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.
Chapter Six
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.
She draws a short biography from him, Lydia Manström, who takes it in and only passes along such things as will cause no one embarrassment. What she retains within her tailored velvet jacket with its braids and trimmings is this: the oldest son of an overly ambitious teacher and an unpredictable father, forced to start school a year ahead of his own age group, always teased and excluded. Unable to honour his father, plagued by his mother’s overblown expectations. At the age of fourteen, stricken with tuberculosis of the stomach and the knees, a year in hospital, in the tear-filled eyes of his mother, dying. In an adult ward, among repulsive men with indecent stories and suggestions—the poor nurses!—and no reservations about his innocence. And then to see how they died, suffocating in their obscenity, drowning in their slime. How he prayed and promised to serve the Lord with joy all his life if only he could escape the hospital alive and make a life of his own. How he recovered, became a star pupil in school, took up sports to get into condition, graduated, and began to study theology. Studied and studied, often with distaste and without pleasure. The war that broke out. His stricken conscience at being exempt from military duty while brothers and friends were dying at the front, his resolve to be always ready, without complaint, to help those who needed him—Mrs Vale O’Tears, Miss Gloomquist, Mr von Woe. Food supply commission, Home Guard, fire brigade, war orphans. His studies like wading through tar. Debilitating anxiety, despair at the alliance with Germany and Finland’s unfortunate invasion of East Karelia. Pangs of conscience like a fire blanket over his rebellious spirit. Should I or shouldn’t I? But yes! You must. Always.