57°03”N, 135°19”W #6
But the greatest tribulation of all is yet to come, as soon after this Hampus leaves too.
He is due to travel out into the territories and does not take Anna with him; he refuses flat out no matter how much she begs and pleads.
She is too close, Hampus will not be back in time for the birth of the child, and Anna cannot bear the thought that it might take weeks before he learns that he has become a father.
She cries and complains so much that her usually calm husband loses his temper.
Imagine wishing to travel out into a wilderness populated with wolves and bears with a little one in your belly – what an ungodly idea!
Anna should think of the child and of her husband, she should control her emotions and help Hampus to overcome the anguish of their separation – surely she understands that the governor cannot put himself and his family before the needs of the Company?
Anna does understand. Hampus sets off and she remains at home, an obedient wife, she bids her husband farewell on the quayside as the others stare at them, she kisses him on the cheek and wishes him Godspeed on his journey, though she feels the urge to scream.
For three days, Anna lies in bed bemoaning her fate, until eventually forcing herself onto her feet.
She decides to drown her sorrows in work.
This should be easy, as there’s endless amounts to do, and she is keenly aware that she is constantly being compared to the wife of the Finnish governor who preceded the Voevodskiis.
Margaretha Etholén held dances, masked balls and musical soirées, and all those who visited Novo-Arkhangelsk marvelled to find such a refined cultural life in the colonies.
Margaretha seemed indefatigable: she founded a school for the local girls where she taught them Russian, history, geography and housekeeping; she invited them for dinner at Kekoor Castle, where they practised dances and learned the art of sophisticated conversation.
Some of them even learned French, and these girls made excellent wives for the Company’s officials.
For this, Margaretha received plaudits all the way from St Petersburg, as there was a constant dearth of suitable wives out in the territories.
In Anna’s imagination, Margaretha was as perfect as a statue.
Anna visits the girls’ school. She decides to give the children some Bibles and to read the Word for them, but the Orthodox monks forbid her from sticking her nose into the children’s religious education.
What else could she teach the children, what can she talk to them about?
The girls sit at their desks, stony-faced, and Anna is at a loss as to how best to win their affection.
The native children do not understand what is best for them, many of them try to flee the school and run back to their families, to a life of poverty and misery.
Anna has heard the servants saying that the girls even sell their services to visiting sailors, and the thought makes her feel sick.
The child inside her slumps like a slippery fish, and the teacher complains about the children’s laziness and the school’s leaking ceiling.
The classrooms smell of fungus and algae, and Anna escapes the building at the first opportunity.
On the Tzarina’s name day, Anna hosts a dinner party, but nothing goes the way she plans.
The cook drinks the port wine intended for the jelly, and in a drunken stupor he neglects to prepare some of the dishes.
There isn’t enough soup to go round, and in an attempt to rectify matters the cook offers the remaining guests bowls of coloured water.
Anna has never felt so mortified, and she cannot even sack him as there is no-one else capable of making pastries in this ghastly town.
But she stops visiting the kitchen and instead passes on her wishes via the housekeeper, though she knows that the servants laugh at her, at her weakness, and she is sure she hears giggling each time a door closes behind her.
When she was in London, Anna picked up a copy of Dr Bull’s Hints to mothers for the management of health during the period of pregnancy and in the lying-in room, with an exposure of popular errors in connexion with those subjects, and hints upon nursing.
She follows these guidelines most diligently, wakes up early in the morning, does some physical exercise and washes her nipples with a tincture made from green tea and birch bark, she bathes in cool water and dries her body with a rough linen sheet, tries to remain calm and happy, to avoid vexation and palpitations.
But everybody knows someone who has died in childbirth.
She is to have her firstborn in this unknown town, on this strange continent, and she will do so alone, without the support of her husband, her mother or friends, and she does not trust the colony’s doctor, a young man with a penchant for drink and who cannot answer even the most rudimentary questions without first consulting his books.
Anna writes letters one after the other, imploring her mother for guidance and advice, though she knows that her letters will not reach Europe before her time has come.
Summer comes to an end. The hummingbirds leave the garden, wind presses the clouds against the mountains and water runs down into the town.
The duckboards placed along the streets sink squelching into the mud, and one cannot step outside without dirtying one’s shoes.
Dampness creeps into the walls of Kekoor Castle too, but Anna pulls a shawl around her shoulders and opens the windows to allow fresh air inside.
She airs the room until she wakes up, her fingers blue with the cold, and she flinches, frightened that she might have hurt the child, and eventually swallows her pride and asks the housekeeper to seal the windows shut once again.
Their town is only called Novo-Arkhangelsk on maps and in St Petersburg.
To the locals, it is Sitka, and this old world continues to seep through their lives.
The church has clearly neglected its responsibilities, for in a hundred years only a handful of the natives have accepted the true and righteous faith, and the colonists are no better than them – they know what is right, but they have chosen differently.
In Sitka, Anna witnesses sins she cannot even name, and by the shores she sees the totem poles: the raven–bear, the bear–frog, the frog on a man’s shoulders.
She sees their wooden, grimacing mouths and wakes from her dream, covered in sweat.
The cat has jumped onto her bed, a primitive, distasteful beast that brings voles and rats indoors and crunches their bones under her bed.
Everything around her is brutal, foreign and ugly.
She has had enough of her mission civilisatrice, and she gets up and writes another letter to her mother in which she says she has decided henceforth to concentrate only on the upbringing of her own children for she believes a mother’s responsibility is always first and foremost to her family.
In December, Anna gives birth to a daughter.
The birth is difficult, the midwife is sweating and Anna is screaming, panting and praying as blood, mucus and faeces pour out of her, things she wishes neither to see nor name, but eventually she is able to hold the newborn baby in her arms. She lifts the girl up to her breast: she is a modern woman who will nurse her baby herself, allow nutrients to flow from her body and spend sweet, precious days alone with her in the nursery.
But try as she might, she produces no milk, though she does exactly as the books instructed her: swallows tinctures, wraps herself first in warm, then cold towels and allows the confused doctor to examine her breasts.
Nothing seems to help. She cannot express any milk, then to compound matters further she comes down with a fever.
Through her slumber she can hear the child crying with hunger; at first she sounds angry, then gradually weaker, until she no longer has the strength to demand food but simply lies in her crib, limp and pale, and Anna cannot understand what she has done wrong.
Why can’t she do something that even the simplest beast can do?
Eventually, she is left with no option. The doctor goes looking for a wetnurse, but in this godforsaken place there are no women of sufficient standing currently nursing a child of their own.
They will have to find an Indian woman from one of the local villages, where there is no shortage of children, but at this Anna draws the line.
No heathen will suckle a child of hers; let the girl drink cow’s milk.
But here, even that is hard to come by. There are very few cows, for keeping them is so impractical; the bears are all too keen to help themselves to some easy prey, and they pluck the livestock from their enclosures like berries.
Despite their numerous attempts, the Alaskan soil resolutely refuses to be turned into fertile farming land, and animal feed must be imported from elsewhere, but then the humid air rots the hay, meaning that during the winter the cattle have nothing but mouldy fodder, and after eating this they become thin and sickly and produce no milk.
Anna does not care. Let them fetch milk from California if necessary; she will pay whatever it costs.