She sat at the kitchen island, on one of the tall stools, the wobbly one, and finished the food she’d fixed earlier. She ate most of a piece of bread with too much butter and drank more scotch. Arman Jahani did not have a daughter. She was sure of this. It was late and she was tired. Martin would be home soon and she wanted to be in bed before he arrived. She stood up to pour herself a glass of milk. Milk soothed her stomach. She would be hungover in the morning but she didn’t care. She reached for a glass on the far side of the counter and as she leaned forward she brushed the plate off the counter and to the floor. Shattered fragments of china tickled her bare feet.
The plate was not a plate. It was only dozens of pieces of thick ceramic, the patterned lines and shapes disrupted, taken apart, put back together to form something new. She got down on her knees and moved the largest piece to one side and began to place the smaller pieces on top. The edges were sharp and she held each piece as tenderly as possible.
She knew it was Martin before he even opened the door. And when he entered the room, she didn’t need to look up to see that she’d been right. “I’ve made a mess,” she said. She pushed aside the plate and picked up a bit of bread with her fingertips and put the bread in her mouth.
“You don’t have to do that,” Martin said. “Please. I’ll get it later.”
“Forgive me.”
“I’ll help you to bed,” Martin said.
“You should have stayed, Martin. You could have stayed. It wasn’t difficult.” She felt his hand on her head. He probably didn’t know the night she was talking about but that didn’t matter. She leaned forward, devoted, rapidly filling her mouth with the bread as if she were kneeling at the altar of a darkened church.
The Winter War II
A large frowning sun rushed from one side of the screen to the other. Then the bald-headed meteorologist with the ponytail called for snow on Easter Day. He heard the door open, heard the echo of the stone-floored hallway, and there was a man in the room with him. The man kissed Bent on the cheek, and the channel went to commercial. It was a familiar one. Big discounts if it snowed on Easter. A storm was coming. The man said something. Bent heard, answered on instinct. “I suppose it is,” he said. “One has to take risks now and again.”
It was Bent’s birthday. Eighty-eighth, he thought, maybe eighty-ninth. What did it matter? The war was coming. “There’s a war,” he said. One minute he’d forget this, the next it’d be there, pressing as hard as ice trapped in a narrow bay.
The man held a bouquet of pink and yellow up at his face, smiled behind it. “A vase,” Bent heard. The man went to the kitchen. Bent heard kitchen sounds. Water running, a refrigerator door suctioning closed, a cupboard slammed shut. Then a man came out of the kitchen. He looked familiar but Bent couldn’t place him. “Who are you again?”
The man laughed. “Your grandson. Lennart. I’m here to take you to the museum. The Winter War, remember?” Snow fell onto the balcony. A rusty old chair buried.
Lennart was talking, standing up, moving lips. Bent caught little of it.
The war pressed at his skull, pressed him toward a memory. Had it already been or was it on its way?
“You should wear a suit tonight,” Lennart said.
“Where am I going?” Bent asked.
“The film,” said Lennart. “The Winter War.”
Small details stuck. Morning, 1939, winter. The Soviets had invaded Finland. Article in the paper about bombings, Mannerheim. Three neighbors had already gone off to fight, one a flight mechanic, two in a ski unit. Bent was in Humlegården Park, trying to decide if he should go fight too. There was a need. Swedish volunteers were being accepted. Bare trees lined the pathway. A circle of stone benches surrounded a statue of Carl Linnaeus. The first flakes of snow fell atop orderly hedges.
The palms of Lennart’s hands brushed roughly down Bent’s shoulders, pulling him from that park, from that snow to another. The balcony railing outside had transformed to white. “It’s been a long time since you’ve worn this?” Lennart asked.
“I don’t remember,” Bent said.
In the taxi on the way to the museum, Lennart spoke. Bent listened to the tires on the icy road. Slush from the salt and vehicles. A bus skidded to a stop at a station.
The museum was all bright lights and white smiles and crowds of noisy people. They floated by all of it, stopped among rows of chairs facing a wall of thick curtains. The room was humid and sticky. They took seats near the front. The curtains parted. On the screen appeared the image of a summer cottage, white trim, iron-red walls, and a small garden surrounded by a short, white fence.
A man walked in front of the screen and tapped his chest. Static, booming voice. “Welcome to The Winter War,” the voice said, and the man disappeared from the stage.
Light, slow, exposed shaking bare branches of two tall birches to the left of the cottage. Dark, then light. Night, then day. A single flower, red, in the garden bloomed. Others soon followed. Bent knew what he was seeing. This was time, sped up. Or else all else was slowed. Leaves fell to the ground. It rained. The rain turned to snow. Snow covered the grass, the roof. The garden was buried in white. The cottage was the shape of a cottage only clumsier. Icicles reached for the ground from the rain gutters. A gray sky pinned it all down.
In the winter he saw them. A group of soldiers crouched in a trench, dressed in white capes that blurred the falling snow against the dirt. Some of the soldiers stood and looked over the edge of the trench at the cottage and the violent storm engulfing it. Rifles leaned against the dirt. Bent shook at the sound of an approaching plane. Gunfire, shouting. Bombs whistled down, explosions filled the room. The room lit up orange. Snow and dirt rained down on the soldiers, who all crouched low and covered their heads. There was smoke. The clumsy little cottage stood still in the smoke.
Clouds parted and the snow stopped. Bright sun reflected off shrinking mounds of snow. Bent looked down and removed the hood of the white cape of the dead man beside him, dead face looking up at the sky. He knew this man. If not this man then another. They were all the same, dead soldiers.
And then it was done. The war was over. The cottage, iron-red again, the fence white and sharp-lined. Grass and flowers grew. Birds arrived. Branches sagged under the weight of new leaves. Bent sat in his chair. His legs burned and his feet felt heavy.
It was Linnaeus that did it. Back in that park. Snowy morning, 1939. A statue of Linnaeus, for his ideas of an orderly world. Bent knew what he needed to do, where he fit, how his life must be classified. At the Finnish Legation, where the volunteers were being commissioned, Bent signed papers that same afternoon.
He let his grandson lead him by the elbow to the bar where he was given a beer and placed in another chair. He watched his grandson drink two drinks, then a third. The boy squirmed in his chair, twice tried to say something Bent didn’t hear. Single words arrived from Lennart’s chair, his face leaned close to Bent. Film, he heard. Marie, apartment. He couldn’t make sense of it so he just watched Lennart twist and turn, cross his legs, uncross his legs, another gulp from a glass. His son Rolf, who was dead, had had the same unending flow of nervous movement. Bent watched his grandson, looked at his son. Time guttered. Rolf was alive and then he was not. The unsteady flame of the memory.
Lennart, somber-faced, stood eventually. Bent allowed himself to be led to the taxi stand. A whistle sounded, arms waved, tires crunched over packed snow and salted gravel.