"An ordinary bloody oak," the boy said to the tree. "Hardly fifteen meters
high. That's nothing much to boast about.
"And nor are you
a hundred thousand," he said, thinking of his grandmother, now nearly
ninety and nothing but an ordinary shrill old woman.
Named, measured,
and compared, the tree retreated from the boy.
But he could still
hear the singing in the great treetops, melancholy and reproachful. So
he resorted to violence and crashed the stone he had kept for so long
in his pocket straight into the trunk.
"That'll shut you
up," he said.
The great tree instantly
fell silent, and the boy knew something important had happened. He swallowed
the lump in his throat, disowning his grief.
That was the day
he said farewell to his childhood. He did so at a definite moment and
in a definite place; thus he would always remember it. For many years,
he pondered over what he had relinquished on that day far back in his
childhood. At twenty, he would have some idea, and then would spend his
life trying to recapture it.
But at this moment,
he was on the hillside above Appelgren's garden, looking out over the
sea, the fog gathering around the skerries before rolling in toward the
coast. In the land of his childhood, the fog had many voices, the fog
singing from Vinga to Alvsborg on a day like this.
Behind him was the
mountain and the meadow. At the end of the meadows, where the ground opened
up, were the oak woods, the trees that had spoken to him over the years.
In their shade, he
had met the little man with the strange round hat. No, he thought, that
wasn't true. He had always known the man, but it was in the shade of those
great trees that he had actually seen him.
It no longer mattered.
"Just a load of shit,"
the boy said aloud as he crawled under the barbed wire of Appelgren's
fence.
He managed to avoid
the old woman, Edit Appelgren, who used to tear out the couch grass in
her dead-straight flower beds on early spring days like this. The foghorns
had frightened her indoors. She couldn't stand fog.
The boy understood
that. Fog was the grief of the sea, as infinite as the sea, almost unbearable--
"Oh, shit," he said,
for he knew better, and had just resolved to look on the world as other
people saw it. The fog was the warmth of the Gulf Stream rising when the
air grew cold.
Nothing more than
that.
But he couldn't really
deny the sorrow in the long drawn-out wail of foghorns over the harbor
entrance as he slanted across Appelgren's lawn and slipped into his kitchen,
where he was given hot cocoa.
His name was Simon
Larsson. He was eleven, small, thin, dark complexioned. His hair was coarse,
brown, almost black, his eyes so dark sometimes it was hard to distinguish
the pupils.
What was strange
about his appearance had hitherto evaded him, for up to that day, he hadn't
been given to comparisons and had escaped a great many torments. He thought
about Edit Appelgren and her difficulties with the fog. But he mostly
thought about Aron, her husband. Simon had always liked Aron.
Simon had been a
frequent runaway--one of those children, like cheerful puppies, who follow
the temptations of the road. It could begin with a colorful toffee paper
in the ditch outside the gate, continue with an empty box of Tiger Brand
and a little farther away a bottle, then another, a red flower, and farther
on a white stone, then perhaps a glimpse of a cat.
In that way he ended
up farther and farther away from home, and he remembered very clearly
one time when he had realized he was lost. That was when he saw the tram,
large and blue as it rattled out of town. It frightened him terribly,
but just as he was opening his mouth to bawl, Aron was there.
Aron bent his tall
figure over the boy, and as he spoke, his voice seemed to come from up
in the sky.
"Good gracious, boy,
running away again, eh?"
He heaved the boy
up onto the carrier of his back bicycle and started walking home, all
the time talking about the birds, the fat chaffinches and cheeky great
tits, the gray sparrows hopping around them in the dust on the road.
He said he had nothing
but contempt for them, those flying rats.
It was spring, so
they cut across the field and the boy learned to distinguish the song
of the lark. Then, in his tremendous voice, Aron sang a song that went
rolling down the slopes and echoed against the cliffs.
"When in spri-i-i-ing
among the mountai-ai-ains--"
Best was when Aron
whistled. He could imitate any bird, and the boy almost burst with excitement
when Aron got the female blackbird to respond to him, lustily and willingly.
Then Aron grinned his good big grin.
The birdsong that
surpassed all others in the hills at the mouth of the river was actually
the shrieking of gulls. Aron could imitate them, too, and could tease
them into such rage, they would dive-bomb down onto the boy and the man.
Then Simon laughed
so much he almost wet himself, and the neighbors on their errands hastened
past along the road, but would stop and smile at the tall man who was
enjoying himself as much as the little boy.
"Aron will never
grow up," they said.
But Simon didn't
hear that. Right up to this very day, Aron had been king in his world
Excerpted from Simon's Family © Copyright 2009 by Marianne Fredriksson. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
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