A Faraway Island (17 page)

How could she ever have imagined Aunt Märta would help her? No one can. She’ll never see her mother and father again.

Her tears overwhelm her so fast she can’t get out of the room first. Stephie is sobbing, loud and hard.

“I want to go home!” she wails. “I want to go home!”

“Settle down now,” Aunt Märta says. “I’ll phone the relief committee tomorrow. Not that I think it will do any good. But it’s the duty of a good Christian to help those in need.”

Stephie stares at Aunt Märta through her tears. Aunt Märta’s face is solemn and determined. She looks like someone who has made up her mind.

“Go wash your face,” she tells Stephie. “And I want no more tantrums, do you hear?”

While Stephie rinses her burning-hot cheeks with cold water, she thinks that maybe there is a glimmer of hope. If anyone can make people do what she wants, it’s Aunt Märta.

“What
did they say?”

Stephie’s in the kitchen doorway, out of breath and red-faced. She’s run the whole way home from school.

Aunt Märta, standing at the stove, turns toward her.

“What on earth is this? Coming in here with your snowy boots on? Go right out in the vestibule and take them off!”

Stephie obeys. By this time she knows Aunt Märta well enough to be sure she will never get an answer to her question until she does.

“Wipe up that mess,” Aunt Märta instructs her when she comes back in.

Stephie takes the floor rag and wipes up the few little wet spots she can barely see on the floor. She rinses the rag, wrings it out, and hangs it up to dry.

“Aunt Märta, did you phone the relief committee?”

“I s’pose you think I haven’t got anything better to do than spend the whole day on the telephone,” Aunt Märta says.

“Not at all,” Stephie placates. “I was just wondering …”

“It took me over an hour,” Aunt Märta tells her.

“I’ll peel the potatoes,” Stephie offers. She has to improve Aunt Märta’s mood to find out what’s happening.

“Yes, please,” Aunt Märta, says, softening up a little. “Use the enamel basin.”

Stephie pours water into the pale yellow basin with its green edge. She goes to the root cellar and gets some potatoes, then takes out the paring knife.

Aunt Märta’s cleaning a cod, pulling out musty-smelling purplish innards from the slit belly. Stephie holds her nose and her breath to escape the smell.

“So, Aunt Märta, did you reach someone at the committee office?” she asks tentatively again.

“Finally, yes.”

“What did they tell you?”

“The woman said there was nothing they could do.”

The knife slips in Stephie’s hand, gliding right off the potato she is peeling. Her left index finger stings and there is a drop of blood.

“Aren’t you the clumsy one, though?” Aunt Märta asks. “Let me see that finger.”

She holds Stephie’s finger under the running water, rinsing off the blood. It’s only a tiny cut, but the finger throbs and aches.

“Why not?” Stephie asks.

“Why not what? Let me clean this cut.”

“No, no—why can’t they do anything?”

“Because the relief committee is only allowed to help children. Government policy. No adult refugees are admitted, unless there are special circumstances.”

“And aren’t there special circumstances for us?” Stephie asks. “Nellie and I are already here.”

“You and five hundred other children,” Aunt Märta says. “What if every single one of you wanted your parents to be let in?”

“But my father’s a doctor. He would be of use. He could work on the island, and the other nearby islands, if someone could just take him around by boat.”

Aunt Märta bandages Stephie’s finger. “Well, that’s what the lady told me. Sorry to say, nothing to do about it. You finish those potatoes, now.”

Stephie peels all the potatoes and rinses them in clean water. If only she could make one single person understand!

There’s only one way out. She will have to talk with the ladies on the relief committee herself. If she could tell them everything, show them her father’s letter and really explain the whole situation, surely they’d understand they had to help Mamma and Papa.

She’ll have to go to Göteborg. But how?

“You can walk on the ice all the way to Hjuvik.” Wasn’t that what the woman in the post office said? Hjuvik’s on the mainland. There would be a bus from there to Göteborg.

On Saturday
, Stephie says to herself.
When we get out of school early. I’ll have to save my lunch sandwiches, or try to make a couple of extra ones without being seen. I’ll dress warmly, and take the little compass Uncle Evert taught me to use
.

On
Saturday Stephie puts on double stockings and her thickest sweater. She sneaks the compass into her knapsack and tells Aunt Märta she’s planning to go sledding after school, so she’ll be staying out.

“Be home for dinner,” Aunt Märta tells her.

“May I pack an extra sandwich?” Stephie asks. “To have at the sledding hill if I get hungry?”

Aunt Märta says yes. Stephie folds her father’s letter into her coat pocket along with the holiday letter with all the good advice from the relief committee. There’s an address on the back of the envelope. When she gets to Göteborg she’ll find her way there.

In the warm classroom her stockings begin to itch. Stephie squiggles like a worm in her seat, trying to scratch her thigh without anyone noticing.

“What’s going on? Have you got fleas?” Britta asks. Since Christmas vacation she has forgiven Stephie enough to at least be on speaking terms again.

“It’s these stockings,” Stephie replies. “They’re new.”

Britta nods in complicity. She knows very well how itchy new woolen stockings can be.

After school Stephie pulls her sled down to the harbor, but she doesn’t want to go out onto the ice in plain view. Someone might see her and wonder where she’s headed. So she turns left and walks a little distance along the shore, until she is out of sight, behind a pointed headland.

Not until Stephie has stuck the sled under a bush does she realize that she will somehow have to get back to the island, too. Until that moment her plans have been focused entirely on walking to the mainland across the ice and taking the bus to Göteborg. She hopes the coin she has in her pocket will be enough for the bus fare. Once she arrives in Göteborg, she will ask how to get to the address on the envelope.

But what will happen after that? Will she have to walk all the way back out to the island? Or will the relief committee give her the money for a boat ticket? The best thing would be if she could just wait in Göteborg for Mamma and Papa to arrive.

She thinks her parents would be happier in the city than out on the island. Papa could take the boat to collect Nellie, and they could all rent an apartment in Göteborg. It
wouldn’t have to be a big one, if only they could all be together again.

Stephie tests the ice with one foot. It doesn’t crack. She takes a few cautious steps. The snow-covered ice feels just as firm as the ground.

She checks her direction using the compass, as Uncle Evert taught her. Her plan is to walk straight east. Surely that will take her to the mainland.

For a short while she is protected from the wind by the island, but once the shore is far behind her a cold wind sweeps in off the ocean. It’s lucky she’s warmly dressed.

She turns around to look back. This may be the last time she ever sees the island. It’s strange to see the harbor, the docks, and the boathouses from out here, to be walking on what is usually open water.

The wind has swept the ice free of snow. She runs a little way to pick up speed, then slides on the smooth ice.

In front of her she sees a little islet with three houses and a couple of sheds. Margit, who’s in her class, lives there. She and her brother row to school every day, except now, when they can walk across the ice.

Stephie hurries past the area where she might be seen from the houses, and passes a point. Out of sight, she sits down on a rock at the shore, opens her knapsack, and removes the sandwiches. She can have one now, but will have to save the other. She has a long way left to go; she doesn’t know exactly how far it is to the mainland.

Swallowing the last bite of the sausage sandwich, she rinses it down with a swallow of milk from her bottle. Then she gets up, checks her direction again, and walks on.

When she has put the islet behind her, there is nothing but a huge sheet of open ice ahead, endless whiteness as far as the eye can see. The only things sticking up out of the ice are other occasional rocky islets.

The chill penetrates the soles of her boots, making first her feet and then her legs feel very cold. She ought to have stuffed her boots with straw as she remembered reading about people doing in the Alps. Though there wouldn’t have been room for much straw in her already too-tight boots.

Stephie stops to check her direction again. Feeling around in her knapsack for the compass, she can’t find it. She takes everything out—her sandwiches and schoolbooks—shaking the sack upside down. The compass just isn’t there. She must have forgotten it when she stopped to eat.

She turns around and sees the islet far behind her. Should she go back? That would take at least half an hour, and then another half hour to return to this spot. If she just continues straight ahead, she can probably manage without the compass.

The expanse of ice seems never-ending. Now Stephie is cold through and through, in spite of her heavy sweater and double stockings. She eats the last sandwich as she walks. The milk in her bottle has frozen to a white slush.

The worst part is that it’s already getting dark. The dusky air is blue, and her shadow on the ice is eerily long and thin. It looks like she’s on stilts.

Night falls quickly. Soon she won’t be able to see at all. If she stops where she is, she will freeze to death during the
night. The snow creaks, and the ice makes clicking sounds. In the far distance she sees the flashing red light of a lighthouse.

When it is nearly pitch black, she sees the contours of land ahead. She begins to hurry. Exhausted and freezing cold, she steps back onto land. She’s standing on a stony beach. To the right there’s a dock and a boathouse….

Stephie raises her gaze. Straight ahead she sees a white house with high stone steps. It’s a house she recognizes.

She must have walked in a circle instead of straight ahead, turning back out to sea instead of toward the mainland as she thought. She walked right around the island in such a wide arc she couldn’t see it until she swung around again and struck land on the west side. The lighthouse she saw must have been the same one she usually sees from the top of the hill.

Her whole long trek was completely in vain. She’s back where she started. She hasn’t been able to do a thing to help her mother and father, not a single thing.

The kitchen window is bright. When she opens the front door she smells fried pork.

“Stephie,” Aunt Märta calls from the kitchen, “is that you?”

Aunt Märta heats up the baked beans for her, scolding her for being late.