A Faraway Island (10 page)

They have math for the first hour. The problems are easy, simple division Stephie learned in fifth grade. She waves her hand eagerly and finally gets a chance to solve one problem at the blackboard.

“Quite right,” Miss Bergström tells Stephie when she is done. “Very good.”

“Verrrrry good,” Sylvia imitates in a whisper. Miss Bergström pretends she hasn’t heard.

When recess comes, Stephie hopes Vera will find her, but she doesn’t. Vera spends recess in a corner of the schoolyard, among a crowd of girls that includes Sylvia. Sometimes Stephie senses them looking at her. She wonders what they’re saying.

Britta, though, seeks her out and asks if she wants to jump rope. Stephie does just fine until she notices Svante staring. Then she gets nervous and misses a step. So she has to turn the rope.

While Britta is jumping, someone comes up behind Stephie. She turns her head and sees Sylvia’s whole crowd, with Sylvia in the lead.

“Say something in German,” Sylvia commands.

Stephie shakes her head and keeps turning the rope.

“Say something!” Sylvia repeats. “You can talk, can’t you?”

“Sure.”

“So say something, then,” Sylvia nags. “We want to hear how it sounds.”

“Say something,” one of her friends urges. It’s Barbro, the girl who’s always with Sylvia.

The group encircles Stephie. Vera stays in the background, pulling up a sock and rummaging through her dress pocket.

“How about a yodel?” Sylvia asks. “You’re from the Alps, after all.”

Britta misses a step now. She walks over to Stephie’s end and takes the rope from her hand.

“Your turn,” she says.

“Stop showing off,” Sylvia says to Stephie. “Don’t think you can butter Miss Bergström up, either. Little Princess from Vienna. Who asked you to come here, anyway?”

Stephie pretends she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t care what Sylvia thinks.

She runs in under the turning jump rope, counting silently to herself.
One … and … two … and … one … and … two … and—

There’s a sudden tug and the rope is pulled tight. Stephie falls down, scraping the palms of her hands on the hard gravel. Sylvia smiles mockingly as she drops the rope and walks off with her entourage.

When
November arrives, the island is even grayer than it was over the summer. Only the juniper bushes are still green. It’s dark when Stephie leaves for school in the morning, and it’s dark by the time she returns in the afternoon. She has a long walk. The wind blowing in off the ocean bites right through her coat; her knees go blue with the cold.

Still, she’s pleased to be going to school. How would she have made the days pass otherwise? The afternoons and evenings with Aunt Märta are long enough. They never just sit chatting as Stephie and Mamma would.

The minute Stephie walked in after school, she and her mother used to sit down, Mamma with a cup of coffee and Stephie with hot chocolate. Stephie would tell her mother what she had done that day, and what she had seen on her way home. Mamma might tell her a story about her own
childhood or about when she performed at the opera. They would talk about the books they were reading, or about the trips they planned to go on together when Stephie was older.

Writing to someone is not the same as talking face to face. A conversation is so much more than words: a conversation is eyes, smiles, the silences between the words. When Stephie writes to her mother, her hand can’t keep up with her mind, so it’s difficult to get everything on paper; all the thoughts and feelings run through her head. And once the letter has been mailed, it can take several weeks before she gets an answer.

Aunt Märta never asks Stephie any questions or tells her any stories. She makes sure that Stephie does her homework, cleans her room, and helps with the housework. Nothing more.

In the evenings Aunt Märta sits in the front room and knits. At seven she turns on the radio to hear the news and the evening prayers. But the minute music comes on, she turns it off. “Secular” music is sinful, Aunt Märta tells Stephie, and secular music includes everything but hymns and spiritual songs like the ones the choir sings at the Pentecostal Church. Jazz, popular music, and classical music, it’s all the same to Aunt Märta—the devil’s playground.

Sometimes when Aunt Märta is out, Stephie turns on the radio. Except for those times, the white frame house is silent.

Things are different when Uncle Evert is home. He talks to Stephie, tells stories about things that happened on board the fishing boat, asks her about school, praises her progress with Swedish, and makes a joke of her mistakes.

“I’ll take you out on the
Diana
next summer,” he tells her. “I’ll teach you to row the dinghy, too.”

Summer is a long way off. Stephie won’t be here then, though she doesn’t tell Uncle Evert that. She’s already been in Sweden three months. “Six months at the very most,” her father promised.

But the letters from home no longer contain updates about entry visas, Amsterdam, or America. Her father writes that he and Mamma have moved to an even smaller room, and that Mamma now has a job keeping house for an older lady. Mamma, a housekeeper! Stephie can’t imagine her mother wearing an apron and working in someone else’s kitchen.

Mamma doesn’t write anything about her work. Her letters are full of questions about Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert, about school, about whether Stephie is making friends on the island. Stephie answers that everyone is kind to her, that she has lots of friends and is doing well at school. The last part, at least, is true. She often even learns the verses of the hymns by heart, though she only just barely understands what they’re about.

In every letter, Mamma asks Stephie to remind Nellie to write home.

You’re the big sister, and I depend on you to help your little sister
, Mamma writes.
Be sure she writes to us regularly, and try to help her keep up her German. Her spelling has become so much worse. Of course, I’m pleased that you’re learning Swedish, but German is your mother tongue and one day you will be back
.

“Tomorrow,” Nellie promises when Stephie tells her to
write home. “I’ll do it tomorrow. Today I’m going to play with Sonja after school.” Sonja is a friend from class.

But when the next day comes around, Nellie has plans to go to one of her classmates’, or she’s invited one of them back to Auntie Alma’s. Nellie is popular. Every morning when she gets to school a flock of girls is waiting for her, competing to be her chosen playmate. Nellie laughs and jokes as if she’s known Swedish her whole life.

No one waits in the schoolyard for Stephie. Vera sticks with Sylvia’s gang, and Stephie’s not welcome among them. She has to seek out Britta and her friends if she wants someone to play with. Although they let her join in when she asks, she always feels like an intruder. They talk so easily about people and things she knows nothing about. No one ever invites her home after school. Once, she tries to ask Britta back with her.

“It’s too far,” Britta answers. “I don’t think my mother would let me. Not at this time of year when it’s so dark.”

The worst thing of all is Sylvia’s constant teasing. Stephie’s German accent, her clothes, her appearance—everything that makes her different from the others—is the object of Sylvia’s ridicule, and she nosedives straight at her target like a seagull swooping down to pick up a juicy morsel.

“Horsehair,” Sylvia says, pulling on one of Stephie’s braids. “Look, her mane is braided! Why don’t you wear feathers in it as well, like a circus horse?”

“Hee-hee-hee,” Sylvia’s crowd giggles. All but Vera, who just looks away and pretends not to hear.

Svante likes Stephie’s braids. Sometimes he strokes one
furtively as he walks by her in the classroom. When he touches her, Stephie pulls back from his big hands, hands that are never completely clean.

Vera teases Svante, imitating his clumsy movements and the way he slurs his words. Vera is very good at imitation. She notices little details, gestures and expressions, and captures them perfectly.

Once, when Miss Bergström is out of the room, Vera imitates her. When the teacher returns with a map, the class is laughing loudly. They have to pinch one another to stop before there’s trouble. Another time Vera waves her hands and rolls her
r
’s like the preacher at the Pentecostal Church, though it upsets Britta and the other children who go to Sunday school there.

Of course Svante’s interest in Stephie hasn’t passed Sylvia by unnoticed.

“The Princess from Vienna has an admirer,” she says with a sneer. “The Princess and the village idiot, just like in the fairy tales. Except Svante’s not likely to turn into a prince!”

One day Svante pulls a package out of his schoolbag and hands it to Stephie. This happens during lunch break, when everyone is eating sandwiches and drinking milk in the classroom. At first Stephie thinks Svante’s offering her one of his sandwiches, which are wrapped in greasy brown paper.

“No, thank you,” she declines politely. “I’ve got my own.”

Svante laughs loudly. “It isn’t a sandwich,” he says. “It’s a present. For you.”

“Come on, open it,” urges Britta, who sits next to her.

“Yes, open it,” says Sylvia, leaning forward to get a better view. “We want to see what your admirer bought you.”

“I’ll open it at home,” Stephie says, hurriedly pressing the package into her knapsack.

Svante gets angry. “Open it now!” he tells her. “I want to be there when you do.”

Stephie can’t avoid it, so she unwraps the greasy brown paper. The package contains a roughly hewn handmade frame.

“Turn it over,” Svante orders her impatiently.

Stephie turns the frame to the front. There’s a picture in the frame, a familiar face that glares at her. A face she’s seen thousands of times, in newspapers, on posters, in shop windows back home in Vienna. Black hair brushed down over the forehead, a black moustache, sinister eyes. It’s a blurry picture in black and white, probably from a magazine. A framed picture of Hitler.

“I made it myself,” Svante tells her. “Do you like it?”

Stephie stares at the picture, trying to make sense of it.

She remembers seeing Hitler once in real life. It was last March, when the German army made a triumphal procession through the streets of Vienna. Hitler was there, chauffeured in a black Mercedes.

Stephie and Evi snuck out to watch the parade, against the instructions of their mothers. At first it seemed exciting—like a special occasion.

“Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!”

People pushed and shoved to be able to see better. Lots of them raised their arms in the Nazi salute.

A fat woman shoved the girls aside. A uniformed man stared nastily at them. Stephie and Evi tried to push back through the crowd to get away, but they couldn’t. In the end
they pressed up against the wall of a building, making themselves as invisible as they could, until the parade passed and the crowd began to disperse.

“Let me see,” says Sylvia from the row behind. “What is it?”

She puts out a hand to take the picture from Stephie, who holds on to it, tight. In the tussle, Stephie knocks over her bottle of milk; the milk spills out over the picture and drips onto the floor.

“Don’t you like it?” Svante asks in disappointment. “I thought you’d be pleased. You do come from Germany, don’t you?”

He leans forward onto Stephie’s desk, pressing his huge hands on the surface and bringing his pimply face right up to hers.

“Let me be,” Stephie cries. “Leave me alone, you idiot!”

Miss Bergström appears in the doorway. “What on earth is going on here?” she asks.

“It’s Stephie,” Sylvia tells her. “Svante tried to give her a present, but she wouldn’t accept it. She called him a stupid idiot.”

“Stephanie,” Miss Bergström says sharply. “That is not how we address one another at our school. Perhaps you do, where you come from. But we don’t, here in Sweden.”

Stephie rushes out of the classroom, down the stairs, and out into the schoolyard. She throws the picture to the ground, crushes it under her heel until that awful face is gone, and stamps on the frame until it breaks. Then she opens the door to the outhouse and tosses the whole thing into one of the holes, straight down into the smelly muck.