The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom

Author:Rosa Liksom [Liksom, Rosa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-107-6
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I once asked the Colonel why he tortured me,

why hardly a month went by that he didn’t try to outright kill me. He said,

You always hit the ones you love.

WE MADE OUR WAY DOWN the disfigured body of the Maiden Finland and arrived in Tammisaari. As Alatalo drove us up to the large manor house, the Colonel said, This is our new home. From the outside it looked like a ramshackle place. Alatalo carried our suitcases to the half-rotted veranda, waved good-bye, and got in the car to head back to Rovaniemi. The Colonel opened the door and the inside of the house was as lovely as a fairy tale. We took our clothes off straightaway and ran from room to room looking for a bed. Ever since I was a kid I’d believed that hopes and wishes made the world go round, that we could live for the rest of our lives happy, believing in each other.

The house was an old mansion built between a pond and the sea. An industrialist the Colonel knew had given it to him to use as long as the political situation demanded it. The pond was called Lappi Pond, of course. The place had ten elegantly decorated rooms: a parlor with Biedermeier furniture, empire wall lamps, and real French lace curtains the color of ivory, a dining room with a massive, multibranched crystal chandelier, and a wonderful glassed-in veranda where we held crayfish feasts every fall for the next several years. There was a sweet lattice trellis on the front of the veranda with fragrant climbing honeysuckle and white acacia just like at Ilse’s house on Germany’s Eastern Front. From the dining room window you could see a big garden with old maples and lindens and fruit trees and farther off the endless, lead-gray autumn sea. Our time at Tammisaari made me a yard and garden person. I still love hazels and horse chestnuts and wandering in the stiff reeds and cattails along the shore and other wonderful things like that. Anything that rustles in the autumn wind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.