The Lost Village(35)
The divine
To let the divine light in
There is no fear before God. Only love.
The top few sheets match the one Emmy and I were looking at in the church. They look like sermons that Pastor Mattias has written, cut and edited, seemingly churning out draft after draft, polishing his ideas like any good writer. The language is turgid but compelling.
I turn the pages.
The next page must have been written at a different point in time. There are no crossings-out here; everything is written in one great sweep, and the handwriting is different, too. It’s bigger, more sprawling, as though written in a rapturous frenzy.
God has always demanded sacrifices of His own; salvation is neither cheap nor easy. The true path may lead us through darkness, but it is only in daring to walk through the valley of the shadow of death that we can be reborn, pure and new, on the other side; only by sinking down into darkness that we can find the light.
The true path is neither sweet nor seductive. The true path is not straight, but winds. It is an arduous path, for it separates the faithful from the lazy and weak, the worthy from the unworthy.
Meanwhile, beside that path, the Devil lies in wait. He walks among you, masked by innocent faces and gentle voices. And he will whisper in your ear: “Follow me. Choose earthly pleasures, these gleaming, short-lived distractions. Who cares about eternity?”
You must find his servants among you. They will surely appeal to the evil within you, implore and beseech you, but you must temper your hearts and listen to God’s voice alone. Heed not the lies that drip like honey from their lips, that coil around your hearts only to weigh them down. Steel yourselves against these lies, and follow the true light.
You are His warriors. You are his chosen ones. But you must choose Him. You cannot lie back and expect salvation; your place in the Kingdom of Heaven is not assured. You must let go of your worldly lives, dare to travel through the darkness in order to see the light. You must be willing to see his enemies for what they truly are, and strike them down with a divine strength and wrath.
I lick my dry lips and turn the page. Lightning strikes outside, and I see the bolt through the little Plexiglas window between the driver’s seat and the back. I count slowly—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi—then the rumble comes from above, quick and ruthless. The storm must be right over us.
The pages are muddled up, as though someone has just thrown them together. The next page isn’t the continuation of the hastily written sermon. At first I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. It looks like something a child has drawn. Incoherent scribbles. Some of the shapes look like clumpy stick figures.
It makes me uneasy to think a child could have been there in that room, with the person writing what was on those pages.
The words make me think of poor, battered Birgitta Lidman. An outsider, an outcast, even before Pastor Mattias arrived. Were these the words that turned them against her?
Grandma’s voice echoes in my head.
Her name was Birgitta, but she was of meagre gifts, as we used to say in those days. At some point they started calling her names. Her mother had died a few years before, and on her deathbed she had asked my mother to look after Birgitta. My mother, being the sort of person who always wanted to help, agreed.
Birgitta was a tall, ungainly woman, with straggly hair and small dark eyes that never looked straight at you. Sometimes, before her mother died, you would see the two of them in the village together, but after her mother left her alone in this world, Birgitta stopped leaving her hut. Before I moved away, my mother and I would take it in turns to take a basket of food up to Birgitta each day. The basket always contained exactly the same things, for it was very important to Birgitta that nothing ever change.
Between her grunts, her evasive eyes, and her habits, Birgitta could be quite unnerving. At times she could fly into a rage, when she would get so frenzied that she would even do herself harm. I remember one instance, when Mother and I brought her a table and two chairs that Mother had managed to convince one of the village boys to make for her. They were a little crooked and uneven, but we thought them better than nothing (at the time the only furniture Birgitta had in her hut was a bed and chamber pot). But Birgitta was quite beside herself; she started shaking her head and rocking back and forth on the spot, and then her grumbling grew to a bellow, and she started flailing around wildly. She gave Mother a real wallop, but the one who came out of it worst was her: she smacked her head against the wall, giving herself a great big gash in the forehead.
Was her hut where Pastor Mattias believed that evil lurked?
Was it on these pages that it began, the process that would end with Birgitta Lidman being bound to a pole in the village square and stoned to death?
It’s inconceivable to me that people would listen to that turgid, flowery language about supernatural and evil. But someone did listen.
Aina listened.
I make to turn the page, but lightning flashes across the sky, followed by a crack of thunder after only two counts. I flinch and then laugh, embarrassed, despite there being no one there to see it.
I put those sheets down beside me and reach for the folders that are wedged in at the top of my rucksack. I have to coax them out, and they’re so heavy that they almost slip from between my fingertips.
Grandma’s own research covered hundreds of pages. I’ve selected the most important information for the summaries I’ve given the others, but I had to leave most of it out: she had saved every single article ever written about Silvertj?rn and the disappearance. Much of it is worthless: speculation, false leads, articles that just rehash what others had already written.