Read Swedish Tango / the Rhythm of Memory for Free Online

her fingers replacing words, she motioned to him to sit on one of their small wooden chairs, placing his swollen foot in between her thighs. She could feel the heat emanating from the flesh buried deep beneath the layers of cloth as she peeled the bandages off slowly, placing the strips of fabric in a pot of boiling water that rested on a stool beside her knees.
    He winced as she got closer to the foot. His eyes darted between the face of the wife he had longed for months to gaze upon and his bloody, disfigured foot.
    “You shouldn’t look at it, Sirka,” he whispered, his voice faint from the difficult journey.
    “Hush, be still!” she chided in a voice that quavered despite an attempt to be strong.
    “I don’t want you to see this!” he said, wiggling his leg so that the foot slipped from her thighs.
    But she grabbed his ankle, her strength surprising even herself.
    “If you get an infection, you will die, Toivo! So stay still and let me clean the wound and then sterilize these bandages!”
    He became quiet again. He had little energy left to argue with her, and he did not want to awaken the three sleeping boys.
    “It’s not so bad,” she whispered to him, trying to force back the tears that were beginning to well in her eyes. The battered, oozing mass of his foot lay there, exposed in the orange glow of the fire, two toes curling against Sirka’s white apron, the other three gone forever, replaced by gouges and ribbons of blue and purple, striating the flesh like the lines of an ancient stone.
    “It will heal, Toivo,” she said, her voice trembling as she placed his foot in a pot of warm, soapy water.
    “Never. I’ll be a cripple for the rest of my life.”
    “You can walk, Toivo, don’t be ridiculous.” And she paused, regaining her composure. “Thank God you’re alive, Toivo. We must thank God for that!”
    She raised his foot from the soaking water and kissed it gently.
    “Shall I wake the boys? They will be so happy to see their father!” she said, her face blushing slightly. Although only five months had passed since he’d joined the army against the Russians, to Sirka it seemed like an eternity since she had last been with herhusband. How nervous she seemed with him now! It was as if Toivo were someone from her past she had forced herself to forget, for the wait for his return had been nearly too much for her to bear.
    Yet, now, she not only had to reacquaint herself with his presence, but also to deal with the reality that he would never be able to farm or fish as he once had. Their lives would be difficult, but she truly believed that God would watch over them and that somehow, no matter how difficult it might seem, they would manage.
    Now, nearly a year after his return, she had become pregnant again. But this time, unlike with her other pregnancies, the news of the arriving baby seemed to paralyze Toivo. Nearly every day and every night she would see his face lined with worry. “How will we feed another mouth, Sirka?” he asked her one evening as they lay in their birchwood bed. “The five of us are already existing on scraps alone.”
    Sirka just stared at him. There was little she could say. She knew how little food they had. The tin canisters of flour and sugar had been empty for months. The boys had stopped fighting each morning over the pieces of flat bread she broke into tiny slivers, which had become so small that they had quietly realized it wasn’t worth the quarrel.
    Every morning, she performed the same ritual, dividing the scraps from the day before into small rations. In actuality, the parts were not even. She gave the boys a fraction more than Toivo because they were growing, and took for herself only the crumbs. Had it not been for the baby, she would have eaten nothing at all.
    She tried to convince Toivo that they would all be all right. That God would watch over them. He did his best to smile andagree with her, but the lines in his face and the furrows on his tired