WALK IN PEACE AND SIN NO MORE
In 1925, at age 34, Anna was pregnant. At Torp, a letter was left on Carl Börjesson’s desk. It claimed that Fredrik had raped Anna, after drugging her with wine. Anna, purportedly, woke up finding her clothes in disarray, not aware of what had happened. The maid found the letter and read it. Soon the whole village seemed to know about it. They say this was exactly what Carl Börjesson had intended.
Fredrik called at Torp. Ida told the maid to visit her parents that evening. The maid, her curiosity piqued, stayed to listen at the door. Carl Börjesson’s sister Augusta and her husband Teodor were in the room with the rest of the family. Only Anna was absent. Though the maid could not hear what was said, she could tell that Carl Börjesson did most of the talking. Fredrik said little. When he left, his back was stiff, his hands shoved down the pockets of his overcoat. Fredrik’s housekeeper told the maid he had pushed large holes through the lining.
“It was a difficult time for Anna,” says Allan, brother of Gulli. Allan, Gulli, Allan’s wife Liisa and I sit in Gulli’s cottage, where Gulli and Allan grew up.
“It was a difficult time for all of them,” says Gulli, who served as maid at Torp when Anna expected her child. Gulli recalls that Mrs. Jönsson, the innkeeper’s wife, had offered to put Anna up until “the worst” was over. Then Anna could marry Fredrik, Mrs. Jönsson said, have her child, and time would take care of the rest. Surely, even Carl Börjesson would eventually come around.
“I can’t understand why she didn’t accept,” says Allan. “That was a good offer.”
All four of us sit quiet. Gulli and Allan rest their hands, unmoving, on the tabletop. The tiled stove behind them, salvaged from the vicarage when central heating was installed there in the 1930s, looks too grand for its surroundings. Liisa has taken a seat away from the table, by the wall. Born in Finland, she came to Kungsäter during the Second World War, finding refuge at Torp. Even though she has lived in the village ever since, she still considers herself an outsider in more ways than one. If she knows something, she is not ready to tell me yet.
“In one way Anna was strong,” says Gulli, finally breaking the silence. “She delivered her child. She could have killed herself. Many did.”
That Anna in the Kungsäter of 1925 could have tried to abort does not even seem to enter Gulli’s mind. Yet, hospital records from the early 1900s reveal a terrifying number of women who died from botched abortions. Some swallowed arsenic or phosphor, others used whisk handles or knitting needles.
Instead, Gulli tells me, Anna seemed happy. As her breasts grew heavy and tender, she turned more and more inward. By the time the fetus stirred, all her attention was on the life developing within her. Afraid of falling, she walked with great care. When voices became loud or quarrelsome, she left the room. She felt complete in herself, independent of Fredrik and her family. Even at the bank, she seemed absentminded. It was only she and the child — at first not wanting it, then wanting it more than she had ever wanted anything before.
A month or so before the birth, Anna left for Bollebygd to stay with Adolf and Beatrice. A disease, unknown to his doctors, was slowly drawing strength and life out of Adolf. He himself said it began while he was still at Torp, after he slipped and hit his temple against the laundry tub. No longer able to farm, he had moved his family to the second floor of a house close to the railway station. The owner, an elderly widow, lived underneath. To support his family, Adolf now sold insurance to farmers. Beatrice used to watch him from the window as he returned on his bicycle. He always sat down to rest before he came inside. Beatrice had to be strong for both of them. Aside from nursing Adolf on his bad days, she was bringing up three children, Birgit, Bengt, and Margit. In the evenings, after supper, Anna helped her make umbrellas for a store in Borås.
Since the bed was too soft, Anna gave birth on Beatrice’s kitchen table, lying on her back, knees bent, her feet tied to the table with sheets for support. Beatrice, who had trained to be a midwife under her aunt in Kungsäter, later told my mother she had never worked with anyone so unwilling to cooperate. Anna would not push, not even when Beatrice told her. Clenching her teeth, she barely uttered a sound, though Beatrice begged her to scream — screaming, in Beatrice’s experience, helped against the pain and hurried the child along. Anna, Beatrice said, was deliberately holding back, refusing to bring forth her child. Not until the searing pain gave way to the rolling motions of her uterus, did she bear down. At that point she was no longer in control. Her body was merely the medium for this new life that wanted out.
A week later Anna was back in Kungsäter, leaving her child with Adolf and Beatrice. Under Anna’s name, Brodin noted the birth in the church records: “Ingrid, girl, born out of wedlock, May 15, 1925.” Unlike Brodin, many clergymen refused to acknowledge the births of “illegitimate” children. Some even condemned the midwives who assisted with “such wretched business.”
None of the villagers today can remember Anna’s churching, even though churchings were still common practice in Kungsäter at the time her child was born. “I suppose it was done in private,” says Allan. For Anna’s sake I hope he is right. As an unwed mother, her prospects were grim. Before she could be churched, she had to be absolved of her sin. In most cases this ceremony took place in the vestry, before or after the main service, well within the hearing of the rest of the congregation. Though the minister spoke of forgiveness, the effect was more one of condemnation and punishment. The wording of the actual churching was also different. The married woman was told to “walk in peace,” the unmarried to “walk in peace and sin no more.” The former regained her status in society, the latter had forever lost hers.
Ingrid lived four months. From birth her tiny body was covered with fish-like scales which cracked and blistered and dried into a yellow crust. Judging from the descriptions, I suspect she suffered from ichthyosis, a skin disease caused by a genetic defect, which may have been spontaneous, due to a mutation of a gene, or passed on through family inheritance. At the time, little was known about this disease. It was seen, at least by Beatrice, as an affliction which struck deserving and undeserving alike, for no particular reason. Others were not so sure.
From the first, Beatrice feared the child might be doomed. Ingrid took the bottle willingly enough; yet she did not gain much weight, even though Beatrice added sugar, flour, and even cream to the mixture of cow’s milk and water. Throughout the nights, Beatrice paced the floor with the crying child in her arms. She covered Ingrid’s skin with glycerol to keep it from cracking, and she dusted the raw spots with potato flour to soothe the burn. When nothing else seemed to help, she just kept pacing, asking God to transfer the pain from the tortured little body to her own. A few days before Ingrid died, Beatrice took her to the hospital in Borås. Though the hospital records are no longer extant, Ingrid probably developed an infection, a common complication of ichthyosis, which, with the attendant fever, may well have been deadly. At any rate, Beatrice returned to Bollebygd alone, her arms aching with emptiness.
The body of the dead child was taken to Torp. The small white coffin was placed on a table in the middle of the large upstairs room. Here Fredrik joined Anna, after the maid let him in through the front door. Throughout the night Anna and Fredrik sat together, alone, sharing their grief, surrounded by the gilded black furniture which had come to Torp as part of BrittaLena’s dowry. Fredrik left at dawn, before the rest of the family began stirring.
Had I been able to hear their words that night, I believe I would have understood. Instead I am still limited by what my mother and the villagers keep telling me, that Anna simply bowed to Carl Börjesson who insisted that Fredrik was not “good enough.” The official answer is too pat. More than ever, I am convinced that something eludes me.
Around mid-morning, Carl Börjesson and his family walked across the field to the abandoned churchyard next to the old parish church, now in ruins. Anna walked up front between Fina and Carl. Hjalmar followed, carrying the coffin which seemed even smaller in his large, awkward hands. Behind Hjalmar walked Beatrice, Adolf, Ida, and Gustaf. Anders and Lotta brought up the rear, with Birgit, Bengt, and Margit. Brodin waited for them at the grave. The ceremony was short: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”
Fredrik watched from a distance, as he stood under an apple tree in the pasture below, a lone figure in black, dressed in his Sunday best, a wreath over his arm. Only after Anna and the people from Torp had left did he approach the grave.
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