A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  She sent it by registered post, but not without first agonising about it because she knew that by doing this, she was raising the tension that already existed between them because what benefited one, disadvantaged the other, but it is often thus between people. Alma would get an extra one thousand much-needed kroner every month, but her tenant would have one thousand kroner less, something which presumably was a considerable amount of money in the latter’s budget. But to what extent should Alma consider this when the Pole already rented from her well below market rate? Surely Alma had the right to prioritise her own finances and her own circumstances, and not solely see it from the other person’s point of view, although she was the weaker.

  Fortunately she had a telephone call the same day telling her that one of the studios at Soli Brug Manor was available, that the previous occupant had left before the end of his tenancy, so if she wanted to, she could go there straightaway. She put brown, but also yellow and green materials in the car, along with the coarse linen and the envelope from the regional archives and postponed the problem with her credit cards.

  She drove for only an hour and a half, and yet she thought it was lighter and warmer in Østfold than the place she had left behind. The well-tended estate lay by the river, and Alma was given her own little, newly-renovated log cabin, completely refurbished on the inside, on two floors; on the first floor was a beautiful, large studio with high ceilings, on the ground floor a sleeping alcove, a bathroom and a kitchen, everything was new, but retained its old style and the colours were soft, incredibly attractive, delicate, and most importantly it was warm! She thanked the elderly couple who showed her around, before they left her to her own devices out of respect for her work, and she moved in. She carried her materials up to the studio and put her clothes in the wardrobe. Set out her toiletries in the bathroom, yes, she could definitely work here.

  She drove to Sarpsborg and stocked up on wine and food, she brought everything inside and had enough for several weeks. She walked down to the river with her sketchbook and sat where she had sat in the summer; it was so long ago, she thought, and it was far too cold to take off her shoes and dip her feet in the water. ‘1913’, she wrote in her sketchbook. The year women got the right to vote, the centenary of the birth of Camilla Collett, the year Edvard Munch turned fifty, the year Sigmund Freud published Taboo and Totem, the year Ninja B.’s mother hanged herself at an institution for the insane in Fredrikstad. Then she remembered that she hadn’t redirected her post or stopped the newspaper, and did so straight away; she didn’t dare ask the Pole to take in her post – not now when she had possibly received her letter. She rang her boyfriend, and told him where she was and that she needed to stay there for a long time in order not just to begin, but also complete the tapestry for the Constitution Bicentenary, whose committee chairman was wanting pictures. Unless her boyfriend could lend her three hundred thousand kroner, so she could buy herself out of the contract? He heaved a sigh and said well, I guess that’s just the way it has to be.

  She walked back to her cabin. Now she was ready, she thought. Practicalities had been taken care of. She spread out the brown linen, but was unable to make a start. She had some images in her head, but couldn’t make herself take the first, critical stitch and didn’t know which thread to use. Johanna’s story as a metaphor for how different circumstances for the two sexes might be expressed in an ordinary human life. How would she transfer Ninja B.’s justified anger, when she didn’t recognise the emotion? It had to be red. Oh yes, she would get it done, she would start tomorrow, only tonight she would savour her first evening alone here in this lovely cabin at this lovely estate by the river, on the outskirts of the forest. Outside the window a cat walked past on soft paws, the same mustard-yellow fur as the Polish girl’s, slowly, almost languidly with its tail held high as if proud because it was a manor-house cat, not a timid one like the Pole’s. Alma carried one of the armchairs from the bedroom up to the studio and sat down with a glass of wine so close to the big window in the sloping roof that she could touch it. She sat there as the sky darkened and watched as the stars came out, first one, then another, then suddenly more, and finally all the constellations, Ursa Minor and Ursa Major; she would draw them, she would stitch them once the Constitution picture was done, this mighty arm of the galaxy to which she belonged, it felt as if she was simultaneously falling into it and sinking back into herself, so that the deep secrets inside her touched the deep secrets of the universe.

  She set to work the next morning. With her needle, she drew the forest and the timber and the energy-generating waterfall. Trees and people would share the same picture, the whole story this time. She stitched the miller and the gloomy, cramped mill cottage and the gentry at the manor house. She drew six-year-old Johanna in the sort of pink dress six-year-old girls wore in those days, ankle-long and with puff sleeves, a lace collar, not unlike the one the Polish girl had worn that first spring day, with blonde curls not unlike the Polish girl. She drew Johanna’s late mother, ashen-faced in childbed, and her wretched, tiny, screaming baby brother. She drew the grieving miller and his unmarried, childless, aged sister, Birte, who subsequently moved in to help raise the children. Strict and implacable, then again, her life couldn’t have been easy.

  She drew Johanna, aged nine or ten, roaming free in the forest playing with eleven-year-old Viktor from the manor house. Running along the river where the timber flowed, tumbling around in the clearing where the stacks of logs were the colour of bread, smelling of grain and with fat drops of resin seeping out of them. It’s good that there is still timber in this world, she wrote, a sleeping giant on the earth, a secret power which will last for generations, almost like iron. And she remembered her trees at home which might be one or two hundred years old, and might have a kind of consciousness; the trees that rustled in the wind on Soli might be the very same trees in which Johanna had once climbed, and it was a good thought that trees live longer than people – unless they are chopped down. He’s a big chap, said the man who had come to look at the tall spruce tree her neighbour thought she ought to have cut down because the lower branches and the roots, which spread just as far and wide below ground as the top reached towards the sky, were in the process of undermining the foundations of the house. But that would cost fifteen thousand kroner, so it would have to wait until spring, though it really should have been done before the autumn gales set in and caused spruce needles and cones to fall into her newly-cleaned gutters. ‘He,’ the tree surgeon had said, assigning a gender to the tree. And Alma assigned genders to her trees and drew withered grass and leaves being burned off in the spring because the smell of it was the same year in year out, centuries in centuries out, she drew tracks of hares and deer, foxes and elks, and Johanna and Viktor, who knew where the chanterelles and the blueberries and the boysenberries and the wild raspberries grew, just like the ones Alma had in her garden at home, and the wild strawberries that ripened on sun-drenched slopes as early as June. And in the summer they would swim in the swift, cold river, until one summer they had grown too big to climb the trees, and most definitely too big to swim in the river. Their meetings weren’t as straightforward as they used to be; now a strange tension arose when they happened to bump into one another. Alma added two mustard-yellow cats, one proud and one timid.

  Viktor grew tall and his shoulders broadened, Johanna’s breasts rounded under her blouse and her hair was blonde and so long that it flowed all the way to Viktor on the other side of the aisle in the church every Sunday, Alma drew how Viktor was sent to Kristiania to continue his studies, while Johanna was sent to Fredrikstad to work in a factory making clothes for the workers at the sawmill, in order to earn money so her younger brother could continue his education and make something of himself. This was how the aunt and the miller thought, and Johanna too, and so would Alma, had she lived in those days. The question was: what was Alma blind to in her own time?

  The deeply religious Birte ruled the mill c
ottage, which had turned out to be her fate, with an iron hand. And Johanna sewed at the factory while she fantasised about the dresses she would like to have made, had she had enough money for fabric and thread. She sketched them in her room in the evenings, lace and ruffles, and next to the dresses – Viktor. She hid the drawings in a folder under her bed because no one must know that the miller’s daughter thought she knew anything about drawing.

  Thus she got through her days hunched over the sewing machine by thinking about the evening, drawing beauty and abundance on cheap paper, then hiding it under her bed. But she also saved up a little money, and one Saturday she took the train to Kristiania and bought three metres of lime green cotton and happened to bump into Viktor, Alma read in a letter he wrote to a college friend who later became the Bishop of Borg, and whose letters had been preserved. Alma drew them, strolling along the waterfront, and how Viktor escorted Johanna to her train where he declared his love for her before she got on it, and how Johanna sat up all night, her pounding heart ready to burst. And Alma sat up all night hunched over the linen, knowing that Johanna’s feverish dreams would never come true, that her heart would break and the blood would spurt and cover all of the coarse linen.

  Johanna went home to the mill cottage in her lime green dress, only to learn that Viktor was engaged to Ane Persdatter, she was told so by the bitter Birte, who probably knew only too well what it meant not to get the one you loved. Who hoped to heal her own broken heart by hurting Johanna because sadly the unhappy tend not to comfort one another, despite what a few people might think. Oh, all those unhappy women, Alma thought, and drew a black border of them near the bottom.

  An engagement party was held at the manor house, but Johanna wasn’t invited. Had she been the miller’s son, she might have been able to rise above her class by earning herself a reputation as a draughtsman, but not the miller’s daughter who grew so thin in one week that she was admitted to hospital.

  Many people have their hearts broken. And hearts are difficult to mend. Ultimately, life is unfair. But at least we can organise society so it becomes as easy as possible for lovers to be together, Alma thought, because if there’s one thing the world needs, then it’s happy lovers, and she remembered her boyfriend and sent him a text message saying she was thinking about him.

  Alma had spent three weeks at Soli and Johanna three months in hospital, when the doctors felt she was strong enough to return home, but not to work. She wasn’t given a warm welcome because the miller had lung disease and her aunt was cross that she was still responsible for her sickly niece, who should have been provided for by someone else long ago. The miller’s son had gone to sea, it said in the crew register of the schooner, Frida, and the family got letters from him from unimaginable places such as Zanzibar and Shanghai, which Alma drew right near the border. Anecdotes about black people and stories about wild animals were all they learned about the outside world, because the aunt read nothing but parish magazines which were mainly preoccupied with the consequences of sin, and they had no radio it would appear from the inventory from their insurance company. So it was unlikely that Johanna knew anything about events abroad. Perhaps she had heard that Selma Lagerlöf was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909, and that Marie Curie was awarded her second Nobel Prize in 1911, but these were just the exceptions that prove the rule. It takes a long time before the breakthroughs of pioneering men and women affect how the common man or woman view their own situation, Alma realised as she sat at Soli trying to understand the conditions under which Johanna lived, surrounded as she was by so much ignorance. If Johanna had heard about British suffragettes fighting for the right to vote, she probably wouldn’t have felt encouraged, that was the tragedy, Alma thought that the oppressed and those discriminated against take on the beliefs of their oppressors, making it doubly hard for them to free themselves. If Johanna had heard about suffragettes on hunger strike in prison, she would probably have been frightened and thought that they must be mad. There was nothing to suggest that she recognised the anger they must have felt, and which Ninja B. must have felt on her mother’s behalf, at not being treated as a responsible human being who can contribute to society. If Johanna had felt anything like that, she might well have thought it was a sin. It was distressing, Alma thought, but what ought she to be justifiably angry about today?

  An ugly vicar moved to the area and Birte brought Johanna along to a parish meeting because one solution to the Johanna problem was if the vicar wanted her. He did, and Johanna accepted her fate without a fight as if she deserved it, as impotent as the spectators to the protest in Trieste, as Alma in her Norwegian situation. Alma wanted to push Johanna out of the vicar’s clutches, but also wondered in which direction future generations would want to push her? What did Alma take for granted that she ought to question? It was hard to identify because people have a tendency to view what happens in their own age as the norm, she must bear that in mind.

  Ninja was born eleven months after the marriage. And though the vicar was disappointed not to have had a son, Johanna was happy, Alma decided, because there is a happiness which doesn’t change over time, the one a mother experiences when holding her new-born in her arms. Alma drew this along with the peace found in the logs floating slowly down the big rivers, and which floated down the River Ågårdselven.

  Johanna loved her child. But the strict, hideous vicar was of the old school which believed that mankind was born in sin and that the remedy was corporal punishment and horror stories about the never-ending suffering that awaits any sinners. Johanna couldn’t bear to see her child become increasingly scared the older she grew, she got angry and plucked up the courage to take her child and run away. However, she was caught after one and a half days on a road near the Swedish border and put in an asylum when the vicar declared that she was an unfit mother. But how can you tell who is mad in a mad world, Alma shouted out loud, as they tore the child from her mother’s arms. Wasn’t she reacting in a sane way to an insane situation? However, the vicar won because he was a vicar and a man and a person of authority, and Alma drew him as fearsome, smug and blind in the centre of the picture. And Johanna, who killed herself in the madhouse on Friday 13 November 1913, in a final act of protest. She left behind only a folder of drawings and a note saying:

  ‘My life is so unlived.

  I made no difference to anyone.

  I’m a life that grew misshapen, and this stunted life must end now.’

  Alma copied it out in full as vomit flowing from Johanna’s mouth, the noose around her neck attached to something outside the picture, her dangling body and the other incarcerated women, and the men who guarded them, whose eyes shone with terror, contempt and desire.

  She dived into bed and slept for twenty-four hours or more. Slowly she awoke to bright sunshine at Soli with hoar frost across the lawns, making it look more like spring than autumn. The sky was bright blue, the cat strolled past her kitchen window on soft paws and when Alma opened the door to greet the day, she saw the old married couple calmly working together on wrapping their precious rose bushes in fleece to protect them against the coming frosts. No, this won’t do, Alma thought when she looked at her work. The light she had shone on the past was no bigger than a small torch, and what she saw depended on her point of view. If she turned just a fraction, she would see that in parallel with suffering and repression, other ordinary lives were being lived by decent people who behaved like the average population, normal and proper and were, according to yardstick of the period, people who wanted to do the right thing, but had the mind-set common in those days, who enjoyed their pleasures and their new-borns, who bore their trials and tribulations, who were scared of dying, and didn’t necessarily experience more unpleasant emotions than Alma, than most people, than us. It was so easy to be distracted by the ignorance and prejudices which reigned back then, the restrictions, all the things they didn’t understand, things that we today regard as self-evident, Jews
and Jesuits and Samis and women, and forget that future generations will cast the same critical gaze on us and shake their heads. Alma asked herself if there were historical precedents for it being damaging to fight for the liberation of suppressed minorities, but couldn’t remember any. She took the car to Fredrikstad and bought the blackest linen she could find, returned and attached it to the left side of the tapestry, embroidered it with cold silver threads so it looked like the constellations on the night sky, in the day under the sun through the window in the sloping roof, at night under the stars, then added those who moved the world. Those who had the courage to speak against power when they found it necessary, regardless of the cost, who protested though they were regarded as mad, everyone who didn’t just want a head start for themselves, but progress for the many. And especially those who turned the scrutinising spotlight on themselves in order to reveal their deepest motives and who had the courage to share what they saw.