The Lily Pond (14 page)

She feels lonely, terribly lonely and abandoned.

She hears a melody coming from the other side of the wall.

Warily, she knocks on Sven’s door.

“Come in.”

She opens the door.

“Oh, it’s you. Come in and sit down.”

Sven lifts a pile of books and papers off a chair and sits down on his bed. Stephie just stands in the middle of the room.

“What’s wrong?” Sven asks. “What’s happened?”

That’s when she begins to weep. Not sobbing, just tears running silently down her cheeks.

“Stephanie,” says Sven. “Poor you. Come here and sit down.”

When she still doesn’t move, he gets up, takes her by the hand, and leads her over to the bed. Sitting down next to her, he puts an arm around her shoulders. She leans her head on his chest, feeling his warmth. He smells faintly of aftershave. She has never been this close to him before.

They sit perfectly still. She wishes that this moment would last forever, that they would never move—Sven with his arm around her, her with her head to his chest. She can hear the beating of his heart.

In the end, he’s the one who shifts. Turning to the side, he puts one hand under her chin and raises her face to his.

Now
, she thinks, shutting her eyes.
Now he’ll kiss me
.

She parts her lips slightly, like the film stars do.

But Sven doesn’t kiss her. Opening her eyes, she sees him take a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe away her tears. Then he releases her, gets up, and walks over to the Victrola. Only now does Stephie realize that the music has ended and that the needle has been scraping the middle of the record.

“Tell me, what happened?” He pulls the desk chair over so he’s sitting opposite her.

“There was a letter from Papa,” she says.

“What was in it?”

“It’s so awful. Mamma has to work in a factory now. They have hardly anything proper to eat. Papa is no longer permitted to take the tram to work. And Evi’s left for Brazil. I may never see her again.”

It’s as if the dam has burst. Everything Stephie’s been keeping pent up inside spills out: all her thoughts and her dreams, all her longing and her worries.

Sven listens.

“I wish I could help you,” he says when she finally stops. “That I could do something so your parents would be able to come here.”

Stephie nods without saying anything. She knows there is no more to be done. Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert, and even Mrs. Söderberg, have already done all they can to help Mamma and Papa get entry visas for Sweden.

“Friends have to be able to talk to each other about everything, don’t they?” Sven asks her then.

Stephie nods again. But she can’t help wondering whether Sven really talks to her about everything—or whether he’s keeping certain things secret. Things having to do with Mayhill and a tavern.

week has passed since Stephie was at the movies, and no punishment has yet been called down on her, by God or by Aunt Märta. Still, she’s worried about what will happen the next time she goes to the island.

The fall semester is drawing to a close, and schoolwork is taking more and more of Stephie’s time. There are several quizzes and tests each week.

Stephie isn’t particularly worried about her grades. She knows that she’s at the top of the class, along with Alice and a girl named Gunnel. Of course, her Swedish isn’t perfect, but the last time they turned in compositions, Miss Ahlberg said that she had a surprisingly large Swedish vocabulary, and that her spelling had improved greatly since the start of the school year.

“Not to mention, Stephanie, that you have such an active imagination,” she added.

In math and biology Stephie is sure of getting a top grade. Hedvig Björk isn’t the kind to have favorites, but she does appreciate the girls who show an interest in her subjects.

Miss Krantz continues to be critical of Stephie’s German pronunciation, but she usually turns to Stephie if she wants the right answer to a grammar question. Stephie always knows, though she can’t always explain why a certain answer is correct, and she isn’t always able to refer to the correct chapter of their grammar book. Stephie doesn’t really know why she should be. If she knows the right answers from the wrong ones, why on earth does she have to be able to quote the rule?

German tests are always translations, both from Swedish into German and the other way around. When Stephie does translations to Swedish, Miss Krantz takes off points for her Swedish mistakes. Still, she has never caught Stephie making a single error when she translates to German.

One afternoon, just after they’ve had a test returned, May says to Stephie, “It’s not fair of Miss Krantz to deduct for your Swedish. She’s our German teacher. What does your Swedish have to do with it?”

Basically, Stephie agrees. But there’s nothing she can do about it.

Toward the end of November, they’re having the last math test that’s going to count toward their grades for the
first semester. The day before the test, Stephie forgets to take her math book home. She realizes it’s still in her desk when she and May have left the schoolyard and are turning the corner by the city theater.

“You go on ahead,” she tells May.

“I have time to wait.”

“That’s all right. You go on.”

“See you tomorrow, then.”

Stephie runs back, crosses the schoolyard, and bounds up the steps. She hopes Hedvig Björk, whose class they had during the last period that day, will still be there.

The classroom door is open; Hedvig Björk is wiping the blackboard. “Excuse me. I forgot my book,” Stephie pants, out of breath.

Hedvig Björk smiles. “You sound like you’ve been running for your life.”

Stephie gets her book from her desk and is about to leave.

“Since you’re here,” Hedvig Björk says then, “would you mind doing me a favor, Stephanie?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“Take this book to Miss Hamberg. I think you’ll find her in the staff room, but if she isn’t there, you can just put it on her desk, the one over in the far corner, next to mine. You do know where the staff room is, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Thanks for helping me.”

The school building is quiet and empty. Stephie’s footsteps echo in the hallways.

She knocks on the door to the staff room, but no one comes to open it. She pushes at the door and finds that it’s unlocked.

She doesn’t feel completely comfortable walking in when no one is there, but she opens the door.

The light coming through the window hits her eyes, but Stephie discerns a figure inside. It’s not a teacher.

It’s Alice.

She’s standing at Hedvig Björk’s desk, bent forward as if she has been rummaging through the piles of paper on it. She straightens up and sees Stephie. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m supposed to leave this book for Miss Hamberg.”

“Miss Björk asked me to get something for her,” Alice says, “but I can’t find it. You can put the book over there, on Miss Hamberg’s desk.”

There’s something fishy going on. If Hedvig Björk asked Alice to go and get her something, she could also have sent the book for Miss Hamberg with her. But if she didn’t send Alice, what is Alice doing in the staff room? What has she been looking for on Miss Björk’s desk?

“Don’t worry,” Stephie says. “I won’t tell.”

Alice avoids her gaze. “What do you mean? Tell what? You’re always imagining things. You’ve been spying on me since the very first day of school. Sitting by the pond in
the afternoons—staring at me when I pass. I’ve told you to leave me alone. Don’t you get it?”

Stephie hears her own voice, clear but distant, as if it belongs to someone else: “Why do you hate me?”

“Because you make me so ashamed.”

“Me? Why?”

“My family has lived here for four generations,” says Alice. “We’ve never had to be embarrassed about being Jewish. My parents and even my grandparents speak perfect Swedish. My father’s a prominent businessman. We socialize with everyone worth knowing in this city. But now you refugees are turning up. People who have nothing, and who can’t even speak Swedish. That makes it different for us, too. People might think we’re like you.”

Stephie’s dumbstruck. It takes her most of a minute to figure out what she should say: “What if Sweden had been occupied, too? Like Denmark and Norway? What if the Germans had come here and taken your papa’s business away from him, taken your beautiful house and all your money? What if everyone worth knowing in this city no longer wanted to have anything to do with you? Would you have escaped then if you could have? Gone to any country that was willing to have you? Tried to learn the language as best you could? And if they wouldn’t let the grown-ups in, don’t you think your parents would have sent you and your sisters and brothers away?”

But by that time, Alice has swept past her through the door and vanished down the long corridor.

Stephie stops in her tracks. Without having to turn around, she knows who’s calling her name. She’d know his voice anywhere.

“Hang on,” she says to May. “It’s Sven.”

May knows, of course, that Sven is the son of the family with whom Stephie boards. She knows that they’re friends, and that Stephie often borrows books from Sven and sometimes lends them to May. But she has no idea about Stephie’s feelings for Sven. Now and then Stephie thinks she’d like to talk to May about it, but somehow all the lies she has told Harriet and Lilian get in the way when she wants to talk about what things are really like.

Sven catches up with them. His collar is turned up against
the rain, and he’s pulled his hat down over his forehead. The hat is wide-brimmed with a dent in the middle of its peak. Stephie’s never seen Sven in a hat before. Usually he wears either his school cap or nothing at all on his head. The hat makes him look very grown up; she hardly recognizes him.

“Hi,” he says. “What weather! It’s raining cats and dogs!”

Stephie laughs. She’s never heard that before, and she pictures black-and-white kittens pouring down from the skies, along with puppies that look like Putte. That would be better than these heavy, wet drops of freezing rain.