Chapter 5

A Community is Dedicated

Stan wasted no time in getting us all organised. Rooms were assigned and those who had complained about their loss of living room space were banished downstairs into the cellar where they got extra space but lost their bathroom facilities. When after a fortnight they decided that they preferred the latter to the former, they were reinstated upstairs in a much more docile and humble frame-of-mind. Whilst there was undoubtedly a loss in terms of private living-room space the children rejoiced in their private bathrooms until they realised that looking after them would be entered into their weekly cleaning duty list. Maria and Władysław were particularly pleased to get their own private rooms with showers.

In our initial exploration of the house with its labyrynth of corridors we had missed a fairly large room behind the new library-cum-office which we had thought was a cupboard and this became Stan's private room. With effectively less bedrooms than before and therefore less privacy than we had enjoyed in Raj, it became impractical for Stan to visit us in our rooms anymore as those who were mothers were forced to share the same room with older children. But once the intercom system had been reinstalled life pretty much returned to normal. After much discussion it was agreed that we would maintain the "open door" system of nocturnal visiting but that each wife would have one day each month which she knew was exclusively hers. Once our menstruation cycles had become realigned it was a relatively easy matter to plan visits to everyone's satisfaction.

But we all saw that there would be an accute bedroom problem as the family grew. Assuming this would be our final home for the duration of this life, unless the Tribulation intervened beforehand, and knowing from the various visions that Stan and Isabel had seen that there might be as many as twenty sister-wives in the family together with all their chidlren, we understood the need for some considerable planning. And about the only solution we could come up with was to build another storey on top of the house or convert some of the cellar rooms into flatlets. Extending the house itself did not seem too practical but was a third possibility.

Three years later, once our finances had become more secure and the businesses were thriving, we opted to extend the west and east wings, adding another forty-five rooms in all, which were designed along the flatlet model of Raj. This also enabled us to take some more guests in the herrgård and so relieve the burden on the Engströms who for this period took care of the majority of our guests.

Kadesh-Naphtali would witness enormous changes in the years to come with the construction of another house opposite the Engströms which became the main Conference Centre with the facilities at the Engströms being given over to schooling and administration. Five more houses would be built in the next five years on the west side with another two on the farm itself. A chapel would be built on the east side of the main drive.

For a spiritual colony to be successful it must also have a solid economic foundation. The farm, we knew, would never be a big profit-generator as the government would want its share of produce, and so served mostly to provide all our food needs plus a little extra cash. In the second year a gigantic industrial glasshouse was erected on the farm next to the orchard for the production of a variety of vegetables, fruits and even flowers, much of which was marketed in order to generate some extra income. A number of locals were occasionally hired when we were short of staff. To ensure that the local community knew nothing of our polygamous lifestyle, it was agreed early that all the monogamous and single members of the community would live in the farm area, leaving the polygamous families to live around the herrgård.

As soon as we were unpacked following our arrival, Stan summoned the whole colony together for the consecration ceremonies. It took two whole days to complete and began by our walking around the entire area of land we owned and marking rocks every 20 to 50 yards or so with consecrated oil. Once the circuit was complete, we invoked Yahweh's protection around the entire area, using the anointed rocks as spiritual markers.

After lunch we worked our way around the entire mansion house consecrating each room, both on the inside and the out. Every door lintel and window was marked with oil inside and out and then consecrated by prayer. Even the space in the rooms was consecrated by marking each of the walls and blessing the space inbetween according to the pattern shown us by the founder of our Order. All of this was both to cleanse the space and structures of negative vibrations and atmospheres that may have been left by the previous visitors and owners as well as to ensure that no demons had legal gounds to be anywhere on the property. In every blessing the cleansing power of the blood of Christ was invoked.

Andreea had been very disturbed on some of the nights before Stan's arrival and being prone to visions had seen an unpleasant manifestation. An ugly gargoyle-looking figure had appeared in her room which had quite shaken her and whilst she had dismissed the appartition in the Name of Christ and did not see it again, she still felt an uncomfortable presence. After the consecration there was no such feeling again.

I had never seen anything like this consecration ceremony before, and afterwards I felt such a sense of cleanness round about me. Similar blessings were done on the soil also, blessing it to be fertile and fruitful. We went around the orchard and the fields as well as blessing the chickens. The same would be done when the cows arrived, and all the new buildings. The river, sluice and pond were blessed and Yahweh's angels invoked to protect against accidents, for we were worried about the dangers of drowning here. Equipment such as tractors, ploughs, and the like were also anointed and blessed. Finally, when all was completed, Stan asked Yahweh to bless the whole property with a spiritual canopy to provide a shield against demons, prying ultrasonic waves, and anything invisible that might be hostile. We understood, of course, that in order to have this sort of protection would in large measure depend on our righteousness and in getting right with Yahweh as soon after as we might have sinned so as to restore whatever might have been destroyed in the invisible realm.

During the same evening Stan laid hands upon all our heads, including Björn's, and blessed us in the Name of Yahweh. Björn in his turn blessed his own wives. What a wonderful praise service we had that night, the bonds between us growing deeper by the day. Having the Engströms with us, moreover, added a new dimension to our loving which had been absent in Raj. For the first time we felt more like a Church and not just a biological family.

Sonja and Misha gave birth three weeks apart, which is fortunate as Björn would have his hands full. We childless wives of Stan were soon helping out at their home as much as we could to relieve Björn. Sonja's girl was named Ruth and Misha's boy Jakob. Björn was so proud to be a double Daddy! Both babies were born in the Engström house without complications with the help of a midwife from Borlänge who visited regularly to check up on both mothers and children. Her regular visits made us concerned about what image of us this unbelieving lady might have for we wished to be as private and unconnected as possible to the outside world as far as our home was concerned. The state authorities were more concerned about the welfare of the children than they were about knowing who the father(s) were, and one of the benefits of Swedish feminism for us was that the fathers did not have to be registered. The policy of our colony was that the fathers should not be registered provided we did not claim any welfare that would normally be available to single parent families, which of course we were not. We wanted as little welfare help as possible and to become independent.

In the matter of "alternative lifestyles", Sweden was one of the most tolerant in the world though polygamy was still technically illegal. The policy of our Order generally was to keep our polygamy concealed except in those countries where it was normal and accepted. Since the state did not pry unduly in Sweden it was much easier than it had been in conservatively Catholic Poland. Such a state policy, whilst certainly to our advantage, was not to our liking in its admission and acceptance of what the Bible considered to be "perversions".

Homosexual "marriage" was accepted in Sweden and we were sure other perversions would come also, including polyandry and multiple marriages. Stan had taught us that amongst the Inuits traditionally two couples would "marry" together and share spouses, and that such a system, though perverse, had evolved to meet the demands of harsh Arctic living conditions. I knew that in the States there were already what is known as "sunset clauses" in marriage contracts allowing a marriage to be terminated after a specified period of time unless the couple wanted to renew it. The liberal atheistic society seemed prepared to experiment with almost anything. Being in the middle of this was, to say the least, uncomfortable since we knew that permissive political forces would wish to recruit us in their bid to have many different alternative lifestyles legislated for. We were not, for example, at all happy when we received positive comments from the Swedish Wiccan community who somehow came to know about us for they practiced both polygyny and polyandry (called polyamory by them) - we wished to be completely separate from all of that, not to mention their occultism.

But to be innovators of polygamy in an essentially monogamy-only culture meant being lumped together with the occultists and other perverse religions by our Christian brethren. Often we felt like the proverbial pig-in-the-middle. For us there were only two acceptable marriage lifestyles - monogamy and polygyny, of which the latter was simply the natural extension of the former. The two were were, and are, to all intents and purpose, the same thing as far as biblical definitions were concerned. Stan had been a monogamist, bigamist, trigamist, quadramist, pentamist, hexamist, heptamist and now an octamist! For us monogamy was but the first note in a scale, and not something separate and different from polygamy. Indeed, monogamy was just a grade of polygamy - the first grade.

The rapid growth of Kadesh-Naphtali was owed, in part, I believe, to the sudden increase in fertility amongst us. After the Nilssons and Åkerstedts arrived in the second and third months following our own arrival, respectively, Sarah-Jane got pregnant. That was in December. Anna followed in February and Andreea in March, leaving only myself barren. I was depressed for a while and felt the Lord had rejected me. And being around the Engströms with their two babies and my three pregnant sister-wives just made me feel even worse.

The winter had not been as bad as I had expected it would be. There had been plenty of snow in January and February and the temperatures had, at their lowest, fallen to -21°C, but had only remained at that level on the thermometer a couple of days. For the most part it was quite mild - or so the Swedes assured us! By April when the thaw started, the pond level was getting dangerously high, requiring that the sluice be opened more and more, creating a problem in storing energy which had to be wasted. Stan was concerned what would happen if the turbines ever burned out because of the expense of replacing them. Stan wanted to know if we could export the electricity by selling it cheaply locally at surplus periods but was told it was not practical.

Now we were generating our own electricity but Lars Nilsson wanted alternative forms of energy as well. Work was under way to use solar cells and wind-generated power but we did not as yet have the finances to realise these goals. We could, of course, hook up to the grid of a local electricity company though this would dent our economy considerably. Building up a stock of spare parts was therefore of the highest priority, but that took money and therefore time.

The sense of despondency I felt at not being pregnant had not abated by the time Passover came around again. We had all noticed how circumstances had led to three pregnancies simultaneously and were keen to find out why the Lord had allowed my three sister-wives to get pregnant especially then, and especially as two of them, Anna and Sarah-Jane, had been trying for so long. We concluded, rightly or wrongly, that it was a reward for coming to Sweden and for being willing to sacrifice our former home in order to start a new ministry (I had forgotten that moving had probably saved our skins!). But why was I not included? I soon discovered that Isabel was feeling much the same way as I was for still her anticipated second child had not come. Seeing the other three getting pregnant had hurt her as it had led her to believe that she was unworthy, just as I was feeling now.

Stan had gone through the theology of all this before and we knew we should not have been feeling that way. The pregnancy of a sister-wife should be the object of praise and happiness - our being hurt showed only how self-centred we were and our inability to accept things the way God had ordained. But it was still tough and I remembered also that Stan had taught me that we had to do out part when it came to physical blessings. We often forgot how Stan felt about the matter for he was as keen for Isabel and I to get pregnant as he had been happy when Sarah-Jane, Anna and Andreea had conceived. And we had taken covenants to treat our sister-wives' children as our own in love and appreciation.

Since Stan was obviously fertile I wondered if perhaps there was a biological fault with myself and I was tempted to see a doctor about the matter. But Stan was less than enthusiastic.

"Our society had been trained to rely on science more than on Yahweh. We have plenty of biblical examples of women who were barren whom God subsequently blessed with children. They got pregnant in His own time and way. Hannah and Rachel are two prime examples. And their waiting was worth it, wasn't it?"

He was right, of course. Rachel had given birth to Joseph, who would become the tribal head of Israel, supplanting rebellious Reuben, and Hannah had given birth to a great prophet, Samuel. Both had pled with the Lord long and hard and both had been rewarded. Hannah's case had been rather special and I had, I must admit, been attracted to this woman. Could it be that the Lord wanted a special sacrifice at my hands?

Stan had rightly not been helpful when I had suggested this to him as I had nothing concrete in mind. He had gathered all his wives together one evening to discuss the problem and asked them if they would agree to him sleeping exclusively with me for two weeks to try and get me pregnant. I must admit I felt a bit guilty at this suggestion but everyone was enthusiastic, though I could see Isabel holding her tears back which didn't help matters for me one bit as I knew she would feel shunted to the side. But she already had a fine son, Stanisław, Jr., whom Stan was enormously proud of, and she knew that the second child she had been promised may well have been the one she had miscarried. She had also had a lot of time with Stan before. Afterwards she came up to me and apologised for being so unsupportative and asked me to forgive her for her selfishness. I knew that she was still struggling with the last vestiges of a lack of self-esteem that she had inherited from her childhood - her father had wanted a son, not a daughter, and she had been acutely conscious of the fact that she was not what would make him happy. She had tried to be what she wasn't and wounded herself psychologically.

How cruel and selfish parents can be sometimes - they don't realise the psychological harm they can do to their children. Acceptance of who and what a child is is the most important thing a parent can do after lavishing love on him. Isabel had imagined all sorts of things about Stan that were pure fantasy, born of a lack of trust both in herself and in others, and imagined that he loved her less than the others. It had been hard for her watching child after child born to her sister-wives and believing each time that when she remained childless it was because she was unworthy. The problem had improved with time but had never entirely gone away. She wanted to be rid of the guilt she felt because she knew it impaired her relationship both with Stan and her sister-wives. I had often wondered why she spent so much time alone. So the period when I was without child had actually been a blessing to her and we had spent much time together consoling one another. Not that I felt the same degree of a lack of self-worth that Isabel did - my childhood had been stable, unlike hers, her family being ripped apart by divorce when she was young, which she was ultimately to blame as the psychological cause of her not being able to cope with polygamy in the early days and for leaving Stan for three years.

Isabel and I got to know each other very well and I believe I was the first sister-wife whom she finally opened up to about her sex life. I had always imagined her as timid in this department but as it turned out she was no mouse when it came to love-making! Which only went to show that the quiet ones on the outside are very usually the opposite inside. Stan had, of course, taught me this but I had never quite believed it until I got to know Isabel better. And yet I should have known better for Stan himself was by natural disposition introvert. And he was no mouse in bed! Time, and the necessity of being a patriarchal head, had largely taken care of that introversion though he would sometimes, when under great pressure, disappear and leave us to ourselves. Though none of us liked that, it forced to us to confront issues directly without seeking him as a mediator always, and this had matured us.

One evening when I was together with Isabel and we were chatting, she suddenly stopped short in mid-speech and looked at me with great intensity and surprise. Her mouth was moving but no words were coming out.

"What ever is the matter, Isabel," I asked worried, "are you feeling OK?"

But she still seemed unable to speak. Tears began to well up in her eyes. Finally, the words came out:

"The Lord wants me to bless you to get pregnant," she stuttered, and then began to cry.

I was speechless for a while. She continued:

"He wants me to bless you with all my heart and pray over you now, and give you and Stan my blessing for the fortnight. Do you mind?"

"No, of course not," I said, with a slight lump in my throat. "I'd be really happy if you would!"

Isabel came round behind me and laid her trembling hands on my head and began to bless me to be fertile. She apologised for her earlier barely concealed hostility and asked the Lord to fill her heart with love towards me and the hoped-for child. I felt her struggling inside, her real heart-felt desire to be right with Yahweh and with me, to overcome her weakness. She was fighting to trust the Lord in a way that she had never done before.

Stan made love to me for a fortnight every night and I was, I freely admit, in paradise. It was like having my honeymoon all over again. And every evening before I went into his room, Isabel asked if she could bless me. I was so impressed - I admired her courage, and it really helped. If I could have brought her with me with Stan I would have done so, because I knew she was giving her whole heart to me and my becoming pregnant, and I felt she had every right to share in my success if God granted it to me. That's how close and open I felt towards her.

How I do not know, but Yahweh must have heard all fourteen of Isabel's blessings because, praise the Lord, I got pregnant during the Passover season! And the only thought I had after I was sure, was that Isabel should be blessed in the same way. I therefore asked Stan if he would also give Isabel a fortnight as he had done me, to which he agreed, touched by my deep concern and love for her.

And so it was that, after the agreement of the others, who had in effect surrendered two whole months of intimate affection for us, that we all blessed Isabel just before she went into Stan's room every evening. I was amazed at the solidarity and even more amazed that they were all so willing to sacrifice their sexual wants in order for their sister-wife to get pregnant. Who can doubt that the love of Yah'shua is present in great abundance in such circumstances? For a woman, giving her bed to a sister-wife is surely one of the greatest sacrifices she can make, and yet for us who were naturally at one with Christian polygamy this proved to be almost no obstacle at all. Sharing Stan physically eventually became no different to sharing his table because we no longer feared that we were missing anything that the others had. We were all more than happy to bless Isabel in this way. Even more interesting, we none of us actually saw it as a sacrifice - of giving up something precious that might hurt, because it didn't hurt at all. Our experience was just the opposite - the Holy Spirit filled us with pure joy.

I don't think any of us doubted that Isabel would get pregnant after what had happened to me. Seeing the mighty hand of Yahweh at work had given us all a tremendous faith-boost. Though she was on the very door of the menopause, we remembered Sarah and trusted that the Lord would give her a son.

In the same month of April, Isabel conceived and Stan had five pregnant wives! It then occurred to us that we were going to need that midwife a great deal over the coming months and that so many pregnancies in one house was bound to raise eyebrows in the neighbouring county kommun. How would we ever hide our polygamy with so many children suddenly being born into the world? Here there were four men (apart from Władysław and Karl), twelve women, and over twenty children with five more on the way. Their birth would be a matter of record. What should we do? We began to wonder if Stan was going to turn into a latter-day Peleg whose family had reputedly run into the hundreds! It required no great amount of mathematics to see that if Stan was going to have about twenty wives, as we believed, that Kadesh-Naphtali would be crawling with children in the end. What then? And how would the colony function with so many mothers effectively "out of action" for several months, for they would be weak and unable to carry out all the essential tasks that needed doing in the colony, especially in the winter. We knew that the very spiritual and physical fibre of the colony would be tested to the full.

Though long-range planning was one of Stan's fortes, he could come up with no satisfactory answer to this problem, and concluded that if the Swedish state was as indifferent to different lifestyles as he believed it was - provided no demands were placed on economic welfare by us - then perhaps we should just ignore the matter. Governments for the most part, he said, were only interested in gathering taxes and paying out as little as they had collected as possible.

Björn's view was that we should at least either get our own midwife or convert Ingrid from Borlänge. However, as we have discovered so often in the past, our resolutions concerning people were of little effect or use unless the Lord was in them. Władisław was training to be a doctor but there was no guarantee that he would wish to remain on the colony. He seemed divided as to whether to strike it out alone in the world or remain with the family and start his own. Besides, it would be some years yet before he qualified as a physician and if he got involved in the Swedish Health Service he might find himself posted almost anywhere in the country. He had even toyed with the idea of returning to Poland though Stan had pretty well dissuaded him to do this because of the dangers. The son of an enemy is almost as good a prize as the enemy himself in the warped minds of those filled with the spirit of murder.

It's a funny thing - when you need something especially badly, Yahweh has a tendency to bring people in your path to resolve problems. Sometimes you have to wait a while, other times it happens very suddenly. The move to Sweden had been planned by Stan for over two years and then, suddenly, there were seven pregnant women in the new colony!

The arrival of the Nilssons and Åkerstedts was essential to the suvival of the colony. Both were monogamist families who accepted the principle of polygamy but seemed in no hurry to rush anything. Hans Nilsson (35) and his wife Bente (33) had three children: Petter, aged seven, Marin, aged five, and Johannes aged two. His speciality was alternative forms of energy production and had been interested in various community projects before, hiring himself out to different groups, mostly non-Christian. He and his wife had been committed Seventh-day Adventists before they had met Björn who converted them to Messianic Israelism and Patriarchy. From Borås east of Göteborg (Gothenburg), they had moved to Jönköping to be near the Engströms.

The Åkerstedts were farmers from the Falköping region northwest of Jönköping. Bengt (50) and Michäela (42) were former Seventh-day Adventists like the Nilssons, and brought into the Covenant by Hans. Karl at 21 was their eldest who decided to follow in the footsteps of his father and who was now, as was plain to all, even more encouraged by the attention Maria Królewieca, Suszana's eldest, was giving him, and about which we were highly delighted. He had a sister, Karin (17), likewise raised a strict Adventist who was already eying Władisław Królewiec though Stan's son had not, at that time, returned her interest, being in any case away most of the time in Gävle. Stan seemed to approve of both possibilities but thought more time was needed for both his eldest children since Maria did not approve of polygamy which Karl was almost certain to want to pursue himself. Władisław had not made up his mind whether to go for one wife or more and felt no especial calling from God in the matter. He was not one to be rushed and would probably watch and see how Karin turned out. Karl was already interested in farming like his father and was enthusiastic about the Kadesh-Naphtali venture, so would probably remain. We were not sure how Karin would turn out though she seemed interested in the work of our Order. She was still young and might yet experience conflicting pulls.

It did concern us how our teenagers would grow up. Stan would not admit a family to the colony who had elder teenage children who were hostile to either the colony or to polygamy as they might, if not converted or at least subdued, leave the colony and make our lifestyle public. This was, to be sure, a very delicate matter. Selecting families to join us was therefore done with the utmost care always and never without a definite confirmation from the Holy Spirit to as many people in the colony as possible. Though we were keen to expand, we were not at all eager to bring in any possible seeds of destruction. Stan warned us that since the original Paradise in Eden had contained a serpent, the chances of not introducing at least one snake were small. There would have to be a complete separation before the final tribulation colonies were set up as no snake would be allowed into these. This might mean dividing families up, as Yah'shua had warned, though all of us prayed it would never happen to ours.

The Åkerstedt family had already experienced one small upheavel when Bengt had expressed interest in marrying a second woman, Sissel, though it seemed she had pulled out before the move to Kopparberg. Michäela was not opposed to the match in principle but was uncertain as to Sissel's true intents and motives. Both the Åkerstedts and Nilssons were in any case open to polygamy in their home.

My first month of pregnancy seemed no different from the way I felt before though I was of course past my depression. I did find that I was emotionally more sensitive and more sexually aware than before, though. Sarah-Jane, Anna, Andreea, Isabel and I all developed a special pre-maternal fellowship and were constantly comparing notes and asking advice from Suszana, Kryztina and Kasia. Sarah-Jane, Anna and I were the "greenhorns" and were together rather more often than with the others, enjoying the novelty of it all.

I don't know how Stan could bear so many women constantly talking about female things though I noticed that now Björn was here that he was often in his company. Sonja and Misha would often come over to us and Stan would wander over to Björn's such that the Engström home came to be known colloquially as "Patriarchs' Corner" and the Królewiec's as "The Nunnery", both of which were Anna's silly ideas, of course!

"Well, I just don't know what to do," said Stan one day looking very serious indeed, though the glint in his eye made me realise that he was teasing as usual.

"What don't you know what to do, honey?" I asked, expecting some humorous quip.

"Well, all my wives either have children or are about to have them. There aren't any barren ones anymore and I just don't know what to do."

Anna giggled. "Well, it's your own fault darling, for being so attractive!"

"Now you can have a rest!" chipped in Sarah-Jane.

"No way," protested Kasia, "what about me??"

"What about you," said Anna, "you've already got seven-in-one!"

Kasia scowled. Alexei was a power-house to be sure and so Kasia often got the butt of humorous remarks about him which wore thin after a while.

"Oh, it's worse than that," Anna went on grinning, "Stan's got two wives in Kasia as well! She's the only living example of internal polygamy. I don't think it's fair, really - Stan should see us twice as much as Kasia."

Kasia wasn't sure whether to laugh or be annoyed. If teased too much, she had the habit of stamping her foot on the ground which unfortunately just got Anna going even more.

"Pay no attention to them, my love," said Stan protectively, "they're only jealous. Haven't you noticed all those cans of red hair-dye that Anna brought from Poland with her?"

Kasia lightened up a bit and it was Anna's turn to scowl. There was a friendly rivalry between the two that was fairly evenly-matched. I kept out of it as it just wasn't my scene at all. But Stan just loved egging them on, seeing it all as youthful play. If Anna went too far, Kasia would just go up to Stan and give him a very deep and long kiss, looking at Anna out of the corner of her eye. And Anna always took the bait. Not to be outdone, Anna would come up to Stan and wait for her turn. Stan, always one to be scrupulously fair, would start kissing Anna in the same way whilst she looked Kasia in the eyes. Of course, the two would break down giggling in the end and hug each other. There was no animosity between them. And sometimes I envied their dynamic relationship which was always so charged.

With the move to Kadesh-Naphtali I noticed that the sister-wives began developing new bonds with each other. As I have said, Isabel and I were much together. Kryztina and Kasia were very much with Sonja Engström, and Suszana seemed to be fascinated by Andreea. Stan, Misha and Andreea were very much into theological matters. Sarah-Jane was less with me now and seemed to gravitate towards Anna - they were certainly similar when it came to cheekiness! Stan called our interrelationships "Brownian Motion" which had baffled me a while until he had explained that it was the movement of dust particles on a liquid surface caused by the rapid movement of molecules in the liquid. I was always learning odd tidbits from him. It was by this means that he gained our interest in so many different topics which we in turn passed on enthusiastically to the children. It was catching. Learning was shere pleasure - always.

September rolled along and it was near to Sarah-Jane's birth. She had been quite ill latterly and had developped all sorts of cravings. The latest was salad cream on chicken sausages. And she wasn't the only one. Andreea would break out into a sweat every time she saw chocolate or smelled hot cocoa. But little did we know of what was about to strike us from the realms above and make those cravings disappear into the trashcan of forgetfulness.