Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

“I don’t remember,” Bent said.

In the taxi on the way to the museum, Lennart spoke. Bent listened to the tires on the icy road. Slush from the salt and vehicles. A bus skidded to a stop at a station.

The museum was all bright lights and white smiles and crowds of noisy people. They floated by all of it, stopped among rows of chairs facing a wall of thick curtains. The room was humid and sticky. They took seats near the front. The curtains parted. On the screen appeared the image of a summer cottage, white trim, iron-red walls, and a small garden surrounded by a short, white fence.

A man walked in front of the screen and tapped his chest. Static, booming voice. “Welcome to The Winter War ,” the voice said, and the man disappeared from the stage.

Light, slow, exposed shaking bare branches of two tall birches to the left of the cottage. Dark, then light. Night, then day. A single flower, red, in the garden bloomed. Others soon followed. Bent knew what he was seeing. This was time, sped up. Or else all else was slowed. Leaves fell to the ground. It rained. The rain turned to snow. Snow covered the grass, the roof. The garden was buried in white. The cottage was the shape of a cottage only clumsier. Icicles reached for the ground from the rain gutters. A gray sky pinned it all down.

In the winter he saw them. A group of soldiers crouched in a trench, dressed in white capes that blurred the falling snow against the dirt. Some of the soldiers stood and looked over the edge of the trench at the cottage and the violent storm engulfing it. Rifles leaned against the dirt. Bent shook at the sound of an approaching plane. Gunfire, shouting. Bombs whistled down, explosions filled the room. The room lit up orange. Snow and dirt rained down on the soldiers, who all crouched low and covered their heads. There was smoke. The clumsy little cottage stood still in the smoke.

Clouds parted and the snow stopped. Bright sun reflected off shrinking mounds of snow. Bent looked down and removed the hood of the white cape of the dead man beside him, dead face looking up at the sky. He knew this man. If not this man then another. They were all the same, dead soldiers.

And then it was done. The war was over. The cottage, iron-red again, the fence white and sharp-lined. Grass and flowers grew. Birds arrived. Branches sagged under the weight of new leaves. Bent sat in his chair. His legs burned and his feet felt heavy.

It was Linnaeus that did it. Back in that park. Snowy morning, 1939. A statue of Linnaeus, for his ideas of an orderly world. Bent knew what he needed to do, where he fit, how his life must be classified. At the Finnish Legation, where the volunteers were being commissioned, Bent signed papers that same afternoon.

He let his grandson lead him by the elbow to the bar where he was given a beer and placed in another chair. He watched his grandson drink two drinks, then a third. The boy squirmed in his chair, twice tried to say something Bent didn’t hear. Single words arrived from Lennart’s chair, his face leaned close to Bent. Film , he heard. Marie, apartment . He couldn’t make sense of it so he just watched Lennart twist and turn, cross his legs, uncross his legs, another gulp from a glass. His son Rolf, who was dead, had had the same unending flow of nervous movement. Bent watched his grandson, looked at his son. Time guttered. Rolf was alive and then he was not. The unsteady flame of the memory.

Lennart, somber-faced, stood eventually. Bent allowed himself to be led to the taxi stand. A whistle sounded, arms waved, tires crunched over packed snow and salted gravel.

They drove home slowly in the snow. The snow fell thick, heavy with water, onto the windshield. The driver gripped the wheel hard, stuck his head close to the glass, fogging two round circles with the breath from his nostrils.

Soon they were home. And Lennart was before him, kneeled, pulling off first one shoe then the other, lifting one socked foot to free the cuff of Bent’s pants, and Bent stood nearly naked, his body one he still did not recognize below him. Himself, his son, his grandson, these unfamiliar bodies.

In bed, he listened to the murmur of the television from the other room. Explosions or laughter. First of February 1940, Bent arrived with a group of five thousand volunteers at Märkäjärvi to relieve the Finnish battalions fighting there. The winter had been harsh, and supply lines from the bases at Boden and Tornio were disrupted regularly. Deep drifts of snow skulked high up the pines. All along the line, trenches and encampments yawned from the frozen earth. He was ordered to a position just north of the line. Through a thick stand of pine to the south, smoke from a Russian fire reached across the gray sky. It was nearing dark. Only midday, but the clouds were so thick the light remained unchanged for the hours he crouched in the trench, rifle trained on the smoke and flicker of movement through the trees. A head, shoulders, rising embers from a stoked fire. First the cold burned but then it numbed. It circled him in bed now. He had never seen so much snow. The first shots stabbed the dirt. Then mortar rounds, more gunfire. Blood an icy continent at the root of what was left of the man beside him. Outside, a fist of clear sky began to open and the storm cleared, snow in the orange light of the courtyard lighter and lighter until it was gone.

Marie took her daughter to swim at the beach. They splashed around near the shore. Tove emptied the bag of sand toys, looked disappointed to find only a small bucket and a half dozen filthy plastic molds. There was a shell, a crab, a sea star, some animals Marie didn’t recognize. While Tove was occupied with these things, Marie waded out in the water. The cool water gripped her legs. Tove filled the bucket with wet sand, dumped it out, filled it again. She made a messy pile of shells and sea stars. Marie walked backward, watching her daughter, until the water was up to her waist, then her shoulders, and finally deep enough for her to be unable to stand. She floated in the water for a little while. Then she swam back and dried beside Tove in the hot sun.

There was a floating pier just up the beach. Tove had pointed to the children jumping from the pier into the water when she and Marie walked down to the beach from the metro station. She’d said she’d wanted to try. “You’re too young, Tove,” Marie had said. “You don’t swim well enough yet.”

Now sand covered, pink from sunburn on her cheeks and neck, she asked again. “Please,” Tove said.

Marie said, “One time, and then we’ll go home. Lennart’s sister is coming to dinner. I’ll need your help to cook.” She combed a sweaty clump of Tove’s hair back from the girl’s sandy forehead.

Tove helped rinse the sand toys in the water. She hummed a song Marie couldn’t place. Perhaps Tove had made it up. Marie often worried about the person Tove would one day become. Together they walked along the beach toward the pier.

The pier was wobbly and Tove stopped once they’d stepped on it to look up at Marie. Marie smiled. “It’s okay,” she said. “Take my hand.”

At the edge, they stood and looked down into the dark green water. This far inland the saltwater mixed with the fresh and didn’t smell brackish like it did nearer the coast.

“I don’t want to,” Tove said.

“Shall we go home then?” Marie asked, turning back toward the shore and holding her hand out. She tried not to be frustrated, but she couldn’t take her mind off the list of preparations she had before dinner.

“I want to do it,” Tove said. “No, I want to jump.”

Marie turned back to the water. A cold wind whipped drops of water from her legs. “On three,” Marie said. At three, she stopped. Tove’s toes curled over the edge of the pier. A cloud passed in front of the sun, and the hair on Marie’s arms stood up. Children jumped from either side. Water splashed her and Tove’s feet.