An extract from ‘The Summer Book’ by Tove Jansson

– a Finnish story about a grandmother and her granddaughter, chosen by Sarah, for her grandmother on behalf of June’s grandchildren

The Pasture

Sophia asked her Grandmother what Heaven looked like, and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by, on their way to the village over on the mainland. They stopped to look. It was very hot, the road was white and cracked, and all the plants along the ditch had dust on their leaves. They walked into the pasture and sat down in the grass, which was tall and not a bit dusty. It was full of bluebells and cat’s-foot and buttercups.

“Are there ants in Heaven?” Sophia asked.

“No,” said Grandmother, and lay down carefully on her back. She propped her hat on her nose and tried to sneak a little sleep. Some kind of farm machinery was running steadily and peacefully in the distance. If you turned it off – which was easy to do – and listened only to the insects, you could hear thousands of millions of them, and they filled the whole world with rising and falling waves of ecstasy and summer. Sophia picked some flowers and held them in her hand until they got warm and unpleasant; then she put them on her grandmother and asked how God could keep track of all the people who prayed at the same time.

“He’s very, very smart,” Grandmother mumbled sleepily under her hat.

“Answer really,” Sophia said. “How does He have time?”

“He has secretaries…”

“But how does He manage to do what you pray for if He doesn’t get time to talk to the secretary before it’s too late?”

Grandmother pretended to be asleep, but she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone, and so finally she said that He’d made it so nothing bad could happen between the moment you prayed and the moment He found out what you prayed for. And then Sophia wanted to know what happened if you prayed while you were falling out of a tree and you were halfway down.

“Aha,” said Grandmother, perking up. “In that case He makes you catch on a limb.”

“That is smart,” Sophia admitted. “Now you get to ask. But it has to be about Heaven.”

“Do you think all the angels wear dresses, so no one can tell what kind they are?”

“What a dumb question! You know they all wear dresses. But now listen carefully; if one of them wants to know for sure what kind another one is, he just flies under him and looks to see if he’s wearing pants.”

“I see,” Grandmother said. “That’s good to know. Now it’s your turn.”

“Can angels fly down to Hell?”

“Of course. They might have all sorts of friends and neighbours down there.”

“Now I’ve got you!” Sophia cried. “Yesterday you said there wasn’t any Hell!”

Grandmother was annoyed and sat up much too quickly. The whole pasture started spinning around her. She waited for the giddiness to stop.

“And I say exactly the same thing today,” she said. “But this is just a game.”

“It’s not a game! It’s serious when you’re talking about God!”

“He would never do anything so dumb as make a Hell.”

“Of course He did.”

“No He didn’t!”

“Yes He did! A big enormous Hell!”

“Sophia,” she said, “this is really not something to argue about. You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that’s the whole idea.”

“It’s not hard at all!” Sophia shouted. “And what are you going to do about the Devil, then? He lives in Hell!”

For a moment Grandmother considered saying that there was no Devil either, but she didn’t want to be mean. The farm machinery was making a terrible racket. She walked back towards the road and stepped right in a cowpat. Her grandchild was not behind her.

“Sophia,” called Grandmother, “I said you could have an orange when we got to the shop…”

“An orange!” said Sophia contemptuously. “Do you think people care about oranges when they’re talking about God and the Devil?”

Grandmother poked the cow dung off her shoes with her walking stick as well as she could.

“My dear child,” she said, “with the best will in the world I cannot start believing in the Devil at my age. You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.”

“What does that mean?” asked the child sullenly.

“That means respecting other people’s convictions.”

“What are convictions?” Sophia screamed and stamped her foot.

“Letting others believe what they want to believe!” her grandmother shouted back. “I’ll let you believe God damns people and you let me not.”

“You swore,” Sophia whispered.

“I certainly did not.”

“You did too. You said ‘Goddamns’.”

They were no longer looking at each other. Three cows came down the road, swishing their tails and swaying their heads. They passed slowly by in a swarm of flies and walked on towards the village, with the skin on their rear ends puckering and twitching as they went. Then they were gone, leaving nothing but silence.

Finally Sophia’s grandmother said, “I know a song you don’t know.” She waited for a minute, and then she sang – way off-key because her vocal chords were crooked:

Cowpats are free,

Tra-la-la

But don’t throw them at me.

Tra-la-la

For you too could get hit

Tra-la-la

With cow shit!

“What did you say?” Sophia whispered, because she couldn’t believe her ears. And Grandmother sang the same really awful song again.

Sophia climbed over the ditch and started towards the village.

“Papa would never say ‘shit,’” she said over her shoulder. “Where did you learn that song?”

“I’m not telling,” Grandmother said.

They came to the barn and climbed the stile and walked through the Eriksson’s barnyard, and before they got to the shop under the trees, Sophia had learned the song and could sing it just as badly as her grandmother.