The Lily Pond (6 page)

In due time, he’ll understand. He’ll be the one to reach out and touch her.

“Stephanie, I love you,” he’ll say.

She’s no longer a little girl. Soon she’ll have outgrown her rough undershirts and itchy woolen stockings. Then he’ll see her as she really is.

Five years isn’t a big age difference. Mamma is nine years younger than Papa. And Sven’s even said he finds Stephie mature for her age.

“You almost seem older than some of the girls who are my age. Silly superficial girls who think about nothing but themselves. Promise me you’ll never be like that!”

No, she is never going to be like those girls Sven despises. Or like Harriet and Lilian. She’ll never hurt him,
never flirt, and never be self-absorbed. She and Sven will mean everything to each other.

But not yet.

Stephie is sitting on one of the benches by the lily pond, thinking about all this and staring out across the gleaming surface of the water. It’s the same bench she and Sven sat on that first evening. She sits here often, always on this very bench. Sometimes she’s joined by a wrinkled old woman who feeds the ducks stale bread from a paper bag.

Stephie never brings anybody else here, not even May Karlsson. When she wants to go to the lily pond after school, she tells May she has to run an errand, and May walks down to the green tram’s nearest stop, instead of keeping Stephie company partway down the avenue.

Two white swans are swimming in the pond, their heads held high. Swans live in lifelong “marriages.” She learned that in Hedvig Björk’s biology class. When the teacher said that, a giggle rippled from desk to desk, and someone asked whether swans fell in love just like people.

“Oh, you silly geese,” Hedvig Björk admonished them. “Are your heads only full of one thing, girls?”

Now one of the swans extends his long neck and puts his head under his wing. He bobs on the surface, not moving. The dark green water-lily leaves are like little islands in the pond. The white flowers shine like stars, though the red ones at the far side are the prettiest sight of all.

Dark-haired Alice lives in one of the brick mansions
above the pond. Sometimes when Stephie is sitting on the bench, Alice passes by on her way home. May said that of all the fancy addresses in Göteborg, the streets above the lily pond are the fanciest of all, with their brick homes closed off from the rest of the city in splendid isolation behind stone walls. May also said that Alice’s parents must be extremely wealthy.

May and Sven have one thing in common: they both think society is unfairly organized. But May believes that the Social Democratic Party is in the process of changing all that, and that the most important thing is for people like her, “ordinary people,” as she says, to have the opportunity to get an education and become decision makers in society. She wants to be a politician herself.

“Then they’ll see what May from Mayhill can do,” she says, laughing.

“May from Mayhill” is an expression someone in the class started using one of the very first days of the semester. May wasn’t offended, though her neighborhood is anything but hilly: she even calls herself that sometimes so no one can use the expression to make fun of her.

The sun disappears behind one of the tall trees on the other side of the pond. It’s getting cold. Stephie heads for home.

She unlocks the front door with the key she has safety-pinned to the inside of her coat pocket. At first she was told to go to the kitchen door and ring the bell when she got
home, but Elna got tired of her “eternal comings and goings” and asked Mrs. Söderberg to arrange for Stephie to have a key of her own.

“The girl has a good head on her shoulders,” said Elna. “She won’t lose your key.”

Mrs. Söderberg ranted on at Stephie about everything that could happen if she lost it: the apartment could be broken into, the silver and the paintings could be stolen—“priceless works of art, you know”—the East Indian china might be broken, and the Persian rugs trampled with dirt.

Stephie finds Elna polishing the hall mirror.

“There’s a letter for you,” Elna says.

The letter is on the table under the mirror along with the rest of the day’s mail. It’s postmarked from Vienna, the first letter from home to reach Stephie in Göteborg.

The handwriting is Papa’s.

Stephie puts the letter aside.

Cultivated people. Friends of your own kind
.

What does Papa mean? Who are her own kind? Vera on the island obviously isn’t. Stephie imagines that Papa wouldn’t think May Karlsson is, either, not with her parents and six siblings all living in a one-bedroom apartment in Mayhill. Is dark-haired, nervous Alice Martin of Stephie’s own kind? Are Harriet and Lilian? For the first time in her life, she has the upsetting feeling that her papa may not always be absolutely right, may not always know what is in her best interest.

early September Hedvig Björk takes the class on a biology excursion. Their other classes have been canceled, since they’ll be gone all day. They take the tram and then have quite a long walk from the stop to Lake Delsjön. Their rucksacks are heavy with glass jars and bottles to collect aquatic animals and insects in. Hedvig Björk takes long strides at the head of the class.

The Söderbergs have lent Stephie a pair of Karin’s old rubber boots; they’re a little big and they flop as she walks along. She knows she looks silly with her too-big boots protruding from the nearly outgrown skirt she’s wearing so as not to dirty her nice ones. She wishes she had a pair of trousers. Or a burgundy wool leisure suit with matching trousers and jacket, like Alice has.

The girls spread out along the lakeshore with their bottles and jars. Their prey is every living thing: worms and water spiders, beetles and leeches.

From a distance the water gleams blue in the sunshine, but standing at the edge, Stephie sees that it’s brown and muddy, not clear like the seawater at the island. There is a scent of damp earth. The bottom is slushy and squishy underfoot. If you walk out too far, you sink in the sludge, and the water runs over the tops of and into your boots.

Hedvig Björk isn’t the least bit bothered by wet feet. Her culottes are hiked up and she’s wading around quite far out, more excited than any of her pupils.

“Look, girls,” she shouts, “a whirligig beetle!”

Aquatic animals have peculiar names: diving beetles and backswimmers, marsh treaders and pond skaters. As if there were a whole little community down in the water, peopled by creatures, each with its own occupation.

A shimmering dragonfly lands on Stephie’s arm, turning its round head and bobbing its little body. It’s so lovely, with its transparent wings, that she’d rather let it fly away, but for Hedvig Björk’s sake she turns a glass jar upside down over it, reverses the jar carefully making sure to place her free hand across the opening. Then she screws a top poked with holes over the dragonfly.

After a couple of hours, hot, dirty, and wet, the girls eat their packed lunches while sitting on a rocky ledge overlooking the lake. As usual, Alice keeps to herself. Stephie notices she doesn’t have a single spot of dirt on her leisure suit.

“Alice,” Hedvig Björk asks, “aren’t you going to eat?”

Alice shakes her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“Didn’t you bring any sandwiches?”

“No.”

“Have one of mine,” Hedvig Björk says, offering her a cheese sandwich.

“No thank you.”

“Do as I say, now,” Hedvig Björk replies. “You need to eat if you’re going to spend a whole day out of doors. Take it!”

Alice accepts the sandwich, taking tiny bites and eating extremely slowly.

After lunch break, Hedvig Björk inspects their bottles and jars. She admires Stephie’s dragonfly.

“
Lestes sponsa
. A damselfly. And a fine specimen at that.”

At first Stephie thinks she must be joking, but it appears the insect is really called a damselfly.

The afternoon is to be devoted to gathering plants for their herbaria. They are allowed to go one by one or two by two, as long as they don’t get out of earshot of the whistle Hedvig Björk borrowed from the phys ed teacher, and can find their way back.

May isn’t there—she’s sick today—so Stephie heads off on her own. Alice walks away without so much as a glance at the other girls. Stephie goes in the same direction—not following on her heels, but more or less the same way. They are collecting ferns, mosses, and lichens. When spring comes, there will be flower excursions.

“Blue anemones, wood anemones, lilies of the valley! We’ll go out into the woods once a week and watch spring develop,” Hedvig Björk told them in class with great enthusiasm.

For a while Stephie keeps Alice in sight among the trees, but then she loses her. All she can hear is the cracking of twigs under her own rubber boots, the tweeting of the birds, and the wind murmuring softly in the treetops.

Stephie picks her plants carefully, folding them in pressing paper. When she gets home, she’ll put them in new paper and lay them under a heavy pile of books. Some of the girls have real plant presses, but she wasn’t able to afford one out of her scholarship money. When they’re dry, each plant must be glued into a herbarium and tagged with its Swedish name, its Latin name, and the site where it was found.

Deep in the woods the moss is as thick and soft as an elegant carpet. The evergreen trees are dark and dense. Here and there are boulders, encrusted with moss and gray shield lichen. Stephie has never before been in a forest like this one. In the woods near Vienna, the wind whistles in the crowns of broad-leafed trees. On the island, what people called the woods was just stunted, windswept pine trees and bristly juniper bushes.

Suddenly something cranberry red appears among all the greens and grays. Alice is leaning into a bramble. At first Stephie thinks she must be picking a plant, but as she approaches, she realizes that Alice is bent forward throwing
up. Stephie sees bits of Hedvig Björk’s cheese sandwich in the moss.

“Alice,” Stephie cries. “Are you all right?”

Alice looks up. “Go away,” she says.

“Do you need something to drink? I’ve got some milk left.”

“Get lost!” Alice yells. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“There’s no need to shout,” says Stephie. “I was only trying to help!”

“I don’t want any help,” Alice retorts. “Especially not yours. Go away and don’t you dare tell a soul about this.”

Alice straightens up, brushing her hair back from her face. Her eyes gleam, black as pitch, against her pale skin.
She’s so pretty
, Stephie thinks.
Haughty, pretty, and lonely
.