Ice

by Ulla-lena Lundberg

  For the third year she has her parents as summer guests. Petter has met them at the store and at church, where once each summer they attend a service as a kind of social obligation, despite that fact that the general’s wife is Greek Orthodox. Now the pastor gets the idea to invite them to Lillus’s christening, which will take place in the church, with coffee after at the parsonage. The pastor’s own parents will come, along with one of his wife’s sisters and her fiancé, plus friends from the area. It would be an honour if … They owe Doctor Gyllen their thanks and would be delighted if … He is a little embarrassed and almost expects them to thank him and decline, but very cordially they say yes.

  The front pews in the church are occupied by Petter and Mona’s relatives and the first friends they made on the Örlands—the organist and the verger and their wives, Adele Bergman and Elis, Brage Söderberg and Astrid, along with Cecilia and Hanna, who’ve been such a great help to them. Everyone in a festive, benevolent mood. Then the general and his wife with Doctor Gyllen, all three of them inscrutable. A warm-hearted christening, Lillus gurgling and delighted by the water on her head, by Papa’s voice, by everything so big. She is frightened when they all start singing, but she gets over it quickly, and after the baptism the pastor once again invites everyone present to the parsonage.

  The general knows better than to sit and stare, and his wife learned early how to conduct herself. Doctor Gyllen has trained herself to look a firing squad in the eye without blinking, and no one can see what any of them are thinking. She doesn’t usually attend christenings. Pulling out new babies is not a problem, it’s a job, but freshly scrubbed infants dressed in white as the centre of attention can stir up feelings. Which are held in check with the help of half a pill, which doesn’t leave her muddled but allows her to function normally in social situations. Still, it’s a relief when it’s over and she can stand up, shake hands, congratulate the parents, and take a professional look at the baby, which looks very good! Remembers to greet Sanna as well. The organist, who understands children, says, “Congratulations on becoming a big sister,” to her as she stands earnestly beside her mother, and others follow his example.

  Cecilia has run to the parsonage and got the fire going in the stove, and Mona and Sanna hurry after her with Lillus, who has filled her nappy and can be smelled from a great distance. Lillus! The others follow along at an easy pace. The pastor brings up the rear, walking quickly, and falls into step with the Gyllens, honoured guests who nevertheless draw attention to the fact that they are not members of the inner circle of friends. “A beautiful christening,” says the general’s wife, and the general adds, “Beautiful weather too. I allow myself to hope it is a good omen.”

  “Thank you,” the pastor says. All sorts of things stumble on his tongue until he says, “A day to remember for us. I’m happy you wanted to be here.”

  Doctor Gyllen is walking beside him, full of something she wants to say. She stops and takes off one shoe and shakes it. Nothing comes out. Her parents walk quietly on, arm in arm. The pastor waits politely. Doctor Gyllen straightens up, as tall as he. She talks the way she did when she didn’t want people to see that she was talking, without looking at him. “I too have a child. I am in such distress.”

  The pastor pauses long enough to keep himself from blurting out some empty phrase. No religious talk, as he knows what she thinks of that. “Is he still in Russia?” he asks, a neutral question.

  “You know that it’s a he?”

  “People have mentioned it. Not gossip. With all respect. But still that you had to leave your son behind. The way things are in the Soviet Union, everyone understands.”

  “I abandoned him. How can I live with that?”

  “My dear friend, when it happened you couldn’t know you’d be separated for such a long time. I understand your sorrow and pain. I admire your strength and composure.”

  “You don’t know what it was like. You never knew when you saw people if it would be for the last time. Colleagues. Friends. Your husband. Your child. If I had stayed, KGB would have separated me from my son. But that’s no excuse. I can never forgive myself.”

  “In many situations, we’re our own strictest judges. I don’t want to force my beliefs on you, but as a priest I can offer you one comfort. There is one who offers mercy and forgiveness when we can’t offer them to ourselves. He understands your choices. He sees your anguish. He forgives you.”

  She has not looked at him, but now she looks away even more, if that’s possible. “The important thing is not how I feel. The important thing is my son. No contact possible. Letters have been sent. Official. Private. Red Cross. Nothing. Not even my father. Russia is like another planet.”

  “I know. I don’t know if it would help you if we went through what can be done. I’m certain that you and your father know all the possibilities and have tried every channel. But sometimes it can help to discuss matters with an outsider who is sworn to silence. Nothing we speak of will go further. Maybe by pure chance we’ll come up with something new. In my line of work there are also examples of miracles.”

  He smiles, understands perfectly well that she sees things differently, but he nevertheless enjoys shocking her with his naiveté. She almost smiles back, digs in her purse and shakes a pill into the palm of her hand and swallows it without water, throws her head back so it will slide down. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you. And forgive me for detaining you. Now we must go to the parsonage. Christening coffee cannot begin before Papa and Pastor arrive.”

  They go in. The doors are open between the dining room and the parlour, there is a great buzz, and all the chairs are in use. The idea is that Mona should sit with the baptized baby in her arms while others serve, but it’s hard for her to see how slowly it’s all going, and she hates having her mother-in-law in the kitchen. Soon enough, Lillus is put to bed and Mona takes over. With help from Cecilia, who is willing and biddable, everything goes smoothly. And when the guests who are not staying on – in every corner of the parsonage – get up to to, the pastor says to Doctor Gyllen, “I’m planning to come to the village tomorrow. We need to talk about the roof-beam celebration for the Health Care Centre. Would it be all right if I look in during the afternoon?”

  “That will be fine,” says Doctor Gyllen. “But I don’t expect any miracles.”

  And here he is, where everyone can see, his briefcase in hand, knocking on Doctor Gyllen’s door. A long meeting, there is clearly much to discuss concerning the Health Care Centre. Her parents are out rowing in the nice weather. The general’s wife has a parasol raised against the sun, the general has a handkerchief on his head with knots tied at the corners, his braces over his undershirt, his trouser legs rolled up, and his lily-white feet on the duckboards. They row to an island in the bay and have coffee on the granite slope.

  The pastor greets her with a smile, the doctor thanks him for yesterday’s reception. “It was all very pleasant.” As for the roof-beam party, maybe better to return to it when Sörling is ready to suggest a date. In any case, they need to discuss the refreshments with Adele Bergman. So:

  The pastor has to start, he’s used to that. “All of this must feel like small potatoes compared with your own struggle.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I do not think what happens here is unimportant. This is the right way to live—normally. Precious for me.”

  “Yes, I feel the same way, ever since the end of the war. It’s good that we understand each other on that point. Moreover, I realize that here in Finland there’s a great deal we don’t understand about Rus—, about the Soviet Union. This Iron Curtain they talk about makes it hard for information to get through. Propaganda on their side, propaganda on ours. What are things really like over there?”

  “A little better, I hope, now that the war is over. Materially. Maybe not the same hunger. But otherwise my information is quite old. Years have gone. No channels which function. Total isolation. We know nothing. We do not hear even rumours.”

  �
�Before the war there were lots of rumours. People disappearing. No one knew anything for sure.”

  “People who have never lived there don’t understand. No one knows what it was like.”

  “No. Did you know other Finns in Leningrad? My father was in contact with Finns he met in America who moved to the Soviet Union, but then there were no more letters.”

  “Many are dead. Others in camps. Yes, I knew Finns. In happier times, in their youth, my father knew Edvard Gylling. He looked me up in Leningrad. You will think it comic, but we always spoke Swedish together. Except last few times. We didn’t dare. We spoke only Russian, only the most common phrases. ‘I am happy to see you, dear Edvard Gylling.’ ‘And I to see you, dear little Irina Gyllen.’ ‘How is your dear family?’ ‘Fine, thank you, in good health. Fanny especially sends greetings.’ That was his last visit to Leningrad. Then arrested. Fanny taken away. Grown children, no contact.”

  “Terrible.”

  “He was a good person. An idealist. A socialist. Ach, if he had only stepped back when the civil war in Finland could no longer be prevented.”

  “Like our own great donor, who knew enough to flee to Sweden. He had relatives here who helped him move on.”

  “Gylling could have done the same. But he could not betray his ideals. What he saw as the cause. He could not betray his comrades.”

  “He made the wrong decision for the right reasons. While things are happening, we have no access to the final accounting.”

  “If he could have persuaded Fanny to stay in Sweden with the children or go to Finland when it was still possible! We were such good friends. Our names so similar. We had nicknames for each other. We always spoke Swedish. About our youth. Although I had more Russian than he and had lived longer in Russia. I was admitted to medical school before the Revolution.”

  “You lived through all of it.”

  “Yes. I knew how poor, ignorant, dirty, helpless the people were. We were many who thought the Revolution must happen to change these evils. How could we? So stupid.”

  “You believed in reforms, ideals. That’s not stupid.”

  “Years went by before we understood, and then we didn’t want to believe. I could pursue my studies, I took examinations, specialized. Got married. My husband like me. Those years, when we could have emigrated to Finland. The Finnish immigrants also.”

  “People act on the information and the hopes they have. No one can demand that you should have known then what you know now.”

  “Yes, but later. People start to disappear. Arrests. Everyone afraid. People afraid to talk. Afraid to telephone. Suspect each other. It takes astonishingly long time, my dear Pyotr Leonardovich, before you realize you are not paranoid to suspect your friends of being informers. You do everything from fear—wrong things, immoral things, ugly things. You’ve never had to see what you can be driven to do.”

  “No.”

  “And the worst of all, you let time pass until you can no longer save yourself. Contacts with Finland broken. No more invitations to consulate. Russian police at the gate, always asking for invitation, name, papers. The best doctors gone, new doctors and commissars, surveillance. My husband and I told ourselves for long time the regime needs doctors. They can’t manage without us. We’re safe. If we just work, not talk, not attract attention. Then we had our son, born in ’thirty-two. For him we do everything.”

  “Yes.”

  “There is so much envy. Everyone has something that someone else wants. Your job at the hospital. Your apartment. Something so unimportant you can’t even imagine. We discuss all the time, my husband and I, what is best for the child. If one of us is arrested, the other gets divorce. Disclaim the other, we forgive each other in advance. Live quietly with child. Hope for better times.”

  “I sympathize completely with everything you say.”

  “Yes. But then just betrayal. He is arrested, for what? Enemy of the people, saboteur. Divorce as we planned, but not right, immoral. And no use. If he, Russian, blameless, is arrested, why then not me? You cannot imagine such terror. I thought only of saving us. Me and my son. Then I got chance—I cannot tell you how or through whom …”

  “Of course not!”

  “… but I got chance, without my son. And I was so terrified, I deserted him. I thought: in Finland we can arrange exit visa for him, legally, with help of legation. Selfish, wrong! Then came the war, all diplomatic relations broken. Five years! I can never forgive myself.”

  “For pity’s sake! If you had stayed you would have been arrested yourself. You’d have disappeared like so many others. Your son would have lost his mother anyway. Now at least you have a chance of getting back in touch.”

  “Thank you. Yes, that is rational thinking. But think of the child. Abandoned by his mother, completely alone in the world. He doesn’t think like you. He has simply been abandoned.”

  “Do you know anything about the people you left him with? Your husband’s relatives?”

  “No. Strangers at that address, no contact. Unable to trace father’s parents either. Maybe also arrested.”

  “The Finnish Consulate?”

  “Yes, father has certain contacts. A brave person rang the bell of the apartment where I left him. Other people there. No information about earlier residents. Nor about father’s parents at their address. But otherwise Finnish legation in Moscow very cautious. We must not provoke great powerful Soviet Union that swallows us in next war.”

  “I suppose you’ve tried to contact orphanages in the Leningrad area.”

  “Yes, but you understand—evacuations. And I’m glad for that. Otherwise the boy would not have survived the siege. But it meant chaos in documentation.”

  “He’s a teenager now. Maybe he’s tried to find you? He knows that you came from Finland. He knows your maiden name, maybe even remembers the name of his grandfather. If he contacts the Finnish legation … Or no, he doesn’t know you fled, and it can’t be easy for an adolescent in the Soviet Union to contact a foreign legation.”

  “His parents are enemies of the people, Finland an enemy in the war. How could he, a fifteen-year-old boy?”

  “No, that was silly of me, too optimistic. What I mean is later, in the future. But it’s now you need to make contact.”

  “I don’t even know if he’s alive. If he is alive—a boy at the worst age. If we saw each other now, it might not be a happy meeting. Accusations, hate towards me. Hate towards Finland.”

  “You can grieve about that later. What’s important now is to find out if he’s alive and how he’s getting along. Everything else follows from that. My dear Doctor Gyllen, I will keep all of this in my mind and in my heart. You may well believe that there is nothing to be done, and for the moment perhaps you’re right. You’ve thought of everything, you have contacts that I can’t even imagine. But believe me, it helps to talk about things, the person you talk to can keep his eyes and ears open and perhaps stumble across something that proves to be useful. Things happen all the time that no one ever expected.”

  “Miracles?”

  “Forgive me. I know you don’t believe in them. Neither do I, but I hope for them. Allow me to do so for your sake. Please don’t take it the wrong way, Doctor Gyllen, but I’m going to pray for you. For your reunion. Privately, of course,” he adds quickly.

  “Yes of course, naturally. What can I say? Thank you.”

  They both smile. The pastor is not going to embarrass her by saying a prayer at the table. She is not going to depress him by telling him how she feels about religion. She is happy that she’s been able to maintain her self-control. No tears, no turgid self-accusations. On his side, he has not been unnecessarily pious. He gets ready to stand up and smiles apologetically. “Remember you can always talk to me. My vow of silence is absolute and includes even murder. You have your own medical confidentiality. Oh my, it’s only two months now until we both face our respective examinations. Thank you for talking to me, but now we have to study.”

  “Tha
nk you for coming,” she says, finding it absolutely impossible to say anything more.

  “Don’t mention it. My wife and I owe you a huge debt of gratitude, you know that.”

  She stands in the window and watches him as he cycles homewards. Before he’s out of sight, he stops at some bushes and eats raspberries. Only then does she realize how totally absorbed she was by her own problems when he was talking to her. Örlanders never let anyone leave without offering food or drink. Even when food is scarce, Russians never forget the rules of hospitality. She should have given him coffee! She should have bought a coffee cake at the store now that such things are available again. He tried to give her hope, and she sent him away hungry!

  The pastor has added Doctor Gyllen’s son to the list of things he prays for, and he prays a first prayer as he rides. He thinks of Doctor Gyllen, unnaturally self-controlled or perhaps petrified and frozen to the core after all she’s been through. And he thinks about what it would be like to have to leave Sanna and Lillus, to suddenly not come home one day. If it was a matter of saving their lives, certainly, but if it was a question of saving his own? A terrible choice, and slim comfort he came up with for Doctor Gyllen: that under present circumstances she would have been separated from him in any event. But which sounds better to an adolescent? My parents were liquidated, or, My mother abandoned me and fled to Finland? Doctor Gyllen lives with this every day. Dear God, let her be reunited with her son.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER HIS ARRIVAL on the Örlands, Pastor Petter Kummel is about to make his first trip to the mainland. It is the end of September, beautiful Indian-summer weather. Bareheaded, because his handsome head of hair lifts his hat off his head, light topcoat not used since his arrival, cassock in his suitcase. His dissertation sent on ahead, notes about it in his briefcase. Since the trip is a long one—boat to Mellom, steamboat to Åbo, train to Helsingfors, bus to Borgå—there is reason to believe he’ll have time to rehearse a number of fine points in church law and theology and polish his prepared sermon, so his briefcase is stuffed with abstracts and other papers of every kind. The heart inside the shirt is relatively calm. In his free moments, he has actually managed to read a great deal and has real faith in his ability to elucidate a variety of topics. And it would be presumptuous to believe his dissertation the worst ever written!