“Deh!” Sanna says. But Mama is lying down looking for signs of mice on the kitchen cupboard floor. “You never know what to expect in an old house like this with big cracks between the floorboards,” she confides to Sanna. “So we’ll need to get a cat right away. Would Sanna like a kitty?” “Deh!” says Sanna. “We’ll get one,” Mama decides. She has her hands full, because she wants everything to be ready when Petter gets back, so he’ll just stand there open-mouthed. As she scampers back and forth on her very nimble feet, she wonders if, as usual, he’s letting himself be talked to death so he’ll never get away, and simultaneously she hopes he won’t be in too much of a hurry so she’ll have time to get everything in order.
She’s hungry, too, because no one can work for hours on end without eating something. There’s milk in the pitcher, but not even Sanna lives on milk alone. She’s crying now, tiny and thin as she is, and soon she’ll be crying inconsolably, while their supposed protector, for whom Mona has left a salaried position, is off in the village making himself popular with the locals. Mona fills a pot with water the reception committee carried in and gets a fire going under it. There’s a good draught in the kitchen stove, but then there’s a good draught on this whole blustery island, not a tree to windward of the chimney. Out here, she instructs Sanna, you can’t open the damper more than a crack or the firewood will get pulled right up the chimney!
“Wah,” says Sanna, and Mama takes out the box of cold food. She’s not so dumb and inexperienced that she’s let herself be transported to a desert island without the wherewithal to throw up a barricade against trouble and want. There’s tea, which she and Petter will enjoy at the table in the parlour this evening, and sweet rusks, one of which she moistens with a little milk that she’s warmed on the now hot stove and feeds to Sanna. “Good!” she commands, and Sanna eats and stops crying. “Papa will be home soon, and then we’ll make some real dinner. Then Mama will go out to the barn, and tomorrow will be just an ordinary day.”
Just an ordinary day is what she longs for most of all, after the years of war, after Petter’s first assignment as a substitute preacher, housed in one room and kitchen with wife and newborn baby. A routine of their own is the loveliest dream in the world for people who have had to adapt to all manner of changing circumstances, all of them out of their control. Every family in Finland is calling for a home of its own, and this one has come sailing along and landed right here at the end of the Baltic Sea. And now it’s furnished. In a couple of hours, Mona Kummel has made it habitable, and the only thing missing is the honest smell of cooking food. Mona cannot relax. With Sanna on her arm, she wanders from window to window and looks out. She has water boiling like mad in two pots so that whatever he brings home can be cooked without wasting a moment.
“It’s awful how fast the time goes!” she says to Sanna. “It’ll soon be time to do the milking and I haven’t even started on the food. Where is he?”
“Geh,” says Sanna. “Papa-papa-papa.”
“He’ll be here soon,” says Mama. And when she’s said that a number of times, in he comes, knees buckling under the load, while the Coast Guard heads back to base. Mona had thought they’d make a tour of the house, but when Petter has picked up Sanna and begun to express his admiration, she cries out that they haven’t time, they need to eat something. Signe will be there any minute, and then they have to do the milking. “Well, what were you able to get?”
Petter is pleased with himself. Praise God, what a provisioning it’s been. “If I weren’t married to you, I would have proposed to Adele Bergman,” he says. “What a woman! She sits there on her throne like some higher being that everyone looks up to. Guess what she did! She called me into her office and invited me to sit down. I realized right away that she would talk and I would speak when spoken to. She said she imagined that we needed practically everything in the way of groceries except milk, and so this morning she’d set aside some things for us. Because otherwise it would all be gone! ‘It’s astonishing,’ she said, ‘the way people grab stuff just because certain things are no longer rationed. When they needed coupons at least we could estimate the rate of consumption.’
“I sat there stunned and thought to myself that when they ran out of everything, then Adele Bergman still had a secret little reserve that she portioned out to specially deserving people. And now we’re among them. I have flour, Mona. I have sugar. I have rolled oats and semolina. I have powdered eggs. I have peas. I have herring for this evening, and then we’ll fish for ourselves. I have salt. I have crispbread until we can do our own baking. I even have a loaf of fresh bread as a welcoming gift. That wonderful woman had even arranged for a sack of potatoes from the village until we can find some closer by.”
“Give!” says Mona, and a number of potatoes are energetically scrubbed in the kitchen basin and dumped into boiling water, followed by a shower of salt. “Twenty minutes!” she shouts. “Where’s the flour? I’ll make a white sauce. I brought pepper with us. Put that jar of herring on the table! What wonderful flour! I’ll make pancakes, we’re famished. Oh it’ll be so great to have a real meal. Can you wait? Take a piece of crispbread!” She works frantically, whips the batter, makes the sauce, throws plates and knives and forks on the table, starts making pancakes in the little frying pan. “If only we had some jam,” she says, and her husband smiles to himself and pulls out a little jar of apple sauce. Apple sauce! The first commercial apple sauce since the war. My goodness!
No one who’s seen Mona Kummel dash about would ever suspect that she can actually sit still—and longer than you might think, once she’s got the food on the table and the family in place. They eat herring and good potatoes with white sauce, and they wolf down the pancakes with sugar and apple sauce. They eat a great deal for such a small family. So much that they go on sitting when they’re done, in the gentle intoxication that a hot meal can offer when it’s several hours late. Sanna wears a melting smile, with a border of sugar and apple sauce around her mouth. Mona asks Petter about the people he saw at the store, what they looked like, what they said, and he tells her how polite and friendly they all were. Everyone shook his hand and welcomed him and spoke to him so freely and easily that it was a joy. “People are easy to talk to here,” he says. “What good people! And what a day we’ve had! My head is spinning. Hard to believe that it’s just one day since we stood on the pier in Åbo wondering if the boat would ever get under way.”
He glances in towards the parlour and on towards the bedroom that lies beyond, for now he wants to see what miracles his wife has performed. “Well why not? Come on, although I’m expecting Signe any minute and I would have liked to clear the table before she got here. But come.”
Papa picks up Sanna and they go on their tour of inspection— everything in its place, everything put to rights. “How did you find the time? How did you manage? My dear, you shouldn’t have moved the sideboard and the table by yourself! Here I’m away just a few short hours and when I come back—order from chaos.”
“Well, well,” his wife says. “The book boxes still aren’t unpacked, because you’ll have to use the boards to build a bookcase. And your suitcase and office things, I’ve just put them in your study. You can unpack them yourself while I’m milking the cows. Where is Signe? It’s almost six o’clock.”