But now he was enlightened, he shouted at her. He was no longer afraid of anything.
When they reached Sundsvall, the town was enveloped by darkness and cold. Forsman pulled up on the edge of the town, in fact. Hanna was not yet able to check her vision of what Sundsvall would look like with the reality. Most of it was still in store for her as she wriggled her way out of the furs and stepped out of the sleigh.
Forsman’s house was built of stone, and comprised two imposingly large storeys. As he pulled up, hordes of people came teeming out of the front gate and the lodge. Antero was led away, and the sleigh was taken care of. All the furs and other contents of the sleigh were carried into the house. Hanna was bewildered by everything that was happening all around her, all these unknown people staring at her, some of them openly, others surreptitiously. She was used to meeting unknown people one at a time. Sometimes it had been vagrants who had wandered up north on the banks of the river, sometimes individual travellers or people carrying axes and saws that her father had brought home with him from the forest. But never anything like this, this teeming crowd of unknown people.
Forsman noticed her discomfort, and bellowed out in a loud voice that the girl accompanying him was Hanna Renström, who would be visiting relations in Sundsvall. But tonight, New Year’s Eve, she would be a guest in his home.
By midnight Forsman had gathered together all his family and all his employees, including his grooms and maids. He opened wide a window in the large room that Hanna had gathered was called “the drawing room” and shouted to everybody to be silent. The clock in Sundsvall’s church struck twelve. Hanna could see that Forsman was counting the chimes silently as his eyes glazed over.
To her horror she gathered that he was on the point of bursting into tears. Never in her life had she imagined that a grown man could weep. She had a lump in her throat, and realized that something important was in fact happening as the chiming of the clock, carried by the cold air, penetrated the drawing room through the open window. Once the chimes had finished, Forsman started to sing a hymn and all those assembled there joined in—including Hanna, although she did so furtively.
She spent that night in a room shared by three of the maids employed in the house of stone. She shared a bed with a girl called Berta, who was about her own age. Berta smelled less than absolutely clean, and Hanna suspected that she might well smell no better herself. Berta pushed and shoved, claimed most of the bed space, and informed Hanna glumly that she would have to be up by five o’clock, despite the fact that it was New Year’s Day and was more or less regarded as a Sunday. But she would have to make the fires and heat up the tiled stoves with the firewood the skivvies brought in.
Berta soon fell asleep. But Hanna lay awake, thinking that there was something missing. It was some time before she realized what it was.
There was no creaking in the stone walls. The cold didn’t penetrate the stone walls like it did in the timber-built house she had grown up in.
And it was only then, as she lay in bed inside stone walls, that it finally dawned upon her that she was now living in an unknown world. She could no longer reach out her hand and touch her siblings, or hear Elin’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in her bed.
She was somewhere else now, somewhere that was completely new and unknown to her.
She tentatively placed her hand on Berta’s warm body. She missed her brother and sisters who had always been around her. She was on her own now, and she didn’t know how she would be able to cope with the void that surrounded her.
11
The following day Forsman sent Jukka, the most trusted of his servants, to help Hanna to locate her relatives. He had been given the address where they were thought to live by Elin, but Sundsvall was not a town where streets and house numbers could always be relied on.
Even worse was the fact that Forsman, who was confident he knew everybody in the town, had never heard of a family called Wallén. But he hadn’t told Elin that. He thought that perhaps they lived at one of the sawmills in the vicinity of Sundsvall.
The cold was less severe now. Hanna could feel that it was no longer biting into her skin the way it had done during the long sleigh journey.
Forsman went out into the street with them.
“If you don’t find the family, bring her straight back here,” he told Jukka, who was standing with his fur hat in his hand.
Hanna thought that Jukka was somewhat cowed and insecure when confronted by his enormous employer in his voluminous fur coat. He was certainly over sixty, but was nevertheless afraid, like a little child worried it might receive a beating.
She couldn’t understand why this was.
They set off. As soon as Forsman had gone back inside, Jukka was transformed. He spat and walked with a swagger, elbowing aside anyone who got in their way, and seemed to be in charge of the snow-covered and inadequately cleared street.
Hanna observed the town she had come to in the pale wintry light. For each stone-built house they passed, there seemed to be ten tumbledown little wooden shacks that had grown up out of the ground. Like mushrooms, she thought. If the stone houses were edible, the wooden shacks were the sort of fungi you stamp on and don’t put in your basket.
She felt worried all the time. Would she be able to fit in here? Or was she the kind of person who would never feel at home in this town?
And then she came to the sea—but that was nothing like what she had expected either. There was a harbour with lots of big ships, some with masts, others with black funnels. But the water didn’t go on for ever, as her father had said it did. She could see land in all directions, and no sign of open water beyond the ice and a network of open channels.
Jukka urged her to keep moving whenever she stopped. He seemed to have just as little time as his employer, and was always in a hurry.
They walked along the icy edge of the harbour. Hanna almost slipped and fell over several times. Her shoes, made by a Lappish cobbler in Fjällnäs, were not suitable for the town’s stony and ice-covered pavements.
They came to a cluster of wooden houses which seemed to be hugging one another in order to keep warm.
Jukka stopped and asked a man pulling a sledge laden with firewood the way to the address he had been given, to the Walléns. The man, who had a large burn mark on one cheek and a very loud chesty cough, pointed and tried unsuccessfully to explain. Jukka soon lost patience, touched his cap as a gesture of thanks, and they continued walking.
“It’s impossible to find anywhere in this damned town,” he muttered in his sing-song dialect. “Completely impossible, but I think this is it even so.”
He had stopped in front of a two-storey wooden house with a lopsided roof, broken and patched-up windows and a door that threatened to fall out of its frame. Jukka knocked hard on the door. It was opened immediately by an old lady so wrapped up in shawls that the only parts of her that Hanna could see were her eyes and her nose.
“Wallén,” said Jukka. “Does the Wallén family live in this house?”
The old woman gave a start as if he had punched her. Then she said something he couldn’t understand.
“Take that shawl off, damn you!” he roared. “I’m here on behalf of Jonathan Forsman, the businessman. He wants to know if anybody called Wallén lives here. I can’t hear a word of what you are mumbling behind all those rags you’re wearing.”
The old woman removed the shawl that was covering her face. Hanna could see now that it was gaunt and hollowed, as if she was often left starving.
“The Wallén family,” said Jukka again, making his impatience obvious.
“They’ve gone,” said the old woman.
“What do you mean, they’ve gone? Gone to heaven or hell? Give me a proper answer before I lose my temper.”
The old woman backed away, but Jukka placed his large boot between the door and the frame.
“There’s only one old man left here in the house,” she said. “They left him behind. I don’t know w
here they’ve gone to.”
Jukka sucked at his lips and tried to make up his mind what to say to that.
“We’ll go in and talk to the old boy,” he said eventually. “Show us where he lives!”
The old woman led them up a staircase. Pale-looking children were standing in doorways, staring wide-eyed at the strangers going past. Hanna noticed that there was a stale, acrid smell, as if the house was never aired.
They continued up to the attic floor where the old woman finally stopped outside a door, knocked, then immediately scurried away. When Jukka opened the door, he pushed Hanna inside.
“Go and talk to your relative now,” he said. “Either you’ll be living here, or you’ll have to come back home again with me.”
The room contained a bed, a Windsor-style chair and a cracked mirror hanging on one of the walls. Hanna could see a reflection of her face in it—a worried face, somebody she didn’t really recognize. Then she looked at the old man lying in the bed who was staring at her as if she had just descended from heaven.
She recalled what her father had said, the last words he had whispered secretly into her ear. About her being a mucky angel. Had he been right?
Was it really an angel the old man seemed to see standing in front of him? Or just a confused serving girl from the distant mountains?
12
Jukka was impatient.
“Talk to the old boy now,” he growled. “We don’t have time to just stand around gaping at him.”
He walked over to the window and opened it: it had been closed for so long that it was extremely difficult to move.
“It stinks in here,” he said. “A nasty stench of old man. The earth has already started to eat you up, without your noticing. Your body is already full of worms and maggots, chewing away at your flesh.”
Jukka glared expectantly at Hanna. She went up to the bed where the old man was lying. He had bits of old food in his beard, his nightshirt was sweaty and dirty. She explained who she was, what she was called, and who her father and mother were. The old man didn’t seem to understand, or maybe he hadn’t heard. She repeated what she had said, but louder.
In reply he raised a trembling hand. Hanna thought he was trying to greet her—but the hand was pointing to the window.
“I’m cold,” said the old man. “Close the window.”
Jukka was standing by the window as if on guard. He took a step forward, as if he were about to attack.
“The room stinks,” he said. “It needs airing. But do you realize who this is, standing here in front of you? Hanna Wallén. Are you a relative of hers, or not? If you can tell us yes or no, we can leave you in peace.”
But the old man didn’t understand. He started begging for food—he was hungry, and nobody gave him anything to eat any more.
Hanna tried again. Explained once again who she was, and talked at length about Elin. But it was no use. The old man in the filthy bed was living in a different world, in which the only thing that mattered was his hunger.
“Come on,” said Jukka. “Let’s go. This is a waste of time. We’ll talk to the old woman downstairs. She might know.”
If she’d been able to, Hanna would have run out of the house and not stopped until she was back home again with Elin and her brothers and sisters. Nobody wanted to take care of her, the whole journey had been in vain. She didn’t belong in this town. She’d been welcomed by a confused, bewildered old man, nobody else.
When Forsman heard about the failed expedition, he tore a strip off the cowering Jukka. Was he incapable of ferreting out where the family had gone to? Would that have been so difficult?
Forsman calmed down eventually, and said to Hanna in his usual friendly voice that he would personally take over responsibility for finding out where the family had gone to. She shouldn’t worry. People didn’t just disappear into thin air. He would no doubt be able to find the relatives she had come to meet.
“In the meantime you can stay here,” he said. “You can make yourself useful about the house. Help the other girls!”
Two days later he had some information to pass on to her. He called her into his office, where he was sitting at a desk, chewing away at a cigar stub.
“That old man you met is just a sort of lodger,” he said. “He’s not even a relative. He’s allowed to lie there in that bed until he dies. Then somebody else will take over the room. A whole family of dockers are lined up to move in. They’re no doubt hoping he’ll die as soon as possible because at the moment that family is living in a cattle shed. But nobody seems to know where the others have gone to.”
He looked hard at her. She was beginning to feel scared, but braced herself.
“I think you should stay here for the time being,” said Forsman. “We could do with another maid.”
She closed her eyes, and breathed out. She couldn’t make up her mind if that was due to relief or to joy. She tried to conjure up the sounds from the house by the river: but everything was silent, her thoughts were interrupted only by the noise of a cart clattering past in the street.
Forsman seemed to gather what she was thinking. He smiled. Hanna curtseyed, and left the room.
She said silently to herself: well, at least I’ve got something to do here now.
13
She worked together with Berta from then on. She followed her around, helped her out in her duties, and also allowed her to show her around the town in what little spare time they had. Most of the time was spent washing the clothes of everybody in the very large household, and also the sheets and tablecloths. There was a pump in the inner courtyard, and they fetched water from there to the laundry, which was next to the stables. Hanna couldn’t understand how Berta coped with the strenuous work, which kept her occupied for more than twelve hours a day. Berta had started working for Forsman when she was thirteen years old. She told Hanna that her father had died as a result of an accident at the sawmill in Essvik, her mother had died of consumption the following year, and the children had all gone their different ways. Berta kept coming back to her assertion that she had been lucky to get a job in Forsman’s household. Although it was hard work and not exactly uplifting, she had a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in and a meal three times a day. What had she to complain about? What right had she to do so?
“If I were to leave, there would be at least ten girls queuing up outside in the street, hoping to take over my job,” said Berta early one morning as they were standing by the pump, filling their buckets. “Why shouldn’t I cling on to what I have?”
“Will you still be here ten years from now?” asked Hanna.
Berta shook her head and burst out laughing. Although she was still young she had lost several of her upper teeth.
“I can’t think that far ahead,” she said. “Ten years? I don’t even know if I’ll still be alive then.”
But Hanna persisted. There must be something that Berta dreamt about, surely?
“Children,” said Berta hesitantly. “I’d love to have some. But for that to happen I’d have to find a husband. And I haven’t. I want somebody who doesn’t drink or fight. Where can anybody find a man like that?”
Whenever Hanna asked Berta a question, she answered it inside her own head with regard to herself. What did she want? Would she still be alive ten years from now? Or would she be dead as well? Who was the man she hoped to meet? Did she really hope to meet one? And what about children? Could she really think about having children when she was still a child herself in so many ways?
Towards the end of February an unexpected thaw set in. In the evenings, if they had enough strength left, they would go for a walk through the town. Berta showed her round, did so with pride, with a sort of sense of both owning something and having responsibility. She knew something that Hanna didn’t. The town was hers.
Occasionally Berta would ask a few questions about the place where Hanna lived before she had come to Sundsvall with Forsman: but Hanna soon noticed that Berta was not really all that int
erested in what little she had to tell. Or perhaps it was just that Berta had never seen anything but the town she lived in, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like by a river below a high mountain.
Her relationship with Berta was something completely new for Hanna. During the time she lived in Forsman’s house she and Berta became close friends who dared to take each other into their confidence. Almost every evening they lay in the bed they shared, whispering. It seemed to Hanna that she had never before had a friend like Berta. The relationship she had had with her siblings and her mother had been quite different.
They dared to talk about the difficult things in life. Love, children, men. Hanna soon realized that Berta had just as little experience as she did when it came to what life had in store for them.
Sometimes in the evenings when they were out walking, always arm in arm, with their shawls wrapped tightly around their hair and chin, boys of about their own age who were loitering around would shout to them: but they never replied, just increased their pace—even if later, when they had gone to bed, they might giggle and talk about what had happened.
We’re not there yet, Hanna thought; but one of these days we’ll stop and start talking to those boys.
Most of the time they spent together, when they were not working, they devoted to helping each other to learn to read. They had realized from the start that their knowledge was more or less equally meagre. Berta had been given a dirty and well-thumbed ABC book by a cook who used to work at Forsman’s house. They would pore over it, spelling out words, testing each other, and before long they were secretly borrowing books from Forsman’s library, reading aloud to each other with increasing confidence.
Hanna would never forget the moment when the individual letters stopped dancing around in front of her eyes. When they no longer made faces at her but formed words and sentences, and eventually whole stories that she could understand.
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