Jonas was never quite certain, but they must have walked up to the downed elk, with the dog running round about, sniffing, licking blood from the dead animal’s nostrils, before it lay down as if on guard. Arnhild U. slung off her rucksack. ‘So what are you doing in Lom?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on the elk, on the head with its glassy, wide-open eyes.
‘I’d been planning to take a look at some of the old farms, the storehouses mainly,’ he said. ‘But when I left the hotel after breakfast I changed my mind, I felt I just had to go for a walk.’
‘Well, I suppose you’d better come home with me,’ she said as casually as before, and even at that point, he thought later, he must have known how it would end: with stave and log while he staved his log into her.
Of what followed, if it really did happen, he had only a hazy recollection: how Arnhild U. pulled out a knife and did things to the dead bull elk that mystified him, things to do with the penis and testicles and rectum, and something with the throat and gullet, before she slit open the belly from breastbone to haunches and embarked on the actual disembowelling, such a very bloody and messy business that Jonas had to turn away; only after the stomach, the intestines and other entrails were spilled out upon the ground, with the steam rising from them, did he turn round again, in time to see how, after hacking away the diaphragm, she stuck her hand far inside the chest cavity and with a grunt pulled out the gullet and windpipe, lungs and heart, making his gorge rise. ‘The heart,’ she said, pointing to a lump in a whitish sac before cutting it loose, and seconds later she was sticking two fingers into a red slimy clump and holding it aloft in her bloody hands like a bowling ball, looking as if she had just reached into a safe and brought out a jewel casket. ‘Hold this,’ she said, tossing it into Jonas’s hands. He felt the way his own heart thudded to be holding this elk heart, still warm; how his fingers slipped into the cavities into which the veins had run, while a rank smell rose from the hefty, pear-shaped lump of flesh, the very seat of the elk’s life. Arnhild U. scooped blood out of the abdominal cavity with her cupped hands and when she was finished she smiled for the first time, stood there smiling with her black hair plaited in a wreath around her head and her arms covered in blood and gore to the elbows. The entrails smoked on the ground, almost like the remains of a campfire. The whole countryside reeked of something indefinable, something raw and primitive.
She took a roll of kitchen paper from her rucksack and cleaned her hands, walked up to him with the knife raised. He held the heart while she sliced off a little piece, popped it into her mouth. ‘Mmmmm,’ she said, closed her eyes, opened them again, looked at him, long and hard, he was still holding the elk heart up in front of him, with both hands, as if he were taking part in some sort of sacrificial rite.
As she was getting Jonas to slip the heart into a carrier bag, four burly men came walking up the hill. ‘Can you lot manage to haul this down to the tractor without me?’ she said, when the men reached them. ‘I have a guest,’ she said, as if that explained everything. They nodded wordlessly, looked at Jonas, looked at the elk; one of them had already gone off to cut down a birch bough. Arnhild U. packed the carrier bag containing the heart into her rucksack and started to walk down the hill, Jonas automatically following behind. The dog stayed behind with the men.
Although Jonas was sure that at least some of the events detailed above must have occurred, he never could figure out what actually happened next. He remembered them coming to the road where her car was parked, and that they drove towards Otta, that they turned off the road and drove up to a big old farm set around two courtyards and comprising a number of buildings built out of logs, blackish-brown timbers, including the farmhouse itself. They must have gone in there, he thought they had, into the kitchen, before she showed him the parlour, full of heavy, old furniture, log chairs and rose-painted cabinets, woven hangings and bookcases, a large desk, on which sat a picture of King Haakon; he believed he remembered that, because it had surprised him, a desk, he could not have known that freeholder’s daughter Arnhild U. would one day save the reputation of the farmers, at a time when most people felt that subsidies to Norwegian agriculture were becoming somewhat excessive. But that was still some years away; on that particular day Arnhild U. was alone on the farm, and she gave Jonas Wergeland, student of architecture, a guided tour, showed him the ancient storehouse, the stabbur where Jonas — although he had almost no memory of this — had gazed about him in awe, had said something about the corner-post, muttered something about the Middle Ages, about the Folk Museum, about Norwegian building materials: stone, wood and turf, that it was beautiful, powerful, he believed he had said, ran his hands over the thick solid crossbeams on the ground floor of the loft as if it were a living creature.
The way he recalled it later, they then stepped into the cow byre, which had been modernized, and there was something about the smell of the place, not that it was in any way bad, but there was something so strong, so primordial about it, something to do with muck and beasts and fermentation gases that had an almost stupefying effect. She had taken his hand, he was certain about that, while they were still walking along the feed-floor between the stalls containing the cows, or rather, those that were inside, the ones that had recently calved, recumbent creatures, large heads to either side, chewing the cud, she even came out with the odd name as they progressed, that is just what they did: progressed, as if passing between the rows of pews in a church. As far as he could remember the walls were white, and yet to him the room had seemed dim and full of big brown eyes that followed them, placid animals, a room that thrummed harmoniously. It must have been somewhere around there, probably right at the very back, by the door into the feed-room, because he thought he remembered there being calves, both new-born calves, each in their own little box, and calves in bigger pens, and hay, too, the calves were given hay, she said, at least he thought she had said that, just before she pressed herself against him with a desire so fierce that he could feel her heart pounding through her clothes, feel her whole body trembling, after which she blinded him, almost smothered him with kisses and started to tear impatiently at his belt and then, with surprising strength, a powerful longing, she almost lifted him off the floor and threw him down in a tiny, empty box, into the hay, or at any rate onto something soft, something yielding and comfortable, and I am here to tell you that this is, in all essentials, true. I can also reveal that she had tried all along to resist, even though she had been filled with desire from the moment she laid eyes on him up on the hillside, because she was a virtuous woman, with strong moral principles, particularly regarding sex before marriage, but there in the byre, possibly because it smelled so strongly of living things, she had allowed her emotions to gain the upper hand, or as she was later to say: ‘I knew it was madness, but I was so blessedly spellbound. It burned the very cockles of my heart.’ Those were exactly, and typically, the words Arnhild U. used.
Jonas, for his part, was never absolutely certain whether it could have been true, that he really did lie there on his back, right next to the calves, seeing her suddenly standing over him, naked from the waist down, how she flushed red, or how her whole face seemed to swell with lust as she tore off his trousers and sat astride him, at the same time guiding his hands up under her homespun jacket and sweater and flannel shirt, cupping them over her breasts and shutting her eyes; and no sooner was that done than, with a long deep breath, she opened herself to him, and he slid inside her, in to something so warm and wet and vital that it immediately put him in mind of a big warm heart. And later, he had the definite impression that not even he, not even Jonas Wergeland, for all the singular experiences he had been through, had ever been made love to with such ecstasy, with such a fierce intensity, with such power, such carnal — yes, that was just the word for it — lust as when Arnhild U. made love to him: Arnhild U., who threw back her head and rode him as if she had been waiting for this half her life, who rode so hard that the hair around her head began to fall loose, made love to him deeply, passionately, slowly; thinking back on it later he would always feel that it had been like making love to the earth itself, and yet all the time he had the idea that she was not making love to him, but to something greater, thoughts she herself had, or that she was making love to something quite different, a creature of fable, and there was also something about the animals close by, the sound of hooves stamping on the floor, a lowing sound, possibly from a cow about to calve and, above all else, the smell, the smell of cattle and silos, of hay and muck, pure muck, permeating everything and making him feel like a beetle, a beetle in a dung heap, living life to the full. But just one look at her face was enough to dispel this thought, because her face glowed as if she were praying, as if she were right in the middle of a prayer, and as she rode him, more and more intensely, moving up and down, both deep and high at the same time, her face slowly took on a look of utter ecstasy, and the wreath of hair, or what was left of the wreath of hair, seemed almost like a halo around her head. This sight absorbed his attention for so long that his own thoughts did not overcome him until near the end, in the form of a strong awareness of, not to say a longing for, roots: to belong somewhere, because it had been brought home to him that it was from this that he, too, stemmed, from houses built out of stone and wood and turf, other places, other times, farmers, fishermen and hunters, yes, hunters too, and it was on the way home, after his visit to Lom, that Jonas Wergeland was struck by the impulse to stop off at Gardermoen in order to find out finally where his mother’s childhood home had stood.