“But I’ve already told him… a big guy with a moustache like this.”
Lisa measured a couple of decimeters from her top lip with her hand. Anna-Maria smiled.
“Sven-Erik Stalnacke.”
“Yes.”
“Can you go over it again?”
“Where shall I start?”
“How did you get to know one another?”
Anna-Maria watched Lisa Stockel’s face. When people searched through their memories for a particular event they often dropped their guard. As long as it wasn’t an event they were intending to lie about, of course. Sometimes they forgot the person sitting in front of them for a while. A wry, fleeting smile crossed Lisa Stockel’s face. Something softened for a moment. She’d liked the priest.
“Six years ago. She’d just moved into the priest’s house. And in the autumn she was to be responsible for confirmation classes for the young people both here and in Jukkasjarvi. And she set about it like a gun dog. Contacted all the parents of the children who hadn’t registered. Introduced herself and talked about why she thought confirmation classes were so important.”
“Why were they important?” asked Anna-Maria, who hadn’t thought they were the slightest use when she’d taken them a hundred years ago.
“Mildred thought the church should be a meeting place. She wasn’t that bothered about whether people believed or not, that was between them and God. But if she could get them to church for a christening, confirmation, weddings and major festivals, so that people could meet one another and feel sufficiently at home in the church so they’d turn to it if life became too difficult, then… And when people said ‘but he doesn’t believe, it seems wrong if he’s studying just to get presents,’ she said it was good to get presents, no young people studied because they liked it, neither at school nor at church, but it was part of their general education to know why we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and Ascension Day, and to be able to name the apostles.”
“So you had a son or daughter who…”
“Oh, no. Well, yes, I have got a daughter, but she’d been confirmed several years ago. She works in the pub down in the village. No, it was my cousin’s boy, Nalle. He’s got special needs and Lars-Gunnar didn’t want him confirmed. So she came to talk about him. Would you like a coffee?”
Anna-Maria said yes.
“She seems to have upset people,” she said.
Lisa Stockel shrugged her shoulders.
“That’s just the way she was… always straight in. As if she only had forward gear.”
“What do you mean?” asked Anna-Maria.
“I mean she never went round the houses about things. There was no room for diplomacy or fancy words. She thought something was wrong, and she just went for it.”
Like when she got all the churchwardens against her, thought Lisa.
She blinked. But the picture in her head wasn’t so easily gotten rid of. First of all it was two brimstone butterflies dancing around one another above the sweet scented arabis. Then the branches of the weeping birch swaying gently to and fro in the breeze from the calm summer river. And then Mildred’s back. Her military march between the gravestones. Tramp, tramp, tramp over the gravel.
Lisa scuttles after Mildred along the path in Poikkijarvi churchyard. At the far end the team of churchwardens are having their coffee break. They have a lot of breaks, more or less all the time really. Work when the priest is watching. But nobody actually dares to make any demands of them. If you turn this lot against you, you’ll end up holding a funeral in the middle of a pile of earth. Or trying to shout over the top of a lawn mower working two meters away. Preaching in a freezing cold church in the middle of winter. The parish priest is totally bloody useless, he does nothing. He doesn’t need to, they know better than to mess with him.
“Don’t start an argument about this,” Lisa tries to divert her.
“I’m not going to start an argument.”
And she really means it.
Mankan Kyro catches sight of them first. He’s the informal leader of the group. The boss of property services doesn’t give a damn. Mankan decides. He’s the one Mildred isn’t going to start an argument with.
She dives straight in. The others listen with interest.
“The child’s grave,” she says, “have you dug it yet?”
“What do you mean?” says Mankan apathetically.
“I’ve just been talking to the parents. They said they’d chosen a spot with a view over the river, up there in the northern section, but that you’d advised them against it.”
Mankan Kyro doesn’t answer. Instead he spits a huge lump of chewed snuff onto the grass and rummages in his back pocket for the snuff tin.
“You told them the roots of the weeping birch would grow through the coffin and go right through the baby’s body,” Mildred goes on.
“Well, wouldn’t they?”
“That happens wherever you bury a coffin, and you know that perfectly well. You just didn’t want to dig up there under the birch, because it’s stony and there are so many roots. It was just too much like hard work. I just can’t get my head round the fact that you valued your own comfort so highly that you thought it was okay to plant pictures like that in their heads.”
She hasn’t raised her voice the whole time. The gang around Mankan are staring at the ground. They’re ashamed. And they hate the priest who’s making them feel ashamed.
“So, what do you want me to do, then?” asks Mankan Kyro. “We’ve already dug a grave-in a better spot if you ask me-but maybe we ought to force them to bury their child where you want.”
“No way. It’s too late now, you’ve terrified them. I just want you to know that if anything like this happens again…”
He’s almost smiling now. Is she going to threaten him?
“… then you’ll be testing my love for you beyond the limit,” she concludes, and walks away.
Lisa runs after her. Quickly so that she doesn’t have to hear the comments behind her back. She can imagine. If the priest’s husband gave her what she needed in bed, maybe she’d calm down.
“So who did she annoy?” asked Anna-Maria.
Lisa shrugged her shoulders and switched on the coffee machine.
“Where do I start? The headmaster of the school in Jukkasjarvi because she insisted he had to do something about bullying, the old biddies from social services because she got involved in their territory.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there were always women with kids at her house, women who’d left their husbands…”
“She’d set up some sort of foundation for the wolf,” said Anna-Maria. “There was a big debate about that.”
“Mmm, I haven’t got any cake or milk, you’ll have to have it black.”
Lisa Stockel placed a chipped mug with some kind of advert on it in front of Anna-Maria.
“The parish priest and some of the other clergy couldn’t stand her either.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, because of us, the women in Magdalena, among other things. There are almost two hundred of us in the group. And there were plenty of people who liked her but weren’t actually members, quite a lot of men, although no doubt people have told you the opposite. We used to study the Bible with her. Went to services where she was preaching. And did practical work as well.”
“Like what?”
“Loads of things. Cooking, for example. We tried to think of something concrete we could do for single mothers.
