A Treacherous Paradise (3 page)

Hanna remembered her father as strong, and with a friendly smile. But also at times melancholy, lost in thoughts she knew nothing about. She sometimes had the impression that he had trolls in his head when he sat at the kitchen table, seemingly in a different world, with his hands like lead weights in his lap. He was sitting there in his own house, with the rest of his family, but nevertheless he wasn’t there at all. He was in a different world where stones had turned into trolls, reindeer moss had become hair, and the wind whispering through the pines was the chattering of voices of the dead.

He often used to speak about them. All those who had lived in the past. It frightened him to think about how few were living in the here and now, and how many more were already dead.

There was an illness, an epidemic that all women knew the name of: thumping sickness. It broke out when men had been hitting the bottle and thumped everybody within range – mostly their children and the women who tried to protect them. Her father certainly did drink to excess at times, albeit not very often. But he was never violent. And so his wife, Hanna’s mother, didn’t worry so much about the schnapps as about his melancholy. When he drank he became maudlin and wanted to sing hymns. Despite the fact that at other times he was keen to burn down churches and drive out the priests into the forests.

‘
Without shoes,
’ Hanna recalled him shouting. ‘
Chase the priests out into the forests without shoes when the cold is at its worst. That’s where they should be banished to, into the forests, barefoot.
’

Hanna’s maternal grandmother, who lived in a draughty cottage on the edge of Funäsdalen, scared the living daylights out of her when she talked about her damned son-in-law who would condemn all his offspring to hell as a result of his blasphemous prattle. There they would find in store for them scalding temperatures and sulphurous gases and red-hot coals under the soles of their feet. Her grandmother preached threats and punishments with evil eyes and didn’t hesitate to scare her grandchildren so much that they used to burst into tears and were unable to sleep at night. Hanna thought that the worst punishment of all was when her mother forced her to keep on visiting her grandmother.

She remembered how Grandma was always angry. The old woman never stopped complaining about her daughter. She couldn’t forgive Hanna’s mother for marrying that good-for-nothing Renström, despite her warnings. Why had she fallen head over heels for that man who had nothing to commend himself? He was small, bow-legged and bald even before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. And he had Finnish blood in his veins, and he came from the depths of the forests – from as far away as Värmland, where it was impossible to distinguish between day and night.

Why couldn’t she have picked out a man from Hede or Bruksvallarna or somewhere where honest folk lived?

Hanna’s mother was called Elin. She submitted to her ancient mother, never contradicted her, accepted everything her mother said without a word of protest. Hanna could understand that it was possible to love somebody who treated you badly, no matter how odd that sounded. That must have been the relationship between Grandma and Elin.

Elin
.

Hanna had always thought that it was a name that didn’t really suit her mother. Somebody called Elin ought to be slim and delicately formed, with hands like milk and fair hair hanging down over her back. But Elin Wallén, Elin Renström after her marriage, was powerfully built with lank reddish-brown hair, a large nose and teeth that were not quite regular. They gave the impression of wanting to jump out of her mouth and run away. Elin Renström was certainly not a beautiful woman. And she knew it. And perhaps she also regretted it, Hanna sometimes thought when she became old enough to take a critical look at her own face in her father’s cracked shaving mirror.

But her mother was by no means subdued as a result of her less than pretty appearance. She had qualities that she made the most of. She made up for her shortcomings by always keeping a strict eye on her family’s cleanliness. No matter how draughty and cold her house was, she made sure the floors, ceilings and walls were kept spotlessly clean; and the same applied to her children and her own body. Elin hunted down lice like a battalion of soldiers attacking an enemy. She filled and emptied the tin tub in which they all bathed, carried the water up from the river, heated it over the fire until it became warm, scrubbed everybody down, then carried up more buckets of water with which to wash all the dirty linen that was always piling up.

The four children also watched in admiration as their mother handled their father when he had came home tired and dirty from the forest. She would wash him in a way which suggested she was engaged in an act of eternal love. And he seemed to enjoy the touch of her hands as she scrubbed and dried him, clipped his rough and misshapen nails, and shaved him so closely that his cheeks became as smooth as those of a baby.

But Hanna’s first memory was the cold. The cold and the snow, which began to fall around the end of September, and didn’t release its grip until early June, when the last white patches finally melted away.

And of course there was also the poverty. That was not a memory as such, but the reality in which she lived while growing up. And it was also the thing that eventually forced her to leave her home by the river.

Hanna was seventeen years old then, her father was already dead, and she spent all her time helping her mother with her brothers and sisters since she was the eldest. They were poor, but they managed to keep the worst of their destitution outside the walls of their house.

Until the year 1903. That summer was afflicted by a long and severe drought, and then an early frost which killed off whatever the drought had failed to burn up.

That was the year when her life changed for ever.

The horizon had previously been a distant phenomenon. Now it came close. Like a threat.

EVEN IF SHE
didn’t want to remember it, it was a day she could never forget.

The middle of August, low clouds, an early morning. Hanna accompanied her mother to look at the devastation. Everything shrivelled and burnt. The earth was strangely silent. The flour they had left would barely last them until Advent. Nor would they have enough hay to feed their only cow over the winter.

As they walked through the dead field, on a slope down to the river, Elin saw her mother cry for the first time. All those long weeks while her father had been ill in bed and had eventually died, Elin had merely closed her eyes, shut out the inevitable end and the hopeless loneliness that was now in store for her. But she hadn’t cried, hadn’t screamed. Hanna had often thought about how her mother was directing all her pain inwards, to where she had hidden away somewhere inside her a secret source of strength that overcame all her pains and troubles.

It was then, as they were walking over the dead field and realized that destitution was now on their doorstep, that Elin started talking about how her daughter would have to go away. There was no future for Hanna there by the river. She would have to move to the coast in order to earn her living. When Elin and her husband had come to the bank of the river and taken over the unpromising little smallholding from one of her uncles, they’d had no choice. It was 1883, a mere sixteen years after the last great famine that had devastated Sweden. If famine was now on its way back, Hanna would have to leave while there was still time.

They were standing at the edge of the forest, where the silent field came to an end.

‘Are you chasing me away?’ Hanna asked.

Elin stroked her nose, as she always did when she was embarrassed.

‘I can cope with three children,’ she said, ‘but not four. You are grown up now, you can look after yourself, and make things easier both for you and for me. I don’t chase my children away. I just want to give you the opportunity of living your life. If you stay here all you can do is hope to survive, nothing more.’

‘What can I do down by the coast that would be of any use to anybody?’

‘The same as you do here. Look after children, work with your hands. There is always a demand for maids in towns.’

‘Who says so?’

It wasn’t her intention to contradict her mother, but Elin took it as impertinence and took tight hold of her arm.

‘I say so, and you must believe me when I say that I mean every word that passes my lips. I’m not doing it because it gives me any pleasure, but because I have to.’

She let go of Hanna’s arm, as if she had been guilty of assault and was now regretting it.

It dawned on Hanna that what her mother was doing was something extremely difficult.

She never forgot that moment. It was right then, and in that very place – at the edge of the grim landscape of famine, standing beside her mother who had just wept for the first time in her presence – that Hanna realized that she was who she was, and nobody else.

She was Hanna, and irreplaceable. Neither her body nor her thoughts could be replaced by anybody else. And it occurred to her that her father, who was now dead, had been just like her: a person who could not be replaced by anybody else.

Is this what it means to be an adult? she thought, her face turned away because she had the feeling that her mother could read her thoughts. Exchanging the insecurity of a child for a different unknown – the knowledge that the only possible answers are the ones you can provide yourself?

They returned to the house, which was hidden away in a copse comprising a few birch trees and a single mountain ash. Her brother and sisters were indoors, despite the fact that this autumn day was not particularly cold. But they played less and tended to be quiet when they were hungry. Their life was a never-ending wait for food, and not much else.

They stopped outside the door, as if Elin had decided never to allow her daughter inside again.

‘My uncle Axel lives in Sundsvall,’ she said. ‘Axel Andreas Wallén. He works in the docks. He’s a nice man, and he and his wife Dora don’t have any children. They had two boys, but both of them died, and after that they didn’t have any more. Axel and Dora will help you. They won’t turn you away.’

‘I don’t want to go to them as a beggar,’ said Hanna.

The slap came without warning. Afterwards, Hanna thought the blow was reminiscent of the impact from a bird of prey diving down at her cheek.

Elin might possibly have slapped her before, but in that case it would have been triggered mainly by fear. If Hanna had wandered off alone to the river in the spring when it was a raging torrent, and risked falling in and being drowned. But now Elin hit her as a result of irritation. It was the first time.

It was a slap given by a grown-up person to another grown-up. Who would understand why.

‘I don’t abandon my daughter in order to make her a beggar,’ said Elin angrily. ‘I only have your best interests at heart. There’s nothing for you here.’

Hanna had tears in her eyes. Not because of the pain – she had experienced much worse pain than that in her life.

The slap she had received confirmed what she had just been thinking: now she was alone in the world. She would have to leave and travel eastward, towards the coast, and she would never be able to return. What she left behind would sink deeper into oblivion for every metre a sleigh’s runners whisked her away.

It was early autumn, 1903. Hanna Renström was seventeen years old, and would be eighteen on 12 December.

A few months later she would leave her home for ever.

HANNA THOUGHT TO
herself: the time of sagas and make-believe is over. Now it’s time for real-life stories.

She realized that when Elin told her what was in store for her. It sometimes happened that businessmen from the coast who travelled over the mountains in winter to Norway for the Røros market didn’t take the usual and shortest route back home, along the River Ljusnan and down to Karböle. Some of them headed northwards after crossing the Sweden–Norway border and then, if the weather permitted it, turned off via Flatruet and along the River Ljungan so that they could do business in the villages on the riverbanks.

There was one businessman in particular, Jonathan Forsman, who usually travelled home via the villages north of Flatruet.

‘He has a big sleigh,’ said Elin. ‘On the way home it’s never as heavily laden as it is when he’s on his way to Røros. He’s bound to be able to make room for you. And he’ll leave you in peace. He won’t try to make advances to you.’

Hanna looked doubtfully at her. How could Elin be so sure? Hanna was well aware what life had in store for her, she had never been totally devoid of other young girls to talk to. Not least the girls who used to act as maids in the shacks up in the mountains when the farmers’ and shepherds’ flocks were grazing in their summer pastures: they had all kinds of strange tales to tell with a mixture of giggles and badly concealed discomfort. Hanna knew what it was like to blush, and what could happen inside her body, especially in the evenings, just before she fell asleep.

But that was all. How could Elin know what might or might not happen on a long sleigh-ride to the distant coast?

She asked her straight out.

‘He’s seen the light,’ said Elin promptly. ‘He used to be an awful man, just like most of those old devils with their sleighs. But since he became a Christian he’s a sort of good Samaritan. He’ll let you travel with him and won’t even ask for payment. And he’ll lend you one of his fur coats so that you won’t freeze.’

But Elin couldn’t be absolutely sure if he would come, or when. The usual time was shortly before Christmas, but there had been occasions when he didn’t turn up until into the New Year. And he had been known not to come at all.

‘He might also be dead, of course,’ said Elin.

When a sleigh set off and was swallowed up by flurries of snow, you never knew whether that might be the last you ever saw of a person, no matter how young or old he was.

Hanna would be ready to travel at any time after her birthday on 12 December. Jonathan Forsman was always in a hurry, never stayed anywhere longer than necessary. Unlike people who always had no end of time to spare, he was an important person and hence was always in a hurry.