and arguments. And Bertil had been pleased to have Stefan, grateful for the son who stayed at home. Stefan could see in his mind’s eye how Bertil would come into his room at the parish hall. He had a particular way with him, a code that meant: you are my chosen one. He would appear in the doorway, owl-like with his thick, silvery hair and his stocky body, his reading glasses either perched crookedly on top of his head or on the end of his nose. Stefan would look up from his papers. Bertil would glance almost imperceptibly over his shoulder, sidle in and close the door behind him. Then he would sink down into Stefan’s armchair with a sigh of relief. And a smile.
Something clicked inside Stefan every time. More often than not Bertil didn’t want anything in particular, he might want to talk about a few minor matters, but he gave the impression that he wanted a bit of peace for a little while. Everybody ran to Bertil, Bertil sneaked off to Stefan.
But after Mildred’s death, things had changed. She was no longer there, like a rough seam chafing in the priest’s shoe. Now it was Stefan’s dutiful conscientiousness that seemed to chafe. Nowadays Bertil often said: “I’m sure we don’t need to be quite so formal,” and “I’m sure God will allow us to be practical,” words he’d adopted from Mildred.
And when Bertil talked about Mildred it was in such glowing terms that Stefan felt physically sick from all the lies.
And Bertil had stopped visiting Stefan in his office. Stefan sat there, incapable of getting anything done, agonizing, waiting.
Sometimes the priest walked past the open door. But now the code had changed, the signals were different: rapid footsteps, a glance through the wide-open door, a nod, a quick smile. In-a-hurry-how’s-things, that meant. And before Stefan had even managed to return the smile, the priest had disappeared.
Before he’d always known where the priest was, nowadays he had no idea. The office staff asked about Bertil and looked strangely at Stefan when he forced a smile and shook his head.
It was impossible to conquer Mildred now she was dead. In that foreign land she had become her father’s favorite child.
The service was almost over. They sang a concluding hymn and departed in the peace of God.
Stefan should have left now. Gone straight out and just gone home. But he couldn’t help it, his feet made a beeline for Bertil.
Bertil was chatting to a member of the congregation, gave Stefan a sideways glance, didn’t let him into the conversation, Stefan could wait.
Everything was wrong nowadays. If Bertil had just acknowledged him, Stefan could have thanked him briefly for the service and left. Now it seemed as if he had something in particular on his mind. He was forced to come up with something.
At long last the parishioner left. Stefan felt obliged to explain his presence.
“I felt I needed to take communion,” he said to Bertil.
Bertil nodded. The churchwarden carried out the wine and the wafer, gave the priest a look. Stefan trailed after Bertil and the churchwarden to the sacristy, joined in the prayer over the bread and wine without being asked.
“Have you heard anything from that firm?” he asked when the prayer was over. “About the wolf foundation and so on?”
Bertil removed his chasuble, alb and stole.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps we won’t dissolve it after all. I haven’t decided yet.”
The churchwarden was taking all the time in the world to pour the wine into the piscina and place the wafers in the ciborium. Stefan ground his teeth.
“I thought we were agreed that the church couldn’t have a foundation like that,” he said quietly.
Besides which it’s the church council’s decision, not just yours, he thought.
“Well, yes, but for the time being it exists anyway,” said the priest, and Stefan could clearly hear the impatience beneath the mild voice. “Whether I think we should pay for protection for the wolf or spend the money on training is something we can take up later in the autumn.”
“And the hunting lease?”
Bertil was smiling broadly now.
“Now now, that’s not something for you and I to stand here arguing about. That’s a decision for the church council when the time comes.”
He patted Stefan on the shoulder and left.
“Say hello to Kristin!” he said, without turning round.
Stefan had a lump in his throat. He looked down at his hands, the long, stiff fingers. Real piano fingers, his mother used to say when she was alive. Toward the end, when she was sitting in her apartment in the care home and mixing him up with his father more often than not, all this talk about his fingers used to upset him. She would hold on to his hands and order the nurses to look at his hands: just look at these hands, completely unmarked by physical work. Piano fingers, desk hands.
Say hello to Kristin.
If he dared to start looking at things as they really were, marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life.
Stefan could actually feel himself hardening inside. Hardening toward Bertil, toward his wife.
I’ve carried them long enough, he thought. It has to end.
His mother must have realized about Kristin. What he’d fallen for was her resemblance to his mother. The slightly doll-like appearance, the graceful manner, the good taste.
But his mother had definitely realized. “So personal,” his mother had said about Kristin’s home the first time she visited her son’s girlfriend, “very pleasant.” That was when he was studying in Uppsala. Pleasant and personal, two good words to use when you couldn’t say beautiful or tasteful without lying. And he remembered his mother’s amused smile when Kristin showed off her arrangement of dried everlasting flowers and roses.
No, Kristin was a child who had a mediocre talent for imitating and copying. She’d never become the kind of priest’s wife his mother had been. And what a shock he’d had the first time he went to messy Mildred’s house. All her colleagues and their families had been invited to Mildred’s for a Christmas drink. It had been an interesting collection of people: the priests and their families, Mildred herself, her husband with his beard and apron, pretending to be under the thumb, and the three women who had temporarily sought refuge in the priest’s house at Poikkijarvi. One of the women had two children who must have had every kind of behavioral difficulty in the book.
But Mildred’s home had been like a Carl Larsson painting. The same light touch, warm and welcoming without being over the top, the same tasteful simplicity as in Stefan’s childhood home. Stefan couldn’t see how it fitted in with Mildred’s personality. Is this her home? he’d thought. He’d been expecting bohemian chaos, with piles of newspaper cuttings on storage shelves and oriental cushions and rugs.
He remembered Kristin afterward: “Why don’t we live in the priest’s house in Poikkijarvi?” she’d wondered. “It’s bigger, it would be better for us, we’ve got children after all.”
No doubt his mother had seen that the fragile side of Kristin that attracted Stefan wasn’t just fragile, but broken. Something cracked and sharp that Stefan would hurt himself on sooner or later.
He was suddenly seized by an upsurge of bitterness toward his mother.
Why didn’t she say anything? he thought. She should have warned me.
And Mildred. Mildred who’d used poor Kristin.
He remembered that day at the beginning of May when she came in waving that letter.
He tried to push Mildred out of his mind. But she was just as insistent now as she had been then. Pushing. Just like then.
“Right,” says Mildred, bursting into Stefan’s office.
It’s May 5. In less than two months she’ll be dead. But now she’s more than alive. Her cheeks and her nose are as red as freshly waxed apples. She kicks the door shut behind her.
“No, sit down!” she says to Bertil, who’s trying to escape from the armchair. “I want to talk to both of you.”
Talk to, what kind of introduction is that. That alone tells you everything about what she could be like.
