Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal

by Sigrid Undset

  “No, Marta,” he said. “It can’t be true. When a person has brought four children into the world, and the one he loves most is going to be left all alone . . . oh, it can’t be true that all bonds are severed at death.”

  I have no energy to write another word tonight. I feel so miserable and tired from thinking about everything.

  April 8, 1903

  Today Otto talked about our marriage. He has been aware of much more than I thought.

  Pastor Løkke came to see him again today, and Otto talked to me about the one thing that now preoccupies him.

  “I feel at peace now, Marta. Oh, it’s good to find respite in my faith in the One who is strong and merciful. I never thought that I’d be able to say good-bye to life so calmly, especially when I’m so young and will leave such an infinite number of things undone. I love life, and I was such a strong, healthy person. But now I know that I won’t lose any of the things I love, that I’ll keep holding on to them in a different way—as if close to my heart.

  “I’m happy that you believe the same as I do, that you also know that two people cannot be parted for eternity if they truly belong together. I spoke to the pastor about you today. He says that God does not demand that you accept this immediately with patience and without complaint—but solace will come to you.

  “And the children . . . I think, Marta, that I’ll be able to see them and follow them in spirit even after I’m dead. Maybe even keep watch over them, in some way. I’m sure that God will be a better father to them than I could ever be . . . but maybe I won’t be parted from them, either.

  “The two of us, when we meet someday . . . then we’ll be able to love each other more deeply than here on earth, because there will no longer be any of the trivial things that have sometimes kept us apart.

  “You see, I know that you haven’t always been completely happy. I noticed it over the past few years. You’ve always been a restless creature, my dear. I never spoke to you about it; I was rather afraid that I might make matters worse. Oh, but we mostly had good days together, didn’t we, Marta?”

  I said yes, and then I wept. It’s awful how nervous I’ve become; I can’t hold back my tears whenever Otto talks that way. But fortunately it no longer bothers him as much now that he has found his faith.

  “We’ve truly always wanted the best for each other. And Marta, one day we’ll understand and see everything—we’ll realize that all the things that came between us were just small, insignificant earthly things that forced their way between us from the outside. They were a result of habit and upbringing and the like. How trivial they were. That’s what we’ll see when nothing in one person’s life is hidden from the other.”

  EVEN IF I COULD BELIEVE, would it bring me any comfort? “When nothing in one person’s life is hidden from the other.”

  If one day we should see each other’s naked soul . . . and truly see how infinitely petty those things were that first came between us . . . But I rebelled in the midst of the riches of heaven, because the One who was almighty and all-knowing had allowed so much misery and shame and corruption of the soul and ugliness to appear—seeping in through tiny little cracks into what had begun so gloriously.

  Sometimes I long to believe. I wish I could cast off all of this—my sorrow over this meaningless life and the unhappiness that is irreparable. I wish I could believe there is some meaning to all of it, and some salvation. But I can’t. A person would have to give up her own common sense in order to believe in a loving God behind it all—as well as her most basic feeling of decency in order to imagine a salvation made possible through remorse.

  The pastor talked about the trials that God imposes to force those who are obstinate to yield—what a slave-driver that God is!

  Shouldn’t a mother believe in eternal life, Otto asks, since she is the one who gives birth to life? “A child is a letter from Our Lord”: that’s something I once saw in print. A young girl doesn’t really know what she’s doing when she allows herself to be given away, with a wreath and a veil and a pastor and bells and music and the Devil, to a man who will destroy her. A poor woman goes out to have a little fun, perhaps to get drunk so as to forget how hopelessly she toils all day long. A girl is assaulted one evening on a highway by some unknown brute. Perhaps they will all receive “a letter from Our Lord.”

  What does Our Lord have to do with my children? What does a child have to do with eternity? How is a child supposed to live a never-ending life when he started as an egg inside me? If my child were to die just after birth, how would we find each other, someday, much later, when life had ended for me, too? Perhaps I would have tried to believe some of this if I had lost a child.

  We humans are supposedly created in God’s image—the One who rules the infinite world. I try to think about that . . . and end up thinking about my own life, with my nearsighted eyes. I think it’s childish babble.

  April 12, 1903

  I stared until I was blind at the fact that Otto didn’t understand me. It never occurred to me that I didn’t understand him. We’ve been walking in the dark, yet were so close to each other that if only I had stretched out my hand, I would have found him at my side. Our young love burned out, and I let it be extinguished, never seeing how easily I could have nourished the fire of a love that might have made things bright and warm for both of us, lasting our whole life. And yet I thought I was so clever.

  Otto saw that our life had slipped onto the wrong track, and he grieved over it—not as bitterly as I did, since he always had his work, after all, and he never spent much time thinking about himself. But he has grieved over it and longed for a more intimate life together. Exactly how bad things were, he never knew. Duty and fidelity were for him much too obvious a matter, and he would never have dreamed that two people who married for love and had a home and children together could drift so far apart. I always thought that he saw nothing.

  But the matter keeps coming up when he talks, though for him it’s now just a shadow of things that once existed. He is done with all that. It has been easy for him to turn to faith—this man who is the very epitome of faith.

  He asked me whether I would receive the Sacrament at the altar with him.

  “Don’t do it if it’s not something you want to do, Marta. These matters can’t possibly look the same to you, standing in the midst of life, as they do to me. You should understand that you mustn’t do it for my sake, but for your own.”

  I’m glad that I said yes at once, because I saw how happy it made him.

  Now I read the Bible to him every day, and then we always talk about it, although he can’t bear to speak very much. His quiet, hoarse whisper eventually vanishes altogether, and I keep having to help him gargle and give him juice to drink. So I read to him.

  It’s not difficult for me to slip into his way of thinking, and sometimes I feel a certain solace in this pretending to believe. Seen from the inside, there’s plenty of consistency in Christianity. It’s like standing inside a towering cathedral with stained-glass windows—except that I know that the real world and daylight are outside.

  Oh, good Lord, what despair that this is to be how it ends! I tell lie after lie. I don’t dare say to him a single word that I truly mean.

  Part III

  scattered pages

  Lillerud, July 1904

  What sort of person am I, actually? I thought I was kind and clever. I committed a great sin, but I suppose I believed that it happened without any of the blame being rightfully mine.

  Now it looks to me as if I’ve been more blind and uncomprehending than anyone else. I don’t know anybody whose life has fallen apart as drastically as mine has. And surely that has to be the result of some fault inside me.

  When I look around the room and see the children as they lie sleeping, I think about what disappointments I’m going to experience through them. Will they, too, slip away from me, like everything else? My life seems nothing but one shattered hope after another, one opportunity for happiness
after another that I have refused. Now I’m so tired that I don’t really know how I’m going to keep on living. I feel as if I’ve been crushed inside by a series of falls, and I don’t have the energy to get up.

  I took out paper and writing materials to reply to Henrik’s letter. Whenever I read it, I imagine that I notice a little of the old warmth in him. But I have nothing to say in return. Yet I’m not completely indifferent; I’m glad to know that he still cares about me. I don’t think we’ll see each other again in this world, but it’s rather comforting to know that he’s sitting over there in Newcastle still harboring good thoughts toward me. And I think he’ll always have them. Henrik is basically a loyal person.

  People are complaining up here about the sun, which burns and blazes day in and day out.

  I usually sit next to the split-rail fence at the edge of the woods or down near the river. Otherwise, everything is disgustingly scorched here, but the bog is still fresh and green, and the alder shrubs have thick, dark foliage. There’s only a little water in the river, but it feels good to sit and listen to the stream murmuring over the rocks and to see the sunshine glinting between the shadows of the leaves, making the water glitter and the insects turn into hovering sparks every time they flit into the light.

  Sometimes I walk up to the heights. There’s nothing to see but the spruce forest—the uniform, sun-gilded darkness of the spruce forest covering the low, rounded hilltops and, off in the distance against the sun-bright sky, a glimpse of a blue ridge. The peace in the forest on those burning, bright days is as deep as eternal sleep. You can actually sense how faintly and gently the life forces are seeping through the trees and heather. Finally it seems that life has started to move just as sleepily and quietly through my own body and soul, and my sorrow sinks down inside me and falls asleep.

  I hardly see the children all day long. They’re off at the cabin, playing with the new owner’s children. At first Einar didn’t want to go over there, but now he has joined the others.

  Only Åse putters around the courtyard here with Ragna’s little bare-bottomed Tomas. When I take her onto my lap and she sits there chattering, mostly to herself, I both listen and don’t listen . . . then I think how inside this small head pressed against my breast there’s a whole world. How much of it will I ever know? It does no good to imagine anything else—the souls of my own children are like foreign countries, with an infinite number of long roads that I will never travel. A mother thinks that she knows her children and understands them, but every single child realizes one day that she does not. Yet when I sit with my arms around Åse, I’m not completely alone. With a child on your lap, you’re as close to another person as you’ll ever be.

  FOR THE SAKE OF MY CHILDREN I said yes when Henrik asked me to marry him. I was so tired when Otto died, so tired that I collapsed at the thought of having to make my way alone through the world with the children.

  When Henrik sat beside me in the chapel his face was almost as pale as Otto’s was in his coffin. And he shivered, as if he were freezing, as Pastor Løkke talked about God’s mercy, which had manifested itself in the midst of illness and death, and about Otto, who had wandered the earth, tending to his business and his home with his eyes on the ground, but in those difficult and lonely hours he had turned his gaze upward. Sometimes I recognized Otto’s own words, but eerily foreign and distorted, like memories that appear in dreams. Then the pastor talked about the faithful, self-sacrificing wife of the deceased and about his friend and partner.

  The whole time I felt that I was dreaming, with the hymns and all the wreaths, the strangers in the procession, all those ominous black top hats crowded together, and many friends I hadn’t seen or thought about for years.

  It’s all been oddly unreal since that morning when I received word that I should come at once.

  Otto was conscious and recognized me, but he could barely talk. He had fits of restlessness, and in between he would lie utterly still. Death was completely different from what I had imagined. There would be no real death struggle, the doctor said. But the room was filled with a seething agitation, and Otto, who was holding my hand, suddenly seemed to look away from all of us, stared straight ahead, and whispered, “Jesus . . .”

  Just before that, he signaled that he wanted to say something to me, and when I leaned down, he whispered, “You mustn’t stand there, Marta—you should sit down, dear.”

  I COMPLAINED TO HENRIK: “Isn’t this a terrible punishment that’s been meted out to the two of us? We have to stand here at Otto’s grave and think about what we’ve done, and there’s nothing we can do to make things right. We can only regret and regret, and it’s completely useless and doesn’t do a single living person any good.”

  “You’re right,” said Henrik.

  “For as long as we live, we’ll have to carry this burden around with us. What a misfortune—it dwells inside us like a disease that will never change. And we know that.”

  “Know? Oh, what do we know, Marta? That we’re suffering, and that we have suffered? And that we’re going to keep suffering? But where does that lead us? We don’t have the slightest idea what life might make of our sorrows.”

  “You may say that. But I know. You speak of life—I’m telling you that life is over for me now.”

  Henrik did not reply. He merely sat there, staring straight ahead.

  “Listen here, Marta,” he said at last. “We both are aware, of course, that when a suitable time has passed, we’re going to get married.”

  I leaped to my feet. I was furious. I groaned and raged and showered him with reproaches.

  “You betrayed your best friend,” I said scornfully. “Seduced his wife. And before he’s even been a week in the grave, you come here and talk about our getting married!”

  “Yes,” said Henrik quietly. “Because that’s the way it is. You’re right when you say that a terrible punishment has befallen us. But we threw ourselves into the current, and we’ve washed up where we now stand. Shame and remorse and disgrace—we can’t escape them. But we’re still alive, and we can’t just lie down and die. You have your children. And I . . . would it help you any if I were dead? Then you would have no one. We’ve been thrown together, so we had better look at the situation realistically. We will wake up every morning to life and another day that we have to get through—shouldn’t we try to live it as best we can?”

  “How nice that you can already see it all so sensibly,” I said bitterly.

  “I think the best thing we can do is to be completely honest with each other and ourselves,” said Henrik. “You and I are the only ones who know what we have done. And we’ve certainly had enough time to figure out for ourselves what it was all about. And also what would come of it. If Otto had regained his health, I would have gone my own way, and you would have had to find some means to make amends with him. But now he’s no longer here. The two of us can do him neither harm nor good. He exists only in memory, yours and mine. If we pretend to take him into consideration, it’s only ourselves, our moods that we’re indulging. Now it’s just you and me, and we must try to get what we can out of life. We could wait a ‘suitable’ period, pretending we were so devastated that we had no thought for anything but our grief. But that’s precisely what’s so terrible, that we can’t grieve without mixing up our sorrow with memories of the past and thoughts of the future.

  “Good Lord, Marta, don’t you see that sometimes it almost drives me mad, the fact that I can’t stand beside you as your brother and your friend and grieve with an honest heart over Otto? Wishing that everything that now consumes our thoughts had never happened, was something we had never known? That if we heard about such a relationship, it would seem to us an aberration that we couldn’t possibly understand?

  “But it did happen. Why should we play games with each other? Let’s at least be honest!”

  “Yes. Of course, you’re right. But I just don’t have the strength to think everything through at the moment. No, I can’t see thin
gs the same way you do. Oh, Henrik, my life has been so horrible ever since. You have no idea . . .”

  “Yes, I do, Marta,” he said very softly. “What do you think my life has been like these past few years?”

  I paced back and forth in the room, crying and moaning. And then I stopped in front of him.

  “It’s over. All of it. Why should we try to build anything back up? What good will it do? And what was the reason that we destroyed each other? A whim, an impulse, that’s all, nothing more!”

  “Marta, what you call nothing has been my whole life, practically as far back as I can remember.”

  I stood still.

  “You know very well,” said Henrik, “that I’ve loved you ever since I was a boy.”

  EVEN SO, I DID CONSIDER MARRYING HIM. I hadn’t actually said that I would, and we never specifically discussed it, but that was always the assumption.

  Henrik came to see me almost daily. He was nice to the children in his quiet way—took the boys skiing on Sundays and sent them to the theater and such. And toward me he was inexpressibly inventive and patient, trying to entice me out of my stony grief.

  Whenever he came to visit, I would sit motionless, the very image of despair, with my eyes cast down. I would actually try to encourage all the torment and weariness and sorrow that had otherwise subsided a bit during the day’s work. I would picture to myself how hopeless and unhappy and humiliating the whole situation was—and then I would let him do his utmost to thaw my frozen, mute soul. I let him talk, and I listened with a sorrowfully scornful smile and gave terse, oracle-like replies. But I regarded these visits from Henrik as his duty, and I considered it my sacred right to torment him.

  Yes, I tormented him as best I could, and Henrik put up with my moods with the patience and meekness of an angel. I felt no love for him but accepted his love, tugging and tearing at his heart as best I could.