The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (23 page)

Maria Magdalene's feelings towards the woman are mixed. She has some sympathy for her on account of her shrewdness and for being an outsider, yet she, too, is galled by her arrogance and feels pangs of jealousy when she returns from the ford in the company of the men. She has words with the woman. You give rise to unease and envy, she warns. The other women hate you.

But she will not listen. She is as contrary as a child and seems to be permanently consumed by anger, which she is determined to take out on others. She replies that if the women cannot hold on to their men, it must be their own fault.

I wanted to help you, says Maria Magdalene. But now I understand that you do not want to be helped.

The women seethe in silence; they put their heads together and mutter. Maria hears them agree that they are ill-served by having a stranger live among them who nourishes herself so heedlessly on their meagre resources. When the winter comes she must be gone. And if she will not leave of her own accord, they have decided, they will kill her. She is unchristened and one cannot be punished for killing a heathen. Maria broods upon it and must concede that in her heart she wants them to do it. Why will she not leave? It is her own fault if anything should happen to her. Naturally, the men are aware of what is afoot, but remain passive. They are contented by the upheaval; they amuse themselves with the stranger and take her with them into the fells and lie with her, or else they creep over to her place on the sleeping bench when the lamp has been extinguished, whereafter the darkness is penetrated by giggles and plea­sured moans. But when the winter comes, Maria considers, and life turns harshly upon them, then they will be quite as eager as the women to get rid of her. So for the time being they grin smugly, stay frivolous for as long as they can, and refrain from pondering the consequences. Maria speaks with her husband, only for him to sweep her concerns aside. The woman is a heathen. She has lain with almost everyone; it is no wonder the women frown upon her.

You lie with her too, Maria accuses.

He flinches slightly, then smiles, puts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. She is but a heathen, a bit of fun for us men. Surely you cannot begrudge your husband a bit of fun? It is you I love, you who are my wife.

They are going to kill her, says Maria.

Oh, I am sure it will not come to that.

You have no understanding of women at all, says Maria. You have no idea how vengeful and wicked they can be. You think women are better than men.

Let us speak no more of it.

She must leave, says Maria. I tell you, I won't have her living here any more.

Now you are the vengeful one, says Habakuk.

But that evening the stranger does not come to lie on the bench. Maria discovers that she has moved into one of the other dwellings.

Habakuk has bought himself peace for a time. After a while, Maria asks him about the woman's plight. It seems they neglect her; she exists on chewed bones and rotten food. They force her to give up her child to another woman. One evening, when five of the women are alone with her, four of them hold her down and the fifth thrusts a tent pole into her groin.

Here's your priest! they shriek. Can you feel how pleased he is to see you?

She clenches her teeth and her face contorts into a lump of pain. Yet she makes not a sound. Maria takes no part in these goings-on. But she is present. And she does nothing to stop them.

They cease when she begins to bleed. They draw away, frightened by the sight of blood, and leave her to lie in peace on her bench. She continues to bleed, then comes the fever. She curls into a ball without making a sound and assumes she is dying. Maria hopes she will die. It would be best. And yet she attends to her every day and brings her water and soup. It is her duty as a Christian. Eventually the woman gets up. She staggers about on her spindly legs and gloats. The women respond by placing red-hot coals on her skin when she sleeps. They tear out tufts of her hair. Maria offers to let her move back into her house. She declines.

These are my lessons, she says. And better at least than those of the Missionary Oxbøl.

Then one day, when most of the men are away, the women drag her down to the shore; and those who do not drag her, kick her and scream their encouragement to the others. They tie a rock around her neck, then row out into the bay and throw her overboard. They row ashore again and gather together to watch. Maria Magdalene sees it all from outside her house. She does not intervene. The woman does not sink. She hangs suspended with her head down, legs flailing in the air. The women stand on the shore and yell that she must die! Some of them wail hysterically. They gather stones on the beach and hurl them at her.
Diavulu!
they shout. Die! Their missiles rain down and penetrate the surface with loud splashes and plops. Some are well-aimed and strike their target. Maria hears it all. The woman still flails. It seems her head cannot be entirely underwater, for strangled, spluttered screams issue from her mouth and lungs. The women retire to their dwellings. They cannot endure the sight of her struggle to remain alive. Maria hears them break into a shrill-sung hymn.

She goes down to the shore and wades out to the little island on which the boats lie drawn up, and launches a kayak into the water. As she approaches the woman she can see that she has been kept afloat by pockets of air in her clothing. Maria keeps a distance, she is afraid that the woman will grab her and cause her to capsize. Their eyes meet. Her gaze is oddly calm. She reaches out her hand and the woman hesitantly accepts it. She cuts the rope and the rock sinks to the bottom. The woman heaves herself on to the stern sheets. She grips the boat tightly, coughing and vomiting.

Those useless idiots, she says. I could have told them myself that rock was too small.

Maria takes her home with her. She gives her dry clothes and hot soup. She must force her to eat.

Why do you want to die so much? she asks angrily.

Because I'm good for nothing, the woman replies through chattering teeth. I can spread my legs for men; it's all I can do. I'm full of the Missionary Oxbøl's semen; it runs in my blood and when I sweat, I sweat semen. Once, I wanted to be christened and die in order to find peace, salvation. Now all I want is to die. Salvation is not for me.

You cannot stay here, says Maria. You poison the entire settlement. You're a bad person. I want you away from here.

The woman looks at her with a smile of resignation. You are like me, she says. You are my sister.

What do you mean? I'm not like you at all.

You have lain with him, too, she says. He told me. You were his great love.

The Missionary Oxbøl's only love is the Missionary Oxbøl himself, Maria says. He will find punishment in time. She turns and begins to mend some clothes.

Behind her the woman chuckles and talks deliriously to herself about old Oxbøl. She calls him Pater Oxbøl and speaks in detail of the things he forced her to do and of what she would like to do to him in return. Maria regrets having brought her ashore.

When Habakuk comes home, she tells him what has happened. He is at once dismayed and angry.

How dreadful!

How barbaric!

The poor woman!

You're as guilty as them, says Maria. You can do penance by help- ing her.

I will do whatever you believe is best, says Habakuk.

The next day two kayaks paddle out through the ford. They lie deep in the water. Each carries a passenger in the stern, their backs to the kayak man. One is the woman, the other her little daughter. The women of the settlement stand on the promontory and watch them leave. In the even­ing the catechist holds prayers. We are all of us guilty before God, he says. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone! When he has finished, the women break into their shrill song. Maria Magdalene sings with them.

Outside, it begins to snow.

She has not told anyone about it. But she cannot keep it secret for ever. Sooner or later she must at least speak to her husband. Or a priest. But where to find a priest? Especially now, after the colony has been moved to its present location, the clergy have neglected their district. Of course, she could speak to the settlement's catechist. But he is too pious to her unsentimental mind and would doubtless only fall down upon his knees and endeavour to talk her into following his example; and there they would moan and wail and invoke the wounds of Christ and the like. Such matters are not for her. She loves the Lord, she has respect for the Passion, but she has no desire to wallow in wounds and blood and bodily fluids like the Brethren.

She must wait until her husband returns. He is away hunting the rein­deer and has not been home for some weeks. He has taken a mistress with him, another young woman, to cook and sew and keep his bed warm. She herself is too weak to go on such demanding trips. And keeping him warm at night is something she increasingly neglects, as Habakuk frequently has complained. If you were as expert in attending to your husband's needs as you are in the Gospel, then I would be a happy man, he says. As such, it is only right and fair that he take a mistress with him. But she wished that he did not.

She doesn't even know when it began. It was sometime during the winter when they were still snowed in and their meat reserves were dwin­dling. She had these strange dreams in which a figure clad in white appeared to speak to her. To begin with she thought it was Oxbøl coming to her, that it was a nightmare, and she would wake up with the bedclothes soaked in sweat. Oxbøl is not a man with whom she wishes to spend another night. The dream recurred twice and she began to sense that it was not the old priest at all. The figure spoke, but she was unable to catch the words. Perhaps they were uttered in some foreign language, Greek or Hebrew, it was hard to tell. Though she is relatively well-read, the biblical languages are not her strong point. She can rattle off some rhymes in Latin, but that is all. When Habakuk is in a playful mood he will often refer to her as his little papist. No, the figure did not speak Latin. Nor was there anything threatening about him. She had felt there was, the first time, but then her impression changed. If anything, the figure was beckoning to her. But what was he trying to say?

Then the dreams stopped. Most probably this was common, she told herself, that dreams become particularly vivid after some dreadful occur­rence. First there was the woman who had arrived and caused them such trouble. Then came the truly dreadful occurrence. Their eldest son, the pale and freckled boy, had been practising firing the bow his father had made for him, and a wayward arrow had struck his sister in the eye. The boy had run away and hidden; the girl lay on the shore, screaming. Some of the other children came running up to their house to raise the alarm. When they came to the girl, the arrow was broken, whether by her own hand or her brother's they never found out. But Habakuk grasped the short and jagged shaft and tugged. It was a real arrow with barbs, and the point was a sharply honed piece of metal from the Trade, the type that breaks off and lodges itself crosswise in the flesh. Habakuk pulled on the shaft, Maria had to hold the girl's head tightly, and she could feel her husband use all his might as he twisted and turned the arrow to remove it. The leather bindings succumbed, but the arrowhead remained where it was. They hoped the wound would close and encapsulate the metal inside the orbit of her eye. But the girl died in the night. The boy, her older brother, returned the next day. He acted as if nothing had hap ­pened, ate his food, slept on the bench, and they left him in peace.

It was some days, or rather nights, after this accident that Maria Magdalene again dreamt about the figure clad in white. She thought perhaps it was the Lord wishing to comfort her in her grief. But she did not want His comfort. If You were any good, You would have saved my daughter and spared my son from becoming a murderer; now it is of no consequence. Each day she went about the place in the presence of her son, the murderer. She gave him food, mended his clothes, stroked and caressed him, and could not help but hate him and his freckled face and foxlike eyes. And the boy could sense this; he drew away from her. They had no other children who had survived the first year of life.

Habakuk has now begun to talk of moving up on to the high ground. He pretends not to remember it was her idea. It would be unusual. Maria has never known of anyone settling more than a stone's throw from the water. And yet there is something majestic and alluring about the plateaus. The fog does not reach there. A person can sit and watch it come creeping in the evenings and lay itself upon the water from shore to shore, pearly and lustrous, and so dense one feels able almost to step upon it and cross the ford on foot. In the mornings one may watch it drawn out to sea again. Living at the shore a person cannot see a hand in front of their face in the fog, one is blinded and incarcerated and cannot judge from where a sound might issue.

We would be closer to God up there, says Habakuk.

Maria smiles to herself.

And then the white-clad figure returns and speaks to her again. It is the middle of summer. The son has gone into the ford with his father and Maria is glad to be rid of them both. The settlement is all but depop­ulated, apart from the catechist and two elders who survived the last winter and now live in fear of the next.

This time she both hears and understands what he says:
Maria Magdalene, do you believe all this to have come from nothing?

He has taken her up onto one of the plateaus, they must have wandered there in the dream, though she cannot recall having done so. Now he stands and sweeps out his hand to indicate the ford and the fells and the sky. She scrutinizes him, taking note of his appearance, for she has decided to commit the dream to writing as soon as she wakes. Now she sees that it is He. The Saviour. She is in no doubt. He resembles the illus­trations she has seen of Him in several ways: the beard, the long wavy hair, the brown eyes, the pale skin, the coat. But the look He gives her, the expression on His face, is not as she would have imagined. His eyebrows are raised, His lips curled in a wry smile. Is the Lord tor ­menting me? she thinks to herself.