Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  But they are still standing, shifting their weight from one foot to the other when the pastor’s wife comes in with the coffeepot, and they let her fill their cups before they’ll approach the table. They only sit when she commands, “Please! If you don’t sit down your coffee will get cold!” Then at last they take their places and begin to relax and grow cheerful, pass around the sugar bowl and carefully pour big dollops of thick, yellow cream from the pitcher. The sandwiches look delicious. The pastor’s wife has baked bread like they have on the mainland, churned butter from cream she’s saved up all week, sliced cheese from the Co-op on half the sandwiches and put sausage on the rest and garnished all of them with parsley from the kitchen garden that has survived the winter. The food is good and plentiful, and the rolls she serves with the third cup of coffee do her credit. They are all appreciative, and the conversation runs freely and smoothly. The pastor has many questions to ask and they are happy to answer them. It will be some time before he realizes that there are two factions, equal in strength, and that they have seated themselves by village groups. The two blocks communicate only amongst themselves, but he doesn’t know this yet. He sees them only as incomparably friendly, easy to talk to, altogether excellent people.

  “I’m absolutely overwhelmed by such a warm reception,” he says yet again. “To think that so many wanted to come to church today. And such singing!”

  “Well of course everyone wanted to come and see the new priest,” Lydia Manström points out. “And they were pleased with what they saw. We can hope it will mean an upswing in church attendance.”

  It’s almost like a little meeting of the vestry as they go through items that the next real meeting should take up. They also enlighten him about the customs of the parish. It’s good that he doesn’t want to change everything, the way certain previous priests have done. They do not raise any immediate problems. That will wait until they all know each other better.

  This is only a first courtesy visit, but they take so much time that the pastor’s wife begins to wonder if they’re expecting further refreshments. They must realize that almost all food is still rationed, and that the two of them have already used way too much of their allowance. If they’re to go on at this rate, they won’t make it. Adele Bergman at least must understand, she thinks, and looks at her in desperation. Adele Bergman gets the message and understands, has already calculated the approximate expenditure of coupons and wonders how they’re going to manage. Although they’ve got cows in the pasture and fish in the sea. She gives the pastor’s wife a friendly look and hears the little girl complaining in the bedroom.

  “May I come say hello to the pastor’s daughter?” she asks, following Mona into the bedroom. Mona lifts Sanna from her baby bed, feels her backside and determines that she’s dry. “But now I’m going to the kitchen to put her on the potty before she has another accident.”

  Exactly as Mona had thought, Adele Bergman has used Sanna as an excuse to get a look at the bedroom. But be my guest. It too is very proper. Two beds with light brown bedspreads, each with a chair as a nightstand, and a bureau. Still a bit bare, but they’ll have time to acquire a variety of things. A little crucifix hangs above the bureau, and that pleases Adele Bergman. This young priest seems thoroughly Christian every day of the week, and God knows that such a priest is what this parish needs.

  She helps to get the vestry and the council up and out, and just as she’d calculated, the organist offers her a ride in his boat and promises to put her ashore at the Co-op dock, since of course Elis took their boat home much earlier. “It’s been a good day,” she says confidentially, both to the organist as they sit talking pleasantly above the clatter of the engine, and to Elis when she gets home.

  Chapter Five

  IT FALLS TO THE ORGANIST to carefully instruct the priest about the divisions within the parish. He treats the subject lightly, as if it were only a question of a little good-natured rivalry between the two equal halves of the community, and as if he himself stood above the whole struggle and looked down on it with amused condescension. But he grows more serious as he speaks, the furrow between his eyebrows deepens, and his face darkens.

  “There are people in the east villages who wouldn’t pull a west villager from a hole in the ice if they were drowning,” he says.

  “It can’t be as bad as all that!” says the pastor, trying to laugh it all off. “And if it’s an east villager who’s fallen through the ice? What would the west villagers do?”

  But the organist, who had stood above the fray, now says “we”. “We’d probably pull him out, most of us. But you never know. There’s so much personal rancour in a place like this. Real hatred, to tell you the truth. Only a few. But it can poison a whole community.”

  “How does it express itself?” the priest asks, hesitantly.

  “Indirectly. So the divisions are passed down from one generation to the next. The local council consists of two equal blocks, which makes it almost impossible to get anything important done. The chairman has the deciding vote, and pity the poor devil who gets elected chairman. There’s always pressure, not so much from the other side as from his own side. Same thing in the vestry. I’m the chairman there,” he adds, and now he smiles as if he couldn’t stand to look serious. Here on these islands, everyone wears a happy face. That much the priest has already learned.

  The priest smiles too. “I’m sincerely happy to hear it,” he says from the heart. “I’m glad you told me all this. What do you think it will mean for me as pastor?”

  The organist considers. “You’re different from the man we had before. He was older and more cunning, if I may use that word. Over the years, he grew very adept at playing off one side against the other. He knew what to say to get the outcomes he wanted. Don’t forget that in the parish council, you’re the chairman, and you need to chair those meetings forcefully. As for the vestry, it would be a good idea for us to talk things over in advance so I know where you stand.”

  The priest is not as dumb as he may look. He takes the hint, amused and interested. “So you can explain the hidden tensions and intrigues to me and help me figure out what I think. Thank you. Yes. You’re a great help, and I hope we can work together in future, too, and talk to each other frankly.”

  The organist is pleased by the priest’s appreciation and confidence. “I’m telling you this also because you need to know that there’s always a terrible tug of war for the pastor. Of course the church is supposed to be neutral, but this isn’t about politics. It’s personal. If you can make friends with the pastor, you can draw him to your side and get his ear.”

  “Oh, my,” the pastor says. “I can see that I’ve already been drawn towards the west villages. You and your family and the estimable Adele Bergman and Doctor Gyllen and the Hindrikses. And the verger and Signe, although they live so close to the church that we can almost count them as neutral. But it can’t be helped. I don’t intend to sit here like a hermit and treat both sides with suspicion. I mean to go out and meet people in all the villages! You know, I didn’t pick up any of this when the council and the vestry were here for coffee. Everyone was so nice, and I liked every one of you.”

  “Of course you did,” the organist says. “There’s nothing wrong with us one at a time, we’re all very ‘nice’, as you say. That’s why this division is so deplorable. Because it divides people who could be best friends. Instead we have to be cautious and on guard. It’s a shame.”

  This has been a lot for him to swallow, the organist can see that, but the priest is looking ahead. “It’s good you’ve told me all this,” he says. “But now in the beginning I think I’ll act as if I didn’t know a thing. Even though you’ve told me, I’m sure I don’t yet understand all of it in depth. First I need to get a bit closer to people.”

  “You’re off to a good start,” says the organist warmly, which gives the priest time to formulate what he’s feeling.

  ”You’ll probably think I’m childish, but I already like it her
e so much that I don’t ever want to leave. Do you think you could stand me for the next forty years?”

  The organist laughs, as if the divisions had never been raised. “Sounds wonderful. That will be the news item of the year—a priest who isn’t on the lookout for a richer parish.”

  As friends, they set to work on what looks to be a long collaboration. Even in a small parish—or especially in a small parish—there are a host of questions to be aired at every meeting of the vestry. There is already quite a pile of official post. They read it together and the organist sifts through it with an experienced hand and decides what needs to be given to the vestry and what the priest can deal with himself. This one sits with pen in hand and looks capable of sending off letters in a steady stream. He seems almost eager, as if his fingers were itching to get started, and the organist is happy at the thought of working with a priest who respects the way things have always been done and doesn’t immediately want to make changes.

  The priest himself looks on the organist the way a young man looks on an experienced older man, with almost childish confidence. As they sit there in his study, working, glancing at one another appreciatively, the pastor feels an uninhibited pleasure in having an older man as support, guide, and friend. Almost a father figure, if the organist had been a little older. He is in fact only fifteen years older, but he has life experience and practical skills, which the priest well knows do not necessarily come with increasing age.

  He thinks of his own father, and how different his life could have been if he’d had a father like the organist, who could have given him guidance in difficult matters and taught him useful lessons. Instead, he’s had to figure everything out on his own, by trial and—especially in his youth—by painful error. He has had to learn carpentry, construction, and repair, for Leonard, his father, is unable to do any of these things. He has suffered shame and fled from this same father’s high-blown declarations, such as “I know what people are like!”, although anyone following his advice would have met with misfortune. All his life, he’s had to rely on learning from experience, and now he sits here opposite the organist and thinks what it might have been like to have had a father who was sensible and just.

  Petter is the oldest of three brothers and it happens that the organist too has three boys and, even more remarkably, a beloved and spoiled daughter, exactly like the Kummel family’s adored Charlotte. The youngest of the sons is the family’s sunshine child, just like the Kummels’ Jösse, forever twenty years old in his hero’s grave, whom Petter still thinks of with a curious distaste and … shame?

  The similarities are striking, and it is with great interest that he makes his first visit to the organist’s home. Where he is amazed to see that this incomparable father figure doesn’t seem to have a very good relationship with his sons. On the contrary, they avoid him, always seem to have important things to do that drive them away from the table and out the door as quickly as they can manage. To have such a father and to shun him, that surely indicates that no son can have had a good relationship with his father, at least not once he’s entered puberty.

  It sometimes seems to Petter that biology has an answer for almost everything that happens in a human life, but there is no explanation for puberty. He can understand the importance of liberation and the development of an independent personality, but why must this period last so long and the alienation be so profound? Why must people reject the value of learning and actively oppose the acquisition of knowledge during the very years when their capacity to internalize instruction is at its height? And why do human beings see themselves as hopeless, ugly, and miserable when in fact they are at their most attractive age? What is nature’s purpose with puberty, which is as cruel as death?

  Although when you look at the three adolescent organist sons, you have to admit that if they’re feeling ugly and miserable, they hide it well. They’re just a bit reserved because they’re sharing a dinner table with the pastor. In their different ways, they’re as shamelessly attractive as their parents, well built, with a startling loose-limbed elegance. But no camaraderie between them and their father, no visible trust, no understanding, only a barely discernible smile of ridicule whenever the organist tells a story. To his horror, Petter recognizes certain glances he himself exchanged with his brothers when father Leonard got going. Otherwise there are few similarities between the wise and capable organist and the sadly foolish Leonard Kummel, who is such an embarrassment to his sons. All they have in common is fatherhood, which a son must turn away from if he’s to become his own man. This is what the organist’s sons dream of, just as the teacher’s sons once did. But still, these boys’ highest aspiration—to become unlike their father—is much harder to understand than that of the Kummel brothers!

  For his part, Petter would be happy to adopt the organist as his father, if such a thing were possible. He feels a warmth of spirit, as if for the first time in his life he stood under someone’s protection and was not required to be the oldest and wisest, a model for his siblings, a support for his mother, and an ideal schoolboy. A beast of burden collapsing under the weight of hopes and demands. A dried herb in a plant press of expectations.

  Now, at last, he sits side by side with a man in whom he has absolute confidence, a man who says, “This is the way we do things here.” A man who expects nothing more than that he be young and ignorant and in need of help. A man he has already impressed with his pragmatism and common sense. A man who is easy to talk to and whose replies show that has listened and understood.

  Giddy as he is from all the friendship he feels, it will take a while for him to realize that the organist is not universally loved here on the islands. Many bear him a grudge. His payment in kind is a thorn in their flesh, especially during the hay harvest when he drives home the yield from the splendid hayfield that belongs to the church and is reserved for the benefit of the parish organist. Later, he learns that the organist was a hated customs officer during Prohibition. There are those who consider him self-righteous—in his own eyes a head higher than everyone else—and who therefore think he needs to be cut down to his ankles. They bide their time.

  This is a side of island life that lies in the shadows when people show their smiling faces, but the priest is young and learns quickly. He does not regret the respite he enjoyed when he first arrived, believing he had come to an ideal community. It was what he needed so that love and loyalty could take root for all time.

  He has ridden through the villages on his bicycle, on roads with a strip of grass down the middle and lots of gates. Sometimes he has to stop and ask, but he’s already learned the names of many farms. The bicycle is a good thing to have, but all the houses face the sea where the real traffic is. Spanking dinghies, thumping herring boats, creaking skiffs. Out there is where he would like to be, and he’s been talking to the organist about getting a motorboat, which he could use both for fishing and for getting around.

  Mostly for getting around, although he loves the idea of putt-putting about in his own boat, free and independent. He reviews his assets under the friendly eye of the organist. His salary is small and his student loans large. Unlike the local people, who spend big when they’ve had a good fishing season or sold seal oil to the government and then later live close to the bone, the priest has little chance of acquiring a large sum of money. But it will work itself out, and he now tells the organist proudly that he learned to sail when he was still a boy. The skiff that goes with the house has a hole for a mast in the thwart, and there’s an old spritsail. He’s going to fix it up and use it. But in the future he’s going to have a motorboat so he can move about in all kinds of weather. If the organist hears of any good deals, he should let him know.

  The organist is happy to find the pastor so open and trusting. Maybe too much so, he thinks fleetingly, knowing that there are those who would exploit those qualities. Of course he does need a little guidance, and when it comes to figuring out how to organize their lives on Church Isle, he is ready
to help in word and deed.

  As if to confirm this thought, and to make both of them jump, the phone rings. It is Adele Bergman, who has heard that the priest cycled by. It was easy to guess where he was headed, and now she wants to say that if he’ll stop in at the Co-op on his way home, he can pick up the paint and thinner he ordered. Some good brushes have also come in, and some coffee biscuits if he wants to splurge.

  The priest smiles when he gets this message, for here is another person who will support him in word and deed. “Whether you like it or not,” the organist says, who nevertheless is an ally of Adele Bergman’s and chairman of the Co-op board. “We wouldn’t have got through the war half so well without Adele,” he adds quickly. “When you live as far out as we do here, it goes without saying that we’re last on the list, and when the Central Co-op got to our order, there was never anything left. But Adele didn’t take it lying down. I’ve heard her talk to them on the phone. ‘Our Co-op members are just as valuable as those in the city, and according to the Co-op bylaws, we have the same rights. As a Co-op manager, I won’t bend an inch, and I demand that we get the deliveries we’re entitled to. Without delay. Because we’re farthest out, we should get our deliveries first, since the small amounts we need are hardly noticed.’ And so on. She never let them forget us. It was a lot easier for them to carry our orders down to the boat than to try and explain to Adele why we weren’t going to get them. When things got really bad, 1944 for example, and it was simply impossible to get your hands on any boat fuel at all, she went to Åbo herself and got her hands on two barrels of petrol, which she had them carry down to the boat with her. Then she stood there and guarded them until the boat left, and then at every stop along the way. Word got here before Anton did, and when the boat arrived in the wee hours, there was a crowd of people on the Co-op dock with canisters. And then things got really hot. ‘The store will open at eight o’clock and not one minute earlier,’ she told them. She must have been dead tired, but there she stood at eight o’clock on the dot and measured out what everyone had a right to. Adele gets more done than a man. People laugh at her, but they count on the fact that she’ll get her hands on what we need. When we went to the herring market in Helsingfors after the peace was signed, everyone from here was astonished at how little there was to buy in the shops—compared to what Adele could plunk down on the counter for us if she thought we were worthy and had earned it.”