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February 14 - July 11, 2025
And all of a sudden he felt as if he had somehow been lifted up and were swimming in the light.
He crawled under the coverlet, twisting and turning the pillows; they smelled so strangely of fish.
He spoke so arrogantly and his round, red face looked so much like a child’s backside that Simon’s hands itched to give it a swat.
It was too bad their father hadn’t given them advice on how to forget as well—when the friendship was broken and the honor dead and the faithfulness a sin and a secret, disgraceful torment, and there was nothing left of the bond but the bleeding wound that would never heal.
The horses splashed through the slushy snow.
“I knew you did it for the sake of our father-in-law and because you’re a good man.”
His hatred felt like a shattered lance;
And whenever Erlend saw what he had done, he usually behaved like a skittish stallion that has torn its reins loose and become wild with fright at what is dragging along behind.
“But man proposes, God disposes.”
When she told me all this, Mother, she wept so hard that it would have melted a rock in the hills.”
“No misfortune has come of it,” said Erlend. “Rather, it seems to me the boy has paid a small price to learn that a man shouldn’t trust a woman.”
She feared it would land these hot-tempered boys in some kind of trouble. But Erlend said curtly that they were old enough now to become accustomed to carrying weapons.
Now he stumbles over something in the grass, falls headlong, and in the next instant the beast is upon him with its back arched and its head lowered between its front paws. Then she wakes up.
They would take with them bloody threads from the roots of her heart when they flew off, and they wouldn’t even know it. She would be left behind alone, and all the heartstrings, which had once bound her to this old home of hers, she had already sundered. That was how it would end, and she would be neither alive nor dead.
I learned a few things back then that a man can never learn at home in this country, whether he’s sitting in splendor in his high seat with a silver belt around his belly and swilling down ale or he’s walking behind a plow and breathing in the farts of the farm horse.
And yet, Kristin, I have difficulty accepting that this is the proper interpretation of God’s words: that you should go about storing everything away and never forgetting.
Soon they’ll be grown men, all our sons. And you’re still acting like a bitch with pups.”
Suddenly she lifted her head and let out a long breath. For once he had been forced to listen.
They were whirling away from her, both her husband and all her sons, with that strange, boyish playfulness which she seemed to have glimpsed in all the men she had ever met and in which a somber, fretful woman could never participate.
I am the one who loved you and who loves you still.
she had tampered with these memories the way a corrupt ruler tampers with the coin and mixes impure ore with the silver.
No, he had never betrayed her, nor had he ever made her feel secure. And she could see no end to it all. Here she stood now, about to beg him to come back, to fill her goblet each day with uncertainty and unrest, with expectations, with longings and fear and hope that would be shattered.
Simon was right. Simon . . . and her father. They had held on to their loyal love for her, even as she trampled on them for the sake of this man whom she no longer had the strength to endure.
The first thing she noticed was the rush of blood that flooded his face, so youthful and red. The quick tremor on his fine, soft lips, and his big, deep-set eyes beneath the shadow of his brows.
I’ve wished that my kinsman Bjørn would pay me a visit. Do you remember that he once said he didn’t think I’d be able to stand to feel the edge of a blade at my throat? I’d like to tell him now that I wasn’t particularly frightened when I had the rope around my neck.”
“Do you dare sleep in my arms then?” She caught a glimpse of his smile in the darkness, and she grew faint. “Aren’t you afraid that I might crush you to death, Kristin?” “If only you would.” She fell into his arms.
She opened her lips to his mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck. Never, never had it felt so blessed.
She was just as powerless against him as ever.
Under the bushes, in a damp, shady spot, grew a cluster of small, white, star-shaped flowers. Their petals had blue veins like a woman’s breast, and in the center of each blossom sat a tiny brownish-blue bud. Erlend picked every one of them.
Her father’s marvelous gentleness was not because he lacked a keen enough perception of the faults and wretchedness of others; it came from his constant searching of his own heart before God, crushing it in repentance over his own failings.
In a flash she saw her flock of boys: the way they had stood at the periphery of her life during the past years, crowding together like a herd of horses in a thunderstorm, alert and wary, far away from her as she struggled through the final death throes of her love.
She had once heard a saga about a murdered man who couldn’t fall to the ground because he had so many spears in his body. She couldn’t fall as she walked along because of all the eyes piercing through her.
“You cannot help me, whether you stay here or you throw yourself into the Laag.”
“I will not live long enough to be . . . so old . . . and so pious . . . that I can bear . . . to sit calmly in the same room with someone who has told lies about you.”
ALL FIRES BURN out sooner or later.
And yet even when she received his kisses with her lips pressed tight, when she turned her whole being away from him in order to fight for the future of her sons, she sensed that she threw herself into this effort with the same fiery passion this man had once ignited in her blood.
He told me that the true wilderness for a Christian man’s soul was when his sight and senses were blocked—then he would follow the footsteps of the Lord out of the wilderness, even if his body was still with his brothers or kinsmen. He read to me from the books of Saint Bernard about such things. And when a soul realizes that God has chosen him for such a difficult test of his manhood, then he shouldn’t be afraid that he won’t have the strength. God knows my soul better than the soul knows itself.”
Lamenting with all her heart, she would pray with humble tears for the Savior’s gentle Mother to serve as Bjørgulf’s mother in her stead and to offer him all that his earthly mother had left undone.
On the stairs Bjørgulf tried once more to pull away from Naakkve. He threw himself against the wall and shouted, “I curse, I curse the day I was born!”
Not a muscle moved in her son’s face.
Walking back, she placed her hand on his shoulder for support.
Kristin herself could not have found a more capable woman to succeed her at Jørundgaard, not if she had searched through all of Norway.
But Kristin stood her ground; her voice revealed nothing except amazement and maternal kindness.
Inside her there was an empty house, completely silent, dimly lit, and with a smell of desolation. The scene shifted: a tidal shore from which the sea had retreated far away; rounded, light-colored stones, heaps of dark, lifeless seaweed, all sorts of flotsam.
Again it came upon her, that peculiar feverlike inner vision. The river seemed to be showing her a picture of her own life: She too had restlessly rushed through the wilderness of her earthly days, rising up with an agitated roar at every rock she had to pass over. Faint and scattered and pale was the only way the eternal light had been mirrored in her life. But it dimly occurred to the mother that in her anguish and sorrow and love, each time the fruit of sin had ripened to sorrow, that was when her earthbound and willful soul managed to capture a trace of the heavenly light.
in spite of everything, in spite of her willfulness, her restless heart had managed to capture a pale glimpse of the love that she had seen mirrored in her father’s soul, clear and still, just as the bright sky now shimmered in the great mountain lake in the distance.
She dreamed that she was standing in the sunshine in a courtyard of some grand estate, and Brother Edvin was walking toward her from the doorway to the main house. His hands were full of bread, and when he reached her, she saw that she had been forced to do as she envisioned, to ask for alms when she came to the villages. But somehow she had arrived in the company of Brother Edvin, and the two of them were traveling together and begging. But at the same time she knew that her dream had a double meaning; the estate was not merely a noble manor, but it seemed to her to signify a holy place, and
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You were the one who once told me that those who have loved each other with the most ardent desire are the ones who will end up like two snakes, biting each other’s tails.
“I will rise up and go home to my Father.”
Kristin smiled sadly.
