Chapter 16 The Map

9:45 AM

Oh, it was a bad week. Everything went wrong. Lena was snowed under with grading and teacher’s meetings. She couldn’t keep up with the paperwork, she had so many tests to check, so many written papers to correct that she developed panic attacks every morning when she was supposed to start her classes. She felt dizzy, wanted to throw up, and felt stomach pain a minute before she entered the school. She didn’t know whether it was the approach of spring and warm temperatures, but children behaved untypically bad, especially those she was taking care of, and bringing order and silence in the class was almost impossible. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Karol also had less time for her, he disappeared somewhere among parents, teachers, and children, leaving her - an abandoned lover, waiting like a sailor’s wife with hope for quick return and comfort.

But comfort didn’t happen. Quite the reverse, she was more and more disillusioned. He ignored her a couple of times in the corridor. He canceled a couple of their planned meetings. Then she saw them both taking a stroll along the school’s courtyard. A blissful married couple. Hand in hand, she - with a visible pregnancy belly, he - the proud father of his future baby. Karol’s wife was completely different from Lena. She was tall and slim, she had typically European features, as opposed to Lena’s slanted eyes. She was blond, with long waves of hair wrapped around her subtle face. Lena understood him, she could easily explain his love for her, his desire for her body. She only couldn’t understand that he wasn’t able to make a choice. Or that the choice was already lost for her.

In the afternoon, she looked at the empty class and made a promise to herself. She counted days in the calendar until the end of the school year, looked at empty desks, crayons lying on the floor waiting for cleaning ladies to pick them up. She glimpsed at the cupboards standing by the walls, at pot plants signed with children’s names. She also looked at herself in the class’s mirror: exhausted, both from stress and a broken heart. She didn’t like what she saw. She made up her mind and decided that she never wanted to come back. Her short career as a teacher was about to be over. It took one year: one year of an unfortunate selection of children, one year of a heartbreaking love affair. It was only a year, which left her a nervous wreck with pangs of guilt, disillusionment, and lack of hope.

Her room was a mess. Students’ tests were lying everywhere on the floor and on the sofa. Teachers’ notebooks were there to be filled with subjects, dates, and grades. Missing children from Sweden were looking at her from the photographs, waiting to be taken care of. Lena’s hair was messy, her make-up was smudged all over her face. She even had some bread crumbs around her mouth, because she didn’t pay attention to how she was eating.

To this sight, came Robert, not bothering to knock at the door.

‘You look fantastic,’ he said, ‘So womanly and charming.’

Lena looked at him as if she was looking at a moron. He laughed. He tried to be nice, he asked her about her job, he inquired about her investigation, being so kind not to mention any of her personal problems. She told him a little about the missing children.

‘That’s funny that they are called exactly like these Bullerbyn children. Sweden, children, so cliche...’

‘What did you say?’

‘Well, Lasse, Bosse, Lisa, Britta, Olle... more or less like the characters of the book. Don’t tell me that you haven’t read any of Astrid Lindgren’s novels as a child?’

‘Maybe so, I don’t remember. I didn’t read much as a child...’

‘I read these books to my girls, Pippi Langstrumpf, The Brothers Lionheart, Karlson on the Roof, The Six Children of Bullerbyn. These are the best books ever! Naughty but smart children, so many adventures, no parents! I was obsessed as a little boy. I can borrow you some. I have the whole collection!’

Robert enthusiastically returned to his room, brought a bit worn volumes of kids’ books and handed all of them to Lena.

Within a week, she read them all, rediscovering her lost childhood, laughing at kids’ adventures and admiring the wit and imagination of the author. But some things soon fell into place and made sense for her. She looked at the pictures of children’s room, which she had taken so carefully over the past few months. She looked through the search history of children’s computers. She carefully searched through one of the boys’ boxes of toys, books, and magazines to confirm her suspicions.

All of these children had a collection of Astrid Lindgren’s books. And it wouldn’t be surprising. So many children in Sweden read stories about Pippi, Lasse, Bosse, Lisa, and other brave representatives of their age. So many children all over the world had newer and older copies of popular books. But all the missing children, who got mysteriously lost in the orientation run, owned a surprisingly identical set of books.

Lena carefully looked through the books which Lasse’s mother had given to her. They were in Swedish so Lena couldn’t decipher whether there was any information hidden between the lines, but she noticed that some of the pages were torn as if someone had needed them. As if they had contained an important piece of information.

While checking Olle’s search engine’s history, she found the website on which these particular books could be bought. She wanted to order all of these books online, but she received a very suspicious message that all volumes couldn’t be bought at once. They could only be ordered one by one each month, after completing a short test on the knowledge of the plot of the previous volume. It was supposed to teach children a systematic attitude and hard work. It was a deal for which they didn’t even have to pay, as after completing the test, the book was supposed to arrive for free.

Taking part in this game would take Lena forever. She didn’t have a year to answer questions and wait for another volume to arrive. Even if she pretended to be a child, it would take too much time. She wasn’t even sure if this was the right trace.

But Lena was a teacher, and having spent hours in the class, looking at her students’ ideas, she knew how to cheat. First, she contacted all the parents of the missing children and asked them to send her the volumes of Astrid Lindgren’s novels, which were left in the children’s rooms. Then, when they finally arrived, she looked at some of them in search of the torn pages. Interestingly enough, all children had torn away the same exact pages spread all over the books with no apparent order. One page in every identical book, whether at the beginning, the end or in the middle was missing. Lena almost lost hope when she looked through all the books. It was impossible to make up a whole from the missing parts. It was impossible to point at the guilty one with no evidence whatsoever.

‘Yes!’, she said to herself opening the last set of books sent to her.

One boy, Olle, himself being an avid reader and a lover of the written word, couldn’t have done such a thing. It was almost a sin to even bend the corner of a book, not to mention to tear it apart. If he needed the page, he could xerox it or make a written copy or a photograph. Other kids were much less merciful. Olle’s respect for books left Lena with a number of pieces of a bigger drawing, which she carefully put together so that all lines matched and found their endings, all squares were orderly numbered, and all doodles built familiar entities. And indeed, in a few minutes she was looking at very meticulously written directions, very carefully drawn meadows, lakes, and houses, and in the middle of it all, there was one house, which was marked as the X. She instantly knew that she found a map, which over the years all the children had found themselves. A map, which directed them to an alternative finish of the orientation run and Lena to a possible answer to her mystery.