Every day when the sun went down, Sophia would climb up the ladder, poke her nose through the trapdoor, and peer into the attic. She could see one little corner of the bathrobe if she craned her neck.
“What are you doing?” Grandmother asked.
“None of your business, nosey!” Sophia whined in her most irritating voice.
“Close the trapdoor. There’s a draft,” Grandmother said. “Go and do something outside.” She turned towards the wall and went on with her book. They had both become impossible and couldn’t get along at all. They quarrelled the wrong way. The days were cloudy, with rising winds, and Papa just sat at his desk and worked.
Sophia thought about the bathrobe more and more. The thing living in it was as quick as lightning but could lie in wait for days without moving. It could make itself thin and slide through a crack in the door, and then roll itself up again and crawl under the bed like a shadow. It didn’t eat and never slept and hated everyone, most of all its own family. Sophia didn’t eat either – that is, nothing but sandwiches.
It may not really have been her fault, but one day they ran out of bread and butter, and Papa took the boat in to the shop to get supplies. He put the water jug in the boat, and the cans for kerosene and petrol, and he took the shopping list from the wall and left. There was a southwest wind when he set out, and in a couple of hours it had risen so that the waves were riding right across the point. Grandmother tried to get the weather report on the radio, but she couldn’t find the right button. She couldn’t keep from going back to the north window every few minutes to look for him, and she didn’t understand a word she read.
Sophia went down to the shore, and came back and sat down at the table. “And all you can do is just read,” she said. She raised her voice and screamed, “You just read and read and read!” Then she threw herself down on the table and wept.
Grandmother sat up and said, “He’ll make it all right.” She was feeling a little ill and felt for the Lupatro behind the curtain. Sophia went on crying, but she kept an eye on Grandmother under her arm. “I don’t feel good either,” she screamed, and jumped up and vomited on the rug. Then she was quiet and pale and sat down on the bed.
“Lie down,” Grandmother said, and she lay down. They both lay down and listened to the wind outside as it attacked in short, violent bursts.
“Once you get to the village,” Grandmother said, “it always takes a long time at the shop. There’s always a queue, and no one’s in a hurry. And then the boy has to go down to the dock and fill you up with petrol and kerosene. And you have to go and pick up the mail, and sort through it to find what’s for you. And if there’s a money order you have to go in and get it stamped, and that means a cup of coffee. And then he has to pay the bills. It can take a long time.”
“Go on,” Sophia said.
“Well, then he has to take everything down to the boat,” Grandmother said. “He has to pack it all in and cover it so it won’t get wet. And on the way down he remembers to pick some flowers, and give some bread to the horse. And the bread’s way down at the bottom of a bag somewhere …”
“I shouldn’t have eaten so many sandwiches!” Sophia wailed and started to cry again. “I’m cold!”
Grandmother tried to cover her with a blanket, but the child kicked it off and flailed her legs and screamed that she hated all of them.
“Quiet!” Grandmother yelled. “Quiet down! Or I’ll end up being sick – and probably all over you.” Sophia stopped screaming immediately. There was a moment’s silence, and then she said, “I want the bathrobe.”
“But it’s up in the attic,” Grandmother said.
“I want it,” her grandchild said.
And so Grandmother climbed the attic ladder. It went fine. She crawled over to the window for the robe and dragged it back to the trapdoor. Then she dropped it down into the room and sat and rested for a while, dangling her feet over the edge. She hadn’t been up there for a very long time, and she read the labels on the boxes. String. Tackle. Bottles. All kinds of things. Rags and old trousers. She had printed the labels herself. They had painted the ceiling blue, but they hadn’t put enough glue in the paint; it was flaking.
“What are you doing?” Sophia yelled. “Are you okay?”
“It’s okay,” Grandmother answered through the trap. “I feel better.” She lowered one leg very cautiously and found the step. Then she turned slowly over on her stomach and brought down the other leg.
“Take it easy!” Sophia called from down below. She saw Grandmother’s stiff old legs move from one step to the next and finally reach the floor. Grandmother picked up the robe and came over to the bed.
“You have to shake it first,” Sophia said. “And make it come out.”
Grandmother didn’t understand, but she shook the robe. Something came slinking out of one sleeve and disappeared under the door. The robe smelled the same as before. It was very heavy, and became a warm, dark cave. Sophia fell asleep right away, and Grandmother sat down in the north window to wait. It was blowing hard, and the sun was setting. She was far-sighted and saw the boat half an hour before it reached the island – a moustache of white foam that would appear at irregular intervals and sometimes vanish entirely.
When the boat reached the shelter of the island, she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. A few minutes later, Sophia’s father came into the room. He was wet through. He put down the bags and lit his pipe. Then he took the lamp and went out to fill it with kerosene.
The Enormous
Plastic Sausage
SOPHIA KNEW THAT VERY SMALL ISLANDS in the sea have turf instead of soil. The turf is mixed with seaweed and sand and invaluable bird droppings, which is why everything grows so well among the rocks. For a few weeks every year, there are flowers in every crack in the granite, and their colours are brighter than anywhere else in the whole country. But the poor people who live on the green islands in towards the mainland have to make do with ordinary gardens, where they put their children to work pulling weeds and carrying water until they are bent with toil. A small island, on the other hand, takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought, the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it, and wait quietly in their roots. There’s no need to feel sorry for the flowers, Grandmother said.
The first to come up was the scurvywort, only an inch high, but vital to seamen who live on ship’s biscuit. The second came up about ten days later in the lee of the channel marker, and it was called stepmother, or love-in-idleness. Sophia and Grandmother used to walk out to see it. Sometimes it blossomed at the end of May and sometimes at the beginning of June. It had to be viewed at length. Sophia wondered why it was so important, and Grandmother said, “Because it’s the first.”
“No, it’s the second,” Sophia said.
“But it always comes up in the same place,” Grandmother said. It occurred to Sophia that all of the others did, too, more or less, but she didn’t say anything.
Every day, Grandmother would walk around the island in order to keep track of what was coming up. If she found a piece of uprooted moss, she would poke it back where it belonged. Since she had a hard time getting on her feet again whenever she sat down, Grandmother had become very skilful with her stick. She looked like an immense sandpiper as she walked slowly along on her stiff legs, stopping often to turn her head this way and that and have a look at everything before she moved on.
Grandmother was not always completely logical. Even though she knew there was no need to feel sorry for small islands, which can take care of themselves, she was very uneasy whenever there was a dry spell. In the evening she would make some excuse to go down to the marsh pond, where she had hidden a watering can under the alders, and she would scoop up the last dregs of water with a coffee cup. Then she would go around and splash a little water here and there on the plants she liked best, and then hide the can again. Every autumn, she co
llected wild seeds in a matchbox, and the last day on the island she would go around and plant them, no one knew where.
The great change began with some flower catalogues that came for Sophia’s father in the mail. For a while, he read nothing but flower catalogues, and finally he wrote to Holland and they sent him a box full of bags, and in each bag there was a brown-and-white bulb in a bed of light, protective down. Papa wrote for another box, and this time they sent him special gifts from Amsterdam: a porcelain wooden shoe that was really a vase, and several of the house bulbs, which were called something like Houet van Moujk. Late that autumn, Papa went back out to the island alone and planted his bulbs. And all winter he went on reading about plants and shrubs and trees in order to learn as much about them as he could. They were all of them delicate and pampered and had to be handled scientifically and with great care. They could not survive without real soil and water at specific times. They had to be covered in the autumn so they wouldn’t freeze, and uncovered in the spring so they wouldn’t rot, and they had to be protected from field mice and storms and heat and frost – and the sea, of course. Papa knew all that, and perhaps that was why he was interested.
When the family returned to the island, they had two boats in tow. Huge bales of real black inland soil were rolled ashore and lay around near the water like sleeping elephants. Cartons and bags and baskets of plants wrapped in black plastic were carried up to the veranda, along with shrubs and whole trees with their roots in sacks, and hundreds of small peat pots full of delicate sprouts that would have to live indoors at first.
Spring was late, and there was sleet and storm every single day. They fed the fire until the stove shook, and they hung blankets in front of all the windows. They piled the suitcases against the wall and made narrow paths among the plants that stood huddled on the floor to keep warm. Occasionally, Grandmother would lose her balance and sit down on some of them, but most of these straightened up again. They stacked firewood around the stove in rows to dry, and hung up their clothes from the rafters. And the poplar tree, the cement, and the shrubs were out on the veranda, under plastic. The storm continued, and by and by the sleet turned to rain.
Sophia’s father woke up every morning at six o’clock. He built up the fire and made sandwiches for everyone and then went out. He tore up the turf in huge sheets and picked the bedrock clean. He dug deep holes all over the island and filled the ragged scars with real black soil. He collected stones and built walls to protect these gardens from the wind, he put up trellises on buildings and trees for the climbing plants, and he dug up the marsh pond in order to put in a concrete dike.
Grandmother stood in the window and watched. “The marsh will rise eight inches,” she said. “The junipers won’t like that.”
“We’re going to have speckled pond lilies and red water lilies in there,” Sophia said. “Who cares what the junipers like?”
Her grandmother didn’t answer. But she decided that when the weather got better she would rescue the broken turf and turn it right side up, because she knew it was full of daisies.
In the evenings, Papa would light his pipe and brood over the chemical composition of the soil. Flower catalogues covered the table and the bed, and the pictures shone gaudily in the lamplight. Sophia and Grandmother learned all the names and tested each other. They printed each of them on a slip of paper.
“Fritillaria imperialis,” Sophia said. “Forsythia spectabilis! That’s a lot more elegant than ‘stepmother’.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Grandmother said. “For that matter, stepmother’s real name is Viola tricolor. Anyway, really elegant people don’t need nameplates.”
“Well, we’ve got a nameplate on our door in town,” Sophia said, and they went on with their printing.
One night the wind died down and the rain stopped. The silence woke Grandmother, and she thought: Now he’ll start planting.
The sunrise dazzled the house with light. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sea and the island steamed. Sophia’s father got dressed and went outside as quietly as he could. He took the plastic cover off the poplar and carried it down to its pit above the beach meadow. The poplar was twelve feet tall. Papa put soil around its roots and attached rope stays in every direction until it was very firmly braced. Then he carried the roses into the woods and laid them in the heather, and then he lit his pipe.
Once everything was in the earth, there was a long period of waiting. One still, warm day followed another. The Dutch bulbs opened their brown husks and grew straight up. Inside the dike, white root sprouts began moving in the slime, held in by a fine-meshed metal net that was anchored down with stones. New roots were seeking a foothold all over the island, and every stem and stalk was infused with life.
One morning, Sophia threw open the door and shouted, “Gudoshnik is coming up!”
Grandmother went out as fast as she could and put on her glasses. A slim, green spear was sticking up out of the earth, clearly and distinctly the beginning of a tulip. They studied it for a long time.
“It could be Dr. Plesman,” Grandmother said. (But in fact it was Mrs. John T. Scheepers.)
Spring rewarded Papa’s labours with great gentleness, and everything but the poplar began to grow. The buds swelled and burst into wrinkled, shiny leaves that quickly spread and enlarged. Only the poplar stood naked among its ropes and looked just the way it had when it arrived. The nice weather continued long into June, and there was no rain.
The whole island was covered with a system of plastic hoses that had already sunk halfway into the moss. The hoses were joined with brass couplings, and they all came together at a little pump that stood under a box beside the largest of the island’s natural rainwater basins. There was a huge plastic cover over the basin to keep the water from evaporating. Everything had been worked out very cleverly. Twice a week, Papa started the pump, and the warm brown water ran through the hoses and sprinklers and splashed out over the ground in a fine spray or a thick stream, depending on the type of plant and its particular needs. Some were watered only one minute, others for three minutes, or five minutes, until Papa’s egg timer rang and he turned off the precious supply.
Obviously, he could not spare any water for the rest of the island, and it slowly turned brown. The island’s own turf dried out and turned up its edges like slices of old sausage, several spruces died, and every morning the weather was just as relentlessly beautiful. In along the coast, thunderstorms ranged back and forth one after the other, with torrents of rain, but they never made it out to sea. The water in the big basin sank lower and lower.
Sophia prayed to God, but it didn’t help. And then one evening while Papa was doing the watering, the pump made a dreadful gurgling noise and the hose went slack. The basin was completely empty, and the plastic cover stuck to the bottom in a million wrinkled folds.
Sophia’s father walked around thinking for one whole day. He made calculations and drew plans and took the boat in to the shop to use the phone. A great heatwave settled over the island, which looked more and more exhausted every day. Papa went in to the shop to use the phone again. Finally he took the bus into town, and Sophia and Grandmother understood that the situation had become catastrophic.
When Papa came back, he brought the enormous plastic sausage with him. It was the colour of old oranges, and its heavy folds filled half the boat. It was specially constructed. There was clearly no time to be lost, so the pump and the hoses were loaded aboard and they set off immediately.
The sea lay glossy and listless in a shroud of heat, and over the coast towered the usual wall of deceitful clouds. The gulls barely lifted as they drove by. It was a very important expedition. By the time they reached Bog Skerry, the boat was so hot the tar was running, and the plastic sausage stank horribly. Papa carried the pump up to the bog, which was large and deep and full of sedge and cotton grass. He screwed the hoses together, heaved the sausage into shallow water, and started the pump. The hose filled and straightened out across t
he rock, and very, very slowly the plastic sausage began to grow. Everything went according to plan and expectation, but no one dared tempt fate by talking. It grew into a colossal, shiny balloon, an orange raincloud, ready to burst with the thousands of litres of water in its belly.
“Dear God, don’t let it burst,” Sophia prayed.
And it didn’t. Papa turned off the pump and carried it down to the boat. He stowed away the hoses. He moored the sausage firmly to the stern and placed the family on the middle seat. Finally, he started the motor. The lines drew taut and the motor pulled, but the sausage didn’t move.
Papa went ashore and tried to push, but nothing happened.
“Dear God who loves little children,” Sophia whispered, “please make it come loose.”
Papa tried again and nothing happened. Then he took a run and threw himself at the plastic sausage and they both began to glide across the slippery sea grass and right on into the water in one long, gulping flow. And Sophia started to scream.
“Now don’t blame God,” said Grandmother, who was very interested in the whole procedure.
Sophia’s father climbed into the boat and started the motor with a jerk. The boat took a leap forward, pulling Sophia and Grandmother off their seat, and the enormous plastic sausage sank slowly down into the water, straining at its lines. Papa hung over the stern and tried to see what it was doing. It crept through the seaweed, and where the bay deepened it disappeared completely and pulled the motor down into the water until it spit. The family shifted their weight quickly forwards: there was less than four inches from the gunwales to the water.
“I’m not going to pray to Him again,” said Sophia.