They decided to take Berenice out in the boat, where there weren’t any ants, and thus coax her away from a greater fear into a lesser one, and Grandmother went back to her book.
By the foot of her bed there was a nice painting of a hermit. It was a colour reproduction on shiny paper and had been cut out of a book. It showed a desert in deep twilight, nothing but sky and dry earth. In the middle was the hermit, lying in his bed reading. He was in a kind of open tent, and beside him was a bedside table with an oil lamp. The whole space occupied by the tent, the bed, the table and the circle of light was hardly larger than the man himself. Farther off in the dusk were the vague outlines of a lion at rest. Sophia found the lion threatening, but Grandmother felt it was there to protect the hermit.
When the southwest wind was blowing, the days seemed to follow one another without any kind of change or occurrence; day and night, there was the same even, peaceful rush of wind. Papa worked at his desk. The nets were set out and taken in. They all moved about the island doing their own chores, which were so natural and obvious that no one mentioned them, neither for praise nor sympathy. It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.
The arrival on the island of the child Berenice – we shall call her by her secret name – involved complications that no one had foreseen. They had never realised that their causal island household was in fact an indivisible unit. Their absent-minded manner of living in time with the leisurely course of the summer had never had a guest to reckon with, and they could not see that the child Berenice was more afraid of them than she was of the sea and the ants and the wind in the trees at night.
On the third day, Sophia came into the guest room and said, “Well, that does it. She’s impossible. I got her to dive, but it didn’t help.”
“Did she really dive?” Grandmother asked.
“Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.”
“Oh,” Grandmother said. “And then what?”
“Her hair can’t take salt water,” explained Sophia sadly. “It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.”
Grandmother threw off the blanket and stood up and took her walking stick. “Where is she?” she asked.
“In the potato patch,” Sophia said.
Grandmother walked across the island to the potato patch. It lay a short way from the water, in a lee among some rocks, and had the sun all day. They always set out an early variety of seed potatoes on a bed of sand and then covered them with a layer of seaweed. They watered them with salt water, and the plants produced small, clean, oval potatoes with a pinkish luster. The child was sitting behind a large rock, half hidden beneath the branches of a pine. Grandmother sat down nearby and started digging with her trowel. The potatoes were still too small, but she dug up a dozen or so all the same.
“Here’s what you do,” she said to Berenice. “You plant a big one and it turns into a lot of little ones. And if you wait, they all get big.”
Berenice looked at her from under a tangle of hair, quickly, and then looked away again. She didn’t care about potatoes, or people, or anything at all.
If only she were a little bigger, Grandmother thought. Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how awful it is. Here you come, headlong into a tight little group of people who have always lived together, who have the habit of moving around each other on land they know and own and understand, and every threat to what they’re used to only makes them still more compact and self-assured. An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.
Grandmother thought about all these things so intensely that she forgot about the potatoes and Berenice. She gazed out over the lee shore to the waves that swept around the island on both sides and then rejoined and moved on towards the mainland – a long blue landscape of vanishing waves that left only a small wedge of quiet water behind them. A fishing boat with a big white moustache was sailing across the bay.
“Oh look!” Grandmother said. “There goes a boat.”
She looked around for Berenice, but by this time the child had concealed herself completely beneath the tree.
“Oh look!” said Grandmother once again. “Here come some bad men. We better hide.”
With some difficulty, she crawled in under the pine tree.
“See?” she whispered. “There they are. They’re coming. You better follow me to a safer place.”
She started crawling across the rock and Berenice followed along on all fours at a furious pace. They made their way around the little bilberry bog and came to a hollow full of willow bushes. The ground was wet, but that couldn’t be helped.
“That was close,” said Grandmother. “But we’re safe for the moment.”
She looked at the expression on Berenice’s face and added, “I mean we’re safe. They’ll never find us here.”
“Why are they bad?” whispered Berenice.
“Because they’re coming to bother us,” Grandmother said. “We live here on this island, and people who come to bother us should stay away.”
The fishing boat sailed on by. Sophia hunted for them. She looked for half an hour, and when she finally found them, quietly teasing some tadpoles, she was angry.
“Where have you been?” she screamed. “I’ve looked all over!”
“We hid,” Grandmother explained.
“We hid,” Berenice repeated. “We won’t let anyone come bother us.” She walked over very close to Grandmother and stared hard at Sophia.
Sophia didn’t answer but turned abruptly and ran away.
The island shrank and grew crowded. Wherever she went, she was aware of where they were. She had to stay away from them, but the minute they disappeared she was forced to search them out so she could ignore them again.
After a while, Grandmother got tired and started up the guest room stairs.
“I’m going to read for a while,” she said. “You go and play with Sophia.”
“No,” said Berenice.
“Well, then, play by yourself.”
“No,” said Berenice. She was scared again.
Grandmother went after a pad of paper and a charcoal pencil and put them down on the steps.
“Draw a picture,” she said.
“I don’t know anything to draw,” the child said.
“Draw something awful,” Grandmother said, for she was really tired now. “Draw the awfullest thing you can think of, and take as much time as you possibly can.”
Then she closed and latched the door and lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up over her head. The southwest wind whispered peacefully, distantly in from the sea and enveloped the island’s inner core – the guest room and the woodyard.
Sophia pulled the bait box up to the window and climbed up and gave three long and three short knocks on the windowpane. When Grandmother emerged from her blankets and opened the window a crack, Sophia informed her that she had withdrawn from the society.
“That Pipsan!” she said. “I’m not interested in Pipsan. What’s she doing?”
“She’s drawing. She’s drawing the awfullest thing she can think of.”
“She can’t draw,” whispered Sophia passionately. “Did you give her my pad? What does she have to draw for?”
The window slammed shut, and Grandmother lay down again. Sophia came back three times, each time with a dreadful picture, which she pasted up on the window facing in towards the guest room. The first picture showed a child with ugly hair who stood screaming as large ants crawled over her body. The second showed the same child being hit on the head with a stone. The third was a more general view of a shipwreck, from which Grandmother concluded that Sophia had worked off her anger. When she had opened her boo
k and found her place at last, a paper came sliding through the crack under the door.
Berenice’s drawing was good. It had been done in a kind of painstaking fury, and depicted a creature with a black hole for a face. This creature was moving forwards with its shoulders hunched. Its arms were long scalloped wings, like those on a bat. They began near its neck and dragged on the ground on either side, a prop or perhaps a hindrance for the vague, boneless body. It was such an awful and such an expressive picture that Grandmother was filled with admiration. She opened the door and called, “It’s good! It’s a really good drawing!” She didn’t look at the child, only at the drawing, and the tone of her voice was neither friendly nor encouraging.
Berenice remained seated on the steps and did not turn around. She picked up a little stone and threw it straight up in the air, whereupon she stood up and walked slowly and dramatically down towards the water. Sophia stood on the woodpile and waited.
“What’s she doing now?” Grandmother asked.
“She’s throwing stones in the water,” Sophia said. “She’s going out on the point.”
“That’s good,” Grandmother said. “Come here and look at what she did. What do you think?”
“Well, yes …” Sophia said.
Grandmother put the picture up on the wall with a couple of thumbtacks.
“It’s very original,” she said. “Now let’s leave her in peace.”
“Can she draw?” asked Sophia gloomily.
“No,” Grandmother said. “Probably not. She’s probably one of those people who do one good thing and then that’s the end of it.”
The Pasture
SOPHIA ASKED HER GRANDMOTHER what Heaven looked like, and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by, on their way to the village over on the mainland. They stopped to look. It was very hot, the road was white and cracked, and all the plants along the ditch had dust on their leaves. They walked into the pasture and sat down in the grass, which was tall and not a bit dusty. It was full of bluebells and cat’s-foot and buttercups.
“Are there ants in Heaven?” Sophia asked.
“No,” said Grandmother, and lay down carefully on her back. She propped her hat on her nose and tried to sneak a little sleep. Some kind of farm machinery was running steadily and peacefully in the distance. If you turned it off – which was easy to do – and listened only to the insects, you could hear thousands of millions of them, and they filled the whole world with rising and falling waves of ecstasy and summer. Sophia picked some flowers and held them in her hand until they got warm and unpleasant; then she put them down on her grandmother and asked how God could keep track of all the people who prayed at the same time.
“He’s very, very smart,” Grandmother mumbled sleepily under her hat.
“Answer really,” Sophia said. “How does He have time?”
“He has secretaries …”
“But how does He manage to do what you pray for if He doesn’t get time to talk to the secretary before it’s too late?”
Grandmother pretended to be asleep, but she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone, and so finally she said that He’d made it so nothing bad could happen between the moment you prayed and the moment He found out what you prayed for. And then Sophia wanted to know what happened if you prayed while you were falling out of a tree and you were halfway down.
“Aha,” said Grandmother, perking up. “In that case He makes you catch on a limb.”
“That is smart,” Sophia admitted. “Now you get to ask. But it has to be about Heaven.”
“Do you think all the angels wear dresses, so no one can tell what kind they are?”
“What a dumb question! You know they all wear dresses. But now listen carefully; if one of them wants to know for sure what kind another one is, he just flies under him and looks to see if he’s wearing pants.”
“I see,” Grandmother said. “That’s good to know. Now it’s your turn.”
“Can angels fly down to Hell?”
“Of course. They might have all sorts of friends and neighbours down there.”
“Now I’ve got you!” Sophia cried. “Yesterday you said there wasn’t any Hell!”
Grandmother was annoyed and sat up angrily.
“And I say exactly the same thing today,” she said. “But this is just a game.”
“It’s not a game! It’s serious when you’re talking about God!”
“He would never do anything so dumb as make a Hell.”
“Of course He did.”
“No He didn’t!”
“Yes He did! A big enormous Hell!”
Because she was cross, Grandmother stood up much too quickly, and the whole pasture started spinning around and she almost lost her balance. She waited for the giddiness to stop.
“Sophia,” she said, “this is really not something to argue about. You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that’s the whole idea.”
“It’s not hard at all!” Sophia shouted. “And what are you going to do about the Devil, then? He lives in Hell!”
For a moment Grandmother considered saying that there was no Devil either, but she didn’t want to be mean. The farm machinery was making a terrible racket. She walked back towards the road and stepped right in a cowpat. Her grandchild was not behind her.
“Sophia,” called Grandmother warningly. “I said you could have an orange when we got to the shop …”
“An orange!” said Sophia contemptuously. “Do you think people care about oranges when they’re talking about God and the Devil?”
Grandmother poked the cow dung off her shoe with her walking stick as well as she could.
“My dear child,” she said, “with the best will in the world I cannot start believing in the Devil at my age. You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.”
“What does that mean?” asked the child sullenly.
“That means respecting other people’s convictions.”
“What are convictions?” Sophia screamed and stamped her foot.
“Letting others believe what they want to believe!” her grandmother shouted back. “I’ll let you believe God damns people and you let me not.”
“You swore,” Sophia whispered.
“I certainly did not.”
“You did too. You said ‘Goddamns’.”
They were no longer looking at each other. Three cows came down the road, swishing their tails and swaying their heads. They passed slowly by in a swarm of flies and walked on towards the village, with the skin on their rear ends puckering and twitching as they went. Then they were gone, leaving nothing but silence.
Finally Sophia’s grandmother said, “I know a song you don’t know.” She waited for a minute, and then she sang – way off key because her vocal cords were crooked:
Cowpats are free,
Tra-la-la
But don’t throw them at me.
Tra-la-la
For you too could get hit
Tra-la-la
With cow shit!
“What did you say?” Sophia whispered, because she couldn’t believe her ears. And Grandmother sang the same really awful song again.
Sophia climbed over the ditch and started towards the village.
“Papa would never say ‘shit,’” she said over her shoulder. “Where did you learn that song?”
“I’m not telling,” Grandmother said.
They came to the barn and climbed the stile and walked through the Nybonda’s barnyard, and before they got to the shop under the trees, Sophia had learned the song and could sing it just as badly as her grandmother.
Playing Venice
ONE SATURDAY THERE WAS MAIL FOR SOPHIA – a picture postcard from Venice. Her whole name was on the address side, with “Miss” in front, and on the shiny side was the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen. There was a long row of pink and gilded palaces rising from a
dark waterway that mirrored the lanterns on several slim gondolas. The full moon was shining in a dark blue sky, and a beautiful, lonely woman stood on a little bridge with one hand covering her eyes. The picture was tinged with real gold here and there in appropriate places. They put the postcard up on the wall under the barometer.
Sophia wanted to know why all the buildings were standing in the water, and her grandmother told her all about Venice and how it is sinking into the sea. She had been there herself once. The memory of her trip to Italy exhilarated her, and she talked on and on. Occasionally she tried to tell about other places she had seen, but Sophia wanted only to hear about Venice, and especially about the dark canals that smelled of must and rot and that each year pulled the city farther down into the mud, down into a soft black slime where golden dinner plates lay buried. There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom. “Look, Mama,” said the lovely Venetian girl, “the kitchen is under water today.” “Dear child, it doesn’t matter,” her mother replied. “We still have the drawing room.” They rode down in their lift and stepped into a gondola and glided through the streets. There wasn’t a vehicle in the entire city, they had all long since sunk into the ooze. The only sound was footsteps on the bridges, and people walked and walked all night. Sometimes one heard a strain of music, and sometimes a creaking noise as some palace settled and sank deeper. And the smell of mud was everywhere.
Sophia went down to the marsh pool, which was a smooth brownish-black under the alder trees. She dug a canal through the moss and the bilberry bushes. “Mama, my ring has fallen in the canal.” Her ring was gold, with a red ruby. “Dear child, don’t trouble yourself. We have the whole drawing room full of gold and precious jewels.”