1966

BRIGHT DAYS, OPEN spaces. Elsa is away for three weeks from June to July and we make a home in the country. We check the fish traps every morning. I put on his rubber boots and row. He sits at the back of the boat with the little girl and they make up stories and laugh.

One day I get a pike from the trap, it struggles but I keep my hold on it. The pike brings greetings from the bottom of the lake, the little girl laughing as I make up words for the fish.

“Is it cold at the bottom of the lake?” she asks, giggling.

“Yes,” I answer in a fish voice. “It’s cool and quiet there. Nothing ever changes at the bottom of the lake.”

He sometimes draws me while I’m rowing. More often he lets the days and the fish be, without trying to capture them. The sun rises and sets. The world is frozen in place. The oak trees in the yard grow dense with leaves from one day to the next. The blackbird has already quieted, the warblers are still singing. Now and then one of his friends drives into the yard in a car uninvited, but that doesn’t bother us. Some of them bring a bottle of wine with them, some want to make a party of it. Sometimes families come. We stay up late into the night with the wine and chocolate they’ve brought and all sorts of talk—the child often falls asleep in my lap.

We begin to take turns speaking in big words.

But the world . . . , someone says. This country . . . , someone else answers. This era . . . , someone adds, and once again we’re talking about humanity and where it’s going.

No one will admit it but all of us are actually more interested in the lake and the sauna and the half of a blueberry pie on the table than we are in the fact that reality is being created at this very moment in offices and meeting rooms and on speakers’ platforms and who knows maybe underground in the kinds of groups whose names have only just been thought up.

Kerttu spends time at these meetings. She doesn’t care at all about blueberry pie. She eats it if she finds it in front of her, but she doesn’t waste her time thinking about it. A loon is just a word to her, from a bygone time.

But there are those of us who are content with the beginnings of sentences and the call of a loon as it rakes across the surface of the lake.

“But the world . . . ,” someone says.

He looks at me. The little girl is asleep on my lap with Molla under her arm and we don’t need to say it out loud: the world is right here. Somewhere else, at this very moment, the jungle is bathed in napalm and a lot of people are upset about it. So are we, as long as we can keep our blueberry pie. In Paris, an all-consuming indignation at the general state of things has already begun, now they’re trying to dress indignation in a suitable shape for the masses.

Alongside all that—the indignation, the seas of flame and horror, solidarity and unmetered verse—somewhere a long-legged, short-haired girl is wearing a yellow dress. Her eyes are pools, but she shows them off more than before. She puts on false eyelashes and pictures are taken. I see the pictures in Hopeapeili magazine, the “Silver Mirror,” and wonder when it was that this dumbstruck expression came into fashion. That’s happening right now—new fashions are being created. But we don’t care about that because we have the spruces and the oaks, the blueberry pie, the beginnings of sentences. They’re all that we need.

One of our summer guests pours himself some more wine and says, “Everything is going to have to be looked at from an angle of hope first. Kind of like what Martin Luther King said.”

“Not King, Kant,” someone corrects him. “We should look at Kant again and ask ourselves what we can really hope for. Only then will we be able to ask ourselves what we can do about it.”

The others nod. Kant is approved, but most of the gazes are aimed at the blueberry pie and the clumsy bee that’s decided it wants a piece, too.

SUMMER HAS COME to a halt, the sky stands still, the grass grows without making a sound, the wild strawberries grow heavy with dew and light, swelling from day to day toward the earth. The little girl picks them every morning, they patter into an enamel cup like blind, happy grubs.

“Shall we put them on a stem of grass to make a necklace?” I ask.

“How?” she says.

I string her a strawberry necklace, and another for Molla. She wears it around her neck until the berries are soggy. She stains the curtains with the juice and a red drop runs down her neck and between her shoulder blades and one of the summer guests says, Child, you look like something’s pricked you.

“It’s Eeva’s prick,” she says, pleased with her jewelry.

“Don’t talk silly,” I scold her.

“Eeva’s prick is silly,” she says, and I threaten to wash her mouth out with soap like my mother sometimes did to me.

I wrap the threat in a grin and she laughs and runs away.

THE MAN DAWDLES over his work. He prepares everything he needs to begin, but he never gets started. One of his friends brings him some canvases, which he stretches on wooden frames he’s built. He studies new techniques in the shed on rainy days, the ones they talked about in Paris last year. How about combining photographs and oils, what about that idea? Should he try it? He sets up his camera, ready for anything, but he doesn’t take any pictures.

“What are you doing?” I ask sometimes, standing at the door after the guests have gone and before any more have arrived.

“Practicing,” he says without turning around.

“Practice with me. I’m bored. Ella’s taking a nap and the rain’s going to melt me soon if something doesn’t happen around here.”

“Sit down there, then,” he says.

He draws the outlines of my features in rough, careless strokes, starting with a soft lead pencil on paper, and it’s not bad. He doesn’t think of it as art, as a work of art, he’s just experimenting. I keep him company, sit there looking at him. He lights a cigarette and takes a drag, turns on the radio. I turn back to the book I’m reading.

“So that’s the way it is,” he says after a moment.

“What’s the way it is?”

“This scribble.”

“Are you drawing me?”

“I’m trying.”

An hour goes by, sometimes two. He mixes paints, makes a few strokes. Thinks maybe he should try ink after all, maybe he could bring out my features better that way. It’s a half-formed thought—mellow and careless. On porous paper, maybe. He decides he’ll try it later if he feels like it.

The rain patters on the roof and neither of us would change anything about this moment, not even the fly making its way down the window pane on suction cups when we’re not looking.

The rain, the sprays of blueberries in the woods, the red bucket in the sauna, the little girl in the house napping and dreaming. The two of us, completely without plans. We talk about something, but not about anything important. We talk about what we’ll do tomorrow on our way into town to pick up the mail from the apartment. Or maybe not, one or the other of us says. Maybe the day after tomorrow, the other one says.

Dreamy, lighthearted, a cigarette in his mouth, he looks like he’s entitled to achieve immortal visions through half-careless glances.

He doesn’t think he’ll paint me, but then he just begins.