Now she was sorry she didn’t have the yearbooks any more. She would have liked neatly stored memories too. Like Håkan’s. Memories you could show others. Representative memories. For Kiruna’s sake, if for no other reason. What was she going to think about her mother? True, destroying the yearbooks had been hilarious. That was some consolation. To be honest, she couldn’t remember a time when she had laughed more. Tears had streamed down their cheeks; Susso had lain prone on the table with the pen in her hand, paralysed by silent laughter. No, she had never laughed like that again, laughed so hard she didn’t know what to do with herself. That was something she had only ever experienced with Susso.

She dug deeper into the box and pulled out a handful of stapled A4s that said ART IN KIRUNA. By Susso Myrén and Diana Sillfors, class 8B. She couldn’t believe her eyes. An extant school assignment!

Someone had added an F in pencil before the word ART. Probably Susso, but she couldn’t be sure; their handwriting was difficult to tell apart. Which was actually odd considering that they hadn’t learnt to write in the same school. They had been influenced by each other later on. When Susso started writing the letter E like an L with two bars instead of an I with three bars, she had followed suit. Or maybe it had been the other way around. Everything between them was intermingled.

It was a school assignment about various works of art in the city. The assignment had been to select a number of pieces they were familiar with and write what they knew about them and then find each piece of art and describe it and see if they could learn something new, either by going to the library or by asking someone, anyone. Susso had been new in town and hadn’t known any of the public artworks, not even the Northern Lights Obelisk; she had asked if that fat guy in Asterix had a cousin in northern Sweden. Diana smiled at the memory while she flipped through the papers.

This is what they had written about The Thinking Sami:

Location: By Park School

Year it came to Kiruna: 1927

What we knew before: It’s next to Park School. It’s of a

Sami, thinking. It’s nice. It looks at the church.

What we saw when we got there: It was made by

Ingrid Geijen or Geijer. It’s made of black stone. It

has a knife with genuine Sami patterns in its belt. It

has shoes with tassels. And it has mittens with Sami

patterns. It’s looking out at the town or at Restaurant

Lapplandia or something in that direction. Not at the

church, which is what we thought.

Interview with Kiruna resident number 1:

Do you know anything about it?

No

Do you know who made it?