The Lily Pond
Page 3
A group of girls gathers in the hallway around two blondes who are clearly friends. Although they’re not sisters, they look very much alike, with big blue eyes and little round mouths. Their dresses are also similar, in the latest fashion, one green, the other blue. The girl in green is Harriet; the girl in blue, Lilian. They’re the prettiest girls in the class, and they obviously know it.
Stephie goes to the lunchroom, where she finds a number of the textbooks she needs that aren’t too dog-eared. She has to be economical with her scholarship money if she’s going to make it last.
As she’s leaving, someone calls her name.
“Stephanie, wait up!”
It can’t be Sylvia or Ingrid; they would have called her Stephie. Puzzled, she turns around. Behind her is a round-faced girl with glasses.
“I’m May Karlsson,” the girl says. “We’re in the same class.”
“I know,” Stephie replies. “I saw you.”
“Did you find any of the books you need?”
Stephie shows her the books she found.
“German Grammar, that’s one of the most expensive,” May says in an envious tone. “Lucky you! I only found these.”
She shows Stephie a couple of books.
“You see,” May says, taking Stephie by the arm, “I really have to scrimp and save. I have a scholarship to cover my books and my tram costs. If I didn’t, my family wouldn’t be able to afford to let me go to grammar school. I have six brothers and sisters, and my dad works in the shipyards.”
“I’m on scholarship, too,” says Stephie.
“Are you? I never would have guessed.”
They go on talking as they head to the bookstore, where they buy the other books they need, as well as notebooks and school supplies. They’re still chatting as they walk along the street. May goes into a bakery and buys a little bag of crumbled cookies. They sit on a bench and continue getting to know each other as they eat their broken treats.
“Do you want to sit next to each other at school?” May asks.
Stephie nods. “Yes, let’s.”
Then May gives Stephie her first tour of the city. She explains where the different tram lines go, and Stephie finally understands that although all the trams are pale blue, each one has a colored sign on the front with a number in the middle.
“See? The green line will take you to Mayhill, where I live, for instance,” May says. “You have to go all the way out past the workers’ community center to get there. But I guess there’s no reason for you to come to our neighborhood. You live at such a fancy address.”
“I’m nothing but a lodger,” Stephie tells her. “I don’t really live there.”
Stephie tells May all about how she arrived on the island a year ago, and about going to school there, and how her teacher thought she should have a chance to continue her schooling. Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert refused at first, until the doctor’s wife offered Stephie lodging with them and promised to help apply for her scholarship.
The church clock strikes twelve.
“I’ve got to be going. I look after my little brothers and sisters in the afternoons while my mother does domestic work,” May says.
“Who’s going to look after them when we have full days of school, then?” Stephie asks.
“We’ll work it out,” May says. “There are neighbors who can help. And Britten’s eleven, so she can see to the younger ones some of the time. Here comes the green tram! See you tomorrow.”
May boards the tram. Stephie finds her way back to the Söderbergs’. She spends the afternoon making paper covers to protect her books and writing a long letter home to Mamma and Papa.
She describes her new room, her school, and her homeroom teacher. As always, she tries to be as positive as she can, not wanting to worry them. That’s why she doesn’t tell them she feels lonely in the big, empty apartment. Somehow she doesn’t get around to telling them about May Karlsson, either.
next morning when Stephie leaves for school, her bag is crammed full of books. Her lunch sandwiches are in the outside pocket. She doesn’t have to bring her own milk; milk is served free of charge in the lunchroom.
Today Harriet and Lilian are wearing identical dresses with a floral pattern. Like yesterday, they form the core of a big crowd of giggling girls in the hallway. Stephie doesn’t bother joining in. Not that she thinks they would make her feel unwanted, but she would probably just find herself standing on the edge of the group, not knowing what to say. Sometimes it’s difficult for her to speak Swedish with people she doesn’t know very well. She hasn’t got all the nuances straight, and people sometimes misunderstand her.
May Karlsson arranges for them to be seated next to each other in class. The dark-haired girl doesn’t arrive until the last minute, sliding unobtrusively into a free seat.
Over the course of the day, they have five different teachers, but not Hedvig Björk, since they don’t have math or biology on Tuesdays. They have old Miss Ahlberg, their Swedish teacher, a cute young sewing teacher, and a physical education teacher who lines them up in perfect rows on the schoolyard and who seems to love blowing her whistle: “One, two, jump, one, two … Keep those lines neat, girls!”
After gym comes the lunch break. When Stephie walks into the lunchroom, she sees the dark-haired girl sitting alone. Stephie gets her glass of milk and goes over to the table.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asks.
The girl nods uninterestedly.
Stephie didn’t intend to be so straightforward, but the words just fly out: “You’re Jewish, too, aren’t you?”
“What business is that of yours?” the girl hisses. “Don’t go getting any ideas. I’m Swedish.”
Her angry reaction takes Stephie completely by surprise.
Had they been in Vienna, she would have understood it, supposing the girl was like Evi, who always said defensively, when the subject came up, that her mother was Catholic. But here in Sweden there’s nothing wrong with being Jewish, is there? And if Stephie is wrong, if there is a different explanation for the girl’s dark hair and brown eyes, all the girl has to do is say so.
“Sorry,” Stephie mumbles. “I didn’t mean any harm.… I was only wondering.…”
At that very moment May Karlsson comes over and sits down next to her. Oblivious to the tension, she starts joking with Stephie about the dictatorial style of the phys ed teacher.
“I bet she’s going to make us do jumping jacks and calisthenics every time we have gym,” May says. “She definitely doesn’t seem like the kickball type.”
The dark-haired girl gets up and walks off, leaving her glass of milk virtually untouched on the table. That’s the only sign that she was even there. No waxed paper, no sandwich crumbs.
Their first teacher after lunch is Miss Fredriksson. They’re going to have her for history and Christian studies.
“Anyone who wants an exemption from Christian studies has to have a certificate of affiliation with another denomination,” she says.
In Vienna Stephie and the other Jewish children in the class had Judaism with a rabbi, while the Catholic and Protestant children had ministers from their own faiths. On the island it had never even occurred to anyone that Stephie might want to be exempted from Christianity. And in fact, she is Christian now. She has been baptized and accepted into the Pentecostal church.
She turns around and sneaks a look at the dark-haired girl, who is studying her cuticles with feigned indifference.
“Nobody?” Miss Fredriksson asks. Stephie feels like the teacher is staring straight at her.
“What about atheists?” May Karlsson asks. “Are we entitled to an exemption?”
“At your age,” Miss Fredriksson replies, “you couldn’t possibly comprehend atheism. I’ll have no such nonsense here.”
The last two hours of the day are German class. The girls are going to have German seven hours a week; lots of them are already complaining, even before the first class: “German verbs! And prepositi
ons that take the accusative and dative!”
They’ve heard all about it from their older siblings and friends.
Stephie’s got nothing to worry about. German is her native language, of course.
Their German teacher is Miss Krantz. With a z. Stephie hears the girls whispering about her, hears somebody call her the witch and the others hush her nervously. Miss Krantz is wearing a stiffly starched chalk-white blouse buttoned all the way to the chin. The heels of her shoes clatter hard against the floor as she paces back and forth in front of the class.
“Grammar is the foundation,” she tells them. “If you don’t master the grammar, you will never learn German properly, which means that you must be prepared to work hard. My classes require effort. In one semester I want you to be able to recite the prepositions that govern the accusative and the dative perfectly, in your sleep. If you haven’t learned them, you will not receive a passing grade. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Stephie wonders for a moment whether Miss Krantz really goes around waking her pupils up in the middle of the night, but decides she wasn’t being literal. She isn’t sure what the accusative and the dative are, but she’ll figure it out, and nobody else seems to know what Miss Krantz is talking about, either.
Miss Krantz continues with a roll call, asking each girl to introduce herself by saying “Ich heisse …” followed by her name.
“Ich heisse Alice Martin,” the dark-haired girl says.
“Ich heisse May Karlsson,” May says, sounding more like she’s speaking Swedish with a Göteborg accent than German.
“Ich heisse Stephanie Steiner.”
Miss Krantz straightens up with a start.
“What kind of pronunciation was that? Where do you come from?”
“Aus Wien,” Stephie whispers. From Vienna.
“Als Flüchtling?”
“Yes, I’m a refugee.”
“Here we do not speak Viennese,” Miss Krantz retorts. “At our school we speak proper German, as it is spoken in Berlin, capital of the Reich. And Fräulein Steiner will have to learn to do so as well.”
Stephie feels her cheeks go hot. She never expected to be spoken to that way. Maybe German is going to be her hardest, not her easiest, subject after all.
“She’s a horror,” May whispers gently into her ear. “Don’t let her get you down.”
In the afternoon Stephie and Sven take Putte for a walk in the park across from the apartment. Stephie tells him about her teachers, and he tells her about his. Sven likes only one—the Swedish teacher who’s encouraging him to write. All the others are old fogeys, in Sven’s view, and there are even a few Nazi sympathizers.
“They shouldn’t let people like that teach,” Sven says. “But they think it’s all right to be brown, as long as you’re not red.”
“Red?”
“You know, communist.”
“Are you a communist?”
“No,” Sven answers. “I guess not. But they’ve got a lot of things right. We need a society with much more equality. And all the old, rotten ideas ought to be done away with. Like inherited wealth. Military force. Public officials who only help their own kind.”
Stephie puzzles. What he’s saying sounds right, but still …
“The Nazis also want to do away with all the old ideas, and with the wealthy,” she says. “And they’re in favor of power for the people, too, or so they say.”
“They’re liars,” says Sven. “The Nazis are on the payrolls of the big businessmen in Germany. The arms industrialists. Then they go around blaming unemployment and poverty on the Jews.”
Sven draws his hand through his hair until it stands on end. His brown bangs don’t hang down as far over his eyes as when he came home from his hiking trip. One of the first things his mother insisted on was that he go to the barbershop.
“How long do you think it’s going to last?” Stephie asks.
“What?”
“The war.”
Sven sighs. “Hard to say. Things don’t look very bright right now.”
And they really don’t. The Germans have occupied not only Denmark and Norway, but also France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Italy has entered the war on the side of Germany, and just in the last few days, the Germans have begun dropping bombs over London. On the radio, the newscasters have reported a large number of casualties and injuries, with lots of people homeless, now that their houses have been bombed to rubble.
“What if they win?”
“The Germans?”
Stephie nods.
“Forget it,” says Sven. “They don’t have a chance. Don’t you see?”
Stephie wishes she were able to believe him.
boys’ high school, where Sven is in his final year, looks like a citadel on a hilltop; it’s a heavy redbrick building with little turrets at each end and a row of narrow slots up near the roof. In Stephie’s history book there’s a sketch of a medieval fortress with very similar turrets and slots, through which soldiers shot arrows to ward off their enemies. At her school, they sometimes sing a morning hymn about God being a mighty fortress, and it always makes Stephie think of Sven’s school.
It’s only a stone’s throw from the dark citadel of the boys’ high school to the sunny yellow school the girls attend. There’s even a shortcut along narrow lanes leading between the lovely brick mansions above the lily pond and down through the park along graveled paths. Boys often stand outside the low wrought-iron fence by the girls’ school when they finish for the day. Harriet and Lilian are the only girls in 1A who ever have boys waiting for them, though. Their “young men,” two pimply fifteen-year-olds, are always there after school and sometimes even on lunch break.
Harriet and Lilian are the queen bees of the class. But they don’t reign supreme by being mean, threatening, and bullying, like Sylvia did in Stephie’s class on the island. Harriet and Lilian are always cheerful and nice to everyone. The others are attracted by their sweetness, like greedy flies to a sugar cube. Everyone wants to be friends with Harriet and Lilian, to bask in their glory.
Well, almost everyone. Not the bookworms, and not the most childish of the girls, the ones who still skip rope on the schoolyard. Not dark-haired Alice Martin, who keeps her snobbish distance from the whole class, and certainly not May Karlsson.
“Siamese cats.” May snorts contemptuously. “They think about nothing but their appearance.”
Sometimes Stephie stands at the edge of the crowd that gathers around Harriet and Lilian. She doesn’t really want to be there, but at the same time she can’t resist listening to the gossip about secret notes, promises, misunderstandings, and reconciliations.
“Love is divine,” Harriet says with a sigh.
As if Harriet knew anything about love! A girl who keeps her admirer waiting, pretends to forget their dates, says she’s going to let him kiss her and then changes her mind. She teases him and annoys him intentionally, and Lilian does the same.
“You have to keep them hanging. If you don’t, they get tired of you,” says Lilian.
That’s not love, and Stephie knows it.
She loves Sven.
She loves everything about him: his brown hair, the way it falls over his forehead, his gray eyes, and his high cheekbones. His voice, his hands, and the way he talks. And things you can’t see. The essence of Sven.
She hasn’t let on to him. She doesn’t need to. For her, it’s enough just to see him. For the moment, she wants to keep her love inside, like a warm little ball, a throbbing core she can touch gently now and then.
In due time, he’ll understand. He’ll be the one to reach out and touch her.
“Stephanie, I love you,” he’ll say.
She’s no longer a little girl. Soon she’ll have outgrown her rough undershirts and itchy woolen stockings. Then he’ll see her as she really is.
Five years isn’t a big age difference. Mamma is nine years younger than Papa. And Sven’s even said he finds Stephie mature for her age.
No, she is never going to be like those girls Sven despises. Or like Harriet and Lilian. She’ll never hurt him, never flirt, and never be self-absorbed. She and Sven will mean everything to each other.
But not yet.
Stephie is sitting on one of the benches by the lily pond, thinking about all this and staring out across the gleaming surface of the water. It’s the same bench she and Sven sat on that first evening. She sits here often, always on this very bench. Sometimes she’s joined by a wrinkled old woman who feeds the ducks stale bread from a paper bag.
Stephie never brings anybody else here, not even May Karlsson. When she wants to go to the lily pond after school, she tells May she has to run an errand, and May walks down to the green tram’s nearest stop, instead of keeping Stephie company partway down the avenue.
Two white swans are swimming in the pond, their heads held high. Swans live in lifelong “marriages.” She learned that in Hedvig Björk’s biology class. When the teacher said that, a giggle rippled from desk to desk, and someone asked whether swans fell in love just like people.
“Oh, you silly geese,” Hedvig Björk admonished them. “Are your heads only full of one thing, girls?”
Now one of the swans extends his long neck and puts his head under his wing. He bobs on the surface, not moving. The dark green water-lily leaves are like little islands in the pond. The white flowers shine like stars, though the red ones at the far side are the prettiest sight of all.
Dark-haired Alice lives in one of the brick mansions above the pond. Sometimes when Stephie is sitting on the bench, Alice passes by on her way home. May said that of all the fancy addresses in Göteborg, the streets above the lily pond are the fanciest of all, with their brick homes closed off from the rest of the city in splendid isolation behind stone walls. May also said that Alice’s parents must be extremely wealthy.