“Thank you!” Petter says. “What a welcome offer, but are you sure it’s no trouble?”
“No trouble at all,” says the Coast Guardsman. “When you live on an island, you’ve got to chase your chances.”
To the Kummels’ ears this sounds wonderfully original, for they haven’t yet learned that this saying is a part of the standard local idiom. It’s a way of articulating the obvious nature of neighbourly help, a way of expressing any number of independent measures and creative solutions that do not always fit strictly within the limits of land-based law. The priest picks up the scent of an independence he has longed for all his landlocked life, and it ignites a great feeling of friendship towards the still nameless Brage Söderberg. He has come on the wings of dawn and made a laborious expedition seem weightless as a feather.
But the priest’s wife gets a jolt. She jumps up and pulls a sheet of paper from one bag and a pen from another. Standing at the sideboard, she writes frantically, stamps her feet and calls out apologetically, “Just another few seconds!” Brage Söderberg looks surprised and Petter begins to suspect that there’s maybe no need for such a rush. But his wife has no time to reflect on that possibility. The urgency that she believes must motivate the Coast Guardsman drives them off at good speed and, nearly running, she tells her husband all the things he must remember to buy, ask for, and place on order. She has certainly forgotten much, she cries, waving the list in the air, so he’ll have to use his wits, summon up all his common sense, think for himself. Now they just need to get moving, get a move on, away, and does he have the ration coupons? No, dear heaven! “Sorry, I’ll run,” and she runs back up at full speed.
“Wow!” Brage Söderberg does not know them well enough to comment, but Pastor Kummel, a little embarrassed, says his wife is afraid they’re intruding on his work day. She’ll calm down once they get organized a bit. While they wait, he inspects the Coast Guard cutter with genuine interest and the two of them discuss horsepower and seaworthiness, and the priest hopes he may ask for advice when he has the means to buy a motorboat, something he eagerly anticipates doing. But by then his wife is already back, a little short of breath, her cheeks red. She gives him not just the ration cards but also, triumphantly, his wallet, which she has found lying on the kitchen table. In among the dishes! Must he always unburden himself of his wallet as soon as he enters the house? Couldn’t he just leave it in the pocket of his coat, thin as it is? Anyway, thanks to her attentiveness and presence of mind, he will not have to shame them by asking for credit on his very first visit to the store.
But now get going! And as the boat growls away across the sound, it seems to move more slowly than Mona Kummel, who steams back up to the parsonage one more time. But when she’s out of sight up on the crown of the hill, she slows down just a bit. She is alone, although there’s a roaring in her ears from all the engine noises and all the talk and the lack of sleep these last twenty-four hours, and she allows herself to catch her breath and gaze out at the church, which stands there red-capped in a hint of spring greenery against a blazing blue sea and bright sky. Beautiful, she lets herself think. Fresh air, though a little raw. I’ll need to bundle up Sanna properly until midsummer!
She also thinks about how they now have a house and a home and a life of their own, and with joy in her heart she goes into the parsonage and starts dragging the furniture into place and unpacking their belongings. But first, in her own kitchen, she reaches out her hand and takes the last slice of bread, heavy with butter, which maybe she should have offered to the Coast Guardsman, although she didn’t think of it at the time. From now on, she’ll churn her own butter, bake her own bread, do everything one does on a small farm. She sees that the verger’s Signe has carried in a pail of milk, still warm, and if Petter can get some flour, she’ll make pancakes, and if he brings home some potatoes, all will be well. This evening he can row out and lay a net by the dock, because they bought the old priest’s boat and his perch net at auction. (Where their agents were Petter’s much too chatty and therefore inattentive and easily cheated relatives, but disappointments of that kind are only to be expected.)
Mona Kummel loves her husband. Love between young married couples is hardly uncommon, but the glow in her breast is something more. It’s hard to hold inside her chest, hard to keep it from breaking out like a welder’s flame and singeing the hair and eyebrows of everyone who comes near and encroaches on his time and on the space that is rightfully hers. Because the priest is so often away or occupied with church business, she uses industrious activity to control the flame.
Sanna, who is now awake, knows she’s better off sitting quietly in her crib than chasing out into the whirlwind now rushing through the house. Mama dashes past the open door and sees that Sanna is up. “Sleep, go to sleep!” she calls. “Mama’s here.” There’s a scraping and squeaking as she shoves the big sideboard into place in the parlour. A momentary pause while she judges the distance between the two corners of the wall, then another scrape and squeak so it’s exactly in the middle, to the centimetre. Then the table and chairs are put in place. The boards of the packing crate break open with a crack, and she begins to unpack and fill the sideboard. The sounds move farther away and Sanna cries in her loneliness. Mama is so far away in the strange house that she has to cry as loudly as she can and stand up in her bed and scream “Mama! Mama!” at the top of her lungs before Mama finally hears.
“Hush, Sanna!” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Do you want to get up?” Quickly she lifts Sanna from her crib and carries her through the parlour and the dining room into the kitchen. She feels the back of her pants and is pleased that she’s managed to get out the potty and plant Sanna on it before she’s had an accident. “Good girl!” says Mama, and suddenly Sanna is sitting on her throne and looking around. She’s seeing many things for the first time, and there is much to remark upon, but she doesn’t know the words. “Beh” maybe, or “Deh”. “Deh! Deh!” she says and points. “Yes,” Mama says. “Window! We’ll get curtains when we can. Paper curtains are so tiresome, I think the kitchen will have to wait until we’ve got some fabric.”
“Deh!” Sanna says. But Mama is lying down looking for signs of mice on the kitchen cupboard floor. “You never know what to expect in an old house like this with big cracks between the floorboards,” she confides to Sanna. “So we’ll need to get a cat right away. Would Sanna like a kitty?” “Deh!” says Sanna. “We’ll get one,” Mama decides. She has her hands full, because she wants everything to be ready when Petter gets back, so he’ll just stand there open-mouthed. As she scampers back and forth on her very nimble feet, she wonders if, as usual, he’s letting himself be talked to death so he’ll never get away, and simultaneously she hopes he won’t be in too much of a hurry so she’ll have time to get everything in order.
She’s hungry, too, because no one can work for hours on end without eating something. There’s milk in the pitcher, but not even Sanna lives on milk alone. She’s crying now, tiny and thin as she is, and soon she’ll be crying inconsolably, while their supposed protector, for whom Mona has left a salaried position, is off in the village making himself popular with the locals. Mona fills a pot with water the reception committee carried in and gets a fire going under it. There’s a good draught in the kitchen stove, but then there’s a good draught on this whole blustery island, not a tree to windward of the chimney. Out here, she instructs Sanna, you can’t open the damper more than a crack or the firewood will get pulled right up the chimney!
“Wah,” says Sanna, and Mama takes out the box of cold food. She’s not so dumb and inexperienced that she’s let herself be transported to a desert island without the wherewithal to throw up a barricade against trouble and want. There’s tea, which she and Petter will enjoy at the table in the parlour this evening, and sweet rusks, one of which she moistens with a little milk that she’s warmed on the now hot stove and feeds to Sanna. “Good!” she commands, and Sanna eats and stops crying. “Papa will be
home soon, and then we’ll make some real dinner. Then Mama will go out to the barn, and tomorrow will be just an ordinary day.”
Just an ordinary day is what she longs for most of all, after the years of war, after Petter’s first assignment as a substitute preacher, housed in one room and kitchen with wife and newborn baby. A routine of their own is the loveliest dream in the world for people who have had to adapt to all manner of changing circumstances, all of them out of their control. Every family in Finland is calling for a home of its own, and this one has come sailing along and landed right here at the end of the Baltic Sea. And now it’s furnished. In a couple of hours, Mona Kummel has made it habitable, and the only thing missing is the honest smell of cooking food. Mona cannot relax. With Sanna on her arm, she wanders from window to window and looks out. She has water boiling like mad in two pots so that whatever he brings home can be cooked without wasting a moment.
“It’s awful how fast the time goes!” she says to Sanna. “It’ll soon be time to do the milking and I haven’t even started on the food. Where is he?”
“Geh,” says Sanna. “Papa-papa-papa.”
“He’ll be here soon,” says Mama. And when she’s said that a number of times, in he comes, knees buckling under the load, while the Coast Guard heads back to base. Mona had thought they’d make a tour of the house, but when Petter has picked up Sanna and begun to express his admiration, she cries out that they haven’t time, they need to eat something. Signe will be there any minute, and then they have to do the milking. “Well, what were you able to get?”
Petter is pleased with himself. Praise God, what a provisioning it’s been. “If I weren’t married to you, I would have proposed to Adele Bergman,” he says. “What a woman! She sits there on her throne like some higher being that everyone looks up to. Guess what she did! She called me into her office and invited me to sit down. I realized right away that she would talk and I would speak when spoken to. She said she imagined that we needed practically everything in the way of groceries except milk, and so this morning she’d set aside some things for us. Because otherwise it would all be gone! ‘It’s astonishing,’ she said, ‘the way people grab stuff just because certain things are no longer rationed. When they needed coupons at least we could estimate the rate of consumption.’
“I sat there stunned and thought to myself that when they ran out of everything, then Adele Bergman still had a secret little reserve that she portioned out to specially deserving people. And now we’re among them. I have flour, Mona. I have sugar. I have rolled oats and semolina. I have powdered eggs. I have peas. I have herring for this evening, and then we’ll fish for ourselves. I have salt. I have crispbread until we can do our own baking. I even have a loaf of fresh bread as a welcoming gift. That wonderful woman had even arranged for a sack of potatoes from the village until we can find some closer by.”
“Give!” says Mona, and a number of potatoes are energetically scrubbed in the kitchen basin and dumped into boiling water, followed by a shower of salt. “Twenty minutes!” she shouts. “Where’s the flour? I’ll make a white sauce. I brought pepper with us. Put that jar of herring on the table! What wonderful flour! I’ll make pancakes, we’re famished. Oh it’ll be so great to have a real meal. Can you wait? Take a piece of crispbread!” She works frantically, whips the batter, makes the sauce, throws plates and knives and forks on the table, starts making pancakes in the little frying pan. “If only we had some jam,” she says, and her husband smiles to himself and pulls out a little jar of apple sauce. Apple sauce! The first commercial apple sauce since the war. My goodness!
No one who’s seen Mona Kummel dash about would ever suspect that she can actually sit still—and longer than you might think, once she’s got the food on the table and the family in place. They eat herring and good potatoes with white sauce, and they wolf down the pancakes with sugar and apple sauce. They eat a great deal for such a small family. So much that they go on sitting when they’re done, in the gentle intoxication that a hot meal can offer when it’s several hours late. Sanna wears a melting smile, with a border of sugar and apple sauce around her mouth. Mona asks Petter about the people he saw at the store, what they looked like, what they said, and he tells her how polite and friendly they all were. Everyone shook his hand and welcomed him and spoke to him so freely and easily that it was a joy. “People are easy to talk to here,” he says. “What good people! And what a day we’ve had! My head is spinning. Hard to believe that it’s just one day since we stood on the pier in Åbo wondering if the boat would ever get under way.”
He glances in towards the parlour and on towards the bedroom that lies beyond, for now he wants to see what miracles his wife has performed. “Well why not? Come on, although I’m expecting Signe any minute and I would have liked to clear the table before she got here. But come.”
Papa picks up Sanna and they go on their tour of inspection— everything in its place, everything put to rights. “How did you find the time? How did you manage? My dear, you shouldn’t have moved the sideboard and the table by yourself! Here I’m away just a few short hours and when I come back—order from chaos.”
“Well, well,” his wife says. “The book boxes still aren’t unpacked, because you’ll have to use the boards to build a bookcase. And your suitcase and office things, I’ve just put them in your study. You can unpack them yourself while I’m milking the cows. Where is Signe? It’s almost six o’clock.”
She looks out the window, towards the water and towards the land, and the priest follows her gaze and sees how pretty it all is, naked granite and a light green cloud like smoke between the hills this early May. Evening sun, and the church roof glowing with a subtly different shade of red than it had this morning. In the churchyard, black and white crosses, an entire congregation.
“Do you think she doesn’t dare come in?” Mona wonders.
“Of course not,” Petter says. “We’ve already met them, and they know we don’t bite.”
“Well, yes,” Mona says, “but we should have said a time. There are all sorts of things I should be doing, and here I am just going from window to window.” But as she goes, she clears the dishes from the table and pours wonderfully hot water into the dish tub. “So I guess I’ll just get started,” she says. “Maybe it’s a way of getting her to come, as soon as I’m up to my elbows in the dishes.”
“I’ll fetch some more water,” he says. “And if she really doesn’t dare come in, I’ll see her. The well is down there by the garden somewhere, if I remember rightly.” He goes and comes back without seeing any sign of Signe, but the water is soft and sweet with a lot of meltwater, golden brown the way well water often is in the spring.
Mona finishes the dishes and puts Sanna on the potty for another session, and still Signe doesn’t come. “If they weren’t so friendly, I’d be really annoyed,” she says. “Do you think she misunderstood me? Do you think I should go to the barn by myself? But of course then she’ll be hurt that I didn’t wait for her. What a nuisance! I so wish we could be on our own.”
Mona Kummel is dying to go out to the cow barn. In the beginning, the congregation is going to think her enthusiasm for the two cows and three ewes is play-acting, to show that she’s trying to share their everyday lives in every way, but in fact there is no one on the Örlands with a more fanatical partiality for livestock than the pastor’s wife. As a child on her family’s farm, she liked the creatures in the barn and the stable rather more than the ones in the house, and even now that she’s got her beloved husband and, through him, a family of her own, she still loves the animals that first made her human. But this is not a sentimental attachment or romantic nonsense, because Mona Kummel sends animals to slaughter, punishes those that misbehave, and never says that she loves cows. She just keeps them with a passion. Rational and realistic as she is, she loves animals for their contribution to self-sufficiency and because these cows guarantee her family a life of its own.
She can’t rush out to the cow barn now, b
ecause she’s agreed to go with the verger’s Signe, but how is it possible that the verger’s Signe doesn’t show up at the hour when all of Finland, yes, all of Scandinavia, milks its cows?
“Maybe they milk their cows later here, since they don’t deliver their milk to a creamery?” says her husband, who sometimes shows evidence of a practical intelligence that amazes his wife. She admits that he may be right, and says it might be just as well to put Sanna to bed now. On the other hand, she needs to be washed first. There’s warm water on the stove, which it would be a shame not to use, so maybe after all … “If Signe comes you’ll have to take over.”
There is time to wash Sanna and tuck her in and give her a good-night blessing before Signe arrives. And not just Signe but the verger with her. They come in quite calmly, with no apology for being late, which in their own eyes they are not. The verger asks how the day has gone. He supposes that they’re tired and says that he and Signe can go to the barn by themselves so they can rest a bit.
“Out of the question!” Mona says. She is ablaze with anticipation. “It will be great fun to meet our cows. I saw that the pails had been washed—thank you so much, Signe—so let’s just grab them and go!”
It’s possible that the verger and Signe had in mind a somewhat longer prelude to the milking, but they adapt smoothly and follow her out into the passage where she makes an energetic racket with the milk pails and the strainer and grabs a package of cotton filters. “There’s soap in the cow barn?” she says, and Signe nods. The pastor explains that he’d be happy to come along but that someone has to stay inside with Sanna this first evening in case she wakes up and is frightened in her new surroundings.
Mona leads the procession to the cow barn. She’s wearing a milking smock from the old days, and she’s slipped into a pair of old, worn shoes in the passage, but on the inside she’s dressed for a ball. She opens the door and steps straight into the cow barn, no milk house of the kind she’s used to. Two stalls for the cows, an empty calf’s crib, and against the far wall a sheep fold with three ewes and a partition full of butting heads and wobbly legs that add up to a total of five lambs.
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