Sleet: Selected Stories

It was an ordinary morning in a winter that would not let go. We were wearing out the gray benches furthest up in the auditorium, just under the balcony, at our backs twelve high windows snowed in by drifts, down below us the grade schoolers’ little heads bathed in the light of electric votive candles hanging throughout the auditorium in clusters of eight. A lamp glowed in its green shade atop the lectern down in front, while a gloom redolent of melting snow hovered around us. A snow squall had moved in that morning and its muted sheen settled over us like a gray shadow. The intractable winter had left us gray as well. Everything was gray, except for the pages of our books, which shone forth with surprising brilliance among the desktop rows. We could sense one another’s anxious eyes fleeing over the words like a defeated army crossing hostile territory.

It was an ordinary morning just as everything was ordinary in those days. The organ’s pipes shimmered like dark icicles in the murk of the music loft while down below in the light Mr. Lind, the head lecturer, held forth with a sermon for the general assembly before prayers. A small dark figure, he stood behind his desk, or rather a step or so too far behind it. And it made him seem lonely, like a rider without a horse. And it made us insecure, out of our own fear of loneliness. We couldn’t hear anything. His lips moved, that much we could see, and we could see how intent his eyes were as they bored into the ceiling high above him, perhaps in an effort to drill right through it to the light of day. But his words didn’t reach us, other than as a poorer kind of silence. The sleep and dreams we’d so recently shaken off still hemmed us in like a low ceiling.

It must have happened just before we were about to stand up for prayers. I was sitting there looking at Mr. Lind, thinking to myself: “If there really is a God, I bet Mr. Lind stands there and talks to him.” And then suddenly I felt an elbow nudging mine gently. Just once at first, and then again. So it wasn’t a random thing — it was a signal. I turned my head slowly to the left and looked at Ekman.

He wanted me to see something there in his lap. It didn’t look like much: just a little brown wallet or something resting on his pant leg, no bigger than his two palms opened side by side. Didn’t seem like anything to get excited about. I was about to turn away when I noticed Ekman’s hands starting to quiver just a little, the way they did whenever he was about to do something with them. So I stuck with him and watched his fingers tremble in anticipation as they began to open the little wallet. And what do you know! It wasn’t a wallet after all. It was a little brown and gray chess board, with tiny slots in the squares for the pieces to fit into, miniature painted figurines on little celluloid pegs.

I could tell he was waiting for me to take up the chess set and run my hands over it in admiration. So I lifted it carefully out of his hands as we stood up from our benches. And as the “Our Father” ascended up to the ceiling, if not quite to His heavenly kingdom, I let my fingers play over the pieces, from the kings’ wide crowns to the bishops’ crosses to the rooks’ sturdy battlements. And the whole time I could feel — right through my drowsiness, right through the icy light and the organ tones and the “Our Father” — that I was in the presence of a friend. Like a source of warmth emanating from my left.

Our first subject that morning was history, with Mr. Lind. We spent that year in what they called the Flower Room, an odd-shaped classroom right across from the auditorium. It was narrow like a hallway, with our eight desks lined up side by side along one of the long walls. The teacher’s desk was on a small platform along the opposite wall. Behind it, covering the whole wall, hung a painting depicting a small gathering of girls in long white dresses picking flowers on a meadow in full bloom and fashioning wreaths from the flowers. We always felt a bit sheepish looking at that painting, since it seemed to show a very private scene. They were picking flowers for each other, not for the eight of us going through our first year in the three-year classical studies line. But there they sat before us, tarrying in the tall grass among the flowers, fashioning wreaths for each other’s coffins as they longed for old age.