“Did you see her moving in the picture, Grandmamma?”
“Nobody did. Wherever she was, whether outside feeding the ducks or inside looking out of the window, she was always motionless, just a figure painted in oils. It was all very odd,” my grandmother said. “Very odd indeed. And what was most odd of all was that as the years went by, she kept growing older in the picture. In ten years, the small girl had become a young woman. In thirty years, she was middle-aged. Then all at once, fifty four years after it all happened, she disappeared from the picture altogether.”
“You mean she died?” I said.
“Who knows?” my grandmother said. “Some very mysterious things go on in the world of witches.”
“That’s two you’ve told me about,” I said.
“What happened to the third one?”
“The third one was little Birgit Svenson,” my grandmother said. “She lived just across the road from us. One day she started growing feathers all over her body. Within a month, she had turned into a large white chicken. Her parents kept her for years in a pen in the garden. She even laid eggs.”
“What colour eggs?” I said.
“Brown ones,” my grandmother said. “Biggest eggs I’ve ever seen in my life. Her mother made omelettes out of them. Delicious they were.”
I gazed up at my grandmother who sat there like some ancient queen on her throne. Her eyes were misty-grey and they seemed to be looking at something many miles away. The cigar was the only real thing about her at that moment, and the smoke it made billowed round her head in blue clouds.
“But the little girl who became a chicken didn’t disappear?” I said.
“No, not Birgit. She lived on for many years laying her brown eggs.”
“You said all of them disappeared.”
“I made a mistake,” my grandmother said. “I am getting old. I can’t remember everything.”
“What happened to the fourth child?” I asked.
“The fourth was a boy called Harald, ” my grandmother said. “One morning his skin went all greyish-yellow. Then it became hard and crackly, like the shell of a nut. By evening, the boy had turned to stone.”
“Stone?” I said. “You mean real stone?”
“Granite,” she said. “I’ll take you to see him if you like. They still keep him in the house. He stands in the hall, a little stone statue. Visitors lean their umbrellas up against him.”
Although I was very young, I was not prepared to believe everything my grandmother told me. And yet she spoke with such conviction, with such utter seriousness, and with never a smile on her face or a twinkle in her eye, that I found myself beginning to wonder.
“Go on, Grandmamma,” I said.
“You told me there were five altogether. What happened to the last one?”
“Would you like a puff of my cigar?” she said.
“I’m only seven, Grandmamma.”
“I don’t care what age you are,” she said. “You’ll never catch a cold if you smoke cigars.”
“What about number five, Grandmamma?”
“Number five”, she said, chewing the end of her cigar as though it were a delicious asparagus, “was rather an interesting case. A nine-year-old boy called Leif was summer-holidaying with his family on the fjord, and the whole family was picnicking and swimming off some rocks on one of those little islands. Young Leif dived into the water and his father, who was watching him, noticed that he stayed under for an unusually long time. When he came to the surface at last, he wasn’t Leif any more.”
“What was he, Grandmamma?”
“He was a porpoise.”
“He wasn’t! He couldn’t have been!”
“He was a lovely young porpoise,” she said. “And as friendly as could be.”
“Grandmamma,” I said.
“Yes, my darling?”
“Did he really and truly turn into a porpoise?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “I knew his mother well. She told me all about it. She told me how Leif the Porpoise stayed with them all that afternoon giving his brothers and sisters rides on his back. They had a wonderful time. Then he waved a flipper at them and swam away, never to be seen again.”
“But Grandmamma,” I said, “how did they know that the porpoise was actually Leif?”