“Did you cry?” I asked.
“What do you mean, cry?”
“When your mom laid here and died.”
“Probably.”
She ran in front of us down the stairs.
“Want to see something else?”
“No.”
“Come on. Don’t you want to see something else?” “What?”
“In the basement.”
“What in the basement?”
She had already opened the door to the basement and started down the stairs.
Jill looked at me. “You go ahead.”
There was nothing special about the basement. A big oil heater, a clothes rack with sheets hung up to dry. A mangle by the window and a pile of square stones with empty flowerpots on it.
“What’s so big about the basement?” I asked.
She looked secretive. Her beret had gotten loose and was hanging by a few hairs. She opened the door to a smaller room.
“There!” she said and pointed.
There was a big washtub in the room, one that people used to boil laundry in. Nothing else.
“What about it? My grandparents had one of those.”
“Flora puts me in it sometimes.”
“Huh?”
“When she’s angry with me.”
“She puts you in that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’s she do that?”
“She puts water in it and says she will boil away my stubbornness.”
Prickles went up and down my spine, but it wasn’t sympathy or fear; it was something else, and it felt kind of good.
I’ve been thinking about this the last few days. Children seem to lack empathy. But do all children lack empathy? Or was it just me… or my home? I had nice, kind parents who treated me well. Maybe even spoiled me a little; they were very old when I was born. I was the only child; no other children to rub against. Of course you get a little spoiled in such a situation.
But even a child can choose her friends. She should have bothered someone else, not just Jill and me the whole time. She carried Sandy Candy boxes in her school bag; we could choose menthol or honey, and if we couldn’t choose, we got both. Oh, how we wanted to be rid of her!
I believe it was my suggestion that we go to the cemetery. It was a long way, the whole length of Sandviksvägen, if you went there directly and didn’t run through side streets.
She stuck to us like a leach. Jill and I talked to each other and pretended that she wasn’t there, but I knew that she was going to follow us and, in fact, I was counting on it.
It must have been late September or early October because the leaves were still green, but there was a snap in the air. We were wearing jackets and long pants and we had our school bags, which we always took with us. We were still very proud of them, and of being old enough to go to school.
The boxes of candy lasted until we reached the cemetery. “What are we going to do?” asked Justine.
“We’re going to visit your mom.”
With some effort, we managed to open the heavy iron gate, but then we couldn’t figure out how to close it again. We left it open. Justine knew exactly where the grave was; she led us straight for a while, then to the right. The stone was tall and white and there was a name that I no longer remember.
“I wonder what she looks like now,” I said. “Probably just bones left. And a lot of hair. They say that hair keeps growing on the dead when they’re in the casket. Hair and nails, too.”
“I don’t want to be a skeleton!” shrieked Jill. “I don’t want my fingernails to keep growing!”
“Nobody does,” I said.
Justine said, “You have to have a skeleton inside yourself, or you’ll fall into a heap.”
We wandered toward the white building which was a bit farther in. An old man was right behind it, raking the pathway.
“That’s the house of the dead,” I said. “The bodies lie in there, the ones that need to be buried, and wait their turn.”
The old man stopped raking and yelled at us. We pretended not to hear. We hid behind a hedge. After a while, he hung up the rake and left. He went through the gate and shut it firmly behind him. Now we were alone in the cemetery.
There was a rain barrel beside the house of the dead. There was a great deal of rain in the barrel, which I saw when I peered in, and the sides were slick with algae.
“Let’s play fish,” I said, because I noticed that Jill was going to say that she wanted to go home.
“What do you mean, play fish?” asked Justine.
“Aquarium,” I said. “The rain barrel can be our aquarium.”
Jill said, “We shouldn’t be playing here.”
“The old guy’s gone.”
It was totally quiet. The wind moved through the birch leaves, but no birds. They must have left for warmer climates already. I remember all this so well. It’s strange. I was only seven years old.
“Justine’s going to be the fish,” I said, and noticed that she wanted to protest, but then pulled herself together as if she were gathering courage to say yes.
“Do I have to take my clothes off?” she asked.
“What do you think, Jill? Should she take off her clothes?”
Jill bit her lip and nodded. Then she began to giggle; she had this way of suddenly exploding into giggles. I was giggling, too. We told her to take off her clothes, and she did so. She didn’t have to. Everyone has free will. She probably liked it somehow? Maybe she liked it when Flora put her in the washtub? Otherwise, why tell us about it?
There were pee marks in her underwear; I saw that when she put them aside. She had goose bumps. She couldn’t climb in the rain barrel by herself, so we had to help her. There was a splash when she slid in. She screamed a bit; the water was cold against her naked tummy.
“Now you’re our fish,” I said.
She splashed a little, pretending to swim.
“We’ll give you some food. What do fish eat?”
“They eat… worms.”
Something happened with Justine, she stood straight up like a rod in the barrel and her eyes were wide open.
“No worms! I’m not that kind of fish! I only eat leaves!”
“Be quiet,” I said. “Fish don’t talk.”
We pulled some leaves from the bushes and rained them down on Justine in the rain barrel. She calmed down. Her hair was wet, and her teeth were starting to chatter.
I don’t know what came over me, what was going on with me; I was just a child, seven years old. I saw the hose hanging next to the wall of the house; I unrolled it and turned on the faucet.
“You’re going to get more water in your aquarium,” I said to Justine and she began to jump up and down and protest.
I’ve thought about it since then. I really wanted to see her with water up to her chin, yes even to her mouth and nose. I knew she could drown, but that was something that didn’t affect me. Or rather, it would be interesting to see how that could happen. When people drowned. I pulled the hose to the edge of the rain barrel and began to spray water into it.
First she screamed and flailed around wildly. I couldn’t stop myself from spraying her right on the head. Water streamed down her face and into the edges of her mouth. Afterwards I thought it must have been really cold. Now the water was up to her chin.
Jill said, “You should turn off the water.”
It was almost as if I couldn’t help myself.
“Turn it off, Berit! Turn it off!”
When I didn’t react, she went and turned it off herself. Justine was so cold she was shivering violently.
I walked around a while, thinking. Then I took a stick from the ground.
I held it a bit over the edge.
“Look! I’m fishing!”
Jill ran and got a stick, too.
“Who’ll get a bite?” I called out. “Who will get a bite first?”
Maybe I thought that she would grab the sticks and we could pull her out and she could get her clothes back on. But she didn’t do it. She stood there in the barrel and howled. I hit her with the stick, right over one of her ears. Jill looked at me, and then she did the same thing.