Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  The parsonage is on Church Isle, isolated from the parish, and in human terms it offers a haven of peace for the priest when he finally gets home. And it certainly looks peaceful for a moment or two when he comes jogging up the hill from his boat. The wind dies at dusk, and the evening air is raw and damp. He takes the steps in a couple of bounds, lifts the latch, smells the fire in the stove, opens the door. A scream of joy and Sanna throws herself into his arms. Mona, angrily, “Sanna! Go straight to bed! Once you’re there, you stay there!” She takes Sanna by the arm, hard, and Sanna yelps and clings to him tightly. Strict loyalty a requirement, but he must be loyal to his child as well, and he holds Sanna close and says, “Just a little while. I haven’t seen her all day.”

  No indeed, but he hasn’t seen Mona all day, either. Mona, who sees him mostly when he’s worn out and dog-tired and still has lots of work to get through even though it’s already late. The parish never sees him that way, whereas she … But what is she thinking? The husband she loves has come home at last, and she ought to be happy. And of course she is happy. She’s only irritated because she can never have enough, because she’s jealous of the parish that gets such great gulps of him while she gets him back when he’s dead tired and should just be allowed to go to bed.

  “Sit down,” she says. “We’ll have some tea and you can tell me about the catechetical meeting. What the food was like, and who you talked to. Sanna can stay up for a little while, but then to bed.” With Sanna’s arms around his neck, he starts to tell about the meeting—how well they read, how openly they answered his questions. How the organist is clearly on his guard in the east villages. About the baked pike and about Arthur Manström and his lawfully wedded wife Lydia. About the way his head buzzes with all the talk and the singing. How nice it is to be home. How absolutely wonderful it is to come home to his two girls. He never in his life expected to feel such happiness.

  They sit there a bit dizzy with exhaustion, drink their tea and know a little more about the nature of happiness than they did when they were even younger. Then Mona had taken their relationship for granted. Later events made her terribly jealous and put her on her guard. Not that he would have been unfaithful or allowed himself to be tempted. It was rather that he behaved as if he lacked a sense of self-preservation and believed that he was some sort of Jesus put on earth to bear the world’s sorrows.

  In plain language, Mona had to murder a whole religious movement in order to save him. This was the Oxford Movement, an intellectual and theological renewal of faith, with great ethical demands, which had a powerful influence on Petter and his closest friends during their studies at the School of Theology at Helsingfors University. During those same years, the movement was hijacked by the Americans and transformed into Moral Rearmament, MRA. In Petter’s second parish, where he served temporarily as assisting pastor, MRA had a solid foothold among a leading group of parishioners. A person with as much common sense as Mona had only to look at them as they greeted Petter to hear alarm bells. Unrealistic dreamers, the whole bunch, who managed to monopolize him in no time and pull him into endless evening meetings that fairly reeked of confession and tormented self-examination. So persuasive were they that Petter got the idea that it was his duty to stand up in the pulpit before the entire congregation and confess the erotic missteps of his youth as well as the vice of self-abuse, a plan averted only when Mona threatened to beat him senseless with a cast-iron frying pan rather than let him leave home for church, and when Uncle Isidor made an emergency visit. In the course of this private conversation, Isidor stressed the fact that a priest must by all means be truthful, but that he must also be an example for his congregation, as prescribed in his clerical oath. What kind of example will he be if he stands in the pulpit and wallows in youthful sins, no longer of any consequence. If a priest could … well then, couldn’t anyone? That’s what many will think. Others will laugh at him behind his back and he will lose all his authority and, worse, his legitimacy as a priest. Does he want to be relieved of his office? Has he lost his mind? Has he thought this through all the way to the bitter end? Think of Mona and his little daughter. Think of his mother! Who has already suffered such grief.

  It does not help him to cite the Oxford Movement’s four absolutes: absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, absolute love … (“Absolute idiocy!” Mona calls from behind the door) … because those are abstract concepts, even if they are a distillation of the most beautiful thoughts in the Sermon on the Mount. But we live as best we can here on earth, where our actions have consequences on a social plane. Think, dear Petter. Think. And if you won’t think about those consequences, then think instead about the four absolutes. Which of them did Our Saviour place first? Yes, love. And if you want to be absolutely honest with yourself, who is it that you love most? Yes, Mona and your little girl. Your mother. You have no absolute right to cause them such distress.

  All that is bad enough. Even worse is that in the overheated atmosphere of those evening meetings, when Mona must of course stay home with Sanna, there are romantic young women who confess their wicked thoughts and, weeping, throw themselves on the priest’s breast. And the priest, who stands for absolute love, what is he supposed to do? Unable as he is to see through their cunning, he tells himself that it’s all pure spiritual anguish when in actual fact it’s an irresponsible effort to captivate a married man and father. Moreover a priest and a model for the parish. Where is he supposed to put his hands? What is he supposed to do when they cry, “God! I cannot go on like this!”

  They. Well, one. Who is so terribly in love that she can’t stand it but comes rushing to his home in her despair. Right past Mona as if she were a simple servant girl, no one who mattered. Straight to the priest. “Oh God! Help me! Pray for me!”

  His face a picture of masculine helplessness. She is about to push him into his study. She doesn’t see Mona, doesn’t reckon with her, she is meaningless, a person lacking spiritual life and love in Christ, a person who in a deeper sense has no right to him. She, Mona, with a teaching degree, steps forward and takes the overwrought young woman by the arm, hard. “Calm yourself!” she commands. Miss N stops in her tracks. Her tears freeze on her cheeks. Her hand halfway to his breast. Her thought cut off in midstream.

  “Forgive me,” she says. “I didn’t mean … I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “So it seems,” says the pastor’s wife. “I suggest that we drink a cup of coffee in the kitchen and then maybe you’ll feel better.”

  She bustles about in the kitchen. Angry as a bee, Petter sees, but frighteningly polite to the fervid young woman, who sits at the table and shrivels, without a sob or a sigh. “Here you go,” Mona says, and Miss N dares do nothing but drink her coffee. Looks at no one, least of all at the priest, who stares into his cup. He can think of nothing to say, although he’s the one licensed to preach, and his wife is forced to continue.

  “To my way of thinking, MRA has gone way too far. Its demands are terribly exaggerated and people get all worked up and overwrought and lose their heads. I can’t give you any advice, but I can’t help thinking you’d be better off staying away from those meetings. And I’ll give the same advice to my husband, who has many duties here in this parish without MRA trying to draw the last drop of his blood.”

  Now Miss N looks at Mona, eyes wide, and draws a breath almost like a mortal sigh. “Yes,” she breathes. “Thank you. I hardly recognize myself. It’s like a dream.”

  “Yes,” Mona says. “Reality is different. Work, for example.” She looks at her husband, the priest, a penetrating gaze. So blue, so powerfully blue. So indescribably, incomprehensibly, powerfully blue. The fifth absolute—blueness. “Yes,” she concludes. “And now I have to get on with mine. Perhaps you’d like more coffee?”

  “No thank you,” she breathes. “I have to go. What you said about the meetings is right.” She says goodbye to them both, and no one who sees her go can help feeling sorry for her, the way we feel sorry for any
young person who has lost her faith and hope. What passes later between the priest and his wife occurs in private, but we can presume that it is not the priest who emerges triumphant.

  “How could you be so blind?” she cries, for example, after he’s assured her, scandalized, that there was of course no physical attraction on either side. “Everyone must have seen it but you! Don’t you understand anything? What would you have done if I hadn’t managed to stop her?”

  He looks like a schoolboy, not like the beloved man she married. “I suppose I would have prayed with her. You know in the Movement we talk a lot about prayer. About its power to change our lives.”

  “Ha! She threw herself at you! She was this far from a declaration of carnal lust.”

  “Then naturally I would have calmly talked sense to her. Explained that we’re brother and sister in Jesus Christ. Nothing more.”

  “I wonder if you really don’t realize how overheated the atmosphere gets at those meetings of yours. Your demand for honesty has pretty much the same effect that pornography has on a dirty old man. There are thoughts and inclinations that people are better off keeping to themselves. A little common decency never hurt anyone. You encourage simple, unbalanced souls to vent the feelings that they’d keep under wraps in a more sceptical atmosphere. Has it occurred to you that you’re acting like a sect, though you belong to the church?”

  He can hear how weak he sounds as he admits that there is much in what she says. That it takes someone with her analytical ability to put a finger right on the sensitive point. Yes, people’s feelings ran away with them. Yes, the atmosphere was thoroughly overheated. As a priest, he should have realized that they expected leadership from him, not simply a confirmation of their surging emotions. What she says about sectarianism is perfectly true. Distressed as he is, it’s still interesting to see how it starts. You think it’s just an internal revival, and then it turns out that you stand at the forefront of a little group that is distancing itself from the rest of the congregation. It’s not healthy, she’s absolutely right about that.

  By and by he also agrees to decline to attend any further evening meetings. Doesn’t intend to make excuses but means to be absolutely honest when he informs Westerberg that he is taking this step because he has grown increasingly dubious about the overheated atmosphere within the movement. It is becoming too naked and intrusive. It’s becoming sectarian, he will say, and then add that he would also like to spend more time at home with his wife and newborn child.

  They talk and talk, though neither one of them has the time, and of course the result is that, both of them in tears, they reaffirm their love and agree that he naturally never and that she naturally never thought.

  The priest stops going to the meetings, which gradually die a natural death when one after another of the little group stops coming. Some internalize the absolutes and continue to have them as lodestars in their personal lives. Others remember the whole episode with shame. In any case, the movement does not recover. Across Finland, a few faithful enthusiasts support it for a time, but it wavers and fades and eventually gives up the ghost.

  She who murdered it feels a certain triumph at first. Then doubt and unease as well. That he could actually be so naive. That she has to act the policeman. Save him from things he should have the sense not to stick his nose into. That she has to get so angry in order to make him see what’s going on.

  This background made it easier for her to support his decision to ask for an appointment to the outermost outer islands. Here they will be isolated from the whole world’s Christian cliques and coteries. Here they will have more time for each other and be able to live a life of concord and true love.

  In truth, it is hardly possible to find a congregation less given to sectarianism than the people of the Örlands. The prevalent, cheering belief out here is that the church is one, and that that one church is the Örlands’ church. Its priests are the object of healthy interest and indulgence—the way they sometimes behave! But they are theirs, for better, for worse, as long as they have them. Often they serve with a wandering eye, on their way to richer pickings, and are quickly forgotten. But this one says he wants to stay and meets their interest with great candour and goodwill.

  There is something special about him, which his wife is the first to acknowledge. That’s why she loves him, why she married him. But wherever he goes, he attracts people like a magnet, she might almost wish he were a little less attractive. As it is, there is no one who doesn’t want to talk to him and bask in his glow. He himself is unaware of this magnetism and is astonished that people are so friendly. Extraordinarily friendly, he keeps saying. A little less would be plenty, his wife thinks. Moderately cordial would be just fine. So that he could do what he needs to do, hold his meetings and functions, and then come home!

  The pastor’s wife is no clinging vine. Wherever you plant her, she sends out strong stalks and leaves. She handles herself with the greatest competence, organizes and manages and keeps an eye on her domains. She is happy to work alone, for then everything stays on track. But of course she listens for him. And of course she goes from window to window sometimes and wonders if he’s never going to come. What kind of a marriage would it be if she never wanted him at home?

  Of course she understands that the church and the congregation are his primary responsibility and that he’s never really off duty. He gets up from his supper with a smile, he closes his textbooks and comes out of his study happily, delighted to be disturbed. Come right in! Talks at length about the weather, which out here is a subject of life and death, asks about family members, whose names he’s already learned, discusses boat connections and the fishing prospects, compares notes about the hay. Lets people take their time before getting to the point—some kind of certification from the parish register, as is often the case, or a christening or maybe even a wedding. Then both parties grow exhilarated, for the priest can recommend marriage warmly. So now at last! He sounds so enthusiastic that it warms their souls. If they have doubts, they forget to mention them.

  It takes time, like everything else he does—a simple trip to the post office, a visit to the Co-op. He might as well announce his schedule from the pulpit, the crowds could hardly be larger. People stand waiting for him on his way home. If he catches up to someone on his bicycle he stops and chats. Every cottage asks him to look in as he passes. The church is one and the priest is one, but he ought to be eight people, so there’d be something left over for his wife.

  Smiling, he tells her it will be like this only briefly, as long as he has the novelty of newness. Now, after the long winter, they’re eager for new people, but it will be different when summer comes. Then they’ll start with the hay, the children who work in Sweden will be coming home, and there will be sailboat visitors and summer guests. In August, they’ll start on the autumn fishing. They’ll be busy. This is only a honeymoon, the workaday world will soon begin.

  The pastor’s wife had no honeymoon. They got married during the Continuation War, at the Helléns’. That evening they were driven by horse carriage to the school where she was substituting. In the morning, she went down to her schoolroom while he studied exegetics in the teacher’s quarters. This is the way she usually describes the unromantic beginning of her married life, concealing the fact that there were also oceans of shyness, tenderness, and bliss.

  As a result, she doesn’t really like it that he can compare his feelings for the Örland congregation with love and marriage. Of course she ought to be pleased at his lively interest and strong feelings. She can’t admit even to herself that she wants those feelings reserved for herself alone. It’s obviously a good thing that he’s put himself on such a solid footing with the congregation right from the outset. Naturally she’s proud of his ability to capture people’s affection. She notes proudly that he’s just as good at making friends as his father ever was, Leonard the famous chatterbox. But in contrast to him, Petter has substance and an unaffected manner that goes straight to
people’s hearts.

  Here on the Örlands they can work side by side. His salary is meagre, so their little farm is of the greatest importance if they’re to pay off his student debts and buy a boat and a horse. Much of it is in a sorry state, but it also has great potential. They can enlarge the kitchen garden, dig up a new potato patch, and clear bushes and undergrowth for an extra fairly good-sized hay meadow. They will also have to build a new fence and clean out and rebuild the cow barn. By next year, the whole place will look very different.

  The priest is interested in farming, his wife is an expert. She is already looking ahead to the end of the summer when she will be leading two bountiful cows and a heifer into a freshly limed barn with a loft full of fragrant, nourishing hay. They’re going to get a household pig and three hens. They need to get some seed potatoes as soon as possible, although Petter says that no one in the villages would ever think of planting potatoes when the ground is still so cold. They do it closer to midsummer. “Not here!” says Mona, who has already dug a couple of furrows in the kitchen garden and planted parsley, dill, radishes, lettuce, and carrots. Onions and beets, peas and beans will follow as soon as the soil is a bit warmer. And she hasn’t forgotten flowers. She’s brought seeds for columbines, daisies, and marigolds, and she can dig up some sod with cowslips and wild pansies from the cow pasture and transplant them to her flowerbed. Later in the summer, she can collect all sorts of seeds from the churchyard and set out tulip and narcissus bulbs in the autumn. As early as next year, everything will be more the way she imagines it—blazing flowerbeds, a well-tended vegetable garden. If the pastor is to be a model for the community, then the parsonage should be one too, and the pastor’s wife goes to work with confidence.

  They work for their common future, and Mona thinks that when they’re old they’ll be able to look around and agree that these hardworking years were the best of their lives. They will then be old and weak and lack the urgency and the briskness of youth. Now they are young and healthy and can deal with anything. Even if it seems overwhelming, there is little they can’t accomplish—and they have time.