It had once been a place for the poor. Now, the red paint was flaking, tiles were missing from the roof, and the surrounding forest was closing in on the wooden building. When the west wind blew, branches could be heard whipping against the old windows. It was called “Fattigstugan”, the poor-house. Here, the local church placed those who could no longer take care of themselves. People whose families were either insolvent, indifferent or extinguished. Men, women, old and young, covered in lice and dirt, wearing rags stained with blood, vomit and feces. When people from the church came to deliver food and tend to the bedridden, their faces were filled with disdain rather than sympathy. There was no doubt that fattigstugan was the end of the line.
The small two-story house was located deep in the forest, far away from the eyes of the villagers. From the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, fattigstugan was the designated dwelling for the unwanted residents of the village. In the church records all their names are listed, their dates of arrival, and later – like a clockwork – their deaths. No evidence of anyone leaving the place alive. Most were buried in unmarked graves in the surrounding forest. The wolves would take notice of this practice. After a resident had been unceremoniously placed in their grave, the subsequent night would turn into a loud feast for the hungry animals. They would rip and tear into the flesh of the corpse in a tug-of-war, chasing each other while growling and howling. The morning after, the bone fragments were spread thin over the area. To the convenience of the caretakers, the grave was now empty – but not for long.
By the end of the 19th century, the Swedish government set out to reform the old agricultural village society. The steam whistles from the continent were enticing the northern countries to come join the future. This future was built on steel and concrete. And so, in 1904 the sick and poor people of that small wooden house were taken away from their miserable existence, sent away on steel trains and escorted into large concrete institutional facilities. There, their misery continued with renewed vigor. “Ur askan i elden.” From the ashes – into the fire.
When young Ingrid Månsdotter skied the forest tracks on the route between school and her parents’ farmstead, she always glanced towards the old fattighus. It was a house that had been filled with people for a hundred years and stood empty for almost thirty. She did not like the feeling she got when passing through the area. The trip to school usually took her less than an hour if her skis were newly waxed, and by foot it took almost half an hour longer.
There was something about the image of the house that lingered with her long after she had left it behind her in the tracks. Even after she had reached her parents’ home and started loosening the laces of her skis, she envisioned all the rooms of that old house, with their furniture still in place, the white curtains heavily stained with black mold still hanging from the windows. But when she had taken off her heavy coat an sat down in front of the crackling fire, the cold feeling quickly gave way to a warm serenity.
Ingrid’s mother would brush her hair and sing songs from the booklet she had bought for a Shilling from the travelling merchant. Her father would come in through the door with his moustache full of snow, carrying a heavy bundle of firewood that he slammed down on the floor next to the furnace so that bits of sawdust and bark whirled through the air, and mother would scold him while trying to hold back a smile that soon turned into a grin. Father would then give her a kiss on the forehead and pat Ingrid’s cheek, and mother would help him off with his heavy leather boots while he asked his daughter about school, if she had read Luther’s Small Catechism today, and if her skis needed a new layer of wax. Yes father, no father. And then they would eat their evening porridge in the candle-light and go to bed with their bellies full and their minds at ease.
Ingrid loved the modest but cozy house she lived in. She often felt like other houses were “saturated with sorrow”. This was certainly the case with fattigstugan, which she had to pass by on an almost daily basis. Yet, she felt like fattigstugan was harboring something more than old clogged up and fossilized sorrow. An invisible presence she instinctually feared with all her being.
Some nights Ingrid dreamed about fattigstugan. She found herself inside that godforsaken building, seated on a soft and damp chair in the compact darkness of the living room. In her dream the snow outside the windows reflected a faint light that made some outlines discernable to her eyes. A storm was making the house creak and whistle. A thick layer of dust covered all the furniture, and the corners of the doorframes were coated with spiderwebs. The house looked empty, but something was moving from room to room, hovering over the crooked and rotting floorboards. Ingrid could neither see nor hear it, yet she always knew the exact position of this entity.
In the winter-months, the forest route that Ingrid skied was dark as night both when she left for school in the morning, and when she returned in the evening. She didn’t mind it. The only thing in the forest that scared her was fattighuset. The rest was just trees, snow, and animals that kept their distance. Father had told Ingrid that wolves and bears were stronger than man, but man was more cunning than any beast. This, the beast of the forest had learned throughout the millennia. An innate respect had evolved between man, wolf and bear. This was the law of the Nordic forest.
It was the middle of January. Christmas had come and gone, and Ingrid was listening to her teacher talk about distant places with palm trees, coconuts and strange animals of all shapes and sizes. Outside the window, the wind was increasing, and the heavy snowfall came down in a sharp angle, like a curtain being pulled to the side. Fröken Lindström, her teacher, told Ingrid she could stay at her cottage next to the school for the night. The idea of worrying her parents like that made Ingrid’s eyes well up, but she pushed back the tears and said that she’ll be fine, she has skied the route so many times that it won’t be a problem. When school ended, she went outside to strap her shoes to the wide wooden skis. The snow was coming down so hard she could barely see her feet as she tightened the leather straps, and her staffs had fallen over in the storm and had to be dug up from a layer of snow. As she set out towards the darkness of the forest, the ski tracks were so obstructed by the snowfall that she could barely see them on the surface, but as her feet plowed through the powder-snow, the hardened crust of the lower layer kept her skis in the furrows.
After a while her cheeks and nose began to sting, so she wrapped her thick gray scarf around her face. She wiggled her toes as hard as she could to keep them from getting colder, and often made stops to blow hot air into her wool-gloves. As she was about to continue her journey, she realized she could no longer feel the trail she had been following. The layer of snow had coated the tracks so heavily that they were far under the snow. Now, she would have to navigate by her surroundings. But she couldn’t. She could only see snow, darkness and trees. Ingrid had been to many funerals, yet she rarely contemplated her own mortality. As her whole body began to shiver, the thought of death entered her mind. When she looked around her in search of a point of reference to orient by, she saw the house. First, a feeling of relief – she knew the direction home, and she wasn’t lost. Then came the fear. Fear, because she knew now what she had to do. The fear of dying was stronger than that of the unknown. This night would be spent in the belly of the beast – fattigstugan.
She took her skis off and walked towards the front door while whispering a prayer to herself. It was not locked, and with a loud creaking noise the house revealed to Ingrid the darkness it contained. She closed the door behind her and sat down on the floor while rubbing her numb feet. There was a smell of mold and rotting wood, but she was surprised at how intact the walls, roof and windows had remained. The room was as cold as the winter forest outside, but the walls kept her completely sheltered from the storm. She could feel the warmth returning to her fingers and toes as she sat with her feet and arms cocooned insider her thick winter coat, tightly pressed against her body.
After a while, Ingrid did something she never thought she would do inside this house – she fell asleep. She dreamed that she was at home in front of the fireplace. Her mother stirring a large kettle of soup while father was sharpening his ice skates on a stool by the front door. From the outside, a voice could be heard uttering the name “Ingrid”, over and over. Her parents gestured at Ingrid to be quiet. Her dad walked up to her, and whispered in her ear, “Don’t let them know you’re here. They want to take you away from us.” “Where?” Ingrid replied with a trembling voice. Her father explained that she had fallen I’ll after coming home from school during that stormy night. On her third day of illness, a priest had visited them. The priest said that the girl was dead, but mother and father did not believe him. She was just breathing so slowly, and speaking so faintly that the priest, who didn’t know Ingrid, couldn’t see it. Now, the gravedigger comes for a visit every day. He places an open casket outside their door and calls her name, hoping that she will come out and claim it as her eternal resting space. Every time he visits, he brings a better, more beautifully decorated casket. Today, it was a golden casket with an inlay of the softest of silk and a pillow made of swan’s-down. The voice continued calling her name, until it became so faint, she could barely discern it. “Ingrid… Ing… rid.”
She woke up in a room where the daylight poured in from the windows. The decadence of this place was now clearer to her, and she felt more fear and reluctance than she had felt during the darkness of night. But she was alive. Now, she could take the forest route back home to her parent’s house. She had to use all her force to push open the door through the deep layer of snow that had fallen during the night. The sun was shining, and the snow was sparkling with a bright white light that blinded her eyes. She took a deep breath and felt the fresh winter air fill her lungs. As she was stepping out, her foot hit something solid that was laying on the ground.
Ingrid looked down and squinted so she could see through the blinding light. It was a man laying face-down, frozen solid with caked snow in his moustache and eyelashes. The dead man in front of Ingrid was her father. He had been out looking for his missing daughter in the stormy night. Ingrid now realized it was his voice she had heard in her dream. Her tears were dripping over the dead father as she cried and cursed the dream that kept her from waking up. Then, her crying was interrupted by a sound echoing from inside the house. A wretched raspy voice, coughing maniacally from the darkness of the inner rooms. And Ingrid ran. She ran through the forest faster than she had ever done before. At home, Ingrid could feel her mother’s tears landing on the top of her head as she brushed her icy hair. The flames of the furnace burnt throughout the night – father’s firewood.