When the Snow Fell (2 page)

His dad was old. Even though he was only forty-one. But his back wasn’t as straight as it used to be. And his face was thinner.

In addition, he shaved less often, and more carelessly.

Joel didn’t like this. It was as if a cold wind had blown right through him. He didn’t want a dad with a hunched back and unshaven cheeks.

But he also thought about the New Year’s resolutions he would make that evening. His own secret New Year’s Eve that nobody else knew about.

It was something he’d been thinking about for ages. Evening after evening he’d gone cycling round the little town, without thinking of anything else.

He’d made up his mind that he was going to live until he was at least a hundred years old. That would mean that he’d live until the year 2045. It was such an incredibly long way away that it really meant he would live forever.

But Joel knew that if he was going to achieve that aim,
he would have to start preparing himself even now. If he didn’t, he would end up with a back just as hunched as Samuel’s.

That was really the most important thing. More important than living to be a hundred. He didn’t want to have a hunched back.

He knew what he was going to do in order to ensure that. It was one of the New Year’s resolutions he would make that evening.

From tomorrow onwards, he would start toughening himself up. He had a plan, and he would carry it out once winter had established itself.

He was quite sure about it.

If you wanted to become really old, you had to toughen yourself up.

His train of thought was broken because Samuel was ready to leave for work. He put on his thick wooly hat, then turned round in the doorway and looked at Joel. Samuel often looked sad when he set off for work. That was something Joel didn’t like either. It could give him a stomachache. It was at moments like that when he found it impossible to understand what Samuel was thinking.

He might be thinking about Mummy Jenny, who had simply vanished all those years ago. That could make Samuel just as sad as Joel could be.

Or was he thinking about the sea, which he wasn’t
going to get to see today either? Among all those pines and firs that he chopped down and trimmed?

“Don’t just sit there dreaming,” he said. “That will make you late for school.”

“I’m setting off as soon as I’ve got my boots on,” Joel said.

“It’s winter again now,” said Samuel with a sigh. “And you can bet your life that winter’s going to be long, and dark, and cold.”

“We could move away from here,” said Joel. “Tomorrow.”

“If only it was as easy as that,” said Samuel. “But it isn’t.”

Then he left. Joel could hear his footsteps on the stairs. The front door closed with a bang.

Joel fastened his boots. Put on his jacket, wooly hat and scarf. He couldn’t find his mittens. He would have to choose between looking for them, and arriving on time for school.

He chose to forget about his mittens. It wasn’t all that cold yet. Winter had only just begun.

He also decided not to take his bike. It could be good to test his boots. Kick up a bit of thin, powdery snow. But even as he started walking downstairs he could feel that they were starting to be too small. He needed a new pair. But how would he be able to convince Samuel of that? Boots were expensive.

“Being poor is expensive,” Samuel often said. Joel thought he almost understood what his dad meant.

He went out into the street. It was still dark. Only a narrow sliver of light oozed out over the spruce forests standing to attention around the little town.

School beckoned. Miss Nederström was bound to be there already. If he got a move on, he would arrive in time.

He kicked up a flurry of snow.

He was already thinking about the coming evening, when he would make his solemn New Year’s resolutions.

Winter had fooled him this year yet again.

But that didn’t really matter.

The important thing was that a new year had begun.

On the way home from school Joel bought some black pudding.

He was nearly always the one who had to do the shopping, as Samuel got back home so late from the forest. Joel did the cooking, the washing-up and the shopping day after day. But Samuel did the cleaning and washed all the clothes. He did that on Saturday evenings before they sat down to listen to the wireless.

Joel didn’t like shopping for food. At the grocer’s, Ehnströms Livs, he had to jostle with old women who could never make up their minds what they wanted to buy. If he was unlucky he might bump into the mother of one of his classmates. It was at moments like that he felt annoyed with his own mum, Jenny, who had gone away and left Joel and Samuel. Even if she didn’t want to stay
with her family, she could at least have made sure they had all the food they would need. She could have filled the house up to the rafters with food. Then Joel wouldn’t have needed to keep running to the shops and coping with all those women.

The previous year, however, he had made a big change to the routine. He started shopping only every other day. In addition, he bought the same food for the same weekday every week. Anything to speed things up.

On Mondays they always had black pudding and potatoes. With lingonberries that he and Samuel would pick in the autumn and make into jam.

But this particular Monday, things were not the same as usual at Ehnström’s.

Joel noticed that the moment he entered the shop.

There was a new assistant. It was usually Mr. Ehnström himself, or his wife, Klara, who did the serving. Now there was a different woman behind the counter. She was much younger than most of the other women in the shop. Joel had never seen her before. That put him off slightly.

“Black pudding,” he said in a firm voice when it was his turn.

The girl behind the counter smiled.

“How much?” she asked.

“Enough for two people,” said Joel, his usual response.

“Just think—the lad lives alone with his dad and does all the housework himself,” said somebody behind his back.

Joel whipped round. It was a big, fat woman; her face was sweaty. She was the mother of one of the girls in Joel’s class. At that moment he hated both the mother and the daughter. It was his classmate who had blabbed about Joel’s not having a mother, of course. And then, naturally, this fatty stands here sweating and tells the new shop assistant something that has nothing to do with her.

Joel could feel himself blushing. He always did when he was angry.

“Isn’t he a little marvel?” said the fat woman.

Joel hoped she would explode and die on the spot.

The girl behind the counter smiled. But she made no comment. She served the black pudding. Joel paid. All the time he was afraid the fat woman standing behind him and nudging him in the back with her fat belly would say something else about him.

But she didn’t.

When Joel emerged into the street, he was still embarrassed. He didn’t want to go shopping anymore. He didn’t want to be his own mother. But he did want revenge. Needless to say, the fat woman hadn’t dropped dead as he’d hoped. It was as he had always said: grown-ups just didn’t know what was best for them.

He crossed the street and stood between two lamp-posts where it was murky. His hands were cold because he didn’t have his mittens with him. He stuffed the paper bag containing the black pudding inside his jacket. He
should really hurry up now. Dinner ought to be ready by the time Samuel got home. Besides, it was New Year’s Eve. He had a lot to prepare before going out that evening.

But he couldn’t forget that fat woman who had put him to shame in front of the new shop assistant.

He wondered who the girl was. Could it be Ehnström’s daughter? When Joel was handed the black pudding and he paid for it, he’d looked surreptitiously at her. She was younger than he’d first thought. About twenty-five, he’d have said. Although he was bad at guessing people’s ages. He sometimes thought that Miss Nederström was ninety, but somebody had told him, to his great surprise, that she wasn’t even fifty.

There was something else about the new shop assistant that had made him curious. She sounded different when she talked. She wasn’t a local. Although he couldn’t be certain, he thought she probably came from Stockholm. The previous summer, a traveling circus had come to town. As usual, Joel had helped to erect the fence and carry chairs in order to get a free ticket. He’d run an errand for one of the circus workers, and bought some coffee. The worker came from Stockholm, and spoke a very distinctive dialect. The new shop assistant at the grocer’s spoke in a similar way. As far as he could tell.

His train of thought was broken when the fat woman came out of the shop. Joel gritted his teeth and hoped as
hard as he could that she would slip on the steps and kill herself. But she didn’t, of course. It was only innocent people who slipped and got hurt. Really bad criminals never did. Nor did fat women who talked about things that didn’t concern them.

Joel saw her hang her shopping bag on the handle of a kick sledge. He thought it looked like a Walker on runners. It was painted brown, and there were fancy upturned points at the front of the runners, which was a bit unusual.

Joel memorized what the sledge looked like. He knew where the woman lived. On one of his evening expeditions through the town, he would pee all over it.

He watched her disappear round the corner. She still hadn’t burst. Joel hurried home. He felt cold. His hands were white. He thought about the new shop assistant at Ehnström’s.

He wasn’t quite sure exactly what he thought.

When he got home he took off his boots, and started his work by peeling the potatoes. Then he snuggled down in his bed and massaged his toes. They felt sore. His boots really were too small for him. He wondered whether he ought to limp when Samuel came home. Or maybe he ought to lie down and drag himself over the floor. As if he’d been crippled by the boots. In which case Samuel couldn’t very well refuse to buy him a new pair.

He decided to wait until the following day. The boots would still be too small then. He had too many more important things to do tonight.

While he was waiting for the potatoes to boil, he went to the bathroom and examined his face in his dad’s shaving mirror. He had got into the habit of doing this over the last year. It was a New Year’s resolution he’d made a year ago. He would examine his face in the mirror every afternoon, and see how much he’d changed. But now, after a whole year, he thought he looked exactly the same as before. The shaving mirror couldn’t tell him that he’d grown bigger and taller. Nor could it tell him that his feet had become too big for his boots. He supposed it would have been better to have examined his feet in the mirror every day, but surely nobody did that?

Joel tested the potatoes with a fork. Five more minutes. While he was waiting he laid the table. Sometimes he would put out a third plate. Just to see what it would look like. If Mummy Jenny had still been there. He wondered where she would have sat. Between him and his dad? Or in his own place, next to the stove? He decided that was it. She would have been the one to collect the food from the stove.

When everything was ready, the black pudding fried and placed under a lid to keep it warm, and the lingonberry jam fetched from the pantry and put on the table, all he had to do was to wait for Samuel. Joel did what he always did: sat on the window seat and looked down at the street. He’d
done that for as long as he could remember. That was the window from which he’d seen that mysterious dog. It was also where he generally sat when he was forced to make a difficult decision. Or when he felt sad.

You could say that the window seat was Joel’s home. Just as the glass showcase was the home of the
Celestine
.

Joel’s showcase was the window seat. That was his house and his castle.

It was also there that he had realized that something was happening to him. He really was growing bigger. The window seat was starting to feel cramped. There had always been plenty of room, but he had difficulty sitting there now with both his feet up. Especially when he had sore toes.

He was growing up.

The
Celestine
was a model of a ship that would never grow any bigger.

Her master would never become too big to fit inside the case.

Joel tried to work out if it was going to start snowing again. The sky was cloudy. And heavy. Like an awning sagging as a result of all the snow that had fallen on it. It was when the awning split that the snow started to fall down to the ground.

Needless to say, Joel knew that there was no truth in any such thoughts. There was no awning up in the sky. Snow was rain that had frozen and turned into snowflakes.

Warm rain fell in the summer. Cold rain in the winter.

But the awning idea was better. Easier to understand.

Then he saw Samuel approaching. A shadow on the other side of the street.

A shadow with a hunched back.

After dinner Joel went to his room and closed the door behind him. He could hear Samuel making coffee, then switching on the wireless to hear the news.

There was a lot Joel needed to prepare. You couldn’t make your New Year’s resolutions any old way: it had to happen at dead-on midnight.

As he was going to be up late, he lay down on top of his bed and covered himself with a blanket. It would be best if he could manage to sleep for a couple of hours. To be on the safe side, he set his alarm clock for eleven o’clock and put it underneath the blanket.

He could hear a munching noise from inside the wall, right next to his ear. He pressed his cheek against the cold wallpaper. He could now hear the mouse very clearly. It was less than an inch away from him. But it had no idea that Joel’s cheek was so close.

Joel tapped on the wall with the knuckle of his hand. The mouse fell silent. Then it started munching again.

Joel continued listening. Before long he was fast asleep.

When the alarm went off, it was some considerable time before Joel came to. When he woke up he remembered his
dream: he had been inside the wall, looking for the mouse in a complicated network of caves among the wooden beams and uprights.