Stave of Life
There were certain episodes in Jonas Wergeland’s life that he never quite got to the bottom of, that seemed to him to be shrouded in mist; there were even times when he wondered whether they had actually happened. As with the time when he was tramping up a hillside — not far from Ljomarberget, he discovered later — and she, Arnhild U., had stepped out of the haze right in front of him, accompanied by a grey elkhound. His first thought, despite her modern, forest-green clothing and, above all, the rifle she carried, was that she belonged to another age.
‘Idiot, you’ll scare away the elk,’ she had said, giving him a strangely penetrating look that did not, however, prevent a shiver of anticipation from running up his spine. There was something peasant-like about her, a brooding quality emphasized by the dark hair plaited into a wreath on top of her head. And yet her face was powerful, sensual, almost hungry-looking; her nostrils in particular made him feel as if she were sniffing him out, as if the smell of him would tell her more than she could see with her eyes.
‘Ever shot an elk?’ she asked, after taking a good long look at him. Jonas told her that the closest he had ever come to an elk had been the picture on a five øre piece, that such a thing as an elk-hunt was as remote from his experience as fishing for winter herring. ‘Well, you’d better stick with me then,’ she said, as if reciting from a fairytale, and proceeded to walk on. Jonas followed — not to find out what the hunt was like but to find out what she was like.
If he was not mistaken, and if he had not dreamt it, they headed up the hill towards Læshøe: towards what she called the ‘vigga’ — the belt between the forest and the bare mountain-top — through damp country glistening with the shades of autumn, colours to which the mist lent a subdued matte tone, reminiscent of tawny jade. As far as he could recall, the terrain had been hilly, with a few pine trees and a fair scattering of mountain birch, he had not really taken much notice; he had been too busy watching her, Arnhild U., striding on ahead of him with a dog on a leash and a rifle complete with telescopic sight over her shoulder. Each time they halted, he saw her nostrils twitching as if she were trying to compete with the dog to see who would catch wind of the elk first. She kept scanning from side to side, listening too; occasionally she stopped and hunkered down, studying a clump of greenery or running her fingers across the moss; now and again she looked at him with that same expression on her face and her nostrils flaring, as if he were another species of wildlife.
There was something unreal about the whole thing. They had just drawn level with some small patches of marsh when the dog suddenly tensed, lifted its nose into the air and dropped its tail half a turn. Arnhild U. planted a foot on the leash and slid her Browning rifle off her shoulder. She went down on one knee, cocked the gun, made Jonas get down too. Was this true? Did it happen? At any rate Jonas would swear later that he had been there in the marsh and seen a huge bull elk loom up right in front of them and that to begin with he had thought it must be a mirage, because he could not think what such a fabulous creature could be doing in a Norwegian forest; at that moment it had seemed not of this world at all, with its great, shovel-shaped antlers, the massive body on the long, spindly legs, like a ship in full sail. When it turned its head, presenting them with its curling muzzle and long goatee, the thought that flashed through Jonas’s mind was of a primeval world, of the Stone Age.
One thing was for certain, Jonas Wergeland had not come to Lom to hunt elk; he was there to see the stave church. In terms of cause and effect, the road from the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires to the stave church at Lom may have been a tortuous one, but no less understandable for all that. After entering the College of Architecture he had rapidly developed an interest in old Norwegian building styles. Indeed there were many who maintained that the stave church and the combination of staves and cog joints used in old cottages, lofts and storehouses — as found, for example, throughout the Otta valley — was Norway’s only significant contribution to architectural history.
And so, the day before, Jonas had wandered around the stave church at Lom, lost in wonder, running his fingers over the wood carvings on the chancel — an almost mesmerizing upward spiral of dragons — poring over the runic inscriptions, making sketches, lots of sketches, inhaling the scent of tar that pervaded the lofty, picturesque church interior, studying the old doorway, the ornamentation, counting the oldest pillars, inspecting the crossbeams and the St Andrew’s crosses, all the while trying to imagine how the original basilicum, now hidden away like a casket within the more recent church, must have looked, outside as well as in; although even here the dragons’ heads at the apexes of the gables lent the building an air of something dark and ancient, a vast scaly creature that at any moment might rise into the air and fly off across Lomseggen: a sight which, taken together with the smells and the touching had thrown him into a strange mood, one which had stayed with him right through the day, until he fell asleep in his hotel room and dreamed of cattle all night long. The next morning, despite the low cloud and the raw cold air, he had made his way on instinct, following some physical urge, up the hillside.
And now there he was, on his knees — if that is, this happened to him at all — next to a woman with a rifle in her hands, staring at a bull elk roughly a hundred metres away from them which, due to the haze, the misty smoky atmosphere, acquired the semblance of a creature of fable, some sort of dragon, a dragon amid a landscape of matte, red-gold jade; the whole scene seemed so unreal. Not to Arnhild U., though. She dropped her hand, and the dog lay down without a murmur then, just as the elk turned side on to them, she released the safety catch. Jonas’s attention was momentarily caught and held by the two animals, the dog and the elk, so archetypically Norwegian, this odd confrontation between two emblems, two coins of the realm, silver and copper. At that moment the elk froze, still as a statue, with raised head and stiff legs; it must have become aware of them; it was so majestic, so Norwegian, resembling — of all things — a stave church, in the middle of the forest, a powerful piece of ornamentation, something so beautiful that Jonas was about to ask her to spare it when she fired. The elk collapsed as if heaving a sigh, as if it had been brought down by something huge and invisible, striking from right overhead, even before the ear-splitting bang. She looked at him exultantly as if she knew she had been too quick for him.
‘You like to kill,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All good hunters like to kill.’ There was something about her eyes, her cheeks, her nostrils as if the adrenalin had worked a change on her face, rendering it even more hungry-looking, lustful.