Samurai Summer (11 page)

I took off while the ball was slowly on its way back. It rolled into the grass and stopped. Someone else picked it up and threw it a little farther, and on it went. When I passed Kerstin, she laughed again that same way, and I put up my hand to wave at her. Then I slammed into the ground face first. Just like that,
wham!
I felt how my nose got scraped and my face went all warm, but it was a different kind of warmth than I’d felt before. This felt like fire.

“Can’t you even stand on your own two feet?”

I heard the voice next to my ear, but it sounded like it was in a tunnel. My head was spinning.

“If you can’t even stand, then you shouldn’t run!”

I recognized the voice now. I blinked and tried to get up. I felt a burning in my nose again and I could see drops of blood falling onto the ground. I saw feet and legs and grass. I felt a thickness in my throat and I gagged and spat and there was blood in my spit.

Weine said something else, but I didn’t hear what it was. It must have been his legs that I saw right in front of me.

I was just going to let those legs have it when I felt someone lifting me up.

“Oh, dear,” said the counselor.

“He tripped on that root,” I heard Weine say.

“This looks pretty nasty,” said the counselor.

It sounded like Weine was laughing under his breath.

“We’d better take a look at that nose,” said the counselor. “You’d better come with me, Tommy.”

The spinning subsided, but I still had a little trouble seeing. Maybe I had a concussion. Maybe my nose was broken. The counselor held me by the arm, but I tried to pull free. I could walk on my own. I didn’t expect anyone to tell on Weine, but someone must have seen him.

“I think he needs a stretcher,” I heard Weine say.

I didn’t like Weine’s voice. I blinked again and now I could see him. He was smiling. I didn’t like that smile. Standing right behind him was Micke, and he was smiling, too, maybe not realizing that I was looking.

I
t felt like a whole army had marched over my nose, but no bones seemed to be broken. If I had looked in the mirror, I probably wouldn’t have recognized myself, but I had no intention of looking in any mirrors. I never looked in mirrors. Why would I do that? I looked the way I looked.

The samurai used mirrors to capture everything in the world just as it was. The mirror was holy in the sense that it didn’t lie. What you saw in the mirror was the true image of your surroundings. You might not recognize it, but that was how things really looked. The mirror was handed down from samurai to samurai just like the sword. But no samurai looked at himself in the mirror. They held it up and used it to catch the sun. And everything under the sun.

Like me. And Kerstin. She was blocking the sun, and I
was happy about that. It hurt my nose even more when the rays of sunlight hit it with a sizzle.

I sat up in the bed where they had laid me. I hadn’t asked to lie down there. The counselor had left the room. The window was open and I heard the burnball game continuing. Someone hit the ball. It sounded like a hard and long hit. I hoped it wasn’t Weine. Or Micke. I remembered how Micke had looked. He’d had the smile of a traitor and the eyes of a weasel. You could have held up a mirror in front of him and asked, “Who is this? Friend or foe?”

“It doesn’t look too bad,” said Kerstin.

“What doesn’t?”

“The weather,” she said and let out a laugh. It sounded like pearls of glass bouncing on the floor.

“Nothing’s broken,” I said and felt my nose. I had virtually no sensation in the tip of my nose.

“No ambulance then,” she said.

“I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.”

“Who?”

“Weine,” I said. “Did you see him trip me up?”

“Maybe he didn’t mean to.”

“Didn’t mean to!” My nose began to sting like it had gotten angry, too, when Kerstin said that. “Of course he meant to. It’s obvious. As obvious as the sun rising in the morning.”

Someone turned the door handle. The counselor was
back. The room was starting to become cramped. I wanted to get out of here.

“You just take it easy, Tommy.” She picked up a couple of bloody cotton balls from the floor. “No more burnball for you today.”

“My name’s Kenny,” I said, and I slid down from the bed until I was standing on the floor. In a few years I wouldn’t need to slide down. My feet would already be on the floor when I was sitting on a bed. In Japan the beds were on the floor. It didn’t matter if you were a kid or a grown-up. Everyone sat on mats on the floor and ate from low tables.

The sun burned my nose as we stood on the steps. Everyone else was at the front of the building. I heard the sound of the burnball game again.

“Didn’t they want to know why you left the game?” I asked.

“I told them I had a stomachache.”

“Do you?”

She didn’t answer. A gull flying over the lake started laughing as though it had just heard a joke.

“You don’t have to keep me company,” I said.

“When are you going to show me the castle?” she answered.

I heard shouts and hits coming from the burnball field again. It sounded like a war.

“We can go this way,” I said, and I pointed toward the forest on the other side of the beach. We could follow the
edge of the lake for a bit and then take a left into the forest and reach the castle from the other direction.

There was a smell in this part of the forest that I didn’t recognize. It was like a different forest. The trees looked different. Maybe it was because you could glimpse the lake through the trees like a reflection from a mirror. It was darker here than in the other forest.

“What’s that smell?”

“I don’t smell anything.” Kerstin looked around. “I guess it’s just the forest.”

“There’s something else.”

She looked around again. Almost everything was shrouded in half-darkness despite the reflections from the lake—or because of them.

“Must be gloom then,” she said.

“The gloom?” I saw how it covered the path we were walking along.

It seemed to move with us. “Gloom doesn’t smell, does it?”

“When it gets darker, it smells different,” she said.

“Have you noticed that it smells different at night? When the sun goes down?”

“Yeah.”

“There are other smells that come out then.”

“Yeah. And other colors.”

There were already other colors on this path. Shadow colors.

“And in the end no colors at all,” she said.

“Black,” I said. “The black’s still there.”

“That’s not a color,” she said.

“What is it then?”

“It’s a… nothing. I don’t like black. It’s what you wear to funerals. And I don’t like funerals.”

“Who does?” I asked.

“I don’t know what the point is of having them.”

“Well… I guess the dead sort of have to be sent away somewhere.”

“Sent away?”

“You can’t exactly have them sitting at the kitchen table at home, can you?” I pictured my dad sitting in front of me with a cup of coffee. Or a glass of whiskey. “Or in front of the TV.”

“Maybe they have a favorite show,” said Kerstin.

Now we were in the other part of the forest—my forest. The shadows lifted and disappeared among the branches. It got lighter and it smelled lighter too.

“What do you think a dead guy’s favorite TV show would be?” Kerstin continued.

“Could be anything,” I said. “It’s all crap anyway.”

“How do you know? Do you watch them all?”

“Not a single one.”

“But you still know that it’s all crap?”

I didn’t know anything, but I didn’t want to talk about that right now. We didn’t have a TV at home. A lot of people had started buying TVs when they first came out a few years ago, but Papa had said that it was just a bunch of crap, and then… well, then we couldn’t afford one.

“I thought you had seen some samurai movies on TV,” said Kerstin.

“Do they show movies like that?”

“I don’t know. But I guess they should. They show Ivanhoe and William Tell. And Robin Hood.”

“They’re not samurai,” I said. “They’re from England.”

“William Tell’s from Switzerland.”

“Well, they’re not from Japan anyway,” I said.

“How far away is Japan?”

I looked down at the path.

“All you have to do is start digging and eventually you’ll get there.”

Like at a funeral
, I thought as soon as I’d said it. Kerstin looked like she was thinking the same thing, but she didn’t say anything.

Funerals were also meant to make people remember. Everyone had to remember for as long as possible. I hadn’t
liked it when I’d been forced to sit in church with Mama and her sisters and all the others. I didn’t want to go to any more funerals. I didn’t want to remember that way. I wanted to remember in my own way without having to follow all those rules. I didn’t like graves, either, or cemeteries. You were supposed to stand in front of a gravestone and remember, but it was just a stone. It had no soul. It was an unnecessary weight lying on top of the one buried below.

The glade opened up. The shadows were all gone now. We were there.

“It’s not finished yet,” I said.

“You already told me that.”

She walked toward the wall. Somehow, it seemed lower than it was. It was the same with the towers. I looked at them through different eyes now. They had become unfamiliar—like they had been built by others.

“It’s nice,” she said.

“It could be one day,” I said.

She looked around. I thought the whole area looked smaller now. I shouldn’t have shown her the glade and the castle with its courtyards and walls. I didn’t feel proud of the castle anymore.

“It’s really nice,” she said and smiled.

“You think so?”

“Sure.”

“There’s a lot left to do,” I said.

“I can help you.” She held up her hands. “Many hands—”

“Spoil the broth,” I said. But I immediately regretted having said that.

“That’s not how it goes,” she said and smiled again. She didn’t seem to take offense. “And you’ll need help here if you’re going to be finished this summer.”

“We won’t be finished this summer.”

“But you’ve got to, don’t you?”

“We’ll continue,” I said.

“Continue? After the summer?”

I nodded.

“I don’t understand,” said Kerstin.

It wasn’t something I could explain, exactly. I didn’t even understand it myself. Not yet.

The burnball tournament was still underway when we got back to the camp. The shadows along the path were longer. There was a smell coming off the lake. Mud and reeds and murky water. They were screaming louder than ever at the burnball field.

There was a man standing by the thick branch that reached out over the water. On the grass in front of him was a black box. I knew what it was. So did Kerstin.

“Uh-oh,” she said. “I forgot about that.”

“Me too.”

The man was there for the summer photo. We were all supposed to gather beneath the tree, everyone was supposed to look happy, and then the man would press a button at the end of a wire.

In last year’s photo I stood behind the tree. Just when the man shouted, “Cheese!” I hid.

I had stood in approximately the same spot where the man was standing now. When everyone was looking at him and he was looking at everyone through the camera, I had slipped behind the tree. But I was still in that photo.

He saw us coming. It was the same man as last summer wearing the same hot blazer.

“Well, it’s that time again,” he said. “Isn’t this fun?”

“What’s fun about it?” I said.

“Getting your picture taken, of course.” He laughed as though the idea that it might
not
be fun was really hilarious. “Don’t you like photos, kid?”

“Not of me.”

“A good-looking kid like you,” he said and winked. “Of course you should have your picture taken.” He nodded at Kerstin. “And your girlfriend too.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I said quickly.

“Oh she isn’t, huh?” he asked and laughed again.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Kerstin.

“I see,” said the man. “So you just happened to bump into each other, eh?”

He winked again like he had gotten a speck in his eye or had a nervous tick. Maybe photography made you nervous.

Mama took me to a photographer once when I was two, I think. I don’t remember it, but he must have tricked me into laughing because I was laughing in the picture. I was sitting in a wicker chair. There was a curtain hanging behind me. There were no colors—just black and white.

A few years later it was time again, but then I didn’t laugh. I remember that I was there and that the photographer told me to laugh but I didn’t want to. Papa was supposed to have come along to the photographer’s, but we couldn’t find him when we were about to leave.

At home there was a photograph of Mama and Papa standing in some square and laughing into the camera. That was before I came into the world. Maybe that was why they still looked happy. Maybe if I hadn’t been born, they would be as happy now as they were then, standing in that square laughing and baring their white teeth like they were in a toothpaste ad. I was there too. I was in my mother’s stomach, which was sticking straight out.

It was summer in that picture—eternal summer. The
picture was black and white. It wasn’t big, but it had a thin silver frame that made everything look even more black and white. For as long as I could remember, the photo had always been standing on the chest of drawers in Mama and Papa’s bedroom, but when Papa died, Mama moved everything out to the living room, including the chest of drawers. I used to see her standing there looking at that photo for ages as if she were trying to remember something that she’d forgotten.

As if she were looking for something in the photo.

The mailman’s motorcycle sounded like a jet rumbling through the forest when Kerstin and I walked back to the camp. The rumbling lingered like the sound of the jet that Janne and I had seen.

I had received a letter. It was from Mama, of course. I had been thinking about not writing to her anymore so I wouldn’t get any more of her letters, but at the same time, I wanted them. I didn’t want to read them and I did want to read them. It wasn’t actually the words I wanted to read; it was more the fact that something made it into the camp from outside. That there was another world out there. The mailman on his Triumph boneshaker was proof of that. A Triumph Bonneville. He had brought something for me. Just
the envelope would have been enough.