“Good day.” Cecilia curtseys and looks at the ground; Sanna hides on her safe side. “Good day, good day!” says Doctor Gyllen. “So you girls are going out to walk. Good idea.” She walks on, but not as if she were running. Cecilia and Sanna go to the sauna, and of course Sanna can’t even think of sleeping in a new place. She twists and turns on her blanket on the shelf and then sits up, her eyes full of life. Cecilia sings all the songs she knows along with several hymns, and Sanna sings along. Normally, she quiets down after a while, but not today. Cecilia sings several lullabies, but no child was ever more wide awake than Sanna. There are mosquitoes in the sauna, and Cecilia has to agree that it’s not a good place for a nap. But at least they’ve managed to kill almost an hour. Cecilia takes the large dipper from the sauna to hold their wild strawberries, and in boots and sunhats, they head off.
First they must pass the parsonage. The pastor is sitting on the steps, his face grey, and Cecilia is afraid that Sanna will rush up to him, but she is full of the promised expedition and just calls out, “We’re going to pick wild strawberries!” and hurries along the path as if she were afraid of being captured and stuffed into bed. They stride along in their boots, past the churchyard and out into the wilds of Hästskär, where the world loses sight of them in dense thickets and in deep ravines under high granite walls. Where the cows have grazed, it is open and fine, and, just as Cecilia promised, there are wild strawberries. Masses of wild strawberries. A colossal abundance of wild strawberries. They have ripened large and sweet this lovely, dry summer. There are so many that they have to watch where they step so they don’t crush too many with their boots. Sanna picks them one at a time, smells them and looks at them and puts them in the dipper. Cecilia adds hers and tells Sanna that she can eat some if she likes, but Sanna is focused on the picking and is proud of the pile building in the dipper. Time passes quickly. For the first time, Sanna is far away from Mama and Papa and she feels big and full of her task—picking wild strawberries for dessert!
Cecilia is not used to small children with such perseverance, but Sanna is enchanted by her berry picking. “Look Cecilia!” she says every time. Cecilia is picking too, and the dipper fills. Too soon? she wonders uneasily. She suggests that they rest for a while, and Sanna leans against her and falls asleep as if on cue. They sit there in the afternoon sun for almost an hour. Far away, Cecilia hears terrible screams. If she didn’t know that the pastor’s wife was giving birth, she would have concluded that some cow had got its horns caught in a tree. Cecilia shivers and imagines it is she herself. It’s awful. But Sanna sleeps calmly and deeply. Then it grows quiet and peaceful, all she can hear is a seabird crying, and then Sanna wakes up. A little groggy, she sits up. “Good morning!” Cecilia says. “Shall we start home with all our wild strawberries?”
Sanna says she’s terribly hungry, and Cecilia says they’ve been gone longer than she expected and they should have brought some sandwiches and something to drink. “But we’ve got food right here! Let’s eat some strawberries to give us the strength to get home!” They have been sitting in a sort of tiny magic garden, a natural little pasture surrounded by juniper bushes, granite slabs and warm stone cliffs. “Like in a room of our own,” Cecilia says. “And look, here’s our very own privy!” And sure enough, between a big stone and an overgrown juniper bush there’s a little space where they can piddle in complete privacy!
They wander home hand in hand, in complete agreement that it has been a wonderful afternoon. All the rocks are facing in the wrong direction on the way back, and it’s harder to walk, though Sanna marches along energetically. Like the cat with the seven-league boots that they read about, Cecilia says. She can see by the sun that it must be four-thirty by the time they arrive at the parsonage. She reconnoitres carefully but all seems quiet and calm. The door opens and the pastor comes out, beaming. “Come in, come in,” he begins, but Sanna cries out, “Papa, Papa! Look! We’ve been picking wild strawberries! Thousands of strawberries!”
“Well, look at that!” Papa says. “You’ve come at just the right moment, my little strawberry girls. There’s wonderful news. Come in and see.”
The doors to the house stand open, and Doctor Gyllen is sitting in the dining room with her helper, Sister Hanna, calmly drinking coffee. Papa’s cup is half full at the head of the table. Sanna rushes in and shows them the wild strawberries in the sauna dipper. “Let’s put them in a nice dish before we take them in to Mama,” Cecilia suggests. Papa goes to the kitchen with them. Cecilia takes out the good soup tureen and pours the berries into it. Nothing could be prettier, and while Sanna hops up and down with delight and impatience, the pastor says, “Thank you so much, Cecilia. This was perfect. It’s a girl, and now I’ll take Sanna in and show her. Come, Sanna.”
He carries the wild strawberries like the chalice in church and they walk into the bedroom. The window is ajar and the room smells good. Sanna toddles in, “Look Mama, wild strawberries!” Papa holds out the tureen in all its glory and Mama admires it. “What a splendid dessert for this evening! What a good girl!” She’s lying in bed looking happy and satisfied, and there is a tray of coffee on the chair beside the bed. “Coffee in bed is only for birthdays!” Sanna knows to say, and then Papa says she’s right, because today is a birthday. “You’ve got a little sister today, and it’s her birthday. Do you want to see?”
Now she sees that there’s a little packet beside Mama, wrapped in the little baby blanket that once was Sanna’s. Papa lifts it up as carefully as if it were lamp glass, loosens the blanket a bit, and there inside is a tiny little baby. A squashed, vivid reddish-purple face, with black hair pasted along its scalp. You can see from far off that it has no teeth and no eyes.
“Ooh,” Sanna says.
“Not exactly a beauty,” Papa says, “but she’ll get prettier in just a few days. This is your little sister, and you’re the only sister she has in the whole world.”
Sanna says nothing. Of course Papa has talked about a sister or brother, but she thought it would be someone like herself, not this thing. When it’s someone’s birthday, you’re supposed to be happy and sing Happy Birthday, but suddenly she just wants to cry, and cry she does, big tears and a loud wail. Papa puts the strawberry tureen down on the bureau, right under Jesus on the cross, and lifts up Sanna. “There, there, Sanna! You’ve been having lots of fun all day and now you’re really tired.” He rocks her and talks to her and then he says they’ll go and see if they can’t find some supper, and then he’s going to call Grandma and Grandpa and Gram and Gramps and tell them about the wild strawberries and Sanna’s sister!
He would have left the strawberries behind if Sanna hadn’t reminded him. He puts her down and takes the bowl and they walk through the parlour to the dining room, where they see that Sanna has been crying. “It was a shock for her to see her little sister. But she’ll get to be more and more fun every day, I promise.”
Doctor Gyllen has stood up and asks him to call for the Hindrikses’ hired man, but the pastor says that he hopes she can stay and have supper with them. He can hear they’re already working in the kitchen—nothing very special, soured milk and buttered bread and wild strawberries, but they’d be happy if she’d help herself. They have enough soured milk for everyone. Mona clearly had her suspicions when she made it the day before. And at just that moment Cecilia comes up from the cellar with the bowls of soured milk balanced on a tray, and Sister Hanna comes in from the kitchen with small plates and a basket of bread.
“Khleb!” says Doctor Gyllen and sits down, because the only thing she misses from Russia is the bread, the loaves of dark bread that keep that afflicted people on its feet. On Åland, loaves are not a part of the culture, but it does belong to the pastor’s mainland heritage, and here it is, thick slices of splendid bread along with home-churned butter piled on a plate, something the suffering Russian people have had to live without for years. “Ah! Kvass!” she says when the small beer is carried in, suddenly realizing that she has missed that, too.