A Treacherous Paradise (5 page)

‘We’ll set off again tomorrow,’ he said after saying grace and checking to make sure that she clasped her hands in prayer properly.

But that night the stormy winds veered to the north and then decided to call a halt. The snowstorm stayed put. They were snowed in and stuck at the dreary inn. Half a metre of snow fell in less than four hours, and the wind resulted in drifts that in places were as high as the building’s roof ridge.

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the journey, just as dusk was falling, that they arrived in Sundsvall. Hanna had been counting the days, but hadn’t realized that this evening was in fact New Year’s Eve. The following day it would be 1904.

Forsman seemed to think that everything associated with the New Year was important. He pushed the horse hard in order to make sure that they reached the centre of town before midnight. New Year’s Eve had never been anything special for Hanna. She had usually been fast asleep when the New Year began. She couldn’t recall either her father or Elin regarding the dawn of a new year as anything special that deserved to be marked by being awake at midnight, or celebrating in any other way.

The fact that they had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together seemed to mean nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all as far as Forsman was concerned. It was the New Year that was important.

The long sleigh journey had taken place in silence when they were travelling through the forests or over the barren plains. Occasionally Forsman had shouted something to the horse, but he had never spoken to Hanna. He sat in front of her in the sleigh like a forbidding wall.

But the last day of their journey was different. He turned round to shout at her, and she shouted back at him as loudly as she could, in order to make herself heard.

Jonathan Forsman regarded the New Year as something holy.

‘God has created the turn of the year to make us think about the time that has passed and the time that is to come,’ he shouted at her in the back of the sleigh.

Before he saw the light, he had always indulged in heathen pastimes on New Year’s Eve. He had heated lumps of lead in the open fire and then dipped them into cold water in order to interpret the shapes they made as forecasts of the future. And he had never dared to enter the New Year without being dead drunk.

But now he was enlightened, he shouted at her. He was no longer afraid of anything.

When they reached Sundsvall, the town was enveloped by darkness and cold. Forsman pulled up on the edge of the town, in fact. Hanna was not yet able to check her vision of what Sundsvall would look like with the reality. Most of it was still in store for her as she wriggled her way out of the furs and stepped out of the sleigh.

Forsman’s house was built of stone, and comprised two imposingly large storeys. As he pulled up, hordes of people came teeming out of the front gate and the lodge. Antero was led away, and the sleigh was taken care of. All the furs and other contents of the sleigh were carried into the house. Hanna was bewildered by everything that was happening all around her, all these unknown people staring at her, some of them openly, others surreptitiously. She was used to meeting unknown people one at a time. Sometimes it had been vagrants who had wandered up north on the banks of the river, sometimes individual travellers or people carrying axes and saws that her father had brought home with him from the forest. But never anything like this, this teeming crowd of unknown people.

Forsman noticed her discomfort, and bellowed out in a loud voice that the girl accompanying him was Hanna Renström, who would be visiting relations in Sundsvall. But tonight, New Year’s Eve, she would be a guest in his home.

By midnight Forsman had gathered together all his family and all his employees, including his grooms and maids. He opened wide a window in the large room that Hanna had gathered was called ‘the drawing room’ and shouted to everybody to be silent. The clock in Sundsvall’s church struck twelve. Hanna could see that Forsman was counting the chimes silently as his eyes glazed over.

To her horror she gathered that he was on the point of bursting into tears. Never in her life had she imagined that a grown man could weep. She had a lump in her throat, and realized that something important was in fact happening as the chiming of the clock, carried by the cold air, penetrated the drawing room through the open window. Once the chimes had finished, Forsman started to sing a hymn and all those assembled there joined in – including Hanna, although she did so furtively.

She spent that night in a room shared by three of the maids employed in the house of stone. She shared a bed with a girl called Berta, who was about her own age. Berta smelled less than absolutely clean, and Hanna suspected that she might well smell no better herself. Berta pushed and shoved, claimed most of the bed space, and informed Hanna glumly that she would have to be up by five o’clock, despite the fact that it was New Year’s Day and was more or less regarded as a Sunday. But she would have to make the fires and heat up the tiled stoves with the firewood the skivvies brought in.

Berta soon fell asleep. But Hanna lay awake, thinking that there was something missing. It was some time before she realized what it was.

There was no creaking in the stone walls. The cold didn’t penetrate the stone walls like it did in the timber-built house she had grown up in.

And it was only then, as she lay in bed inside stone walls, that it finally dawned upon her that she was now living in an unknown world. She could no longer reach out her hand and touch her siblings, or hear Elin’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in her bed.

She was somewhere else now, somewhere that was completely new and unknown to her.

She tentatively placed her hand on Berta’s warm body. She missed her brother and sisters who had always been around her. She was on her own now, and she didn’t know how she would be able to cope with the void that surrounded her.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
Forsman sent Jukka, the most trusted of his servants, to help Hanna to locate her relatives. He had been given the address where they were thought to live by Elin, but Sundsvall was not a town where streets and house numbers could always be relied on.

Even worse was the fact that Forsman, who was confident he knew everybody in the town, had never heard of a family called Wallén. But he hadn’t told Elin that. He thought that perhaps they lived at one of the sawmills in the vicinity of Sundsvall.

The cold was less severe now. Hanna could feel that it was no longer biting into her skin the way it had done during the long sleigh journey.

Forsman went out into the street with them.

‘If you don’t find the family, bring her straight back here,’ he told Jukka, who was standing with his fur hat in his hand.

Hanna thought that Jukka was somewhat cowed and insecure when confronted by his enormous employer in his voluminous fur coat. He was certainly over sixty, but was nevertheless afraid, like a little child worried it might receive a beating.

She couldn’t understand why this was.

They set off. As soon as Forsman had gone back inside, Jukka was transformed. He spat and walked with a swagger, elbowing aside anyone who got in their way, and seemed to be in charge of the snow-covered and inadequately cleared street.

Hanna observed the town she had come to in the pale wintry light. For each stone-built house they passed, there seemed to be ten tumbledown little wooden shacks that had grown up out of the ground. Like mushrooms, she thought. If the stone houses were edible, the wooden shacks were the sort of fungi you stamp on and don’t put in your basket.

She felt worried all the time. Would she be able to fit in here? Or was she the kind of person who would never feel at home in this town?

And then she came to the sea – but that was nothing like what she had expected either. There was a harbour with lots of big ships, some with masts, others with black funnels. But the water didn’t go on for ever, as her father had said it did. She could see land in all directions, and no sign of open water beyond the ice and a network of open channels.

Jukka urged her to keep moving whenever she stopped. He seemed to have just as little time as his employer, and was always in a hurry.

They walked along the icy edge of the harbour. Hanna almost slipped and fell over several times. Her shoes, made by a Lappish cobbler in Fjällnäs, were not suitable for the town’s stony and ice-covered pavements.

They came to a cluster of wooden houses which seemed to be hugging one another in order to keep warm.

Jukka stopped and asked a man pulling a sledge laden with firewood the way to the address he had been given, to the Walléns. The man, who had a large burn mark on one cheek and a very loud chesty cough, pointed and tried unsuccessfully to explain. Jukka soon lost patience, touched his cap as a gesture of thanks, and they continued walking.

‘It’s impossible to find anywhere in this damned town,’ he muttered in his sing-song dialect. ‘Completely impossible, but I think this is it even so.’

He had stopped in front of a two-storey wooden house with a lopsided roof, broken and patched-up windows and a door that threatened to fall out of its frame. Jukka knocked hard on the door. It was opened immediately by an old lady so wrapped up in shawls that the only parts of her that Hanna could see were her eyes and her nose.

‘Wallén,’ said Jukka. ‘Does the Wallén family live in this house?’

The old woman gave a start as if he had punched her. Then she said something he couldn’t understand.

‘Take that shawl off, damn you!’ he roared. ‘I’m here on behalf of Jonathan Forsman, the businessman. He wants to know if anybody called Wallén lives here. I can’t hear a word of what you are mumbling behind all those rags you’re wearing.’

The old woman removed the shawl that was covering her face. Hanna could see now that it was gaunt and hollowed, as if she was often left starving.

‘The Wallén family,’ said Jukka again, making his impatience obvious.

‘They’ve gone,’ said the old woman.

‘What do you mean, they’ve gone? Gone to heaven or hell? Give me a proper answer before I lose my temper.’

The old woman backed away, but Jukka placed his large boot between the door and the frame.

‘There’s only one old man left here in the house,’ she said. ‘They left him behind. I don’t know where they’ve gone to.’

Jukka sucked at his lips and tried to make up his mind what to say to that.

‘We’ll go in and talk to the old boy,’ he said eventually. ‘Show us where he lives!’

The old woman led them up a staircase. Pale-looking children were standing in doorways, staring wide-eyed at the strangers going past. Hanna noticed that there was a stale, acrid smell, as if the house was never aired.

They continued up to the attic floor where the old woman finally stopped outside a door, knocked, then immediately scurried away. When Jukka opened the door, he pushed Hanna inside.

‘Go and talk to your relative now,’ he said. ‘Either you’ll be living here, or you’ll have to come back home again with me.’

The room contained a bed, a Windsor-style chair and a cracked mirror hanging on one of the walls. Hanna could see a reflection of her face in it – a worried face, somebody she didn’t really recognize. Then she looked at the old man lying in the bed who was staring at her as if she had just descended from heaven.

She recalled what her father had said, the last words he had whispered secretly into her ear. About her being a mucky angel. Had he been right?

Was it really an angel the old man seemed to see standing in front of him? Or just a confused serving girl from the distant mountains?

JUKKA WAS IMPATIENT.

‘Talk to the old boy now,’ he growled. ‘We don’t have time to just stand around gaping at him.’

He walked over to the window and opened it: it had been closed for so long that it was extremely difficult to move.

‘It stinks in here,’ he said. ‘A nasty stench of old man. The earth has already started to eat you up, without your noticing. Your body is already full of worms and maggots, chewing away at your flesh.’

Jukka glared expectantly at Hanna. She went up to the bed where the old man was lying. He had bits of old food in his beard, his nightshirt was sweaty and dirty. She explained who she was, what she was called, and who her father and mother were. The old man didn’t seem to understand, or maybe he hadn’t heard. She repeated what she had said, but louder.

In reply he raised a trembling hand. Hanna thought he was trying to greet her – but the hand was pointing to the window.

‘I’m cold,’ said the old man. ‘Close the window.’

Jukka was standing by the window as if on guard. He took a step forward, as if he were about to attack.

‘The room stinks,’ he said. ‘It needs airing. But do you realize who this is, standing here in front of you? Hanna Wallén. Are you a relative of hers, or not? If you can tell us yes or no, we can leave you in peace.’

But the old man didn’t understand. He started begging for food – he was hungry, and nobody gave him anything to eat any more.

Hanna tried again. Explained once again who she was, and talked at length about Elin. But it was no use. The old man in the filthy bed was living in a different world, in which the only thing that mattered was his hunger.

‘Come on,’ said Jukka. ‘Let’s go. This is a waste of time. We’ll talk to the old woman downstairs. She might know.’

If she’d been able to, Hanna would have run out of the house and not stopped until she was back home again with Elin and her brothers and sisters. Nobody wanted to take care of her, the whole journey had been in vain. She didn’t belong in this town. She’d been welcomed by a confused, bewildered old man, nobody else.

When Forsman heard about the failed expedition, he tore a strip off the cowering Jukka. Was he incapable of ferreting out where the family had gone to? Would that have been
so
difficult?

Forsman calmed down eventually, and said to Hanna in his usual friendly voice that he would personally take over responsibility for finding out where the family had gone to. She shouldn’t worry. People didn’t just disappear into thin air. He would no doubt be able to find the relatives she had come to meet.