Sophia went to her grandmother and said, “Call me ‘Dear Child’ and I’ll call you ‘Mama’.”
“But I’m your grandmother,” Grandmother said.
“Please, Mama, it’s a game,” Sophia explained. “Mama, shall we play you’re my grandmother? I am your dear child from Venice, and I’ve made a canal.”
Grandmother stood up. “I know a better game,” she said. “We’ll be old Venetians building a new Venice.”
They started building in the marsh pool. They made pilings for the Piazza San Marco out of a lot of little wooden plugs, and covered them with flat stones. They dug additional canals and built bridges over them. Black ants scurried back and forth across the bridges, while down below there were gondolas gliding along in the moonlight. Sophia collected pieces of white marble along the shore.
“Look, Mama,” she called. “I’ve found a new palace.”
“But my dear child, I’m only ‘Mama’ to your father,” Grandmother said. She was concerned.
“Is that so!” Sophia shouted. “Why is he the only one who gets to say ‘Mama’?”
She threw the palace in the water and stalked away.
Grandmother sat down on the veranda to make a Doge’s Palace out of balsa wood. When the palace was done, she painted it with watercolours and gold. Sophia came to look at it.
“In this palace,” Grandmother said, “there lives a mother and a father and their daughter. Right through that window. The daughter has just thrown the dinner plates out of the window, and they broke on the piazza, because they were only china. I wonder what the mother said.”
“I know what the mother said,” Sophia declared. “She said, ‘My dear child, do you think there’s no end to your mother’s china?’”
“And what did the daughter say?”
“She said, ‘Forgive me, Mama. I promise to throw only the golden dinner plates in the future!’”
They set the palace by the piazza, and the father, mother and daughter continued to live there. Grandmother made more palaces. A great many families moved into Venice and called to one another across the canals. “How far did your palace sink today?” “Oh, it’s not so bad. Mother says it’s only a foot or so.” “What’s your mother making for dinner? My mother’s boiling some perch.” At night they all slept soundly, and the only noise was the footsteps of the ants across the bridges.
Grandmother became more and more involved. She made a hotel and a trattoria and a campanile with a little lion on top. It was a very long time since she’d been in Venice and she could remember the names of all the streets, because her memory was best for things that had happened long ago. One day, there was a green salamander in the Grand Canal and traffic had to make a long detour.
That same evening, it started to rain, and the wind went over to the southeast. The radio said low-pressure system and winds to thirty miles an hour, but no one gave it a second thought. But when Grandmother woke up in the middle of the night as usual, and heard rain pelting on the roof, she remembered the sinking city, and it worried her. It was blowing hard, and there was nothing but a grassy beach between the marsh and the sea. Grandmother dozed off and woke up again several times, and each time she heard the rain and the waves and worried about Venice and Sophia. When it started to get light, she got up and put on an oilskin over her nightgown and covered her head with a sou’wester.
The rain had let up, but the ground was drenched and dark. It will make everything grow, she thought absent-mindedly. She took a firm grip on her walking stick and stumbled on against the wind. It was a beautiful grey dawn, with long parallel rainclouds marching across the sky and white-caps covering the dark green sea. She could see right away that the whole shoreline was flooded, and then she saw Sophia running towards her across the rock.
“It’s sunk,” Sophia screamed. “She’s gone!”
The cottage was open, and the door stood banging in the wind.
“Go back to bed,” Grandmother said. “Take off your nightgown, it’s wet through, and close the door and go to bed. I’ll find the palace. I promise I’ll find it.”
Sophia was crying with her mouth wide open. She wasn’t listening. Finally Grandmother had to go with her to the cottage to be sure she went back to bed.
“I’ll find the palace,” she told her again. “Now stop howling and go to sleep.”
She closed the door and walked back down towards the shore. When she got there, she found that the marsh had become a bay. The waves washed up into the heather and swept back into the sea again, and the alders stood well out in the water. Venice had disappeared beneath the sea.
Grandmother stood gazing at this scene for quite a while; then she turned and went home. She lit the lamp and got out her tools and a suitable piece of balsa wood and put on her glasses.
The Doge’s Palace was ready at seven o’clock, just as Sophia banged on the door.
“Wait a minute,” Grandmother said. “It’s on the latch.”
“Did you find her?” Sophia called. “Was she still there?”
“Yes, of course,” Grandmother answered. “They were all still there.”
The palace looked much too new, not as if it had been through a flood. Quickly Grandmother took her water glass and poured it over the Doge’s Palace, then emptied the ashtray into her hand and rubbed the cupolas and walls with ashes, and all the time Sophia kept pulling at the handle and yelling that she wanted to come in.
Grandmother opened the door. “We were lucky,” she said.
Sophia examined the palace very carefully. She put it down on the nightstand and didn’t say a word.
“It’s all right, isn’t it?” said Grandmother anxiously.
“Quiet,” Sophia whispered. “I want to hear if she’s still there.”
They listened for a long time. Then Sophia said, “You can rest easy. Her mother says it was a perfectly dreadful storm. Now she’s cleaning up the mess, and she’s pretty worn out.”
“Yes, I’ll bet she is,” Grandmother said.
Dead Calm
THE SEA IS VERY RARELY SO CALM that a small boat with an outboard motor will venture out to The Cairn. The Cairn is the last island out in the Gulf of Finland. It takes hours to get there, and you have to take food for the entire day. The Cairn is a long skerry, and from a distance it looks like two islands, two smooth spines with a channel marker on one of them and a little beacon on the other. There is no cairn on the island at all. When you get closer, you can see that the granite spines are as sleek as seals and that there is a long thin neck of boulders between them. The boulders are perfectly round.
The sea was as smooth as oil, and so pale you could hardly tell it was blue. Grandmother sat in the middle of the boat under a violet parasol. She hated violet, but it was all they had. Moreover, it was really a pretty colour, as clear and bright as the sea itself. The parasol made them look like the worst kind of summer people, which they were not. When they reached The Cairn, they went ashore at the first spot they came to, since there was no lee side – in the calm all sides were lee. They carried their things ashore and put the butter in the shade. The granite was hot underfoot. Papa wedged the handle of the parasol into a crack – Grandmother was to lie there on an air mattress and enjoy herself. She watched them set off in opposite directions; the island was so large that pretty soon they turned into little dots moving along the edge of the water. Then she crawled out from under the parasol and took her walking stick and headed off in a third direction of her own, but before she left she arranged some sweaters and bathrobes on the mattress so it would look as though she were asleep.
Grandmother came down to the shore at an interesting spot where a little canyon cut through the rock and ran out into the sea. Even now, at midday, the bottom of this canyon was in shadow – right down into the water and a long way out, like a crevice of darkness. Grandmother sat down and edged into the canyon a little at a time until at last she dropped to the bottom and was all by herself in peace and quiet. She lit a cigare
tte and watched the barely visible swell. By and by, the boat appeared from behind the point. Papa was making a sweep around the reef to set out his nets.
“So there you are,” Sophia said. “I went swimming.”
“How’s the water?” Grandmother said. From the bottom of the canyon, the child was a narrow shadow against the sun, like a stick of wood.
“Pretty bloody cold,” Sophia said, and jumped down into the canyon. The floor of the crevice was covered with stones, from the size of a person’s head down to the size of a marble. They found a place where the granite was full of those very small Finnish garnets you find sometimes, and they tried to dig them out with a jackknife. It didn’t work. It never does. They ate hard bread and watched the boat. All the nets were out, and it sailed back and disappeared around the point.
“You know, sometimes when everything’s fine, I think it’s just a bloody bore,” Sophia said.
“You do?” said Grandmother, taking out another cigarette. It was only her second before noon, and she always tried to smoke in secret when she could remember to.
“Nothing happens,” her grandchild explained. “I wanted to climb the channel marker and Papa said I couldn’t.”
“That’s too bad,” Grandmother said.
“No, it’s not ‘too bad’,” Sophia said. “It’s bloody stupid.”
“Where did you pick that up? You keep saying ‘bloody’ all the time.”
“I don’t know. It sounds good.”
“Violet’s a bloody colour,” Grandmother said. “Talk about ‘bloody’ – did I ever tell you about the dead pig I found once? We boiled the meat off for a week and it stunk to heaven. Your father wanted to have the skeleton for school. You know, for zoology.”
“No,” said Sophia suspiciously. “What do you mean? What school?”
“When your father was little.”
“When? What pig? What did you say it was called?”
“Oh, nothing,” Grandmother said. “One time when your father was little, about your age.”
“He’s big,” the child said, and started cleaning the sand out from between her toes. They each fell silent. After a while, Grandmother said, “Right now he thinks I’m asleep under that umbrella.”
“But you’re not,” Sophia said. “You’re down here sneaking a cigarette.”
They picked out stones that hadn’t been worn completely round and threw them out into the water to make them rounder. The sun moved on across the sky, and the boat came around the point and took up the nets and dropped them right back in again.
“The fishing’s bloody awful,” Grandmother said.
“Listen,” Sophia said. “I don’t have time to stay here with you – I’ve only been swimming twice today. You won’t be sad now, will you?”
“I want to go too,” Grandmother said.
Sophia thought for a moment and said, “All right; you can come too. But only where I tell you.”
They helped each other climb out of the canyon, and then they circled around the hill so as not to be seen. Off to one side of the channel marker, there was a large, deep pool.
“Is this all right?” Sophia asked.
“It’s fine,” Grandmother said. She bared her legs and stuck them into the pool. The water was warm and pleasant. Some light brown muck swirled up to the surface, along with a swarm of tadpoles, but they quickly settled down again. She spread her toes and stuck her legs farther in. There was a big clump of loosestrife where the pool narrowed towards one end, and the granite was streaked with yellow sedum growing in the crevices. Papa had built a fire at the other end of the island, and the smoke rose straight up in the air.
“In all the years I’ve sailed around in these islands,” Grandmother said, “I don’t think it’s ever been this calm before. There was always some wind. He never went out unless there was a storm. We had a spritsail. He’d sail the boat and I’d keep watch for the spar markers in the dark. I hardly had time – ‘north spar,’ I’d say, and then ‘west spar’ – they went by so fast. And one time when the rudder came loose …”
“You fixed it with a hairpin,” Sophia said.
Grandmother swished her legs in the pool and didn’t say anything.
“Or maybe it was a safety pin,” Sophia went on. “Some days I can’t remember exactly. But who was he?”
“Your grandfather, of course,” Grandmother said. “My husband.”
“Are you married?” Sophia cried in astonishment.
“Bloody nitwit,” Grandmother muttered to herself. Out loud she said, “You better ask your father about generations and all that. Ask him to draw it on a piece of paper. If you’re interested.”
“I don’t think so,” said Sophia amiably. “I’m a bit busy right now.”
The channel marker was a high wall of well-spaced, horizontal planks, like a section of picket fence turned on end. It was painted white, with a red triangle in the middle. The distance from one plank to the next was so great that Sophia’s legs just barely reached, and after each step her knees began to shake – not much, just enough so that she had to wait until they stopped. Then came the next rung. Sophia had made it almost to the top before Grandmother saw her. Grandmother realised right away that she mustn’t scream. She would have to wait for the child to come back down. It wasn’t dangerous. Children have a lot of ape in them: they’re good climbers and never fall unless they’re startled.
Sophia was climbing very slowly now, with long pauses between steps, and Grandmother could see she was scared. The old woman stood up too quickly. Her walking stick rolled down into the pool, and the whole rock became an uncertain, hostile surface, arching and twisting in front of her. Sophia took one more step.
“You’re doing fine,” Grandmother called. “You’re almost there!”
Sophia took another step. She got her hands over the topmost plank and didn’t move.
“Now come back down,” Grandmother said.
But the child didn’t move. It was so hot in the sun that the channel marker shimmered and quaked in waves.
“Sophia!” Grandmother called. “My stick fell down in the pool and I can’t walk.” She waited and then called again. “It’s bloody awful, do you hear me? My balance is bloody awful today, and I’ve got to have my cane!”
Sophia started down. She moved steadily, one step at a time.
Damned child, Grandmother thought. Confounded children. But that’s what happens when people won’t let you do anything fun. The people who are old enough.
Sophia was back down on the rock. She waded out into the pool for the stick and handed it to Grandmother without looking at her.
“You’re a very good climber,” said Grandmother sternly. “And brave, too, because I could see you were scared. Shall I tell him about it? Or shouldn’t I?”
Sophia shrugged one shoulder and looked at her grandmother. “I guess maybe not,” she said. “But you can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn’t go to waste.”
“That’s a bloody good idea,” Grandmother said. She walked off across the rock and sat down beside the air mattress, just outside the shade of the violet parasol.
The Cat
IT WAS A TINY KITTEN WHEN IT CAME and could drink its milk only from a nipple. Fortunately, they still had Sophia’s baby bottle in the attic. In the beginning, the kitten slept in a tea-cosy to keep warm, but when it found its legs they let it sleep in the cottage in Sophia’s bed. It had its own pillow, next to hers.
It was a fisherman’s cat and it grew fast. One day, it left the cottage and moved into the house, where it spent its nights under the bed in the box where they kept the dirty dishes. It had odd ideas of its own even then. Sophia carried the cat back to the cottage and tried as hard as she could to ingratiate herself, but the more love she gave it, the quicker it fled back to the dish box. When the box got too full, the cat would howl and someone would have to wash the dishes. Its name was Ma Petite, but they called it Moppy.
“It’s funny about love,” Sophia sa
id. “The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.”
“That’s very true,” Grandmother observed. “And so what do you do?”
“You go on loving,” said Sophia threateningly. “You love harder and harder.”
Her grandmother sighed and said nothing.
Moppy was carried around to all the pleasant places a cat might like, but he only glanced at them and walked away. He was flattened with hugs, endured them politely and climbed back into the dish box. He was entrusted with burning secrets and merely averted his yellow gaze. Nothing in the world seemed to interest this cat but food and sleep.
“You know,” Sophia said, “sometimes I think I hate Moppy. I don’t have the strength to go on loving him, but I think about him all the time!”
Week after week, Sophia pursued the cat. She spoke softly and gave him comfort and understanding, and only a couple of times did she lose her patience and yell at him, or pull his tail. At such times Moppy would hiss and run under the house, and afterwards his appetite was better and he slept even longer than usual, curled up in unapproachable softness with one paw daintily across his nose.
Sophia stopped playing and started having nightmares. She couldn’t think about anything but this cat who refused to be affectionate. Meanwhile Moppy grew into a lean and wild little animal, and one June night he didn’t come back to his dish box. In the morning, he walked into the house and stretched – front legs first, with his rear end up in the air – then he closed his eyes and sharpened his claws on the rocking chair, after which he jumped up on the bed and went to sleep. The cat’s whole being radiated calm superiority.
He’s started hunting, Grandmother thought.
She was right. The very next morning, the cat came in and placed a small dusky yellow bird on the doorstep. Its neck had been deftly broken with one bite, and some bright red drops of blood lay prettily on the shiny coat of feathers. Sophia turned pale and stared fixedly at the murdered bird. She sidled past Moppy, the murderer, with small, forced steps, and then turned and rushed out.