Independent People (55 page)

Such was the first wish, and such the manner in which it was approved and expedited. And little Nonni realized that though this moment might be nothing more than a dream, it would be prudent not to let the opportunity slip through his fingers just in case it wasn’t a dream, in much the same way as people acknowledge the existence of God on their death-beds in case there should actually prove to be a God after all. And what did it please him to decide upon at this moment when the fates had seemed to lay their entire will at his feet? In the blood of some people there is bred only one wish, and they are the children of happiness, for life is exactly big enough for one wish, not for two. In her suffering his mother had planted in his bosom this one wish: he wished for other countries.

“What countries?” asked the teacher.

“A country with woods in it,” he said. “A country something like the one where the Mississippi rolls along, as it says in the
poem. Where the hart and the panther live in the woods. That’s the sort of country I want.”

“Bring me pen, ink, and paper,” said the teacher.

He leaned over the table and wrote in a large flowing hand, and the pen spluttered. And the boy watched him writing with marvelling eyes and was still uncertain whether it wasn’t all a dream or whether he was really awake; whether it was all fun and poetry or whether there actually are moments that determine all the other moments in life and give them purpose.

“There you are,” said the teacher as he handed him the letter with a dignified flourish. “Send that letter down to Fjord at the earliest opportunity. It is your letter of hope. And your wish shall be fulfilled.”

The boy stared inanely at the address; it was to a lady with a foreign name, care of the Sheriff on arrival, no further explanation. Before he went back to bed he laid the mysterious letter of hope on the shelf above his grandmother, then pinched the lobe of his ear—surely it was all a dream; perhaps there would be no sign of a letter in the morning. And when he woke in the morning, the first thing he did was to grope about on the shelf, and what do you think?—there lay a letter addressed in huge handwriting to a foreign lady care of the Sheriff. And he watched out for people making for Fjord and asked them to deliver it for him.

And now that the second wish was fulfilled, it was time for the third. He told the boys that they could go back to bed now. And the boys went back to bed. As soon as they had lain down and closed their eyes again, he reached for the lamp, blew it out, and took Asta Sollilja.

I
T
was really terrible.

Never, never might anything so terrible happen again.

Asta Sollilja was standing by the fireplace early in the morning listening to this hymn behind her. Her hands were girl’s hands, with a coarse bluish skin, broad palms, fine bones, and strong joints. The knuckles were big but the fingers long; the thumb-sinew prominent, the wrist bony and mature-looking. She laid the black twigs of heather on the grate, for she had cleared out the ashes. The slender, sappy dwarf-birch twigs from the heath crackled sullenly when she put a light to them, and she covered them hastily with dry slabs of dung; a gust of wind blew down the chimney, the room filled with smoke. Yes, she was a big girl now, it was she who lit the fire these days, and no road back.

It was early in March, a grey light beginning to show on the windows in the mornings. But it was very cold. It was particularly cold after the night that had just passed. A shiver struck through her and again and again she had to clench her teeth. Her hair was all in disorder, one of her plaits had come undone, and it had not been touched with a comb yet. The tight rag of a frock, which she had forgotten to smooth down her sides, hung in baggy rumples above her hips, so that every time she bent down she showed the hams of her knees, coarsely fashioned in comparison with the slender, undeveloped, childish knees; almost gross, with the strong curve of the thighs above and of the fully grown calves below. She had forgotten to put on her slip, what could have happened to her slip?—and she hadn’t pulled her stockings up either, they were hanging in thick folds round her ankles—but it didn’t matter. She seemed to have grown suddenly so unnaturally broad, she who had always been so unnaturally slim—she felt rather like a fish that has been cut up the middle and split open; yes, with a knife, with a whetted knife. From top to toe she was one living ache, and every movement cost her a twinge somewhere; yes, not only as if she had simply been cut open, but as if she had been pulled to pieces and pounded as well. There was nothing she would have liked half so well as to creep deep under the bedclothes and lie utterly motionless for days on end, without anyone ever disturbing her, just sleeping, sleeping, even dying—all the sleep she had had was one short restless doze, just before dawn, from which she had started up in terror—no, never never might anything so dreadful happen again, no, nor anything like it.

Her only care was to avoid looking round at her grandmother; and yet she saw her as through the back of her head, where she sat rocking slightly to and fro with the knitting in her lap, her head dithering, her face a rune-carved enigma, her eyes blinking
weakly under the heavy blue lids; yet seeing everything and knowing everything, and symbolizing that reality with God and the Devil which rises when the night that came with dreams and forests has run its course. From the elysium of wishing-time she had waked to the grandmother’s age-old hymns, even before day had dawned over the blood; and long before the neutral, soothing fire of everyday life had started blazing, there was recited a hymn in which ebbing delight was multiplied by flooding torment, as when a thousand is multiplied by a million; it was as if the whole of life had happened in one night. She felt as if she had been butchered. Her body was like meat that has been chopped up and bled. Never never—

She tried to muffle the cough that seized her in the thickening smoke, so as not to waken anyone. If only none of them would ever wake up, if only they would all just go on sleeping, never noticing her, never speaking to her. If only day would never break and the water remain standing thus for ever and ever, half-cold, over a half-burning fire; for she was certain that she had changed, that everyone who saw her would be frightened and, not recognizing her, would drive her away. Her brothers were her brothers no more, or rather she was no longer their sister. She had long known that hers was a different nature from theirs; she had envied them ever since they were little and from the very first had understood their mysterious superiority; and now in the end it had come to this, that she had had to pay for what she had not been given. Nothing like this could ever happen to them. And the difficulties they would experience in understanding her fate separated her from them to all eternity; no, no one in the world would ever be able to understand what had happened to her; she stood alone, outside the whole world; it was eternally impossible ever to rectify it, in this isolation she would die. All communication with kindred beings
was destroyed, she belonged to another life. Everything was the same as before, except that she was otherwise; and nothing had happened to anyone except to her. Henceforward day would be foreign to her, every day, all days; and more than foreign: an insoluble problem, a labyrinth, chaos. If only she might be allowed to stand thus over this unheated water to the end of all time, without ever running the risk of waking the community from which she had been isolated, the bonds that she had severed, the unity she had broken; living, or rather not living, on the boundaries between existence and non-existence, beside the half-cold fire and its crackling birch twigs, in a grey indeterminate dawn, without seeking any explanation of the night’s experience, as if in vague memory of a nameless, repulsive bird with a greedy beak that they had once seen flapping its way over the marshes, and had never set eyes on since.

And then in the next moment she had begun to demand of herself an explanation of that which had taken place. What had taken place? And, above everything else, what had she done? No, she hadn’t done anything. She had rejoiced in his joy, a current had passed through her and she had leaned up against him quite involuntarily because a current had passed through her in the middle of the night when he put the light out; and could she help it if a current passed through her? Why did a current pass through anyone? Life itself, one couldn’t help life, one was living. Was it forbidden, or what? Yes, but why was one born, then? Why did a flicker of life have to keep going in her when she was lying under the bitch’s belly? One warm bitch that was certainly lousy, perhaps wormy—why hadn’t her father taken the bitch with him when he went off to search the mountains? No, she had done nothing, nothing—from the time that she had lain under the bitch’s belly until this very morning. All that had happened was that some unknown current had passed through her—

And yet. She had let him—why had she let him? Why hadn’t she thought of her father instead of letting him? Father—it was like a bitter pain cutting straight through her heart. No, no, he must never find out, he who had entrusted her with everything, inside the croft and out, had he not entrusted her first and foremost with herself? He who for one abrupt second had pressed her to his bosom in the loft here—she was the flower of his life. He was going away that he might build her a house, and he had gone down the stairs, and she had sworn that she would never have a
father other than him. He had closed the door after him, and it was the same as if he had closed her heart after him when he went away, and she had cried when he went away, and no one might come in, and no one knew that she had cried, and now he was coming back at Easter-time, and how was she ever to look him in the face? And now an ungovernable spasm of weeping struck through her breast. Try as she might she could not control herself; the tears flowed through her fingers to mingle with the water in the pan, and she pressed her elbows against her sides to stay the heaving of her breast, but weeping too is an independent element in the breast of man, another current, and weeping also is controlled from another world, and man is defenceless against his own tears and cannot get away and cannot get away and cannot get away; and it was the same last night, when he put his arms round her and they were each beside the other, and there was nothing that separated them, and she thought it was joy itself, and she had forgotten her father and everything, and still something had told her to try to get away, away—but she could not get away, she could not get away, she could not get away. One cannot get away, such is life. And stands weeping here over the lifeless fire that one has lit.

This droning procession of sacred philosophy shambled along behind her back like a file of penitent ghosts, while the arch-fiend attacked her on the open flank, the inimical over-self which condemns human nature on Christian grounds. Finally she could stand no more of it. She was driven to utter desperation, for after all there are limits to the amount of Christian ethics that human nature can bear. She fled in a panic away from her grandmother and halted by the teacher’s bed, as if his arms were certain sanctuary. In mortal fear she touched his cheek, then laid her cold palm under the open neck of his shirt. But instead of saving her, he gave a pitiful groan in his sleep and turned over so that he was facing the wall; and the coverlet fell away from him, and he was naked, and there lay her slip all crumpled up beside him. She snatched it away, then threw the coverlet over him, all in the same fit of panic; she had never seen a naked man, and luckily
she didn’t see one now, because the light was still so grey on the window, and what had she done? Who was this man?

It was almost full daylight when she returned from the ewe-house with her brothers. It had done her good to get out into the fresh winter wind; her exertions with the sheep and the hay had brought momentary relief, but she had not dared to look at her brothers and had kept her face averted in case they did not recognize her. He was still lying in bed, still facing the wall; she listened, but could not hear him breathing. She was filled with immediate foreboding, for she thought that perhaps he might be dead. “Wouldn’t you like something to drink,” she whispered. “The coffee is hot.” But he wasn’t dead after all. He woke up and opened his eyes, and even though he replied only with bitter groans she was overjoyed that he should have waked; she hoped he would soon feel better. She brought him his coffee and helped him to sit up. His face was grey and sick, unshaven, long stubble, his hair in disorder, he did not look at her. She sat on his bed, uninvited, and passed her stump of a comb through his hair—“Here’s your coffee,” she whispered, as if in confidence. Then she went on combing his hair; yes, combing his hair, it was quite incomprehensible and yet she did it naturally and without thinking. She even moved closer and held him while she adjusted the pillows to support his back; all as a matter of course, shyness completely gone. She asked him whether he felt any pain, and where he felt it—was there anything special he would like? What did it matter what happened to her as long as nothing happened to him?

I’m as good as dead,” he whispered from the middle of his coffee. Then later: “Let me be. I don’t deserve it.”

He did not thank her for combing his hair, he did not thank her for taking the empty cup; he lay down again, sighing bitterly, and she tucked him in with great care, her throat dry, her heart pounding as if it would never stop; and still he did not look at her, much less give her a pleasant word, whisper. But when he had lain thus for some time, while she sat over him, gazing at him fondly and faithfully, she saw his lips moving and heard him whisper: “God Almighty help me. God Almighty forgive me.”