Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  The pastor and his wife are unquestionably among the worthy. Even if you specifically refuse all privilege, it’s impossible to refuse Adele’s goodwill. And a good thing, too, because the locals find all sorts of things in their sheds and boathouses that they can make use of when things get tight, whereas the pastor and his wife have to start with two pretty much empty hands. God helps those whom Adele Bergman helps, he thinks, laughing, on his way home, heavily burdened. A poor man would have an easier trip home.

  He has fixed up the skiff and raised the sail and heads off. Not slowly, either. The boat hisses through the water and there’s spray from the waves when he turns.

  He learned to sail when he was still a boy, he says, and he’s always liked to sail as close to the wind as he dares. To press ahead before you come about, that’s life. Of course he’s turned over on occasion, but that’s no big deal. And he suspects that he’ll do it again a few times before he gets the hang of the skiff.

  I catch him in the act, you might say. I’m approaching the bay when the priest comes streaking out behind the point. He shoves the rudder over so hard that the boat just lies down, the way you might blow down a house of cards. The priest is in the water, swimming like an otter with the sheet firmly in hand. Though it’s heavy going with the boat in tow, he drags it onto a skerry and turns it over easy as pie and wraps the painter around a stone.

  He’s standing there wringing out his clothes when I come up, cut my motor and throw out a grapnel. “In God’s name,” I start, but I have to laugh when I hear myself, for that’s usually the priest’s line. He laughs too and cries hello. “Are you all right?” I call.

  “You bet,” he says. “I’ve got to test the limits a bit and see what the skiff can do. She needs coddling, the little dickens.”

  My own skiff drifts towards the skerry as far as the grapnel permits and there we sit and talk, I in my boat and he on land. He spreads his clothes out on the granite and then sits down himself on a dry spot. “I’ll just have to sit here until everything’s dry. Otherwise I’ll be in trouble when I get home.”

  He makes it sound like a great joke, but it’s easy for me to believe that his wife would give him a dressing down, and he deserves one. He sails like an idiot just because he’s young and strong and swims like a fish.

  “You need to be careful till you know how the winds twist in among these islands,” I warn him. “They’re nothing to play with, the sea and the weather, and it doesn’t always end this well.”

  It’s then he says that stuff about having turned boats over lots of times. And then he says, “You must have done the same, you’ve lived your whole life on the sea.”

  Then I really have to think. I’m taken aback when I have to tell him the truth. “No, not that I can remember. I’ve always kept my feet in the boat, even if the rest of me hung out over the gunnels.”

  He sighs but then laughs again. “I guess that’s the difference between doing this for a living, like you, and doing it for fun and excitement, like me.”

  “Yes,” I say. “And there aren’t a lot of us who can swim, either. They figure it just prolongs the suffering if you go overboard in open water. What’ll happen to you if you turn her over in a big bay and you’re not up to swimming ashore?”

  “Maybe I’ll have the wits to make my turns a little wider,” he says, and I understand why people like him, because he’s not cocky, however foolhardy he may be.

  He’s funny too, sitting there drying out. Even if I don’t intend to say anything to his wife, I haven’t made any promises to keep my mouth shut otherwise. We’ve always kept an eye on our priests and talked about how they behave. If it’s something hilarious, so much the better. We have the post office in our home, and when I tell the story to Julanda the news will spread quickly. For we forward the news from a laughing mouth free of charge, without ink and envelopes and stamps.

  Chapter Six

  THE CONGREGATION SEES HIM SUNNY. Smiling, interested, eager to learn. Friendly, unaffected. Full of energy. Unassuming and appreciative, always with a good word for everyone. Full of fun, once you get to know him and realize that there is more than gravity beneath that cassock. So charmed by everything the parish has to offer that everyone melts. He likes the landscape: bleak, improbably beautiful in all its moods, fresh breezes and open vistas. The people: indescribably appealing. Charming. Intelligent. Handsome, lively, quick-witted. Knowledgeable, amazingly well-informed. Talkative and articulate. Exceptional. His new life as an island priest: a gift from God.

  So cheerful that you might think he’s never suffered a setback, that what lies behind the delight that wells forth is a lack of deeper life experience or an inborn naiveté.

  Nothing about him indicates that he comes from the great affliction. The endless war. An intense aversion to himself and to everyone who ran after him with their senseless expectations. A Christianity rendered stiff and almost dumb. A greyness and brownness drawn across all of existence. In spite of it, people’s terrible will to live, and, as if to mock them, death’s endless variety and the cycles of disease, anguish, and loss that everyone is forced to pass through on their way to death.

  She draws a short biography from him, Lydia Manström, who takes it in and only passes along such things as will cause no one embarrassment. What she retains within her tailored velvet jacket with its braids and trimmings is this: the oldest son of an overly ambitious teacher and an unpredictable father, forced to start school a year ahead of his own age group, always teased and excluded. Unable to honour his father, plagued by his mother’s overblown expectations. At the age of fourteen, stricken with tuberculosis of the stomach and the knees, a year in hospital, in the tear-filled eyes of his mother, dying. In an adult ward, among repulsive men with indecent stories and suggestions—the poor nurses!—and no reservations about his innocence. And then to see how they died, suffocating in their obscenity, drowning in their slime. How he prayed and promised to serve the Lord with joy all his life if only he could escape the hospital alive and make a life of his own. How he recovered, became a star pupil in school, took up sports to get into condition, graduated, and began to study theology. Studied and studied, often with distaste and without pleasure. The war that broke out. His stricken conscience at being exempt from military duty while brothers and friends were dying at the front, his resolve to be always ready, without complaint, to help those who needed him—Mrs Vale O’Tears, Miss Gloomquist, Mr von Woe. Food supply commission, Home Guard, fire brigade, war orphans. His studies like wading through tar. Debilitating anxiety, despair at the alliance with Germany and Finland’s unfortunate invasion of East Karelia. Pangs of conscience like a fire blanket over his rebellious spirit. Should I or shouldn’t I? But yes! You must. Always.

  And then the things that Lydia Manström can calmly pass along: Mona, who saved him, her teacher’s apartment that made it possible for him to complete his studies. His ordination, his brief service as an army chaplain, his first appointment as temporary pastor in a parish that had lost its priest. The birth of Sanna. And then across the water to a life that is open and bright and fantastic. Ten times better than he had humbly hoped for as an unattainable future goal. Freedom. Openness. Warmth. Beauty. And the word he avoids saying for fear of losing it, the word that nevertheless insists on making itself heard like a paean—Happiness.

  And now he gets effusive, talking about how theology itself has suddenly burst into bloom, how he sees that beauty in nature is an analogy, a metaphor for God’s love, for life in Jesus Christ. That we can celebrate the beauty around us because that affirmation is a recognition of God’s love. Christianity is not gloom and doom. Christianity is an affirmation! He means to preach this message.

  Yes. A little embarrassed at being so emotional, but still very happy. He smiles at Lydia Manström as they sit catching their breath after his first parish catechetical meeting in the east villages. “And you yourself, Mrs Manström? How did you come out here?”

  “Across the water”
, she says evasively, although he has a right to a confidence from her after all he’s told her about himself. He waits, feeling a bit snubbed. Surely he hadn’t been that pushy? She has to go on. “We met in Åbo. I came down to the boats. He sold fish. Then I came out here and gave a class in weaving. When it was over, we were engaged. Simple as that.”

  It sounds as if she would rather have a tooth pulled. It’s clear that you don’t ask personal questions of Lydia Manström. It’s a different story with her husband, Arthur Manström, a man of wide experience, who is always enthroned as the central figure in the tales he tells. He now comes sweeping in, impressive, Roman nose, velvet voice like a lover. Lazy as a god, courted and admired, he claims proudly to be a farmer fisherman but lives on his wife’s salary as a teacher. The foundation of it all is eloquence … indeed, when eloquence was passed out, Arthur Manström stood at the head of the line and helped himself.

  The priest is a bit overshadowed here, although he too has a beautiful voice and can both sing and talk. But Arthur can talk the sparrows off the roof, he draws people’s attention like a wood sprite, he scrapes and smiles and flatters and bows. Once, he lured the chaste Lydia from Åbo to the Örlands. Knew that he couldn’t let her return a virgin, because it would then be too easy for her to reply evasively to letters, to make other plans, to be sadly unavailable when he wanted to visit. A secret engagement would not do, either. No, he needed to speak calmly, smoothly, fluently, back her into a corner, down onto the floor, in under her skirts, a calm voice through all the No! No! while his hand makes its way past waistbands and openings, into position. Accomplished. And then she can only become engaged and marry him, for in Lydia’s world if you lie with a man then he’s the one you must marry.

  There is much gossip, and it will eventually reach even the pastor’s ears. There was only one child, now the adult heir apparent, today in the process of fathering his own children. What everyone would like to know: Did he tire of her once he had her? Is she perhaps revolted by the act of sex? Was she injured so severely in childbirth that she is incapable of …? But on the other hand she isn’t sickly and in pain like women with uterine prolapse and a damaged urethra but rather energetic and full of drive, with good posture, a slim figure, a rapid gait, and she’s a real disciplinarian at school. Active in the Martha Association and People’s Health, a leader in the food supply commission during the war, a promoter of adult education, practical skills and handicrafts. Writes letters to their member of parliament and the county council and lobbies for the interests of the Örland Islands. Writes “we” in her letters, but is absolutely “she”, an outsider. Silent as the grave when it comes to personal matters.

  Arthur reigns in the masculine world of the farmer fishermen without overexerting himself, rests up at home when Lydia is at school, has all manner of errands and activities in the afternoons that require him to be out once school is over. Appears in Lydia’s company mostly at the table and especially when they are invited out. He then leads her by the elbow, smiles and speaks like a seraph, with a heavenly sweetness. He has many names for her: my better half, my consort, the mistress of my house, my treasured companion, my wedded wife. She calls him Arthur, which stamps her as an outsider, because on the Örlands, women call their husbands “himself”.

  Arthur, well, here he is. He sits down beside the priest on the Åbo sofa in the parlour, his bass voice purring with pleasure. He has eaten his fill and has had some real coffee. Perhaps, too, he has fortified himself from some bottle of two- or three-star cognac, because those who can’t stand his flash and twinkle will hint later to the priest that he hasn’t a sober moment. If so, we are viewing genteel inebriation at its most appealing— he’s a kindly and communicative fellow with a broad register and converses about Church Isle in the Middle Ages and tells stories about the former priest who preached in his Home Guard uniform. Once as he climbed into the pulpit, his revolver fell from its holster, and when he bent down to pick it up, the church’s famous acoustics picked up someone whispering clearly, “Duck thy heads, for now he reloadeth.”

  “There are many such stories,” the silver-tongued Arthur adds, and the pastor laughs and says that he’s sure there are. It’s like being taken by the hand and led through the steps of a dance—you nod and smile when you get the signal and are then swept away across the floor. The pastor glances around surreptitiously and notes that Lydia is no longer present. Somewhere in the great convivial flow she was washed towards the kitchen, where she clearly has much to do now that dinner is over. The dishwater steams and there are towers of pots and bowls and plates. Arthur holds forth, and the priest, who learned at home to regard his father’s conversation with a certain scepticism is nonetheless charmed and seduced. Arthur must have sold his soul to be able to talk this way! Lydia still has hers, a hard pod in a vault, a petrified dream deep inside an active and laudable sense of duty. The priest has revealed some of his to her, and she has observed it without asking a single question, but in such a way that he’s been led to reveal still more.

  Mona has been at home with Sanna, which she all too often has to be, and when he finally gets home after this long day and would simply like to read the newspapers, he wanders around with Sanna around his neck and tells Mona about everyone he’s met, intelligent and well-spoken every one, but the prize goes to Arthur Manström. He repeats a couple of the anecdotes he can recall and adds, “Lydia is a different story. Probably smarter than all the rest of us put together but discreet as a spy ring. I believe she’s the least gossipy person I’ve ever met.”

  Mona gives him one of those penetrating looks that make him look away. He knows more or less what she’s thinking. He should watch his tongue and not quite so frankly reveal his innermost thoughts to anyone and everyone. A person needs to button up and caulk his hull. Things said in confidence sound entirely different when shouted from the rooftops. This is what she’s thinking, among other things, and she’s right as usual.

  But. It’s not true that he babbles indiscriminately. It you expect candour from others, you have to open the door to yourself a bit. If you want to reduce people’s reservations, you have to thin out your own. And yet it’s something of a problem for Mona that he sits there chatting with people as if he had all the time in the world. Time that ought to be hers. Theirs. Of course it’s fun and exciting to have a new priest who’s young and full of fun, happy and accommodating, of course everyone wants to talk to him, sit there and bask in his attention and waste the time he ought to devote to so much else.

  While the priest lingers in the village, eating party food and drinking coffee until his belly is stuffed, talking and singing hymns, his wife has done the milking and washed the dishes, put the laundry in to soak, cranked the separator, scrubbed the kitchen floor where he has thoughtlessly tracked in mud, built a fire in the bathhouse to heat laundry water, hauled up water from the well, washed clothes with a will, fed herself and Sanna at appropriate intervals, chased off the tenant farmer’s cows which had broken through the fence, pounded in some posts ostentatiously with a stone without attracting any attention whatsoever from the tenants, who do not show themselves in any window. And when she looks inside, there is not a living soul. It’s like the Mary Celeste—a fire in the stove, food warm on the plates, sails set for a light breeze, but no life. Back in the parsonage, there’s no end to it. If she has a free moment, there are clothes to be mended, letters to be written. Food must be prepared—though he’ll hardly be hungry when he gets home—and kept warm in case he comes late, as usual. The evening milking will have to be done soon, and Sanna will have to go with her because there’s no one else in the house. She’s sensible for her age, but you still have to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t get covered with dirt or go too close and get stepped on. Gnats and mosquitoes enough to drive you crazy. Sanna screams and cries, and the cows throw their heads and stamp their feet—they’d step right into the milking pail if she wasn’t careful. It takes forever even if she hurries, and then she has
to stand there and filter the milk and lower it into the cowshed well. The warm milk warms up the well water, and the whole thing is an inefficient joke for someone from a real dairy farm with a basin and ice stacked under a layer of sawdust. But you have to be grateful to have milk at all, so she can’t complain. “Come, Sanna. Now we can finally go. Good girl.”

  Yes. Sanna. It’s not right that he so rarely has time for his own daughter. His own family. Of course he has to do his job, but shouldn’t he have some time for himself? But then he has to write his sermon, and study for his pastoral exams, and read through the endless pile of correspondence from the diocese. He has to stay abreast of the local news, and the world news, otherwise he’ll be hopelessly out of touch, and then there are all those theological journals. He has to write letters to his mother, all too often and all too detailed, and she immediately responds with dreadfully long and closely written replies. More’s the pity, because then he has to write again promptly, also closely written and at length, and sympathize. There’s no end to it.