Part 5: Our Own Spring

The last letters are written after the ice has gone. They belong to the spring of a younger generation: the school and its pupils, Emil and his bell, and a love of Vera's own, kept on the same shelf as her grandmother's.

Day 48: By the Lake

Christina Rossetti wrote: "When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me."

You would have agreed with her. You always said a sad song was a waste of a good tune.

Dear Grandmother,

We buried you by the lake on Saturday, as you wished. My mother found it in your own hand, in the papers you gave her years ago, before the illness: "If it can be done, by the lake where I taught." It could be done. There is an old piece of ground among the birch trees, above the shore near the ferry house, where the lake town has buried its people for two hundred years. Your place is under a birch at its edge, facing the water. The town council said yes before my mother had finished asking.

I thought there would be a few of us. My mother, me, Emil. Maybe Mrs Varga.

The whole town came.

They came up the path in twos and threes from nine o'clock on, in their good coats, some with small children on their shoulders. Greta came on her green bicycle with a bunch of catkins in the basket. Dora came with two baskets covered in cloths. Mrs Varga came on Kostya's arm and stood at the front, and told everyone who would listen that she had been in the teacher's class. Mr Okafor drove from the district office and stood at the back with his hat in his hand. My pupils came, all eleven, in a line, holding hands, the way we walk down to the shore.

Tomas and Mila stood beside me. Mila held my hand on one side and my mother held it on the other, and between the two of them I stayed on my feet.

Emil stood at the edge. Of course he did. He always stands at the edge, as in the photograph. But when the time came to put earth on the coffin, my mother turned and looked at him, and held out the little trowel, and said, "You first." He took it. His hands were very steady, the ferryman's hands. He let one handful of earth fall, and then he took a small wrinkled apple from his pocket and laid it beside the earth, from the tree behind the ferry house. Nobody asked him why. Nobody needed to.

Nobody sang a sad song. Noor and Sofia had asked me the week before whether the class could sing, and I had said yes, but only something you would like. They chose the song from the winter play, your play, the one about the lamp in the window. Eleven thin voices in the wind off the lake. The oldest people had sung it in your classroom fifty-eight years ago, and from the second verse they all joined in.

Afterwards everyone went down to the village hall, where Dora's baskets turned out to hold plum cake, enough for everyone, from your card. This is the small thing I tried, or rather the small thing I let happen, and I would ask anyone to try it after a day like this: do not cook for yourself. Let someone else bake. Dora would not let me near the oven all week, and she was right. It was a gift to sit down and be fed.

Food after a burial is one of the oldest customs there is. In many villages the bread for that day was baked by the neighbours, never by the family, and every house sent something, a loaf or a jar or a pot of soup, so that the family's table would be full on the day it felt emptiest. Mrs Varga said that when her own mother died, the kitchen was so full of soup that they ate it for a week, and every bowl tasted of a different house.

Emil sat by the window of the hall with a piece of cake and did not eat it. I sat beside him. After a while he said, "She danced here. Right there, by the door." Then he ate the cake, slowly, all of it.

Rossetti asked for no sad songs, and we kept her rule. There were tears, plenty of them, but the song was a winter song about a lamp, and the cake was sweet, and the lake was blue for the first time this year. I think you would have stood at the front of it all, in the wind, and liked it.

Your Vera

Day 49: The Bell Rung Twice

Victor Hugo wrote that the greatest happiness in life is to be sure that we are loved.

I used to think that was a line for the young. This week it belonged to an old man.

Dear Grandmother,

On the evening after your burial, I walked down to the ferry house just before six. I had not planned to. I had washed the plates from the hall and stacked the chairs with Dora and Tomas, and then I found that my feet were taking me down to the shore by themselves, the way they take me to the stove in the morning.

Emil was already on the landing. The bell hangs where it has always hung, on a black iron post at the end of the old jetty, with a rope worn smooth by his hands and his father's before that. He did not look round when I came. He just moved over a little on the boards to make room for me.

At six he rang it, six slow strokes, once through, the way he does every evening. The sound went out over the open water and came back off the far shore, thinner, a second later.

Then he waited until the last of the sound was gone, and he rang it all through again.

I have heard that bell every evening since September. I had never heard it twice. A few windows opened along the shore. Somebody's dog barked. Up on the hill, outside the shop, I saw a woman stop with her shopping bag in her hand and look down at the lake. Later Greta told me that half the town had stopped what it was doing, the way you stop stirring when you hear the kettle.

"Why twice?" I asked, when he let the rope go.

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, "When the ferry ran, one bell meant we were leaving the shore. Two meant we had come in safe on the other side." He wound the end of the rope round its hook. "She is across. That is all."

We stood there until it was nearly dark. He told me he would go back to one bell from now on, because the town would worry if he did not. But he had wanted them to hear the second one this evening, just once, so that they would know.

On the way back along the shore he stopped below the birch trees and looked up at the place where you lie. The earth was still dark and new. The apple was gone; a bird had taken it, or a child, and he said either one would have pleased you. He stood there with his cap off for about as long as it takes to boil an egg, and then he put it on again and said, "Right," the way Dora says it when the bread is in the oven.

My mother had gone back to the city on the afternoon bus. When I rang her that night and told her about the bell, she was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Good. Somebody should ring a bell for her."

When I got home, I tried a small thing that I want to keep. I set an alarm for six o'clock the next evening, and when it rang, I stopped what I was doing, which was peeling potatoes, and stood still for one minute and thought of you. Only one minute. Not to be sad. Just to stand in the same minute as Emil on the jetty. Anyone could try it: choose an hour, and give one minute of it to someone, every day. It costs less than a stamp, and it is always delivered.

Old bells are made of bronze, which is mostly copper with some tin melted into it, and Tomas says that is why they ring so long. An iron pan goes dull when you knock it, but bronze holds the sound and lets it out slowly, like a heavy pot that stays warm long after it has left the stove. Bell makers tuned a new bell by shaving metal from the inside, a little at a time, until the note was right. Emil's bell has a small dent on its lip where, he says, his father once struck it with an oar in a storm. It still rings true.

Victor Hugo was right, and Emil knew it before I did. For fifty-eight years he rang one bell every evening, not knowing whether it reached you. I think the second bell was not really for the town. It was his way of saying that he is sure now. You knew him, in Room Twelve, and said his name. He was loved, and he knows it, and that knowing went out twice across the water.

Your Vera