Smile Until You Are Wed

by Joel Fishbane

In some Swedish circles, young girls prepare dream porridge to find out who they will marry. The porridge is heavily salted and the girls eat it before bed, for it is said that their future husband will visit their dreams to slake their thirst. But on the twilight Hank Fitzpatrick came to her, Kjerstin Almgren was wide awake. The midnight sun had given her terrible insomnia, and she was curing her thirst with a canteen she hid under the bed.

It was the third twilight in a row that Mrs. Almgren had forced the porridge on her daughter. She did not know that Kjerstin wasn’t sleeping. In fact, Kjerstin hadn’t hardly slept at all since the season of the midnight sun began. In the morning, when interrogated about her dreams, Kjerstin simply lied. “I dreamed of a man with a wild and defiant manner,” she said, stealing the phrase from a book. “He had the devil’s eyes and hair like Samson before the haircut.”

Mrs. Almgren shook her head. “No. There’s no one like that in this town. We’ll have to try again.”

On the second twilight, Kjerstin made sure to read a different book. “I saw a man with a stern, but compassionate face,” she said the next morning. “He wore a lumberjacket and had a forehead that betrayed a wonderful sense of humor.”

Mrs. Almgren sighed. “Tonight we’ll add another cup of salt.”

The trouble was that Mrs. Almgren was waiting for a description that matched one of the town’s two most prestigious prospects. All her life she had lived in mortal fear of betrothing her daughter to the wrong man, and was looking to the dream porridge to give her some sort of sign. Kjerstin would have preferred to leave the matter of marriage to herself, but she had long since lost the opportunity. She was twenty-seven and it was Mrs. Almgren’s opinion that if Kjerstin could handle the matter herself, it would already be done.

The notion that Kjerstin might not ever marry was not really a consideration, not even to Kjerstin.

Mrs. Almgren’s two candidates were Rolf Paulson, from the town council, and the lawyer Lindstrom. Neither had a wild and defiant manner, but Lindstrom was smart, Paulson was kind and both had money. On the third twilight, Mrs. Almgren prepared a bowl of salty porridge, and mentioned the town council as often as she dared. Better a kind husband then a smart one, in her opinion.    Kjerstin, meanwhile, was well aware of her mother’s schemes, but by the third twilight she no longer cared, for on this particular evening, she had a scheme of her own.

During the midnight sun, darkness does not fall. Instead, a hazy gloom descends that is still bright enough to read by, providing it isn’t cloudy. As soon as the incessant daylight dimmed, Kjerstin put aside the empty canteen and exchanged her thick socks for a pair of beaded slippers. With great care, she slid out of her nightgown and into the prettiest thing she owned: a pale cotton dress with an elegant trim along the hem, bodice and cuffs. She washed her hands and face in icy water, for she didn’t dare heat the kettle, less it wake her mother. She did not touch her hair. It was a cold twilight, and she dared not remove her sleeping cap until the last minute when she heard Hank Fitzpatrick on the trellis.

He clambered into the room and kissed her all over. Then he took an atlas from his knapsack and showed her a map. “This is where I would take you,” he proclaimed grandly and Kjerstin, like Rapunzel, finally lowered her hair and plotted her escape.

***

Until then, Kjerstin Almgren had lived in the tiny village all her life. She knew everything there was to know about the men who surrounded her. Like her mother, she knew Rolf Paulson was kind, while the lawyer Lindstrom was smart. She also knew who was handsome, fat, clever, dull or still a virgin. But she knew nothing of  Hank Fitzpatrick, for he came from the outside world.

“He’s spectacular,” she whispered to the cat. “Pale and clean, like a blank page.”

Hank Fitzpatrick had stumbled blithely into Kjerstin’s village the day before. It was the end of a spring that had seen him blown across Europe by convoys, freight trains and the kindness of strangers. He arrived in village on foot, for he had been hitchhiking across Sweden and his last ride had deposited him several miles back. When he arrived, he found the entire place deserted. He assumed he had wandered into a ghost town until he heard the sudden, strange twang of the nyckelharpa. It was being played so badly by Kjerstin's uncle that Hank Fitzpatrick almost turned away, for it sounded like the ghosts were angry. Then, Kjerstin’s aunt began playing the flute, and Sven the Butcher joined in on a drum, and as both were supreme musical talents, Hank followed the sound. He turned all the proper corners and walked up the hill, until he discovered the entire community nestled in a pasture of silver birch.

Kjerstin Almgren did not look all that lovely. The prettiest thing she owned was still in her armoire; instead, she was wearing the same outfit she had been wearing to the Midsummer Festival every year since she was seventeen. In 1983, the clothes would be declared the Swedish National Costume, but on the day Hank Fitzpatrick stumbled into town, they were just an unfortunate and unflattering tradition. "Oh, I'm sure they’re flattering on some," Kjerstin often said to the cat. “Just not me.” Kjerstin’s clothes had been handed down so often that by the time they reached her, the hems were miserable and the seams suicidal. She wore her mother’s bodice, her aunt’s bonnet, and fat Camilla Wrede’s bulky cotton skirt. The broach was tarnished and the clasp of the pewter belt was held together by God. She stood away from the festivities, beneath a blooming birch, alone, twenty-seven and convinced she was terribly, terribly ugly.

Naturally, Hank Fitzpatrick fell in love with her right away.

“You there! Stop gawking!” This was from Berit Andersson, who was standing nearby.

“What is all this?” asked Hank in English.

Berit gasped. “An American!” Hank had shaved in a river that morning, but his hair was scraggly and he was badly in need of soap. Now that he was also English, he became completely intolerable. “Get away from here!” yelled Berit.

“Varsågod,” said Hank in broken Swede. “Jag är hungrig som en strömming.” He had been trying to say that he was so hungry he could eat a horse, but he botched the vocabulary. "I am so hungry I could eat a herring," he said to Berit. Berit laughed. She grabbed a single herring off her neighbour's plate and flung it in his direction. The fish bounced off Hank's shoulder and flopped in the grass.

Hank sensed that the hospitality of the Swedes had been grossly exaggerated. He turned to go.

“Vänta!” said Kjerstin.  

Hank did not understand the word but he knew a command when he heard one. Kjerstin Almgren marched over to Berit and snatched the plate of herring from the neighbour. Hank later confessed that he imagined she would avenge him by spilling the fish over Berit’s head. Kjerstin only laughed. That is the difference between the English and the Swedes, she told him. The English crave revenge, while the Swedes recognize the value of a plate of fish. Instead of vengence, Kjerstin simply paid Berit’s neighbour for the food and brought it to where Hank Fitzpatrick was standing.

“Here,” she said.

“You speak English!” exclaimed Hank.

“Berit does too. You'll have to forgive her. She doesn’t trust foreigners. I’m afraid few people in this town do.”

She took him to the stream so he could wash. It was not until he took off his shirt to clean his arms and chest that she became conscious of how she looked. She took off the bonnet and let her hair fall to her shoulders. That’s right, she thought. Be a fool. Play the coquette. You with the insomniac’s deep hollow eyes. She wished he had come six months later, during the long stretch of polar night. How pretty I look when no one can see me, she thought with longing.

Hank reached into his bag and removed a fresh shirt. It was green and had the stripes of a corporal on the sleeve.

“You’re a soldier!” she said.

“Not anymore.”  He confessed with a proud grin that he had been dishonourably discharged. Kjerstin tensed. She knew that a dishonourable discharge was saved for the very worst of offences: murder, rape, desertion. Oh please, she prayed. Please let it be desertion…

It was. Hank Fitzpatrick had managed to avoid the military police for three days before he was caught and court-martialed. He saw the tension in her cheeks and thought he would be stigmatized, as he had been elsewhere. Then her face relaxed. Kjerstin Almgren was perfectly ambivalent to military law.  What did she care for the rules of some foreign army? She sighed with relief and continued her campaign of sly winks and subtle flirtations.

When she learned Hank had nowhere to stay, she began to plot ways to convince her parents to allow him to sleep in the attic. Mrs. Almgren, though, was too suspicious for such things. She took one look at Kjerstin's fallen hair and Hank's handsome nose and directed him to the nearest inn.

“I don't have any money,” Hank Fitzpatrick said.

“He does't have any money,” Kjerstin translated.

“I speak English,” said Mrs. Almgren indignantly. Like Berit, she knew the language, but did not trust it. After some consideration, she sighed and turned to her husband. Mr. Almgren was such a quiet shadow that it was easy to forget he existed. Until his wife spoke to him, Hank Fitzpatrick had not even realized the man was there.

“Go fetch Sven. He can stay with him for the night.”

Kjerstin was delighted. Sven the Butcher lived next door.

Later, they sat outdoors at a large table and ate herring, potatos and salmon with dill. Until then, Hank had been saving his money by living almost entirely on olives and bread. He gorged himself and drank to excess, such that Sven the Butcher had to carry him home. But he was not so drunk that he did not remember Kjerstin whispering that her window was the second on the right, and that her trellis was strong enough to support a man's weight, should one choose to climb it.

***

Climbing a trellis is dangerous work in a land without night. The dusk was hardly enough to obscure his figure, but Hank Fitzpatrick climbed all the same. He continued to do so every twilight for a week.  It was necessary for him to create excuses to stay in the village. Sven had assumed his guest was staying for a single evening, for no one came to stay; if tourists visited at all, it was because they were on their way to somewhere else.

“Well I’m not a tourist,” said Hank Fitzpatrick. “I’m an explorer.”

“Vagabond is more like it,” growled Sven. He put Hank to work in the butcher shop. All week, Hank scrubbed blood off the floor and stuffed intestines into sausages. He washed Sven’s truck and tended to the mule, which pulled a blood-caked cart whenever the truck broke down. At supper, he ate sturströmming and drank beer. Then, after Sven had fallen asleep, he would scale Kjerstin Almgren’s trellis so he could lie in her arms.

By now, Kjerstin had eaten far too many bowls of porridge. When she lied about her dreams, she no longer stole descriptions from books. Instead she simply described Hank Fitzpatrick in cryptic terms. “I was visited by a man with brutal arms and hair as soft as snow,” she would say, and Mrs. Almgren would despair for Rolf Paulson didn’t have hair and Lindstrom’s arms were too wiry to ever be described as brutal. Poor Kjerstin continued to eat her porridge, but she knew it could not go on forever. Her only saving grace was that Lindstrom was at trial in Stockholm and Paulson was out of town on business. Eventually, though, both men would return, at which point her mother would stop looking in oatmeal for signs and simply trust her own infallible instincts.

“Why won’t she approve of me?” asked Hank. “Is it because I’m not a Swede?”  

“It’s because you don’t want me to stay here,” said Kjerstin. Her parents had lived in the village their entire life. They believed in their small little pocket of Swedish countryside, in the endless nights of winter and the endless shifts in the mines, and of course in dream porridge and crayfish dinner parties and annual celebrations. They did not believe in the outside world, and they certainly never wanted to face travelling into it to visit in-laws and grandchildren. This was why Kjerstin was twenty-seven and had never married. She had resisted all the boys in the village, for to accept them would have resigned her to living there forever.

“Why haven’t you left?” Hank asked.

Kjerstin blushed. Of course she could have left long ago. But she had inherited her parent’s terror of the outside world. She needed to be led there, preferably by a man who would marry her.  

“Marriage?” repeated Hank. “You want me to marry you?”

By way of answer, Kjerstin kissed him deep and drew his breath so it filled her lungs.

The possibility of easy escape was thwarted by the sun. “Even in twilight, someone will see us.” Kjerstin was thinking specifically of her mother, who had been keeping a close watch ever since Hank Ftizpatrick had started sleeping next door.

“What do we do?” asked Hank.

“The midnight sun will be over in a few months. Then we’ll have six months of night. We could elope at high noon and it wouldn’t make a difference.” She adored this idea, for she knew how lovely she would look during a polar wedding. But Hank could not stay for six months, and Kjerstin knew she could not wait. Even if her mother did not choose a husband, there would still be  dozens of bowls of porridge. She seized Hank’s hand.

“We will just have to elope by twilight and hope for the best.”

There were two roads open to them, both of which led to Stockholm . From there they could take a boat. Or even fly. It was clear that Kjerstin thought an airplane to be the more romantic notion. The town’s one movie theatre had shown Casablanca too many times; she had never seen an airport, but she believed them all to be windswept and in black and white.

“But how would we get to Stockholm ?” asked Hank.

“The same way you got here.” said Kjerstin.. She had assumed her soft and brutal solider had a car. She panicked when she learned the truth, for even she knew there was nothing romantic -- or realistic -- about hitchhiking in twilight. Everyone in town knew her. Anyone going to Stockholm would simply take her right back to her parents. Kjerstin rubbed her jaw. “What we need is a horse,” she said finally, and then she thought of something better: the stoic mule grazing in Sven’s backyard. He had taken an instant liking to Hank. Accustomed to pulling carcasses, she was certain the slim body of a Swedish girl would please him very much.

***

They agreed to leave two twilights later, when the almanac predicted rain. Kjerstin believed the combination of dusk, rain and stormclouds would serve as a useful replacement for the dead of night. Out of caution, Hank suggested they escape separately. He would steal the mule and wait for her under the birch tree where they had met. Kjerstin agreed; it seemed right that after so many years she make the first leg of her journey on her own.

The following twilight, Hank Fitzpatrick scaled the trellis for a final time. They lay as always beneath the blankets, and Kjerstin Almgren allowed the scent of him to overwhelm her. Until now there had only been kisses and subdued passion, but now there was the thrill of their plot to consider, not to mention the fact they were secretly affianced. She could feel Hank Fitzpatrick urging her on in the careful, gentle way one spurs a horse from a trot to a cantor. Or was it the horse who urged the rider? Perhaps she had planned this as carefully as she planned their escape. Later she would find it remarkable that she had been hardly surprised by the act; that she had curiously chosen underclothes that were clean and free of holes; that earlier that day she had put drops of perfume in the sheets. In the faint glow of that polar haze , she examined his wounded body. There were scars from the war, the mark from a failed tattoo, a place where a bullet had torn through his flesh. He was thin from his travels, but his brutal arms seized her when it mattered and she bit the flesh of a pillow to keep from crying out.

After, she could hardly help but fall asleep. It was the deepest sleep she had fallen into since the start of the midnight sun, and it was so deep that she did not awake when her mother discovered them. Mrs. Almgren had burst inside full of delight. The night before, in desperation, she had tasted of her own porridge. In her sleep, Rolf Paulson had poured crystal water down her throat. The thrill of the dream shattered when she saw her daughter, deflowered and swaddled in the arms of an Englishman. She almost cried out, but then she thought that all was not lost, not if she kept her head. No one needed to know what she had found, least of all Rolf Paulson. Seething, she went out and returned with a kitchen knife. Then she knelt silent by Hank’s side of the bed and pressed the tip of the blade into his failed tattoo. It drew blood. Hank woke with a start. Mrs. Almgren pressed a finger to his lips so he would not wake her daughter. Then she leaned forward and whispered in the pleasantly murderous manner that only mothers are capable of:

“If you are still in town by lunch, you will not be alive by supper.”

She did not leave the room. Instead, she stood by the door, gripping the knife while Hank Fitzpatrick dressed. She kept glancing at her daughter. You won’t wake her if you know what’s good for you, she promised with a glare. She believed Hank Fitzpatrick would understand. He struck her as the sort of man who had encountered such glares before.

Mrs. Almgren need not have worried about waking Kjerstin. Exhausted by insomnia and young love, she remained virtually comatose until four o’clock that afternoon. By then, Hank Fitzpatrick was no longer in town.

“He said he had to move on,” shrugged Sven the Butcher.

But Kjerstin did not panic, for she had seen Sven’s backyard and knew that his mule was nowhere to be seen.

That evening, she sat silently at supper and feigned sorrow, for she knew her mother would accept nothing less. Meanwhile, Mrs. Almgren informed them that Rolf Paulson was expected to return before the end of the week. “I give you full permission to pout until then,” said her mother, feeling gregarious. “But when he returns, you will pinch your cheeks to rouge them and smile until you are wed.”

Kjerstin nodded in agreement, for she fully expected to smile not only until she was married, but for many years after.

Before bed, she found the cat and hugged her tight. “Where I’m going, there is no herring,” she said, and this seemed to soothe the animal, who licked Kjerstin’s face to forgive her for being left behind.

Kjerstin lay awake until twilight reached its peak. Then she drew a small bag from beneath the bed, which she filled with her beaded slippers, the prettiest dress she owned, and a single necklace which had belonged to her grandmother. She would not miss the tattered skirts, the old bodices, the wrinkled bonnets. Perhaps there was another closet of used clothing in her future, but it would not come from here. She knew Hank knew nothing of the territory, so she packed an old map to guide the way. She also packed her canteen of water and several cans of herring to sustain them for the trip. At the window sill she stopped, for she realized she had not said goodbye to her father; as always, her mother had eclipsed him and she had forgotten he was there.

She descended the trellis and ran away.

***

It stormed that night, just as the almanac predicted. She was drenched by the time she reached the birch tree, but she was content for the storm had brought with it a glorious darkness. She called out Hank’s name, expecting him to step from the shadows, shivering and soaked. “Hank!” she called again, but he did not appear.

She waited, growing more and more frightened. First the rain stopped, then the sky began to clear. Finally the twilight lifted. Kjerstin searched the trees desperately for some evidence that Hank Fitzpatrick had been there. A letter. Surely, he posted a letter and the rain had washed it away. She could not imagine how he had been detained, but knew the letter would explain it. Then she heard the car. A car! Of course! Something had happened to the mule, so Hank had stolen a car.  She saw Sven the Butcher’s truck winding up the road and of course it would be Sven’s truck, for once the mule had broken down, and the truck would be the savoir. She gathered her things, still wet from the storm, and ran into the road to meet her husband.

Instead, she found her father sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Get in,” he said. Kjerstin tried to object, but Mr. Almgren silenced her with his hand. “Get in. Your mother doesn’t sleep forever, no matter how much we may want her to.”

Defeated, Kjerstin got into the car. She looked back at the birch tree and believed she would never been able to smile for Rolf Paulson, or anyone else again. She was so busy plotting the best way to drown in Lake Mälaren that she did not notice Sven the Butcher’s truck was headed away from the village and not towards it. She looked over at her father, but Mr. Almgren was focused on the road.

“Turn around,” she said. “He still might come. He won’t know where to find me.”

“He won’t be looking,” said Mr. Almgren. He took an envelope from his pocket. The letter she had searched for had not been by the birch trees at all. Knowing it was supposed to rain, Hank Fitzpatrick had sent it to the house.

Mr. Almgren had not driven in many years. He clutched the wheel and would say no more to his daughter, less it distract him. Kjerstin’s thoughts flew to her soldier. She still thought it was some sort of mistake - she would not believe she had been betrayed for many years. Even now, with his letter in her hand, she still believed Hank was waiting for her at the end of the road.

They surfaced not at a black and white airport, but a crowded harbor where a ferry waited in the mouth of the Baltic Sea. Mr. Almgren did not want her to fly. He did not share his daughter’s romantic notions about airplanes. Airplanes had always startled him. Boats he both understood and trusted. “I have taken you this far,” he said. “The least you can do is promise how you will go the rest of the way.”

Kjerstin Almgren still didn’t understand how she had come to stand at a harbor in Stockholm without Hank at her side. Mr. Almgren had bought a ferry ticket. He pressed it into her hand, along with a small purse of money.

“Why have you brought me here?” she said.

Her father shrugged. “I wouldn’t want anyone to marry Rolf Paulson.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Rolf Paulson is an ass.”
“At least with him I wouldn’t be alone.”

“There are worse things than being alone, raring. Don’t grow old in this place. If not for your mother, I would have told you to leave long ago.”

“And what will you tell her now?”

“What is there to say? I looked for you all day, but I never found a thing.”

A whistle went and he pushed her onto the boat. He stayed on the dock while the ferry pulled away. She was so miserable, she did not move. Lake Mälaren was gone, but the Baltic Sea stretched out endlessly before her. She studied the water, and was still standing at the railing when the boat reached Helsinki .

A sailor approached. “Are you getting off?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well we’re turning around. If you’re don’t get off, you’ll just go back to where you came from.

Kjerstin Almgren considered this carefully. Then she gathered her things, crumpled my father’s letter and threw it into the sea.

Joel Fishbane is a playwright, writer and director. His work has been published in Geist, Armada Quarterly and an upcoming issue of The Antigonish Review. His new play "Short Story Long" will premiere in Montreal in May 2008. He has a diabetic cat and sometimes plays the clarinet.