Ulla-Lena Lundberg - Ice

The priest smiles when he gets this message, for here is another person who will support him in word and deed. “Whether you like it or not,” the organist says, who nevertheless is an ally of Adele Bergman’s and chairman of the Co-op board. “We wouldn’t have got through the war half so well without Adele,” he adds quickly. “When you live as far out as we do here, it goes without saying that we’re last on the list, and when the Central Co-op got to our order, there was never anything left. But Adele didn’t take it lying down. I’ve heard her talk to them on the phone. ‘Our Co-op members are just as valuable as those in the city, and according to the Co-op bylaws, we have the same rights. As a Co-op manager, I won’t bend an inch, and I demand that we get the deliveries we’re entitled to. Without delay. Because we’re farthest out, we should get our deliveries first, since the small amounts we need are hardly noticed.’ And so on. She never let them forget us. It was a lot easier for them to carry our orders down to the boat than to try and explain to Adele why we weren’t going to get them. When things got really bad, 1944 for example, and it was simply impossible to get your hands on any boat fuel at all, she went to Åbo herself and got her hands on two barrels of petrol, which she had them carry down to the boat with her. Then she stood there and guarded them until the boat left, and then at every stop along the way. Word got here before Anton did, and when the boat arrived in the wee hours, there was a crowd of people on the Co-op dock with canisters. And then things got really hot. ‘The store will open at eight o’clock and not one minute earlier,’ she told them. She must have been dead tired, but there she stood at eight o’clock on the dot and measured out what everyone had a right to. Adele gets more done than a man. People laugh at her, but they count on the fact that she’ll get her hands on what we need. When we went to the herring market in Helsingfors after the peace was signed, everyone from here was astonished at how little there was to buy in the shops—compared to what Adele could plunk down on the counter for us if she thought we were worthy and had earned it.”

The pastor and his wife are unquestionably among the worthy. Even if you specifically refuse all privilege, it’s impossible to refuse Adele’s goodwill. And a good thing, too, because the locals find all sorts of things in their sheds and boathouses that they can make use of when things get tight, whereas the pastor and his wife have to start with two pretty much empty hands. God helps those whom Adele Bergman helps, he thinks, laughing, on his way home, heavily burdened. A poor man would have an easier trip home.

He has fixed up the skiff and raised the sail and heads off. Not slowly, either. The boat hisses through the water and there’s spray from the waves when he turns.

He learned to sail when he was still a boy, he says, and he’s always liked to sail as close to the wind as he dares. To press ahead before you come about, that’s life. Of course he’s turned over on occasion, but that’s no big deal. And he suspects that he’ll do it again a few times before he gets the hang of the skiff.

I catch him in the act, you might say. I’m approaching the bay when the priest comes streaking out behind the point. He shoves the rudder over so hard that the boat just lies down, the way you might blow down a house of cards. The priest is in the water, swimming like an otter with the sheet firmly in hand. Though it’s heavy going with the boat in tow, he drags it onto a skerry and turns it over easy as pie and wraps the painter around a stone.

He’s standing there wringing out his clothes when I come up, cut my motor and throw out a grapnel. “In God’s name,” I start, but I have to laugh when I hear myself, for that’s usually the priest’s line. He laughs too and cries hello. “Are you all right?” I call.

“You bet,” he says. “I’ve got to test the limits a bit and see what the skiff can do. She needs coddling, the little dickens.”

My own skiff drifts towards the skerry as far as the grapnel permits and there we sit and talk, I in my boat and he on land. He spreads his clothes out on the granite and then sits down himself on a dry spot. “I’ll just have to sit here until everything’s dry. Otherwise I’ll be in trouble when I get home.”

He makes it sound like a great joke, but it’s easy for me to believe that his wife would give him a dressing down, and he deserves one. He sails like an idiot just because he’s young and strong and swims like a fish.

“You need to be careful till you know how the winds twist in among these islands,” I warn him. “They’re nothing to play with, the sea and the weather, and it doesn’t always end this well.”

It’s then he says that stuff about having turned boats over lots of times. And then he says, “You must have done the same, you’ve lived your whole life on the sea.”

Then I really have to think. I’m taken aback when I have to tell him the truth. “No, not that I can remember. I’ve always kept my feet in the boat, even if the rest of me hung out over the gunnels.”

He sighs but then laughs again. “I guess that’s the difference between doing this for a living, like you, and doing it for fun and excitement, like me.”

“Yes,” I say. “And there aren’t a lot of us who can swim, either. They figure it just prolongs the suffering if you go overboard in open water. What’ll happen to you if you turn her over in a big bay and you’re not up to swimming ashore?”

“Maybe I’ll have the wits to make my turns a little wider,” he says, and I understand why people like him, because he’s not cocky, however foolhardy he may be.

He’s funny too, sitting there drying out. Even if I don’t intend to say anything to his wife, I haven’t made any promises to keep my mouth shut otherwise. We’ve always kept an eye on our priests and talked about how they behave. If it’s something hilarious, so much the better. We have the post office in our home, and when I tell the story to Julanda the news will spread quickly. For we forward the news from a laughing mouth free of charge, without ink and envelopes and stamps.

THE CONGREGATION SEES HIM SUNNY. Smiling, interested, eager to learn. Friendly, unaffected. Full of energy. Unassuming and appreciative, always with a good word for everyone. Full of fun, once you get to know him and realize that there is more than gravity beneath that cassock. So charmed by everything the parish has to offer that everyone melts. He likes the landscape: bleak, improbably beautiful in all its moods, fresh breezes and open vistas. The people: indescribably appealing. Charming. Intelligent. Handsome, lively, quick-witted. Knowledgeable, amazingly well-informed. Talkative and articulate. Exceptional. His new life as an island priest: a gift from God.

So cheerful that you might think he’s never suffered a setback, that what lies behind the delight that wells forth is a lack of deeper life experience or an inborn naiveté.

Nothing about him indicates that he comes from the great affliction. The endless war. An intense aversion to himself and to everyone who ran after him with their senseless expectations. A Christianity rendered stiff and almost dumb. A greyness and brownness drawn across all of existence. In spite of it, people’s terrible will to live, and, as if to mock them, death’s endless variety and the cycles of disease, anguish, and loss that everyone is forced to pass through on their way to death.