Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

Now there remained for her only to submit.

— 4—

A Settler Wife’s Evening Prayer:

Tonight again I pray for forgiveness, as I did last night and the night before, and all evenings since I lost my child. I have confessed my sin and endure my punishment with patience, but soon I hope to feel that you have forgiven me a little. I want so to feel that you haven’t turned your face away from me. Otherwise my despair will be great. I have no one to turn to, no one but you. Karl Oskar is kind and thoughtful about me, but my husband can be my staff only in worldly matters. When I worry about my soul, then he can’t help me — no, no more than any other wretched human being.

I’m a simple and ignorant woman but I have repented and wish to better myself. From now on I will patiently endure the life which you in your grace and blessing give me. I will take care of the little ones with all the strength you give me. I shall try as well as I can to look after the other children you have given me. But you know how tired I get at times; in the evenings I feel worn out, and in the mornings I wonder if I will be able to get up.

Sometimes I feel I would be glad to die, because then I would have the enduring rest which I long for. But I worry lest I die before my children can take care of themselves. If I should leave Karl Oskar he would be unable to handle the little ones alone; this you know. Ulrika is barely five years old and little Frank isn’t three yet. Therefore, I pray you, my creator and Lord, let me live still a few years, at least five years more, if you could grant me this. By then Johan and Marta will be nearly grown and can look after the others. Then I’ll be satisfied to die, if only you will receive me in your wonderful rest and peace.

I think often about the words of Robert, my brother-in-law: I’m unable any longer to fight against him who rules creation — I might as well try to lift the whole earth onto my shoulders or tear down the heavens above my head. Therefore, do with me as you wish! I am reconciled to all. Like him I submit to the lot destined for me. Then nothing ill will happen to me in death.

But dear Lord — I cannot think of being dead alone; in time I want Karl Oskar and the children with me in death. I do not wish to be alone in eternity.

Give me strength to last a few years more! Dear God, the first thing and the last I pray for this evening: Don’t make my children motherless too soon!

Bless and keep all of us who sleep under this roof and all the settlers who have come to this foreign land! Amen!

— 5—

It was Kristina’s habit, during this season of the year, to lie awake in the evenings after she had gone to bed and peer into the dark for that land where the evenings in spring were light.

In her thoughts she traveled the road back, piece by piece, mile after mile, down the rivers, across the prairie, over the sea. But the road each time seemed longer — she never reached the end, not even half or a quarter of the distance. She never reached her goal, she spent all her time on the road. And each time she journeyed a shorter distance, while the land receded farther.

By and by, as the land of her childhood and youth faded into a distant memory, it was transformed in her mind’s eye. And as she remembered it in later years, she no longer longed for it: she was already there.

As a small girl she had lost her doll one day, the first doll she had ever had, a china doll in a blue-flowered dress; it had fallen into the farmstead well at home in Duvemåla. She was inconsolable over her loss and cried and begged her father and brothers — wouldn’t they please get the doll out of the well for her? But the well was too deep; whatever was lost in it once remained there. So her doll had stayed at the bottom of the well. On clear days she could look down into the well and see the doll’s dress like a streak of bluing in the water. She would climb up on the fence around the well so that her parents had to forbid her to go near it. But whenever they were out of sight, she would steal back to peek in. She could see the rose cheeks of the doll fade away and the dress fade in the water. Her lost doll existed, and she knew where it was, yet it was lost to her forever.

At the next fair her father had bought a new and much bigger doll for her, with a still prettier dress, but this didn’t help; she could never forget the other one, her longing for the lost one was as great as ever. She talked only of her lost doll, she re-created it, put new dresses on it, envisioned it as the largest and most magnificent doll ever to be bought at a fair. At last it had become a doll no one had ever seen or ever would see.

So it was with her native land. She had lost it in a well so deep that she never could retrieve it. At first she had at times caught a glimpse of it with her inner eye, but during the past years it had sunk ever deeper and farther away from her. The land was there, and she knew where it was; she stood staring after it in the daytime, she had stretched her arms out to it in her dreams at night. But she would never reach it, never get it back. And she had no hope ever on this earth of seeing her beloved ones there at home.

But as the years passed and drew the homeland farther and farther away from her, the memories of that land came ever closer, and the light over them became clearer.

Thus, the same change had taken place with regard to her homeland as with the doll of the blue dress down in the well-bottom. She made a Sweden out of her own longing, a Sweden she carried within herself, a homeland that was hers and no one else’s. In so doing, she built recklessly from anything she could get hold of: all of childhood’s light and happy experiences in her home village, as they appeared across memory’s bridge; the dreams she had dreamed of her home while in this foreign land; happenings in Sweden she had heard others speak of; memories from the reading of the Bible and the saga books. She gathered up experience and dreams, guesses and suppositions, truth and fiction — from all these she wove a land that no one had ever seen and no one ever would see.

Kristina often told her children about Sweden. The two oldest had some faint memory of an earlier home far away, but to the other four, Sweden was only the land where Father and Mother had been born and where their grandparents lived. The mother often told them of her own childhood, her sisters and playmates, of schooling and games, about the seasons — a cooler summer and a warmer winter than here — about the first day of spring when she ran barefoot, about the first wild strawberries in summer and the first apples that fell from the tree in fall, about the wastelands blossoming heather in August, of the ripe-red lingon tussocks in September, the winter’s sleigh rides and the ice on the pond, about the Christmas morn journey to the early service in the light the crackling pitch torches cast over the snowy night.

She told it as it came to her, as the moment supplied her, and she changed it from time in time, added to, or deleted from it. Sometimes the children might find her out: But Mother, you told it so the last time! And now you tell it this way. Which way was it? And she couldn’t reply except to say that it was the way she told it, and that was the right way and it couldn’t be any other. Because that was how it was in Sweden where she was born and had lived as a child.

But her own children listened to her in the same way as they listened to fairy stories. To them, Sweden at last became one of those wonderful countries they read about in storybooks, where only good and pleasant things happened to the inhabitants — a country well suited for children. Once little Ulrika asked her mother: Did Sweden exist in reality? Was it actually a country on earth? Or was it, like that country with the proud prince and the beautiful princess, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon?