Kristin Lavransdatter

by Sigrid Undset

“You didn’t look up, Ragnfrid, when you sat in the bridal bed wearing the crown,” he said in the same voice. “Our daughter was less modest than you were; her eyes were not shy as she looked at her bridegroom.”

  “She has waited for him for three and a half years,” said the mother quietly. “After that I think she would dare to look up.”

  “No, the Devil take me if they’ve waited!” shouted the father, and his wife hushed him, alarmed.

  They were standing in the narrow lane between the back of the latrine and the fence. Lavrans slammed his fist against the lower timber of the outhouse.

  “I put you here to suffer ridicule and shame, you timber. I put you here so the muck would devour you. I put you here as punishment because you struck down my pretty little maiden. I should have put you above the door of my loft and honored and thanked you with decorative carvings because you saved her from shame and from sorrow—for you caused my Ulvhild to die an innocent child.”

  He spun around, staggered against the fence, and collapsed against it with his head resting on his arms as he sobbed uncontrollably, with long deep moans in between.

  His wife put her arms around his shoulders.

  “Lavrans, Lavrans.” But she could not console him. “Husband.”

  “Oh, I never, never, never should have given her to that man. God help me—I knew it all along—he has crushed her youth and her fair honor. I refused to believe it, no, I could not believe such a thing of Kristin. But I knew it all the same. Even so, she is too good for that weak boy, who has shamed both her and himself. I shouldn’t have given her to him, even if he had seduced her ten times, so that now he can squander more of her life and happiness.”

  “What else was there to do?” said Ragnfrid in resignation. “You could see for yourself that she was already his.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t need to make such a great fuss to give Erlend what he had already taken himself,” said Lavrans. “It’s a fine husband she has won, my Kristin.” He yanked at the fence. Then he wept some more. Ragnfrid thought he had grown a bit more sober, but now the drink took the upper hand again.

  As drunk as he was and as overcome with despair, she didn’t think she could take him up to the hearth room where they were supposed to sleep—it was filled with guests. She looked around. Nearby was a small barn where they kept the best hay for the horses during the spring farm work. She walked over and peered inside; no one was there. Then she led her husband inside and shut the door behind them.

  Ragnfrid piled the hay up all around and then placed their capes over both of them. Lavrans continued to weep off and on, and occasionally he would say something, but it was so confused that she couldn’t understand him. After a while she lifted his head into her lap.

  “My dear husband, since they feel such love for each other, maybe everything will turn out better than we expect. . . .”

  Lavrans, who now seemed more clearheaded, replied, gasping, “Don’t you see? He now has complete power over her; this man who could never restrain himself. She will find it difficult to oppose anything that her husband wishes—and if she is forced to do so one day, then it will torment her bitterly, that gentle child of mine.

  “I don’t understand any longer why God has given me so many great sorrows. I have striven faithfully to do His will. Why did He take our children from us, Ragnfrid, one after the other? First our sons, then little Ulvhild, and now I have given the one I love most dearly, without honor, to an unreliable and imprudent man. Now we have only the little one left. And it seems to me unwise to rejoice over Ramborg until I see how things may go for her.”

  Ragnfrid was shaking like a leaf. Then she touched her husband’s shoulder.

  “Lie down,” she begged him. “Let’s go to sleep.” And with his head in his wife’s arms Lavrans lay quietly for a while, sighing now and then, until finally he fell asleep.

  It was still pitch dark in the barn when Ragnfrid stirred; she was surprised she had slept at all. She put out her hand. Lavrans was sitting up with his hands clasped around his knees.

  “Are you already awake?” she asked, astonished. “Are you cold?”

  “No,” he replied, his voice hoarse, “but I can’t sleep anymore.”

  “Is it Kristin you’re thinking about?” asked Ragnfrid. “It may turn out better than we think, Lavrans,” she told him again.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m thinking about,” said her husband. “Well, well. Maiden or wife, at least she lay in the bridal bed with the one she had given her love to. Neither you nor I did that, my poor Ragnfrid.”

  His wife gave a deep, hollow moan. She threw herself down next to him in the hay. Lavrans placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “But I could not,” he said with fervor and anguish. “No, I could not . . . act toward you the way you wanted me to—back when we were young. I’m not the kind of man . . .”

  After a moment Ragnfrid murmured, in tears, “We have lived well together all the same, Lavrans—all these years.”

  “So I too have believed,” he replied gloomily.

  His thoughts were tumbling and racing through his mind. That one naked glance which the groom and bride had cast at each other, the two young faces blushing with red flames—he thought it so brazen. It had stung him that she was his daughter. But he kept on seeing those eyes, and he struggled wildly and blindly against tearing away the veil from something in his own heart which he had never wanted to acknowledge—there he had concealed a part of himself from his own wife when she had searched for it.

  He had not been able to, he interrupted himself harshly. In the name of the Devil, he had been married off as a young boy; he had not chosen her himself. She was older than he was. He had not desired her. He had not wanted to learn this from her—how to love. He still grew hot with shame at the thought of it—that she had wanted him to love her when he had not wanted that kind of love from her. That she had offered him everything that he had never asked for.

  He had been a good husband to her; he believed that himself. He had shown her all the respect he could, given her full authority, asked her advice about everything, been faithful to her; and they had had six children. He had simply wanted to live with her without her always trying to seize what was in his heart—and what he refused to reveal.

  He had never loved anyone. What about Ingunn, Karl’s wife at Bru? Lavrans blushed in the darkness. He had always visited them when he traveled through the valley. He had probably never spoken to the woman alone even once. But whenever he saw her—if he merely thought of her—he felt something like that first smell of the earth in the spring, right after the snow had gone. Now he realized: it could have happened to him too . . . he could have loved someone too.

  But he had been married so young, and he had grown wary. Then he found that he thrived best out in the wilderness—up on the mountain plateaus, where every living creature demands wide-open space, with room enough to flee. Wary, they watch every stranger that tries to sneak up on them.

  Once a year the animals of the forest and in the mountains would forget their wariness. Then they would rush at their females. But he had been given his as a gift. And she had offered him everything for which he had never wooed her.

  But the young ones in the nest . . . they had been the little warm spot in his desolation, the most profound and sweetest pleasure of his life. Those small blonde girls’ heads beneath his hand . . .

  Married off—that was what had happened to him, practically unconsulted. Friends . . . he had many, and he had none. War . . . it had been a joy, but there was no more war; his armor was hanging up in the loft, seldom used. He had become a farmer. But he had had daughters; everything he had done in his life became dear to him because he had done it to provide for those tender young lives that he held in his hands. He remembered Kristin’s tiny two-year-old body on his shoulder, her flaxen soft hair against his cheek. Her little hands holding on to his belt while she pressed her hard, round forehead against his shoulder blades when he went rid
ing with her sitting behind him on the horse.

  And now she had those ardent eyes, and she had won the man she wanted. She was sitting up there in the dim light, leaning against the silk pillows of the bed. In the glow of the candle she was all golden—golden crown and golden shift and golden hair spread over her naked golden arms. Her eyes were no longer shy.

  The father moaned with shame.

  And yet it seemed that his heart had burst with blood—for what he had never had. And for his wife, here at his side, to whom he had been unable to give himself.

  Sick with compassion, he reached for Ragnfrid’s hand in the dark.

  “Yes, I thought we lived well together,” he said. “I thought you were grieving for our children. And I thought you had a melancholy heart. I never thought that it might be because I wasn’t a good husband to you.”

  Ragnfrid was trembling feverishly.

  “You have always been a good husband, Lavrans.”

  “Hm . . .” Lavrans sat with his chin resting on his knees. “And yet you might have done better if you had been married as our daughter was today.”

  Ragnfrid sprang up, uttering a low, piercing cry. “You know! How did you find out? How long have you known?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lavrans after a moment, his voice strangely dispirited.

  “I’m talking about the fact that I wasn’t a maiden when I became your wife,” replied Ragnfrid, and her voice was clear and resounding with despair.

  After a moment Lavrans said, in the same voice as before, “I never knew of this until now.”

  Ragnfrid lay down in the hay, shaking with sobs. When the spell had passed she raised her head. A faint gray light was beginning to seep in through the holes in the wall. She could dimly see her husband as he sat there with his hands clasped around his knees, as motionless as if he were made of stone.

  “Lavrans—speak to me,” she whimpered.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked, not moving.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You should curse me—strike me . . .”

  “It’s a little late for that now,” replied her husband; there was the shadow of a scornful smile in his voice.

  Ragnfrid wept again. “No, I didn’t think I was deceiving you, so deceived and betrayed did I feel myself. No one spared me. They brought you . . . I saw you only three times before we were married. I thought you were only a boy, so pink and white . . . so young and childish.”

  “That I was,” said Lavrans, and his voice seemed to acquire more resonance. “And that’s why I would have thought that you, who were a woman, you would have been more afraid of . . . of deceiving someone who was so young that he didn’t realize . . .”

  “I began to think that way later on,” said Ragnfrid, weeping.

  “After I came to know you. Soon the time came when I would have given my soul twenty times over if I could have been without blame toward you.”

  Lavrans sat silent and motionless.

  Then his wife continued, “You’re not going to ask me anything?”

  “What good would that do now? It was the man who . . . we met his funeral procession at Feginsbrekka, when we were carrying Ulvhild to Nidaros.”

  “Yes,” said Ragnfrid. “We had to step off the road, into the meadow. I watched them carry his bier past, with priests and monks and armed men. I heard that he had been granted a good death—reconciled with God. As we stood there with Ulvhild’s litter between us I prayed that my sin and my sorrow might be placed at his feet on that last day.”

  “Yes, no doubt you did,” said Lavrans, and there was that same shadow of scorn in his quiet voice.

  “You don’t know everything,” said Ragnfrid, cold with despair. “Do you remember when he came out to visit us at Skog that first winter after we were married?”

  “Yes,” said her husband.

  “When Bjørgulf was struggling with death . . . Oh, no one had spared me. He was drunk when he did it to me—later he said that he had never loved me, he didn’t want me, he told me to forget about it. My father didn’t know about it; he didn’t deceive you—you must never believe that. But Trond . . . my brother and I were the dearest of friends back then, and I complained to him. He tried to threaten the man into marrying me—but he was only a boy, so he lost the fight. Later he advised me not to speak of it and to take you. . . .”

  She sat in silence for a moment.

  “When he came out to Skog . . . a year had passed, and I didn’t think much about it anymore. But he came to visit. He said that he regretted what he had done, that he would have taken me then if I hadn’t been married, that he was fond of me. So he said. God must judge whether he spoke the truth. After he left . . . I didn’t dare go out on the fjord; I didn’t dare because of the sin, not with the child. And by then I had . . . by then I had begun to love you so!” She uttered a cry, as if in the wildest torment. Her husband turned his head toward her.

  “When Bjørgulf was born,” Ragnfrid went on, “oh, I thought I loved him more than my own life. When he lay there, struggling with death, I thought: If he perishes, I will perish too. But I did not ask God to spare the boy’s life.”

  Lavrans sat for a long time before he asked, his voice heavy and dead, “Was it because I wasn’t his father?”

  “I didn’t know whether you were or not,” said Ragnfrid, stiffening.

  For a long time both of them sat there, as still as death.

  Then the husband said fervently, “In the name of Jesus, Ragnfrid, why are you telling me this—now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She wrung her hands so hard that her knuckles cracked. “So that you can take vengeance on me. Chase me away from your manor . . .”

  “Do you think that would help me?” His voice was shaking with scorn. “What about our daughters?” he said quietly. “Kristin, and the little one?”

  Ragnfrid said nothing for a moment.

  “I remember how you judged Erlend Nikulaussøn,” she murmured. “So how will you judge me?”

  A long icy shiver rippled through the man’s body, releasing some of his stiffness.

  “You have now . . . we have now lived together . . . for almost twenty-seven years. It’s not the same thing as with a man who’s a stranger. I can see that you have suffered the greatest anguish.”

  Ragnfrid collapsed into sobs at his words. She tried to reach out for his hand. He didn’t move, but sat as still as a dead man. Then she wept louder and louder, but her husband sat motionless, staring at the gray light around the door. Finally she lay there as if all her tears had run out. Then he gave her arm a fleeting caress. And she began to cry again.

  “Do you remember,” she said in between her sobs, “that man who once visited us while we were at Skog? The one who knew the old ballads? Do you remember the one about a dead man who had come back from the land of torment and told his son the legend of what he had seen? He said that a great clamor was heard from the depths of Hell, and unfaithful wives ground up earth for their husbands’ food. Bloody were the stones that they turned, bloody hung their hearts from their breasts . . .”

  Lavrans said nothing.

  “For all these years I have thought of those words,” said Ragnfrid. “Each day I felt as if my heart were bleeding, for I felt as if I were grinding up earth for your food.”

  Lavrans didn’t know why he answered the way he did. His chest felt empty and hollow, like a man whose heart and lungs had been ripped out through his back. But he placed his hand, heavy and weary, on his wife’s head and said, “Earth has to be ground up, my Ragnfrid, before the food can grow.”

  When she tried to take his hand to kiss it, he pulled it abruptly away. Then he looked down at his wife, took her hand, placed it on his knee, and leaned his cold, rigid face against it. And in this manner they sat there together, without moving and without speaking another word.

  II: THE WIFE

  IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

  INGVALD UNDSET

  PART I


  THE FRUIT OF SIN

  CHAPTER 1

  ON THE EVE of Saint Simon’s Day, Baard Petersøn’s ship anchored at the spit near Birgsi. Abbot Olav of Nidarholm had ridden down to the shore himself to greet his kinsman Erlend Nikulaussøn and to welcome the young wife he was bringing home. The newly married couple would be the guests of the abbot and spend the night at Vigg.

  Erlend led his deathly pale and miserable young wife along the dock. The abbot bantered about the wretchedness of the sea voyage; Erlend laughed and said that his wife was no doubt longing to sleep in a bed that stood firmly next to a wall. And Kristin tried to smile, but she was thinking that she would not go willingly on board a ship again for as long as she lived. She felt ill if Erlend merely came close to her, so strongly did he smell of the ship and the sea—his hair was completely stiff and tacky with salt water. He had been quite giddy with joy the entire time they were on board ship, and Sir Baard had laughed. Out there at Møre, where Erlend had grown up, the boys were constantly out in the boats, sailing and rowing. They had felt some sympathy for her, both Erlend and Sir Baard, but not as much as her misery warranted, thought Kristin. They kept saying that the seasickness would pass after she got used to being on board. But she had continued to feel wretched during the entire voyage.

  The next morning she felt as if she were still sailing as she rode up through the outlying villages. Up one hill and down the next, carried over steep moraines of clay, and if she tried to fix her eyes up ahead on the mountain ridge, she felt as if the whole countryside was pitching, rising up like waves, and then tossed up against the pale blue-white of the winter morning sky.

  A large group of Erlend’s friends and neighbors had arrived at Vigg that morning to accompany the married couple home, so they set off in a great procession. The horses’ hooves rang hollowly, for the earth was now as hard as iron from black frost. Steam enveloped the people and the horses; rime covered the animals’ bodies as well as everyone’s hair and furs. Erlend looked as white-haired as the abbot, his face glowing from the morning drink and the biting wind. Today he was wearing his bridegroom’s clothing; he looked so young and happy that he seemed radiant, and joy and wild abandon surged in his beautiful, supple voice as he rode, calling to his guests and laughing with them.