Swedish Tango / the Rhythm of Memory by Alyson Richman Read Free Book Online Page B

mother will be waiting for her with her arms outstretched and her scarf blowing around her pale white face.
    She wants to
will
herself home. She tightens her thin arms around her small bear and recalls the sensation of her mother’s embrace. How her mother’s blond hair wove into her own. How she was gently kissed at night and how her mother’s clothes smelled like fresh air and melted snow.
    Yet, the scent of home has already begun to recede from her memory. Blue-spruce and white-fir branches crackling on the fire. Now, she is enveloped by the smell of fresh leather seats and thick walls of carpet. Years later, even when she is a grown woman of twenty, she will be struck by the poignancy of this smell. For, every time she steps inside a new automobile, she will always see herself as a girl of barely two years of age, sitting in the backseat of a 1942 Volvo, struggling because she is unable to articulate her feelings into words. Struggling because she is incapable of communicating her overwhelming sense of loss.

Eight

K ARELIA , F INLAND
    J ANUARY 1944
    She had written to her daughter several times, carefully inscribing the envelopes with the address that the war agency had sent her in the mail a few days after her daughter had been transported to Stockholm.
    Sirka realized that the child was too small to read or even to understand these letters. But she wrote them anyway, hoping the family in Sweden might reply to them even if they wrote to her in a language she couldn’t comprehend. Yet, as many letters as Sirka wrote, she never received a response.
    Still, for nearly two years, Sirka continued to write. The letters remained a one-way dialogue between her and her only daughter, the little green-eyed girl whom she still carried closely in her heart.
    Ironically, life had been no easier for them since the little girl was taken. The family still remained hungry and the fighting continued. At Sunday services, when Toivo and the boys would travel to the church only a few kilometers away, the priest’s list of boys who had perished in the fighting continued to lengthen. Now, as the fourth year of fighting ensued, with little chance of peace in sight, Sirka began to worry that, in a few years, her own sons might be drafted.
    It sickened her to pass by the cemetery now: the rows of iron crosses for the lives already lost, the red flowers that grew fromunderneath the snow. All those young boys, their fathers—those husbands—it was too many to count.
    Sirka continually reminded herself that, despite her hardship, at least her husband had returned from the front alive. Despite his wounds, she had to be grateful for that.
    She had given up hoping that Toivo would return to his former self. Before the war, he had been larger than life. A robust man with a contagious laugh and a passion for the wilderness. Not to mention a passion for her. But he had returned not only with a physical wound, but with one far deeper in spirit. Incapable of fighting with his fellow soldiers, he sank deep into depression. He lost all of his physical strength, his muscles atrophying so that the flesh hung like wet linen on his bones. For hours, he would sit on the narrow wooden chair by the fire, his crutch propped against the corner, his fingers trembling at his sides.
    As her husband was now incapable of fishing, Sirka and the three boys became responsible for obtaining what little food they could harvest during the cold, long winters. Three days a week, she would place birch woven shoes over her reindeer-skin-lined feet and tread through the snow. A basket slung over one shoulder and a fishing pole slid under her arm.
    Her body had become more stocky over the past year, as she was required to do far more physical work than she had done when Toivo was in full health. Now, sometimes when she would go to fish on the lake, she would wear his old army parka and hat—the white ones that blended with the snow.
    She had gone to the lake all by herself