He held out her neck-ring, and unsmilingly she slipped it over her head, saying: If you teach me to love you again, I’ll show you why dark water catches light.
He drank water from the moss beneath her arms. Her voice kept the high sound and the low sound of a stream.
She said: Your memory stone is choking me.
What shall I do with it, Birgitte?
Birgitte’s not my name.
You told me to come here.
Go home and roll your stone away.
When Olav opened his eyes, the sun hurt them. The ground chilled his back. He was lying in his wife’s opened grave, with dribs of rotten sailcloth between his fingers and the memory stone on his chest, facing downwards. He managed to push it off, then clambered back into the sunlight. As soon as he stood upright he felt as if he had recovered from a drawn-out illness.
Although he felt curious as to whether the silver neck-ring remained in her coffin, burning her bones with precious frost, he remembered the words of Christ: Let the dead bury the dead.
So he called workmen to haul the stone away. The gravediggers filled in the hole and laid new turf over it.
Then he remarried — a sweet young girl named Jorunn, who had long been on his mind. She promised to outlive him, which she did. He left instructions to be cremated.
THE NARROW PASSAGE
. . if foul witch dwell
by the way you mean to fare,
to pass by is better than to be her guest,
even if night be near.
In 1868 some Rogalanders remained in hopes that the herring would swim home to them, and a few even believed it, for it is always an insult when good things depart, and one readymade defense of the insulted is faith. That great wooden hand still pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, as if to remind us where those good things go; while the herringmen reached in the opposite direction, praying even yet for silver treasure in their nets. Out where the coast unrolled page after page of rock-stories, it seemed as if some secret fish-hoard might yet give itself, pallidly pure, like autumn light breaking weakly through the clouds; and since the herring occasionally pretended to return, the believers went on believing, awaiting their own continuance, watching the stillness of black water in the rain. Fortunately, universal afflictions manifest themselves in our neighbors before we need to confess the symptoms in our own faces. In other words, Karmsundet grew impoverished more rapidly than Stavanger, whose shipwrights and merchantmen made do thanks to lobster if not lumber; but even in Stavanger the unluckiest fishermen presently began to pack up for America. They were followed by carpenters whose iron-jacketed mallets had rusted, servant-girls expelled from their fine situations beneath the master’s stairs, stevedores whose great shoulders went unhired and whose despondent women had given up expecting to stand in mountains of herring, gutting and salting by the hour; ropemakers whose only use for their product would have been to hang themselves, bankrupt farmers and other apostates from the silvery faith.
The shipping companies’ agents promised easy terms and golden lives to any who would buy their tickets. After all, isn’t gold superior to silver? To be sure, certain crows kept croaking about the Amelia, which departed Porsgrunn Harbor with two hundred and eighty souls, seventy-nine of whom died of sickness. But some of her survivors came out rather well. One family even bought a piano, in a place called Minnesota. Although not all emigrants could expect that, they stood a fine chance of doing worse at home. Even the Rosenkilde family, it was said, was suffering: they now ate red meat but thrice a week.
Many Stavanger emigrants signed up with Mr. Køhler, his family having dwelled thereabouts since the Late Bronze Age, which rendered him nearly trustworthy and his passengers nothing if not civically patriotic. But not all were satisfied in the end. The ones who got buried at sea declined to complain, but their widowers and orphans wrote home that America had cost them twelve weeks belowdecks in a stinking prison of verminous, vomitous bunks, scuttles locked tight and not even enough water to drink — never mind the thieves in Liverpool and the road agents in New York.
So when Øistein Pederson and his wife Kristina prepared to make the adventure, they wondered whether Mr. Køhler’s competitors might be any better. Kristina had already been dismissed from the cannery, for slackness, so the foreman said, but to her husband she tearfully swore before God that she had never for a moment slowed down; even between fish-barrels she kept on, cleaning the floor or sharpening the gutting-knives, nor had there been complaints about her. Øistein believed his spouse, who was honest in all things; moreover, the factory immediately took in a horde of hungry young Swedish girls who worked for less. A week later they hired her at Magnussen’s, and it seemed as if they could live as before, weary over their bowls of soup on the narrow wooden table, so early it was still dark, a sheen of her gold hair reflected like aurora borealis on the dark frosted window. Then Magnussen’s closed.
Øistein was a cooper. For three months they got along on his earnings, but the canneries ordered ever fewer barrels, so he and Kristina began to quarrel. On a certain cold night, Øistein slept badly, awoke in a fever, and because the room was so close and squalid, he fancied himself already dead, trapped in the cold black earth, open-eyed, blind, unable to catch his breath. What could he do but suffer forever? Of course he had simply lost himself beneath the bedclothes. With a gasp he threw them off, disturbing Kristina, and gave thanks when he saw her shape in the pallid nightdress. Although he kept this experience to himself, it changed him. In brief, he conceived a horror of rotting away in Stavanger.
Come to think of it, horror of constriction might have been his very nature’s foundation-stone. When he was a boy of five or six, his mother, who once saw it, told him how the great stele of Saint Mary’s needle leans ever closer to Haakon’s church; some believe that when they touch, Doomsday will arrive. Of all the children, Øistein was the only one affected by this tale. He could almost imagine himself caught in that inevitable evil hour — pinched, chilled and crushed. Seeing how readily he grew disturbed over nothing, his father realized that the child had too much time on his hands, and set him to the most wearisome tasks of coopering, which he soon mastered, after which nobody could find any fancies of which to disapprove in that quietly straightforward young man. Kristina’s father, and perhaps even Kristina, would have been surprised to know what sort of person had joined their family. Naturally, they themselves might have presented a few astonishments to Øistein, had there ever come time to get to know each other in that way.
After his nightmare, he asked himself: If the herring never come back, what’s the best we can expect? — The answer untricked his mind.
To say that Kristina and Øistein loved each other conveys less than I would wish, for doesn’t marriage often commence with some kind of love? After three years their passion had not waned to nothing; but it had lessened, for a fact. On the other hand, they had learned how to be loyal helpmates each to the other. Øistein thought matters through, from his wife’s point of view and his own. If there was no money then there would be more quarrels, in which case the chance of their remaining true friends appeared as unlikely as a happy ending to one of those tales which begin with a pretty girl luring a man into the churchyard. Anyhow, even if the old plenitude returned, why should Kristina spend herself in gutting herring by candlelight? Sometimes when they lay down together he could barely endure the smell.