Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent

I am determined to close myself to the world, to tighten my heart and hold on to what has not yet been stolen from me. I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt.

Then I understood that it was not me they stared at. I understood that these people did not see me. I was two dead men. I was a burning farm. I was a knife. I was blood.

It was not so hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margrét thought. As it says in the sagas, Opt er flagð í fögru skinni. A witch often has fair skin.

That dress was my last possession. There is nothing in the world I now own; even the heat my body gives out is taken away by the summer breeze.

Tóti fell silent. He had rehearsed this speech as he rode to the farm, and he was pleased that he’d managed to remember to say ‘spiritual comfort’. It sounded paternalistic, and self-assured, as though he was in a lofty state of spiritual certainty: a state he felt he should be in, but had a vague, discomfiting sense that he was not.

so often feel that I am barely here, that to feel weight is to be reminded of my own existence.

I thought they might believe me. When they beat the drum in that tiny room and Blöndal announced ‘Guilty’, the only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse. They want to disappear you.

But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.

Like being with Natan in those first months, when my heartbeat shuddered through me and I could have died, I was so happy to be desired.

‘To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.’ Tóti persisted. ‘But, Agnes, actions speak louder than words.’

People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself. No matter how much you try to live a godly life, if you make a mistake in this valley, it’s never forgotten. No matter if you tried to do what was best. No matter if your innermost self whispers, “I am not as you say!” – how other people think of you determines who you are.’

‘Shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Yes, I know. I know,’ Agnes said. She bundled her knitting things together and began to walk back down to the farm. ‘Not in my case, Reverend Thorvardur,’ she called to him. ‘I’ve told the truth and you can see for yourself how it has served me.’

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

Ingibjörg laughed. ‘Oh, Margrét! When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?’ ‘Many a time, I should think!’ Margrét snapped.

His appearance excited in me strong suspicions of that order – he is freckle-faced and – I beg your pardon, Reverend – red-headed, a sign of a treacherous nature.

Has Steina ever had to decide whether to let a farmer up under her skirts and face the wrath of his wife, who will force her to do the shit-work, or to deny him and find herself homeless in the snow and fog with all doors barred against her?

She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins.

It seemed intimate somehow; the rhythm of the plunger and the sound of quickened breathing. He felt himself blushing.

THE REVEREND IS SURELY WONDERING at what we were to one another. I watch him and know that he is thinking of Natan and I, letting the thought roll through his mind, savouring it, like a child sucking the marrow out of a bone. He might as well be sucking a stone.

The weight of his fingers on mine, like a bird landing on a branch. It was the drop of the match. I did not see that we were surrounded by tinder until I felt it burst into flames.

Do these dumb animals know their fate? Rounded up and separated, they only have to wait one icy night in fear. I have been in the killing pen for months.

Tóti felt his limbs grow sore from so long in the sharp air, he cast his mind back, again and again, to the woman he met by the Gönguskörd pass, and the memory warmed him to the bone.

‘The truth is that Natan and I became friends because we were fond of speaking with one another. He came to Geitaskard every few weeks, and we would talk.’ She glared at Lauga. ‘He offered me friendship, and I was pleased to have it,

No one could understand what it was like to know Natan. In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We’d place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces. We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down. We saw one another through the fog, the suffocating repetition of life.

It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.

Then there was the first touch of skin on skin, and that was the gunshot, the freefall. The bands of my stockings were loose about my knees as the softness of his hair caressed my neck. I craved his weight, then. I craved the breath of him: the quickening inhalation and the warm pressure of his mouth. His smell, the slippery buck of his body, he was nothing like the others. I arched my neck until my face was wet with the drifting damp. I could feel him, the heat of him, the very quick of him. He groaned and the sound lingered in the air like a cloud of ash over a volcano. I wanted to weep afterwards. It was too real. I felt too much to see it for what it was.

For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.

They both got into moods and the feel of a room would fall from high spirits to a glowering in an instant. It was contagious, too. With them you’d feel every small injustice done against you like a thorn in your side.

This appeased him a little, but I was frightened at the way his mood changed so quickly. I learnt later that he was as changeable as the ocean, and God help you if you saw his expression shift and darken.

his family are so poor you might call them barrel-lickers.

There is time enough for everything; too much time, and so the family of Kornsá have gone to church to kill the miserable hours that creak about on a Sunday morning.

He felt her long dark hair brush against his ear and a shiver of longing passed through him.

Have you ever loved a woman? A person you love as much as you hate the hold they have on you?