Mother Karen received a letter from Johan.
He offered his condolences and was politely sad. He did not want to make the trip home until after he had taken an important examination. And after all, his father’s funeral had already occurred.
Between the lines, Mother Karen read what she already knew. He had no understanding of how to run the business or the farm. He did not want to be stowed away in a warehouse and knew little about bookkeeping. But he would like an advance on his inheritance while he was studying to be a clergyman.
If he felt sorrow, he did not show it by a desire to carry on his father’s business.
Mother Karen read the letter aloud to Dina.
“My greetings and deepest sympathy to Dina in this difficult time,” were Johan’s closing words.
Chapter 2
And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he had spoken with him, a pillar of stone; and he poured out a drink offering on it, and poured oil on it. So Jacob called the name of the place where God had spoken with him, Bethel.
Then they journeyed from Bethel; and when they were still some distance from Ephrath, Rachel travailed, and she had hard labor. And when she was in her hard labor, the midwife said to her, “Fear not; for now you will have another son.”
And as her soul was departing (for she died) she called his name Bennoni [Son of My Pain]; but his father called his name Benjamin [Son of Happiness].
— Genesis 35 : 14-18
One day Mother Karen entered the master bedroom unexpectedly, without knocking. Dina was standing in the middle of the room, getting dressed.
It was obvious that she was pregnant. The sun shone through the tall windows and revealed everything to Mother Karen’s wise eyes. Dina had been a widow for five months.
The older woman was small and frail. Standing beside Dina’s large figure, she seemed more like a rare porcelain doll that always stood in a glass case with unrumpled hair than like a real human being of flesh and blood.
The wrinkles in her face were a delicate spiderweb that trembled in the sunshine when she went to the window to be closer to Our Lord as she gave thanks.
She stretched both hands toward the young woman. But Dina’s eyes were two columns of icy glacial water.
“Bless you, Dina, you’re going to have a little one!” she whispered, deeply moved.
Dina quickly drew on her skirt and held her blouse in front of herself protectively.
When the old woman showed no sign of leaving, Dina threateningly set one foot in front of the other. Small, determined steps.
And before Mother Karen knew it, she was standing in the dark hallway, facing a closed door.
Dina’s eyes haunted the old woman. Not only during the day but even in her sleep and her dreams. She did not know how to approach this self-isolated creature.
On the third day she tried, vainly, to make contact with Dina, she went to Oline in the kitchen. To get comfort and advice.
Oline was standing at the end of the table. Wearing two aprons. One over the other.
The plump body with the firm breasts had never nursed so much as a cat. Nonetheless, Oline spoke as if she were the primeval mother.
She unconsciously knew that she directed most things with her mere presence. With the drawn corners of her mouth and her pink, wrinkled forehead, brimming with kindness.
Oline thought the young wife needed to be left in peace. She needed good food! And warm lined slippers, instead of those terrible shoes in which she paced the drafty floor.
In Oline’s opinion, it was quite natural that Dina was angry at having a child when she did not have a husband at her side.
“Women get upset about less important things,” she said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. As though she could tell scores of similar stories.
You could not expect such a young wife to see either glory or blessings in perpetuating the family line, after what she had experienced.
So Oline reduced everything to a matter of time and loving care.
Those who thought Dina had left her room for good the day she searched the office were mistaken.
She went to the stable. And, to Mother Karen’s despair, she went riding. In her condition! But otherwise Dina stayed in her room. She ate in her room. Lived in her room.
When Mother Karen occasionally urged her to come down to the dining room, especially when they had guests, she just smiled and shook her head. Or she pretended not to hear.
Dina had resumed a childhood habit. She had eaten alone then too. Because her father could not stand to see her. Especially not while he was eating.
* * *
Tomas tried to catch Dina’s eye when she came to get Blackie to go riding. He helped her mount by linking his hands so she could use them as a stirrup. He had begun doing this when it was rumored she was pregnant.
“You should use a saddle … until everything is over” he once said, with a shy glance at her abdomen.
She did not need to answer. Since she was mute.
People openly discussed that Mistress Dina was pregnant, mute, and distant from everyone.
They felt sorry for old Mother Karen, who was trying to run the large estate. Even though she was over seventy and had trouble with her legs.
People said that when a doctor was summoned to cure her depression, Dina threw a chair at him because he had walked into her room without knocking.
He reportedly threatened Dina with the insane asylum if she did not behave herself. But she did not pay the least attention. She just gave the doctor such a terrible look that he found it safest to withdraw, without attempting to cure her.
Afterward, Mother Karen offered the doctor a glass of liqueur, and a wild-grouse dinner with wine and cigars, to compensate for the young wife’s conduct.
Alone in her room, Dina raged and slammed bureau drawers. Because her clothes no longer fit.
Her stomach and breasts had grown, giving the young body dimensions that would have attracted the attention and envy of those less well endowed. Had she appeared in public.
But she paced back and forth across the bedroom floor and had nothing to do with anyone or anything.
Finally, she allowed Mother Karen to come in for a while. And they sent for a seamstress from Strandsted.
The days flowed into one another. Forged together by dark nights. Heavy. Like sour smoke from an ill-tended hearth.
I am Dina, who reads in Hjertrud’s book. Through Hjertrud’s magnifying glass Because Christ is an unhappy creature who needs my help. He will never manage to save himself. Has twelve devoted men who clumsily try to assist him. Without success. They all are cowardly, afraid and helpless. Judas at least can count…. And he dares to be truly evil. But he seems to let himself be forced into a role. As if he does not have the sense to say he refuses to be the traitor just so the others do not have to be. …
Because Dina was unable to speak, people thought of her as being deaf too.
They chattered in the halls and behind her back. And since she made no sound to indicate that she heard what they said, it became a habit. As a result, Dina always knew what happened and what people thought.
She wrote down her brief orders and wishes. Using a slate pencil on her black slate. She sent purchase orders to the bookstore in Troms0.
The steamboat brought her crates of books. Which she opened herself with the crowbar lying near the stove.
The maid who emptied the ashes and brought firewood felt uneasy about having such a tool there.
But it was worse when the heavy, sinister-looking object was not in its accustomed place.
The books were about accounting and farm management. Sometimes Dina’s reading made her so furious that Oline thought the young wife had completely smashed the stove with the crowbar.
Dina sent for an accounting expert. For several hours a day, she sat in the warehouse office, getting a thorough explanation of the entire bookkeeping system.
It caused great tension between her and Niels. The young
accountant stayed for a month. Moved between the main house and the office like a watchdog.
“The next thing you know, Madam will probably start purchasing merchandise for the store,” Niels muttered to the young accountant, Petter Olesen, who was not the least tempted to participate in the sarcasm.
He had never had things as good as at Reinsnes. In fact, he would gladly have continued working there forever.
In the evenings he sat in the smoking parlor, puffing Jacob’s best meerschaum pipe as if he owned it.
But he had to do without Dina’s company. Except while he was teaching her bookkeeping. She stayed in her room. When she was not riding or writing orders and questions. Which were always absolutely clear.
No one could call her friendly. But since, she did not speak, she never said a harsh word either.
Mother Karen sparkled with pleasure because Dina showed such energy. But she also had the misfortune to reproach the young woman for not paying enough attention to her “condition.”
Dina responded with terrible cries that rattled the mirror and the windowpanes in the drawing room.
If there was one thing everyone at Reinsnes feared, it was when Dina leaned over the banister and emitted sounds that went straight to the marrow of all who were forced to listen.
There was no question whom Dina resembled, Oline said.
But for the most part, things were peaceful. Mother Karen often dozed under her woolen lap robe in the sitting room. She read, and reread, the dry letters that arrived regularly from Johan. Sometimes she read them aloud to Dina. She permitted herself an old age, because she saw the estate was operating somewhat.
For several months the guest rooms stood empty. The sorrow and strange behavior at Reinsnes was not exactly appealing. A lethargic mood settled on the large innkeeping and trading establishment.
However, the Mother Karen returned from the Lofoten Islands with good profits. Thanks to Anders. It became evident that many things for which Jacob had taken credit were due to Anders’s skills.
Everyone awaited, and talked about, the baby.
Of course, Dina could not talk about it. But she did not write about it on her slate either.
The maids, Thea and Annette, sewed tiny garments in their spare time, and Oline worried because the midwife lived so far away.
One damp day when thunder was in the air, it happened. The thing Mother Karen had feared.
Dina got thrown from her horse.
Fortunately, Tomas was watching from the fields. He ran so fast his lungs hurt and he tasted lead. Found her lying in a patch of budding lingonberry blossoms. Arms and legs outstretched. Crucified to the earth. Her face toward heaven, her eyes wide open.
The only injuries Tomas found were a cut on her forehead and a gash on her leg from a dry pine branch.
He headed for the summer barn because it was closest. And because Our Lord sent a sudden, malicious attack of thunder and pounding rain.
Blackie had been terrified by the first thunderclaps and had thrown Dina when she tried to calm him.
Tomas half carried her into the leaky barn. Helped her lie down on the old, dusty hay. For the time being. Because her labor pains had started, and he had an imminent birth on his hands.
But Tomas had once assisted his mother when she was in similar condition on their remote cotter’s farm. He knew what, needed to be done.
Blackie was impossible to ride. So Tomas ran to the main house for help.
There they immediately got busy with firewood, hot water, and sheets. The maids scrubbed their hands and followed Oline’s quick orders.
Dina should not be moved now, Tomas told them, turning his hat in his hands like a wheel.
Oline waddled up the hill toward the summer barn at an amazing pace. Tomas ran after her, pushing a loaded wheelbarrow.
The sky opened and dumped torrents of rain. Which threatened to inundate everything under the oilskin in the wheelbarrow.
“That’s enough!” Oline shouted into the air breathlessly. “We will not have a flood and a birth at the same time!”
She wanted to convince the forces of nature that now she was in command.
Everything was over within scarcely an hour.
Dina’s son was a sturdy, but small, baby. Born in a summer barn while the heavens descended and nourished all growing things.
Blackie stood by the barn door, his large head and stained teeth moving restlessly.
Had it not been that the whole thing was a miracle, and that Jacob died in November, Oline would have said this child was born prematurely.
But she laid the blame on the mother, who acted like a young girl when she was “in that condition.”
Dina did not scream while giving birth. Just lay with wide, staring eyes and moaned.
But when the baby was out and they were waiting for the afterbirth, she gave the most terrible scream they had ever heard.
Dina flailed her arms in the air, opened her mouth, and howled without restraint.
I am Dina who hears a scream build a nest in my head. It caulks my ears. In the washhouse at Fagemess, the steam seeps out of Hjertrud while she drains herself onto the floor. Then she collapses. Her face splits. Again and again. We drift away together. Far away …
Dina lay inert and silent.
Mother Karen, who was in the barn too, whimpered in despair.
But Oline slapped Dina’s cheeks so hard that the marks of her fingers remained like a scar.
And the scream poured from her again. As if it had been blocked for a thousand years. It mingled with the thin sound of a newborn baby’s cry.
They laid him at her breast. His name was Benjamin. He had dark hair. His eyes were old and black, like coal in the mountains.
The world held its breath. A sudden silence. A liberation.
Some minutes later, from the bloody sheets they heard an unexpected command:
“Shut the door! It’s cold!”
Dina said the words. Oline wiped her wrinkled forehead. Mother Karen folded her hands. The rain made its way through the sod roof. A wet, wary guest.
Tomas got the news as he sat on a box under a tree. Soaked to the skin without knowing it. At a respectful distance from the summer barn.
An amazed smile spread over his entire body. Reached his arms. They spread wide, and the rain filled his palms in an instant,
“What did you say?” he cried happily, when Oline gave him the news.
“Shut the door! It’s cold!” She laughed, hugging herself with rosy bare arms.
Laughter echoed between them. The old woman smiled in astonishment.
“Shut the door! It’s cold!” she muttered, and shook her head.
Dina was carried to the house in a heavy sail. Its four corners borne by Niels, a cowherd, a customer in the store, and Tomas. Anders was in Bergen.
Down the path to the courtyard, through the double doors, upstairs to the canopy bed in the master bedroom.
Only then did the midwife arrive, to make sure that everything had been done properly. She was extremely satisfied, and the midwife’s dram was served on silver trays in both the kitchen and the master bedroom.
Dina drank greedily, while the others sipped. Then she asked a maid to get the soaps in the chest of drawers. Her voice was the whine of unused block and tackle.
She placed the soaps in a circle around the child at her breast. Thirteen lavender- and violet-scented soaps. A magic circle of fragrance.
Soon they both were asleep.
Her milk would not come.
At first they fed the baby sugar water. But that would not do for long.
All the women’s backs perspired from the constant crying. After four days it became a continuous wheezing, interrupted by brief pauses when the exhausted infant dozed.
Dina was pale but remained aloof from the women’s fretting.
Finally, Tomas mentioned that a Lapp girl in the southern part of the parish had just given birth to a child that died.
Her name was
Stine. She had large eyes and a slim body, beautiful golden skin and high cheekbones.
Oline openly complained about having such a thin wet nurse. That Stine was Lapp made it even worse.
But her small breasts soon proved to be a source of the elixir of life. And her lean, sinewy body exuded tranquillity, as if created to lull a child.
She had lost her baby boy a few days before. But did not say a word about that. At first she was wary, wretched, and bursting with milk.
They knew she was unmarried, but nobody mentioned it.
In the heavy, fragrant July nights, Stine brought peace and equilibrium. Everything grew calmer.
A sweet smell of infant and milk emanated from Stine’s small room. Seeped through the hall and into the most hidden corners. Even in the servants’ quarters one caught the scent of woman and child, strange as that might seem.
Dina stayed in bed for seven days. Then she began pacing again. As actively as a goat climbing a mountainside.
“If it’s not the baby, then it’s the mistress herself,” sighed Oline.
It was a hot summer. In the buildings and in the courtyard. People on the estate began to believe everything could be as before, when Master Jacob was alive and a dram was offered to family and friends and cultured travelers from far and near.
Stine nursed the baby. And slipped to and fro like a shadow. Silently. Akin to the groundwater and the summer wind.
Oline told everyone not to mention that the baby was born in the summer barn.
Mother Karen remarked that the Lord Himself was born in a stable, and this might be a sign.
But Oline did not change her mind. She did not want anyone to hear about the barn. Nonetheless, people heard. Dina of Reinsnes had paraded among the guests wearing only pantalets on her wedding day, and now she had given birth in a haymow!
During the summer, Dina began wandering about the house.
Once when she was in the kitchen, she commented that Oline had dandruff on her shoulders.
Oline was deeply hurt. Hadn’t she delivered this depraved woman’s child in a barn? She glared at the beamed ceiling after Dina left, looking like a fierce dog chained at the doorstep.
Dina's Book Page 15