The half-pill has worn off, and for the first time, she’s forgotten to bring the box. And the worst is still to come, the part she fears, when they gather and sing “Shall We Gather at the River” as a farewell. Although they know she’s not a churchgoer and probably doesn’t believe in God, nothing can stop them. Then the party breaks up. She hardens herself as they come forward one by one and thank her and say goodbye. Younger women whose babies she’s delivered curtsey, somewhat older ones assure her that they will have no more children now that she’s leaving. Patients of all kinds display healed wounds, show broken arms without a sign that anything was ever wrong, assure her that their headaches have lessened and the ringing in their ears subsided.
Thank you, thank you,” she says to all of them. “Goodbye, goodbye.” Many cry. They want to see her cry as well, but that’s not possible. She has trained herself never to show any emotion that might betray her. Finally she walks to the school dock with the Hindrikses. She won’t have to say goodbye to them until tomorrow, and now they surround her as usual, chatting amiably, for the last time. With dismay, a result of the medicine’s having worn off, she wonders what it will be like to live by herself in the clinic in the northern archipelago, without the Hindrikses. Do they understand how much she has loved them, indirectly, in the gaps between pills? Erika Hindriks hasn’t changed since she arrived, but the girls have grown and become young women. She says to them, “Take care of yourselves when you head out into the big wide world.”
Do they realize how painful it would have been for her to involve herself closely in their lives as they were growing up? In them, she has seen the time pass. In the face of their hopefulness, she has watched her own fade. Thank goodness they’re girls. It would have been worse with boys, who would have grown into great louts while she was there, hardly recognizable from the eight-year-olds they once were.
A great many random thoughts go through her head during the boat trip home. Her only defence is silence, never say too much, never reveal yourself. Very impolite, ungrateful, after such a party, but the Hindrikses forgive this too. They’d probably be frightened if she were suddenly to change. If she were to disturb the picture of her they’ll come to preserve. Accept her, ask nothing more of her than what she lets them see.
“How will we manage?” is a question people ask in every house. Five years is long enough to forget what it was like to do without. On the other hand, people have a wealth of terrible stories about people who died of peritonitis, intestinal obstructions, blood clots, gangrene, blood poisoning, because they didn’t get to the hospital in time. “You people from the Örlands always arrive when it’s too late,” is a remark that can be cited in every house. During Doctor Gyllen’s time things have been different. Whatever she couldn’t deal with herself she sent in before it had progressed too far, using the Coast Guard as emergency transport. Now they’re being abandoned. How are they supposed to know, how can they make such judgments? They can’t expect much from a newly graduated nurse, and it will take a long time for her to learn.
“How did we manage before?” is the obvious question. The answer is equally obvious: “Worse.” This is said in every house, but perhaps least of all at the organist’s, where Francine has had a hard time with Doctor Gyllen’s matter-of-fact tone and firm methods. She is aware that the doctor’s praise for brave, capable women having babies does not apply to herself. Francine doesn’t want any part of it, doesn’t want to be present, resists. “No,” she says. “It’s not happening. I can’t do it.” The doctor mentions her four strong, healthy, beautiful children. “They were also born somehow,” she says impatiently. “We try again. We push again.” As if she were the one having the baby. And the boy, of course, damaged, retarded. Hole in his heart. Now dead. For the best, but never again. Didn’t dare ask Doctor Gyllen about birth control, just wanted to disappear, never see her again.
Lydia Manström is now more alone than ever. Not that she and the doctor were close, rather that she took comfort from that fact that they could be. If the opportunity arose, if the circumstances were right. She has something she’d like to discuss. Is it the doctor’s impression, too, that boys and young men force themselves on many of the girls in the period when young people are experimenting and forming relationships? That it’s almost a given that the man, the boy, violates the girl he’s decided will be his? Or that a girl, in the worst of cases, can circulate among several of them? And suffer a merciless contempt, not to put too fine a point on it.
The problem is hard to define. Obviously there are different degrees of willingness and different degrees of resistance. Certainly there are girls who expect it, prepare for it, provoke, entice. That’s the best case. But those who don’t want to. Those who haven’t decided. That can be hard. On the other hand, maybe it’s these very girls who need some kind of physical persuasion. So the question is, doctor, do you see this as a problem? Or is it just life? She herself has brought heifers to a bull and seen how frightened they are, and how eager.
In short, what’s the definition of rape? Lydia has pondered this question for years. And now she’ll never be able to bring it up. Maybe just as glad she never did. She would only have got tangled, implied something that she would have been ashamed of later. Maybe it’s not a problem for other people, not even for the ones who are its victims when they’re young. Maybe in fact that’s the way it is for most of them, and everyone accepts it as the way it has to be. A part of becoming a woman, an introduction to womanhood?
What could the doctor have said about that? The doctor, who is so reserved and strict? For four years, she has imagined that they might talk, quietly and without a lot of fuss, these two who can both keep secrets, and no one who saw them would suspect. There is of course a chance that the doctor would have looked at her with complete incomprehension—a woman with a professional education, a salaried position, the mistress of a farm, chairman of the Martha Society, active in the parish and in public health. And the problem? Well, excuse me, it was really nothing.
Ill at ease, she stands up, takes a swing through the kitchen and into the parlour. There are school papers waiting to be corrected, but nevertheless she takes out stationery, unscrews the ink bottle, dips her pen, and writes.
“Tomorrow we’ll start saying ‘In the doctor’s days,’ for tomorrow she leaves. Never again will the Örlands have a doctor of our own. It was edifying to witness the touching expressions of gratitude that these fisherfolk extended to her today. There was not a dry eye in the assembly when the chairman of the local council and the local priest expressed everyone’s thanks for her admirable contributions to public health. Now we feel nothing but emptiness when we think of our future without our doctor.”
In the performance of her important duties, Adele Bergman has the support of an iron constitution. Elis, on the other hand, often feels there is something wrong with his heart. So Doctor Gyllen has listened, tapped him on the back, taken his pulse, looked into his eyes, and remarked how nice it is to see a healthy man for once. Now they’re wondering what will happen. As long as Doctor Gyllen was on the Örlands, she held sickness and death in check. Those who died while she was there were the victims either of old age or accidents. A few sad cases of cancer, but otherwise “state of health—good”, as she herself said over the telephone to the provincial health director and which the operator passed along for the edification of all the islanders.
Adele was one of the doctor’s most faithful supporters, and she feels her absence deeply. Nevertheless, she is not entirely unhappy that the Örlands’ most prominent free-thinker has now moved away. It has been a thorn in her side that the doctor, however unintentionally, has given easily influenced young people reason to believe that it is modern and even admirable to turn their backs on church and religion. The priest doesn’t seem to take it that seriously, and when she brings up the doctor’s liberal views, he looks embarrassed and mumbles something about how hard it is to see into the human heart. Even though Doctor Gyllen
doesn’t know God, God knows Doctor Gyllen and uses her skills for the benefit of many.
An evasion that doesn’t entirely please Adele Bergman. Hard-boiled in business, burning with Christian zeal, she aspires to complete surrender, a deeper insight into the need for salvation. It is not enough to seek it for your own sake, all Christians should also take responsibility for their brothers and sisters and open their eyes to the Divine light.
Thanks to the new priest, spiritual life on the Örlands is on the upswing. Many now go to church quite often, prayer meetings in the villages are well attended. That’s good. But Adele sees many habitual Christians among the participants, and for them religion is form without content. Where is the heartfelt, personal faith that permeates and transforms the entire life of the true believer?
The priest, from whom she hopes so much, won’t look her in the eye. “I’m wary of the term ‘habitual Christian’,” he says a bit apologetically. “When people come to church, we mustn’t push them away by calling them that. Isn’t habit itself a source of firmness and fortitude in the life of faith? Maybe habit is precisely the thing that sustains people’s personal faith. Where we hold our devotions, the door is open. God is present. We must believe that.”
“But what about personal commitment?” Adele insists. “People are so dreadfully lukewarm. It’s enough for them to go to church once in a while as if they were buying an indulgence. Then it’s back to normal. Egoism, personal advantage, cold calculation. How are we supposed to open their hearts?”
If Adele didn’t know what a good Christian he was, she could swear he was embarrassed. “I ask myself that same question when I write my sermons. What do we know about the hearts of our neighbours? Open to scripture but at the same time open to temptation and pressure and even to direct exploitation. We see that in many sects.”
“Your fear of sectarianism is really very High Church! I’m talking about the need for revival, the spiritual winds that should not blow only at Pentecost!”
“You are so right. But I’m uncertain. Revival divides a community. Most of all, I just don’t think I’m up to leading a revival. How do you do it?” He smiles disarmingly, but of course he could if he wanted to! His reluctance is a barrier, as is the way he takes refuge in all his administrative duties and the work on his farm. He is getting to be more and more like other Evangelical Lutheran priests, who divide their duties into segments—preaching, parish work, administrative duties, farming. Forgetting that their entire lives must be a lesson from scripture. The smallest activity must be a sermon about God’s goodness to those who give themselves without reservation! That’s what priests should be, like medieval monks whose only duty was to love God and their fellow men.
Petter’s ideal is absolute truthfulness, yet there is something about Adele that makes him less communicative, makes him weigh his words. It seems to him suddenly that there’s no point in saying certain important things. For example, that when he looks into the beloved faces of the Örlanders, what he most wishes for them is not revival’s constant self-examination. He’s more inclined to wish them the freedom of a Christian soul. The freedom to be unharassed, untormented, untroubled. Happy, if that is possible more than momentarily. Life is full of worry and want and sickness and sorrow; he would so very much like to spare them eternal damnation.
If God is love, he loves the Örlanders, with their foxy ways, their wolfish grins and their cloven hooves, their sheep’s clothing and their borrowed feathers, their rabbit paws and tiger hearts. Rapid shifts and dodges, all of God’s spirited creation embodied in them in sparks and flashes. Snouts and paws, fur and scales, whistles and calls. An auk, an eider duck, a wagtail, a snipe. A wing brushing the brow, the round head of a seal breaking the surface. A smile spreading over all of it, quickly gone, rapidly returning. Beyond categorizing and moralizing, the priest sometimes thinks.
The priest struggles with a strong sense of sin and is diligent about self-examination. Is this actually something he wishes on others? He doesn’t want a return to church discipline and refuses to be a religious policeman, with God on his tongue as he condemns. No killjoy, which he has been for himself often enough. But rather a guide towards true joy in Christ, not deflated by anxiety and fear of discovery, derision, and punishment. A road you travel in daylight, with a burden no greater than you can bear.
The Örlanders are as social as herring and combine in different, shifting communities, most eagerly in their families and villages. Instigating a religious revival that bursts those bonds is not for Petter. “No,” he has to say to Adele, spelling it out. “I’m not the man to lead a revival. As best I can, I will preach the Word, which redeems and liberates. Guide, not compel. Example rather than decree.”
“If only it were that easy!” says Adele. “People are simply too stiff-necked. Contrary and hardened. They wear smooth, happy faces, but oh my.”
“Yes,” Petter says. Simply. For of course she’s right. Deadly sins cut a wide swath through the villages, virtues are shadowy figures of derision. But they are rampant among people who also have a capacity for sympathy and compassion, trust and goodwill. They can’t live without other people, and therefore they are attentive to society’s rules, which mustn’t be violated. A light side and a dark side, open as a book, full of secrets. Smiling, turning away. Benevolent, malicious. Never only the one or the other.
When you get right down to it, he thinks, the Örlanders have opened the path to Christian fellowship for him much more effectively than he could have done it for himself. The Örlanders have freed him from constant introspection, which is a form of egocentricity—as if everyone kept a constant eye on him. Maybe that’s what people do on the Örlands, but in that case it’s a happy and indulgent eye, more forgiving than the devastating gaze he used to fix on himself. He speaks better when he’s not looking at himself so grimly, and he thrives on the fellowship that the congregation so generously offers him.
On the Örlands, it seems natural to avoid a petty focus on people’s shortcomings, seductively easy at times to be indulgent towards wickedness that can’t be ignored. The free-spoken Örlanders open the box a bit and out slips something about tyrannical husbands, swindlers, and adulterers, and, secondhand and only as a rumour, and in whispers, a hint about rape and bestiality. He can talk seriously with a sinner who seeks him out, he can try to help a victim, but the public condemnation that Adele expects of him is beyond his capacity. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” is a fine exhortation even today, but it is hardly an adequate answer when considering the plight of those who’ve been subjected to an outrage. So what kind of priest is he to be? An attentive friend, always ready to talk and listen. But is he to render himself half blind and deaf in the process? Maybe so. And the alternative? The path to salvation is not as straightforward as Adele wants him to paint it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THEIR THIRD WINTER. Petter has lived through every kind of weather out here on the Örlands and moves easily on land and water across his parish. The darkness is not completely dark. Because the islands are not covered with forest, the land lies open to the sky. Starlight and moonlight can reach it, or the gliding streak of light between sky and sea. “Out here we’re always in touch with heaven!” he says to people who ask if he’s not afraid of getting lost in the dark. He feels strongly that just because the church lies at one edge of the parish, its priest must not use that fact as an excuse for withdrawing during the winter months. As pastor, he must live with his congregation, and when do they show a greater openness to the church’s message than during the dreary winter months, when the wind whines among the scattered houses, and the meagre flames of the oil lamps flicker?
Mona is happy that this is the last winter he’ll have to go out on the ice or in a boat in full storm. The work on the bridge has progressed, if not far enough then at least satisfactorily. All the work is being done by volunteers, so they can’t insist on regular hours, just be grateful when some fellow appears wi
th a horse and sledge. Petter has put in countless days of labour, hauling, pulling, carrying, hammering and nailing, and, most of all, keeping everyone in in good spirits. When he gets home, he’s frozen stiff and exhausted, for his cheer-spreading and bridge-building require a kind of mental energy that takes its toll.
It’s cold, wet work, exposed to the weather, and no one likes it. That it gets done at all is proof, according to Adele, of the priest’s unusual ability to lead and inspire. If anyone complains, she snorts loudly and points out that the bridge is not being built for the benefit of the pastor’s family but in order to make it easier for the whole congregation to get to church! But it will soon be done, and with the bridge in place, next winter will be a piece of cake, and in the spring he’s going to do something about that motorboat as well.
He is happy and full of faith in the future, and Mona, who never stops working, has stopped worrying and listening for him as much as she used to do in previous winters when he came home late. You can’t blame a wife for having confidence in her husband and for accepting the fact that he lets people stand and talk to him for far too long so he’s never on time. She simply has to believe that he’ll finally get home. Sometimes so late that she has to fight to stay awake. She doesn’t want to miss having tea with him and talking over the events of the evening before they collapse into bed.
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