Fair Play Read Online Free PDF

anymore.”
    â€œTo hell with goals,” Mari said. “What I’m talking about is desire, about having to.”
    â€œHaving to what?”
    â€œI think you know.”
    â€œAnd then what? Those pictures. They drown. They drown and get lost among millions of other pictures. And most of them are completely unnecessary—and, what’s more, pretentious.” Jonna added a little more quietly, “I mean other people’s. Most of them.”
    The storm came nearer, a huge alien backdrop making its steady way across the water, never before seen in such splendor and maybe never to be repeated. The sky moved toward them in a finely drawn curtain of local thunder showers, each with its own delicate drapery. The light turned subterranean and yellow, the shallows had gone Bengali green. Very soon, it would all be nothing but gray rain.
    â€œTake care of the boat,” Jonna shouted, jumping ashore. She ran up to the cottage.
    Mari tied up Viktoria , two lines on the north side and two on the south. She walked up to the top of the island and saw that the curtain of rain was coming closer, albeit slowly. Jonna would have plenty of time to make her crucial first sketch.

ONE TIME IN JUNE
    B ACK NEAR the turn of the century, Mari’s mother had helped start the Girl Scouts in Sweden. The girls admired her, of course, but from one very small Scout named Helga she got absolute, unqualified adoration. Helga was as quiet as a mouse and afraid of practically everything. Mari’s mother could see that Helga would never under any circumstances become a good scout, and she therefore tried as quietly as possible to protect the child from the simple hardships that might only increase her terror.
    Helga’s greatest phobia was thunderstorms. When the thunder rolled nearer, Mari’s mother would find the unfortunate child and try to calm her with whatever explanations she could come up with—sudden temperature changes, electrical charges, updrafts and downdrafts. It is not certain that Helga understood, but it did make her feel better.
    Helga had a camera that she carried wherever her beloved Scout leader took her. She pasted the photographs into a scrapbook that she never showed to anyone. It was her secret treasure, a barricade against a dangerous world. On the first page, she’d pasted in a little lock of hair under cellophane. After a great deal of planning and anxiety, she had clipped off the uttermost tip of her Scout leader’s majestic braid.
    Remarkably, Helga never looked up her idol after her scouting years, never even sent the inevitable Christmas cards that give the recipient an annual rush of holiday sentimentality or, more often, a twinge of bad conscience. On the other hand, Helga did continue with the Scrapbook, pasting in, as time went by, wedding and birth announcements and everything else that concerned her Friend. The chapter she’d entitled “First and Foremost an Artist” dealt with her participation in art exhibitions and included newspaper reviews, several reproductions, and a couple of interviews. The family surrounding her Friend received only that narrow margin of interest that could not be avoided. The Scrapbook ended with an obituary and a poem in which Helga attempted to express all the feelings she had never uttered.
    Many years later, Helga happened to see a notice in her morning paper. The early works of several artists were to be auctioned off, and there was a list of names. Helga bought a collection of drawings and watercolors Mari’s mother had done during her earliest years as a student. She framed them nicely, hung them, photographed them, and put the pictures in the Scrapbook, which was now complete and perfect.
    That summer, for some reason, this perfection came to feel like a burden. Helga decided to shift her protracted responsibility to another altar, and so she wrote to Mari. The material she’d collected was too valuable to send