The Quarry

Öland 1957

When the winter storms come, the fresh snow drifts to form metre-high frozen waves out on the alvar. Vendela can no longer walk across it, so for several months she has to take a long detour in order to get to school.

At the end of March the sun comes back and her father gives her a pair of boots made by the old village cobbler, Shoe-Paulsson. The stitching is poor and they let the water in, but she can walk across the alvar again between the melting snowdrifts.

She can go to the elf stone.

That spring Vendela takes her mother’s jewellery, piece by piece, and on her way to school she leaves each item as an offering to the elves. Her father doesn’t seem to notice that things are going missing; when he isn’t working in the quarry, he’s too busy looking at the starlit sky and working out the orbits of the man-made satellites. The farm is going to rack and ruin, and he seems to have forgotten the Invalid, but none of this bothers him.

Vendela places the pieces of jewellery in the hollows on the stone, and they disappear. Sometimes they stay there for a few days, but sooner or later they vanish. She never sees them again.

When she makes a wish it is almost always granted, sometimes in the strangest ways.

She wishes for a best friend in her class, someone who is hers alone and who doesn’t care about the farmyard aroma surrounding her. Two days later, Dagmar Gran asks if Vendela would like to come to her house after school. Dagmar’s family is rich; they have a big farm near the church with several tractors and more than forty cows — so many that they are known only by a number rather than a name. Vendela can’t go, because she has to see to Rosa, Rosa and Rosa, but she asks if she could perhaps come over a bit later on. Dagmar says that’s fine.

The following week Vendela asks the elves if they could sort out something other than boiled eel for dinner; Henry has discovered cheap eels from the east coast, and has cooked them for ten consecutive days by this stage.

‘We’re having chicken tonight,’ says Henry that same evening. ‘I’ve just wrung the neck of one of them.’

Once she and Dagmar Gran have become best friends, Vendela asks if she can move to an empty seat next to Dagmar, but fru Jansson says that she is the one who decides where her pupils will sit, and Vendela is to sit by the window, next to Thorsten Hellman, who needs someone who has a calming influence on him.

So the next day Vendela stops at the elf stone and places a fine gold chain in one of the hollows. Then she wishes for a new teacher, someone nicer and kinder than fru Jansson.

Three days later fru Jansson catches a cold and stays at home. The cold turns into a chest infection which almost kills her, and she has to go to a sanatorium on the mainland. She is replaced by fröken Ernstam, a young supply teacher from Kalmar.

The pupils pick spring flowers by the roadside and give them to fru Jansson’s husband, who is the school caretaker. Vendela curtsies extra deeply and says quietly that she hopes fru Jansson will soon be better.

On her way home that day she dare not even look at the elf stone.