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.
6
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?