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and shaken like worm-eaten turnips before the congregation. In the row in front was a little girl with braids, fair golden hair gleaming in the darkness, squashed in by grown-up bodies riddled with dread. She was motionless, pressing a doll to her heart as the storm raged over her head. It was horrific to see her mother and father weeping. Watching her grown-up relatives being transformed, crushed. Sitting there hunchedup, feeling the fall-out dripping all over her and thinking: it’s all my fault. It’s my fault. If only I’d been a bit better behaved. Isak had clenched his boyish hands tightly together, and inside them it felt as if a swarm of insects were creeping around. And he thought: if I open my hands we’ll all die. If I let them escape we’re all finished.
    And then one day, one Sunday after a few years had passed, he crawled out onto the thin nocturnal ice. Everything crumbled away, his defenses collapsed. He was thirteen and could feel Satan beginning to grow deep inside him. Filled with a fear that was greater than the fear of being beaten, greater than the urge for self-preservation, he’d stood up in the middle of the prayer meeting and, holding onto people’s backs, he’d swayed back and forth before collapsing nose-first into the lap of Christ. Callused hands had been placed on his brow and his chest, it was a second baptism, that’s the way it was done. He had unbuttoned his heart and been drenched by the flood of his sins.
    There was not a single dry eye in the congregation. They had witnessed a great event. The Almighty had issued a summons. The Lord had taken the boy with His very own hand, and then given him back.
    Afterward, when he learned to walk for the second time, as he stood there on trembling legs, they had propped him up. His corpulent mother had hugged him in the name and blood of Jesus, and her tears flowed down over his own face.
    Obviously, he was destined to become a preacher.
    * * *
    Like most Laestadians Isak became a diligent worker. Felled trees and piled the trunks up on the frozen river during the winter, accompanied the logs down to the sawmills in the estuary when the ice melted in the spring, clearing jams on the way, and looked after the cows and potato fields on his parents’ smallholding during the summer. Worked hard and made few demands, steered well clear of strong drink, gambling and Communism. That sometimes caused him a few problems with his lumberjack colleagues,but he took their mockery as a challenge to be overcome, and didn’t say a word during the working week, merely read books of sermons.
    But on Sundays he would cleanse himself with saunas and prayers, and put on his white shirt and dark suit. During the prayer meetings he could cut loose at last, sail forth to attack filth and the Devil, brandish the Good Lord’s two-edged sword, aim His law and gospel truth at all the world’s sinners, the liars, lechers, hypocrites, the foulmouthed, boozers, wife-beaters, and Communists who flourished in the accursed valley of the River Torne like lice in a blanket.
    His face was young, energetic, and smooth-shaven. Eyes deep-set. With consummate skill he grabbed the attention of his congregation, and was soon engaged to a fellow believer, a shy and well-polished Finnish girl from the Pello district, smelling of soap.
    But when the children started to come, he was forsaken by God. One day there was nothing but silence. Nobody answered his pleas.
    He was left with nothing but confusion, tottering on the edge of the abyss. Filled with sorrow. And festering malice. He started to sin, just to discover what it felt like. Minor little wicked acts, aimed at his nearest and dearest. When it dawned on him that he quite enjoyed it, he kept going. Worried members of his church tried to engage him in serious conversations, but he put the Devil’s curse on them. They turned their backs on him, and did not return.
    But despite being abandoned, despite feeling hollow, he still