Ice

Best not to think about the joy with which she unpacked everything and arranged it all in the parsonage. It’s a feeling she’ll never have again, but she can still have order and method in her life, and perspective. It’s a job, a project, a duty, and it can be done effectively and without a lot of sloppy sentiment.

For what happens at a funeral is that the survivor is thrust back into the family and clan that she believed she had escaped. The priest’s wife sees them approaching and surrounding her and cutting her off from the parish community she has been a part of, from the new friends who are not burdened by ties to the past or by double loyalties. From the settings in which she is a free and independent individual, freed from the troubles and failings of her youth. All this will be taken from her. The dear people of the Örlands will be shoved aside by the approaching relatives, who will return her triumphantly to the scenes of her deepest defeats, where she had constantly to assert her right to a life of her own, now spent.

On the Örlands, it seems natural to avoid a petty focus on people’s shortcomings, seductively easy at times to be indulgent towards wickedness that can’t be ignored. The free-spoken Örlanders open the box a bit and out slips something about tyrannical husbands, swindlers, and adulterers, and, secondhand and only as a rumour, and in whispers, a hint about rape and bestiality. He can talk seriously with a sinner who seeks him out, he can try to help a victim, but the public condemnation that Adele expects of him is beyond his capacity.

If God is love, he loves the Örlanders, with their foxy ways, their wolfish grins and their cloven hooves, their sheep’s clothing and their borrowed feathers, their rabbit paws and tiger hearts. Rapid shifts and dodges, all of God’s spirited creation embodied in them in sparks and flashes. Snouts and paws, fur and scales, whistles and calls. An auk, an eider duck, a wagtail, a snipe. A wing brushing the brow, the round head of a seal breaking the surface. A smile spreading over all of it, quickly gone, rapidly returning. Beyond categorizing and moralizing, the priest sometimes thinks.

On the one hand, he should strongly disapprove and condemn what had occurred. On the other hand, it was a manifestation of the anarchic and pragmatic attitude towards land-based law that he found so exhilarating and admirable in his sovereign Örlanders. On the third hand, he saw more clearly than ever before that he was excluded from certain aspects of their lives, no matter how much he had convinced himself otherwise.

It breaks his heart to look at them, Sanna and Lillus, the way they love him and forgive him everything, no, do not even see that there is anything to forgive. Adoring and happy, they cling to him and love him however much he is away, however little time he has for them, however much he forbids them to stick their noses into his office, however often he goes off and leaves them. They stand and wave for as long as he’s in sight, and when he comes back after what must seem an eternity to a child, he can hear their joy even before he opens the door. There are a lot of sentimental verses written about a mother’s love, but as far as he knows, very little has been written about children’s love, which is like God’s, unconditional and boundless.

If he believes for a moment that Papa will follow his instructions, he is quickly disabused of his error. Petter has at least had the foresight to have the letter returned to him for his signature, which has kept his father from immediately mailing it off to America, beaming. What his father returns to him is a terribly long, tightly written letter. Even without knowing English, it is easy to see that Petter’s instructions have not been followed. Papa begins by writing four pages about Negro slavery, which he opposes. Then he writes three pages about his own difficult years as an immigrant in America. Next, he writes about the weather in this part of the world, which has given him rheumatism, destroyed his nerves, and brought the life of Mrs Cain’s son to an end. On the last page, when he has tired of writing, he has scraped together a few lines about the funeral, the plantings, and Christian hope.

And second, even more shameful, because he unconsciously assumed that the seaman came from a background where his people slaved on cotton plantations and could neither read nor write. How could he be so thoughtless, so prejudiced? What reason does this woman with the lovely handwriting and the friendly message have to believe that he will put her cash gift to proper use?

“Khleb!” says Doctor Gyllen and sits down, because the only thing she misses from Russia is the bread, the loaves of dark bread that keep that afflicted people on its feet. On Åland, loaves are not a part of the culture, but it does belong to the pastor’s mainland heritage, and here it is, thick slices of splendid bread along with home-churned butter piled on a plate, something the suffering Russian people have had to live without for years. “Ah! Kvass!” she says when the small beer is carried in, suddenly realizing that she has missed that, too.

The pastor’s wife says indignantly that they no longer have any extra bedlinen at all—not a thing!—because of all the people they have in the house. It’s not a home any more, it’s a kolkhoz!