Son of Svea by Lena Andersson

Author:Lena Andersson [Andersson, Lena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

21

One Saturday morning in November when Elsa was ten, and approaching her third season still unbeaten in competitive events, she and Ragnar drove the barely five kilometers to the golf course in Järfälla for one of their regular training sessions.

The first snow had fallen. It lay in a thin layer on the mown grass of the golf course. The air temperature was around zero, and the sleety snow beat against their faces like sharp tacks. The exercise track was green and skiddy.

Ragnar could see his daughter’s distaste and was aware of his own reluctance to venture out in this weather, but he thought that it was at moments like this she must be able to resist convenience, and he his sympathy for her.

“Ugh, what horrible weather,” said Elsa as they were parking. “It’s not going to be very nice on the track today.”

She got out of the car, holding up her arm to shield her face from the sharp snow particles. He had never seen her so unfocused and unwilling before a training session. The awful thing about it was the presentiment it gave him of a day when she might turn her back on what was fundamental, and he would have no way of stopping her.

As they stood there, each of them despondent for their separate reasons, a skier came by, someone they recognized. He was keeping up a challenging pace, and his ski suit had salty deposits striped across the lower back; he must have been skiing since before dawn. The man gave them a brief nod and fought on, head down, face set into a grimace. His name was Jyrki Ristolainen, and he had come fifth in the big Vasaloppet race back in March. Two years earlier he had resigned from his job on the production line at the Marabou chocolate factory in Sundbyberg and started work as a garbage collector so he would have more time to practice, even though he was over forty. Ristolainen was known to spend more hours training than the top skiers, just over a thousand a year. They watched him go. He was giving it all he’d got, diagonal striding even though he was on the flat, with long, jerky steps; a real slogger on the track. A few seconds later he was out of sight, behind the wall of dull, gray light and densely falling snow. It could barely be called daylight.

Ristolainen’s indifference to the weather impelled Elsa to make a half-hearted attempt. She went two hundred meters, stopped, turned back, and said it hurt her face too much and that the track was too slippery.

It was simply an entreaty on her part, a request to be let off, just this once, which was why she had still not divested herself of her skis and poles. Then Ragnar bellowed at her in a way he seldom did: “If it’s good enough for Jyrki Ristolainen, it’s good enough for you!”

His eyes were ablaze as he bent down, roughly pulled off her skis and strapped them to the top of the car.

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