Samurai Summer by Åke Edwardson

that it didn’t lie. What you saw in the mirror was the true image of your surroundings. You might not recognize it, but that was how things really looked. The mirror was handed down from samurai to samurai just like the sword. But no samurai looked at himself in the mirror. They held it up and used it to catch the sun. And everything under the sun.
    Like me. And Kerstin. She was blocking the sun, and Iwas happy about that. It hurt my nose even more when the rays of sunlight hit it with a sizzle.
    I sat up in the bed where they had laid me. I hadn’t asked to lie down there. The counselor had left the room. The window was open and I heard the burnball game continuing. Someone hit the ball. It sounded like a hard and long hit. I hoped it wasn’t Weine. Or Micke. I remembered how Micke had looked. He’d had the smile of a traitor and the eyes of a weasel. You could have held up a mirror in front of him and asked, “Who is this? Friend or foe?”
    “It doesn’t look too bad,” said Kerstin.
    “What doesn’t?”
    “The weather,” she said and let out a laugh. It sounded like pearls of glass bouncing on the floor.
    “Nothing’s broken,” I said and felt my nose. I had virtually no sensation in the tip of my nose.
    “No ambulance then,” she said.
    “I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.”
    “Who?”
    “Weine,” I said. “Did you see him trip me up?”
    “Maybe he didn’t mean to.”
    “Didn’t mean to!” My nose began to sting like it had gotten angry, too, when Kerstin said that. “Of course he meant to. It’s obvious. As obvious as the sun rising in the morning.”
    Someone turned the door handle. The counselor wasback. The room was starting to become cramped. I wanted to get out of here.
    “You just take it easy, Tommy.” She picked up a couple of bloody cotton balls from the floor. “No more burnball for you today.”
    “My name’s Kenny,” I said, and I slid down from the bed until I was standing on the floor. In a few years I wouldn’t need to slide down. My feet would already be on the floor when I was sitting on a bed. In Japan the beds were on the floor. It didn’t matter if you were a kid or a grown-up. Everyone sat on mats on the floor and ate from low tables.
    The sun burned my nose as we stood on the steps. Everyone else was at the front of the building. I heard the sound of the burnball game again.
    “Didn’t they want to know why you left the game?” I asked.
    “I told them I had a stomachache.”
    “Do you?”
    She didn’t answer. A gull flying over the lake started laughing as though it had just heard a joke.
    “You don’t have to keep me company,” I said.
    “When are you going to show me the castle?” she answered.
    I heard shouts and hits coming from the burnball field again. It sounded like a war.
    “We can go this way,” I said, and I pointed toward the forest on the other side of the beach. We could follow theedge of the lake for a bit and then take a left into the forest and reach the castle from the other direction.
    There was a smell in this part of the forest that I didn’t recognize. It was like a different forest. The trees looked different. Maybe it was because you could glimpse the lake through the trees like a reflection from a mirror. It was darker here than in the other forest.
    “What’s that smell?”
    “I don’t smell anything.” Kerstin looked around. “I guess it’s just the forest.”
    “There’s something else.”
    She looked around again. Almost everything was shrouded in half-darkness despite the reflections from the lake—or because of them.
    “Must be gloom then,” she said.
    “The gloom?” I saw how it covered the path we were walking along.
    It seemed to move with us. “Gloom doesn’t smell, does it?”
    “When it gets darker, it smells different,” she said.
    “Have you noticed that it smells different at night? When the sun goes down?”
    “Yeah.”
    “There are other smells that come out