Margit Sandemo: The Ice People 15 - The East Wind

Vendel had been invited there once. The Skogh family had a daughter, Maria, who was exactly the same age as Vendel. She was sweet – very sweet – and Vendel’s romantic heart had begun to grow warm. During dinner he sat next to her and he had never been so close to such a feminine creature before. Suddenly his hands seemed incredibly big and clumsy, constantly in danger of knocking over his glass. His tongue refused to obey him and he was practically stammering, and it was as though all the intelligent words he was accustomed to using simply vanished all at once. Where did all these empty phrases come from that he couldn’t stop saying?

But it seemed as if no one noticed his agony. Maria smiled sweetly and a little absent-mindedly and turned just as often to Corfitz Beck, who sat on her other side. But every time she looked at Vendel he got the feeling that something within him had died a little. It was his childhood that died. He felt that he was on his way to becoming a grown-up. And he was twenty years old – it was about time!

The Skogh family lived in one of the finer houses that had been allotted to the Swedish prisoners. Of course, it wasn’t much bigger than a shed and it was hard to say exactly how many families lived there. They had tried to give the house a certain style, as well as they could in their modest circumstances. But for Vendel it was like visiting a real home after all those harsh years in foreign countries.

After the visit he returned to the miserable hovel he shared with the other soldiers. The buran, or the purga, as it was called in Siberia, blew savagely through the streets, heralding a rise in temperature. It was much needed because it had been cold for a long time. Vendel should have been freezing in his plain and simple clothes, but he wasn’t. It felt as though he was walking on air.

As soon as he got home he went to the workshop. There was a small leather purse he had started work on. Initially he had intended to sell it but he now changed his mind. Maria was to have it, she and no one else. And he would make a pattern so exceptionally fine that nothing like it would ever have been seen before.

Vendel worked all night and fell asleep at the workbench. The next day he was supposed to be helping with the construction of a tower in the city, which was already known as the “Swedish Tower” and which would retain that name through the following centuries after the Swedish soldiers of Karl XII who wore themselves out building it.

As they had expected, the weather changed: the purga had delivered some heat in the air but the wind continued to blow just as forcefully. In this temperature building work could continue easily, but Vendel had no time for that. He coughed horribly when the guards came to fetch them and asked if he might stay at home, just for that day. He must have looked very pale after staying up all night working, because the guards let him stay.

That meant that he could continue working on the leather purse. The work took a whole week, but when it was finished it was as beautiful as you could imagine. It had a relief pattern in azure and yellow and an intricate closing mechanism.

Every evening Vendel would casually stroll past the Skogh family’s house. Once he ran into her as she rushed back home, her hands inside a fur muff. “I have to make her a muff,” was his immediate thought.

He lifted his hat and greeted her respectfully. Maria gave him an uncomprehending look, then she recognized him and stopped. She held out her little hand and Vendel had a hard time letting go of it, but he managed to stay within the limits of proper behaviour.

“It was nice talking to you the other night, Miss Maria,” he said politely, because that was what he had practised. But then he was suddenly at a loss for words. “Uhm ... it’s ... uhm ... nice weather today.”

The weather wasn’t nice, but she agreed with him because she didn’t know what to say either.

They were both perplexed for a moment as they stood there, but then she appeared to want to move on.

“Well, I’d better be going,” she murmured dimly.

“Help me, good gods, make her stay,” Vendel moaned inwardly, but the gods were not being very cooperative.

“S-say hello to your mother and father,” he stammered perplexedly, and she nodded and disappeared.

And then there was the purse. How on earth was he going to deliver it to her in a way that would seem suitable? In such a way so that it seemed the kind of gift you might give to the daughter of a family you knew but at the same time so that she understood the love that lay behind it? Without thinking about it, he had probably been hoping to be invited there again, and then it would have been easy to say casually, “Speaking of my work, I have a small thing with me I’ve been working on in my spare time, just for fun. Perhaps Miss Maria would be interested in having it?”

No one could take offence at something like that. And she would be ecstatic and thank him with radiant eyes and then she’d think of him every time she took out her purse to buy something.

But he was not invited back to the Skogh household again. Spring passed, the wind from the taiga forest grew increasingly mild, the migrant birds arrived and the few brightly coloured flowers that grew in the fields began to shoot up outside the city boundary. But Vendel never saw them because he never left the city. He only felt the intense pain of the spring season within his chest: the kind of pain a lover feels when he cannot be with the one he longs for. Never before had a young man attended so many events among the prisoners – farmers’ meetings, council meetings (which were useless anyway because women weren’t allowed to attend them) and every other conceivable event where he might run into Maria Skogh.

True, he did see her every now and then – it was unavoidable in a small town like that. And he did manage to exchange a few words with her every so often, but on the first such occasion he didn’t have the purse with him and he thought he would die of despair. And on the other occasions an opportunity hadn’t arisen or else he hadn’t dared. For a long time he would fidget with the purse in his pocket, but he was shocked one day when he noticed just how dirty it had become. He managed to clean it and tone up the colours a bit, but after that he didn’t dare carry it with him all the time. He had such an ache in his heart and his joy had almost vanished, he almost never joked with his work friends any more. He was no longer the same Vendel Grip they had known.

And then, completely out of the blue, the opportunity he had been waiting for suddenly arose.

It was the summer of 1715; he had just turned twenty-one and considered himself ripe for marriage. The prisoners arranged a summer gathering (“party” would be much too pretentious a word) and that was where he ran into Maria. And this time he had the purse with him.

And that was when he got the chance to give it to her, among the teeming crowds when everyone was leaving and Vendel had been following her with his eyes from the time he arrived until he left. He thought she was more radiant than ever; she seemed to be filled with joy – naturally from seeing him again, he thought – and she had been very friendly to him the whole time.

And then suddenly they stood very close to each other, pressed together by the crowds that were leaving. That is to say, Vendel had probably contributed a little to this closeness.

With fumbling hands he managed to give her the purse as he mumbled a few words, which weren’t at all the ones he had been practising all this time. It was highly likely that she didn’t register a single word.

Then he hurried away, still picturing her surprised and probing gaze.

For three days he walked around in a state of ecstasy.