Kristin Lavransdatter (161 page)

She should have recognized the brick chimney rising up from the sod roof, which was at the back of their house. Closest to her stood the buildings of the hospital, which had vexed Erlend so much because it had shared the rights to their garden.

She hugged the stranger’s child to her breast, kissing her over and over. Then someone touched her knee.

A monk wearing the white robes and black cowl of a friar. She looked down into the sallow, lined visage of an old man, with a thin, sunken mouth and two big amber eyes set deep in his face.

“Could it be . . . is that you, Kristin Lavransdatter?” The monk placed his crossed arms atop the stone wall and buried his face in them. “Are you here?”

“Gunnulf!”

Then he moved his head so that he touched her knee as she sat there. “Do you think it so strange that I should be here?”

She remembered that she was sitting on the wall of the manor that had been his first home and later her own house, and she had to agree that it was rather odd after all.

“But what child is this you’re holding on your knee? Surely this couldn’t be Gaute’s son?”

“No . . .” At the thought of little Erlend’s healthy, sweet face and strong, well-formed body, she pressed the tiny child close, overcome with pity. “This is the daughter of a woman who traveled with me over the mountains.”

But then she suddenly recalled what Andres Simonssøn had said in his childish wisdom. Filled with reverence, she looked down at the pitiful creature who lay in her arms.

Now the child was crying again, and the first thing Kristin had to do was ask the monk if he could tell her where she might find some milk. Gunnulf led her east, around the church to the friars’ residence and brought her some milk in a bowl. While Kristin fed her foster child, they talked, but the conversation seemed to halt along rather strangely.

“So much time has passed and so much has happened since we last met,” she said sadly. “And no doubt the news was hard to bear when you heard about your brother.”

“May God have mercy on his poor soul,” whispered Brother Gunnulf, sounding shaken.

Not until she asked about her sons at Tautra did Gunnulf become more talkative. With heartfelt joy the monastery had welcomed the two novices who belonged to one of the land’s best lineages. Nikulaus seemed to have such splendid spiritual talents and made such progress in his learning and devotions that the abbot was reminded of his glorious ancestor, the gifted defender of the Church, Nikulaus Arnessøn. That was in the beginning. But after the brothers had donned cloister attire, Nikulaus had started behaving quite badly, and he had caused great unrest in the monastery. Gunnulf wasn’t sure of all the reasons, but one was that Abbot Johannes would not allow young brothers to become ordained as priests until they were thirty, and he refused to make an exception to this rule for Nikulaus. And because the venerable father thought that Nikulaus prayed and brooded more than he was spiritually prepared for and was thereby ruining his health with his pious exercises, he wanted to send the young man to one of the cloister’s farms on the island of Inder; there, under the supervision of several older monks, he was to plant an apple orchard. Then Nikulaus had apparently openly disobeyed the abbot’s orders, accusing his brothers of depleting the cloister’s property through extravagant living, of indolence in their service to God, and of unseemly talk. Most of this incident was never reported beyond the monastery walls, Gunnulf said, but Nikulaus had evidently also rebelled against the brother appointed by the abbot to reprimand him. Gunnulf knew that for a period of time he had been locked in a cell, but at last he had been chastened when the abbot threatened to separate him from his brother Bjørg ulf and send one of them to Munkabu; it was no doubt the blind brother who had urged him to do this. Then Nikulaus had grown contrite and meek.

“It’s their father’s temperament in them,” said Gunnulf bitterly. “Nothing else could have been expected but that my brother’s sons would have a difficult time learning obedience and would show inconstancy in a godly endeavor.”

“It could just as well be their mother’s inheritance,” replied Kristin sorrowfully. “Disobedience is my gravest sin, Gunnulf, and I was inconstant too. All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.”

“Erlend’s errant paths, you mean,” said the monk gloomily. “It was not just once that my brother led you astray, Kristin; I think he led you astray every day you lived with him. He made you forgetful, so you wouldn’t notice when you had thoughts that should have made you blush, because from God the Almighty you could not hide what you were thinking.”

Kristin stared straight ahead.

“I don’t know whether you’re right, Gunnulf. I don’t know whether I’ve ever forgotten that God could see into my heart, and so my sin may be even greater. And yet it was not, as you might think, that I needed to blush the most over my shameful boldness or my weakness, but rather over my thoughts that my husband was many times more poisonous than the venom of snakes. But surely the latter has to follow the former. You were the one who once told me that those who have loved each other with the most ardent desire are the ones who will end up like two snakes, biting each other’s tails.

“But it has been my consolation over these past few years, Gunnulf, that as often as I thought about Erlend meeting God’s judgment, unconfessed and without receiving the sacraments, struck down with anger in his heart and blood on his hands,
he
never became what you said or what I myself became. He never held on to anger or injustice any more than he held on to anything else. Gunnulf, he was so handsome, and he looked at peace when I laid out his body. I’m certain that God the Almighty knows that Erlend never harbored rancor toward any man, for any reason.”

Erlend’s brother looked at her, his eyes wide. Then he nodded.

After a moment the monk asked, “Did you know that Eiliv Serkssøn is the priest and adviser for the nuns at Rein?”

“No!” exclaimed Kristin jubilantly.

“I thought that was why you had chosen to go there yourself,” said Gunnulf. Soon afterward he said that he would have to go back to his cloister.

 

The first nocturn had begun as Kristin entered the church. In the nave and around all the altars there were great throngs of people. But a verger noticed that she was carrying a pitiful child in her arms, and he began pushing a path for her through the crowds so that she could make her way up to the front among the groups of those most crippled and ill, who occupied the middle of the church beneath the vault of the main tower, with a good view of the choir.

Many hundreds of candles were burning inside the church. Vergers accepted the tapers of pilgrims and placed them on the small mound-shaped towers bedecked with spikes that had been set up throughout the church. As the daylight faded behind the colored panes of glass, the church grew warm with the smell of burning wax, but gradually it also filled with a sour stench from the rags worn by the sick and the poor.

When the choral voices surged beneath the vaults, the organ swelled, and the flutes, drums, and stringed instruments resounded, Kristin understood why the church might be called a ship. In the mighty stone building all these people seemed to be on board a vessel, and the song was the roar of the sea on which it sailed. Now and then calm would settle over the ship, as if the waves had subsided, and the voice of a solitary man would carry the lessons out over the masses.

Face after face, and they all grew paler and more weary as the vigil night wore on. Almost no one left between the services, at least none of those who had found places in the center of the church. In the pauses between nocturns they would doze or pray. The child slept nearly all night long; a couple of times Kristin had to rock her or give her milk from the wooden flask Gunnulf had brought her from the cloister.

The encounter with Erlend’s brother had oddly distressed her, coming as it did after each step on the road north had led her closer and closer to the memory of her dead husband. She had given little
thought
to him over the past few years, as the toil for her growing sons had left her scant time to dwell on her own fate, and yet the thought of him had always seemed to be right behind her, but she simply never had a moment to turn around. Now she seemed to be looking back at her soul during those years: It had lived the way people live on farms during the busy summer half of the year, when everyone moves out of the main house and into the lofts over the storerooms. But they walk and run past the winter house all day long, never thinking of going inside, even though all it would take was a lift of the latch and a push on the door. Then one day, when someone finally has a reason to go inside, the house has turned strange and almost solemn because it has acquired the smell of solitude and silence.

But as she talked to the man who was the last remaining witness to the interplay of sowing and harvesting in her life together with her dead husband, then it seemed to her that she had come to view her life in a new way: like a person who clambers up to a ridge overlooking his home parish, to a place where he has never been before, and gazes down on his own valley. Each farm and fence, each thicket and creek bed are familiar to him, but he seems to see for the first time how everything is laid out on the surface of the earth that bears the lands. And with this new view she suddenly found words to release both her bitterness toward Erlend and her anguish for his soul, which had departed life so abruptly. He had never known rancor; she saw that now, and God had seen it always.

She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross. Not my happiness or my pride, but my sin and my sorrow, oh sweet Lord of mine. She looked up at the crucifix, where it hung high overhead, above the triumphal arch.

The morning sun lit the tall, colored panes of glass deep within the forest of pillars in the choir and a glow, as if from red and brown, green and blue gemstones, dimmed the candlelight from the altar and the gold shrine behind it. Kristin listened to the last vigil mass, matins. She knew that the lessons of this service were about God’s miraculous healing powers as invested in His faithful knight, King Olav Haraldssøn. She lifted the ill child toward the choir and prayed for her.

But she was so cold that her teeth were chattering after the long hours spent in the chill of the church, and she felt weak from fasting. The stench of the crowds and the sickening breath of the ill and the poor blended with the reek of candle wax and settled, thick and damp and heavy, upon those kneeling on the floor, cold in the cold morning. A stout, kind, and cheerful peasant woman had been sitting and dozing at the foot of a pillar right behind them, with a bearskin under her and another one over her lame legs. Now she woke up and drew Kristin’s weary head onto her spacious lap. “Rest for a little while, sister. I think you must need to rest.”

Kristin fell asleep in the woman’s lap and dreamed:

She was stepping over the threshold into the old hearth room back home. She was young and unmarried, because she could see her own thick brown braids, which hung down in front of her shoulders. She was with Erlend, for he had just straightened up after ducking through the doorway ahead of her.

Near the hearth sat her father, whittling arrows; his lap was covered with bundles of sinews, and on the bench on either side of him lay heaps of arrowpoints and pointed shafts. At the very moment they stepped inside, he was bending forward over the embers, about to pick up the little three-legged metal cup in which he always used to melt resin. Suddenly he pulled his hand back, shook it in the air, and then stuck his burned fingertips in his mouth, sucking on them as he turned his head toward her and Erlend and looked at them with a furrowed brow and a smile on his lips.

Then she woke up, her face wet with tears.

She knelt during the high mass, when the archbishop himself performed the service before the main altar. Clouds of frankincense billowed through the intoning church, where the radiance of colored sunlight mingled with the glow of candles; the fresh, pungent scent of incense seeped over everyone, blunting the smell of poverty and illness. Her heart burst with a feeling of oneness with these destitute and suffering people, among whom God had placed her; she prayed in a surge of sisterly tenderness for all those who were poor as she was and who suffered as she herself had suffered.

“I will rise up and go home to my Father.”

THE CONVENT STOOD on a low ridge near the fjord, so that when the wind blew, the crash of the waves on the shore would usually drown out the rustling of the pine forest that covered the slopes to the north and west and hid any view of the sea.

Kristin had seen the church tower above the trees when she sailed past with Erlend, and he had said several times they ought to pay a visit to this convent, which his ancestor had founded, but nothing had ever come of it. She had never set foot in Rein Convent until she came there to stay.

She had imagined that life here would be similar to what she knew of life in the convents in Oslo or at Bakke, but things were quite different and much more quiet. Here the sisters were truly dead to the world. Fru Ragnhild, the abbess, was proud of the fact that it had been five years since she had been to Nidaros and just as long since any of her nuns had set foot outside the cloister walls.