Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  You need to prick up your ears so you can hear how the water murmurs and moves. And so you can hear how the ice is alive beneath your runners. Also when your speed slackens on wet ice you should listen to the way it sounds in front of you and be on your guard for when the ice starts to pull apart beneath your feet. You must continue forward no matter how heavy the going and not even think of turning back. Your whole body must be an instrument to register the consistency of the ice. You hold your breath sometimes, and fear can make heat blossom like a rose beneath your furs, and then you kick forward as fast as you possibly can. Your whole body is a gauge, making constant judgments as you move.

  And then of course I know that I’m not making my way across the ice alone. Before I leave, I see how the journey will be, and I’m forewarned the whole way. There is nothing odd about that, but neither is it a thing that I can describe in common words. I don’t know what they look like, and even though I often joke with them and tell them to get off the sledge and lighten the load, I don’t believe they have weight in the sense that we do. They exist in the world in a different way, although they once were like us. That’s why they help me and lead me forward. If they had never been like us, they would not understand the kind of guidance I need.

  So for the moment I have made it to the Mellom pier and into the waiting room, where I usually boil myself some coffee and have a sandwich and sleep under some furs for an hour or so until it starts to be time to expect the steamer. The Mellom postman and I take turns going up on the hill to watch for it. When it comes, that’s when we have our best chance of getting wet, the postman and I, when we collect the mailbags out at the channel. The boat brings necessities to Mellom and a few passengers, so the ship stops its engines and glides into the edge of the ice and throws out its gangway. The mailbags come tumbling across, and I take mine and head in towards land off the quaking ice. Maybe for the last time this year, or so it begins to feel.

  Yes, it has happened that I’ve come with a sledge and had to get myself home by boat. One of the closest calls I ever had was when all of Örland Sound broke up behind me with a great crash and roar just as I came in among the large islands. I knew that day that I had to hurry and I sledged along for all my life was worth while the ice thundered under my feet and floes shot up across one another behind my back. I made it dry-shod to the outermost farms and had to borrow a boat to get home.

  The outlook has never been so bad that I didn’t dare go. Julanda has told me many times that I’m not right in the head, going out in all sorts of weather and ice conditions, but I have to say that the salary I’m paid makes it my duty. The ones out there understand that it’s not just about me. The mailbags must also get through. Through all these years, I’ve never lost a mailbag, so I know that they worry about my burden, not just about me, as I travel the ice where they’ve staked out the way.

  When the ice is at its worst, the two island priests talk to each other on the telephone. The experienced Fredrik Berg has warned Petter Kummel that they can’t speak freely from the heart, because the operators listen. Petter suggests that they speak Finnish when discussing sensitive matters, but when he spoke to Central about another matter, Edit tactfully let him know that she understands Finnish quite well after her years as a housemaid in Åbo. So they have to watch their words although there is much to discuss. Work first, but then …

  “So how are things otherwise?” Petter asks. “Out here we’re completely isolated until the ice has gone. The seal hunters are out, and Anton goes to Mellom once a week with his sledge. We’re stuck where we are. I don’t know how Anton does it. He doesn’t come back until night when the ice has frozen hard, because by then his sledge is weighed down with all the newspapers he brings out, mostly ours, I’m afraid. I’m ashamed every time I open them. Anton risks his life for them over and over again. ‘The mail must go through, whether it bears or it breaks,’ he says, proudly.”

  “Yes, it’s a deed worthy of Finland’s White Rose. Did you know he’d won it? The postmen out here usually do—if they survive. It’s easier here, what with the steamboat channel going right past us. If you need to, you can leave Mellom twice a week. But you need to have a good reason. It’s a job getting out to the channel and a job to get on board. Nothing anyone does for the fun of it.”

  “No, we’re very happy just to be able to stay at home. People wonder how we’re going to get through the winters here, but we don’t get cabin fever or even get restless. We’re completely content that our world has shrunk. What’s remarkable is that it’s big enough. All the human types in the world at large exist right here on the Örlands. And every kind of conflict and problem. How is everything there?”

  Petter has noticed a happy, triumphant note in Fredrik’s voice, as if he were biding his time. “Yes, indeed,” he says. “I hardly dare say it out loud for fear it will vaporize like dust, but yesterday we passed a proposal for a new parsonage. Not just a confirmation of the decision that already exists but a decision about implementation: labour allocations among the villages, appropriation of money from the Central Fund. When the motion passed, we stared at each other as though it couldn’t be true. Good heavens the coffee we drank when it was over!”

  “Congratulations,” Petter says. “Do you think that’s the end of the delaying tactics?”

  “If only it were. Technically, we’ve come significantly closer to the goal, which will make it harder to delay the process. I feel quite certain on that point. But you can bet your life that they’ll be in very fragile health when it’s time to start building.”

  “That’s excellent news, in any case. How did it come about?”

  “In January we had a vestry meeting in the parsonage during the worst cold snap all winter. I made sure it was freezing; we lit the fires in the tile stoves just before they got there. We didn’t even need the wind for them to get the hint. The cold came in through the walls and the floor right on cue. The lamps blew out, the curtains fluttered. The coffee was cold before you could get it to your mouth. An icy chill crept up your legs if you sat still for half a minute. The children had colds and coughed and cried so you could hear them through these thin board walls. It was perfect.”

  Petter laughs. “Out here, everyone knows that when you come to the parsonage you leave everything on except the outermost layer. Sometimes even then someone will go back for their coat. We’ve had fur hats at the table, and lots of wool scarves. They take those for granted. That’s what it’s like here in winter. In any case we have wood, which is more than I can say for some of the others out here.”

  “Maybe it’s time to ask for a new parsonage yourselves.”

  “I think I’ll wait until I’ve got my pastoral degree and then see if I can get posted to this parish. Now I’m afraid someone will snatch it out from under my nose. I should have kept quiet about how much I like this place.”

  “You seem quite certain.”

  “I am. How’s it going with your own degree?”

  “Fine thanks. My dissertation is almost finished. I’m thinking of going up for the exam this spring. Then we’ll start building, and in my free time I’ll keep an eye out for available parishes. The parsonage will be done in two years, and our furniture will be on its way to the mainland. And you?”

  Petter’s sigh makes the curtains flutter in his study. “Oh my. I had hoped to make a lot more progress than I have. I go absolutely cold when I think that it will soon be spring. We have a thousand plans for the garden and the farm. And then we’ll have all the guests and the preachers. It’s hopeless.”

  “Plus I’ve heard you’re going to add to your family.”

  “How in the world do you know that?”

  “I’ve got my spies. Seriously, you need to know you can’t keep anything secret out here. When will it be?”

  “In July. I’m stunned.”

  Fredrik has a good laugh into the phone. “We heard about it well before Christmas. But Margit will be happy to have it confirmed. We’ve got not
hing on the way, but if that should happen, I’m sure you’ll hear about it before we know it ourselves.”

  “Did they say if it will be a boy or a girl?”

  “You’ve already got a girl, so of course they think it will be a boy. They call him Little Petter. The priest’s boy. Etcetera.”

  “Well, well. Like I’ve said, the people out here are interested in people. I wonder if they know when I’ll be ready for the pastoral exams. It has to be this autumn at the latest. I’ve made up my mind.”

  And they go on talking. “Dear Brother” is the way the clergy address one another in letters, and that is precisely what Petter feels towards Fredrik, the older brother he never had. As they fulfil their obligations in their respective parishes, matters often arise that they need to discuss. If one of them doesn’t call, the other one does. One day Fredrik hears an odd rumbling and a chair scraping as if Petter were leaping to his feet. Fredrik interrupts himself. “What’s happening?”

  “It must be the ice breaking up!” Petter cries. “I have to go out and watch. Forgive me, we’ll have to talk later.” He hangs up and rings off and hears his father pulling on his boots in the hall. “I’m coming,” he hollers. “Mona, what are you doing? You have to see this!”

  It doesn’t matter that the dough has finished rising and needs to go into the oven. He lifts the trough out into the hall, where it’s cold and the yeast will stop working, and helps her get her boots on. He sweeps a quilt around Sanna and rushes out onto the steps. Father Leonard is already on his way to the bell tower and starts climbing. He throws open the shutters with a bang. “Come!” he cries. Mona takes Sanna from him. “Go on up,” she says. “We can see fine from down here.”

  And it’s true, they can see and hear the ice breaking up from where they stand on the bell-tower hill. But from up in the tower, there is a view of the whole sea. All the way from the horizon in the west to the cliffs, knobs, skerries, and bedrock of the island world to the north and northeast. The entire landscape holds on tight as great shelves of ice climb across each other and heave themselves onto granite slopes. Suddenly the bays are open and the water surges and leaps and throws itself over the moving ice floes, which crash into each other with a great banging and cracking. The shores are lined with a border of growlers piled up so tightly that they butt and bellow among themselves. They push right across the smaller skerries and scrape them clean the way the glaciers once did, stuff themselves up onto larger islands and build huge jousting, shoving logjams. Out towards the open sea there are streaks of black and green and violet that combine and expand while the ice cover moves in waves, creaking and complaining, breaking and bawling. Farther out they can hear the thunder of the open sea as it tears itself free. There is a golden streak at the horizon from the sunshine of the day, but the deepening twilight brings darkness to the land. Silvery and white, the ice towers up against the blackness. Father Leonard has tears in his eyes. Petter stands in awe.

  Down below, Mona is on her way home with Sanna. She is struggling to get free, and although he can hear nothing because of the rush and the roar, he knows that she is squealing and calling and wants to come up to him and that Mona is repeating impatiently that they’ve already seen the ice breaking up and there won’t be anything more. No point in standing out here freezing and catching cold for nothing! Once again, Petter feels that he has failed his daughter. Of course he could have carried her up the steep stairs and kept her warm so she could see. For Sanna, the important thing is to be with him, and all too often he leaves her behind.

  He and his father look at to each other again and again and say, “To think that we got to see this!” But the wind that pulls apart the ice is terribly cold once the sun has set, and soon they have to close the shutters and feel their way back down the steps. Tottering and dizzy. What a display! What power! In his head, Petter is already composing his Pentecost sermon about breaking the ice in the world of the spirit, when all the dams of doubt and scepticism will burst. He has now felt rapture in a concrete form and can transfer it directly to the Divinely gifted rapture that loosens our chains and lets us look straight into the world of bliss.

  Once the ice has broken up, everything moves quickly. So quickly that you lose your breath and wish you were back in the life-giving isolation of winter, which allowed you to think through your thoughts and plan for the day ahead. Now spring runs away with everyone and drives its own agenda. The seal hunters had their boats at the edge of the ice but got sufficient warning and made it home, squinting and sunburned, without any losses and with seals in a row on the floor. Now the hunt for seabirds will begin, eiders and old squaws, which fly along the edges of the bays and land in their traditional places, and there the men sit in their hunting coverts and blast away. Hardly a man in church, consequently, and only a few womenfolk because of the lack of available boats. In the barns, the floorboards are visible. The cows are dry and people can only hope that they’ll make it through these lean weeks until things start turning green in earnest. It is not the case that summer breaks out as soon as the ice has gone. On the contrary, it can be cold and raw for weeks, and that’s when things get tough.

  At the parsonage, the peace of winter has been driven away. Papa paces about, stressed and incoherent, and Petter recognizes the symptoms. Now that the ice is gone he’s going home to tar his boat, put it in the water, and talk Granboda village to death before Mother arrives with all their worldly goods sometime in June. Now Mona has to fit him out, see to it that his clothes are clean and mended and that he has bread and butter to go with the fat spring perch he’s going to pull up from his favourite perch hole. At the parsonage, too, they are happy that net fishing can begin, but it is one more time-consuming chore that steals time from pastoral studies. Once again, he stands and wonders how he’ll have time for all the work that’s falling on him like a house.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AS LONG AS THE ICE REMAINED, it seemed a long time until Mona’s confinement but now her pregnancy too is progressing with frightening speed. No one knows better than Mona how much they need to get done before she can start thinking about having a baby. They have to finish the haymaking, and before they start on that, there’s a great deal to do in the garden that they didn’t have time for last spring. The kitchen garden needs to be fertilized and enlarged, a new drainage ditch must be dug, they have to sow and plant, and just imagine if they’d had time to break up part of the meadow and sow feed grain! Not to mention that they need to look after the everlasting fences, take the sheep out to the islands, groom the cows so they don’t have to be ashamed of them. They must be plump and shiny for the congregation to admire. It would all be so much simpler if they had a horse! When Petter has passed his pastoral exams and been made permanent vicar, their finances will get a bit better, but the loans, the loans! Should they borrow more and buy a motorboat and a horse, or should they wait a year? Why not break in Darling, Goody’s heifer calf from last year? Then they could plough up another piece of land. Worth a try!

  Time rushes by. They get a lot done, as they notice when they look around, but a great deal goes undone as well. When they make lists of all their work, they notice that Sanna is never mentioned once, and their consciences bother them. They’re neglecting their child for all the other important things they have to do, although she’s a little more than two years old, full of curiosity, and loves to talk and philosophize. Most of all, she likes to be read to, but whichever one of them takes the time to read her a good-night story can barely stay awake once there’s a moment to sit down. Time to do something about it, and that’s how Cecilia comes to the house, one of the confirmation candidates who is good with children and reads well. It will be her job to spend time outdoors with Sanna and read her fairy tales all spring and summer. Now, Sanna, you’ll have company and a real pal!

  In years and size, Cecilia is the missing link between Sanna and the adult world. She is smaller than Mona, and at fourteen, she is halfway between them in age. She is chi
ld enough to be able to play and enjoy the story books as much as Sanna, and old enough to have a sense of order and responsibility. She appears at the parsonage like a young lady, knocks before entering and curtseys, but all with the fluttering heart of a little girl. The pastor’s wife has a reputation for speed and resolve that could frighten anyone, but in reality she is kindness itself and says they are happy she could come. Cecilia gets her own room in the attic—something she has never had before. The pastor’s wife has put some grape hyacinths and narcissus in a glass on the chair meant to serve as a bedside table. It is all lovely beyond description, with a wonderful view across the water. Sanna follows her up the steep stairs on all fours, with careful concentration, and looks at Cecilia rapturously. “Are we going to read?” she asks, eyes sparkling.

  “Yes, indeed,” says Cecilia. “As often as we can! And play!”

  Sanna is prepared to begin at once, and so is Cecilia, but Mama tells Sanna that first they’re going to let Cecilia unpack, and then she’ll come downstairs and they’ll all have coffee and get to know each other. She takes Sanna with her, and Cecilia hears them talking on the stairs: “Is she going to live here?” “Yes, this summer. Then she’ll go to school.” “I’m going to go to school too, with Cecilia.” “Well, not quite yet. Do you like her?” “Oh, yes.” “Good …” and then they go into the kitchen and Cecilia stands in her room and pretends she’s a grown woman, the children’s nurse at the parsonage. The best view in the house and a bureau where she can keep her clothes. Not many of them, but you don’t need many in summer. It takes two minutes to put everything into the drawers, but grownups generally take such things seriously, so she stands at the window for a while and gets used to the room, and then she goes down the stairs. There is a smell of coffee from the kitchen and the door is open so she doesn’t need to knock. Sanna comes towards her and takes her hand. “Come and have coffee!” she says. “I get to sit next to you.”