Samurai Summer

by Edwardson, Åke

  We were standing just inside the gate. One of the counselors came out of the main building and walked straight up to us.

  “Matron wants to speak to you, Tommy.”

  “Again?” asked Kerstin.

  The counselor didn’t answer. She just peered down at Kerstin.

  “You come with me,” she said. She tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away and put it on my sword.

  We walked across the playground. The little kids were shouting on the swings and the merry-go-round. One of them had gotten hurt and the cries floated up toward the blue sky. There were no clouds up there today either. I hadn’t heard any weather report for some time. You didn’t need to this summer. It was like some country far away where the sun was always shining.

  The counselor shut the door behind her when she left. Matron had pulled down the roller blinds in her office. It was dark but I could see well enough. I could see her sitting there behind her desk. She was framed by the roller blinds behind her. Like a painting.

  “So, do we have a deal, Tommy?” she asked.

  “Kenny,” I answered. “My name’s Kenny.”

  “Did it taste good? The food last night?” she asked and stood up.

  I nodded.

  “I hope you’re grateful, Tom—Kenny,” she said as she walked around the desk. “We could have sent you away.”

  I nodded again. I’d heard that before.

  “If you’re good to me, then I can be good to you,” she said standing in front of me. “We shouldn’t have to fight each other, you and I, Kenny.”

  She stood just inches from me. It seemed like the room had turned pitch black. I suddenly felt very afraid—more afraid than ever before. It felt like anything at all could happen here inside Matron’s office.

  “We know each other, after all,” she said, and she put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a big boy now, Kenny. You could help me out here at the camp.”

  “H-how?” I asked.

  “You could set a good example. Show the other kids. Show them how to behave.”

  That’s exactly what I’m doing, I thought to myself.

  I tried to think away the fear. To swallow it. I tried to make myself feel tough.

  Matron came even closer.

  “We have to cooperate,” she continued. “Otherwise it’ll be chaos out there.” She kept her hand on my shoulder. It felt like a sledgehammer. “And we don’t want that do we? Chaos?”

  Sure, I thought. That’s just what we want.

  She took her hand away quickly and stood straight up again.

  “By the way, I’ve got something that I think belongs to you.”

  She turned around and took out a brown paper bag from the desk, opened it, and pulled out my bag of Twist.

  8

  The bag of Twist lay on the table between me and Matron. It was see-through and looked unopened, but there was no way of knowing for sure. I could see the small, colorfully wrapped chocolates inside. My mouth watered, but I didn’t want to let her see that. I hoped it wouldn’t show if I spoke. But I wasn’t so stupid as to not realize that it could have been a different bag of Twist altogether. Matron could have bought it especially for this interrogation.

  “It was a mistake,” she said, nodding at the bag. “It somehow ended up in a drawer we thought was empty.”

  Empty. Whoever put the bag of Twist in the drawer must have seen that it wasn’t empty anymore since the bag of Twist ended up there.

  Matron held out her hand and poked at the bag as if I hadn’t yet noticed it was there.

  “So you were right, Kenny.”

  Really. So what did she want me to do now? Tell her that I forgave her and the counselors and the cook and the whole camp? That I forgave Weine? That I forgave my mom and my dad, and the whole country and the whole world?

  “You can take it,” she said.

  I heard what she said, but I guess I must have looked like I hadn’t. My jaw was probably still hanging open in surprise.

  “You can take your bag of Twist,” she repeated. “You can take it with you.”

  My god! Nothing like this had ever happened before. It ought to be big international news. A guy at a summer prison camp with a whole bag of Twist! A whole bag!

  But I knew that the bag was just bait. Or a bribe. Matron wanted to make a pact with me. This wasn’t for free. It had to be paid for twice over, or three times, or more.

  “So we’re friends then?”

  I nodded. That was the smartest thing I could do at this point.

  “We’ll help each other out?”

  I nodded again. I didn’t know how she could help me or how I could help her, but it didn’t matter right now.

  “Take your candy now,” she said. She smiled like she had just done the most charitable deed and the greatest coup of the summer all at the same time.

  The warriors had continued building the inner stone wall while I had been gone. It needed a lot of stone. The three walls around Himeji Castle, which was built in 1609, for example, covered an area of one hundred thousand square yards.

  Our walls wouldn’t be that big, but they’d be big enough. We were building without any mortar just like in Japan. It was much better that way because then each stone could move a little without causing cracks in the entire structure.

  Fluttering above the wall was the standard with our coat of arms. It was a black circle against a white background. Two black lines that were the same thickness as the circle passed through it. We were going to make a few smaller banners—long thin ones. The smaller ones were called nobori and were meant to be carried when the big battle came. A large samurai army had several dozen standard bearers. It was dangerous to be a standard bearer since they always had to stay close to the commanders, and that’s where the battle was the fiercest. Your banner was always worn on your back. We were going to sew a banner holder on the back of our armor. Once we’d finished making our armor. Once we’d gotten the breastplates, side plates, and back plates mounted. We were trying to get hold of some cardboard to make the plates or preferably some plywood. A good suit of armor could save a samurai’s life.

  I hid the bag of Twist underneath one of the cornerstones of the inner stone wall. No one had seen the bag. I had hidden it underneath my shirt and sword strap. I had to think about it more before I told the others about my meeting with Matron. I didn’t know what to do with the bag. As I walked through the forest I regretted that I had accepted it. But at the same time I didn’t have any choice.

  “You were gone a long time,” said Micke.

  “You’ve made good progress on the wall,” I answered.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? For almost two hours?”

  Sausage and Janne entered the glade carrying a couple of big rocks. They dropped them next to the wall, which was a yard high in some places.

  “We weren’t supposed to have any secrets,” said Micke.

  “What secrets are you talking about?” asked Sausage, who’d come over to us.

  “Nothing.”

  “You looked strange when you came back,” said Micke.

  Sausage, Janne, and Micke all looked at me. Did I look strange? I felt strange. I had a secret that I didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t want to carry it around with me.

  “Matron called me into her office.”

  “Are they going to send you away?” Now it was Sausage who looked strange—almost like he might start crying. “They can’t do that.”

  “The opposite. She wanted to make a pact.”

  “Between us and her?” asked Micke.

  “Well… between me and her.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Janne.

  So I told them.

  “It’s gotta be some kind of trick,” said Micke.

  “She said nothing about the castle?” asked Janne.

  “I’m not sure she knows about it.”

  “Of course she does,” said Micke. “S
he knows everything.”

  “She’s a witch.” Sausage looked at me. “But what are we going to do with the bag of Twist?”

  “What does anyone do with a bag of Twist?” said Micke, grinning.

  “It feels like we’re playing right into her hands if we open it,” I said.

  “You’ve already accepted it,” said Micke.

  “It was yours from the beginning,” said Sausage.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Janne.

  “They’re the ones who’ve done wrong,” said Sausage. “You could have reported them to the police for stealing.”

  We ought to report them to the police for worse than that, but it wouldn’t do any good. The police had come over to my house a few times when things had gotten rough at home after Papa had drunk too much, but having the police come hadn’t helped Mama for more than a short time. Then it got even worse.

  “When we’re finished with the wall, we’ll eat the whole bag,” I said. “Then we’ll celebrate.”

  Really, we ought to wait to celebrate until the whole castle was finished. But I had a feeling that the chocolate would be all dried up by then.

  Janne and I found a wall that was already built in a glade when we went looking for small rocks. The glade was about half a mile from the castle.

  This one was more than a yard high all around. It was the foundation of a cabin that didn’t exist anymore. When you saw the foundation you could imagine the rest of it. Strange that we hadn’t seen that glade before—like it hadn’t been there. But you had to make your way through thick forest to get there. It was like a dry jungle. There were no paths. Whoever lived there must have made paths walking back and forth, but it was all overgrown now.

  “We could have built our castle here instead,” said Janne.

  “It’s too far away.”

  Janne looked off toward the forest. It was thinner on the other side; you could see a field between a few pine trees. Then we heard a train whistle.

  “This is closer to town,” he said. “Closer to town than the camp.”

  “Want to go?” I asked. “Into town?”

  “You mean… now? Or this summer?”

  I didn’t know what I meant. It was just something that popped into my head. Maybe it was because Janne would soon be leaving this community and province altogether and be sent to a farm somewhere far away.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and turned to me. “Do you?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  I didn’t know why I said that last bit either. Sneaking off into town was a definite one-way ticket out of here. It had never been done. Maybe I’d also end up on some farm, at least until Mama got back from that rest home. She was back at that place again. They called it a rest home, but I knew what it was, of course. I knew what an asylum was. Maybe it was going to be her home now. Maybe I had nowhere to go anymore, unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the nut house.

  “Maybe we can wait,” he said.

  “Another time,” I said.

  “But it’s a good idea.”

  “We can leave in the morning and be back in time for supper,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Why not?”

  In the afternoon the troop was forced to play burnball again. Not that I complained, but we had other things to do.

  This time Kerstin had ended up on the other team. When she ran past me the first time, on the way to third base, she threw up a hand and laughed as if she thought something was funny or that she and I had an amusing secret.

  I was glad when she rushed past me and did that. I felt warmer for some reason even though the sun was already shining.

  Then we switched. When it was my turn at bat, I saw that she stood farther back than all the others. If I were smart I would just bunt the ball off to the side so no one would be able to catch it before it hit the ground, or else I’d really belt it out over the lake even though that wouldn’t count. But at the same time, I wanted Kerstin to catch my ball in midair. I wanted to hit it higher and farther than ever, but I also wanted her to catch it in the air.

  I connected. I could feel it throughout my body when I hit it right. The impact sort of throbbed through the bat and my arm and shoulders and head. The ball went super high and then super far, and I had to put my hand over my eyes to see when it started to come down in the harsh light.

  I saw Kerstin standing completely still like a statue with her hands cupped toward the sky like she was praying or something. She didn’t have to move an inch. The ball was on its way straight toward her.

  I knew that I had gotten a perfect hit—a lot more perfect than anyone here realized since the ball followed the exact trajectory I had planned. I kept my hand over my eyes to protect them against the sun. I saw Kerstin stay where she was while the ball descended lower and lower until finally she caught it before it reached the ground. I wanted to shout out and cheer, even though we weren’t on the same team.

  “Aren’t you going to run, Kenny?”

  It was Sausage. He was next up at bat.

  I took off while the ball was slowly on its way back. It rolled into the grass and stopped. Someone else picked it up and threw it a little farther, and on it went. When I passed Kerstin, she laughed again that same way, and I put up my hand to wave at her. Then I slammed into the ground face first. Just like that, wham! I felt how my nose got scraped and my face went all warm, but it was a different kind of warmth than I’d felt before. This felt like fire.

  “Can’t you even stand on your own two feet?”

  I heard the voice next to my ear, but it sounded like it was in a tunnel. My head was spinning.

  “If you can’t even stand, then you shouldn’t run!”

  I recognized the voice now. I blinked and tried to get up. I felt a burning in my nose again and I could see drops of blood falling onto the ground. I saw feet and legs and grass. I felt a thickness in my throat and I gagged and spat and there was blood in my spit.

  Weine said something else, but I didn’t hear what it was. It must have been his legs that I saw right in front of me.

  I was just going to let those legs have it when I felt someone lifting me up.

  “Oh, dear,” said the counselor.

  “He tripped on that root,” I heard Weine say.

  “This looks pretty nasty,” said the counselor.

  It sounded like Weine was laughing under his breath.

  “We’d better take a look at that nose,” said the counselor. “You’d better come with me, Tommy.”

  The spinning subsided, but I still had a little trouble seeing. Maybe I had a concussion. Maybe my nose was broken. The counselor held me by the arm, but I tried to pull free. I could walk on my own. I didn’t expect anyone to tell on Weine, but someone must have seen him.

  “I think he needs a stretcher,” I heard Weine say.

  I didn’t like Weine’s voice. I blinked again and now I could see him. He was smiling. I didn’t like that smile. Standing right behind him was Micke, and he was smiling, too, maybe not realizing that I was looking.

  9

  It felt like a whole army had marched over my nose, but no bones seemed to be broken. If I had looked in the mirror, I probably wouldn’t have recognized myself, but I had no intention of looking in any mirrors. I never looked in mirrors. Why would I do that? I looked the way I looked.

  The samurai used mirrors to capture everything in the world just as it was. The mirror was holy in the sense that it didn’t lie. What you saw in the mirror was the true image of your surroundings. You might not recognize it, but that was how things really looked. The mirror was handed down from samurai to samurai just like the sword. But no samurai looked at himself in the mirror. They held it up and used it to catch the sun. And everything under the sun.

  Like me. And Kerstin. She was blocking the sun, and I was happy about that. It hurt my nose even more when the rays of sunlight hit it with a sizzle.

  I sat up in the bed where they h
ad laid me. I hadn’t asked to lie down there. The counselor had left the room. The window was open and I heard the burnball game continuing. Someone hit the ball. It sounded like a hard and long hit. I hoped it wasn’t Weine. Or Micke. I remembered how Micke had looked. He’d had the smile of a traitor and the eyes of a weasel. You could have held up a mirror in front of him and asked, “Who is this? Friend or foe?”

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” said Kerstin.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “The weather,” she said and let out a laugh. It sounded like pearls of glass bouncing on the floor.

  “Nothing’s broken,” I said and felt my nose. I had virtually no sensation in the tip of my nose.

  “No ambulance then,” she said.

  “I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.”

  “Who?”

  “Weine,” I said. “Did you see him trip me up?”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean to.”

  “Didn’t mean to!” My nose began to sting like it had gotten angry, too, when Kerstin said that. “Of course he meant to. It’s obvious. As obvious as the sun rising in the morning.”

  Someone turned the door handle. The counselor was back. The room was starting to become cramped. I wanted to get out of here.

  “You just take it easy, Tommy.” She picked up a couple of bloody cotton balls from the floor. “No more burnball for you today.”

  “My name’s Kenny,” I said, and I slid down from the bed until I was standing on the floor. In a few years I wouldn’t need to slide down. My feet would already be on the floor when I was sitting on a bed. In Japan the beds were on the floor. It didn’t matter if you were a kid or a grown-up. Everyone sat on mats on the floor and ate from low tables.

  The sun burned my nose as we stood on the steps. Everyone else was at the front of the building. I heard the sound of the burnball game again.

  “Didn’t they want to know why you left the game?” I asked.

  “I told them I had a stomachache.”

  “Do you?”

  She didn’t answer. A gull flying over the lake started laughing as though it had just heard a joke.

  “You don’t have to keep me company,” I said.