As he did every morning, Mr. Lind began by strolling around the room. He rarely sat down during our lessons. Instead he would pace back and forth, back and forth, between the door and the window at the far end of the room, taking the least direct path possible. It was curiously soothing, as if he were taking us on a recreational outing. With his hands thrust down deep into his pockets and his sad gaze sweeping over us like an extended wing, he would direct his disconsolate commentary at us like a man preoccupied with a heavy burden, as if consoling the world for its history. At every other turn around the room, he would pause in front of someone’s desk, not for the purpose of testing our attentiveness, but to give us a chance to voice our own views. And without really realizing how, we were drawn out of our holes and into the open air. Emboldened and intoxicated by the rare liberty he offered us, we met him where he wanted us to meet him: in a forest where ideas were to be discovered and prized, like orchids.
There was only one of us he never met there, only one he could never coax out of his hole, for the simple reason that he feared everything, even freedom. That was Ekman, of course, the friend whom I counted as a friend when he was not afraid, and that was seldom.
Mr. Lind always came to Ekman last of all. And I thought I knew why: because Lind was afraid of him. At the end, when the only turn remaining was Ekman’s, Mr. Lind would always go up and sit down behind his desk, as if he were seeking refuge from something. He would sit there in silence for a long moment, looking out the window, before he eventually began a ritual that vaguely resembled a quiz, a few embarrassing little questions that Ekman would answer in a voice trembling with terror, always quoting the text book. He knew it by rote, the way a prisoner knows every inch of his cell. During other lessons with other teachers Ekman was a source of relief for the rest of us. We only needed to look at him to quell our own terror. His handicap was a source of strength for the rest of us. But in Mr. Lind’s class we despised him.
This morning’s lesson reached that inevitable point and as Mr. Lind took his place behind the desk, Ekman’s delicate face turned sheet-white, as always. Mr. Lind sat quietly for a moment, looking down at his hands on the desk before him. Then he turned his head and looked out at the falling snow, finally saying in a low tone:
“Mr. Ekman, can you tell us what the two parties on the left were called?”
With one exception every eye in the room turned to Ekman. He’d grabbed hold of the outer corners of his desktop in a kind of white-knuckled desperation. He swallowed and swallowed again, all the while staring into the middle of his desktop as into another’s eyes. At last he managed to find his voice.
“The Gironde party … and … and …”
Our teacher looked out at the snow. We looked at Ekman, curious, heartless, powerless. But Ekman took no notice of us. He was aware only of himself. His hands were as white now as his face. Finally he managed something like a whisper.
“… and the Montessori party.”
Then we all looked at each other, the other seven of us. And suddenly Larsson, the hockey player, burst out with a laugh, and Wikman, the class monitor, started giggling. Some of us smiled. Ekman had gotten the words mixed up, not realizing that Montessori wasn’t even French. It was funny, but my own laughter got caught in my throat the moment Ekman looked directly at me. He was imploring me for help with his eyes and the only help I could offer was not to laugh in his face. That’s how paltry a person can be. That’s how paltry I was.
Mr. Lind did not turn to us until the room had grown very quiet. Never before had he looked so dejected. Never before had he seemed so small, so dark.
“La Montagne,” he said in a low voice laced with grief.
In that moment I noticed a strange similarity between Ekman and Mr. Lind. Both sat looking down at their desks, with their hands knotted tight in front of them, as if their muscles were cramping. And their anguish wore the same face.
But this anguish was cut short by the bell. All at once shadows began to dart across the frosted glass of the door and a cascade of sound washed down the stairs to drown us out. We rose up, all of us, and went out into the silent snow.
Gym was scheduled at one o’clock that day, and Ekman and I both had exemptions. We used to roam around town during that free hour looking at trains or boats. Or we’d sit on a bench at the cemetery if it was nice out, and I’d read poems out loud that Ekman didn’t really get. But since it was cold and snowing, we stayed inside the classroom. We only had art class left that afternoon, so he didn’t need to read anything, and with nothing left to fear that day he could be my friend.
At first we stood for a while by the window and looked out at the living wall of snowfall. Some piles of wood stacked high, deep inside the swirling snow, reminded me for some reason of ships at sea. At some point Ekman left my side and then I heard keys jingling near the door. To my great surprise I heard a key slide into the door, and so I turned around quickly.
“Why are you locking the door?” I asked him.
Ekman stood there in front of the door. In his meager outstretched hands was the chess set, as if he were presenting a gift.
“I thought we could play a game of pocket chess,” he said timidly. “And just in case somebody came …”
We pushed the desks together, letting the chess set straddle the crack, and then we sat down to play. I was white and opened with my pawn. The door was still locked. What harm would it do? I managed to get both my knights out without losing either, and right away they scared Ekman. The pieces were too small and they kept slipping out of his trembling fingers. I noticed then that he’d mixed up one of his knights with his bishop when he set up his side. I gave in to the impulse to hassle him a little because he was so anxious.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” I said sarcastically and switched the pieces back to their right places.
His face flushed red.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he whispered. It was his turn now and he needed to do something about my rook, which was blocking his best moves.
But just then we heard something out in the hall, the clatter of someone’s shoes echoing between the walls. Then it fell silent. Whoever it was out there was now standing right outside the door to our homeroom, even taking hold of the door knob. A key slid into the lock with a swiftness that was almost unimaginable and then suddenly there stood Mr. Lind in the doorway blinking at us. I looked right back at him. I hadn’t done anything wrong. There was nothing wrong with playing chess during a free period. In any case, he moved slowly toward us and raised his hand a bit to signal we should stay seated. Then he stopped right beside our desks and looked down at us with an oddly unfamiliar expression.
“What are you doing here?” he asked us in a low tone.
That may have been the first direct question Mr. Lind had asked me that entire term, and it actually caught me a bit off guard, so Ekman answered before I had a chance.
“We — we weren’t doing anything!” he stammered.
“We’re playing chess,” I said.
“Chess?” said Mr. Lind.
And I really couldn’t understand why he sounded so surprised. And I couldn’t grasp why he wasn’t looking at us now. Instead, his eyes settled on our desktops with a kind of perplexed and wounded look.
I felt compelled to look there myself.
The chess set was gone. Ekman must have stashed it away in his pocket before Lind stepped into the room. Suddenly Mr. Lind was gone too, now standing at the window with his back to us. Cutting us off.
“It’s not good for you to sit inside like this,” he said. “It’s better for you to go outside.” And then, after a moment, he thought twice in his Lindian way: “Though it is snowing.”
Then he turned again and passed right by us, leaving without a word, without even a look. Quietly we pulled the desks apart, went down the stairs, pushed open the doors with our shoulders and stepped out into the swirling snow. In the lee of the wood stacks, we continued our game. Just before t
wo o’clock, I brought the game to check and mate with my knights and queen. The snow whistled around us and there in the midst of it we were alone. Something occurred to me then, something I wanted to ask Ekman. But again he got there ahead of me. Standing back further in the lee of the wood stack than me, he suddenly looked frightened again, so he leaned in closer toward me and asked:
“Do you think he saw the chess set?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“OK, then,” he said and breathed out with an obvious look of relief.
Later that evening he called me at home and asked me the same thing again.
There was as much snow the next morning. Cars were knee-deep in it, and balcony doors were impossible to open. The streets were barely recognizable. Otherwise the day began as just another ordinary morning with Lind leading us in prayers. And when he came in to our first class — this time to lecture us on Christianity — everything followed the same fairly typical routine as he meandered through the room and talked to us. At his usual intervals he paused, speaking to each of us in turn, and in a moment or two it would be my turn. My desk was closest to the window, so I was always the last one Mr. Lind would address before Ekman. Today I was looking forward to it because I knew my psalms cold, and I had even made an extra effort to be well prepared. I kind of felt like I had a debt to repay. And Ekman must have felt the same.
So when Lind turned around at the door and slowly walked back along the row of desks, I was already smiling in anticipation of my turn. But I smiled too soon, because then something happened that caught me completely off guard. Lind went right on by me without stopping, and then he paused at the window and stood there for an interminable moment with his back to us — or, rather, with his back to me. Mystified, I turned to Ekman, but he hadn’t even noticed, probably because he was too preoccupied thinking about how it would be his turn next.
But his turn never came either. Mr. Lind went up to his desk and sat down, and that was it. We were asked to open our books and began to talk about the next lesson. I mean the others began to talk about it. Ekman and I didn’t exist. And when that fact dawned on him, Ekman turned as white as I’d ever seen him. As if it had a mind of its own, his hand delved into his pocket and shoved the chess set down as deep as it could possibly go.
It was worse for me. I had nothing to hide. And nothing to hide behind. Not even a pocket chess set to clutch in my hand. I could feel my face flushing red, and my skin seemed to prickle with guilt. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I grew warm and sweaty, and the bell just wouldn’t ring. I kept hoping for a word from Mr. Lind, or even a quick glance in my direction, but neither came. And when the bell finally did ring, I wished that it hadn’t. I didn’t want things to end this way. I don’t think either of us did, because Lind would not be walking past us again today.
And now he was gone.
The rest of the day disappeared down a well of sweltering shame and longing. As the day wore on our guilt only intensified, and with each passing hour Ekman became more and more sure that Lind had seen the chess set sticking up out of his pocket. I told him that was impossible, but this gave him little consolation. In truth, consolation was probably well beyond our reach. Even when we were ready to head home, as we made our way down the main hallway, we hadn’t come close to glimpsing it, but that’s when we saw Mr. Lind at the other end of the hallway coming towards us. He didn’t spot us right away. We stopped and stood on opposite sides of the hallway so that he couldn’t get by without seeing at least one of us. Finally he got so close that he couldn’t possibly avoid seeing us, but his pace never slackened in the least. Carefully I eased myself out from the wall where I’d been leaning. It felt a bit like stepping up onto a railroad track and trying to stop a train with nothing but your body.
But he didn’t run me over. He derailed and veered toward the nearest window, where he stopped and looked out at the damned snow. Desperation breeds its own kind of boldness, and mine was considerable.
“We’d like to speak to you, Mr. Lind,” I managed to blurt out.
“Yes,” Ekman whispered.
Lind pulled out a little black notebook and began to page through it aimlessly, or so it seemed. I got the impression it was just for show. Maybe he just wanted to give his hands something to do, since they were trembling slightly. Finally he put away the book.
“Come to my place at 8 p.m. then,” he said. “OK?”
We didn’t respond, nor did he wait for an answer. In a moment he was gone, somewhere in the late-day gloom. For hours that evening I sat at our kitchen table without as much as turning a page in my book. I was struck by how meaningless it was to read, how impotent reading seemed in the face of real meaning. And there was no one I could talk to about it. I had only one friend, and I couldn’t talk with him. Just before it was time to go he called, though, and I had to speak to him then. He wanted to know for the last time whether I thought Lind had seen the pocket chess set. A mirror hung just over the telephone and as I spoke to him I couldn’t help looking into it. I hated my own reflection, as if it were some shameful disease. And the worst thing was, even if I broke the mirror my reflection would still be there.
“Yes!” I screamed into the receiver desperately. “Of course he saw it! Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
I’d screamed so loud my mother came into the hall, wondering what was going on. I hung up the phone and told her it was nothing. It was nothing. That’s what was so hopeless about the whole thing. Whenever anything real happened, there really wasn’t anything to it. It just felt like there was.
I ran through the streets as the snowfall dwindled to a flurry. I felt as though my reflection remained in the storefront windows even after I passed them by, as though all the people I met on the street could see my guilt like a festering sore. Lind’s street was dark, and that was good. The staircase inside was murky, so I took the elevator. It was so full of mirrors that I had to turn the light off on the way up. When I rang Mr. Lind’s bell, Ekman came to the door and answered it. He had just gotten there himself and was standing in the outer hall waiting. Lind was on the phone behind a white door. I stepped softly up to the door and eavesdropped a bit. “Well, we’ll have to see about that,” I heard him say. Then it got quiet. See about what? Afraid and defiant, I hung up my hat and coat and gloves. Ekman combed his hair in front of the hall mirror. He could look at himself in the mirror. That was odd. It wasn’t right.
Then Lind came out into the hall and nothing turned out the way I’d imagined it would. Be fearless. This is what I had told myself at our kitchen table back home. You’ve done nothing wrong. You’re innocent.
All the same, it was the offender in me who stepped into the large room behind the white door. There were no hiding places in that room. I felt small, overwhelmed by the pure number of books, by the plushness of the carpets, by the crystal chandelier hanging from the middle of the ceiling. I stopped in my tracks to take it all in, feeling as if I’d been ripped asunder. In a distant corner of the room was an ensemble sofa, smoking table, armchair, and floor lamp. I wasn’t entirely aware just how it was I got there, but suddenly I found myself sitting on the sofa next to Ekman. The reading lamp was just above me, cocked in my direction, shining right in my eyes. I would have liked to move it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The light pierced right through my eyes into my head. It was painful, and out of that pain flowed regret. I suddenly regretted everything: that I had come here, that I had made friends with Ekman, that I had learned to play chess. I also regretted that I was alive. The light was blinding me and the sofa was cramped, forcing us to sit right up against each other. Then I began to sweat. A glass was thrust into my hand, and as it seemed to be dissolving before my eyes I had to hurry up and drink it down. When I put it down on the table, with its shiny surface, I noticed that Lind was sitting opposite, looking right at us. He had been looking at us for quite some time.
Now I tried to reposition myself, tried to disconn
ect from the body that seemed attached to mine, but the sofa was like a vice, so we were stuck together for good. The tones of a piano fell down upon us from a room somewhere above. They sounded so naked somehow. At some point I heard myself say:
“We were playing chess.”
It was like reciting a lesson. Four words that meant nothing. But that also meant everything. However, I wasn’t going to get out of it so easily, and in some strange way that seemed only fair. Getting off the hook shouldn’t be too easy, I thought. So I was actually glad to hear Ekman whisper:
“We weren’t doing anything.”
My face could feel Lind looking at it. But before long it didn’t much matter. One more second and the jaws of the vice would come together inside of me. Again that idiotic phrase from my kitchen table invaded my head. Be fearless. Be fearless! I raised my hands to my eyes to shield them from the light and half-screamed:
“Show him the chess set, Ekman!”
And then, like a skipping record, came Ekman’s response:
“We weren’t doing anything.”
After that we must have sat there a little while longer. I think we may have drunk another glass or two of the sparkling water. Outside the snow continued to fall, swirling in gusts, white as the breath of God. Clear tones resonated from the piano upstairs, as a church bell tolled somewhere in town. It was just the way it should be. Everything was just the way it should be. I was spent, finished. The only piece missing was for me to be carried out and thrown to the vultures.
At some point we were all in the outer hall again, where it was cold. I felt an incredible sense of relief to be free of that sofa in one piece, to be liberated from that foreign body. The cold was restoring some of my vitality. And while I was putting on my coat a thought struck me: the whole time we were in there with him Lind hadn’t said a word to us.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 14
