the woods. We were getting close to one of the many old wooden gates along Green Street, and passed one of my better places of wild strawberries. I wondered if I ought to tell Eulalia about it, but then I thought one has a right to keep ones places of wild strawberries even from ones best friends. And they weren’t due yet for several weeks anyway.
On one side of the path a pasture leaned up over the ridge. There were no sheep there and the grass had grown tall and soft and blue harebells and cornflowers made you almost want to dive into it all to cool off...
“I think I’m gonna stay here for a while and train”, said Eulalia. It took me a second or two to realize what she meant.”
“You’re gonna fly? Now? Can I watch?”
“No, I don’t think I can if someone is watching. I have to be alone with the fear if I’m gonna make it sleep.”
“Okay”, I said, “I suppose I have to go home anyway. I’m starting to get hungry. Good luck!”
Eulalia waved and ran up the hill and I shouted after her:
“Sure you don’t want to come and eat something?”
She stopped and turned around:
“Windgirls don’t get hungry all that often but thanks anyway. If the training goes well I may fly by your bedroom window tonight.”
“Don’t do that, Eulalia, my granny could be so scared she never dare look out a window again.”
Eulalia grinned:
“Maybe your granny understands about flying creatures better than you think. Go home now!”
And I went. At the end of the slope I climbed the gate and then I ran. It started to get chilly in the shadows and I was really hungry now.
My grandmother and I had soup at the big table in the dining-room where dead ancestors looked at us from photographs on the walls. It felt stranger than usual.
Then we listened to the radio and played cards and talked about this and that. I asked her if she had ever been lost on the island.
“Only once”, she said, “and it wasn’t even long ago. I was out walking in the woods on the other side of the Clearing and I thought about something and all of a sudden I couldn’t tell where I was. I just kept walking without recognizing anything, and then I caught sight of a house on the other side of a vast pasture. I didn’t believe I’d ever seen the house nor the pasture before and it felt a bit scary since I’ve been moving around here for some eighty summers. But I climbed a wooden fence and crossed the pasture and when I got closer to the house I saw it was Ohlssons, our closest neighbour!”
“But that’s only a couple of hundred metres from here.”
“Sure, but I probably haven’t seen that house from the back side since I was a little girl and used to play I was an orphant wind whirling around up on the ridge there. Anyway, when I finally understood where I was I couldn’t help laughing. And I thought it was a lucky thing I’d gotten lost so that I could have such a good laugh afterwards. Furthermore it was quite exciting.”
“What did you say?” I said.
“About what?”
“What did you say you were playing when you were little?”
“That I was a wind, you mean? Yes, I played I was a wind trapped inside a little girl. And in order to find my parents, who of course were winds too, I had to learn how to fly. That kept me busy for a whole summer.”
I watched my grandmother and felt all dizzy trying to imagine what she had looked like when she was little, before she grew up and got round and soft, and before the hair lost its colour. I got dizzy because what I saw was Eulalia.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I think I’ll go to bed now”, I said.
I didn’t sleep much that night but lay for a long time listening to Granny snoring on the other side of the room. A twig of lilacs was knocking lightly against the windowpane every now and then and I had all sorts of strange thoughts.
Could it be, I thought, that Granny and Eulalia knew each other although neither one of them had said anything about it? Were they trying to make a joke, or was it only coincidence that Granny had been playing Eulalia some seventy years before Eulalia even existed? Could there be two of one person – one who was eight or nine years old and one who was past seventy? Was there any other explanation? I just couldn’t make it out, but at least my dizziness passed eventually and I just felt how much I liked Granny because she had been playing a windgirl when she was little. And I really hoped that Eulalia would learn how to fly, so that one day she got to meet her mom and her dad again.
I couldn’t find her next day, although I was hanging around the Clearing for over an hour in the morning and almost as long in the afternoon. The door of the house was closed and there were two lambs resting in the shadow behind the stairs. I didn’t want to disturb them so I pounded on the boards covering the windows and then I sat on a rock by the ruin on the other side of the road but she never appeared. I couldn’t even hear the wind whistle.
Instead I spent the evening home at the farm – climbed the loft where the farmer had gotten his hay out so that I could train boxing up there with an old cushion I’d hung in a rope around one of the beams in the roof. Then I stood at the gate, playing with the worn leather ball. Sometimes I could make it bounce between my feet for twenty minutes or half an hour, but now it didn’t go so well – probably because I couldn’t help glancing out towards the meadow for Eulalia all the time.
When it got dark I went inside and sat with Granny by the cracking fire in the stove. We played China-chess and she won every time. In secret I was watching her somewhat crooked nose and the white curl of hair that kept falling down over her eye so that she had to put it back behind the ear.
That night I was so tired I actually fell asleep rather instantly. Then I dreamt about when Granny was little and ran around up on the ridge in the woods, playing she was a wind caught in a girl. She made whistling and howling sounds with her arms spread out like wings when she ran downhill between the pines to get speed. Then she tripped and fell, and flew several metres, and when she landed she broke her nose against the ground.
When I woke and sat up it was still dark in the room, and I was all sweaty. I got out from under the heavy covers and put my feet on the cold floorboards, and sat like that until I started shivering. Then I silently went over in the darkness to crawl in behind Granny like I hadn’t done for years. Then I lay there, listening to her snoring and to the nibbling of the mice inside the walls.
I couldn’t find her the next day either. In fact it was almost a week before I saw her again, and then it was only because she came to look for me. The sun was going down over the pine forest beyond the gate and I was chopping wood outside the woodshed behind the barn. I felt lonely and a little abandoned and needed something to take my mind off girls pretending they knew all sorts of strange things only to disappear without a word. Then she suddenly peeked out through the shrub ahead of me.
“Hi...” I said, almost dropping the axe from surprise.
“Nick”, she said, “you’re too small to be chopping wood.”
“Yes”, I said, “that’s what my dad would say.”
“I know”, she said and laughed, “but you’re doing well, eh?”
“So far I’ve got all my fingers. But where have you been, Eulalia? I’ve been looking for you every day.”
“Not close enough, maybe.”
“I don’t know”, I said, “how close must one look for you?”
“Well, it certainly isn’t enough with a short peek through the window boards. Nor is it enough to sit by the Clearing for a while as if I didn’t have anything else to do but hang around there. If you want to see Eulalia you must look until your eyes hurt, until your eyes almost want to cry because they can’t see her... And from now on I guess you’ll have to bend your neck backwards as well.” Eulalia grinned so happily that her ears moved again and I dropped the axe and took a step towards her:
“Do you mean what I think you mean?” I said.
“Well”, she said, swapping the grin for he
r most concerned face, “it’s true I know how to enter the heads of little boys, but I can’t hear all they’re thinking – especially not when I have to listen to what they say at the same time.”
“But”, I said, “did you learn how to steer? That’s what I meant – can you fly now?”
“You know what”, she said, “we’re going now. Come on!”
She stepped out of the shrub and grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the meadow. I didn’t even have time to close the door of the woodshed.
I tried to explain to Eulalia that I would soon have to go to bed, but she didn’t much care to listen:
“Are you tired?” she asked.
“Well, not exactly”, I said, “but Granny...”
“Don’t worry”, said Eulalia, “she knows you’re in good hands.”
And so it came that I let myself be dragged into the woods by a barefoot girl who was no bigger than I, just as the day left the island and the shadows were eaten by darkness. Eulalia still held my hand and for some strange reason it made me all calm though I was normally afraid of entering the woods at night. We followed the sheep-path in under the pines and out on Green Street, and then went past the pasture by the house that Granny used to call “Larssons” although nobody lived there. The sheep were waiting to fall asleep in small groups close to each other and one or two raised their heads in surprise when we marched by in the darkness.
On through a part of the woods where