The Lily Pond Read online

  ALSO BY ANNIKA THOR

  Winner of the Mildred L. Batchelder Award

  for an outstanding children’s book originally

  published in a foreign language

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2011 by Linda Schenck

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Juliana Kolesova

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York. Originally published in Sweden as

  Näckrosdammen by Annika Thor, copyright © 1997 by Annika Thor, by Bonnier Carlsen, Stockholm, in 1997. This English translation published in arrangement with Bonnier Group Agency, Stockholm, Sweden.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the

  colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thor, Annika.

  [Näckrosdammen. English]

  The lily pond / Annika Thor ; translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck. —1st

  American ed.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: A faraway island.

  Summary: Having left Nazi-occupied Vienna a year ago, thirteen-year-old Jewish refugee Stephie Steiner adapts to life in the cultured Swedish city of Gothenburg, where she attends school, falls in love, and worries about her parents who were not allowed to emigrate.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89914-0

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Juvenile fiction. [1. World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Jews—Sweden—Fiction. 6. Göteborg (Sweden)—History—20th century—Fiction. 7. Sweden—History—Gustav V, 1907–1950—Fiction.] I. Schenck, Linda. II. Title.

  PZ7.T3817Li 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010053548

  Random House Children’s Books supports the

  First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  About the Author

  funnel of the steamboat opens wide, releasing a mournful howl and a cloud of black smoke. The moorings have been dropped, and the gangway has been drawn up. In a wide arc the boat pulls away from the pier and steers out to sea.

  Stephie stands in the stern, waving. All the people on the pier wave back: Nellie, Auntie Alma, the little ones, and Vera. Stephie said goodbye to Uncle Evert last night, before he headed off with the fishing boat he works on, the Diana. When he and the rest of the crew return with their catch in a few days, Stephie won’t be there.

  The people on the pier are shrinking; soon Stephie can’t see them. The last thing she loses sight of is Vera’s copper-red hair, glistening in the sun.

  “Let’s go inside and sit down,” Aunt Märta says. “Our clothes are getting dirty from the coal smoke.”

  Brushing a few particles of dirt only she can see off the sleeve of her light summer coat, Aunt Märta precedes Stephie to the passenger area, her little straw hat pressed firmly down over the gray bun at her neck.

  Aunt Märta’s wearing her very best clothes to take Stephie to Göteborg, where Stephie is going to board with Dr. Söderberg and his wife, so she can continue her schooling. The school on the island is only for the first six years. One weekend a month, and on vacations, she’ll stay with Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert. It’s all planned.

  The air in the passenger area is muggy; Stephie fans herself with a newspaper someone left on the bench where they’re sitting. Aunt Märta, though, sits straight as a ramrod, with her buttons done up to the neck and the corners of her head scarf crossed neatly over her chest. She doesn’t seem to notice the heat.

  The suitcase at Stephie’s side contains nearly all her earthly possessions: her clothes, her books, her diary, and her photographs of Mamma and Papa. The only thing she left in the room under the eaves at Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert’s is her old teddy bear. She’s a big girl now, thirteen.

  She intends to go by the name of Stephanie at her new school. It sounds romantic and grown up, not childish like her nickname. Sven, the Söderbergs’ son, calls her Stephanie. She’s looking forward to seeing him again soon.

  “My name is Stephanie,” she mutters softly to herself.

  “What was that?” asks Aunt Märta.

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s no need to be nervous,” Aunt Märta tells her. “You’re just as good as everyone else, remember that. Better, even.”

  Aunt Märta doesn’t easily dish out praise, or flattery, as she calls it. Coming from her, this is an enormous compliment.

  “Aunt Märta,” Stephie begins.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you ever regretted taking me in?”

  Aunt Märta looks bewildered. “Regretted? Of course not,” she says. “We did the right thing. There’s no regretting that.”

  “But I mean have you never wished they had sent you a different child? A nicer one?”

  At that, something even more unusual happens. Aunt Märta laughs.

  “Oh, my dear girl, you have the strangest ideas! The thought has never so much as entered my mind. I admit that you do foolish things at times, but you’ve never done anything so bad that both God and I were not prepared to forgive you.”

  Stephie can’t help wondering who is stricter, Aunt Märta or her God. Or do God and Aunt Märta always agree about everything?

  The steamboat barrels along between the little islands and skerries. Off in the distance behind them is the horizon.

  A year ago Stephie and her younger sister, Nellie, made this trip in the opposite direction, from Göteborg out to the faraway island; it was the last leg of their long journey from home. Their parents are still in Vienna. The Swedish government agreed to take in Jewish refugee children, but no adults.

  When Stephie was sent to the island, she had to leave everything familiar behind and make her way to a foreign country to live with strangers who spoke a language of which she knew not a word. In a letter to her parents, she wrote, This place is nothing but sea and stones. I can’t live here. She
never sent that letter.

  This time she’s not leaving because anyone is making her; she’s leaving of her own free will. She wants to go on with her education, study hard, and go to the university, where she’ll become a doctor, like Papa. She’s wanted to follow in his footsteps for as long as she can remember. But from the beginning, of course, she expected to do it all at home, in Vienna.

  So here she is, breaking away again, this time from Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert; from Vera, the one friend she finally made; and from Nellie, who’s going to stay with Auntie Alma and her family on the island. Will Stephie never again feel completely at home anywhere? Will she always be on her way to the next destination?

  The boat will soon be in Göteborg. They’ve left the sea and are making their way through the mouth of the Göta River to the harbor.

  “Couldn’t we go out on deck now?” Stephie asks. “I’d like to see the city from the water.”

  “All right,” Aunt Märta concedes. “If it means so much to you.”

  They stand by the guardrail on the right-hand side. On that bank of the river is the city center. The other bank is actually an island, a big one, called Hisingen, where all the shipyards and industries are.

  “Look, the Seaman’s Wife.” Aunt Märta points to a statue of a woman on a very tall column. “She’s looking out to sea, waiting for her husband to return.”

  Although Stephie can’t see the statue’s face, she imagines that the woman looks like Aunt Märta, with those worry lines she always has on her forehead when Uncle Evert is out at sea. There is a war on, the fishing waters are a minefield, and although Sweden is not one of the countries at war, Swedish fishing and merchant vessels have been blown up.

  The boat docks at the pier, which is very long, wide near the shore and narrower farther out in the river. Men in blue overalls are loading barrels and boxes from nearby trucks. Stephie feels a bit dizzy; she hasn’t seen so many people in one place for a very long time. Cautiously, suitcase in hand, she makes her way down the gangplank. She and Aunt Märta press through the crowd toward land. Stephie sees a steady stream of traffic; the cars smell nasty to her unaccustomed nose. She takes a big stride from the pier to the cobblestones. It has been a whole year since she set foot on a city street.

  reach the center of town, Aunt Märta leads Stephie to what she refers to as the white tram. Stephie thinks it looks blue like all the noisy trams making their way down the main road. But she says nothing, just contents herself with gazing out the window at the tall stone-and-brick buildings, the shop windows, and the shiny cars rolling past.

  City memories flood through her. She knows the feeling of running down cobbled streets wet with rain, rushing so as not to be late for school, doing her best not to knock into any of the other people, also in an early-morning hurry. She knows how it feels to stroll lazily along a shopping street, studying the elegant dresses on display. When they were younger, Stephie and her best friend, Evi, would stand in front of the shops, making up endless stories about the beautiful mannequins in the windows.

  Göteborg doesn’t resemble Vienna, but it’s still a city, with all its sounds and rhythms. The sadness and uncertainty Stephie felt a short time ago disperse, replaced by eager anticipation. Here, in this city, anything might happen.

  In contrast, and to Stephie’s surprise, Aunt Märta seems nervous. Back home on the island, she always knows, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what needs to be done and what is right. Here she looks around uncomfortably, twisting her white summer gloves in her hands. Time after time she consults the directions the doctor’s wife gave her. Suddenly she pulls the rope, and the bell up by the driver rings. The tram pulls to a stop, but Aunt Märta finds that she was too early. Embarrassed, she has to explain to the conductor, with all the other passengers staring, that they really wanted the next stop.

  When they finally disembark on a platform in the middle of the wide street, Aunt Märta looks carefully right, left, and then right again before they cross. They turn off the wide avenue, with its rows of planted trees, onto a side street. A couple of blocks later, they turn another corner.

  “Here we are,” says Aunt Märta.

  In front of them stands a four-story yellow brick building. The bricks around the windows are laid out in intricate patterns; the balconies have wrought-iron guardrails. Across the street is a park, a little slope that was spared when the whole area was flattened for housing. Narrow paths lead up among the trees, and the grass is bright green.

  Ages ago, in Vienna, before the Germans invaded, Stephie lived across the street from a park—a park with a Ferris wheel.

  Aunt Märta nods. “Yes, this is it.”

  Instead of walking up to the door, Aunt Märta seems to be going back to the corner they came from. Stephie sets her suitcase down, waiting.

  “Come along,” says Aunt Märta.

  “But …”

  Aunt Märta’s not listening. She continues around the corner, through an open gateway and into a courtyard. There is a harsh smell coming from rubbish bins standing off to the side, by a shed.

  In the courtyard there are several narrow doors opening onto stairways.

  Looking around, Aunt Märta decides which door they will go through. Stephie follows.

  Stephie drags her suitcase up four cramped flights of stairs. She has no idea what they’re doing, but can sense that no good would come of asking. Finally they stand in front of a tall, narrow door with an enamel plate on it. It reads SÖDERBERG, KITCHEN ENTRANCE.

  Aunt Märta rings the bell. A moment later a woman in an apron opens the door. It’s Elna, the Söderbergs’ maid. She was with them last summer when the family rented Aunt Märta and Uncle Evert’s house on the island. Elna slept on the wooden settle in Aunt Märta’s kitchen.

  “Good day to you,” she says. “Come in. I’ll let the mistress know you’ve arrived.” They wait in the large high-ceilinged kitchen. On the wall near the upper part of the door are a bell and a panel with nine little windows. One is open, displaying the number five. As Elna passes, she presses a button and the window with the five shuts.

  Stephie’s curiosity makes her want to go right over and press the button to see what will happen, but she feels too timid. Besides, it would be childish. Only kids touch everything in sight.

  Mrs. Söderberg appears at the kitchen door, smiling.

  “Oh, Mrs. Jansson,” she exclaims, “there was no need to use the kitchen entrance! My word, walking up all those flights for no reason when we have an elevator!”

  Aunt Märta doesn’t reply to these apologies; she just extends a hand in formal greeting.

  “And little Stephie,” the doctor’s wife continues in the same effusive tone. “I’m so pleased to see you here.”

  Stephie curtsies and shakes Mrs. Söderberg’s hand.

  “Let me show you the room,” the doctor’s wife says. “This way!”

  The kitchen door opens onto a passage so narrow that they have to walk single file. At the end of the hall is another door, this one with a pane of glass, which opens onto the main entrance and foyer, with elegant rugs on the floor.

  To the right there is an open double door, and through it Stephie sees a large room full of antique furniture. On the other side is an ordinary door, and a little way along is another. Mrs. Söderberg opens the first of the two doors.

  “Here we go!” she says.

  The room is beautiful, spacious and bright, with a large window extending from the level of Stephie’s waist all the way up to the ceiling. There’s a white desk under the window. In fact all the furniture is white: the dresser, the chairs, the bookshelf, the little mirrored dressing table, the bed, with its frilly pink bedspread. The wallpaper is patterned, pink rosebuds against a pale gray background. The tied-back curtains are ruffled and white. There is a little pink-shaded lamp on the dressing table.

  “Isn’t it the perfect room for a girl?” Mrs. Söderberg asks. “It’s just as it was when Karin lived here.”

  Kari
n is the daughter in the family, Sven’s older sister.

  “Karin and Olle are honeymooning in Båstad,” Mrs. Söderberg adds. “Sadly, what with the war, they couldn’t possibly go abroad. This war is a hardship for us all. You cannot imagine, Mrs. Jansson, what trouble I had arranging the food for their wedding dinner. Rationing! Such a test of our housewifely skills, don’t you agree?”

  Aunt Märta mumbles some kind of assent. She seems to feel awkward.

  “Perhaps you see things differently,” the doctor’s wife goes on. “I’ve heard fishermen have never had it so good.”

  At that, Aunt Märta looks her straight in the eye. “Oh, yes, at peril to their lives,” she replies. “The seabed is full of mines.”

  Now it’s Mrs. Söderberg’s turn to mutter, this time an apology. A moment later she’s back in form, showing Stephie the closet in one corner of the room and the little cubbyhole with a sink on the other side.

  “So you can take all the time you need getting yourself ready in the mornings,” she says. “There’s a bathroom and toilet at the far end of the hall, too, down toward the kitchen.”

  In addition to the door to the hallway, there’s another door in the room.

  “Where does that one go?” Stephie can’t help asking.

  “To Sven’s room,” Mrs. Söderberg answers. “And now,” she goes on, turning to Aunt Märta, “I think we ought to let little Stephie unpack her things while we have a chat in the library.”

  Stephie finds herself alone in the room—a room that adjoins Sven’s. So close she’ll be able to hear him get up in the morning, wash, and take a clean shirt from his closet, maybe whistling to himself.

  Right now, though, it’s silent on the other side of the wall. He must not be home or he would have come in and said hello. Stephie opens her suitcase and begins to organize her belongings. Her dresses come nowhere near to filling the spacious closet. She thinks about Karin, how she must have had lots of clothes. Not even the dresser is more than half full when Stephie has unpacked. Although there are some books in the bookcase, there is still more than enough room for hers.

  She sets her jewelry box with the little twirling ballerina on the dressing table, in front of the mirror. When she opens the drawer to put her comb, brush, and barrettes away, she finds a note.