“And just what would the girl do with a cello? She should learn to embroider instead!”
The tutor, who was outwardly frail and anxious but inwardly tough as an unopened nut, modestly pointed out that he could not teach Dina to embroider. But he could, on the other hand, teach her to play the cello.
That is how a cello, which cost many speciedakr, came into the house.
The sheriff wanted the instrument kept in the parlor so that visitors could clasp their hands in admiration.
But Dina had a different idea. The cello was to be kept in her room, on the second floor. For the first few days she carried it back upstairs each time her father ordered it moved to the parlor.
The sheriff soon tired of this. And an unspoken compromise was reached. Whenever cultured people or other important guests came to visit, the cello was brought downstairs. Dina was summoned from the stable, bathed, dressed in a long skirt and bodice, and required to play hymns.
Mr. Lorch would sit nervously twisting his mustache. It did not occur to him that no matter how many were in the room, he was probably the only person capable of hearing Dina’s small mistakes.
Dina early understood that Mr. Lorch and she had one thing in common. Namely, they took responsibility for each other’s inadequacies. This became a comfort to her.
When the sheriff raged above Lorcha’s bowed head because, after three years of tireless instruction, Dina still could not read properly except in Hjertrud’s Bible, she would open the door to her room, take the cello between her knees, and send the notes of her father’s favorite hymns streaming down into his office. It had an effect.
That she learned arithmetic very quickly, that she embarrassed the young clerk at the warehouse when she added numbers of several digits in her head faster than he could write them down — these were things nobody mentioned. Except Mr. Lorch.
Each time Dina read her catechism aloud for the sheriff, Lorch defended himself with seeming humility against accusations of being incompetent in his work.
For Dina made up the words she did not know how to read. So the text often was unrecognizable but considerably more colorful than the original.
The servants stood listening, the corners of their mouths twitching, not daring to look at one another for fear of bursting into unrestrained laughter.
“Not arithmetic! That’s not natural for a girl! Her younger brother should have learned arithmetic,”’ the sheriff countered in a broken voice. Then he rushed from the room. Everyone knew the sheriff’s wife was several months pregnant when she was scalded to death.
To be honest, though, this was the only time the sheriff even indirectly reproached Dina for that.
There was an old organ at Fagerness. Far back in the main parlor. Covered with a jumble of mugs and platters.
It was such a poor organ that Mr, Lorch refused to teach Dina on it. He gently suggested to the sheriff that in a house that had so many prominent guests, from both home and abroad, it might be nice to have a proper grand piano. Which was, in addition, a beautiful piece of furniture.
Moreover, a piano would need to be in the parlor. This would be a way of compensating for Dina’s obstinacy regarding the cello.
A black English grand piano arrived at the house. It was a hard, sweaty job to unpack it from the sturdy crate and remove the rags and wood shavings.
Mr. Lorch tuned it, pulled up his trouser legs, which were threadbare at the knees, and slid carefully onto the solid swivel stool.
There was one thing Mr. Lorch could do better than anything else. Play the piano!
With eyes like doves that had just been set free, he began to play Beethoven. The Appassionata Sonata.
Dina sat tightly pressed against the velvet back of the chaise lounge. Her feet dangled in the air. Her mouth opened with a deep sigh as the first notes filled the room.
Dina’s face was rivers and streams. A loud sound came out of her and knocked her to the floor.
The sheriff ordered an immediate halt. The girl was sent to her room. She was twelve years old and should know how to act properly.
At first Mr. Lorch did not dare to go near the piano. No matter how much Dina begged, scolded, and coaxed.
But one day the sheriff left for the Assembly and was to be away a week. Then Mr. Lorch shut all the windows and doors in the parlor, despite the warm May weather.
Once again he pulled up the worn knees of his trousers and carefully seated himself at the piano.
He let his hands pause for a moment over the keys and then touched his fingers to them with all the love he possessed.
He hoped Dina’s reaction to the Appassionata would not be repeated. Today he chose Chopin’s Tarantella and a Valse,
But he could just as well have played his entire repertoire. Because Dina wept and howled.
This continued for the whole week. The girl was so red-eyed by the time the sheriff returned that they did not dare to let him see her. She complained of feeling ill and went to bed. Knowing her father would not come into her room. He was deathly afraid of possible infection. He got that from his dear, departed mother, he said. And made no secret of it.
Mr. Lorch had a plan. One afternoon he mentioned it to the sheriff as the two men sat in the parlor and the sheriff talked at great length about the Assembly.
It was a shame about that expensive piano not being used. And did the sheriff think Dina’s weeping might stop if she just practiced listening to music? In fact, someone he knew owned a dog that slowly but surely had become accustomed to music. For the first month, the animal only howled. It was terrible. But gradually the dog became calmer. In the end, it would just lie down and go to sleep. Of course, that had been violin music. But still …
The sheriff finally confessed to Lorch that he could not stand crying. He had heard enough crying when his wife passed away so tragically. She had screamed for an entire day before she was released.” Ever since then, such sounds were very painful for him.
And at last Mr. Lorch heard Hjertrad’s story. About how Dina had moved the lever that caused the huge kettle to pour boiling lye over her poor mother.
Mr. Lorch, who was not accustomed to having people confide in him, had nothing comforting to say. He had been in the house three years without knowing why he was teaching a wolf cub.
The sheriff’s details sickened Lorch. But he listened with a musician’s tough discipline in distinguishing art from sentimentality.
And various ideas went through the tutor’s sensitive mind. Some had to do with his belief that the sheriff had accepted the tragedy to a degree. Despite his outer sorrow.
Mr. Lorch ventured to suggest, in a gentle way, that it still would be too bad if no one played that expensive piano. He could teach Dina when the sheriff was not around.
Now that the sheriff had finished his story, cleared his throat, and smoked another pipe of tobacco, he agreed to Lorch’s idea.
Afterward, Mr. Lorch took a long walk. Along pale springtime shores. Dry grass poked through the snow, and homeless seabirds soared overhead.
In his mind he kept seeing Dina’s hardened face. Heard her glib, defiant mental arithmetic and her frantic weeping when he played the piano.
He had actually been planning to go to Copenhagen that summer to study music. He had saved a considerable amount at the sheriff’s estate. But he stayed. A shriveled young man. Who already had thin hair and a worn face, although he was not yet thirty.
He somehow felt a calling.
Dina continued to talk. At first only to Lorch. But then gradually to the others with whom she came in contact.
She learned to play the piano. From Lorch’s music. First small pieces and finger exercises. Then hymns and light classical selections.
Lorch was very particular about the music. He wrote to Trond-heim, Christiania, and Copenhagen for music that would be appropriate for beginners. This also put him in touch with his old musical friends.
Dina learned to both play and listen without howling like a wolf
. And the sheriff’s home became known for its music. Visitors sat in the parlor listening to the cello and piano. And drank punsj. It was an atmosphere of decorum and brilliance. The sheriff was extremely satisfied.
Mr. Lorch, with his haggard, unattractive appearance, his awkwardness and dull reserved manner, became known as an artist.
Lorch told Dina many strange things from the great world. As well as many stories about music and magic.
One day as they rowed for pleasure on a calm sea, he told her about a man who asked a headless sea specter, called a draug, to teach him to play the violin. The music had to sound so beautiful that a princess would weep and want to marry him!
The draug agreed to teach the man. And, in return, he wanted some good fresh meat.
The ghost did as he had promised. The violinist learned his art so well he could play even while wearing thick gloves. But then he realized he did not have any meat. So instead he threw a bare bone into the sea.
“Then what happened?” asked Dina eagerly.
“He should never have tried to fool the draug. For the ghost sang to him night and day: ‘Because you gave me a meatless bone,/You’ll play the strings but make no tone.’ “
“What does that mean?”
“He became a very good player, but the princess wasn’t moved by his music. So he didn’t win her hand.”
“Why not? When he was so talented?”
“Being able to play music well isn’t the same as the art of making sounds that touch people’s hearts. Music has a soul, just like human beings. It also must be heard…”
“You have that art,” Dina said firmly.
“Thank you,” said the tutor with a slight bow. As though he were in a concert hall, with a princess in the front row.
To Dina, Lorch was a person to whom she could turn when anything went wrong. And when she was present, nobody dared to make fun of him.
He learned to deal with her eager caresses and embraces. Simply by standing straight and letting his arms hang at his sides. His eyes were spiderwebs in the brush, with raindrops in them.
That was enough for her.
Mr. Lorch took Dina to Hjertrud’s grave. It was covered with lovely flowers. A whole bed, edged with round moss-covered pebbles.
Lorch spoke to Dina in a soft voice and explained things she had never asked about.
That Hjertrud did not bear any resentment. That she sat in heaven and was happy to have escaped this world’s hardships and sorrow.
That everything was somehow predestined. That people were tools in one anothers’ lives. That some people did things that seemed horrible in their own and others’ eyes but that could become a blessing.
Dina turned her moist eyes toward him, as if she realized that she had exalted Hjertrud. In fact, set her free! That she had actually done what nobody else dared, or wanted, to do. Delivered Hjertrud to God the Father in heaven. Where there were no sorrows or servants or children. And in gratitude, Hjertrud sent the fragrance of dog rose and forget-me-nots.
Dina’s look made Lorch change the subject. He explained a little breathlessly about the different parts of the flowers.
The summer that Dina turned thirteen, the sheriff came home from Bergen with an unusually well-trimmed beard and a new wife.
He exhibited her with pride, as if he had created her himself.
The “new one” moved into Hjertrud’s room after a week. Everyone on the estate, as well as the neighbors, thought it happened somewhat suddenly.
Two maids were assigned the task of removing dear, departed Hjertrud”s things and scrubbing the dormer room. It had been closed all these years. Like a chest for which no one had a key and therefore everyone had to forget.
Poor Hjertrud no longer had any use for the room, after all, so no harm had been done. Everyone understood that. But nonetheless, there was something about the manner in which it was done.
People spoke in low voices. Said that as time went on, the sheriff had felt such a need for women that the maids at his estate did not stay long. If they wanted to avoid trouble. So when Dagny arrived in the house, it was not entirely an ill wind that blew no good.
She was a genuine Bergen woman. With three layers of petticoats, a waist as thin as a knitting needle, and hair piled elaborately on her head. She should have been a blessing to them all, but it was not to be that way.
One of the first faces to greet the sheriff’s new wife was a homemade plaster mask.
Dina had gone to great lengths. Had dressed up in the plaster mask and a white robe to surprise her father.
She had made the face herself. According to Mr. Lorch’s instructions. A cast of his face, which was not wholly successful. It looked more like a dead person than anything Dagny had ever seen. More grotesque than humorous.
The sheriff roared with laughter when the figure appeared in the parlor doorway. Dagny clapped a hand to her forehead.
From the first day, Dina and Dagny waged a cold, implacable war. In that war, the sheriff had to accept the role of intermediary if there was to be any contact between the two females.
I am Dina. Hjertrud has thrown down to me a small button from her coat. Before, she did not like that I had dirty fingernails. Now she never mentions them,
Lorch says I have a gift for calculating numbers quickly in my head. He dictates and I add. Sometimes I subtract digits too. Or divide. Mr. Lorch figures it out on paper. Then he draws a deep breath through his teeth and says: “Prima! Prima!” Then we play music together. And do not read anymore from the catechism or the book of sermons,
Hjertrud ‘s screams shatter the winter nights into tiny shreds that flutter past my window. Especially just before Christmas, Or she pads about in felt slippers, so I do not know where she is. She has been thrown out of her room.
All the pictures are packed away. The dresser has been emptied. The books were placed in my room. They move in and out of the shelves in the moonlight. Hjertrud ‘s black book has soft edges. And contains many adventure stories. I borrow her magnifying glass and pull the words up to me. They flow through my head like water. I get thirsty. But do not know what the words want of me.
Hjertrud has moved out completely. An eagle keeps circling above us. They are afraid of it. But its only Hjertrud. They do not understand.
Chapter 2
He delivers the innocent man.
— Job 22 : 30
Tomas! Do you know why the horse has to sleep standing up?” Dina asked one day.
She east a sidelong glance at the short, stocky boy. They were alone in the stable.
He was a cotter’s son, from the home where Dina had stayed for some years. Now he was big enough to earn an extra skilling on the sheriff’s estate, besides the labor regularly imposed on a tenant farmer.
He tossed some fodder into the manger and let his arms fall to his sides.
“Horses always sleep standing up,” he said.
“Yes, but don’t they also stand up when they’re awake?” asked Dina with her peculiar logic, as she jumped into the warm horse manure and began pressing it between her bare toes like greasy worms.
“Yes.”
Tomas gave up.
“Don’t you know anything?” Dina demanded.
“Aww!”
He spit and wrinkled his forehead.
“Do you know that I burned my mother to death?” she asked, looking straight at him.
Tomas just stood there. He did not even manage to put his hands in his pockets. Finally, he nodded. As if saying a prayer.
“Now you have to sleep standing up too!” she insisted, with the strange smile that was uniquely hers.
“Why?” he asked in bewilderment.
“I told the horses what I did. They sleep standing up! Now you know what I did. So you have to sleep standing up too! You’re the only ones I’ve told.”
She turned on filthy heels and ran from the stable.
It was summer.
That night Tomas was awakened by someone entering his s
mall room. He thought it was the stableboy, who must have changed his mind about taking the rowboat to go fishing for coalfish.
Suddenly she was standing over him, breathing. He looked into two wide, accusing eyes. Gray as polished lead in the dim light. Set heavily in her head. Threatening to roll down onto his bed.
“You cheated”’ Dina accused, and lifted the blanket. “You were supposed to sleep standing up!”
She looked at the boy’s naked body, which he instinctively tried to cover with his hands.
“You’re funny-looking!” she decided. Pulled the blanket off him completely and began to examine his inner thighs.
He defended himself with an embarrassed grunt and reached out an arm for the trousers hanging at the edge of the bed. Before he knew it, he was standing in the middle of the floor. Then she was gone. Was it all just his imagination? No. Her smell remained. Like wet lambs.
He did not forget the experience. Sometimes he awoke in the middle of the night, certain that Dina was in the room. But he never had any proof.
He could have bolted the door from the inside but told himself that the other fellows would find that strange. Would think he was locking someone out.
The horses seemed to look at him strangely when he fed them. Sometimes, when he offered them bread crusts and they opened their huge jaws with yellow rows of teeth, he was sure they were laughing at him.
She was the first person who had seen him. Like that. Since then, everything was somehow confused.
He began to go to the pond behind the grove. He guessed that she bathed there. Because he suddenly realized he had seen her with wet hair on warm summer afternoons.
He thought he heard something rustling in the haymow during the light summer evenings when he was busy in the stable.
He could swear someone moved in the bushes when he bathed in the pond after evening chores.
One evening he did it! Trembling with chills and excitement, he walked from the cold water to the rock where he had left his clothes. Calmly, not running with his hands in front of him as he usually did. And he had laid his clothes on a rock much nearer the grove. As if he wanted someone to see him.
Dina's Book Page 4