Deep Sea (2 page)

On one of the first cards, Papa asked Stephie if she could try to send food. He didn’t say what they needed, but Aunt Märta helped Stephie fill a box with canned goods, dried fruit, oatmeal, and dark bread that kept well. Now they prepare a package every time Stephie goes home to the island. Aunt Märta pays for half the food, and Stephie saves her pocket money to pay for the other half. She also has some savings from the job she had as a delivery girl for a florist in town during the holiday season. In the winter, Aunt Märta knitted socks, mittens, and scarves and put them in the boxes. And every now and then, May’s mother, Aunt Tyra,
gives her a can of evaporated milk or a box of raisins to add to the next box.

May, too, knows that the card is from Stephie’s parents. Putting Ninni down, she takes the bag of groceries from Stephie.

“Go into the bedroom,” she says. “I’ll take care of the kids and dinner.”

As May heads for the kitchen with Ninni in tow, Gunnel stands in the hall, staring at Stephie, who is hanging up her coat.

“Gunnel!” May calls from the kitchen. “Come on in here and leave Stephie in peace.”

Reluctantly, Gunnel moves toward the kitchen. Stephie takes the card with her into the bedroom she and May share with Britten and Gunnel. May’s parents and Ninni sleep in the living room, while Kurre and Olle, who are eleven, share the kitchen settle. Erik sleeps in the bathroom, where there ought to be a bathtub, but the war has made delivery impossible. The landlord has promised them a tub as soon as the war ends.

Stephie sits down on her bed, one of the bottom bunks, and reads:

Thirty words. Thirty words are so little. She can picture Mamma writing a draft in pencil, crossing things out, and making changes to be able to say all she wants to in that space. Maybe she changed
Dearest Stephie
to
Darling
just to save one word. Maybe she shortened the part about Aunt Märta from
Please thank Aunt Märta so much from us
. But she had been unable to resist that little exclamation,
Imagine!
And what did she mean, really? Was it possible to stage an opera in the camp? Could that be true?

Her mother’s dream role had always been the Queen of the Night, but she never had the chance to sing it while she worked at the opera. She said she was too young for the role in those days. But before the Germans invaded, the family went to see a performance of
The Magic Flute
.

Well, maybe Theresienstadt isn’t such an awful place after all
, Stephie thinks.
If it’s a place where you can put on a Mozart opera, it can’t be all bad, can it?

Stephie reads the little card over and over again, as if she might be able to extract something more from
those thirty words. A whisper, a few notes of music, the answers to her questions.

A hubbub in the kitchen brings her back to reality. Ninni’s hurt herself, and May is blaming Gunnel for not having kept a good enough eye on her little sister while May was cooking.

Stephie gets up off the bed. She tries to be as helpful as she possibly can with everything that needs to be done at May’s. It’s the least she can do. The relief committee does send some money to May’s parents as a contribution to Stephie’s room, board, and pocket money, but it’s still not easy for them to have her living with them. Even without Stephie, there would be nine people in the apartment. Although it’s larger than the family’s old one on Kaptensgatan, it’s still crowded.

When summer arrives, Stephie will return to the island as she did last summer, and Aunt Märta will get the money from the relief committee for those months. Whatever is left after food expenses and pocket money for Stephie will be deposited in a savings account at the post office bank in Stephie’s name.

“For the future,” says Aunt Märta.

The future. Stephie used to imagine an endless series of days. A road through an open landscape, not straight and easy, yet a road you could see and follow. Stephie can’t see that road ahead of her anymore. She moves forward as if in a fog, one cautious step at a time.

Someday the fog will have to lift. Someday the war will have to end.

Stephie goes into the kitchen. May has a pot of potatoes boiling on the stove, and she’s frying herring. The scent of fish rises. Stephie sniffs. Since coming to Sweden, she has learned to like fish.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“Is everything all right?” May counters.

“I think so.”

“Well, would you set the table?”

Stephie takes out plates and glasses and knives and forks, putting them all on the kitchen table. It’s a small kitchen; there’s not enough room for all ten of them to eat at the same time. May and Stephie usually prepare dinner when they come home from school. When it’s ready, they call in the younger children. Later, Aunt Tyra heats up what’s left for Britten, May’s father, and herself. Except on Sundays. On Sundays, they carry the kitchen table into the living room and they all eat together, some sitting at the main table, some around the low table in front of the couch.

The kitchen at Kaptensgatan was bigger, but otherwise everything is better here. It’s a bright apartment, and in spite of not being so big, it feels light and airy. From the living room, you can look straight across the hall and out through the kitchen window. The wallpaper
is nice and new, and there is linoleum on the floors. The kitchen has a gas stove and a china cupboard. There’s hot running water in the kitchen and bathroom, as well as radiators under the windows, so the apartment stays warm. There’s even a trash chute in the stairwell. When Aunt Tyra realized she no longer had to go outside to take out the garbage, tears came to her eyes.

“Just think,” she said. “Regular people like us can live so well! Everything’s so nice and new, and easy to take care of.” She looked at her hands, red and chafed from all the housecleaning she does at home and for the wealthy families she works for. “Hot water in the apartment! Oh, how I would have loved that when all you kids were little. Think how much easier it would have been to keep you neat and clean! All but Erik, of course. He gets dirty the minute I turn my back!”

According to May, Sandarna is the start of a new era. An era in which workers will live in modern housing and exert influence in society. An era that will take root after the war.

After the war.

T
he last math test of the spring semester takes place in the school auditorium. Stephie’s stomach tightens every time she enters this room to take a test. Rows of seats, a teacher on guard up front, and the acrid smell of test papers straight off the duplicating machine remind her of the German test in their first year, the time Miss Krantz falsely accused her of cheating. The memory lasts only for a flash; then the feeling passes.

Nowadays, she and Miss Krantz get along just fine. When Stephie’s only explanation for why you say
der Mond
but
die Sonne
is that you can hear that it would be wrong otherwise, Miss Krantz just sighs and asks one of the other girls for the rule. She doesn’t even criticize Stephie’s Vienna dialect anymore but simply lets her speak her own way.

Stephie knows she has Miss Björk to thank for the improvement. She knows she gave Miss Krantz a talking-to, ordering her to treat Stephie better. It’s amazing that she was able to get her German teacher to change her ways, since Miss Krantz has been teaching for thirty years, and Miss Björk only for five. Stephie feels very lucky to have a homeroom teacher like Miss Björk.

However, her geography teacher, Mr. Lundkvist, is still a problem. As recently as last autumn, he stood in front of the brand-new map of Europe, boasting about Germany’s victories. He claimed that the new borders would be permanent, and that the German-occupied countries would eventually be integrated into the German Reich. He made a sweeping gesture along the whole of the map, from Norway in the north to Greece in the south, and from Paris in the west to Moscow in the east.

“And when that happens,” Mr. Lundkvist went on, “Sweden won’t be able to stay neutral. I’m sure you can see how that would be a geopolitical impossibility.”

As usual, May objected, and, as usual, Mr. Lundkvist threatened to lower her grade.

But now it’s spring 1943, and Mr. Lundkvist seems less sure of himself. Things aren’t going so well for the Germans anymore. During the autumn, the English won a huge battle in the North African desert, and it looks as if the German army will soon have to withdraw
entirely from North Africa. In the east, the Russians put a stop to the German offensive at one of the big Russian cities, Stalingrad. The Russians managed to surround the German troops and, in the end, defeated them. Stephie has seen newsreels of frozen, hollow-eyed soldiers surrendering, hands up.

“This is the beginning of the end,” May’s father said when they heard the news. “Soon the Thousand-Year Reich will fall. How could they have imagined they could beat the Russians?”

The beginning of the end. But when will the end finally come?

Miss Björk passes out the tests. Stephie’s reflections come to an end when a piece of paper with purple type and the strong smell of duplicating fluid lands on her desk. She gets an encouraging smile along with it.

No one is allowed to start until all the tests have been distributed. They have three hours to solve the problems, from nine to noon.

Quickly, Stephie reads through the whole sheet. Eight problems. The first six are easy. Then there’s a geometry question she’s not sure about. Number eight is difficult, too, but as she reads through it a second time, something strikes her, and she knows how to solve it.

Eagerly, she gets out a piece of graph paper and picks up her pencil to begin her work. Before starting, though, she takes a quick look at May, who’s sitting in the same row, over by the window.

May has the test in her hand and is holding it at arm’s length, staring at the problems as if she’s never seen any math before in her life. There’s a big red blotch on each of her cheeks. Stephie can tell she’s terrified. She wishes she could go over to May and tell her the problems aren’t as hard as they look.

You can do the first six easy as pie
, she’d like to say.
They’re exactly the kind we’ve been practicing. Even if you make a mistake or two in working out the first six, you’ll pass. Just don’t freeze up. You’ll be fine
.

But she’s not allowed to leave her seat, and certainly not to talk. She can’t help May get started. In fact, she can’t even catch her eye.

Well, it won’t do May any good if Stephie just sits there not getting started herself. So she reads problem eight one more time and decides to start with that one first.

An hour later, she is done with five of the problems. She has two of the easy ones left, and number seven, the hardest of all.

Miss Björk is walking around the auditorium. She stops by May and puts a hand on her shoulder. May looks up at her, her eyes pleading for help. Even though May’s seat is several yards away, Stephie can see that she’s perspiring.

What makes math so hard for May, who has such an easy time with all her other subjects?

Stephie does the two easy problems and tackles the tough one. She glances at the clock. Quarter to eleven.
She should have plenty of time to do the last problem and then make a clean ink copy of her work by noon.

A sob breaks the silence. Stephie looks up. May is sitting weeping, her head in her hands. Crumpled sheets of paper fall to the floor.

Miss Björk gets up from her seat at the front of the room and walks toward May, but before she gets there, May stands up and rushes to the door, crying her eyes out. Miss Björk watches her helplessly. She can’t leave the auditorium unmonitored in the middle of a test.

Stephie hesitates only for a moment. Then she piles up her work, which, fortunately, is quite neat. She checks quickly that the answers to the seven problems she has finished are clear, and that it is possible to see how she has worked them out. She carries the papers to the front of the room, and gives them to Miss Björk, who is back in her seat.

“I’m finished,” she says.

Miss Björk looks at the graph paper, full of penciled work. She leafs through the pile.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yes,” Stephie replies.

Miss Björk nods.

“All right, then,” she says.