Kristin Lavransdatter Page 6

  Brother Edvin said a prayer over the food and then sat down next to Steinulv on the edge of the bed so he could help the old man eat. Kristin sat down near the woman and fed the little boy, who was so small that he couldn’t reach the porridge bowl, and who spilled whenever he tried to dip into the bowl of ale. The woman was from Hadeland and had come with her husband and children to visit her brother who was a monk at the cloister. But he was out wandering among the villages, and she complained bitterly about having to sit there wasting time.

  Brother Edvin spoke gently to the woman. She must not say that she was throwing her time away when she was here in the bishop’s Hamar. Here were all the splendid churches, and all day long the monks and canons celebrated mass and chanted the offices of the day. And the town was so beautiful, even lovelier than Oslo itself, although it was somewhat smaller. But here, nearly every farm had a garden. “You should have seen it when I arrived in the springtime,” the monk said. “The whole town was white with flowers. And since then the sweetbriar roses have bloomed . . .”

  “Well, what good does that do me?” said the woman peevishly. “And it seems to me that there are more holy places here than holiness.”

  The monk chuckled and shook his head. Then he rummaged around in his straw pallet and pulled out a big pile of apples and pears, which he shared among the children. Kristin had never tasted such luscious fruit. The juice ran out of her mouth with every bite she took.

  Then Brother Edvin had to go off to church, and he said that Kristin could come along. They cut across the cloister courtyard, and through a little side door they entered the church’s choir.

  Construction was still going on at this church too, and scaffolding had been set up at the juncture of the nave and the transept. Brother Edvin told Kristin that Bishop Ingjald was having the choir renovated and decorated. The bishop was immensely wealthy, and he used all of his riches to adorn the churches of the town. He was an excellent bishop and a good man. The friars of Olav’s cloister were also good men: celibate, learned, and humble. It was a poor monastery, but they had received Brother Edvin kindly. His home was at the Minorite3 cloister in Oslo, but he had been given permission to beg for alms here in the Hamar diocese.

  “Come over here,” he said, leading Kristin to the foot of the scaffolding. He climbed up a ladder and rearranged several planks high above. Then he went back down and helped the child to ascend.

  On the gray stone wall above her, Kristin saw strange, flickering specks of light, red as blood and yellow as ale, blue and brown and green. She wanted to look behind her, but the monk whispered, “Don’t turn around.” When they stood together high up on the planks, he gently turned her around, and Kristin saw a sight so glorious that it almost took her breath away.

  Directly opposite her, on the south wall of the nave, stood a picture that glowed as if it had been made from nothing but glittering gemstones. The multicolored specks of light on the wall came from rays emanating from the picture itself; she and the monk were standing in the midst of its radiance. Her hands were red, as if she had dipped them in wine; the monk’s face seemed to be completely gilded, and from his dark cowl the colors of the picture were dimly reflected. She gave him a questioning glance, but he merely nodded and smiled.

  It was like standing at a great distance and looking into heaven. Behind a lattice of black lines she began to distinguish, little by little, the Lord Jesus himself, wearing the costliest red cloak; the Virgin Mary in robes as blue as the sky; and the holy men and maidens in gleaming yellow and green and violet attire. They stood beneath the arches and pillars of illuminated houses surrounded by intertwining branches and twigs with extraordinary, bright leaves.

  The monk pulled her a little farther out toward the edge of the scaffold.

  “Stand here,” he whispered. “Then the light will fall on you from Christ’s own cloak.”

  From the church below the faint smell of incense and the odor of cold stone drifted up toward them. It was gloomy down below, but rays of sunlight were entering diagonally through a series of windows on the south wall of the nave. Kristin began to see that the heavenly picture must be some sort of windowpane,4 for it filled that type of opening in the wall. The others were empty or closed off with panes of horn in wooden frames. A bird appeared, perched on the windowsill, chirped briefly, and then flew away. Outside the wall of the choir the sound of metal on stone could be heard. Otherwise everything was quiet; only the wind came in small gusts, sighed a little between the church walls, and then died away.

  “Well, well,” said Brother Edvin with a sigh. “No one can make things like this in Norway. They may paint with glass in Nidaros, but not like this. But in the lands to the south, Kristin, in the great cathedrals, there they have picture panes as big as the portals of this church.”

  Kristin thought about the pictures in the church back home. The altars of Saint Olav and Saint Thomas of Canterbury had paintings on the front panels and the tabernacles behind. But those pictures seemed dull to her and without radiance as she thought about them now.

  They climbed down the ladder and went up into the choir. There stood the altar, naked and bare, and on its stone top were stacked up small boxes and cups made of metal and wood and ceramic; odd little knives, pieces of iron, and pens and brushes lay next to them. Then Brother Edvin told Kristin that these were his tools. He was skilled in the craft of painting pictures and carving tabernacles, and he had made the exquisite paintings that stood nearby on the choir chairs. They were intended for the front panels of the altars here in the friars’ church.

  Kristin was allowed to watch as he mixed colored powders and stirred them in little ceramic cups, and she helped him carry the things over to a bench next to the wall. As the monk went from one painting to the next, sketching fine red lines in the fair hair of the holy men and women so curls and waves were made visible, Kristin followed close on his heels, watching him and asking questions. And the monk explained what he had painted.

  In one of the paintings Christ sat on a golden chair, and Saint Nikulaus and Saint Clement stood near him under a canopy. On either side was depicted the life of Saint Nikulaus. In one place he was an infant sitting on his mother’s knee; he had turned away from the breast she offered him, for he was so holy, even in his cradle, that he refused to nurse more than once on Fridays. Next to this was a picture of him placing the money bags at the door of the house where three maidens lived who were so poor that they couldn’t find husbands. Kristin saw how he cured the child of the Roman knight, and she saw the knight sail off in a boat with the false golden chalice in his hands. The knight had promised the holy bishop a golden chalice, which had been in his family for a thousand years, as payment for returning the child to good health. But then he tried to betray Saint Nikulaus by giving him a false golden chalice instead. That’s why the boy fell into the sea with the real golden chalice in his hand. But Saint Nikulaus carried the child unharmed beneath the water, and he emerged onto shore as his father stood in Saint Nikulaus’s church, offering the false goblet. All of this was shown in the picture, painted with gold and the most beautiful of colors.

  In another painting the Virgin Mary sat with the Christ child on her knee. He had put one hand up under his mother’s chin, and he was holding an apple in the other. With them stood Saint Sunniva and Saint Kristina. They were leaning gracefully from the hips, their faces a lovely pink and white, and they had golden hair and wore golden crowns.

  Brother Edvin gripped his right wrist with his left hand as he painted leaves and roses in their crowns.

  “It seems to me that the dragon is awfully small,” said Kristin, looking at the image of the saint who was her namesake. “It doesn’t look as if it could swallow up the maiden.”

  “And it couldn’t, either,” said Brother Edvin. “It was no bigger than that. Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he en
ters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows. As you can see, the whole mountain that Saint Sunniva was trapped inside is so small that it will fit on the skirt of her cloak.”

  “But weren’t they inside the caves?” asked Kristin. “Saint Sunniva and the Selje men?5 Isn’t that true?”

  The monk squinted at her and smiled again.

  “It’s both true and not true. It seemed to be true for the people who found the holy bodies. And it seemed true to Sunniva and the Selje men, because they were humble and believed that the world is stronger than all sinful people. They did not imagine that they might be stronger than the world because they did not love it. But if they had only known, they could have taken all the mountains and flung them out into the sea like tiny pebbles. No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

  “But what if a person doesn’t fear and love God?” asked Kristin in horror.

  The monk put his hand on her golden hair, gently tilted her head back, and looked into her face. His eyes were blue and open wide.

  “There is no one, Kristin, who does not love and fear God. But it’s because our hearts are divided between love for God and fear of the Devil, and love for this world and this flesh, that we are miserable in life and death. For if a man knew no yearning for God and God’s being, then he would thrive in Hell, and we alone would not understand that he had found his heart’s desire. Then the fire would not burn him if he did not long for coolness, and he would not feel the pain of the serpent’s bite if he did not long for peace.”

  Kristin looked up into his face; she understood nothing of what he said.

  Brother Edvin continued, “It was because of God’s mercy toward us that He saw how our hearts were split, and He came down to live among us, in order to taste, in fleshly form, the temptations of the Devil when he entices us with power and glory, and the menace of the world when it offers us blows and contempt and the wounds of sharp nails in our hands and feet. In this manner He showed us the way and allowed us to see His love.”

  The monk looked down into the child’s strained and somber face. Then he laughed a little and said in an entirely different tone of voice, “Do you know who was the first one to realize that Our Lord had allowed Himself to be born? It was the rooster. He saw the star and then he said—and all the animals could speak Latin back then—he cried, ‘Christus natus est!’ ”

  Brother Edvin crowed out the last words, sounding so much like a rooster that Kristin ended up howling with laughter. And it felt so good to laugh, because all the strange things that he had just been talking about had settled upon her like a burden of solemnity.

  The monk laughed too.

  “It’s true. Then when the ox heard about it, he began to bellow, ‘Ubi, ubi, ubi?’

  “But the goat bleated and said, ‘Betlem, Betlem, Betlem.’

  “And the sheep was so filled with longing to see Our Lady and her Son that he baa’d at once, ‘Eamus, eamus!’

  “And the newborn calf lying in the straw got up and stood on his own legs. ‘Volo, volo, volo!’ he said.

  “Haven’t you heard this before? No, I should have known. I realize that he’s a clever priest, that Sira Eirik who lives up there with you, and well educated, but he probably doesn’t know about this because it’s not something you learn unless you journey to Paris. . . .”

  “Have you been to Paris then?” asked the child.

  “God bless you, little Kristin, I’ve been to Paris and traveled elsewhere in the world as well, and yet you mustn’t think me any better for it, because I fear the Devil and love and desire this world like a fool. But I hold on to the cross with all my strength—one must cling to it like a kitten hanging on to a plank when it falls into the sea.

  “And what about you, Kristin? How would you like to offer up those lovely curls of yours and serve Our Lady like these brides that I’ve painted here?”

  “There are no other children at home besides me,” replied Kristin. “So I will probably marry, I would think. Mother has already filled chests and trunks with my dowry.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Brother Edvin, stroking her forehead. “That’s the way folk dispatch their children these days. To God they give the daughters that are lame and blind and ugly and infirm; or if they think He has given them too many children, they let Him take some of them back. And yet they wonder why the men and maidens who live in the cloisters are not all holy people. . . .”

  Brother Edvin took Kristin into the sacristy and showed her the monastery’s books, which were displayed on stands. They contained the most beautiful pictures. But when one of the monks came in, Brother Edvin said he was merely looking for a donkey’s head to copy.

  Afterward he shook his head at himself. “There you see my fear, Kristin. But they’re so nervous about their books here in this house. If I had the proper faith and love, I wouldn’t stand here and lie to Brother Aasulv. But then I could just as well take these old leather gloves and hang them up on that ray of sunshine over there.”

  Kristin went with the monk over to the guest house and had something to eat, but otherwise she sat in the church all day long, watching him work and talking to him. And not until Lavrans came back to get Kristin did either she or the monk remember the message that should have been sent to the shoemaker.

  Kristin remembered those days she spent in Hamar better than anything else she experienced on that long journey. Oslo was no doubt larger than Hamar, but since she had already seen a town, it did not seem so extraordinary to her. Nor did she think Skog was as beautiful as Jørundgaard, even though the buildings were finer. She was glad she wasn’t going to live there. The manor was set on a hill, and below lay Botn Fjord, gray and melancholy with black forests, while on the opposite shore and beyond the buildings the sky reached all the way down to the tops of the trees. There were no towering or steep mountainsides like those back home to lift the sky high overhead or to soften and frame the view so that the world was neither too big nor too small.

  The journey home was cold; it was almost Advent, and when they had traveled a short distance into the valley, they came upon snow. They had to borrow sleighs and ride for most of the way.

  The exchange of estates was handled in such a manner that Lavrans turned over Skog to his brother Aasmund but retained the right of repurchase for himself and his descendants.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN THE SPRING after Kristin’s long journey, Ragnfrid gave birth to a daughter. Both parents had no doubt wished that the child would be a boy, but this did not trouble them for long, and they developed the deepest love for little Ulvhild. She was an exceedingly pretty child, healthy, good-natured, happy, and serene. Ragnfrid loved this new child so much that she continued to nurse her even after she turned two. For that reason Ragnfrid followed Sira Eirik’s advice and refrained from participating in her usual strict fasts and devout rituals for as long as she had the child at her breast. Because of this and because of her joy for Ulvhild, Ragnfrid blossomed; and Lavrans thought he had never seen his wife look so happy and beautiful and approachable in all the years of their marriage.

  Kristin also felt it was a great joy that they had been given her little infant sister. She had never thought about the fact that her mother’s somber disposition had made life at home so subdued. She thought things were as they should be: her mother disciplined or admonished her, while her father teased and played with her. Now her mother was gentler toward her and gave her more freedom; she caressed her more often too, so Kristin didn’t notice that her mother also had less time to spend with her. She loved Ulvhild, as everyone did, and was pleased when she was allowed to carry her sister or rock her cradle. And later on the little one was even more fun; as she began to crawl and walk and talk, Kristin could play with her.

  In this manner the people of Jørundgaard enjoyed three good y
ears. Good fortune was also with them in many ways, and Lavrans did a great deal of construction and made improvements on the estate. The buildings and stables had been old and small when he came to Jørundgaard, since the Gjeslings had leased out the farm for several generations.

  Then came Whitsuntide of the third year. At that time Ragnfrid’s brother Trond Ivarsøn of Sundbu and his wife Gudrid and their three small sons were visiting. One morning the grown-ups were sitting up on the loft gallery talking, while the children played in the courtyard. There Lavrans had started building a new house, and the children were climbing up onto the timbers that had been brought by wagon. One of the Gjesling boys had hit Ulvhild and made her cry, so Trond went down and scolded his son as he picked Ulvhild up in his arms. She was the prettiest and most amenable child that one could imagine, and her uncle had great affection for her, although he was not usually very fond of children.

  At that moment a man came walking across the courtyard from the barnyard leading a huge black ox, but the ox was mean and intractable, and it tore away from the man. Trond leaped up on top of the pile of timbers, chasing the older children ahead of him, but he was carrying Ulvhild in one arm and he had his youngest son by the hand. A log suddenly rolled beneath his feet, and Ulvhild fell from his grasp and down the hill. The log slid after her and then rolled until it came to rest on the child’s back.

  Lavrans dashed down from the gallery at once. He came racing over and tried to lift the log. Suddenly the ox charged toward him. He grabbed for its horns but he was knocked off his feet; then he managed to seize hold of its nostrils, pulled himself halfway up, and held on to the ox until Trond recovered from his confusion, and the men who came running from the house threw harnesses over the animal.

  Ragnfrid was on her knees, trying to raise the log. Lavrans lifted it enough so that she could pull the child out and place her on her lap. The little girl whimpered terribly when they touched her, but Ragnfrid sobbed loudly, “She’s alive, thank God, she’s alive.”