbal agreement as of the 17th of this month, it is hereby incumbent upon Johannes Nilsson, farmer in Scandia, to hand over to the new owner before the end of the month the aforementioned property, including all inventory.
Toward the end of the month Mr. Shelby Jr. began appearing more often in the typing room. Now that winter was over, the door to the office frequently stood open. At any moment, and without warning, he might show up with more papers that were a priority, and he’d usually turn to Ellen. “Miss Klar, when you’re finished,” he’d say. She could almost cry when she saw that the stack of papers, which had been gradually diminishing, would suddenly be just as big as when she’d started in the morning. Yet he’d stand there, chatting, as if she had all the time in the world. Maybe he did, but she did not. Yet she said, “Yes, Mr. Shelby. No, Mr. Shelby.” And tried to smile. Until one day when he said, “Why don’t you call me Sol? That’s short for Solomon.”
He was still young, though maybe ten years older than Ellen.
He was not unpleasant. It was just that he took up too much of her time. Often he gave her so much to type that she had to stay a half-hour after the others had left for the day. She didn’t really mind staying for a while longer to work. It was wonderful to have the whole room to herself, and by now it was light enough in the evenings that her trip home wasn’t as unnerving as before. But Mr. Shelby talked so much. About nothing. For instance, about some amusing Swedish client they had. And when he tried to imitate the man’s way of talking, he sounded as if his mouth was full of porridge. Ellen laughed, even though it wasn’t especially funny.
One day he came in carrying a ball that he tossed from one hand to the other. It was new and white and clearly had never been used before. He might have bought it at a shop that very day. “Do you like baseball, Miss Klar?” he asked. She merely shook her head and kept typing. He stood there holding the ball in his hand. She shook her head again, keeping her eyes fixed on the typewriter. Finally he nodded, set the ball on her desk, and silently left the room. She thought he must have forgotten the ball and would come back to get it, maybe after she’d left for the day. He often worked after hours behind the closed door to his office. But the baseball was still on her desk when she got to work the next morning. She didn’t touch it.
Ellen got used to seeing Mr. Shelby appear in the typing room. He talked to the other girls as well, teasing them in the same way. But he always ended up coming over to where she sat, and as the
spring progressed, a too-bright ray of sun would land on her desk from the only window in the room.
“I didn’t know you had red hair, Miss Klar,” he said.
She looked up in surprise.
“I don’t, Mr. Shelby,” she replied. “It must be because of the sunlight.”
“Ah,” he said with a smile. “Well, it looked reddish against the light. By the way, I said you could call me Sol, Miss Klar. All the others do. Sol. ‘Mr. Shelby’ is my father.”
She nodded. She still couldn’t bring herself to say his first name.
“I’d like to ask you a favor, Miss Klar,” he went on. “If you have time for it, that is. Although it’s on Sunday.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she merely nodded.
“We usually sponsor an outing for the office every year,” he told her. “Perhaps you didn’t know that since you haven’t been with us very long.”
She shook her head.
“Well, on Sunday I was thinking of going to look at some locations for this year’s outing. And I thought I’d ask you to accompany me, Miss Klar. As the representative for the girls who work here. Someone usually goes along.”
She looked down, not knowing how to reply.
“It’s not an order. You may do as you please, Miss Klar.”
Then she found herself nodding.
At home she told her family honestly that the boss had asked her to accompany him in order to make plans for an office outing. By now they were used to Ellen going off on her own, and her mother also admitted that she had no idea how things functioned in an office, though she did think it was a shame her daughter would have to work on a Sunday. Ellen replied that it wasn’t so much work as an excursion. And in the middle of the day.
“But you’ll be home before dark, won’t you?” asked her mother, sitting in partial shadow on the other side of the table. At that time of year nobody in the Hollow lit candles or lamps.