One morning she woke to find it had been snowing, a thick covering of unmelting snow. Now the frost had come she must go in to town, buy things, get the motor going. She went and looked at the motor, lifted it up for a while, then put it back against the cottage wall. Maybe after a few days, there was a strong wind. Instead she started looking for the squirrel’s footprints in the snow. The ground was white and unmarked near the cellar and the woodpile; she went round the shore and systematically over the whole island, but found no tracks but her own, clear and black, cutting the island into squares and triangles and long curves. Later in the day she became suspicious and searched under the furniture in the cottage, opened cupboards and drawers, and even climbed up onto the roof and looked down the chimney. “You’re making a fool of me, you devil,” she told the squirrel.
Then she went out to the promontory to count the pieces of board, the squirrel-boats she’d set out ready for a favourable wind to the mainland just to show the squirrel how little she cared what it did or where it went. They were still there, all six of them. But for a moment she was unsure: had there been six or seven? She should have written down the number. How could she not have written it down. She went back to the cottage, shook out the carpet and swept. These days everything was happening in the wrong order. Sometimes she cleaned her teeth in the evening and didn’t bother to light the lamp. All because she no longer had any Madeira left to help divide the day into proper periods, defining them and making them easier to remember.
She cleaned the windows and reorganised her bookshelves, this time not by writers but alphabetically. When she’d done this, she thought of a better and more personal system: she would have the books she liked best on the top shelf and the ones she liked least on the bottom. But she was astonished to find there wasn’t a single book she really liked. So she left them as they were and sat by the window to wait for more snow. There was a bank of clouds to the south that looked promising.
That evening she felt a sudden need for company and went up on the hill with her walkie-talkie. She pulled out the aerial, switched on and listened: she heard a remote scratching and sighing. Once or twice she’d found herself in the middle of a conversation between two ships; perhaps that’s what was happening now. She waited a long time. The night was pitch-black and very quiet; she closed her eyes, waiting patiently. Then she heard something, incredibly far away – no clear words, but two voices talking. Slow and calm, coming nearer, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then their tone changed and their speeches got shorter; it was clear they were bringing their conversation to an end and they said goodbye. She was too late.
She began screaming: “Hello, it’s me, can you hear me?”, though she knew they couldn’t hear her, and then there was nothing left in the apparatus but the far-off sighing and she switched it off. “Stupid,” she told herself. Then it occurred to her that the batteries she had might fit the radio and she went down to check. They were too small. She had to go to town. Madeira, batteries. Under batteries she wrote nuts and crossed it out again. The squirrel had gone – there was no doubt there had been seven pieces of board, not six, all at exactly the same distance from the water: sixty-five centimetres. She read through her list and suddenly it looked like an inventory in a foreign language, nothing whatever to do with her: sheer-pins, embrocation, dried milk, batteries – a list of unreal and hostile objects. The only thing that mattered was the boards: had there been six or seven? She took her measuring-rod and torch and went out again. The shore was empty, absolutely clean. There were no pieces of board there any more, not a single one; the sea had risen and taken them away.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. She stood at the water’s edge, shining her torch down into the sea. The light broke the surface, illuminating a grey-green underwater grotto full of small indefinite particles she’d never noticed before; the grotto grew progressively dimmer the deeper it went. She lifted the torch and shone it out over the water into the darkness. The weak cone of light was captured by a colour out there, a clear yellow, a varnished boat being driven away from land by the wind.
She didn’t immediately understand that it was her own boat; she just watched it, noticing for the first time how helpless and dramatic the movements of an empty, drifting boat are. But the boat wasn’t empty. The squirrel was sitting in the stern, staring blindly straight into the light like a cardboard shape, a dead toy.
She made half a movement towards taking off her boots, but stopped. The torch was lying on the rock, shining obliquely down into the water, revealing a bank of swollen seagrass disturbed by the rising sea, then darkness where the hill curved downwards. It was too far out, too cold. Too late. She took a careless step and the torch slid down into the water. It didn’t go out at once, but continued shining as it sank down along the slope of the hill, gradually fading amid brief glimpses of ghostly brown landscapes and moving shadows, then nothing but darkness.
“You damn squirrel,” she said softly, in admiration. She stayed on standing in the darkness, still amazed, a little weak in the legs and not quite sure whether or not everything had now utterly changed.
It took a long time to make her way back gradually across the island. It wasn’t until she’d shut the door behind her that she felt relieved, hugely exhilarated. Every decision had been taken away from her. She no longer had a need to hate the squirrel or concern herself about it in any way. She had no need to write about it, no need to write anything at all. Everything had been decided and resolved with clear and absolute simplicity.
Outside it had begun to snow, heavily and peacefully – winter had come. She put more wood on the fire and turned up the lamp. She went to the kitchen table and began to write, very fast. One windless day in November, near sunrise, she saw a human being at the landing place…
Letters from Klara
Dear Matilda,
You’re hurt because I forgot your venerable birthday. That’s unreasonable of you. I know the only reason you’ve looked forward to getting birthday greetings from me all these years is because I’m three years younger than you are. But it’s time you realised that the passing of the years isn’t in itself a feather in your cap.
You’re asking for Guidance from Above, excellent. But while you’re waiting for it to arrive, might it not be profitable to discuss a few bad habits which I have to admit aren’t totally alien to me, either.
My dear Matilda, one thing we should all remember is not to grumble if we can possibly help it, because grumbling immediately gives bad habits the upper hand. I know you’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy astonishingly good health, but you do have a unique capacity for giving those round you a bad conscience by grumbling, and then of course they hit back by cheerfully writing you off as someone who no longer matters. I know, I’ve seen it. Whatever it is you want or don’t want, couldn’t you stop whining? Why not try raising your voice instead and shaking them up with a few strong words or, best of all, scaring them a bit? I know very well you’re capable of it: there was never any mewing in the old days, far from it.
And all that stuff about not being able to get to sleep at night, presumably because you catnap eight times a day. Yes, I know; it’s true that memory has an unfortunate habit of working backwards at night and gnawing its way through everything without sparing the slightest detail – that you were too much of a coward to do something, for instance; that you made a wrong choice, or were tactless or unfeeling or criminally unobservant – but of course no one but you has given a thought for years to these things which to you are calamities, shameful actions and irretrievably stupid statements! Isn’t it unfair, when we’re endowed with such sharp memories, that they only function in reverse?
Dear Matilda, do write and tell me what you think about these sensitive matters. I promise I’ll try not to be a know-all; oh yes, don’t deny it, you have called me that in the past. But I’d be fascinated to know, for example, what you do when you can’t remember how many times you’ve said the same thing to the
same person. Do you extricate yourself by starting off ‘So, as I said…’ or ‘As I may have already said…’? Or what?… Have you any other suggestions? Or d’you just keep quiet?
And do you let conversations you can’t follow continue over your head? Do you ever try to make a sensible contribution only to find that everyone else has moved on to a completely different subject? Do you try to save face by telling them they’re talking nonsense or wasting their time on matters too trivial to be worth discussing? In general, are we any of us in the least interested? Please reassure me that we are!
Only if you write to me, please don’t use that antediluvian fountain pen of yours; it makes your writing illegible, and in any case it’s hopelessly out of date. Get them to buy you some felt pens, medium point 0.5mm. You can get them anywhere.
Yours,
Klara
PS I read somewhere that anything written in felt pen becomes illegible after about forty years. How about that? Good, don’t you think? Or are you planning to write your memoirs? You know the sort of thing: ‘Not to be read for fifty years’ (I hope you think that’s funny).
Dear Ewald,
What a nice surprise to get a letter from you. What gave you the idea of writing?
Yes, of course we can meet; it’s been ages, as you say. Something like sixty years, I think.
And thank you for all the nice things you wrote – maybe a little too nice, my dear old friend. Hasn’t time made you a little sentimental?
Yes, I think growing roses is a great idea! I understand there’s a very practical gardening programme on the radio every Saturday morning, repeated on Sundays. Why not listen to it?
Give me a call any time, but remember it may take me a while to get to the phone. And don’t forget to say whether you’re still a vegetarian, because I want to make us a really special dinner.
Yes, do bring your photograph album, I hope we’ll be able to have a reasonable stab at dealing with the inevitable ‘d’you remembers’, and then go on to talk about whatever comes into our heads.
Yours sincerely,
Klara
Hi Steffy!
Thanks for the bark boat, it’s beautiful and it’s lovely to have it. I tried it out in the bath and it balances perfectly.
Don’t worry about that report, tell Daddy and Mummy it’s sometimes much more important to be able to work with your hands and make something beautiful.
I’m sorry about the cat. But if she lived to be seventeen she was probably quite tired and no longer very well. The words you wrote for her grave aren’t bad but you must take care with the rhythm. We’ll talk more about that when we meet.
Your godmother,
Klara
Dear Mr Öhlander,
In your letter of the 27th you claim that I am unjustifiably withholding from you an early work of your own, which you say you need to have, as soon as possible, for a retrospective exhibition.
I cannot remember that during a visit to your niece’s son I ‘wangled’ the picture in question out of him; he is much more likely to have pressed me to remove it from his flat.
I have made a careful study of the signatures on the works I have round me here and can just about make out one which could possibly be your own. The picture seems to show something halfway between an interior and a landscape; one might say that there’s a je ne sais quoi of the semi-abstract about it.
The size, which you didn’t mention, is the classic French 50 x 61.
I’m restoring your work to you by return of post and I hope that it will now be able to take its rightful place in your collection.
Yours faithfully,
Klara Nygård
Dear Nicholas,
I expect you’ve only just got back from your ‘mystery destination’ (I have a strong feeling it was Majorca); be that as it may, I’ve decided to make yet another small change to my will. Don’t groan, I know that deep down all this toing and froing amuses you.
Well, I want to make over a fixed annual sum to the Old People’s Home of whose services I shall one day be availing myself. But – and this is the important point – only during my lifetime. Interest from banks and bonds and whatever else, I can do without – you know more about that than I do. They can use the money in whatever way suits them best.
I’m sure you’ve got the idea, cunning as you are. This temporary extra income will make it worth their while, at the Home, to do their best to keep me alive as long as they can; I shall be their mascot and will obviously be able to take certain liberties. What’s left when I die will not go to them but must be divided up exactly as we planned earlier.
By the way, I’m in excellent health and I hope you are too.
Klara
My dear Cecilia,
It was so nice of you to send me my old letters; what an enormous box, did you at least have someone to help you get it to the post? It really touches me that you saved them all (and even numbered them), but, my dear, that business of reading them through – you understand what I mean? I suppose the stamps were cut off for some stamp-collecting child. But if you have any other correspondence from the beginning of the century you should keep the whole envelope, stamps and all; that’ll make the stamps much more desirable to a philatelist – and be specially careful with blocks of four.
I assume you’re busy clearing out the house – very natural. Congratulations! I’m doing the same and I’ve been gradually learning all kinds of things, one being that if you give special treasures to young people they’re not usually particularly pleased to have them. If you persist, they get more and more polite and more and more irritated. Have you noticed? But, do you know, there’s a flea market every Saturday and Sunday in Sandvikstorg square these days – how about that? Anyone can go there and find what they want for themselves without needing to feel either put upon or grateful. Brilliant idea.
You say you’re gloomy and depressed but that’s normal, Cecilia, nothing to worry about. I’ve read somewhere that it’s a physiological phenomenon, doesn’t that make you feel better? I mean, you feel depressed, so you sit down and think, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s just the way things are.’ Isn’t that the truth?
What else shall I tell you – oh, yes, I’ve got rid of my pot plants and I’m trying to learn a little French. You know, I’ve always admired you; you speak the language so perfectly. What’s that elegant way they have of ending a letter? – Chère madame, I enclose you, no, me, in your – oh you know.
I’m just a beginner.
Chère petite madame, I do miss you sometimes –
Love,
Klara
Dear Sven Roger,
So good of you to make sure the porcelain tiled stove’s in working order again. If those officials come back and say it’s against the law to light it I shall speak to my solicitor; the stove’s an article of Historic Importance, as we’re all well aware.
When you come back from your holiday you’ll find that Mrs Fagerholm from the floor above me has gone in for an unnecessarily sweeping clearance of her attic storage space. She parked her unnameable possessions in front of my own space, so I naturally threw the whole lot out into the corridor.
I remember you once said you’d like some indoor plants for your summer cottage. I’ve put my own collection of pot plants out in the yard next the wheelie bins and anyone’s welcome to take what they want; anything left can go into the bins. I’ll keep them watered for the time being. To explain my apparently heartless behaviour, I’d just like to say that these potted plants have weighed on my conscience for far too long; they always get either too little water or too much, one can never get it right.
By the way, don’t hurry to wash the windows; they have what looks like an attractive light mist on them just at the moment; it would be a pity to disturb it. With my very best wishes for your summer holiday,
K. Nygård
PS Don’t say anything to the Fagerholm woman. I have to admit I really enjoyed thr
owing out her rubbish.
Camilla Alleén
‘Woman to Woman’
Dear Ms Alleén,
Thank you for your kind letter. But I do not consider myself to be in a position to take part, as you put it, in an enquiry into the problems and pleasures of old age.
One could of course maintain that, though taking part might be difficult, it could also be interesting – but I don’t see any point in listing one’s obvious misfortunes, while trying to describe what’s interesting about being old seems to me to be a private matter most unsuited to the dogmatic statements demanded by questionnaires.
My dear Ms Alleén, I’m afraid you’re not very likely to get many honest answers to your questions.
Yours sincerely,
Klara Nygård
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