by Mikael Niemi
It was a well-preserved specimen. The soft bits, such as the eyeballs and flesh on the cheeks, had fallen in. But the rest of the skin remained, as did the eyebrow hair. The jaw had fallen open, revealing the teeth, which looked healthy and in good condition; the man must have died relatively young. On his head was a Sami headdress, painstakingly cut and sewn. The men tried to remove it in order to assess the state of the skull, but it was stuck fast. After cautious wiggling and jiggling, they managed to lift the hat off. They examined the skull and were delighted to find it intact. No fractures, no distortions from the prolonged pressure of earth. The excellent condition of the corpse caused problems for the two men: the skull was firmly attached to the torso by tough ligaments and was difficult to detach. It would be necessary to take part of the spinal column as well. With a cracking sound the rib cage was broken away from the vertebrae, to which end a small ax served the purpose well. A fusty smell had now begun to rise out of the grave, from the soured fat and bone marrow, and I saw fit to stand back while the work was completed. The spoils were placed in a sack of heavy material and labeled with a handwritten tag. A wooden cup and other objects were taken from the grave as well. I walked down the path to the Könkämä River, washed my hands, and rinsed the top of my head and the back of my neck. I felt the curvature of my own skull, its weight, and I had the impression it was loose, that only my hands were preventing it from falling to the ground.
When I returned they were in the process of digging up another grave. They were hoping to find a female specimen this time, which would provide a valuable comparison.
I stood pondering the final day. The moment when Christ would resurrect us all, according to the creed I so often preached. In my mind I saw the graves being opened and the dead standing up, and the headless bodies being obliged to stagger all the way down to Uppsala and Lund to try to put themselves back together.
As the men had promised, I received a generous remuneration. Thirty pieces of silver. I gave it all to the parish.
* * *
—
They even come to Kengis, these men, always men, who are captivated by the north. Their eyes gleam. They want the midnight sun and magnificent views, they want to meet rare creatures such as wolverine and lynx, they want to listen to drums and traditional songs, they want to hear hunting tales of bears brought down by spears, of wolf packs besieging entire villages, and when the day’s adventures are done they want to drink French brandy with mill owners and managing directors and entice farm maids into the sauna. For them Norrland is a kind of India. They come here to perform heroic deeds, gaze at the world’s end on the sheer black cliff of North Cape, paint dramatic scenes to be exhibited in London or Paris, make astounding scientific discoveries, preferably with great physical hardship. For them Norrland is an unbaptized land. It wasn’t really here until they arrived. The folk here are not people, not people to the extent they are themselves. They have a predilection for standing on the highest points of the terrain. They measure all around them with sextants, barometers, oculars, and chronometers, they collect treatises in Latin and compose accounts of their travels with sumptuous accompanying plates printed on costly paper. They fall out with one another over who was here first, who walked the farthest, who discovered the most. But they never compete over who carried the most. Because the peasants always did that. Silent men, short in stature, nameless, tortured under their bearing poles for mile upon mile. They carried the gentlemen’s instruments and punsch bottles to the ancient resting places, they withstood the pain in their backs and joints and at the end, by the shore of the Arctic Ocean, they received their few coins.
The vastness and wildness of Norrland was what they all sought. Mountains to conquer, mighty waterfalls, anything that could, one day, deliver a medal from the hand of the king. The small life, on the other hand, passed them by. Infant diseases, peasants’ coughs and cramps, the outstretched hands of the have-nots. All the cultivation attempts that failed, all the starvation and suffering in lamentable huts. And the alcohol, the snake poison, this caustic piss that burned out homes with its venom and left behind devastated tents and abandoned children.
* * *
—
Was I not one of the gentlemen myself? With my natural history collections and herbarium sheets, with my examination of soil and rich fen and all my cataloging? Yes, in many ways I too was lured by the devil of ambition. To discover a new plant, to scour flora collections and realize that it has never been described before, that I was the one to find it first. That zealousness could make anyone at all a slave to nefarious passions.
But one thing distinguished me from them. I was born here. My mother was of Lapp descent, Lapp blood flowed through my veins. The mountains were my childhood neighbors. I was no occasional visitor. One day my body would rest in this northern soil. These were my people, this was my country, my final home.
60.
I am fifty-two years old now and marked by the autumn of life. Aging came so unexpectedly. My eyes are dim and wreathed in wrinkles. Where previously I could read by one tallow candle, now I need two. As a young man I could eat until my stomach bulged like a storm-filled sail, whereas now I am full after only a few bites, and my bowels answer nature’s call but every three days. My hands that could draw every leaf vein on a plant now tremble when I dip my pen in the ink. My back is bent and my children point out that I lean forward when I walk, as if in a perpetual headwind, though I think I am upright. Sometimes words fail me; I pause and search for the name of a member of the parish, I know her name perfectly well, but it won’t surface. Work takes longer to perform and even simple tasks tire me. My life is on a downward trajectory. Earth to earth approaches. Life has passed so quickly, far too fast. It was not so long ago that I stepped briskly across the watery bogs of inland Västerbotten with my vasculum full of rare plants. An eternity opened up before me, expanse after expanse of mountain waiting with new discoveries. I was unmarried, childless, ambitious. At night I could barely rest, my legs still wandering energetically in my sleep. My thoughts were only of myself, of the triumphs I was convinced awaited me, honor’s sweetness that would soon be conferred upon me from lecterns and directorates. And I did indeed achieve success. But it was to be of a very different kind. The honorary academic titles were bestowed on other, meeker candidates. While I was the one who would touch people’s hearts.
* * *
—
Then I found myself in the wilderness. At the age of twenty-eight I stood with my dead daughter in my arms, Emma Maria, just one week old. The little infant body still had a hint of warmth, her eyes were not fully closed, they held a glimmer as if from inner candlelight. We sat there quietly, Brita Kajsa and I, as the tiny body stiffened and the infant soul departed. It is hard to keep your faith at times like this. Nora, our daughter begotten in sin before we had entered marriage, still lives and is strong. But Emma Maria, the most innocent of us all, the one who had no time to sin in thought or word or deed, was taken.
I too have felt death’s hatchet draw near. Ten years ago in the summer my dear brother Petrus died from hemorrhage of the lungs. And I myself was struck by a cough and fever so severe that I thought I had tuberculosis. Convinced my days were numbered, I thought my life had been in vain and served no useful purpose. I had not made the most of my talents, had devoted my time to satisfying the devil of ambition and neglected my spiritual development. How easy it is to get stuck in the sweet dough of life, to clap each other’s tailcoated backs, to be bedecked with laurel wreaths and medals. And still the success is never enough, ambition is only hungry for more. How easily I could have become one of these art collectors or writing-desk botanists who only lives to have his name perpetuated in the botanic registers.
Eventually my run of illness ended. After some months I finally felt my strength return and was able to rise from my sickbed. And yet it gave me no pleasure. The world seemed to lack color. Dark thoughts
pursued me and I tried to escape them. I obtained a copy of Carl Nordblad’s Health Primer for the Common Man, in which he prescribes an hour of daily walking, and I began to follow this formula. Every day I strode round the church building, circuit after circuit, I paced round the holy place until a trail was formed, worn down to the grass roots in a brown footpath that surrounded the church. And I could feel this physical exertion actually doing me good. My thoughts were still somber and bleak, but the exercise strengthened and energized me. My ailing lungs were exposed to fresh air and they recovered. And I thought about all the sedentary town dwellers in our kingdom, how well they too would feel with exercise. The villagers, however, all the farmhands and maids who dragged and lifted and walked many times more than I did every working day, they thought I had taken leave of my senses. Behind my back they started calling me Wandering Lasse.
My ruminations left me no peace. Was I saved? Yes, I believed in God, didn’t I? I rattled off the confession with the parishioners and dispensed forgiveness for sins as if I were dishing out sugar lumps. Sinners went to church for comfort and a pat on the head. Then all of them went home and carried on drinking and whoring and snaffling money and calling themselves Christians. We took a brandy, we dallied with the maid, we added a few pennies to the bills. Sober boozers, virtuous fornicators, honorable thieves. Could people like that call themselves believers?
That was when I went to Åsele. And God awakened me. He came to me and spoke to me in a woman’s voice. He showed me Milla Clementsdotter, this holy mother of God, who took me into her womb and embraced my shriveled husk and gave me life again.
* * *
—
My work in God’s vineyard will soon be over. I must have only a few years left. How many? Twenty? Or maybe only ten? Autumn is approaching and I can feel the night cold. One winter’s day my life will end and my body will be buried in the earth of the north. I want to believe that I have achieved a little good. There have been a few articles and books, and my extensive herbarium will stand. But in a hundred years all this will be forgotten. Some small detail from my sermons might have lodged in an old crofter-woman’s mind. It won’t be more than that. The only thing that will remain, the only thing that testifies my life and work, will be the name of an unimportant plant. I will be a plant on the southern slope of a mountain in the vast Torne Lappmark.
I bow my head so my hair hangs like a shadow over my brow, I clasp my nicotine-stained hands together. But no one answers. How can I face the world’s pain? Where can I find the strength and grace? The sky is cold over the land of the north, the empty curve of a giant eyeball. Not even the stars are twinkling tonight.
61.
Brita Kajsa woke me early in the morning. Her eyes were wide open, her hand on her heart. I felt paralyzed with fear. My wife was ill, she needed my help. Awkwardly I tried to get up, but she held on to me, pinching my shoulders painfully.
“They’ve got him,” she gasped.
“Who?”
“The neighbor’s maid came to tell me. Jussi’s been caught red-handed!”
“Our Jussi?”
“He assaulted a girl. But this time they managed to arrest him. He’s been put in jail.”
Her chin was wrinkled and thrust out as she tried to say more but couldn’t. All I could do was embrace her. I could still remember the dream she woke me from, I had met Linnaeus himself. He had let me browse through his herbarium, and there I had found an unknown plant, completely new to science, the leaves similar to Taraxacum but the flowers like Dryas. But now a sheet of ice was drawn over my happiness.
Before long the night’s events were on everyone’s lips. Aha, it was the pastor’s noaidi child who attacked the women. The monster! Many people said they had suspected Jussi all the time; he was described as weird, he was from a Sami family and he had a craven, evasive way about him. People had noticed how he avoided eye contact and his voice was low and he mumbled as if he were trying to hide something. In church he had been seen staring across the aisle to the women’s side, making the girls shudder when they felt his lecherous eye. It was obvious this man had for a long time harbored evil instincts within him. Roope could testify that the prisoner had previously been caught skulking beside the village road. Roope had happened to be passing in his cart and thanks to the dog’s vigilance Jussi had been sent packing with a proper bloody nose and at least that night an attack on another woman had been prevented.
I made my way to the prison in Pajala but wasn’t allowed in. The sheriff explained that he and Michelsson had interrogated the prisoner all night and there would be no interference from outsiders. When he had the confession finished and signed, that might be the time for the priest to deal with his sins, but at the moment it was too soon. He reluctantly allowed me to leave a passage from the Bible for Jussi on a piece of paper. I chose Isaiah 51:14.
“The captive exile hasteneth that he may be loosed, and that he should not die in the pit.”
Brahe carelessly folded the paper and said it would be given to Jussi at the appropriate time. Whereupon he showed me out in no uncertain manner. I heard the key turn in the lock when the door was shut.
I looked up to find the villagers staring at me inquisitively. Everyone knew that Jussi had been living with us at the parsonage. Why hadn’t I noticed anything? One of the old women squeezed out a few tears and asked if I would give some words of comfort at this difficult time, when the devil himself had been captured in the village. I said something noncommittal. When the woman grabbed my coat and held on to me, I almost struck her. At the last moment I came to my senses and she let go, a look of terror on her face when she saw the fury in my eyes.
I returned home and sat down to write Sunday’s sermon in an attempt to calm my stormy soul.
* * *
—
If you, the Good Samaritan, do not help this wretched man, who lies half dead at the roadside, then he will surely die forever. And the dogs and all the wild creatures of the forest will seize their opportunity and tear him apart and ravage him. Gnomes and forest demons will rejoice and laugh. . . .
* * *
—
Jussi, my Jussi . . . the poor boy who had been hiding by the path like a little reed. And I picked him. I dug him up by the roots and made a place in my herbarium, a tiny plant ripped out of its home soil. Perhaps I did wrong? Perhaps he would have been happier to have stayed in his meager frost-bound earth. I taught the boy to read and write, but what else did he get in my presence? Not a woman, not a friend. Perhaps I frightened away everything that might have been good for him? His peers were scared of the nasty priest. They wanted to avoid my critical looks, my scathing writings and restless obsession. The peasants sensed that Jussi was different from them. So they beat him to a pulp. They battered him between the legs so that no more like him could come into the world.
Jussi, my Jussi . . . you poor boy. I saved you at the side of the road not once, but twice, I held you like a son to my breast. Did you let the devil build a nest in your poor heart?
I thought of all the times Jussi had just disappeared. He had gone off without a word and then been away for weeks. As if he were driven by powerful external forces. I too had noticed his staring looks at the women’s side in church; he must have felt the desires of the flesh, for he is a young man after all. And at the same time he had been plagued by his timidity and awkwardness. I had never felt shy in front of the fair sex, I had always been able to joke and jest with the girls. But if, like Jussi, you felt strong desires but hardly dared say a word, and if you couldn’t find a way to approach women, then in time an ever greater inner pressure would result. A fire that blazed more and more intensely until it was forced to break out in a frenzy.
What was the psychology that turned this humble village boy into a violent criminal?
I was obliged to put my sermon aside for a while. In despair I bowed my head over my d
esk and clasped my hands. But rational thought was beyond me. Instead I was transformed into an empty vessel. From all directions thoughts shot up like sprouting weeds, poking up like twine. The knot in my stomach wouldn’t loosen and the sharp light of an inextinguishable lamp burned in my chest.
Only much later did I gradually feel my heart lighten. And suddenly it happened. As if the river flowed into me. The long and mighty Torne with its foaming Kengis waterfall flooded through me and sluiced all the dirt and filth. All the gray lice and nits, all the impurity and murk was washed away in the current. Finally, the only thing left was a rounded mirror of water. An eternally circular O.
While it was happening, I was no part of it. I don’t know how long it went on. It was a state I couldn’t describe, because at the time I wasn’t there.