How to Keep a Letter Warm · Nazar Kalugin
Day 8: The Class Photograph
An old proverb says that still waters run deep.
I found a photograph today that made me think of it.
Dear Grandmother,
The school cupboard is the tall one at the back of the classroom, painted the same cream as the door frame in the house, with a key that has to be turned twice. Ari and Noor helped me clear the top shelves this afternoon, because I need them for the reading books. We found chalk boxes, a globe with a dent in it, a bundle of wooden counting sticks and, under a pile of old maps, a flat brown envelope.
Inside was a class photograph. Black and white, a little curled at the corners. Seventeen children on the school steps, in two rows, the small ones sitting and the tall ones standing. And at the end of the back row, in a pale dress with a dark collar, stood you.
I knew you at once, even at twenty-two. You have the same way of holding your head slightly to one side, as if you are listening to a question. You were not smiling exactly. You looked as if you were trying very hard not to laugh at something just outside the picture.
Noor asked who the lady was. I said it was my grandmother, when she was the teacher here. Noor looked at the photograph and then at me and said, "She has your nose." Ari wanted to know which of the children was his grandfather. We looked, but at that age every boy has the same haircut. Soon Sami and Sofia came over from the reading corner, and then the rest, until all eleven were crowded round my desk with their elbows on it, the way people crowd round a stove when the bread comes out.
There was someone else in the picture. Right at the edge, half cut off, a young man was leaning on the school gate. He was not one of the pupils; he was a few years older than you, perhaps, with his sleeves rolled up and a cap pushed back on his head. He was not looking at the camera. He was looking along the row, towards you.
I do not know who he is. On the back of the photograph, in pencil, in your handwriting, there is only the year and the words "my first class". No names.
Here is a small thing I tried, which the children loved. We laid the photograph on a sheet of white paper and looked at it the way you look at jam on a cold saucer to see if it has set: slowly, at the edges first, not the middle. We each had to find one thing nobody else had noticed. Sami found a dog under the steps. Ari found a girl with one sock down. Noor found that the boy beside you was holding a frog. I found the young man at the gate. Looking at the edges first is a good way to see an old photograph. The middle is where the photographer wanted you to look. The edges are where the real afternoon is.
An aside, because I wondered why the darkest parts of the photograph had a faint silver shine. Old photographs are made with tiny grains of silver in the paper. Over many years, air and damp can change the silver, so the darkest places sometimes take on a soft mirror gleam, and the whites go the colour of weak tea. Keeping a photograph in a dry, dark envelope slows that down. Whoever put this one under the maps did it a kindness.
I have brought the photograph home and put it in the tin, flat, under the recipe cards, out of the light. It seems right that it should be with the letters.
My mother has photographs of you from the city years, with Grandfather, smiling properly at weddings and on picnic blankets. I had never seen one of you before that. You look younger here than I am now, which I knew must be true, but had never quite believed.
Still waters run deep. People say it about quiet people, the ones who do not speak much and feel a great deal. You were never quiet with me; you sang all the time. But the girl in that photograph has a stillness I have never seen in you, as if she is holding something very carefully. And the young man at the gate is very still too. He is the only person in the whole picture who is not looking at the camera.
Your Vera
Day 9: The Ferry Bell
An old proverb says that actions speak louder than words.
This evening a bell spoke louder than both.
Dear Grandmother,
Every evening since I arrived, at six o'clock exactly, I have heard a bell from somewhere along the shore. Six strokes, slow and deep, then nothing. The first night I thought it was a church. The second night I noticed there is no church on this side of the lake. By the end of the first week I was putting the kettle on by it.
Leon told me it is the ferry bell. The ferry has not run for twenty years, he said, but the ferryman still rings the bell every evening, and nobody knows why, or everybody knows and nobody says. Bea said it was so the passengers from long ago would know when to come home. Leon said that was silly. Bea said it was not.
So this evening I walked along the shore path to find it. It was cool and clear, and the lake was so still that the reeds stood in their own reflections. The path ends at a wooden house with a long jetty and an old bell hanging from a post at the end, under a little roof of its own. A man was standing by the post with his hand on the rope.
The house has a green door with flaking paint and a row of flowerpots along the wall, every one of them with something still growing in it, which surprised me. A rowing boat lay upside down on the grass, its bottom painted black, like a beetle asleep in the sun.
He was old, tall but bent at the shoulders, in a thick grey jumper, with enormous hands. He did not look at me. He looked at his wristwatch, and at six o'clock he pulled the rope. Six strokes. The sound went out over the water and came back, very faintly, from the far shore, like a guest arriving late to dinner.
When it was done he turned and saw me. I said good evening, and that I was the new teacher. He looked at me for a long moment, longer than a person usually looks, and said, "Yes. You would be." Then he said his name was Emil Haas, and that the bell was his father's, and before that it was the ferry's, and now it was just his.
I asked why he still rings it. He thought about it as if nobody had asked him in a long time. "Habit," he said. "And so the lake knows the time." That was all he would say. He did not ask me in, and I did not expect him to. But he walked me back along his jetty, slowly, and told me to watch the third board from the end, because it was loose.
On the shore path I turned round once. He was still standing at the end of the jetty with one hand on the post, looking out at the water where the ferry would have been.
Here is a small thing I tried while the last stroke was fading. I closed my eyes and counted slowly until I could not hear it any more. Fourteen. At home I tried it again with a saucepan lid and a wooden spoon: three. You could try it with any bell, or any lid. It makes you listen to the very end of a sound, which we almost never do. Most of a bell is in the part after the stroke.
And here is the aside, because the sound surprised me. Sound carries much further over still water on a calm evening than it does over land. When the air close to the water is cooler than the air above it, sound that would normally rise and fade is bent back down towards the surface, and it rolls across the lake instead of escaping into the sky. That is why I can hear Emil's bell in my kitchen, and why, on the stillest evenings, it seems to come from just outside the window.
Actions speak louder than words. Emil said almost nothing to me, and what he did say was mostly about a loose board. But every evening for twenty years he has walked to the end of his jetty and rung a bell for a ferry that does not run. Whatever that means, it is louder than anything he could say. When I got home the kitchen was dark and quiet, and I found that I was still standing at the window, listening for it.
Your Vera