Eulalia Starwind

in the hallway looking into the room I couldn’t see much, but somehow felt she wasn’t there.

  The old uneasiness about the abandoned house in the woods was back. There was a suspicious closed-up smell, and it squeaked and whispered from the attic. The stairs were hidden behind a small door just in front of me and once when I was even younger I had opened it, but wasn’t about to do so again. It was a mean or sad and in any case scary house and I wanted to get out - out to the rising sun and the new day and the chirping of birds and the friendly sighing of the wind in the treetops, out to the lambs and the warm stone walls.

  Still I forced myself to take yet another step into the room, but there I froze again. Dust and dirt from the rats crackled under my feet when I swayed back and forth with a growing dizziness. The board she had removed to let the light in was once again covering the back window, and the room was dark and silent and empty. I felt the hairs of my arms rise when I hurriedly ran through the hallway and the front door and further in among the junipers.

  I walked homewards with my head hanging down, more confused than sad. “So that’s it”, I thought, “all of it in my own imagination. What’s wrong with me?”

  After a while I passed the gate of the land that Granny used to call “Larssons”. I didn’t know who Larsson had been, and the house where Larsson once had lived was just a fallen shed about to be swallowed by the lilacs. At the pasture some lambs walked around, chewing from the thin grass and when they saw me they came over to put their heads through the fence so I halted and fed them for a while. A big bad-tempered one went for my hand but most of them just wanted to eat.

  All of a sudden a thought flew through my head and disappeared again before I could catch it, and I turned around surprised as if to see it. What was it? I stopped feeding the lambs and concentrated with all my might. And then I saw the thought again, and now I could hold it and knew what I had forgotten. I threw the grass over the fence and ran as fast as I could back through the woods up towards the Clearing, ran all the way in to the house before I could change my mind and didn’t stop until I had rounded the stove in the room and stood at the threshold of the little kitchen.

  And there, on a rusty plate on the built-in table by the oven, lay the burnt and sooty cake of Eulalia!

  It was almost an hour before she turned up. I was sitting on the wall behind the house, picking my toenails, when I suddenly heard her behind my back:

  “You too are pretty good at not turning around.”

  Of course I turned around in an instant and saw her standing there with her hands on her hips and the broadest of all her smiles in that funny face.

  “Hi, but I didn’t hear you”, I said.

  “No, that’s true”, she said and climbed the wall to sit next to me with her bare feet stretched out into the air.

  “I got here a while ago”, I said, “ but you weren’t in so I sat down to wait.”

  “I know”, she said. She was still smiling but not as much and she didn’t look at me.

  “You’re a little funny”, I tried.

  “I know about that too”, she said. “I try not to be so funny but it’s hard for me.”

  “I’m not sure I understand”, I said.

  “Maybe that’s because you’re trying”, she said.

  “You mean there’s something wrong in trying to understand?”

  “Only if you seriously believe it’s possible.”

  Now she had really lost me so I didn’t say anything more. Not until I thought of something else to talk about:

  “Do you often come here to the island?”

  “Yeah”, she said, “you could say I’m always here.”

  “You mean you live here all year?”

  “I think I mean I live most everywhere all the time.”

  “But...why didn’t I ever see you before?”

  “Beats me, maybe you’ve got bad sight.”

  And there it went silent again. I couldn’t understand why she had to be so sulky and secretive, and now I only had one thing left to say. But what was the point in waiting:

  “Hey, I thought of a name for you.”

  She got up and walked a few steps out on the grass, scaring some sheep that were resting in the shadow of a juniper bush, and then she turned towards me so fast that the blue shirt fluttered around her waist.

  “I hardly dare”, she said in a whisper, “is it true – am I to get a name?”

  “If you want”, I said.

  “Don’t say anything yet...is it long or short? Is it shoutable, is it a good name to whisper? Can you ride it, can you feed it? Is it kind of a slow and humming name or more like sharp and rapid? Can you say it backwards? Can you chew it without it losing its flavour?”

  “Eulalia”, I said. Mainly to shut her up.

  She froze in the middle of her excited movements and just stood there for a few seconds, bent forward with one hand half way up into the air. She pouted her lips and crossed her eyes as if thinking. Then she relaxed her whole body and sat down flat on the ground.

  “It’s got to be the nicest name I ever heard”, she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s got to be the surest thing I ever said.”

  “I thought of it walking here.”

  “How kind you are! How happy I am!”

  “I thought you seemed a little sad because you weren’t called nothing, and then it came to me that Eulalia is a rather fun name.

  “You know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “I feel just like an Eulalia.”

  She floundered a little with her feet again, and turned her face towards the sky and shouted:

  “Mom! Dad! My name is Eulalia!”

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Just thought they should know.”

  “And they can hear you?”

  “Oh yes, they can always hear, just like I can. As a matter of fact I don’t even have to shout but sometimes I do all the same because it feels so good.”

  “You’re surely the weirdest one I’ve ever met”, I said.

  “But Nick...”, she said.

  “Yeah, what?” I said.

  “At least now I’ve got a name!”

  That was true, at least now I could call her something. It made me happy seeing her so pleased with the name, even though it wasn’t my own invention – surely there were many other Eulalias to be found, just as happy about it.

  After she got a name she also seemed a little less sulky. At least she didn’t sulk as often, and as we got to know each other it got easier and easier for her to look me into the eyes. And although I too could be shy around girls I would look back, because for some reason she never scared me even when she told me things that were completely impossible to grasp. Maybe I would get dizzy and fall to the ground or I would get curious and ask and ask until she explained or until she told me to be silent – but I was never the least afraid.

  How could anyone ever be afraid of a kind dirty Eulalia with giant shorts and broken toenails?

  We spent almost the entire day together. I only went home to have lunch and to make sure that Granny didn’t worry, but that didn’t take long. Then I ran back along the paths and along Green Street to ask Eulalia about more stuff. Her answers were sometimes so strange they only made me want to know more.

  “Why don’t you live with your parents?” I asked when we were lying flat on our backs in the grass in the middle of the moor, chewing straws.

  “Because the wind can’t ever stop. If the wind makes a halt it will die. It has to keep going even if it likes it in a place or else it would have to whirl around and around until it got all dizzy and until people got bored with it and moved away.”

  “What’s the wind got to do with your parents?”

  “The wind is my dad.”

  “Oh”, I said and wondered if it could actually be that way. Could a girl that looked more or less like any other girl have a dad who was a wind? I’d never heard of it before, but why no
t? I’m not sure how much I really believed of all that Eulalia told me, but it was clear that at least she already had me picturing things I’d never pictured before.

  “And your mom”, I asked, “where’s she?”

  “She blew away pretty soon after having me.”

  “She’s also wind?”

  “No”, she said, giving me a hesitant glance as she sat up. Suddenly the sad look was back in her face, like when I first asked her about her name. She turned her head a little back and forth and picked up a small flat stone from the ground and let it bounce around in her hand.

  “No”, she said again, “my mom is a scent of sea and sunshine who’s dancing around with my dad without ever being able to settle down.”

  I got another quick glance as if she wanted to see if I believed her, but by now I was so busy picturing her parents pushing through all the treetops by all the shorelines of the world that it never struck me it might not be true.

  “But”, she said, “sometimes they visit me rapidly while passing by. At least I think so... And if I should miss them terribly I just walk down to the closest beach and wave!”

  Later we sat up at the lambgift on the ridge. A lambgift is a small open house of wood that exists so that the sheep will have somewhere to hide in the winter. When there is snow and ice on the ground they can’t find anything to eat so the farmers put dry hay for them inside these houses. We leaned towards the wall on the sunny side, watching a big gull sailing on the wind above the pine tops.

  “I can fly too”, said Eulalia.

  “Now you’re lying”, I said.

  “Yeah”, she said giggling, “now I lied.” She boxed me on the shoulder and added:

  “I just wanted to see if you could tell when I’m lying and when I’m not.” I said:

  “Your dad may be a wind and perhaps your mom is a scent of sun and sea, but you’re definitely a girl and girls can’t fly.”

  “You’re right”, she said, “but maybe they can learn!”

  Then she told me how she used to dream she was running down a grassy slope that got steeper and steeper until she couldn’t control the speed, she fell forward out into the air – and flew! In the dream she wasn’t even surprised when she sailed out over the valley to be with her parents, and now she thought that maybe that meant it could actually be done.

  “If you really really believe that you can take off, it may work”, she said. “Problem is that when you’re awake you know it can’t be done. You have to remain on the ground, watching the birds...but that’s not so bad either!”

  “No”, I said. I couldn’t think of anything more to say but then again it didn’t seem necessary. We just sat there on the ground, leaning towards the wall, watching the birds.

  Eulalia said she wanted to be left alone the next day because she had something to do, so I stayed home and helped Granny water the bushes that had begun to dry up in the sun. I had to carry buckets from the pump and got pretty sweaty.

  After lunch we biked over to the church to water the flowers on the grave of her mom and dad, and then we sat for a while on the beach beneath the church. There were always a lot of birds on that beach but they wouldn’t fly much, preferring to hop around in the shoreline where they were poking their beaks between the stones for insects or other such candy. Granny told me about grandpa:

  “He could really fly”, she said, “sometimes he would come falling down so that I was sure he was about to crash before he turned the plane upwards again, disappearing among the clouds with a ringing laughter.”

  “What kind of plane was it?”

  “Well, in the beginning it was one of those old biplanes with two sets of wings and no roof over the cabin. He got all wild as soon as he was airborne – would fly on the side or upside down or looping around in the sky so that I had to go inside, trying to think about something else...”

  “What about you, can you fly?”

  “Well you know I’m not quite sure”, she said with a strange smile, “it’s been so long since I last tried.”

  At night I lay beneath the heavy covers in the tall old iron bed again, watching the fire in the stove. You could hear the wind pushing against the window behind the curtain and I had a hot water bottle to warm my toes on.

  Granny was sitting up in bed at the other side of the room with a crossword puzzle and I thought of Eulalia out there in the desolate and unfurnished house in the woods. How came she wanted to live there? For how long was she going to stay? Did she have anything to eat? Why didn’t she at least clean the place? Where had she lived before? Didn’t she have to go to school? I still had so many questions to put, and yet I wasn’t all that worried because there was something about Eulalia that made me very calm.

  She wasn’t afraid, she had said, because she had squeezed and fingered and tickled her fear so much that it got bored with her and left...

  I moved even further down the bed so that both my chin and my nose disappeared beneath the cover, and wondered if it was actually possible to squeeze and finger a fear away. And I shut my eyes and felt the heat from the glowing wood in the stove come sneaking to put itself on my forehead. I was tired and my thoughts were all tangled up, and suddenly I saw Eulalia inside of my head! She was standing there with her back straight and with her hands on her hips and the hair curling across her face and that somewhat crooked nose. She looked a little angry.

  “Hello there”, she said, “time to shut the light! Don’t make up a whole heap of silly questions now when a couple would be enough...” Then she gave me a broad smile and waved: “See you tomorrow - then we’re gonna tell each other some stuff.”

  I sat up in bed and blinked and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles and she was gone. All I could see were my own confused thoughts running back and forth, hiding behind each other so that I couldn’t make any of them out. Granny gave me a glance and said:

  “Sandman threw you too much, did he?”

  When I came running through the morning on my way to the Clearing, Eulalia was already waiting for me outside the gate. She had made a tail of her hair but her clothes were the same and she sat comfortably leaning against a pine tree. All around her sheep were dozing in the shadows and it looked strange because sheep usually try to keep away from people.

  “Time to wake up now?” she said, “I’ve been sitting here since the sun rose.”

  “This is very early for me”, I said, “normally I sleep for a few hours more.”

  “I know”, she said, “it’s nice to sleep... But sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and wonder why I’m hiding inside when all the stars are lit and the moon is singing with all it’s powers and the owls are hoo-ing in the background. Then I have to dress and get out.”

  “That’s what you did tonight?”

  “Yeah... I was working on my flying all day yesterday and it went so well that I just couldn’t relax when it got dark. I kept thinking how much I would like to fly out into the night with that cool air around my calves. Surely I would have met some wind who knew my dad and who could tell me what he and my mom are up to.”

  “What are you telling me? You were training to fly?”

  “All day long!”

  “And it went well?”

  “Well, I don’t know... I can’t steer yet and I don’t dare fly all that high, and I can’t carry anything or it will pull me to the ground...”

  “But you manage to take off?”

  “Yep! Isn’t it fantastic?”

  We walked through the woods down to the beach. Eulalia was talking all the way about how wonderful it was to fly and about how she looked forward to learning to steer so that she dared rise above the treetops where the winds could get hold of her. As usual I didn’t really know what to say. When I asked if I could watch her flying she said she wanted to wait until she got better. I thought it would be the most marvellous thing I’d ever seen. And if she would teach me...

  “Eulalia”, I said, “do you think I can learn to fly too?”

&n
bsp; She hopped away a couple of metres and checked me out good from my head to my toes.

  “Well yeah...” she said, “I’m certain you can. But in your own way, of course. We’re quite different you and I so I don’t believe I can teach you.”

  “Oh”, I said, feeling rather discouraged. Who would teach me if she wouldn’t - I didn’t know anybody else who could fly.

  “Don’t mope”, she said and tickled my armpits so that I had to fight myself loose, “of course you’ll learn to fly one day. All you really need is to want it bad enough, and never to stop wanting.”

  “And for how long must I want it?”

  “Well”, she said, “maybe it’s more a question of how much.”

  “So how much must I want it then?”

  She stopped short on the path and took my hand and stared me in the eyes with her nose against my nose. Suddenly her voice was serious and a little hoarse:

  “So much that you lose your breath watching the clouds sail by!”

  The beach wasn’t very far and we soon jumped between the rocks in the shoreline. Eulalia was barefoot as always and I’d put my socks inside of the shoes I carried in my hands. Sometimes I lost my balance and had to step down into the cold water, but then again that’s why I’d taken my shoes off. The bottom was slimy and soft from rotten seaweed and sometimes I would accidently step on some flat little fish that rapidly escaped with a fluttering movement tickling my sole.

  After jumping like that for a while Eulalia thought it time to bathe. She undressed on the beach and ran into the water and disappeared beneath the surface. The sun hadn’t been up long and I felt a little chilly but went after her anyway. And once inside the water it soon felt better – we swam around like two pale eels for a long time, holding our breaths and poking at the bottom for hidden treasures (although we didn’t find any of course).

  “Well”, I said later when we sat on the rocks, waiting for the sun and the wind to dry us up before putting our clothes on again.

  “Well what?” said Eulalia

  “You were inside my head last night when I was about to sleep, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, that...”

  “What’s your business there?”

  “Eh, I just thought I would check a little what you were thinking of. And it was all so silly I felt I had to say something.”

  “It’s not nice listening to other peoples thoughts.”

  “Don’t worry, I only listen to stuff that concerns me.”

  “But still...”

  “I know, I’m terrible!”

  She stood up and got dressed and I did the same. Then we sat down again and looked across the sound. Far out there was a little rowing boat pulling net, and further still you could see the ferry heading from our island to the main island. It started to warm up.

  We walked all the way out to the northern strait where you could look out at sea for real. It was almost always windy there and the few trees were all shrivelled up and crooked. The beach was covered with a billion small stones and pebbles that the sea had made all round and soft, and since they made it rather difficult walking we sat down. It was close to the lighthouse that lay by itself on a small islet and I