Independent People (29 page)

Silence.

“You ought to hand that money over to me, girlie. It’s Judas money.”

No answer.

“Who knows, perhaps I have a rig-out for you, wrapped up in my Sunday coat down in the chest. But you’ll have to get a move on and grow up for the spring coming.”

“Moo now, moo-cow.” muttered the old grandmother to the spindle as she kissed the pipe.

“I won’t have this nonsense in front of the youngsters, Hallbera,” said Bjartur sharply.

“Pluck a hair from my tail and lay it on the ground.”

Asta Sollilja’s tears continued to fall on the dishes.

“I’ve been thinking.” said Bjartur, “that since you’re as old as you are, it’s about time I gave you a lamb to call your own. There’s one yellow-brown ewe with a tufted nose that isn’t unlike my little girl.”

For some moments he stood looking half in embarrassment at that slender body which had its own longing in a valley so thick with snow, and which wept and would not be comforted; then he went over to her and stroked her for a few moments as if she were an animal—this little flower.

“When the spring comes,” he said, “I'll let you go down to town with me. That’s much better than going over to Myri; you can see the sea and the world in one and the same journey.” And when he touched her like that, she was sorrowful no longer, and forgot her sorrow, it was so seldom that he touched her. She nestled up against him and felt that he was the greatest power in the world. There was one happy place on his neck between his shirt and the roots of his beard; when her mouth was quivering hot with tears, she would yearn for this place, and find it. Thus would life’s animosity disappear, perhaps all at once; only a moment in the dusk and it was gone.

Presently the lamp was lit.

The little world of humans that eked out its existence there in the oblivion of the frozen wastes was once more its normal self. Bjartur whittled away at a crosspiece for a hay-box, testing it repeatedly for size, with moss and chips of wood in his beard and half a line of poetry on his lips at long intervals. The older boys were teasing wool. They were examples of two diverse temperaments; the elder frizzy-haired and long of limb, a tortuous, inexplicable soul; the younger thickset and, as is usual with self-willed people, enthusiastic and quick-tempered. The elder used to make faces behind his father’s back. In the middle of the day he would sneak into the house and scratch the table with a nail, looking foolishly and obstinately at his mother between whiles
and knocking his knees together as he sat. The middle brother would hold his eyes open with match-sticks of his own accord and would keep on working till he fell over unconscious. They teased and teased and kept on digging one another in the ribs; it would probably end in blows. And Asta Sollilja added another round to her shift, pooh, she was only half a human being, there was this and that wanting on her, and the slightest thing set her off howling, no one would dream of howling the way she did. At last she had finished howling. Mother, on the other hand, was no better today, everything the same as yesterday and the day before. Perhaps the Bailiff could mix the medicine that would cure her?

And the wheel went on spinning through time’s expanse.

Little Nonni was no longer thinking of evening, and though it had come, he did not regard it. Family and cooking utensils alike glided gradually out of the range of his senses; the dimensions of the room expanded into improbability itself, where nothing was any longer possible; how could anything be sillier than an expanding room? Even the sound of Grandmother’s wheel had lost the qualities of proximity; it was like some far, far wind whistling among unknown crags; her cheek fringed by the hood dissolving into irrelevant fog. Was our Sola sent over to Utirauthsmyri to learn to know God? Or did she get a cow? No, it was only the dog by the hatchway, yawning and scratching itself and striking the wall before it curled up. His mother was only a mute recollection of some indistinct world-song, some goal or other that one had been longing for all day long but had now forgotten. Oh that we were there, oh that we were there! The hour that held the goal of all desires was approaching, though none in particular had been fulfilled.

In such a fashion would evening come, before one had realized that the long day was over. It came in disguise, in images that dissolved and faded away. And the boy faded out of time along with the other images that were fading away.

His grandmother unlaced his shoes.

W
ITH
this maid-song from the Jomsviking Rhymes, Asta Sollilja began her education. When she had spelled her way through one stanza, Bjartur leaned back in his chair with half-closed eyes and chanted. Every verse that she read she learned by heart, the chant as well, humming them away to herself whenever she was alone. All the love-songs in this group of ballads were addressed to the same girl; she was called Rosa. Asta Sollilja never inquired who the girl commended so highly by these songs might be, but she saw her together with her father, and loved her with him in the primitive, rugged language of the Rhymes, reminiscent of nothing so much as the pious but despairing cuts in the carving of her grandmother’s spindle-holder. Her notions about how poetry is composed and circulated were vague: she could not distinguish between the voice of her father chanting and the love that lived in the heart of a poet who died in a distant century, but looked at her reflection in the water-bucket in a childish desire to make herself resemble the maiden shining, who in the earth was laid low.

But once they left the maid-songs for the ballads themselves the going became much heavier. Here Bjartur’s explanations did little to dispel the obscurity and knit the few intelligible passages together; the inexperienced reader wandered lost and despairing in an unlit fog of unpronounceable words and difficult kennings that seemed to lack any sort of connection—the Jomsviking heroes, their voyages and battles, were far beyond her meagre imagination. And when the story turned to the lives of the Jomsvikings, her father read it to himself only and laughed, my God, what wenching, then closed the book and said it did young people harm to
hear about such things, it’s smut. Finally the wenching of the Jomsvikings developed to such a pitch that they had to give the book up altogether. Her father produced the Bernotus Rhymes, they are much nicer for youngsters.

“Why can’t I hear anything about wenching?” asked the girl.

“Ehr?”

“I want so much to hear about wenching.”

“Hussy,” he said, and slapped her face; did not talk to her for the rest of the day. After that she never dared refer to such things openly. And when she had reached the passage in the Bernotus Rhymes where the disguised hero visits the bedroom of the Princess Fastina, who has been honoured with the name “Rosary-thwart,” she blushed. Bernotus said:

And there they sat all night, the Princess and the knight, till the sun rose. Asta Sollilja said nothing, not a word, and was careful not to look up. But in the evenings when she went to bed she would draw the blanket over her head, and the little living-room in Summerhouses no longer existed; rather was Fastina, fair-fingered Rosary-thwart, sitting in her bedroom thinking of the knight who conquered all and waiting for his return.

Long, long was the wait she had at home, after Bernotus had had to flee the wrath of the King and had wandered to Borney, where the worst villains in all the world were sent to destroy him. And she sat at home in her bedchamber, alone, while he struggled alone on a distant strand against innumerable foes, one against all.

It was her father chanting.

She peeped out from under the blanket, and there he was, still sitting on the edge of his bed, when all the others had gone to sleep, mending some implement or other. No one stirred any longer, the living-room fast asleep; he alone was awake, alone was chanting, sitting there in his shirt, thickset and high-shouldered, with strong arms and tangled hair. His eyebrows were shaggy, steep and beetling like the crags in the mountain, but on his thick throat there was a soft place under the roots of his beard. She watched him awhile without his knowing: the strongest man in the world and the greatest poet, knew the answer to everything, understood all ballads, was afraid of nothing and nobody, fought all of them on a distant strand, independent and free, one against all.

“Father,” she whispered from under the blanket, for she was convinced that Bernotus Borneyarkappi was he and no other and that she simply must tell him. But he did not hear.

“Father,” she whispered again, and did not know her own voice. But when it came to the point, she dared not say it; when he looked at her, a tremor passed through her, all of her, and she retreated beneath the blanket with loudly thumping heart. Maybe he would have slapped her face as he did in the Jomsviking Rhymes. She was lucky not to have told him.

He went downstairs to see to the lambs before retiring. She counted his footsteps on the ladder, he hummed to the lambs, she followed everything attentively, he came humming up the stairs again, her heart was still thumping.

When she peeped out again he had put out the lamp. Night.

I
T
was in the snow-lit brightness of one tranquil day early in March that there befell great events, never afterwards to be forgotten. Those who have experienced such a thing will know what it means. There was movement in the west, on the ridge, extensive, mysterious. The boys, who by now had also made the acquaintance of the Rhymes, maintained that it was a troop of berserks on their way to join battle. Here was no small relief in the monotony of mid-winter, when even a man with a stick is a phenomenon. Slowly the troop wound its way down into the valley. Both little Nonni and Asta Sollilja had climbed to the top of the snowdrift at the door. Even Grandma scrabbled her way up the eighteen snow-steps to the top and shaded her eyes with her hand. It was a cow.

“Yes, it’s a cow all right,” cried the boys.

Last to join the group was Bjartur himself, grey with hay-mould and foul of temper, there was no room for cattle here, he wasn’t going to have the hay taken from his sheep like this and thrown to cattle, nor had he any desire to take the stall away from his horse, to which he owed more than to any animal alive except the bitch, and hand it over to a strange cow—whereupon he disappeared and did not show himself again before a formal demand was made for his presence.

And on crawled the expedition home across the marshes, the cow followed by its fodder on a horse-drawn sledge. It was a sea-cow.

“Yes, it’s a sea-cow all right,” cried the boys.

She was not very big. Over her back and flanks was bound a cloth from which there stuck a dapple-grey head, wondering and suspicious, and under her udder was tied a woollen rag to prevent her teats from trailing in the snow; housekeeper Gudny of Rauthsmyri had crossed the ridge herself on a winter’s day, unaccustomed to travelling and ill prepared. The breath hung in steaming clouds about the cow’s nostrils in the still, frosty air; there was rime on her whiskers. The smoke from the chimney and the smell of home roused her curiosity still further; she sniffed and snorted and tried again and again to fetch a moo, as if in greeting, but the halter muzzled her too tightly.

The old woman hobbled forward on her stick to meet her.
“Thrice-blessed creature.” she mumbled, “welcome, and a blessing on her.”

And the cow sniffed at the old woman and, as if she recognized such a woman immediately, tried repeatedly to moo in greeting to her.

“Thrice-blessed creature,” mumbled the old woman again. It was the only remark that occurred to her, she who never addressed anyone else in so kindly a manner. She stroked the cow’s rimy cheek, and the cow rumbled deep down in her throat. They understood each other immediately. The strangeness of this halting-place continued nevertheless to fascinate the new arrival; her movements were still a little panicky, her hoofs restless; she was trembling slightly, breathing uneasily, snorting, complaining.

Bjartur asked the visitors what they wanted. Wanted? They had been told to bring him a cow. From whom? From the Bailiff, of course.

“May he be of all men the most cursed for his gifts!” declaimed Bjartur in saga style and was already threatening to whet his knife.

“Please yourself,” replied the others.

“For thirty years the Bailiff has been trying to cut the feet from under me, and if he thinks one cow will do the trick now, you can tell him he’s mistaken,” said Bjartur; and the outcome of it all was that the cow was housed in old Blesi’s stall and dry turf brought to lay under her, while the horse was stabled next door to her in what had formerly been a pen for the weakliest of the lambs. Bjartur carefully plugged up all the crevices through which there was any danger of light and air penetrating; he had handled cows before today and knew from experience, the nation’s thousand years’ experience, that beasts of such a kind must have no communion with those prime elements if they are to give milk.