Samurai Summer by Åke Edwardson Page B

understand,” said Kerstin.
    It wasn’t something I could explain, exactly. I didn’t even understand it myself. Not yet.
    The burnball tournament was still underway when we got back to the camp. The shadows along the path were longer. There was a smell coming off the lake. Mud and reeds and murky water. They were screaming louder than ever at the burnball field.
    There was a man standing by the thick branch that reached out over the water. On the grass in front of him was a black box. I knew what it was. So did Kerstin.
    “Uh-oh,” she said. “I forgot about that.”
    “Me too.”
    The man was there for the summer photo. We were all supposed to gather beneath the tree, everyone was supposed to look happy, and then the man would press a button at the end of a wire.
    In last year’s photo I stood behind the tree. Just when the man shouted, “Cheese!” I hid.
    I had stood in approximately the same spot where the man was standing now. When everyone was looking at him and he was looking at everyone through the camera, I had slipped behind the tree. But I was still in that photo.
    He saw us coming. It was the same man as last summer wearing the same hot blazer.
    “Well, it’s that time again,” he said. “Isn’t this fun?”
    “What’s fun about it?” I said.
    “Getting your picture taken, of course.” He laughed as though the idea that it might
not
be fun was really hilarious. “Don’t you like photos, kid?”
    “Not of me.”
    “A good-looking kid like you,” he said and winked. “Of course you should have your picture taken.” He nodded at Kerstin. “And your girlfriend too.”
    “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said quickly.
    “Oh she isn’t, huh?” he asked and laughed again.
    “He’s not my boyfriend,” said Kerstin.
    “I see,” said the man. “So you just happened to bump into each other, eh?”
    He winked again like he had gotten a speck in his eye or had a nervous tick. Maybe photography made you nervous.
    Mama took me to a photographer once when I was two, I think. I don’t remember it, but he must have tricked me into laughing because I was laughing in the picture. I was sitting in a wicker chair. There was a curtain hanging behind me. There were no colors—just black and white.
    A few years later it was time again, but then I didn’t laugh. I remember that I was there and that the photographer told me to laugh but I didn’t want to. Papa was supposed to have come along to the photographer’s, but we couldn’t find him when we were about to leave.
    At home there was a photograph of Mama and Papa standing in some square and laughing into the camera. That was before I came into the world. Maybe that was why they still looked happy. Maybe if I hadn’t been born, they would be as happy now as they were then, standing in that square laughing and baring their white teeth like they were in a toothpaste ad. I was there too. I was in my mother’s stomach, which was sticking straight out.
    It was summer in that picture—eternal summer. Thepicture was black and white. It wasn’t big, but it had a thin silver frame that made everything look even more black and white. For as long as I could remember, the photo had always been standing on the chest of drawers in Mama and Papa’s bedroom, but when Papa died, Mama moved everything out to the living room, including the chest of drawers. I used to see her standing there looking at that photo for ages as if she were trying to remember something that she’d forgotten.
    As if she were looking for something in the photo.
    The mailman’s motorcycle sounded like a jet rumbling through the forest when Kerstin and I walked back to the camp. The rumbling lingered like the sound of the jet that Janne and I had seen.
    I had received a letter. It was from Mama, of course. I had been thinking about not writing to her anymore so I wouldn’t get any more of her letters, but at the same time, I wanted them. I didn’t want to read them and I did want to