A Winter Book

Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light.

Everything was topsy-turvy.

scrunching and squeaking noises

it in front of the fire and she says: “Once upon a time there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much …” Every story has to begin in the same way, then it’s not so important what happens. A soft, gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time.

had a great responsibility and had to see what the snow was doing.

ou can close your mind to things if something is important enough.

made a tiny little room for myself where nothing existed except the stone and me

On the last day, when Tooti was clearing up the cellar, she found one of our kites from the 1960s and took it out onto the slope. Just for fun, she gave it a little push on its tail and at that moment a gust of wind came along and took the kite with it and it flew high, straight up, and continued far out across the Gulf of Finland.

I sat down and wrote that there is a fine balance between the absolute calm of arrival and the excitement of departure, then crossed out ‘fine’ and added ‘both are indispensable’ at the end, and began to wonder what I had really meant.

We assured each other that it was more stylish to leave in time, before one was forced to, but this got a bit tedious if one said it too often.