Mona gives him one of those penetrating looks that make him look away. He knows more or less what she’s thinking. He should watch his tongue and not quite so frankly reveal his innermost thoughts to anyone and everyone. A person needs to button up and caulk his hull. Things said in confidence sound entirely different when shouted from the rooftops. This is what she’s thinking, among other things, and she’s right as usual.
But. It’s not true that he babbles indiscriminately. It you expect candour from others, you have to open the door to yourself a bit. If you want to reduce people’s reservations, you have to thin out your own. And yet it’s something of a problem for Mona that he sits there chatting with people as if he had all the time in the world. Time that ought to be hers. Theirs. Of course it’s fun and exciting to have a new priest who’s young and full of fun, happy and accommodating, of course everyone wants to talk to him, sit there and bask in his attention and waste the time he ought to devote to so much else.
While the priest lingers in the village, eating party food and drinking coffee until his belly is stuffed, talking and singing hymns, his wife has done the milking and washed the dishes, put the laundry in to soak, cranked the separator, scrubbed the kitchen floor where he has thoughtlessly tracked in mud, built a fire in the bathhouse to heat laundry water, hauled up water from the well, washed clothes with a will, fed herself and Sanna at appropriate intervals, chased off the tenant farmer’s cows which had broken through the fence, pounded in some posts ostentatiously with a stone without attracting any attention whatsoever from the tenants, who do not show themselves in any window. And when she looks inside, there is not a living soul. It’s like the Mary Celeste—a fire in the stove, food warm on the plates, sails set for a light breeze, but no life. Back in the parsonage, there’s no end to it. If she has a free moment, there are clothes to be mended, letters to be written. Food must be prepared—though he’ll hardly be hungry when he gets home—and kept warm in case he comes late, as usual. The evening milking will have to be done soon, and Sanna will have to go with her because there’s no one else in the house. She’s sensible for her age, but you still have to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t get covered with dirt or go too close and get stepped on. Gnats and mosquitoes enough to drive you crazy. Sanna screams and cries, and the cows throw their heads and stamp their feet—they’d step right into the milking pail if she wasn’t careful. It takes forever even if she hurries, and then she has to stand there and filter the milk and lower it into the cowshed well. The warm milk warms up the well water, and the whole thing is an inefficient joke for someone from a real dairy farm with a basin and ice stacked under a layer of sawdust. But you have to be grateful to have milk at all, so she can’t complain. “Come, Sanna. Now we can finally go. Good girl.”
Yes. Sanna. It’s not right that he so rarely has time for his own daughter. His own family. Of course he has to do his job, but shouldn’t he have some time for himself? But then he has to write his sermon, and study for his pastoral exams, and read through the endless pile of correspondence from the diocese. He has to stay abreast of the local news, and the world news, otherwise he’ll be hopelessly out of touch, and then there are all those theological journals. He has to write letters to his mother, all too often and all too detailed, and she immediately responds with dreadfully long and closely written replies. More’s the pity, because then he has to write again promptly, also closely written and at length, and sympathize. There’s no end to it.
The parsonage is on Church Isle, isolated from the parish, and in human terms it offers a haven of peace for the priest when he finally gets home. And it certainly looks peaceful for a moment or two when he comes jogging up the hill from his boat. The wind dies at dusk, and the evening air is raw and damp. He takes the steps in a couple of bounds, lifts the latch, smells the fire in the stove, opens the door. A scream of joy and Sanna throws herself into his arms. Mona, angrily, “Sanna! Go straight to bed! Once you’re there, you stay there!” She takes Sanna by the arm, hard, and Sanna yelps and clings to him tightly. Strict loyalty a requirement, but he must be loyal to his child as well, and he holds Sanna close and says, “Just a little while. I haven’t seen her all day.”
No indeed, but he hasn’t seen Mona all day, either. Mona, who sees him mostly when he’s worn out and dog-tired and still has lots of work to get through even though it’s already late. The parish never sees him that way, whereas she … But what is she thinking? The husband she loves has come home at last, and she ought to be happy. And of course she is happy. She’s only irritated because she can never have enough, because she’s jealous of the parish that gets such great gulps of him while she gets him back when he’s dead tired and should just be allowed to go to bed.
“Sit down,” she says. “We’ll have some tea and you can tell me about the catechetical meeting. What the food was like, and who you talked to. Sanna can stay up for a little while, but then to bed.” With Sanna’s arms around his neck, he starts to tell about the meeting—how well they read, how openly they answered his questions. How the organist is clearly on his guard in the east villages. About the baked pike and about Arthur Manström and his lawfully wedded wife Lydia. About the way his head buzzes with all the talk and the singing. How nice it is to be home. How absolutely wonderful it is to come home to his two girls. He never in his life expected to feel such happiness.
They sit there a bit dizzy with exhaustion, drink their tea and know a little more about the nature of happiness than they did when they were even younger. Then Mona had taken their relationship for granted. Later events made her terribly jealous and put her on her guard. Not that he would have been unfaithful or allowed himself to be tempted. It was rather that he behaved as if he lacked a sense of self-preservation and believed that he was some sort of Jesus put on earth to bear the world’s sorrows.
In plain language, Mona had to murder a whole religious movement in order to save him. This was the Oxford Movement, an intellectual and theological renewal of faith, with great ethical demands, which had a powerful influence on Petter and his closest friends during their studies at the School of Theology at Helsingfors University. During those same years, the movement was hijacked by the Americans and transformed into Moral Rearmament, MRA. In Petter’s second parish, where he served temporarily as assisting pastor, MRA had a solid foothold among a leading group of parishioners. A person with as much common sense as Mona had only to look at them as they greeted Petter to hear alarm bells. Unrealistic dreamers, the whole bunch, who managed to monopolize him in no time and pull him into endless evening meetings that fairly reeked of confession and tormented self-examination. So persuasive were they that Petter got the idea that it was his duty to stand up in the pulpit before the entire congregation and confess the erotic missteps of his youth as well as the vice of self-abuse, a plan averted only when Mona threatened to beat him senseless with a cast-iron frying pan rather than let him leave home for church, and when Uncle Isidor made an emergency visit. In the course of this private conversation, Isidor stressed the fact that a priest must by all means be truthful, but that he must also be an example for his congregation, as prescribed in his clerical oath. What kind of example will he be if he stands in the pulpit and wallows in youthful sins, no longer of any consequence. If a priest could … well then, couldn’t anyone? That’s what many will think. Others will laugh at him behind his back and he will lose all his authority and, worse, his legitimacy as a priest. Does he want to be relieved of his office? Has he lost his mind? Has he thought this through all the way to the bitter end? Think of Mona and his little daughter. Think of his mother! Who has already suffered such grief.