“Do you need any errands run?” Stephie always asks.
Some days there’s a letter to mail or something the doctor’s wife has forgotten to order from the shop. The shopkeeper hires a messenger boy for the summer, and the boy delivers orders to the summer guests on a bicycle with a big metal box on the front. The summer guests phone in their orders.
If she’s going to do an errand at the post office or the shop, Stephie usually takes the bike, tying Putte’s leash to the handlebars. He runs alongside. Otherwise she takes him for a walk along little paths too narrow to bike on. Putte noses around, sniffing, straining eagerly at the leash. Stephie almost has to run to keep up.
She’s not allowed to take off Putte’s leash, but sometimes she can’t resist. He just loves to fetch sticks she throws, and always comes when she calls. If Stephie’s sitting on a rock, he often comes over and puts his head in her lap, wanting to be scratched behind the ears and under the chin.
When Stephie returns with Putte, she usually finds the doctor’s wife and Karin and her fiancé enjoying their morning coffee at the table in the yard. Uncle Evert set up the furniture in the shade over by the rock face. The doctor works in Göteborg all week, and joins his family only on weekends. Stephie doesn’t know where Sven spends his time. She imagines him sleeping late.
One morning when she’s out walking Putte up among the rocks and the scraggly vegetation, she bumps into Sven. She’s standing on a boulder gazing out across the ocean. Luckily, Putte’s on his leash. She’s afraid if anyone in the doctor’s family were to see that she sometimes lets him run freely, she wouldn’t be allowed to walk him anymore.
“Hi there!” Sven calls out. “What a beautiful morning!”
To Stephie there is nothing special about this particular morning. The sun is shining and there is a gentle wind blowing off the water.
Putte recognizes Sven and grows eager. Sven hops down off his rock and approaches them. Putte romps between his legs, begging to be patted.
“Hiya, Putte. Hi, you old thing.”
Sven plays with Putte, but not gently, as Stephie does. He’s rougher.
“You can let him off the leash now,” says Sven. “He won’t run away.”
He never runs away from me, Stephie thinks, but she doesn’t say it.
Sven stops playing with Putte and sits down on a rocky ledge, his feet blocking the path in front of Stephie. She picks up the end of Putte’s leash, but stays where she is.
“The ocean,” says Sven. “I can look at it forever, can’t you? It’s always changing.”
“Uh-huh,” Stephie replies. “Depending on the weather.”
She wishes Sven would move his feet so she could pass.
“Don’t you like the ocean?”
“It’s so big. I’d like it better if I weren’t on an island. If it was all one.”
“One what?”
“One whole place. The people. The city.”
“How long have you been here?” Sven asks.
“Since last August. Ten months.”
“And your family?”
“Mother and Father are still in Vienna. My little sister is here, living with a different family.”
“And what are they like, your family here? The Janssons.”
“Good,” Stephie tells him.
“You’re different from them,” Sven says. “That doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”
Putte whines, pulling at the leash.
“I’ve got to get going,” Stephie says.
“Wait,” Sven answers. “I’d like to read you something.”
He pulls off the little knapsack he’s carrying and opens it, rummaging around. He has to retrieve a crumply bag of sandwiches, a thermos, and a sweater before he gets to the thick book at the bottom.
“It’s in English,” Sven tells her. “Do you speak English?”
“No.”
“That’s all right. I’ll translate.” He leafs through the book until he finds what he is looking for. “‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…’”
Stephie stands stock-still, absorbed. Sven’s voice is different when he reads than when he talks, deeper and calmer.
“‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”
Sven stops and looks up from the page. He and Stephie are both quiet for a few moments. Then Sven closes the book.
“That was all,” he says. “But maybe you’re too young to understand.”
“I understand,” Stephie retorts. “Who wrote that book?”
“An American named Hemingway,” says Sven. “But what I read you is a quotation from the work of a poet named John Donne, who lived in seventeenth-century England. When you get a little older and have studied English, you’ll be able to read the whole thing.”
“I’m not going to study English,” Stephie tells him.
“Why not? You’re good at languages, I can tell from your Swedish.”
“I’m done with regular school,” Stephie says. “I’m just going to take a home economics course next fall. They can’t afford to send me to grammar school.”
“That’s really too bad,” says Sven. “You ought to continue your studies. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders and should read, think, and write.”
He puts his book and other things back into his knapsack.
“If you’d like, I’ll lend you some books,” he says. “I’ve got some with me, and I can ask Father to bring more when he comes out from the city. Some German books, too, if you’d like.”
“Oh, please, that would be wonderful,” says Stephie.
“Feel free to come up anytime. Anyway, aren’t I staying in your bedroom?”
“That’s right.”
“What about that painting?” asks Sven. “Did you pick it out yourself?”
“No,” Stephie says emphatically.
“I’ve turned it toward the wall,” Sven tells her. “Don’t let Mrs. Jansson know, though. If you’d like I can accidentally knock it to the floor so it breaks.”
Stephie laughs. “You don’t need to do that,” she tells him.
Sven gets serious again.
“One night when the room was too hot, I opened the vent, but it turned out to be blocked with a crumpled sheet of paper. A letter. Yours, I assume, since it was in German.”
That letter she wrote her first evening on the island, to Mamma and Papa. If you don’t come and get me, I think I’m going to die. Stephie blushes.
“I didn’t read it,” says Sven. “Word of honor. Do you want it back?”
“No,” Stephie says. “Throw it out, or burn it. But don’t let anybody read it. I’m going now. Putte’s impatient.”
When she is at a distance, Sven shouts, “What’s your name again?”
“Stephanie.”
She doesn’t really know why she didn’t just say “Stephie.” Maybe because “Stephanie” sounds more grown-up.
“Pretty name,” Sven shouts back. “Bye, Stephanie.”
Later the same day Stephie goes to the beach with Nellie. She tries to give her a ride on the back of Aunt Märta’s bike, but it’s hard. Wobbly, and heavy on the uphills.
Nellie’s playmate Sonja is at the beach. The three of them lie on their towels, sunbathing on the sand. The water’s still cold, but after a while in the sun it’s refreshing.
Way out on the far cliffs Stephie sees Sylvia and Barbro with two boys she doesn’t recognize. They must be summer guests.
thirty-seven
One day, toward the end of June, Stephie bikes to the shop to buy a package of cookies for the doctor’s wife. Putte runs alongside the bike as usual.