Punished

50. Marge

MARGE

1986

The apartment was echoey, especially now that the rugs were rolled up and the walls cleared of frames and the large rana where so many of the handicrafts had hung. Stella loved the little guksis and often asked to get them down to play with them. She knew there was no point in asking about the knives, which Marge had hung at the very top. Stella also wanted to try on a beccegahpir, the lace-edged cap that had been Marge’s when she was little, but it didn’t fit her and she was extremely disappointed.

“áhkku can make one for you.”

“Yes! And one for Barbie.”

Marge had left one of the guksis out and Stella was sitting on the bare living room floor, having fika with her dolls in a ring around her. She’d been allowed to fill the guksi with water and was sipping from it loudly. When the phone rang, she flew up and dashed to the hall, announcing their last name clearly and with no hint of an accent.

“Bures áhkku!” Her voice was full of joy and Marge had to leave the moving box and creep closer to the hall to listen. “Soon I’m boadán Sohpparii.”

She blended languages freely, and áhkku and áddjá were consistent about speaking Sámi. Marge had given up on her one-language-at-a-time plan, and so far she hadn’t seen any evidence that her daughter was getting worse at Swedish. But if her parents were diligent about Sámi, she had to be equally persistent with Swedish. How long this would go on, she didn’t know, and there was always a lingering worry that she was doing the wrong thing. When was a child’s vocabulary complete, when could Marge begin to speak the language of her heart with Stella? Sometimes she slipped up, but Stella didn’t notice, just responded haphazardly, sometimes in Swedish and sometimes in Sámi. Maybe this was the dreaded semilingualism?

In the evenings, when Stella crawled into her lap and asked her to sing the Sámi lullaby, the one that had lulled Marge herself to sleep as a child, she forgot all about her misgivings.

In the autumn everything would come to a head; her daughter would begin attending the Sámi school. At first Marge’d had the village school in mind, especially since it was only a few hundred meters from their building, but áhkku and áddjá had looked disappointed and reminded her that the cousins attended the Sámi school in Láttevárri and it was important for Stella to get a proper education in Sámi. It wasn’t an easy decision, and she had agonized over it. How could she bear to send her child off to the very same buildings that had housed the nomad school? She’d made a promise never to set foot there again, after her last day of school there. Now she would take her daughter’s hand and walk inside, leave her in a classroom that might once have been her own, and Stella would sit at a desk with the same view of the schoolyard. It was a terrible way to come full circle.

“I’m not going to tell her that I went there. Not yet, she’s too little, it’s too horrible,” Marge had said to Jon-Ante.

He didn’t respond, was no help, wouldn’t say whether her choice was right or wrong.

Marge walked by her daughter in the hall and stroked her hair; Stella ducked away with an important look on her face and pointed at the phone. It was Marge’s very own gesture, and she welled with laughter.

The moving boxes were all lined up in the living room, and she had labeled them in black marker. In the bedroom was a half-packed box, and she squeezed some mangled sheets and duvet covers into it and laid a few books from the nightstand on top. Jon-Ante had mentioned that he never read at all. This hadn’t surprised her; she hardly knew any men their age who did.

Despite his disappointment about her move, he’d offered to drive the trailer to the village for her. It didn’t reassure him that she’d been planning this for some time, even before they were together. A house had been rented, a place for them to live while they waited for her own house to be built. Jon-Ante had listened in silence at first, and then there it was, almost accusatory: “You could change your mind and stay here. Why do you want to go back?”

“Why do you not want to?” she retorted.

He shut down, wouldn’t let her in, and it made her grumpy. This was becoming a pattern, and it didn’t bode well for the future.

“I want you to come to the village too, move in with us.”

When he didn’t respond, she didn’t feel like telling him any more about the house. Not that it was big enough for a family of three. Nor that she was going to have a larger garage built than originally planned. She’d called the builders without knowing whether he would agree to come with them, but she knew he’d want to bring the car if he did. It hadn’t cost that much more, and Enná and Isá had helped her with the loan.

He’d had a different image in mind, the three of them as a small family living in Lokstallarna by Norgev?gen. When he realized she was serious about the village he grumbled, pointing out that there was nothing for him there. His brothers had houses not far from their parents’, but he only had a tiny cabin next to his childhood home, said that was all he needed.

Marge knew she had no right to expect him to leave a well-paying job at the mine to return to the reindeer, but would it really be that much of a sacrifice if it meant they could be together?

“So you don’t want to go back to reindeer herding full-time?”

A wounded gaze, as if she just didn’t understand. But of course she didn’t—he refused to explain.

“Well, we’re going anyway, for Stella’s sake. She’ll be going to the Sámi school, and she’ll get to spend time with áhkku and áddjá.”

Stella would be secure in the village, becoming an integral part of the extended family—Marge could picture it already. Her daughter would run into áhkku and áddjá’s house just like her cousins, help herself to things, be a real village kid with a mind of her own.

But she mustn’t take anything for granted; Stella was allowed to become whoever she wanted to be. Marge herself had been offered temporary positions both at the preschool and with the home health service, and had chosen the preschool to avoid traveling between villages. Stella was proud that her mother was going to be a teacher. And she couldn’t exactly spend all day speaking Sámi with the children at work, only to come home to her own daughter and be a different person, could she?

Little feet padded into the room and Stella climbed onto the bed, where she jumped up and down until her hair was bouncing around her shoulders. When she stopped, breathing hard, it was clear a new idea had occurred to her.

“I want to write a letter to áhkku. Come on!” She jumped down and grabbed Marge’s hand, tugging at her.

“But I have to pack, sweetie.”

“No, we have to write to áhkku. Where are my pens and paper?” She scooted off to her room. Marge had been afraid there would be some anxiety when Stella’s belongings vanished into boxes, but she had packed with great care and said that áddjá would be giving her a reindeer calf soon. “So I have to move,” she’d said. “I have to be where the reindeer are.”

She returned with a pen and a pad of paper and lay down on her belly on the floor, her pen poised. “I can write ‘bures’ by myself.”

Marge watched her write “hi” as “bores” instead, but who was she to correct her?

“Then I want to write that I’m coming on Friday.”

“Well, you can do that. Just write it out and I’ll check it when you’re done.”

“No, I mean in Sámi.”

Marge sank down on the bed. She hadn’t had this talk with Stella, not yet. Once her daughter was old enough she would tell her everything, leaving no gaps in her knowledge. But at this age? No , said an unpleasant jolt in her belly.

“You know,” she said slowly, bending down to stroke her daughter’s dark hair. “I can’t write in Sámi.”

“What?” Stella wrinkled her nose, then smiled slyly. “You’re just joking.”

“No, I really can’t. I never got to learn.”

“But you went to school.”

Marge slid to the floor and sat cross-legged. Stella crawled up and tossed her legs over Marge’s.

“Well, here’s what happened. I went to a special kind of school when I was little.” Marge reached out her hands and Stella took them, swung them back and forth. “The school was actually a bit like an orphanage.”

She let this sink in, and Stella stopped swinging her arms as an anxious expression crossed her face. Her daughter didn’t like to talk about the orphanage in Colombia, and Marge had stopped trying to make her.

“I lived at that school and didn’t get to see my parents for months at a time. I was seven years old, like you are now.”

Stella held her hands tighter and she squeezed gently back.

“At this school, we weren’t allowed to speak Sámi. I was forced to learn Swedish.” Marge watched closely for any shift in her daughter’s eyes. “I never got to learn to write in my own language. And so I’m not sure how you can write to áhkku.”

Her voice broke as she said “áhkku,” and she had to clear her throat to disguise it.

Stella let go of her hands and slid her legs to each side with a little thud. Marge fumbled for a soft little-kid thigh to squeeze. Stella was ticklish there, but right now she couldn’t find the spots that would make a belly laugh bubble up.

She was too young. How could she subject her to this now? She should have waited, like she’d always meant to. Marge reached for Stella’s face and stroked a warm cheek. How could she ever tell Stella that this was the same school she would soon attend? Even though it was no longer a boarding school, and there was no compulsion, no fear—it was still the same building. Would Stella understand the difference if she said that today it was a good place for Sámi children and their language?

“Were you sad at that school?”

“I was, sweetheart. But it’s okay. I made it through.”

She couldn’t—not now. It was too soon.

Stella lay on the floor, wriggling around and hiding her face. She hummed, peered out from behind one arm, and hid again.

“Didn’t áhkku and áddjá want you either?”

Either.

Marge was about to go to pieces. She couldn’t handle this.

But Stella gave in first and sobbed loudly into the floor. Marge slipped her hands under her waist and lifted her up, and Stella curled like a baby monkey against her chest. Marge carried her to the bed and pulled the covers over them. Stella burrowed her nose into Marge’s neck and snuffled.

“áhkku and áddjá missed me so much. They had no choice but to send me to the school. All the reindeer herders’ children in the village had to leave home. None of us wanted to, and we were so sad.”

Neither of them could keep from sobbing now. Marge tried to hold back and cry softly, but the tears gave her away, salt trickling into her daughter’s hair.

“No one wanted me,” Stella wailed into her neck.

“I did! I wanted you. I wanted you more than anything in the world.” Marge hugged her as hard as she dared and tilted the little face up until they were looking at each other, equally red-eyed and snot-nosed. “Everyone was so happy when you arrived. áhkku, áddjá, your uncle, your aunt and your cousins, our whole big family. We wanted you to be with us. You’re our Stella.”

Marge kissed her cheeks, nose, forehead, and chin and then started over again. Until Stella snorted and pinched her nose.

“Stop! Stop!”

She smiled and wound her arms around her daughter, drawing in the scent of freshly washed hair and sweet breath. She must have been sneaking candy from the pantry again.

“You are the best kiddo in the world, and you’re mine.”

“I love you, Mama.”

Marge closed her eyes. “Mon ráhkistan du.”

Stella imitated the Sámi words perfectly. She pressed their noses together and pursed her lips until they were howling with laughter.

She was like fireworks, exploding with emotion, a flare and then a sudden calm. Maybe this was how she had survived. How had Marge herself survived? That conversation would come in time. They could compare what they had gone through. One day.