A Faraway Island

by Annika Thor

  Stephie and Nellie’s first week on the island is sunny.

  Every day, Stephie goes on a long walk from the white frame house at the end of the world to the yellow house with the enclosed veranda.

  Every day, Auntie Alma takes the girls along with her own children to the beach.

  Every day, Stephie sits on the blanket, fully dressed, watching Nellie and the little ones splashing at the shore, and the older children diving from the cliffs out on the headland.

  Auntie Alma probably thinks Stephie doesn’t know how to swim and is ashamed to show it. In any case, she doesn’t make any further attempts to persuade her to go into the water.

  One morning Stephie wakes up and doesn’t see the sun shining in; she’s relieved. It’s a cloudy, gray day, and windy, too. She puts on a sweater before walking to Auntie Alma’s. Aunt Märta points to the suit and towel on the line, shaking her head and saying something. Stephie catches the Swedish words for “swim” and “cold.”

  “Not swim,” Stephie says. “Nellie …” That exhausts her Swedish vocabulary.

  Aunt Märta nods, ushering Stephie into the room with the wall clock. She points to the three.

  “Come home. Three o’clock,” she says.

  Stephie nods. “Three o’clock.”

  “Evert,” Aunt Märta says. “Uncle Evert’s coming home.”

  Stephie pretends to understand. It’s easier that way.

  In Auntie Alma’s kitchen Nellie and the little ones are sitting around the table drawing, and Auntie Alma is mixing something in a bowl. She always keeps busy cooking, baking, washing the dishes, polishing, and dusting. But unlike Aunt Märta, who does the housework gravely and resolutely, Auntie Alma never appears to think anything is any trouble. Ladles, dust cloths, and brooms seem to dance in her hands as if working all on their own. She kneads dough lightly on her baking board, and the dishes seem to fly from the sink into the drainer.

  Nellie looks up from her drawing. “We’re not going to the beach today,” she announces.

  “Phew,” Stephie replies.

  She helps herself to a piece of paper and a pencil and begins to draw a girl’s face, with large eyes and curly hair. She spends a long time on the mouth, trying to make a thin, arched Cupid’s bow. She has to erase it several times before she’s satisfied. The girl looks glum. Pretty and sorrowful. A little like Evi, her best friend back in Vienna.

  Elsa admires Stephie’s drawing. She’s been busy drawing princesses with long blond hair and pink ball gowns. John is too little to do anything other than scribble what looks to Stephie like a jumble of lines and spirals.

  Stephie walks around to the other side of the table to look over Nellie’s shoulder. She’s drawn a man and a woman, both on their knees on the sidewalk. Standing over them is a man in a uniform. He’s got a pistol in one hand, and is lashing at the couple. Behind them is a shop window, on which someone has written, in big red letters: JEWS.

  Stephie recognizes the scene in Nellie’s drawing. She was there, too, one day just after the Germans invaded Vienna, nearly a year and a half ago.

  The girls had been on their way home from the playground. Outside the furrier’s shop, where their mother bought her fur coats, they saw the furrier and his wife on their knees, scouring the sidewalk with scrub brushes. A man in uniform was guarding them, a pistol in his hand. They were surrounded by a crowd. No one stepped in to help the elderly couple. On the contrary, people were laughing and mocking them. Someone had written JEW in yard-high red letters across their shop window. Stephie took Nellie by the hand and ran home.

  “You shouldn’t be drawing things like that,” she says to Nellie. “Make something pretty instead.” She grabs Nellie’s drawing and crumples it into a ball.

  “What did you do that for?” Nellie protests.

  “Draw something nice,” Stephie says. “Something for Auntie Alma.”

  But Nellie doesn’t feel like drawing anymore.

  “Come with me and I’ll show you something,” she says to Stephie, pulling her by the hand into the front room. There’s an old-fashioned overstuffed couch with a stiff back, a little round table with a crocheted cloth, and armchairs with puffy cushions. There’s a little white organ, too. That’s what Nellie wants Stephie to see.

  “A piano,” she says, “there is a piano.”

  “That’s not a piano, it’s an organ,” Stephie corrects her. “You remember, we had one at school.”

  “Who cares?” Nellie says, sitting down on the organ bench. Her short legs just barely allow her to reach the pedals.

  “I’m allowed to play it. Auntie Alma said so.”

  She starts playing a children’s song, while Stephie investigates everything in the room. Against one wall, she sees a glass-paned cupboard filled with knickknacks: a little box decorated with all kinds of seashells, a porcelain basket full of china rosebuds, two statuettes—a shepherd and shepherdess—and many other treasures.

  There’s even a small china dog. It’s brown and white, with a gold-tipped, rather than a black, nose. It has a blue collar and is standing with its head cocked.

  “Nellie,” Auntie Alma calls from the kitchen. Nellie stops playing, hops down from the organ bench, and runs out of the room.

  Stephie remains mesmerized by the china dog. It’s adorable and she longs to hold it. She notices a brass key in the cupboard door. She turns it, opens the door, and carefully removes the dog. The china feels cool in the palm of her hand. She inspects the dog from every angle, stroking it gently.

  “Mimi,” she whispers. “Your name is Mimi.”

  “Stephie!” Auntie Alma is standing in the doorway.

  Instantly, without thinking, Stephie drops the dog into her dress pocket. She closes the door of the cupboard surreptitiously with her elbow.

  Auntie Alma has set out sandwiches and milk on the kitchen table. Stephie eats only a little. She knows she’s a guest at Auntie Alma’s house, an extra mouth to feed. When Auntie Alma passes the platter toward her again, she says no thanks.

  “I’m not … hungry,” she says slowly, testing her Swedish.

  Stephie clasps the china dog in her pocket. She’ll put it back as soon as she gets a chance.

  After lunch, Auntie Alma sends them out to play. She needs to clean the house, and doesn’t want all the children underfoot.

  The little china dog in Stephie’s pocket upsets her; she feels almost feverish. Holding one hand around it so it won’t bump and break, she sits still on the bench in the yard, waiting for Auntie Alma to call them in so she can put it back. That never happens.

  Through an open window, Stephie hears the kitchen clock chime. Once, twice, three times. It’s three already. She has to leave.

  “I need to go home,” she calls to Nellie.

  Mimi will have to go with her to Aunt Märta’s white frame house. Surely there will be a chance to put her back tomorrow morning.

  Stephie hurries home, running most of the way. As she opens the door she hears the clock chime once: three-fifteen.

  Aunt Märta comes out of the kitchen. She doesn’t seem upset. In fact, she almost looks happy.

  “Come along, now,” she says, leading Stephie back through the kitchen and into the front room.

  A man is sitting in the rocking chair. When Stephie enters the room he rises and walks toward her. He has on blue workingman’s trousers and a knitted sweater. The hand he extends is large, warm, and calloused. His face is sunburned and lined. The clothes he’s wearing smell fishy.

  “Uncle Evert,” Aunt Märta explains.

  “Stephie,” says Stephie.

  “I wish you a warm welcome to our home,” the man says in a soft voice.

  “Thank you,” Stephie replies in Swedish.

  “She understood, Märta! Did you hear that? She understood me!”

  “Yes, she’s beginning to pick up a few words,” Aunt Märta replies. Then she goes into the kitchen to prepare dinner.

  Uncle Evert sits back down in the rocking c
hair. Stephie takes a seat opposite him, and they consider each other. Uncle Evert has bright blue eyes that give Stephie the impression he can see right through her and out into the wide world. Almost as if he has been staring at the ocean for so long it has taken up residence in his eyes.

  Eventually Uncle Evert breaks the silence. He speaks slowly, ransacking his memory for German words.

  “Ich … Fischer.” He points to the ocean. “Farhren weit … mit Boot.”

  Stephie nods eagerly. Uncle Evert’s German is almost worse than her Swedish, but she understands what he means. That he’s a fisherman and has been off on the ocean with his boat.

  Tentatively, they converse in a combination of Swedish, German, and sign language. Stephie tells him that her father is a doctor and her mother was an opera singer when she was young, before she had a family. Uncle Evert explains that he started out as a sailor, which was how he learned a little German a long time ago.

  “Hamburg,” he says. “Bremerhaven, Amsterdam.” And Stephie understands that he is telling her the boat he worked on traveled to the big ports in northern Germany and Holland. This is the first time since she arrived on the island that she has been able to talk with someone other than Nellie. She wishes they could go on talking all the way to bedtime.

  “Evert,” Aunt Märta calls from the kitchen. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Uncle Evert gets up. “Wash … waschen …,” he says, pointing to his work clothes. He vanishes up the stairs.

  Stephie goes into the kitchen to set the table. Three plates, three glasses, three forks, and three knives, instead of the usual two.

  Something hard bumps against her left thigh. The china dog! She’s forgotten all about it. What if it breaks! Or what if Aunt Märta notices the bulge in her pocket and asks what it is. She has to hide it in a safe place. As soon as she hears that Uncle Evert has stopped making noise at the washstand and has gone into his bedroom, Stephie extends her hands toward Aunt Märta and imitates his word.

  “Wash …”

  Aunt Märta nods approvingly. Stephie rushes up the stairs and into her room. Wrapping Mimi in a handkerchief, she hides the china dog at the very back of the bottom dresser drawer, along with her most treasured possessions. Then she hurries out and washes her hands.

  At the table, hands folded, she and Uncle Evert listen to Aunt Märta say grace.

  “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. Let this food for us be blessed.”

  “Amen,” all three of them conclude.

  While they eat, Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert talk about his fishing trip and about the news on the island during his absence. Stephie grasps a word here and there. She pokes around at her portion of cod, removing the slimy gray skin and mashing the fish with her potatoes and gravy. The whole thing becomes an unappetizing white mess.

  As usual, she rinses down her bites of food with milk, and as usual her milk glass is empty long before her plate is. She rehearses silently several times before trying out her new Swedish phrase, the one she heard little Elsa say just a few hours earlier.

  “Would you please pass the milk?”

  Aunt Märta’s chin drops, and she stops talking mid-sentence.

  “Well, I never … !” Uncle Evert exclaims. “Just listen to that perfect Swedish!”

  “She’s a quick learner,” Aunt Märta adds, passing Stephie the milk pitcher.

  “That’s good.” Uncle Evert smiles encouragingly from across the table. “It won’t be long until you sound just like the rest of us when you speak Swedish. Then you’ll be able to go to school.”

  Stephie doesn’t really catch his meaning. But she does recognize the Swedish word for school.

  “Please,” she says. “School.”

  She thinks about her old school in Vienna. Her real school, where she was the top student in her class and always got gold stars for her assignments. Where her teacher liked her—or at least Stephie believed so, until one day in March last year.

  The day after the German army invaded Vienna, her teacher came to school with a swastika pinned to her pretty blazer.

  “Heil Hitler!” she began the day by saying to the class. No more “Good morning, children.”

  “Heil Hitler!” some of the students responded, raising an arm in the prescribed salute. Others just stared, unsure as to what the teacher expected of them.

  They soon learned. From that day on, she told them, they were all expected to start the day with “Heil Hitler!” All but the Jewish children, that is, who were not allowed to perform the Hitler salute. For that reason, the teacher told them, they must sit apart, in the back row of desks, so she could be sure that all the German children, and none of the Jewish ones, were doing the salute correctly.

  An incredulous mumble rose from the room. What was she saying? Could she possibly mean it?

  “Well …?” their teacher said, a stern expression on her face. “Did you hear me?”

  The class monitor, Irene, got up, taking her books from her desk, and moved from the front row to an empty desk in the far corner at the back of the room. A few others followed. Some of the children who had always sat in the back row left their desks and moved forward to the ones now free. Stephie and Evi didn’t budge from their seats, which were directly in front of the teacher’s lectern.

  “You, too, Stephie!” her teacher said sharply. “And Evi.”

  “But I’m not Jewish,” Evi cried. “My mother’s Catholic.”

  “That makes no difference,” the teacher said coldly. “Go sit at the back.”

  Evi got up from behind her desk and rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. There was total silence.

  “Come, now,” the teacher said to Stephie. “Do as you’re told.”

  Stephie gathered up her books and moved to an empty desk at the back. The teacher then picked up a piece of chalk and, without another word, started writing arithmetic problems on the blackboard.

  “What are you sitting there dreaming about?” Uncle Evert asks kindly.

  “Don’t play with your food,” Aunt Märta scolds at the same time.

  Stephie snaps back to the present. Looking down at her plate, she’s surprised to see that she has been drawing something in her mashed potatoes with her fork. A star. Like the gold stars in her assignment books. Like the star of David that stands for “Jewish.” Quickly she gives her mashed-up food a stir and begins to eat again.

  Uncle Evert stays home for two days. When he leaves again Stephie goes along to the harbor to wave goodbye. The fishing boat has a crew of six. The youngest member, Per-Erik, isn’t much older than Stephie, and when the two are introduced, Per-Erik shyly looks away. Auntie Alma’s husband, Sigurd, is also a member of the crew.

  Uncle Evert has told Stephie that the boat is named the Diana. Stephie likes that name, but all it says on the bow of the boat is GG 143, to show that it is vessel 143 of the Göteborg fishing fleet.

  After Uncle Evert leaves, things return to normal. Stephie has breakfast with Aunt Märta every morning, after which she puts things away and washes the dishes. Then she spends the rest of the day with Nellie, until it’s time to go home for dinner. After dinner she washes the dishes again, and helps Aunt Märta with other chores. In the evenings she either sits in her room or in the window nook writing letters or entries in her diary.

  Inside the back cover of her diary she makes a short line for every day she’s been on the island. There are 182 days in six months. Every evening she counts the lines. Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six …

  In her letters to her parents, she tells them everything is fine. She does the same when she writes to Evi, except that she conjures a particularly lovely picture of life on the island. She hopes that if she makes Sweden sound tempting enough, Evi will want to come, too. But she knows that since Evi’s mother is Catholic, Evi may not have to leave Austria at all.

  When Stephie isn’t writing, she’s reading. Soon she’s read every single book she brought from home. The only book in Aunt Märta
’s white frame house is the Bible on the table in the front room.

  “When are we going home, Stephie?” Nellie asks. “Can we leave soon?”

  “We’re not going home,” Stephie explains patiently, “and you know it. We’re going to America. As soon as Mamma and Papa get their entry visas, we’ll meet them in Amsterdam.”

  “When will that be?” Nellie asks for the hundredth time.

  “I don’t know. Soon.”

  They’re huddled close together on a big rock at the beach. The water glistens a beautiful shade of blue in the sun, but the wind is chilly and no one swims anymore. It’s September and all the other children have started school. Stephie and Nellie have the beach to themselves now; it’s the place where they can be alone with their homesickness.

  “Tell me about America,” Nellie begs.

  “In America,” Stephie tells her, “things aren’t at all like here. They have big cities with tall buildings and streets full of cars.”

  “Like in Vienna?”

  “The buildings are much taller. Everything in America is huge. We’ll live in a house with lots and lots of rooms and a big garden. A real garden with tall trees, lindens and chestnuts. Almost a park. Not at all like here.”

  “Will we have a dog there?” Nellie asks.

  Stephie remembers Mimi, the china dog wrapped in a handkerchief in the bottom of her dresser drawer. Auntie Alma must have noticed the dog is missing. With every passing day it becomes increasingly difficult to put Mimi back.

  “Yes, of course we will,” Stephie answers simply.

  “And a piano,” Nellie adds. “We will have a piano in America, won’t we?”

  When they have had enough of sitting and talking they wander the narrow streets of the village. Not that there’s much to see. Houses and yards, mounds of rock. The post office, the shop, the schoolhouse. A little chapel on a rise hovers above the other buildings. At the edge of the village, not far from Auntie Alma’s, is a big red building people call the Pentecostal Church, though it doesn’t look much like a church at all. And near the harbor there’s another, the Mission Covenant Church.