Downstream

Downstream

By Sigfrid Siwertz.

Translated by E. Classen.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Part I
   1. I: The Cry
   2. II: The Robber’s Stronghold
   3. III: The Dance of the Crow Indians
   4. IV: Peter the Watchdog
   5. V: Fear
   6. VI: The Two Fair Heads
   7. VII: Brundin’s Downfall
   8. VIII: September Spring
   9. IX: Peter the Boss
   10. X: Laura’s Marriage
   11. XI: The Spanish Saint
   12. XII: Peter Casts Out Majängen and Brings Home Ekbacken
   13. XIII: Tord’s Exile
4. Part II
   1. I: Laura Entertains
   2. II: Peter the Boss in Love
   3. III: The Angel of Death
   4. IV: The Cold Moment
   5. V: Waste
   6. VI: The Great Dinner
   7. VII: Shadow Play
   8. VIII: Tord Sails Out to Sea
   9. IX: Peter’s Tombstone
5. Colophon
6. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Part I

I

The Cry

To tell the story of a child as you would tell the story of a grownup would be to commit forgery, for once you are wide awake it costs you a great effort to describe a dream exactly as it occurred.

The tide of events flows remote from the child. Only occasionally do its eddies touch upon the consciousness of the child, and then the latter is unaware of their significance. It is precisely this inability to understand the connection between events which makes the realities of children so dreamlike.

In the long dream of childhood there reigns a capricious, mysterious and yet irresistible Fate, beneficent like the fairy with its wand beside the princess’s cradle, or cruel like the wolf in Red Riding Hood. The shadow of that Fate still casts itself over our riper years. It haunts us, ghostlike, even when we have begun consciously to order our lives. Only a few chosen spirits are able to cast off the spell of these fairies and trolls.

This is a tale of people whose childhood was passed in the shadow of the wolf⁠—and who never could escape from their childhood.

First let me tell you about that evening, many years ago, when Peter and Hedvig heard a strange cry coming from the window of their parents’ bedroom. The whole of that day it had been evident that something was in the air. The children were not allowed to go into the bedroom at all, nor even to play on the stairs. After lunch there arrived an old lady with a bag. And then an old man in spectacles drove up in a small carriage. It was the doctor. Little Laura ran away immediately and hid herself, so that she should not have to show her tongue. But this time the doctor had not come to see her, for he went straight up to Mother, and beds were prepared for the children in the green room downstairs.

Stellan, Laura, and Tord had to go to bed at once, as they were so young. But Peter and Hedvig went out onto the kitchen steps. There old Kristin sat and told stories of former days at Selambshof when “Old Hök” was alive.

The most remarkable thing about Kristin was that she alone survived from the days of the old owner. She was grey, bent, tough, the incarnation of the everlasting ill-humoured peasant soul. Even if she only talked of a pair of grey stockings it still sounded like a fairy tale. And since, moreover, the fatalism of age is closely related to the helplessness of childhood, we can well understand that she had two attentive listeners in Peter and Hedvig. Just now the great and serious event that was about to occur plunged her into a gloomy, solemn mood. And just as her ancestors for hundreds of grey generations before her had huddled together by the hearth on dark stormy nights and had told tales of dangers past, so also she now sat in the autumn twilight on the kitchen stairs at Selambshof and told ghost stories to the maids and the cowherd about the old master. She still looked frightened as she talked of him. It really sounded as if she were talking of some great and notorious criminal.

Hedvig had slipped out as silently as a mouse. Her small face with its dark, hungry eyes was pale. Peter leaned sulkily in an awkward posture against the doorpost. But it is not to be supposed that the presence of the children disturbed Kristin in the very least. She just went on. She was talking now about the old pensioned couple down by the Hökar meadow:⁠—You see the master, Old Hök, had made up his mind to starve out such encumbrances on the estate. They received only some thin whey and a little dust that the miller swept up from