by Mikael Niemi
Guttural sounds could suddenly be heard from the kneeling prisoner. Eerie hooting and humming rose up as if from the underworld. It sounded so ungodly that it made the hairs stand up on the necks of the assembled gathering, it sounded like an animal’s curse, a prolonged and threatening magic spell.
“Oooh-ooh-aaah-oooh-ooh . . . ”
The prison chaplain began to pray in a clear, loud voice to drown out the heathen chanting. The prison guards put their fingers in their ears while the executioner took up his position and raised the terrifying ax. With clenched teeth, Thorstensson turned to the doctor, who glanced nervously at the chaplain.
What should they do?
Yes, what the hell should they do with the Lapps?
76.
The snow falls slowly. We leave wet, black footprints along the paths. Every day we walk as far as we can. If we are lucky we find a hay barn. Otherwise we curl up together under a dense fir tree, so close we manage to survive in each other’s warmth.
I will go wherever you want.
And that is what has happened.
The night before we left, we went to the parsonage. We stood in silence for a long time while the pastor held our hands.
“How does Jussi regard the child?” he asked.
“We’re going to take care of it,” I answered.
“Even though it’s not yours?”
“It’s mine now.”
The pastor turned to Maria, with her stomach bulging in her milking clothes. She had not had time to put on anything better.
“Hadn’t you intended to become Michelsson’s wife?”
Maria looked down.
“It was the demons. But now I’ve stopped listening to them.” She looked the pastor in the eye. “It’s Jussi I want.”
The pastor moistened his lips.
“I will remind you that, as far as we know, Jussi Sieppinen is still in prison in Umeå. The man at your side, consequently, must be someone else.”
He looked at me, inviting a response.
“The pastor can write ‘Josef,’” I said.
“Josef Sieppinen?”
“No, just Josef. That’s enough. It goes well with Maria.”
The pastor leaned forward and changed the name.
“Do you take each other as husband and wife?”
“Yes,” Maria whispered. “Yes, we do.”
Gravely he dipped the pen into the ink and registered us in the book of marriages. Right next to each other.
“And where are you planning to go?” he asked in an unsteady voice.
“North,” I answered. “To the coast of the Arctic Ocean.”
“‘Family reported to have moved to Norway,’” he wrote down.
With a deep sigh the pastor laid down his pen. He took hold of my arm and examined the sleeve.
“You’ve washed it.”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“The left sleeve is clean, but not the right?”
I couldn’t answer. He put his nose to the cloth and took a deep sniff.
“Bear,” he muttered. “It smells of killer bear.”
I wriggled out of his grasp, embarrassed. He took a Bible from the table and handed it to me, the same one he had lent to me in prison. I leafed through it and saw that he had managed to find my hidden writings.
“Keep writing,” he said.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you, dear pastor, I shall.”
He threw his arms around me; it felt as though he wanted to say more and his chin quivered against my shoulder. Then he turned away and wiped his hands on his trousers as if they were wet. As if he had just washed them.
“We’ll meet again, won’t we?” I said uncertainly.
He met my eye, his gray cheek glistening with tears.
“It will hardly be in this world.”
“But thank you. Thank you for writing me into the book. Without that, I wouldn’t have existed, Father. . . .”
That was the last word he heard me say. Master. Pastor. The man who became my father. I knew I would never see him again.
We crept silently out into the night. When I closed the parsonage door I felt Maria huddle closer to me. We stood quietly in the cold air. She, called a whore by the villagers. And I, the murderer.
Maria’s stomach was big and I could see the tightness of her kirtle. I carefully embraced the woman who was now my wife. From her pocket I heard the jingling of coins, and I murmured, “Sorry,” my hand in front of my damaged mouth.
“It was Nils Gustaf’s money,” she whispered. “But now it’s mine.”
Cautiously, she pulled my hand away from my lips and looked straight into my ugliness. Then she snuggled closer, so sweet that my heart was racing. And then she kissed me. My beloved wife. Whom I would walk beside for the rest of my life. The soft skin of her neck, the tip of my tongue against hers, a love so strong it reached through the darkness of this northern land.
* * *
—
We know they will come after us, that they will never stop searching. Every day we wander farther north. We face the cold, the wind, and the deepening darkness. We disappear like animals into the silence of winter. The snow covers all our tracks.
EPILOGUE
The pastor Lars Levi Laestadius had his portrait painted a number of times during his lifetime. An oil painting by François-Auguste Biard portrays him instructing Sami people amid towering ice hummocks in fanciful Arctic surroundings and dressed in wolfskin and a top hat. The painting was exhibited in the Salon de 1841 in Paris. Better known is the charcoal drawing by the French artist François Giraud, which exists in various reproductions. On Laestadius’s chest hangs the medal of the Legion of Honor, awarded to him by the French for his contribution to their expeditions. The painting started in this story, however, has never been found.
Since no one knew of a photograph of the pastor, it was a great surprise when in the summer of 2016, during restoration work on the parsonage in Pajala, a photographic glass plate was discovered hidden between joists in the roof. After so many years the image on the plate is remarkably well preserved. The figure of a man in dark clothes can be seen staring at us, sitting outside the church building in Kengis, now long since demolished.
A life story entitled Mu eallin (My Life) was published in northern Norway around 1890 and is one of the earliest known Sami documents, written from within Sami culture. It has in large part inspired this novel. The author’s name is unknown.
The registers in which the pastor entered all the parish births and marriages were kept for many years in Pajala. But on February 21, 1940, the war unexpectedly struck. Soviet planes flew over Swedish territory when the navigators mistook Pajala for the Finnish town of Rovaniemi. Forty-eight high-explosive bombs and hundreds of incendiaries rained down on the village. One of these exploded in the churchyard, only a few meters from the grave of the pastor and Brita Kajsa. Others made craters just outside the church and damaged several more buildings. By some miracle nobody was hit, the only casualty being one of the village horses. The parish registers fortunately survived intact, but the event aroused great concern. In order to afford the important documents greater protection, the archive was moved north to the village of Muodoslompolo. But only one year later, on November 24, 1941, an accidental fire destroyed the parsonage in Muodoslompolo. The registers in which Laestadius had written the parishioners’ names were lost forever in the flames.
The author of this book grew up a stone’s throw from the old parsonage in Pajala, where Lars Levi Laestadius lived with his family until the day he died in February 1861, age sixty-one. According to reports he was lying on a bearskin.
AFTERWORD
All Saints’ Day November 2017, and I’m walking to Pajala Cemetery to light candles on my parents’ graves. Winter has arrived and the paths are covered with a thin laye
r of snow. In the darkness thousands of lanterns twinkle with fairy-tale magic, as if all the stars in the firmament have descended among us. Here and there in the dark I make out shadows bending by gravestones and I see the flicker of flashlights.
I carry on to the older part of the churchyard and soon find my way to the famous tombstone where Lars Levi Laestadius and his wife Brita Kajsa lie. Lars Levi—who started the revivalist movement that bore his name and still today has tens of thousands of followers in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the United States. And yet the old couple’s grave is in darkness. I take my last lantern, sweep the snow aside, and place it on their stone.
* * *
—
Over time, many people have shown an interest in the charismatic pastor. Märta Edquist, Per Boreman, and Bengt Larsson have all written very noteworthy biographies. The pastor’s collected sermons have been translated into several languages and are still in use within the movement. Laestadius was a frequent essayist in the fields of botany, philosophy, theology, and Sami mythology, and many of his letters and articles have been preserved, including his autobiography in the magazine Ens ropandes röst i öknen (The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness). Thus, for those so inclined, there is a wealth of material to delve into. Over the years he has been portrayed fictionally in novels and plays. Sometimes as the fire-and-brimstone preacher; other times as an exalted mystic or leader of a social revolt. The pastor’s personality was full of contradictions, not always to his advantage. Perhaps it is precisely these many facets that appeal to us. He was aware of his own shortcomings and throughout his life he battled with the “devil of ambition” tempting him with worldly success. Who wouldn’t want to have a newly discovered plant named after him and be immortalized in botanical registers? Election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was within reach, but perhaps he was deemed too difficult to handle. The pastor’s favorite hymn was “Wretched Worm and Wanderer That I Am,” and despite his celebrity he made a point of dressing as simply as the Sami and settlers he preached to. His fiery temperament probably came from his father, who is said to have distinguished himself with “good cheer, practical jokes and flashes of wit,”* but who could also be violent under the influence of alcohol. It is clear that this upset his sensitive son. Throughout his life the pastor had difficulty with male authority, and his abhorrence of brandy presumably had its roots in his childhood.
On the other hand, he had great respect for his mother, whom he saw as devout and loving. It is no coincidence that it was a simple, poor Sami woman who inspired him to start the revivalist movement. The woman sought him out while he was holding a service in Åsele. Their conversation gave him “a foretaste of heaven’s joy,” as he writes in his autobiography, and he continues: “I shall remember penniless Maria for as long as I live and hope to meet her in a happier world.” After their encounter his sermons took on “a more elevated tone” and soon the revival movement was in full swing.
Maria, or Milla Andersson Clementsdotter, as she was actually called, can be found in the parish registers. Her life was hard; as a child she was placed with a foster family while her parents kept moving with the reindeer herd. She was reviled and beaten and she attempted to flee back to her parents dressed only in her underclothes, but was forced to return to the foster family. As an adult she married, had a daughter, and probably moved to Norway. But there the trail ends and no one has managed to trace her thereafter.
The Sami boy Jussi in the novel similarly runs away from difficult conditions at home and becomes a wanderer, matkamies in Finnish. The word appears in hymns and in many Finnish ballads as well. A matkamies is alone in the world and is often burdened by great sorrow, by the pain of living. He leaves his everyday life behind and is lost in his solitude, carrying the little he needs in his knapsack. He has no goal, the wandering is his purpose. The English equivalent is a tramp, a vagabond. When Jussi meets the pastor a different wandering begins, into education, into reading and writing. Over the last hundred and fifty years all we Tornedalians and Sami have made such a journey.
The pastor championed people’s education and progress, but at the same time he felt a grave apprehension about the future. He gave prophetic warnings: “Firstly, we will have a war in the whole of Europe on our hands. Secondly, there are major revolutions to come.”
Elsewhere he writes: “If old governments fall, there will always be some ambitious blackguard who will rise to power through popular appeal. And thus there will be no scarcity of tyrants. . . .”
Perhaps it was the vibrations of the impending twentieth century he could feel. Trenches, tanks, Hitler and Stalin, and two devastating world wars.
During the pastor’s lifetime scientific racism began to rise, something that would lead to genocide and the death camps. No one yet knew anything of this, but it does seem strange that the pastor took part in the hunt for skulls himself. In his ministry he committed the deceased to their final resting place, but that didn’t stop him, on two occasions, from assisting while graves in the abandoned churchyards in Enontekiö and Markkina were plundered. What the researchers wanted access to were “Lapp crania,” which were much sought after at this time. Those who are interested can read more in Olle Franzén’s excellent book Naturalhistorikern Lars Levi Laestadius (Lars Levi Laestadius, Natural Historian).
The pastor was buried in Kengis in 1861. Some years later his body was dug up and moved to the newly created churchyard in Pajala. Not even there was he allowed to lie in total peace. As mentioned in the epilogue, a Soviet bomb detonated next to the pastor’s grave in 1940. As it happens, this occurred on February 21, exactly seventy-five years to the day after his death.
* * *
—
And now I am standing by Lars Levi and Brita Kajsa’s tombstone. With frozen fingers I strike a match and light the candle wick, watch the little flame grow and spread its light. I think, Thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for being there.
MIKAEL NIEMI
Pajala, May 2018
* Ens ropandes röst i öknen (The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness).
