With spring comes warmer weather, and with warmer weather comes the fever. It quickly spreads, and even though it takes both old and young, rich and poor, it strikes hardest among the weak. As long as Anna Stina can remember, her mother, Maja, has labored as a washerwoman on Children’s Lea, her back bent over wool and linen, shoulder to shoulder with other women. Every spring she falls ill. It has always been that way. The fever seems to gain easy access to the manufacturing houses even though they keep the windows closed to the unhealthy fumes of the city, and Maja Knapp is always among those affected. It starts as a soreness in the throat with swelling along both sides of the jaw. During the night she grows hot, kicks off the blankets, and sweats copiously. Come morning, she stays in bed. She alternates between freezing and burning up, and Anna Stina, who shares the same blanket, has to accept being in turn embraced or pushed away. Maja does not want to eat anything and hardly drinks. Every bite must be coaxed down.
Sometimes she raves. Her speech comes in a steady gush, as if she can’t help it, sometimes with words that no one can understand, sometimes with a clarity as if she were awake and in full possession of her senses. Tonight, while Anna Stina tries to ease her lips open for spoonfuls of mild soup, she talks about the fire. She, like many other old people from the area, names it the Red Rooster, the calamity that consumed almost all of Maria parish in the year 1759, when Maja Knapp was no more than a few years out of her mother’s belly. Anna Stina has heard the story more times than she can remember but never like tonight. In the grip of her chills, Maja speaks without inhibitions, and the details come as clearly as if she were seeing them in front of her very eyes. It is the story of how they came to Katarina parish.
Maja Knapp was born in Maria parish and she was in her family home that day, a summer when the warm weather had gone from blessing to drought. In the yard between the houses she was fashioning a farmstead out of pinecones and sticks, with cobblestones as buildings and pine needles as palings. Her father and mother were both out, working the fields beyond Danto, and while the neighbor’s wife, too old to do anything else and lame on her left side, kept an eye on Maja between naps, she could play for hours in the shade of the linden tree.
It was already afternoon when Maria’s bells started to peal erratically. Two clear tones, repeated again and again, shortly before four o’clock. Soon Katarina tower answered, and a moment later the same signal came from all three towers in the City-between-the-Bridges. Then the same from the other side of Gilded Bay, from Klara, Jacob, and Hedvig, and then the clock tower high up on Brunke’s Ridge. Soon a gun answered from the shipyard with a double salute, two sharp bangs, over and over. All around town, flags were hoisted to mark the spread of the flames, their colors a warning of which direction to avoid.
The smell came after a while, a sharp odor of smoke. It stung her eyes. The forerunners of the fleeing mass started to appear in the streets, people who had loaded whatever possessions they most wanted onto carts or their backs. During the first half an hour, there were few enough of them to allow those who lived near the church a hope that the blaze would be extinguished. All hope died with the rats.
They came in a gray wave, up from cellars and storehouses and harbor warehouses, all rushing in the direction of the sea. As everyone knows: when the gray brethren flee for their lives, all is lost. In their wake came panic. An hour after the church bells had started to toll, the wind grew stronger, pushing the smoke in front of it and bathing all of Maria parish in twilight.
A young boy came running to help lead away the neighbors. He didn’t give Maja so much as a look, and only as he was on his way out did his conscience make him pause.
“Girl! Run! The fire is coming from Danto and Horn’s Tollgate. Run for the Lock!”
But having been sternly instructed not to enter the street on her own, she chose to wait until the smoke made her eyes water and turned every breath into a cough. Out on the street, she quickly lost her way. She had never before stepped past the threshold of her home, and the smoke erased the most memorable markers—the church spires, the windmills. The crowd frightened her. Heavy feet in wooden clogs, wagon wheels and wheelbarrows. Rather than be trampled against the mud and stone, she chose to hide in the gap between two walls. Down by the ground there was still cool air to breathe and with her cheek against the earth she waited. Out of the haze in the west came terrible noises. Cows and horses that had been left tethered were broiled where they stood and howled their dying anguish. Maja Knapp was still in her hiding place four hours later when the sun went down and the stream of fleeing people had stopped. Only then did she dare to creep out, and she saw then how the sky was burning.
It was on the cobblestoned street that she caught her first glimpse of the Red Rooster. Higher than the Maria Church tower, and with showers of sparks reaching far up in the heavens, he climbed the slope from the edge of the bay to the top of the hill with a thundering roar. He swallowed everything in his path. Flames burst up from the dry timber of the ramshackle wooden houses. They besieged the stone buildings of the rich from all sides, took a sooty hold of the pillars and ornamental finishes of the facades, shattered the windows, and turned the interiors into an oven hot enough to incinerate furniture and tapestries. When the copper rooftops were seared long enough they shot up from the rafters, held aloft on the hot winds like red bats with torn wings. The heat of the Red Rooster’s breath brought blisters to her skin. She would bear the marks that he left on her for the rest of her days.
Some distance down the street, she saw a one-legged man struggling on his crutch with the fire at his heels. When the crutch got stuck between two stones and was wrested from his grip, he tried to crawl. His clothes and wig started to smolder as he screamed wordlessly and suddenly his wig was ablaze. His high-pitched shrieks continued for some time. That was when she finally started to run, crying and screaming, away from the inferno, her blackened face streaked with tears. Around her sparks were flying and igniting new fires wherever they landed. It seemed to her as if she were running through a luminous autumn forest, with flames falling instead of leaves.
Her mother was waiting, desperate, at the Southern Square where the inhabitants had been forced down towards the Lock and packed in tight by city guards with bayonets. She never saw her father again.
The fire was still raging a day later. Maja and her mother at first subsisted on donations from the parish. Later the landowner at Danto took pity on them. Nothing remained of their home. Her father’s body could not be distinguished from others’. Overnight, a generation was reduced to miserable wretches, doomed to wander the rest of their days along the city streets in rags and drunkenness, ghosts of the people they had once been. Three hundred manors and houses no longer existed. Some twenty blocks had been razed to the ground.
As she grew into adulthood, Maja Knapp saw them rise again from the ashes, but now in stone. The wooden houses of her childhood were gone. The carpenter starved while the mason grew rich. Maja Knapp and her mother were forced to move to Katarina parish, where the worn old wooden tenement buildings still stood, a mess of angles and recesses with additions built on every which way so that the landlords could make more money, just one stray spark away from becoming a new death trap for the destitute. That’s where she stayed, found a man, bore a daughter of her own. The father disappeared at the same moment her belly became visible.
Anna Stina lays her hand on her mother’s forehead. Maja Knapp is burning up and her breath is weak. It must be the heat of the fever that makes her remember Maria parish in the grip of the Red Rooster. Anna Stina feels a lump in her throat. She doesn’t want to leave her mother alone but she has no choice. She has to run for help even though she has nothing to offer in return.
When she throws her shawl around her shoulders and opens the door to dash out, she is surprised by the fact that someone is standing outside: Boman, the sexton from Katarina Church. He is young, with hopes of one day taking over as the parish shepherd. He smells so strongly of spirits that he must have helped himself to the bottle in the moments before Anna Stina opened the door. But she has not been expecting any help and wonders who asked the bell ringer to come. She has no time to waste on gratitude.
“Mother Maja has the fever. Please pray for her while I run to the apothecary.”
When Anna Stina returns half an hour later she is empty-handed. Josef Karlsson, the apothecary, is out for the evening, and his wife’s opinion was that he would already be so affected by the punch that it would make no difference even if Anna Stina ran all the way out to the Royal Pasture to fetch him.
A silence has descended on the household. Even the families they share the building with stand still in their doorways when Anna Stina returns. Boman stands next to the bed with his hands folded in prayer. The sheet has been pulled over Maja’s face and at first Anna Stina does not understand why. Boman clears his throat and the words he speaks sound uncomfortably ceremonial in his youthful voice.
“Anna Stina, your beloved mother Maja Knapp has left us, may God have mercy on her soul.”
He mumbles a few more words that she does not hear. Anna Stina feels her knees about to buckle under her. She loses her breath, as if she has been punched in the stomach. The injustice is more than she can bear. Maja Knapp, who has supported her only daughter on her own for so long, who has patiently borne the contempt of her fellow parishioners on account of her illegitimate child, who has worn out her body in physical labor every day—did she endure all this only to die alone and without comfort? It is too much. Anna Stina’s entire body shakes. Boman struggles to find the right words as he speaks up once again.
“It was not for Mother Maja’s sake that I came here tonight. I come with a message from the pastor, and Anna Stina should know that neither one of us could have known in advance what fate held in store this evening. I believe it was providence that Mother Maja had a man of God by her side during her final moments.”
Boman stops and has to rub the bridge of his nose for a while before he can continue.
“We have received a letter that contains a testimony against you. You are hereby summoned before the Consistory in order to face the accusations of whoring and intent to lure the innocent into sin. The pastor would like to speak with you first.”