— Proverbs 21 : 31
Dina began wandering in and out of the two large warehouses at the wharf, as if she were looking for something. She constantly went to get the large iron keys.
People heard her pacing back and forth. First on the lower floor. Then on the upper floor. Sometimes they saw her in the unloading door of the cranehouse under the gable. Motionless, gazing toward the horizon where sea and sky met.
I am Dina. Reinsnes devours people. People are like trees. I count them. The more the better. At a distance. Not inside the windows. Then everything goes black.
I walk around Reinsnes, counting. The mountain range across the sound has seven peaks. There are twelve trees on each side of the lane.
Hjertrud was with me at Tjotta. She was the little girl who hid behind the clock. She made herself so small because I was not alone. She needs a place. It is so cold spending the winters on Fagerness beach.
What you are, you are forever. No matter how you have to walk through a room.
Hjertrud breathes under the planks at the wharf. She whistles among the beams when I open the unloading doors. Hjertrud always returns. I have the gleaming mother-of-pearl shell.
Dina roamed the huge notched-timber warehouses at all hours of the day. Sometimes it was after dark, so she brought a lamp. People got used to her rituals.
“It’s just the young wife walking …,” they said, when they heard sounds from the warehouse or saw light flickering through the windows.
* * *
The echo was not always the same. It depended on the floor where she was, the merchandise stored there, and the wind’s direction. Everything blended with the constant yet shifting pull. Wind, high tide, and low tide.
In one section of the warehouse, the sparse timberwork was solidly reinforced with logs. Merchandise that could not tolerate much cold, dampness, or heat was stored here. Each stall had its particular contents. Barrels of salted herring, stocks of dried cod, salt, tar.
Flour and unmilled grain were also stored in this part of the building. As were furs and a wide variety of trousseau chests and travel chests. The tar smell was not as strong on the upper floors.
Masts and sails lay across the beams on the second floor. They were all different colors, depending on their age and condition.
The sails lay like grayed shrouds in airy coils of rope high under the roof on racks made from long wooden poles. Or they were hung to dry across the huge center beams and sent rhythmic, magical drops onto the scarred floor. It was stained with a variegated pattern. Of tar, fish oil, and blood.
The larger warehouse was called Andreas Wharf after a former owner who hanged himself there. Its walls were covered with fishing gear and innumerable small trawl nets. And it also contained the family’s proudest possession. A new, dark-brown herring seine. That hung, high and airy, just inside the great double doors facing the sea.
The odors were alive and acrid but were constantly cleansed by salty sea winds. Which was a blessing for one’s nostrils.
Shafts of sunlight slipped through the building’s framework and crisscrossed one another. Here and there.
Hjertrud came to Dina at Andreas Wharf. In late autumn. Her first year at Reinsnes.
She stood suddenly at the intersection of three rays of sunlight. They came through cracks in three walls.
She was healthy and unscalded. Her eyes were alert and friendly. She held an invisible object in her hands.
Dina began to speak, in a child’s high voice:
“Papa tore down the washhouse a long time ago. The one here at Reinsnes isn’t dangerous…”
Then Hjertrud disappeared into the folds of the herring net, as if she could not bear such topics of conversation.
But she returned. Andreas Wharf was the meeting place. The place most exposed to the winds.
Dina talked with Hjertrud about the little girl behind the clock at Tjotta and about her new pastime of sitting in the summerhouse.
But she did not bother Hjertrud with trivial things that she had to deal with by herself.
Such as the fact that Jacob and Mother Karen were obviously unhappy about her disinterest in household tasks and that they wanted her to pin up her hair and plan the menus with Oline.
She talked with Hjertrud about all the amazing things in Bergen. But not about the man on the gallows.
Once in a while Hjertrud smiled broadly, showing her teeth.
“They walk around bundled in clothes and talk into thin air. People don’t listen to one another. All they care about is selling their merchandise quickly and at a good price. And the women can’t add the simplest numbers! They don’t know what a long distance it is to Reinsnes. And they don’t see anything around them, because they’ve got such big hats and parasols. They’re afraid of the sun!”
At first Hjertrud replied in monosyllables. But little by little she revealed that she had her problems. With time and space. She did not like being driven from the little bedroom at the sheriff’s estate.
She talked most about the glorious colors in the rainbow, for only a pale nuance was visible down here. And about the starry heavens spiraling around this small earth. It was beyond imagination.
Dina listened to the quiet voice she knew so well. Stood with her eyes half closed and her arms dangling.
Hjertrud’s perfume penetrated the warehouse odors and the stubborn smells of salt and tar. Just when her fragrance grew so intense that it was about to shatter the air, Hjertrud disappeared into the folds of the fishing net.
I am Dina, When Hjertrud goes away, I become a leaf floating in the stream at first. Then my body stands alone, shivering. But only for a little while. Then I count the beams and the windowpanes and the cracks between the floorboards. And blood flows into my veins, one by one, I get warm,
Hjertrud exists!
Jacob feared Dina was unhappy. Once he came to get her in the warehouse.
But she put her fingers to her lips and said “Shhh!” as though he were disturbing an important thought. Contrary to his expectations,
she seemed annoyed and not at all happy he had come.
Later he stopped following her wanderings. Just waited. Eventually he did not notice them.
During the first year with Dina, Jacob was lord and master in the canopy bed. Although sometimes the situation became too much for him and embarrassed and frightened him.
But as time passed, he realized sadly that the marital intimacy he had initiated with force and a widower’s voracity had now become a horseback ride he could not take as often as he wished.
It came to the point where Jacob, who had enjoyed great pleasure in bed all his adult life, was forced to admit he was inadequate.
Dina had no mercy. Did not spare him. Sometimes he felt like a breeding stallion, where the owner and the mounted mare were one and the same.
He cast himself over the cliff as often as he could. But she was insatiable and unrestrained. Encouraged the wildest movements and situations.
Jacob did not get used to it. Became old and tired and lost his proud hunting instinct.
He began to wish for quiet days with a dignified, responsible wife. He thought about dear departed Ingeborg more and more. Sometimes he wept when he was rowing in a rough sea, where the spray kept others from seeing that it was mostly tears flying overboard with the wind.
Both he and Mother Karen believed for a long time that everything would be fine if only Dina would get pregnant.
But that did not happen.
Jacob bought a young black stallion. It was wild and untrained. They named it Blackie, a Norwegian word for devil. Because it was the constant object of oaths and curses in the stable.
Dina sent a message to the sheriff after Christmas, without asking Jacob’s advice. She wanted Tomas to help her train the new horse.
It infuriated Jacob, who threatened to send the boy home.
Dina insisted a promise was a promise. You could not hire a cotter’s boy one day and send him away the next. Did
he want to disgrace the family? Maybe he could not afford a stableboy? Maybe he was not as wealthy as he had told her father when he proposed? Of course he was….
Tomas stayed. He slept with the men in the servants” quarters. But he was ignored or teased. And envied more than a little. Because he was Dina’s plaything. Rode with her in the mountains. Followed her whenever she was outdoors. Stood near her with downcast eyes when she boarded the outrigger wearing a tight bodice and fringed cape.
Dina of Reinsnes did not keep a dog. Had no confidant. She owned a black horse — and a red-haired stableboy.
Chapter 10
Has not man a hard service upon earth,
and are not his days like the days of a hireling?
Like a slave who longs for the shadow,
and like a hireling who looks for his wages.
— Job 7: 1-2
Marriage is like eating a cucumber that was pickled in too sweet a brine. You must combine it with good, well-seasoned meat in order to endure it.”
Oline was sure she was right. She had never been married. But she had seen it all at close range. Thought she knew everything about marriages. Knew them from the first engagement parties. Trousseau chests and dowries. Unexpected, pleasant sounds in the house, creaking beds, and chamber pots.
It began with her own parents, whom she never mentioned. Her mother, a wealthy farmer’s daughter who married beneath her station, was disowned by her powerful family. And lived for years on a cotter’s farm, with numerous children and a small rowboat for getting supplies.
Her husband disappeared at sea. And that was that. True, the boat drifted ashore and could be repaired. But what could the family do with the boat when there was no man to row it?
Her mother died early, and the children got scattered in all directions. Oline was the youngest. And the few small things her parents owned were gone long before it was her turn for an inheritance.
“If you have good health and good teeth, you can chew anything!” she often said. That did not stop her from conjuring up the tenderest bearberries in her sour-cream game sauce. Along with crushed juniper berries, rowan-berry jelly, and plenty of snaps. Pure gastronomic delights.
But that was not the whole story of Oline and her cooking pots.
She had learned her culinary arts “by a miracle” as a young cook’s assistant in Trondheim. How she got there was no less miraculous.
Oline did not talk about herself. So she knew all about everyone else.
One day in Trondheim she had felt so homesick that she decided to take action. Of course, it had something to do with a man, who proved not to be a gentleman….
She found a cargo boat going north. And like the woman she was, she managed to beg a trip home. Carried aboard a large, oval wooden box filled with lefse. Perhaps in exchange for the ticket.
It was a Reinsnes cargo boat. And her destiny.
Oline remained in the blue kitchen. Under many conditions and circumstances.
Ingeborg had appreciated her culinary arts and firm hand.
But after Mother Karen’s arrival, there was a true connoisseur in the house.
She had dined at elegant tables in Hamburg and Paris! And understood that food should be prepared with love and generous measurements.
Mother Karen and Oline discussed a “menu” with as much seriousness as they prayed the Lord’s Prayer.
The old woman had French recipe books in her bookcases. Which she translated, very precisely, into Oline’s language and cookbook measurements. And when ingredients were not available in either Bergen or Trondheim, they devised good substitutes together.
Mother Karen put time and careful thought into planting a small herb garden. And Jacob brought back unusual seeds from his travels.
With the help of this garden, Oline produced such superb creations that people arranged to be weather-bound at Reinsnes, in both calm and stormy weather.
Oline’s loyalty toward the master and his family showed itself concretely. God help anyone who tried to shame them in the parish! Those who did paid the consequences. Oline had connections. She heard everything worth hearing.
The servants at Reinsnes received no warning. They were simply ordered to pack their satchels and leave. Even if it was slaughtering time, or if preparations for a Bergen voyage were under way.
This happened to a young man and woman after poor Jacob moved the canopy bed into the garden to be near his dead Ingeborg. For Oline heard the story again.
“With the help of Our Lord and me, people have the position their talents deserve. If you’re at Reinsnes, you don’t walk around with your nose in your armpit and diarrhea on your tongue.” That was the reference she gave them.
She had observed dear departed Ingeborg’s first marriage. Childless, secure, and gray. Like an eternal late-autumn day, without leaves, without snow, without fruitfulness. She wept only the appropriate tears when the husband disappeared at sea.
But she cherished the widow like a jewel. Tended her through sleepless nights with toddies made from black currant wine and a cinnamon stick. Placed glowing hot stones wrapped in wool cloths in the canopy bed without being asked.
Oline’s skepticism showed on her face the moment she got news of the arrival of Jacob, who was fifteen years younger than Inge-borg.
She had first heard about this man when her mistress mentioned having found a suitable coxswain while she was in Trondheim for a court hearing. The widow had a dispute with a tenant farmer regarding some bird rocks. The title to the property had been lost, and the farmer had laid claim to it.
Ingeborg won the case. And the coxswain came to Reinsnes. Wearing homemade boots and goatskin trousers that had belonged to a brother-in-law in M0re. And a leather hat, with a gray-flecked stocking cap inside, which he carried like a dead crow under his arm.
A coxswain who dressed like his crew and did not care for nautical finery.
The first nights he slept in the small guest room. But his wavy brown hair and dark eyes ignited sparks around him and attracted everyone’s attention. It was a long time since Reinsnes had housed a truly handsome man.
Lithe and well-built, he came into his own once he discarded the leather outfit in which he arrived. Cloth trousers appeared, with wide legs and an exotic cut. Along with a short red brocaded vest and a fine white linen shirt that had no collar and was open at the neck, as though it were the height of summer.
Jacob captured many important fortifications. One of the first things he did was to stride briskly into Oline’s large kitchen with two tender wild rabbits. Which he skinned himself.
He brought other gifts to the kitchen table as well. Direct from the great outside world. Small canvas and burlap bags containing coffee, tea, prunes, raisins, nuts, and citric acid for drinks and puddings.
With an easy naturalness, as if he never doubted who was in charge at Reinsnes, he laid his marvels on Oline’s well-scrubbed table.
And as he stood skinning the rabbits, it happened. Oline gave him her unrestricted love. And through all the years ahead she would keep it alive and warm, like baby ptarmigans in late June. Hers was the kind of love described in the Bible: It endured everything. Absolutely everything!
Mistress Ingeborg also had fallen in love. The pastor could see that too. He talked about love in the marriage ceremony and in his speech at the wedding dinner.
Ingeborg even agreed to have Jacob’s mother move to Reinsnes. Though all she knew about her mother-in-law was that she could not come to the wedding on three weeks’ notice. She lived abroad and owned many bookcases with polished glass doors. She would bring them when she moved to Nordland, as she said in her first letter.
People formed an idea of Karen Gronelv long before she arrived at Reinsnes. Being the widow of a merchant skipper from Trondheim, and the owner of bookcases, gave her esteem and respect. But the fact that she had lived abroad for years, without even a man at her side, showed she was not just any Trondheim woman.
Ingeborg became a mother
scarcely seven months after the wedding. To forestall comments from the pastor when her son was to be baptized so soon after her marriage, she mentioned that she had not had even a week to lose. She had been childless since her first marriage, at age eighteen, and now she was over forty. God would understand her eagerness.
The pastor nodded. He did not say it might seem to God that her haste had more to do with the young bridegroom than with eagerness to be a mother. Such words were not appropriate.
One did not say just anything to Ingeborg of Reinsnes. She gave generously to the poor. And two proud silver candlesticks in the church choir were inscribed from the Reinsnes family.
Instead he blessed her motherhood and told her to go in God’s peace and teach her son all that the Lord had commanded.
And it was decided that the child would become the first clergyman in the family.
Niels was fourteen years old, and Anders twelve, when their parents died in a shipwreck. Since the boys were Ingeborg’s distant relatives, they went to live with her.
After a while, it seemed they had always belonged there. They benefited from the lack of true heirs at Reinsnes.
But when this fellow named Jacob made Ingeborg fertile and blessed the estate with an heir, the foster sons’ youthful dreams of inheriting manorial rights to Reinsnes sank like an overturned boat.
Oline took care of them all, even during Ingeborg’s time. With her stolid devotion and untiring discipline.
She did not mind having two mistresses in the house, as long as they kept their peace and did not get in her way.
Jacob eventually became the most important person in her life. But if anyone had hinted even one word to that effect, it would have meant immediate dismissal.
Given her pride and her awareness of status, which were as strong as her belief in eternal life, she mourned genuinely, with red-rimmed eyes, when Ingeborg died.
Yet no one could have wished for a more beautiful death. All the signs were propitious. The lilacs burst into bloom the day of her funeral. And cloudberries were plentiful that fall.
Dina's Book Page 12