The Summer Book (15 page)

“Grandmother was superstitious.”

“What’s ‘superstitious’?”

Grandmother thought for a moment, and then she said that superstitious was when you didn’t try to explain things that couldn’t be explained. Like, for example, cooking up magic potions when there was a full moon and actually getting them to work. Grandmother’s grandmother had been married to a priest, who didn’t believe in superstition. Every time he was sick or depressed, his wife would cook up an elixir for him, but the poor woman was forced to do it in secret. And when it made him well, she had to pretend it was
Innosemtseff’s Tonic
that had done the trick. It was a great strain on her over the years.

Sophia and Grandmother sat down by the shore to discuss the matter further. It was a pretty day, and the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this – dog days – that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from the sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid.

When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders.

“Maybe we ought to warn Papa,” Sophia said.

“I don’t think he’s superstitious,” Grandmother said. “For that matter, superstition is old-fashioned, and you should always believe your father.”

“Of course,” Sophia said.

The swell carried in a big crown of twisted branches, as if some gigantic animal were wandering slowly in along the sea bed. The air above the rock stood still and quivered with the heat.

“Didn’t your grandmother ever get scared?” Sophia said.

“No, but she liked to scare other people. She’d come in to breakfast and say that now someone was going to die before the moon set, because the knives were crossed in the drawer. Or she would have had a dream about black birds.”

“I dreamed about a guinea pig last night,” Sophia said. “Do you promise to be careful and not break any bones before the moon sets?”

Grandmother promised.

The odd thing was that the milk actually did go sour. They caught a stickleback in their net. A black butterfly flew into the house and lit on a mirror. And then towards the evening Sophia discovered that the knife and the pen on Papa’s desk were crossed. She moved them apart as quickly as she could, but of course the damage was done. She ran to the guest room and banged on the door with both hands, and Grandmother opened it right away.

“Something’s happened,” Sophia whispered. “The knife and the pen were crossed on Papa’s desk. And no, nothing you say can make it any better!”

“But don’t you understand?” Grandmother said. “My grandmother was just superstitious. She made things up because she was bored, and so that she could tyrannise her family …”

“Quiet,” said Sophia seriously. “Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything to me.” She left the door standing open and walked away.

The first cool of the evening arrived, and the dancing midges disappeared. The frogs came out and started singing to each other, while the dragonflies seemed to be dead. In the sky, the last red clouds sank into the yellow ones, making orange. The forest was full of signs and portents, its own secret written language. But what good did that do Papa? There were footprints where no one could have stepped, crossed branches, one red blueberry bush in the midst of all the green ones. The full moon rose and balanced on the top of a juniper bush. Now was the time for unmanned boats to glide out from their shores. Huge, mysterious fish made rings on the water, and the red spiders gathered wherever it was they had decided to meet. Implacable fate sat waiting just over the horizon.

Sophia searched for herbs to make an elixir for her father, but all she could find were plain, ordinary plants. It is never clear which plants can be considered herbs. They are very small, presumably, with soft, pale stems. If possible, they should be slightly mouldy and grow in swampy places. But how could you tell for sure? The moon rose higher and began its inevitable orbit.

Sophia shouted through the door: “What kind of herbs did she cook, that grandmother of yours?”

“I’ve forgotten,” Grandmother said.

Sophia came in. “Forgotten?” she said between her teeth. “Forgotten? How can you forget a thing like that? If you’ve forgotten, then what am I supposed to do? How do you expect me to save him before the moon sets?”

Grandmother put aside her book and took off her glasses.

“I’ve turned superstitious,” Sophia said. “I’m even more superstitious than your grandmother was. Do something!”

Grandmother got up and started putting on her clothes.

“Forget the stockings,” said Sophia impatiently. “And the corset, too. We have to hurry!”

“But even if we pick the herbs,” Grandmother said, “even if we pick them and make an elixir, he won’t drink it.”

“That’s true,” Sophia admitted. “Maybe we could pour it in his ear.”

Grandmother pulled on her boots while she thought.

Suddenly Sophia started to cry. She had seen the moon over the sea, and a person never knew about the moon. It can set all at once, on its own peculiar schedule. Grandmother opened the door and said, “Now you mustn’t say a word. You mustn’t sneeze or cry or belch, not even once, until we’ve gathered everything we need. Then we’ll put it all in the safest place we can find and let it work from a distance. In this case, that will be very effective.”

The island was bright in the moonlight, and the night was quite warm. Sophia watched as Grandmother plucked the head of a beach pea, picked up two small pebbles and a wisp of dry beach grass, and stuffed it all in her pocket. They walked on. In the woods, Grandmother collected a bit of tree moss, a piece of fern, and a dead moth. Sophia followed along silently, her nerves growing a little calmer with each item that Grandmother put in her pocket. The moon looked slightly red and was almost as bright as day. A path of moonlight led towards them over the water, all the way to the shore. They went straight across the island to the other side, and now and then Grandmother would bend over to pick some important ingredient.

Large and black, she moved along in the path of the moon. Her stiff legs and her walking stick marched steadily forwards, and she grew larger and larger. The moonlight rested on her hat and her shoulders as she watched over fate and the island. There was not the least doubt that she would find what they needed to avert misfortune and death. It all found a place in her pocket. Sophia followed along right behind her and saw how Grandmother carried the moon on her head, and the night became utterly serene. When they were back at the house, Grandmother said they could talk again.

“Quiet!” Sophia whispered. “Don’t talk. Let it lie there in your pocket.”

“Good,” Grandmother said. She broke off a little piece of rotting wood from the steps and put it in with the rest, and then she went to bed. The moon sank into the sea, and there was no cause for alarm.

From that day on, Grandmother kept her cigarettes and matches in her left-hand pocket, and they all lived together happily until autumn. Then Grandmother sent her coat to the cleaners, and almost immediately Sophia’s father sprained his ankle.

August

E
VERY YEAR, THE BRIGHT
S
CANDINAVIAN
summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and autumn is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the lamp is hung up on its peg beside the door.

Not right away, but little by little and incidentally, things begin to shift position in order to follow the progress of the seasons. Day by day, everything moves closer to the house. Sophia’s father takes in the tent and the water pump. He removes the buoy and attaches the cable to a cork float. The boat is pulled ashore on a cradle, and the dory is hung upside down behind the woodyard. And so autumn begins. A few days later, they dig the potatoes and roll the water barrel up against the wall of the house. Buckets and garden tools move in towards the house, ornamental pots disappear, Grandmother’s parasol and other transitory and attractive objects all change places. The fire extinguisher and the axe, the pick and the snow shovel, appear on the veranda. And at the same time, the whole landscape is transformed.

Grandmother had always liked this great change in August, most of all, perhaps, because of the way it never varied: a place for everything and everything in its place. Now was the time for the traces of habitation to disappear, and, as far as possible, for the island to return to its original condition. The exhausted flower beds were covered with banks of seaweed. The long rains did their levelling and rinsing. All the flowers still in bloom were either red or yellow, strong patches of colour above the seaweed. In the woods were a few enormous white roses that blossomed and lived for one day in breathless splendour.

Grandmother’s legs ached, which may have been due to the rain, and she couldn’t walk around the island as much as she wanted to. But she went out for a little while every day just before dark, and tidied up the ground. She picked up everything that had to do with human beings. She gathered nails and bits of paper and cloth and plastic, pieces of lumber covered with oilspill, and an occasional bottle top. She went down to the shore and built fires where everything burnable could go right ahead and burn, and all the time she felt the island growing cleaner and cleaner, and more and more foreign and distant. It’s shaking us off, she thought. It will soon be uninhabited. Almost.

The nights got darker and darker. There was an unbroken chain of navigational lights and beacons along the horizon, and sometimes big boats thumped by in the channel. The sea was motionless.

When the ground was clean, Sophia’s father painted all the ringbolts with red lead, and one warm, rainless day he soaked the veranda with seal fat. He oiled the tools and the hinges, and swept the chimney. He put away the nets. He stacked wood against the wall by the stove for next spring, and for anyone who might be shipwrecked on the island, and he tied down the woodshed with ropes because it stood so near the high-water mark.

“We have to take in the flower stakes,” Grandmother said. “They spoil the landscape.” But Sophia’s father let them be, for otherwise he wouldn’t know what was there in the ground when they came back. Grandmother worried about a lot of things. “Suppose someone lands here,” she said. “They always do. They wouldn’t know the coarse salt is in the cellar, and the trapdoor may have swelled from the damp. We have to bring up the salt and label it, so they won’t think it’s sugar. And we ought to put out some more leggings – there’s nothing worse than wet leggings. And what if they hang their nets over the flower bed and trample it all down? You never know about roots.” A little later, she started worrying about the stovepipe and put up a sign: “Don’t close the damper. It might rust shut. If it doesn’t draw, there may be a bird’s nest in the chimney – later on in the spring, that is.”

“But we’ll be back by then,” Sophia’s father said.

“You never know about birds,” Grandmother said. She took down the curtains a week early and covered the south and east windows with disposable paper bedsheets, on which she wrote, “Don’t remove the window covers or the autumn birds will try to fly right through the house. Use anything you need, but please carry in some more wood. There are tools under the workbench. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Why are you in such a rush?” Sophia asked, and her grandmother answered that it was a good idea to do things before you forgot that they had to be done. She set out cigarettes and candles, in case the lamp didn’t work, and she hid the barometer, the sleeping bags, and the seashell box under the bed. Later, she brought out the barometer again. She never hid the figurine. Grandmother knew no one understood sculpture, and she thought it wouldn’t hurt them to be exposed to a little culture. She also made Papa leave the rugs on the floor, so the room wouldn’t look unfriendly over the winter.

Covering two of the windows changed the room, made it secretive and conspiratorial, and, at the same time, very lonely.

Grandmother polished the handle on the door and scoured the rubbish pail. The next day, she washed all her clothes out beside the woodyard. Then she was tired and went to the guest room. The guest room grew very crowded with the approach of autumn – it was a good place to put all sorts of things that were waiting for spring or were no longer needed. Grandmother liked being surrounded by practical, commonplace things, and before she went to sleep, she studied everything around her: nets, nail kegs, coils of steel wire and rope, sacks full of peat, and other important items. With an odd kind of tenderness, she examined the nameplates of boats long since broken up, some storm indications that had been written on the wall, pencilled data on dead seals they had found and a mink they had shot, and she dwelled particularly on the pretty picture of the hermit in his open tent against a sea of desert sand, with his guardian lion in the background. How can I ever leave this room? she thought.

It wasn’t easy to get into the room and take her clothes off and open the window for the night air, but finally she could lie down and stretch her legs. She blew out the light and listened to Sophia and her father getting ready for bed on the other side of the wall. There was a smell of tar and wet wool and maybe a trace of turpentine, and the sea was still quiet. As Grandmother fell asleep, she remembered the chamberpot under the bed and how much she hated it, this symbol of helplessness. She had accepted it out of pure politeness. A chamberpot is nice to have when it’s storming or raining, but the next day you have to carry it clear down to the water, and anything that has to be hidden is a burden.

When she woke up, she lay for a long time and wondered if she should go out or not. It felt as if the night had come right up to the walls and was waiting outside, and her legs ached. The stairs were badly constructed. The steps were too high and too narrow, and then came the rock, which was slippery down towards the woodyard, and then you had to come all the way back again. No sense in lighting a light; it only makes you lose your sense of direction and distance, and the darkness comes closer. Swing your legs over the edge of the bed and wait for your balance to come right. Four steps to the door and open the latch and wait again, then five steps down, holding the handrail. Grandmother wasn’t afraid of falling or losing her way, but she knew the darkness was absolute, and she knew what it was like when you lose your hold and there’s nothing left to go by. All the same, she said to herself, I know perfectly well what everything looks like. I don’t have to see it.