by Lars Sund
Celia was just nineteen when she married. As to the bridegroom, the less said about him the better. He came from the mainland or, to be precise, from one of the big islands in the inner archipelago. To the minds of Fagerö people they amount to the same thing: anywhere the other side of Norrfjärden and Örsund counts as the mainland.
The bridegroom is also reckoned to have been considerably older than Celia.
Young girls are like driftwood on the wide blue waters of life and there is no telling where wind and waves will take them. If the worst comes to the worst, they may find themselves cast up on a dark and cruel shore. That was to be Celia’s unhappy fate.
But she was given a grand island wedding. Nearly a hundred guests had been invited and their boats were packed gunwale to gunwale in Kungshamn harbour so there wasn’t space left for a dinghy. Helmi from Gloskär, the most celebrated cook and caterer in all the south-western islands, had come to Grannas a day in advance with her assistants and her pots and pans and ladles and laid on a feast of such abundance that it would have fed three times the number of guests. They produced cold fillets of pickled Baltic herring, buckling shining like brass and sweetly juniper-scented, Baltic herring of other varieties (sweet pickled herring, glazier’s herring, herring salad), sardines in tins carrying a picture of the Norwegian king, salmon (poached, smoked and gravlax), salted whitefish sliced so thin as to be translucent, beetroot salad, aspic jelly trembling expectantly in its mould, home-made liver pâté, meatballs, chipolata sausages, hot-smoked ham, roast elk as dark red in colour as the finest Honduran mahogany, tomato salad, salted gherkins, fresh radishes, Swiss cheese, Emmenthal cheese and aquavit cheese. They even provided some of the finest delicacies of traditional island cuisine: blood pudding, roast seabirds, preserved seal flippers. Among the hot dishes served were pot roast, beef stew and boiled fresh flounder, with the traditional stewed prunes as dessert.
Oh, how your scribe’s mouth waters and his belly rumbles after writing that list! And he’s thirsty too!
Not that the guests at Celia’s wedding had reason to be thirsty for long. You could choose between lemonade and juice and beer and red wine – and there was an army of waiters ready to pour schnapps and aquavit as soon as anyone banged a glass down on the table.
As they walked back to the reception after the ceremony in the church, dozens of shotguns were fired off to salute the bridal couple: that’s the custom on Fagerö and with guns banging and cracking every inch of the way you’d have thought the Russians had invaded. The bridal toasts were drunk out in the yard, the newlyweds were celebrated with poems and the telegrams were read out. Meanwhile a couple of fiddlers kept their bows busy.
After a short interval to digest the meal and a break for people to follow the demands of nature, the pastor bade them farewell and the dancing started. A temporary floor had been laid in the courtyard at Grannas and a band – the Tip-Tops – had been brought over from the mainland to provide music. Still wearing her sparkling bridal crown, Celia blushed bright red when her new husband led her out for the bridal waltz to the cheers, whistles and applause of onlookers.
In no time at all the dance floor was swarming with bodies circling like a drift net full of herring, all flowery dresses and black jackets, red faces and smiling mouths and stamping feet. The Tip-Tops played waltzes and foxtrots, slowfox and tango: “The Lily of the Valley’s Farewell”, “Red Sails in the Sunset”, “Besame mucho”, “T’was on the Isle of Capri that I Found Her”, “Tango Jalousie”. The respectable matrons of Fagerö delivered themselves into the safe and strong arms of their husbands; big boys invited giggling girls; patriarchs – their vision dimmed by cataracts and limbs stiff with rheumatism – took grey-haired grannies by the waist and stepped out on to the floor, for those who can still walk can still dance, even though things may not go with the same verve as in the days of their youth.
Excited children shrieked and scuttled around like birch leaves in autumn. Men slipped away surreptitiously to consult the hip flasks they had brought with them. Two youths came to blows behind the woodshed – it’s not clear why – but fortunately they were separated before any serious blood was spilled. While going to the privy in a state of inebriated confusion one wedding guest, whose name we’ll refrain from mentioning, managed to drop his wallet into the latrine pit and on attempting to rescue it came close to falling in completely. He was taken down to the shore and cleaned up as far as possible. One of the storm lanterns that had been hung up to illuminate the dance floor crashed to the ground, the petrol caught fire and the dancing had to be interrupted for the short while it took to put the fire out.
In other words, everything went as it should at a good island wedding.
Just after midnight the bride’s father encountered a stranger at the gate.
It was, of course, traditional for uninvited visitors to appear outside the house at the height of the party and call for a viewing of the bride. And so Celia’s father, Ruben Dahlström, assumed at first that this was such a visitor and was about to invite him to join the dance – that, too, was a tradition.
As Ruben started to go down the porch steps a strange shudder ran along his spine and his skin tingled with gooseflesh. It was the same kind of feeling as you get on a warm summer’s day when passing the Dragon’s Hole on the road between Söder Karlby and Storby – all at once you become aware of the wintry breath of the chill water from that spring.
On the bottom step Ruben hesitated.
The Tip-Tops were playing “Kotka’s Rose”. The vocalist’s voice sounded distant and toneless.
Ruben Dahlström had a half-century and more under his belt. In his youth as a seaman he had seen his fair share of the world, and travellers, as we know, often encounter strange things. Even on his home patch he had experienced things that cannot easily be explained away by reason alone. On two occasions, for instance, he had met an undine – both times were at Torskharun, but with a ten-year interval between – and each time she had warned him of approaching storms. And when he was out at the Pålgrundet herring fishing in autumn he had often heard the seamen drowned in the wreck of the schooner Ajatar humming their monotonous laments. He had met a witch’s familiar in his own woodshed one bitterly cold February night twenty years ago – a little fellow who glared at him with evil yellow eyes and gave a shrill scream. As a result of experiences of this kind, Ruben Dahlström had come to the conclusion that there are a good many inexplicable phenomena between heaven and earth, and people need to be on their guard against them. Premonitions of evil should certainly not be dismissed out of hand. With these thoughts in mind he walked down to the gate to take a closer look at the stranger.
It has to be admitted that he walked more slowly and took shorter strides than he usually did.
Ruben did not recognise the man and he couldn’t actually see much of the fellow’s face since it was largely concealed by a broad-brimmed slouch hat. It was, moreover, quite a dark night, it being well into the month of July by this point. The only features that Ruben could pick out were two gleaming eyes and a full black beard. The stranger was wearing a long grey coat and he gave off a slight but clearly perceptible smell of something bitter, rather reminiscent of wormwood.
“Good evening,” Ruben Dahlström greeted him cautiously.
“I em hier to tanz mit te bride,” the stranger said with a strong accent that reminded Ruben of an old bosun from Reval he had sailed with on a Swedish freighter.
The stranger tried to push his way in through the gate. Ruben noticed that he walked with a limp – his left leg wasn’t like a normal human leg in that it didn’t have a proper foot. The shin visible below his trouser leg was covered in hair like the feathering above a horse’s hoof. By this point Ruben Dahlström had a fair idea who he was dealing with.
Throughout the south-west archipelago there are stories of a stranger who comes to any farm celebrating a wedding and asks to dance with the bride. The hospitable and unsuspecting hosts invite the stranger in. He
walks with a limp, but no one is bothered by that. At the stranger’s request the musicians strike up a breathless schottische. He dances with the bride and the dance becomes faster and faster. His lame foot strikes the floor with a thunderous echo and then, at last, the wedding guests realise who the stranger is and they are terror-stricken.
Ruben Dahlström had heard this story many times and he also knew how it ends.
He suddenly felt cold sweat breaking out on his forehead; his mouth was dry as an ash bucket and his knees gave way.
“Are you goink to ask me to the tanz oder nicht?” the stranger asked, his voice sounding like chalk scraping across glass.
We don’t know where Ruben Dahlström found the courage to act as he did because none of those involved in what followed would ever say a word about it. It seems likely that Ruben’s paternal love conquered his fear, for love can drive a man, however meek, to undreamt-of deeds. Perhaps in his mind’s eye at that moment he saw his daughter dancing the bridal waltz, her face flushed, her eyes shining and her black hair gleaming like the spring plumage of the scoter.
Celia was his youngest child and he loved her with all his heart.
Ruben Dahlström took a deep breath and stepped in front of the stranger. He knew that the stranger had to be expressly invited before he could pass through the gate, but he also knew that he would be in great danger himself unless he invited the stranger in.
In desperation Ruben Dahlström sought some way out of his difficulty. He raised his eyes to the deep blue of the heavens but all he saw there were the stars, white, cold and distant. From deep in the stranger’s throat came a growl like that of an old dog. There is a saying that necessity teaches a naked woman to weave, and now an idea suddenly came to Ruben.
“Well now …” he started, but his voice creaked and jammed like a rusty winding handle on a well and he was forced to start again. “Well now … we couldn’t ask a fine gentleman like you to dance without having a drink first.”
“So gib me a trink!”
“No doubt a gentleman like you is a true connoisseur. Schnapps won’t do – brandy is the drink for you!”
The stranger gestured impatiently: “Ja gut – but don’t waste time!”
“Wait here a moment,” Ruben said, trying to keep his voice as steady as possible.
With trembling legs he ran up the track and practically fell into the kitchen at Bengfols. His brothers Axel and Vilhelm were sitting at the table along with Isaksson, Leander Karlsson and various other worthies, all enjoying some peace and quiet and savouring their coffee with a dram. They were astonished to see Ruben charge past into the parlour where the master of the house kept his drinks cupboard. He returned with several bottles of brandy tucked under his arm and grabbed a couple of glasses from the draining board in passing. He looked at the men wild-eyed.
“You must come with me! It’s a matter of life and death – and not just for Celia!”
That’s all he said before charging out through the door like a man in urgent need of a pee.
The group around the kitchen table looked at one another in bemusement. Praise the Lord that there is no such thing as a true islander who ever says no to a drink, particularly when the drink on offer is the best sort of smuggled German brandy. The men rose to their feet and, as one, tramped out after Ruben. The latter had already reached the gate, where he pulled the cork out of the first bottle of brandy, shoved a glass into the stranger’s hand and poured generous nips for both of them.
“Skål!” Ruben said, emptying his glass in one. The stranger followed suit.
“Right, now iss time to …” the stranger began.
Ruben interrupted him: “No, no, not so fast, sir! You need one for the other leg, too, if you’re going to join the dance.”
Ruben refilled the glasses and they drank.
“And now one for the third leg!”
By the ninth or tenth leg the brandy seemed to be having some small effect on the stranger, but Ruben was swaying like a buoy in a heavy sea and clearly couldn’t be counted on any longer. So his brother Vilhelm, who had soon recognised what was at stake, moved in. He stepped in front of the stranger with an unopened bottle of brandy and announced: “Now the bride’s uncle wants to drink a toast with you!”
The stranger had no choice but to join in.
He could drink all right, no doubt about that, but the Fagerö men weren’t exactly novices, either. And they had the advantage that there were a lot of them. When – after a very respectable number of skols – Vilhelm had to fall out, his brother Axel took over. And after Axel came Leander and after Leander came Isaksson. The stranger’s slow progress was marked by a line of empty bottles along the side of the track, and eventually the brandy took its inevitable toll even on him.
“Ach … enough … nicht more …” he slurred with the glass halfway to his lips.
His mouth fell open and a string of spittle hung from his black beard.
He tried to take a step forward, staggered and collapsed on the sandy track.
A sharp smell of wormwood rose from him. The men could see that he had a black hoof like a horse where his left foot should have been.
“Lord Jesus!” Ruben Dahlström whispered, suddenly sober. Leander, meanwhile, was vomiting noisily in a flower bed by the porch.
“Wha … wha … what we going to do with him?” Axel wondered.
Ruben thought carefully.
“We’ll take him down to Stjitsten and throw him in the sea. It’s really deep there,” he said finally.
They heaved the unconscious stranger up on to a wheelbarrow and pushed him to Stjitsten. Just to be on the safe side they filled his coat pockets with rocks before throwing him in the sea, where he sank like a lump of cast iron.
Neither Ruben Dahlström nor any of the others involved ever said a word about what they had done that night. And Ruben never went near Stjitsten again as long as he lived.
Celia never knew anything about her salvation. She went to the mainland with her husband to be with him in sickness and in health – and to obey him, as the apostle Paul commands women to do.
And now the great wheel of the year turned on its axle, and then it turned again. Back at Grannas they didn’t hear from Celia very often, nor did she come to visit, not even at Christmas. What everyone thought was, well, she doesn’t have time, it can’t be easy coming to a big farm on the mainland as a young wife and not knowing any of the people around you.
It was in her third year away that Celia wrote and said she had given birth to a child, a healthy boy who was to be called Albert after his father. The people at Grannas hadn’t even known she was pregnant. They waited for invitations to the christening party, but no invitations arrived.
The wheel of the year turned almost a full circle again to the very worst and darkest time of the year, just before snow cloaks the skerries and ice locks the sea.
That was when Celia returned to Fagerö with her child in her arms. She was carrying nothing else.
“I can’t take any more,” she said.
Celia had sailed into marriage like a proud new-rigged ketch and now, storm-damaged, demasted and with shattered timbers, she was coming home. She had left her youth back on the mainland, along with the light in her eyes and the glow on her cheeks. Grey hairs streaked the black and she was wasting away so that her collarbone protruded bonily like an old woman’s.
Celia would not tell anyone what she had been through. When her father asked she shook her head and said: “I’ll never talk about it this side of the grave.”
She asked them to light the sauna for her. She went there alone, carefully closed the door after her and stayed there a long time. She used a lot of water.
She would let no one touch her child. When Ruben Dahlström wanted to hold him she would scream and clutch the child to her breast. She would look at her father with eyes that made him recoil. And yet she knew – of course, she knew – that no man could be kinder and love children more than her father.
Whatever it was that went on during Celia’s short marriage remains a mystery. Ruben Dahlström wanted to report it to the police. He was even prepared to go over to the mainland himself and call her husband to account. Celia pleaded with her father not to take action. She pleaded so persistently that he couldn’t help wondering whether, in spite of everything, she still had feelings for her husband.
The issue never came to a head anyway, because Celia’s husband chose to forestall both the police and Ruben Dahlström.
The night before Christmas he went into the woods, taking a strong hempen rope with him. He must have gone deep into the woods because he wasn’t found until Holy Innocents’ Day on the 28th, after soldiers from the nearby barracks had been called in to help with the search. When Celia heard the news she muttered, “The Devil took his own sooner than expected.”
She spoke so quietly that no one but Ruben Dahlström heard her. He felt as if he had been struck between his shoulder blades with an oar.
As a daughter of the house Celia carried on living at Grannas. Rumours and talk surrounded her just as a beast in the field is surrounded by buzzing flies and biting midges. It was inevitable that her case would come up before the court of Fagerö moralists, and opinions were divided. There were those who argued that Celia herself bore part of the blame for the way things had turned out. It’s rarely just one person’s fault when two people fall out, and an abused woman isn’t always the innocent party. And even if her husband isn’t good to her, she has no right to walk out of the marriage. Didn’t Jesus Christ himself say, “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder?”
Those who came to Celia’s defence, however, countered with the fact that the mainland is not like the islands, and mainlanders are a strange and peculiar breed among whom there are many criminals, hooligans and lunatics – you only have to read the papers to see that. Celia had a responsibility both for herself and for her son and if she had only had the sense to marry a decent island boy, none of this would have happened.