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Niila’s dad was called Isak and came from a big Laestadian family. Even as a little boy he’d been dragged along to prayer meetings in the smoke-filled hut where dark-suited smallholders and their wives in knotted headscarves sat bum to bum on the wooden benches. It was so cramped that their foreheads hit against the backs of those in front whenever they were possessed by the Holy Spirit and started rocking back and forth as they intoned prayers. Isak had sat there, hemmed in on every side, a delicate little boy among all those men and women being transformed before his very eyes. They started breathing more deeply, the air grew damp and fetid, their faces turned crimson, their glasses misted over, their noses started dripping as the two preachers sang louder and louder. Their words, those living words weaving the Truth thread by thread, images of evil, of perfidy, of sins that attempted to hide underground but were torn up by their hideous roots and shaken like worm-eaten turnips before the congregation. On the row in front was a little girl with plaits, fair golden hair gleaming in the darkness, squashed in by grown-up bodies riddled with dread. She was motionless, holding a doll pressed to her heart as the storm raged over her head. It was horrific to see her mother and father weeping. Watching her grown-up relatives being transformed, crushed. Sitting there hunched up, feeling the fall-out dripping all over her and thinking: it’s all my fault. It’s my fault. If only I’d been a bit better behaved. Isak had clenched his boyish hands tightly together, and inside them it felt as if a swarm of insects was creeping around. And he thought: if I open them we’ll all die. If I let them escape we’re all finished.

And then one day, one Sunday after a few years had passed, he crawled out onto the thin nocturnal ice. Everything crumbled away, his defences fell down. He was thirteen and could feel Satan beginning to grow deep down inside him, and filled with fear that was greater than the fear of being beaten, greater than the urge for self-preservation, he’d stood up in the middle of the prayer meeting and, holding onto people’s backs, he’d swayed back and forth before collapsing nose-first into the lap of Christ. Callused hands had been placed on his brow and his chest, it was a second baptism, that’s the way it was done. He had unbuttoned his heart and been drenched by the flood of his sins.

There was not a single dry eye in the congregation. They had witnessed a great event. The Almighty had issued a summons. The Lord had taken the boy with His very own hand, and then given him back.

Afterwards, when he learned to walk for the second time, as he stood there on trembling legs, they had propped him up. His corpulent mother had hugged him in the name and blood of Jesus, and her tears flowed down over his own face.

Obviously, he was destined to become a preacher.

Like most Laestadians Isak became a diligent worker. Felled trees and piled the trunks up on the frozen river during the winter, accompanied the logs down to the sawmills in the estuary when the ice melted in the spring, clearing jams on the way, and looked after the cows and potato fields on his parents’ smallholding during the summer. Worked hard and made few demands, steered well clear of strong drink, gambling and Communism. That sometimes caused him a few problems with his lumberjack colleagues, but he took their mockery as a challenge to be overcome, and didn’t say a word during the working week, merely read books of sermons.

But on Sundays he would cleanse himself with saunas and prayers, and put on his white shirt and dark suit. During the prayer meetings he could cut loose at last, sail forth to attack filth and the Devil, brandish the Good Lord’s two-edged sword, aim His law and gospel truth at all the world’s sinners, the liars, lechers, hypocrites, the foul-mouthed, boozers, wife-beaters and Communists who flourished in the accursed valley of the River Torne like lice in a blanket.

His face was young, energetic and smooth-shaven. Eyes deep-set. With consummate skill he grabbed the attention of his congregation, and soon plighted his troth with a fellow-believer, a shy and well-polished Finnish girl from the Pello district, smelling of soap.

But when the children started to come, he was forsaken by God. One day there was nothing but silence. Nobody answered his pleas.

He was left with nothing but confusion, tottering on the edge of the abyss. Filled with sorrow. And festering malice. He started to sin, just to discover what it felt like. Minor little wicked acts, aimed at his nearest and dearest. When it dawned on him that he quite enjoyed it, he kept going. Worried members of his church tried to engage him in serious conversations, but he put the Devil’s curse on them. They turned their backs on him, and did not return.

But despite being abandoned, despite feeling hollow, he still regarded himself as a believer. He maintained the rituals, and brought up his children in accordance with the Scriptures. But he replaced the Good Lord by himself. And that was the worst form of Laestadianism, the nastiest, the most ruthless. Laestadianism without God.

This was the frosty landscape in which Niila grew up. Like many children in a hostile environment, he learnt how to survive by not being noticed. That was one of the things I observed the very first time we met in the playground: his ability to move without making a sound. The chameleon-like way in which he seemed to take on the background colour, making him practically invisible. He was typical of the self-effacing inhabitants of Tornedalen. You hunch yourself up in order to keep warm. Your flesh hardens, you get stiff shoulder muscles that start to ache when you reach middle age. You take shorter steps when you walk, you breathe less deeply and your skin turns slightly grey through lack of oxygen. The meek of Tornedalen never run away when attacked, because there’s no point. They just huddle up and hope it will pass. In public assemblies they always sit at the back, something you can often observe at cultural events in Tornedalen: between the spotlights on stage and the audience in the stalls are ten or more rows of empty seats, while the back rows are crammed full.

Niila had lots of little wounds on his forearms that never healed. I eventually realised that he used to scratch himself. It was unconscious, his filthy fingernails just made their own way there and dug themselves in. As soon as a scab formed, he would pick at it, prise it up and break it loose then flick it away with a snapping noise. Sometimes they would land on me, sometimes he just ate them with a faraway look on his face. I’m not sure which I found most disgusting. When we were round at our place I tried to tell him off about it, but he just gaped at me with a look of uncomprehending surprise. And before long he was at it again.

Nevertheless, the oddest thing of all about Niila was that he never spoke. He was five years old after all. Sometimes he opened his mouth and seemed to be about to come out with something, you could hear the lump of phlegm inside his throat starting to move. There would be a sort of throat-clearing, a gob that seemed to be breaking loose. But then he would change his mind and look scared. He could understand what I said, that was obvious: there was nothing wrong with his head. But something had got stuck.

No doubt it was significant that his mother was from Finland. She had never been a talkative woman and came from a country that had been torn to shreds by civil war, the Winter War and the Continuation War while her well-fed neighbour to the west had been busy selling iron ore to the Germans and growing rich. She felt inferior. She wanted to give her children what she had never had. They would be real Swedes, and hence she wanted to teach them Swedish rather than her native Finnish. But as she knew practically no Swedish, she kept quiet.

When Niila came round to our place we often used to sit in the kitchen because he liked the radio. My mum used to have the radio mumbling away in the background all day, something unknown in his house. It didn’t much matter what was on, so we had a pot-pourri of pop music, Women’s Hour, Down Your Way, bell-ringing from Stockholm, language courses and church services. I never used to listen, it all went in one ear and out of the other. But Niila seemed to be thrilled to bits just by the sound, the fact that it was never really quiet.

One afternoon I made a decision. I would teach Niila to talk. I caught his eye, pointed to myself and said:

‘Matti.’

Then I pointed at him and waited. He also waited. I reached out and stuck my finger in between his lips. He opened his mouth, but still didn’t say anything. I started stroking his throat. It tickled, and he pushed my hand away.

‘Niila!’ I said, and tried to make him say it after me. ‘Niila, say Niila!’

He stared at me as if I were an idiot. I pointed at my crotch and said:

‘Willy!’

He grinned, thought I was being rude. I pointed at my backside.

‘Bum! Willy and bum!’

He nodded, then turned his attention back to the radio again. I pointed at his own backside and made a gesture to show something coming out of it. Then I looked at him questioningly. He cleared his throat. I went tense, waiting impatiently. But nothing happened. I was annoyed and wrestled him down to the floor.

‘It’s called babba! Say babba!’

He slowly extricated himself from my grip. Coughed and sort of bent his tongue around inside his mouth to loosen it up.

Then he said: ‘Soifa.’

I held my breath. That was the first time I’d ever heard his voice. It was deep for a boy, hoarse. Not very attractive.

‘What did you say?’

‘Donu al mi akvon.’

There it was again. I was flabbergasted. Niila spoke! He’d started talking, but I couldn’t understand what he said.

He rose to his feet with great dignity, walked over to the sink and drank a glass of water. Then he went home.

Something very remarkable had taken place. In his state of dumbness, in his isolated fear, Niila had started to create a language of his own. Without conversing, he had invented words, begun to string them together and form sentences. Or wasn’t it just him alone, perhaps? Could there be something deeper to it, embedded underneath the deepest peat layer at the back of his mind? An ancient language? An ancient memory, deep frozen but slowly starting to melt?

And before I knew where I was, our roles had been reversed. Instead of me teaching him how to talk, it was him teaching me. We would sit in the kitchen, Mum pottering around in the garden, the radio buzzing in the background.

‘Ĉi tio estas seĝo,’ he said, pointing at a chair.

‘Ĉi tio estas seĝo,’ I repeated after him.

‘Vi nomiĝas Matti,’ he said, pointing at me.

‘Vi nomiĝas Matti,’ I repeated, good as gold.

He shook his head.

‘Mi nomiĝas!’

I corrected myself.

‘Mi nomiĝas Matti. Vi nomiĝas Niila.’

He clicked his tongue enthusiastically. There were rules in this language of his, it was ordered. You couldn’t just babble on in any way you liked.

We began using it as our secret language, it grew into a space of our own where we could be all to ourselves. The kids from round about grew jealous and suspicious, but that only increased our pleasure. Mum and Dad got a bit worried and thought I was losing my powers of speech, but when they phoned the doctor he said that children often invented fantasy languages, and it would soon pass.

But as far as Niila was concerned, the blockage in his throat had been cleared once and for all. Our make-believe language overcame his fear of talking, and it wasn’t long before he started speaking Swedish and Finnish as well. He understood quite a lot already, of course, and had a big passive vocabulary. It just needed translating into sounds, and his mouth movements had to be practised. But it proved to be more difficult than one might have thought. He sounded odd for ages, his palate had trouble with all the Swedish vowels and the Finnish diphthongs, and he was constantly dribbling. Eventually it became possible to understand more or less what he was saying, although he still preferred to stick to our secret language. That was where he felt most at home. When we spoke it he would relax, and his body movements were less awkward, more natural.

One Sunday something unusual happened in Pajala. The church was full. It was a routine service, the clergyman taking it was Wilhelm Tawe as usual, and in normal circumstances there would have been plenty of room. But on this particular day it was full to overflowing.

The reason was that the inhabitants of Pajala were going to see their first real, live black man.

There was so much interest that even Mum and Dad were induced to turn up, despite the fact that they very rarely went to church at all apart from on Christmas Eve. In the pew in front of us were Niila and his parents and all his brothers and sisters. Just once he turned round and peered at me over the back of the pew, but was immediately prodded quite hard by Isak. The congregation included office workers and lumberjacks, and even a few Communists, all whispering amongst themselves. It was obvious what they were talking about. They were wondering if he’d turn out to be really black, pitch black, like the jazz musicians on record sleeves. Or would he just be a sort of coffee-brown?

There was a ringing of bells and the vestry door opened. Wilhelm Tawe emerged, looking a little bit on edge behind his black-framed spectacles. And there behind him. Also in vestments. A glittering African mantel, oh yes…