Swedish Tango / the Rhythm of Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

flannel dress and wool sweater, her pale blond hair swept into a loose bun. She had been mindful not to wake her husband, Toivo, who slept soundly, his red beard spilling majestically over the white sheets she had embroidered the month before they were wed.
    In the adjacent room, their three sons divided themselves between two beds that Sirka had carefully arranged to ensure they would be close to the hearth. She had knitted woolen slippers for them from coarse, unbleached yarn and given them the blanket from her own, sparse bed.
    Today, they planned to go skating. They would pile on their sweaters, slip into their worn boots made from reindeer skin, andallow their mother to rub their cheeks with cod-liver oil, as they prepared to go to the lake three kilometers away.
    But for now, except for Sirka, the small house nestled in the dark forest did not yet stir. She stood for a moment and looked over her sons. In their slumber, they had returned to the way she remembered them as infants. Their mouths half-open, their cheeks flushed and smooth. Inside her womb, the child also slept peacefully. Sirka rested her hands on her belly and wondered to herself if maybe this time she would be blessed with a girl. Someone who might look like her, someone who would one day grow up and become her best friend.
    Sirka had few memories of her own mother, who had died from pneumonia when Sirka was only five. The only thing she had to remember her mother by was a small wooden crucifix that hung from a thin, black string. She had worn it around her neck ever since her father had given it to her, never taking it off, even when she went to bathe. Even when Toivo unwrapped her from her nightgown and held her naked in his arms. Aside from her gold wedding band, Sirka considered it her most valuable possession. A gift from someone who had left her before she was old enough to form a memory. A gift from someone she hoped loved her from beyond a snowy grave.
    She noticed that the wooden crucifix had become even smoother and more beautiful over the years. A soft rosewood, the color of mulled wine. When she was nervous or when she knelt down at night to pray, Sirka clutched it around her fingers, felt the neat angles of its simple, perfect shape, and sensed, for a brief fleeting moment, that she was being watched over, cared for, and was safe.
    Her whole life, she had feared being alone. The mere thought of being left alone in their small wooden house was enough to terrifyher, so she received the news of her pregnancy with great relief and delight. The youngest boy would be going to school next fall, and she was thankful that she would have the baby to keep her company.
    She was not unaware that another child would be a strain on the family. But she had been shocked by the intensity of Toivo’s response when she’d informed him that she was pregnant. It was the first time she had seen him cry.
    He tried to assure her that he was crying tears of joy, but she knew better. She saw how his face had been transformed over the past months. He hadn’t been the same since he had been sent home from the Russian front. He had left home a year and a half earlier a tall, strong man with broad shoulders and arms that resembled the thick tree trunks he had chopped since he was a small boy. But he returned a thin, frail man with sunken cheeks and a shattered foot.
    The evening he first returned home, she stood in the doorway for what seemed like a long time, too shocked even to invite him in. He appeared ghostlike. The white clothes, the pallid skin. Even his eyes seemed lost in a sea of white. The frost had penetrated him to the bone.
    She unwrapped his bandages herself that first evening. His white uniform was soiled with dried patches of blood, the tracings of dry earth and dirty snow; his red-raw fingers grasped a single crutch that supported his slender form. She took his fur-lined hat from him and laid it by the fire and placed his crutch in the corner. Silently,