“No,” Mari answered. “But I’ll try to find out.”
They pulled up their nets on the way home. One miserable roach and a little bullhead that they set free. The cat stood waiting on the shore.
“It’s gone so quiet,” Jonna said. “What did you think? Wasn’t that a good storm?”
“Very good,” Mari said. “The best we’ve had.”
Fog
THEY WERE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA-LANE when the fog rolled in, ice cold and yellow. It came quickly. Jonna drove on for a bit, but pretty soon she turned off the motor.
“It’s not worth it. We’ll miss the island and wind up in Estonia somewhere.”
There is no silence like sitting in a fog at sea and listening. Large boats can loom up suddenly, and you don’t hear their bow water in time to start your motor and get out of the way. They ought to use their foghorns…
I should have brought my compass, Jonna thought. Dead calm, no help from wind direction. No watch, of course. I didn’t even listen to the weather report… And now there she sits, freezing.
“Row a little,” she said. “It’ll warm you up.”
Mari put the oars in the locks. She looked miserable with her narrow, anxious neck and damp hair in tufts over her eyes.
“You’re pulling too hard on the right; we’re going in circles. But maybe it’s just as well.”
“Jonna,” Mari said, “have you got crispbread in the stern box?”
“No, I don’t.”
“My mother…” Mari began.
“I know, I know. Your mother always had crispbread with her when she went out to sea. But the fact is, I don’t have any crispbread in the stern box.”
“Why are you angry?” Mari asked.
“I’m not angry. Why would I be angry?”
A vertical tunnel opened directly above them, leading up to an annoyingly blue summer sky — like flying, except then the tunnel goes straight down.
Finally a ship’s foghorn, a long way off.
“Crispbread,” Jonna said. “Crispbread, for heaven’s sake. Your mother was really fussy about crispbread. She broke it in tiny little pieces and put them in a row and spread butter on each little piece. It took forever. And I had to wait and wait for the butter knife, and she did the same thing every single morning and every day and every year she lived with us!”
Mari said, “You could have had two butter knives.”
A gigantic shadow rose up from the fog and glided past like a wall of darkness. Jonna yanked the motor to life and raced away and turned it off.
Gradually the wake died, and it became completely still.
“Were you scared?” Jonna said.
“No. I didn’t have time. Incidentally,” Mari went on, “your mother was pretty fussy about baking bread. She was always sending us loaves of her bread and every time she sent them off, she’d call at seven in the morning and talk for an hour. Graham bread. When it got mouldy we used to call it Graham Green.”
“Ha ha, so amusing,” Jonna said. “And speaking of mothers, your mother used to cheat at poker.”
“That’s possible. But she was eighty-five years old!”
“No, she was eighty-eight when she cheated. Don’t deny it.”
“Okay, fine, she was eighty-eight. But at that age you’ve got the right to do certain things.”
“Never,” said Jonna solemnly. “At that age a person should have learned to respect her opponent. Your mother cheated shamelessly, and you might as well admit it. She didn’t take me seriously, and you have to in a serious game. Row a little harder on the left.”
It had grown really cold. The fog drifted over them, through them, as impenetrable as ever. Jonna took the dibbling hooks out of the stern box. They might just as well dibble for cod if the day was ruined anyway. But somehow they didn’t feel like dibbling.
They just waited.
“Funny,” Mari said. “Sitting here this way, you start thinking about all sorts of things. What time is it?”
“We don’t have a watch. Or a compass.”
“That stuff about our mothers,” Mari went on. “There’s something I’ve never dared ask. Jonna, what did you two fight about, really? Mother might say the wind was blowing from the northwest, and right away you’d say it was straight from the north. Or north-northwest, or south-northeast, you’d go on like that. And I knew that deep down you were fighting about completely different things. Important, dangerous things!”
“Of course we were,” Jonna said.
Mari stopped rowing. Very slowly she said, “Really? Don’t you think it’s finally time to let me in on what it was you were fighting about? Be honest. We need to talk about it.”
“Fine,” Jonna said. “Terrific. Then what you need to know is that your mother, the whole time, year after year, was secretly swiping my tools. She ruined one knife after another — she didn’t know how to sharpen them. And let’s not even talk about chisels! Don’t even talk to me about all the precision tools that you carry with you half your life, tools you get to know and love — and then someone comes along who doesn’t get it, doesn’t respect them, someone who handles your delicate instruments like they were can openers! Yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say. Her little ships were wonderful, and beautifully made, but why couldn’t she have bought her own tools? She could have wrecked those to her heart’s content!”
Mari said, “Yes. That was bad. Very bad.” She starting rowing again, and after a while she raised the oars out of the water to say, “It was your fault she stopped making ships.”
“What do you mean?”
“She saw that yours were better.”
“And now you’re angry?”
“Don’t be an ass,” Mari said and started to row again. “Sometimes you make me crazy.”
They hadn’t noticed the fog moving off. The heavy summer fog had rolled on north to annoy people on the inner islands, and suddenly the sea was open and blue and they found themselves a long way out toward Estonia. Jonna started the motor. They came back to the island from a totally new direction, and it didn’t look the same.
Killing George
WHEN MARI CAME INTO THE FRONT HALL, she heard the printing press working.
“Are you here again?” Jonna said from inside her studio.
“I just came for those pens…”
Jonna lifted her print and studied it severely. “No,” she said. “I know you’ve brought your George. You’ve changed him.”
“Yes. The whole ending. The whole idea! I’ve got rid of a lot of repetitions, and Stefan isn’t called Sveffe any more. His name is Kalle.”
“Good heavens,” Jonna said.
“Maybe I should come back a little later?”
“No, no, sit down somewhere. I’ll finish this tomorrow.”
They sat across from each other at the window table. Jonna lit a cigarette and said, “You don’t need to take it from the beginning. I know that part. ‘Miss, another round’, and so on. Anton went out to use the phone. Take it from the turtle.”
“But you know I have to take it from the beginning or it won’t be whole! Could I read it fast up to where it’s new? That part when they go to the restaurant is out, and no pointless explanations about Anton, he’s just there. By the way, do you really believe in this idea?”
“Absolutely. But maybe it’s not enough, not really. It may be difficult to finish.”
“But I’ve come to the end!”
Jonna said, “Anyway, take it from the turtle.” And Mari put on her glasses.
‘Speaking of sad things,’ Kalle said, ‘did you read that piece about the lonely turtle in the paper the other day? Its name is George.’