A Treacherous Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

had been squeezed into the cowshed with the cow and the goats.
    Hanna lay awake for ages. No man had slept in their cottage since her father died. Now there was somebody else snoring and snuffling in his sleep.
    Forsman groaned as he breathed in and out, as if he was dragging a heavy burden behind him.
    The next day an occasional snowflake came floating down from the heavens. The mercury indicated minus two degrees. Shortly after eight in the morning Hanna sat down in the sleigh with the two bundles of belongings Elin had prepared for her. She had wrapped herself up in all the warm clothes she possessed, and Forsman wrapped a couple more furs around her – she could barely move.
    Her brother and sisters wept when she hugged them and said goodbye, first one at a time and then all of them in chorus.
    But Elin merely shook her hand. This was the way it had to be. Hanna had decided not to look back once she had sat down in the sleigh. She was weeping deep down inside when Forsman cracked his whip and the black horse started pulling the sleigh. But she didn’t show it. Not for anybody.
    She thought about her father as they set off. It was as if he were also standing there, next to Elin, watching her leave.
    He had returned, just for that moment. He wanted to be present when it happened.
    It was 1903, the year when famine once again afflicted the north of Sweden.

10
    THE JOURNEY BY sleigh from Ljungdalen to the coast was supposed to take five days. That is what Jonathan Forsman had told Elin, almost as if he were making a promise.
    ‘It won’t take any longer than that,’ he said. ‘The going is good, just right for the sleigh, and I don’t have many business calls to make on the way that could delay us. We’ll only stop to eat and sleep. We’ll follow the river, then turn off to the north and make our way through the forest to Sundsvall. It’ll take five days, no more.’
    But the journey did take longer. As early as the second day, before they’d even got as far as the forest that marked the border between the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen, they were hit by a sudden snowstorm that blew up from the east and that Forsman hadn’t anticipated. The sky had been blue, it had been cold and the going was good: but suddenly the clouds had started to pile up. Even the black horse, whose name was Antero, had started to be restless.
    They stopped at an inn in överhogdal. Hanna was given a bed in a room shared by the inn’s maidservants: but she ate at the same table as Forsman, and was served the same food as he had. That had never happened before in her life.
    ‘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