The passage was as dark as the nets which hung in the fishermen’s empty houses, but there began to be great phosphorescent side-chambers at left and right. All the people who had ever died lay smoked and gutted like Norwegian brisling, Mediterranean sardines; imagine the cans of sardines laid out in double rows of five in each pan, four pans per rack, on the bed of the lidding press and you can imagine how the human corpses looked, with she-trolls busily laying them in iron coffins and slathering them with oil.
This way, said the skeleton. Here’s where you Pedersons will find yourselves most useful. Øistein, you can still make barrels, I hope?
It led them through the row of furnaces — crisscrossed logs in their dirt — then nine times nine racks of corpses getting smoked; the Pedersons had to admit that even this was better than sharing a house with twenty people forever. But for a moment Øistein impractically wished that he could have seen Kristina once more in some more pleasant place, even the most verminous street of Stavanger, and even with her back turned as she crept wearily away with a bucket of dirty clothes to wash; if he only could have known, he would have run after her, kissed the striped hem of her long grey skirt—
And they came into another cavern, nearly as large as the first, where to support any conceivable silver-weight in their winches’ grasp, slant beams ran down much of the oozy fronts of the tall, narrow warehouses, most of which still sported pointed roofs as in Old Stavanger; within their lightless rooms, dead women, including Kristina’s mother, toiled waist deep in a stream of silver treasure, and the kerchiefs were open like flowers on the women’s heads… and so at last, their hearts like wet grass on an autumn’s evening, Øistein and Kristina saw where all the herring of Rogaland had gone.
THE QUEEN’S GRAVE
But how is that future diminished or consumed, which as yet is not? or how that past increased, which is no longer, save. . in the mind. .? For it expects, it considers, it remembers. .
My mind bloomed white as yarrow on the queen’s green grave. On the queen’s green grave I lay all night, my face down in the cold wet grass, my purpose right-angled like a wool comb, because Ingrid, beautifully cruel, had promised to leave me unless I brought her a true swan-shirt. It was hardly the first thing she had asked of me, and I wondered how soon she would finish weaving the cloth of her discontent. So far I had wisely bowed my head to her demands. My obedience was resistance, because it delayed our separation. On this occasion her bright and narrow lips had smiled so freshly that I could not imagine refusing her — all the more since she so evidently hoped I would fail. When one is young, and sets his heart on another person, whatever unwillingness she raises may be interpreted optimistically, as mere admonition, rather than as the dreary verdict that it impels: convicted of unloveability; sentenced to loneliness! So I gave Ingrid’s evasions and commandments their most splendid possible construction, hoping that we might yet get along; and because we are all of us passing changeable, at least until our bones get exposed, what could prevent her from possibly discovering more use for me? Three years she allowed me, most of which I spent wandering uselessly among the bird-lakes of Lapland, whose dark shore-rocks are scratched with fleets of swan-necked picture-ships. I importuned goosegirls and witchwives, haunted rookeries by moonlight and was gulled out of all my silver by knowing cormorant-trappers. Guarding my breath within me, I even sought beneath the water the horse, the fish and the iron snake. My perseverance lacking sorcerous qualities, I surfaced with nothing but muck and ice. When I look back on that time I can see that its sorrows and difficulties prepared me for my interview with the queen — but these had begun the instant I met Ingrid; and, for that matter, what would have caused me to love her, had my elders not raised me to love trials for their own sake? To submit, not to Ingrid but to suffering, in order to pay my weird fates their fair price, that was what I did, while the cold water ran out of my aching ears, and I coughed up mud. With what contempt Ingrid would have beheld me then, she who dressed herself so perfectly in black, silver and white, just like the autumn sea! Once more I dove, grappling myself down by the reed-roots, caressing the ooze in those same breaststroke-arcs by which a bellycrawling mason lays down tile, but the most promising thing I could grasp was a pebble. When I crawled out, goose-flocks overflew me, as white and perfect as the breasts of Ingrid.
To be honest, I cannot tell you why I should ever have appealed to her. Almost any other man would have paid three years for the privilege of hunting her a swan-shirt; at least, so the cormorant-trappers told me, grinning. As for me, I loved her, to be sure; I adored the sweet hands of my Ingrid, and the way she watched me with that soft smile of hers whose meaning I thought I knew, not to mention her dark eyebrow-arches. But what does a woman do with a swan-shirt but throw it over her shoulders early one morning and fly away? By now you can tell that my mind circled round and round Ingrid, with more longing than understanding. My dreams and desires concerning her, whatever else they might once have been, had long expressed themselves as mere directional pressure, much as the pallid grasses point downriver from beneath some black current where the salmon no longer spawn.
A certain cormorant-trapper’s widowed daughter, pitying and desiring me, offered not only to weave me a swan-shirt but also to love me and care for me until death, in the fine turf house her dead husband had left her, on the top of a windy hill of reeds. She was a woman of such kind ways that when she came out her door in the morning, ducks, geese and even seagulls would alight in a circle around her, upstretching their necks and opening their beaks, as if for food; what they truly yearned for were caresses, which she gave them. In the side of the hill she had dug a secret cave, which could be reached only through a tunnel behind the kitchen stove; here she hid away cormorants from her angry troll of a father, and when she brought me into that place, simply trusting and loving me, I upraised my candle and saw that in that vast hall of dark dirt she had even made a black lake, glittering with fishes of copper and gold, so that her cormorants could feed and entertain themselves. She and I might well have found joy together. But since I had made up my mind to something else, there was no help for it.
In other words, this story does not exactly begin on the night when Ingrid first asked me for her heart’s desire, nearly closing her heavy eyes as she lay there naked, slyly, sleepily watching me, with one hand on her knee and the other between her gaping thighs. Naturally I wanted to make love right then, but Ingrid refused. Sweetly faithless she had smoothly become, so soon as she felt herself sure of owning me. Whenever I for my part begged for some assurance to keep, my entreaty was as a stone dropped down a dark well; I never even heard the splash. But Ingrid did smile, calmly and beautifully; that was what she gave me just then; I longed to lick her white teeth. Or if she had only slapped me a few times, sharply, so that I could taste each sting, that would have nourished me equally well. I informed my Ingrid that what I wished was for her to trust and depend on me. I desired her to be my linen-goddess — the one I lived for. She replied that she had tried such an experiment once, with someone who brought her such jealous misery that she became abject.