A summer with Kim Novak Read Online Free Page A

up there under colourful parasols, drinking coffee and smoking. We never actually saw them from the playground, but we heard them arguing and laughing and we could see their clouds of smoke billowing.
    During Ewa Kaludis’s brief sojourn at the school, the behaviour on the balcony had changed quite a bit. People had started to stand while smoking instead of sitting. They leaned over the railing and stared vacantly across the playground. She was the first to do that, and of course the studs crowded around her, puffing away and grinning.
    Stensjöö, the deputy head teacher, Håkansson the Horse. Brylle.
    ‘Check out bloody Brylle,’ said Benny. ‘He’s giving it to her from behind.’
    ‘Rubbish,’ said Balthazar Lindblom. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Look but don’t touch, right? If they even brushed up against her, Super-Berra would come down here and beat them up.’
    ‘Too right,’ said Veikko. ‘He’d just knock their heads off with a ball. What a geezer.’
    The girls’ side was unusually crowded during those days in late May. Quite a few football players seemed to have developed nobler interests, and the bike shed was packed. Ewa Kaludis only taught our class and one other, so most kids had to grab any opportunity they got to gawk at her.
    Like during breaks when she was up on the balcony. Kim Novak. Ewa Kaludis. Super-Berra’s super-girl.
    I was one of the lucky ones. We’d had the hopeless Sintring in English and Geography before she stumbled over the plinth. Håkansson the Horse had jumped in and covered for her for a few weeks, but now Ewa Kaludis had been inflicted on us. With only three weeks until the summer holidays. It was pure torment.
    Sweet torment.
    She didn’t have to teach us. It wasn’t necessary. We worked like dogs anyway. Whenever she entered the classroom, we sat in rapt silence. She would smile and her eyes twinkled. It gave us all the chills. Then she would sit down on the teacher’s desk, cross one leg over the other and tell us to keep working on one page or another. Her voice reminded me of a purring cat.
    We worked diligently. Ewa Kaludis either sat on her desk, sparkling, or walked around swivelling her hips as she moved between the desks. If you raised your hand, she’d almost always stand behind you, a little off to the side. When she leaned forward, her breasts would rest against your shoulder. Or, rather, one of her breasts would. It seemed that the boys were always in need of help, and the air in the classroom was heavy with her perfume and with youthful, suppressed desire.
    I didn’t really know what the girls thought of Ewa Kaludis, because I never talked to them, but I reckoned that they benefited from her presence as well. In their own female way. But I could be wrong. Maybe they were green with envy.
    Once when I raised my hand and she came over to help, I felt her breast brush against both my shoulder and my cheek and I almost fainted. I began to black out, and I thought that if I died right then, it would be a happy death.
    She noticed, I think, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me how I was feeling. Of course, that only made matters worse, but then I bit my tongue and things became clearer.
    ‘I’m not feeling very well,’ I said. ‘I think I’m getting my period.’
    I have no idea why I said that, but Ewa Kaludis just laughed. Benny, who was sitting next to me and was the only other person who heard my brilliant remark, said he’d never bloody heard anything like it.
    ‘Fucking hell, Erik. You’ll be sitting pretty after that. You can count on it.’
    I wasn’t sure that he was right, but mostly I was relieved that she didn’t get angry.
    ‘Let’s wait a moment,’ my father said. ‘They’re not quite done with their rounds.’
    I nodded, hugging the bag filled with grapes from Pressbyrån, the corner shop, wrinkling it even more.
    ‘Don’t crush the grapes,’ my father said.
    ‘I won’t,’ I said.
    We sat in silence on the green