Read Online As White as Snow by Salla Simukka - Free Book Online Page A

thinner than before. Just the day before, Jaro had cut them back with a chain saw. To Lenka, the pruned trees looked sadder than usual. The pile of branches beneath them was like a burial mound. Lenka looked at the iron fence that surrounded the yard like a dismal, spiky nightmare. Lost in thought, she stroked the window frame. The white paint was cracked and flaking. The windowpanes needed cleaning. The glowing summer sun revealed the dust and fingerprints. There was no point in cleaning them, though. Not anymore.
    Suddenly, the room felt too small. The landscape looked confined. Lenka wished she could see farther. The house’s familiar smell of musty decay and sweet incense felt suffocating, even though Lenka usually liked it. Usually, it made her feel safe.
    Lenka didn’t understand what could have happened. For five years, she’d been happier than she would have imagined possible. Even though she had mourned her mother and sometimes felt terribly lonely, she’d still been content. Lenka didn’t want anything else. She had received so much in her life. She’d received people who cared for her and gave her a home. She’d received a faith that was greater and stronger than she was. Lenka knew what reward awaited her.
    Lenka thought of her first fifteen years like a dream she’d woken up from. The awakening had been cruel and harrowing, but it had been all the more necessary for that. Before, Lenka had always imagined that life was nothing more than it seemed. Just simple, everyday things like going to school, watching television with her mom at night, daydreaming about friends, falling in love, boys who never gave her a second glance, traveling to New York City, dreams of working as a photographer or a teacher. Life had been shallow and dependent on material and worldly things. Lenka had been excessively concerned about whether she was beautiful. She had stared at her face in the mirror for hours on end, fretting over each and every flaw and using makeup to try to shape herself into something more desirable—even though she was so shy and quiet that no one would ever have noticed whether she had long, beguiling eyelashes or not.
    Lenka had been so insecure. She had been a sleepwalker, really. She hadn’t been able to see the divine light that shone through the world. Not until the White Family helped her see how small and insignificant all the worldliness surrounding them was compared to the Truth. That she was worthless without holiness and without the one true God. Lenka’s life, like the lives of everyone else on earth, was just a climbing of stairs. The true door to her real home would be opened later. So why mourn that the stairs were humble and sometimes hard to ascend when ultimately they didn’t mean anything compared to eternity?
    Yet now Lenka found herself thinking about everything Lumikki had said about her life in Finland. She thought of the aurora borealis and nights without night. She thought about swimming in a hole chopped in the ice. They sounded like such fascinating, peculiar things. Like something out of a storybook. For five years, Lenka had never dreamed of traveling. Yet now, like a thief in the night, came thoughts of boarding an airplane with Lumikki, flying far away to Finland, visiting a sauna, swimming in sparkling lake water, and smelling the scent of the birch trees Lumikki described so beautifully. Lumikki had awoken a desire in Lenka to use all of her senses to their fullest at least once in her life.
    What pointless, stupid thoughts.
    Lenka looked around at the room with its beds lining the walls. Three of them slept here. There was no rug on the wood floor. No paintings on the walls. No desk, no lamp, no chairs. Nothing superfluous. Nothing that could lead one’s thoughts down the wrong path. They didn’t need diversions.In the evenings, they could occupy themselves with prayer. If they weren’t too connected to the world, they could get closer to God.
    Lenka clasped her