“Where will your pencils and paper come from? And the travel passes? I completely forgot about getting around – we couldn’t even buy bus tickets! I’ll get the works bus in, but you’ll still have to get the bus to school.”
“Child benefit,” shouted Sofia, “one hundred and fifty kroons a month – we can live on that! And I won’t be asking you for meat or bread rolls. We can both go on diets.”
“Don’t talk rubbish. You will not be going on a diet,” scolded Natalya Filippovna although in fact her own fleshy arms and soft cheeks embarrassed her. “If you don’t eat and your teeth fall out, what use will the braces be to you?”
“Teeth fall out because of scurvy, if you don’t get enough vitamin C,” replied Sofia knowledgeably, “but you can buy cabbage from the market for that. Sauerkraut! I can probably eat sauerkraut instead of apples.”
She began to make a list of what they could buy for thirty kroons. She had lessons at school on health and nutrition, and knew very well what people should eat. She knew nothing about prices though, because Mum preferred to do the shopping herself. Turned out that there was a fair amount you could buy for thirty kroons: a litre of milk, and bread, and eggs for both of them, and a small packet of margarine for two days, and sauerkraut…
“We’re a long way from starving,” pronounced Sofia confidently. “In World War II the people in Estonia ate moss and leaves off the trees. Most of them made it through.”
This historical empathy did not inspire Natalya Filippovna in the least.
“No way you’d survive long on moss,” she retorted, but then she remembered that Kiira’s mother had survived the Leningrad Blockade. There they’d eaten dogs and cats and pigeons – for as long as there were any to be had. And the trees had been stripped of leaves for food… Cat meat was apparently revolting but dog meat was quite nice – a bit like veal… Even as an old lady, Kiira’s mum would still eat bread as if it were sweets – she would suck dried bits and say that there was no going hungry as long as you had bread… There’d been no eating human flesh where they’d been. One of the neighbours, an old man – not a woman but a man – had died of hunger; he’d lived alone with his little grandchild and had died of hunger but the child had survived. Not everyone had eaten their children or their parents or even their grandchildren.
Natalya Filippovna sighed. Sofia had a way of seeing things that made them seem much simpler, like an adventure.
“Let’s imagine it’s an adventure!” exclaimed Sofia. “Let’s imagine that we’re under siege for a year and a half.”
“Riiiight,” murmured Natalya Filippovna tearfully.
“And maybe I can get myself a job? In summer at least? Some people sell newspapers, don’t they?”
Sofia was like a butterfly, like a reed wafting in the breeze, like a cloud floating up above. Why did she have to have this problem with her teeth, her jaw, that meant it might freeze open all of a sudden? It felt so unfair, so unbefitting.
Natalya knew it was all down to her own wantonness, her own sin! She hadn’t for a moment thought about a child at the time, there in Crimea on the shores of the calm, sighing sea, so great and warm and dark. She had wanted it to be this way, wanted Volodya – that was his name – to remain in her life like a dream, a beautiful dream so utterly different from damp, cold, grey Estonia or Grisha who yelled and got drunk and ruled with his fists and oozed a sour smell in the morning… Perhaps she was afraid that her beautiful dream might turn rowdy, sour and rank in everyday life? Not that she had a clue where to look for him now. If a child had crossed her mind, the possibility that there might be a child and that she might need support… Perhaps Volodya was now a wealthy man and would be willing to pay for the braces and a touch more because Sofia was the spitting image of him. No need even for any DNA testing, one look at her was enough… But she took pride in the idea that “the important thing is to bring up this child” – and in fact she had been perfectly capable of managing on her own… At any rate she’d need to borrow a bit at first, no way could she scrape seven thousand together quickly. Maybe Lyuda had something put away for a rainy day. Lyuda would trust her, no question, if she explained the situation and paid her back two thousand at a time…
Naturally, things were not as straightforward as Sofia had thought. They did just what Kiira’s mother had done: they dried small cubes of bread and sucked them – that was dead good. It didn’t bother her at all, after a while it was just like taking medicine or pills. At school it felt good to pop something into her mouth when everyone else dashed down to the tuck shop at break time to buy bread or crackers and Coke and chocolate. She would suck on bread and then drink water. Soon it became quite the fashion – sucking bread and watching your weight. The whole class sucked on cubes of bread – if they could be bothered to make them at home and bring them into school, and the boys would cadge them off the girls…
And yet her stomach always felt empty. And she constantly had cravings, especially for chocolate. After all she couldn’t accept anything anyone offered her at schooclass="underline" who would believe in her weight-watching and principles if she did? They would all realise that she simply didn’t have any money. She noticed that she would nervously peek into the bins when walking along the street, just in case there was an empty bottle in there. It was completely pointless: she would never have dared to pick one up and claim the deposit; someone might have noticed and labelled her antisocial. What’s more, given all the homeless on the streets, who would want to take anything from a bin – one of them might attack her. She had nothing against them in principle, but they stank. She reckoned that the very act of taking a bottle out of a bin would leave a nasty smell; even a mere glance at a bin made her feel that something might have rubbed off on her and that it would dawn on the others at school what that “something” was… She suddenly became aware that she’d started looking down all the time in the street and on the bus… Sometimes she spotted a twenty-cent piece, for some reason it was usually a twenty-cent piece. But picking it up was tricky – as if it weren’t the proper thing to do – especially on the bus… No one else did, they all went coolly on their way. Not Sofia… As she covered it with her foot she would adopt the expression of someone who’d lost something…
On top of that she suspected that Mum wasn’t playing fair at home: Mum often had sausage or even cheese in the cupboard at home for her and claimed she’d had something to eat at work, but Sofia could see that Mum’s eyes had sunk. Mum said of course that the weight-watching was working very nicely, but Sofia didn’t want her to be thin, or even just thinner. Mum had always been soft, plump and warm. Even as a small child she had been unable to understand why other children weren’t frightened of their thin mothers (even now she didn’t understand it). In her opinion a proper mum had to be plump…
Time moved on and the dentists worked on Sofia’s teeth. Her wisdom teeth were extracted one week at a time by the august gentleman dentist who had introduced them to their sparrow of an orthodontist (that was the nickname Natalya Filippovna had given their clever little doctor, and Sofia liked it – she imagined herself to be a crocodile, mouth open wide, and the orthodontist picking at it just like the little caretaker birds in a crocodile’s jaws). The last one (in the lower jaw) proved rather difficult, but finally Sofia had her first braces fitted, not the actual train tracks as yet, but braces that you couldn’t see: a brace fitted to the inside of the upper back teeth to widen the palate. The front tooth that had coyly held itself back was already standing in a single line with the others… She had questioned whether it was really right to have the braces when they were the cause of so much worry and the reason for her mother’s sunken eyes, but even when just her wisdom teeth had been removed, a feeling of expansiveness spread through her mouth. As for the braces that the dentists had said might make her mouth horribly sore, well, it felt as if they created an expanse throughout her head – as if her intellect and vision had broadened in some way…