The Hills Reply

by Tarjei Vesaas

  IT SEEMS SO TRIVIAL, but it doesn’t take much.

  Just walking up to fetch the milk churn early one morning can be a miracle.

  The scents are a part of it. They are forgotten and reappear, like old songs. The great song about scents cannot be learned by heart, but it accompanies you wherever you go.

  * * *

  —

  THE SUN CAME UP recently over the ridge, and is spilling over the hillside. You have come out of the house to fetch the milk churn from the ledge up by the road. It is summer.

  The scents matured during the hot day yesterday. Last night they hovered here acquiring a cool, intoxicating taste, but translucent and a little distant from us too. The sun renews it all in a moment.

  And not only renews, but creates for today. Every day something new at this hour. The greenwood quickens as it does in the song, and our own hillsides quicken too. It is all around us, it will never leave us. It is like an agreement about being here together.

  There are many things one would not want to miss. Just walking up to the road to fetch the milk churn in this teeming hour, before a new day in the heat-wave.

  The hour of becoming before full daylight. He who sleeps sins when he sleeps away this.

  * * *

  —

  FAMILIAR FARMYARD BIRDS fly up from the steps as you leave the house. Magpie and starling. Pretending to be afraid; not afraid at all. Out and about early. They settle on the nearest roof-tree, not the slightest bit scared. Simply looking to see whether anything has been dropped. The swallows are already sweeping the sky in endless pursuit; by evening they must be some of the most exhausted creatures in the world. Who could imagine that of a streamlined, floating swallow! In the morning you find joy, and the swallow itself seems born of blue air and joy.

  When you finally reach the main road the newly arrived milk churn is standing on the platform. The lane that leads up to it is a short one and makes a familiar crunching sound. It is on a hillside too. Nothing but hills. All of a sudden you feel the sun on your shoulders like a warm embrace.

  The sun-warmed earth with its blades of grass, its ants and its flowers makes the hillside breathe out mixed spices towards you. And mixed for today.

  Spices. Beyond all reason it makes you think of the cardamom-scented air in a pre-Christmas house when you were a child. In a snowed-under house in a snowed-under farmyard, a yard glittering with frost. There is no resemblance, but the wonderful enticement grips you, now as then.

  Beyond all reason. But it is good. A dizziness at being alive in the midst of everything that makes the earth a fine place to live in. From a rustling summer morning to cardamom.

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN THE GIRL on the road.

  She came walking along simply in order to round off the picture. Girls on the road. They belong.

  She belongs to the morning, walking long-legged, as if stepping in tall grass – I do not understand why. There is no grass on the crunching road. I cannot ask her, it is simply beautiful and right that she should walk like that, exactly like that. It would have been the same however she moved, I suppose. You can see she is walking wide-eyed because of the morning. Walking home in wonderment. Perhaps she has come from a dance somewhere and is happy. Stepping as if in tall grass.

  The birches lean towards each other above the lane as she passes; they meet above her head as if she were a new Bendik’s maid.1 As if in tall grass she walks, not into death, but towards life.

  * * *

  —

  FLOWERS AMONG THE STONES, and buds ready to open. The sun will pour down and the scents change as everything is awakened. You can see it already: never has there been such intense flowering on the hillsides as this year. As there will be, many have not yet blossomed. You are a part of this. You are meant to be here.

  The strong awareness of being part of it all. In wonderment you walk on the hillside, in a morning shower of strangeness, just to fetch the milk churn.

  1 Bendik and Aurolilja: a medieval Norwegian ballad of doomed love. The flowers planted on the lovers’ graves met and entwined overhead.

  The Melody

  A SHADOW OVER HER?

  No, none.

  Does he see no shadow on her?

  Not now.

  There has been no shadow for many years.

  No, and the dead cannot rise out of the earth to create one either. So there is none.

  * * *

  —

  THE LIGHT was not always so clear.

  During the time when we were in her care and growing up, it could darken a little, and shadows could speed past, and sorrows speed past. They could feel bitter. In fact they were tremendous fantasies. Clear light shines around her. We cannot claim to be able to point to a single stain. Perhaps it has been washed away because we do not want to know about it, cannot bear it, will not allow it.

  If anyone says it is not true, we are at once prepared with the answer that it is more than true, unshakeably true. And so it always will be. Do not come and say anything that creates shadows, face to face with such firm faith.

  * * *

  —

  BEAUTIFUL GIRLS.

  For a boy there is strong enchantment in the word alone. We heard it and were aware of it for years, without being clear about what it meant. Later we learned how mistakenly, to the point of absurdity, it could be used. How uncertain a judgement it was. How blind and superficial it could be. It was not an easy lesson to learn.

  But when we saw it lying thickly outside too, then we could not help ourselves. One was drawn towards it, and wanted to be drawn towards it. What was it? A state of well-being. An uplifting into something light, so it seemed, where one did not really belong, but was graciously allowed to stay for a little. It usually vanished quite quickly and was gone elsewhere.

  We listened tensely to this talk of beautiful girls, alongside our own thoughts. We had them for a good and obvious reason.

  At home there was an album bound in yellow leather, and in it there were beautiful girls. We often looked at it when the grown-ups were out of the room. But we saw most of them with indifference, we only looked at one of them.

  And we saw her alive every single day.

  The others in the album were her friends at the school she had attended as a grown girl. They were strangely dressed-up, these girls, in clothes that were different from those we were used to seeing on women. Most of them had piled up their hair, and all of them were smooth and pale, with skin like cream.

  We leafed past them until we came to the place we were looking for, to the only important one.

  Perhaps she was dressed up too, but no more than was just right. When we came to her in the pages of the album we did not say a word. We had habitual ways of talking about the others, and not particularly flattering ones either, making fun of things that differed too much from the way we thought they should be. Here we did nothing like that. We fell silent and looked.

  At her.

  She was just as she should be.

  In every way.

  But at the same time we saw something else that surprised us and worried us a little.

  This was how Mother had looked when she was a girl and utterly young. So exciting and so attractive. And so kind in every way, it seemed. And so incredibly soft – and we weren’t thinking about cream.

  Yes, but there was something in all this that was never mentioned. We did not wish to. We just thought it. We could hear her as we sat there thinking. She was as close as that, working on the other side of the door, clattering pots and kettles and pans, dishes and washing-up – there would be many workers to feed that day as usual. If she came as far as the door to keep an eye on the youngest her face was warm and perspiring; the day was hot beside the cooking stove.

  We sat with her beautiful album, and without a word, in the
greatest secrecy, we quietly compared the girl in the album with the woman of today with the pots and perspiration and one thing and another, that had at least begun to worry the eldest of us.

  For they were not exactly alike, these two girls who ought to have been so. The comparison told us this clearly enough. We looked, and kept silent.

  We looked at the photograph of the very young, vivacious girl for a long time and tried to discover how much of what we saw was still there. We discovered a good deal of it too. We were clever enough to see that. It’s about the same, we probably told ourselves. We did not understand the new values that had been added, and more than weighed up those that had gone. Occasionally the eldest, who had the responsibility, would exclaim “She is kind!” in an angry tone of voice.

  The younger ones sat with unaltered expressions.

  One had to cling to the page in the album, to the gentle young girl there.

  If we looked at the pictures together with people from outside the farm, we would point quickly and indifferently, informing with the outermost finger tip: “Mother.” Then leaf quickly on.

  “No, wait,” the outsider might say and leaf back. Then we would all look at her for a long time, and we were tense.

  “Indeed!” they said to us small boys. “Indeed!”

  A hint of what they put into that annoying “Indeed!” must have struck us. Surely they could have kept their mouths shut, they as well as other people?

  * * *

  IMMERSED IN THAT MELODY.

  What was it exactly?

  Something we had at home and did not understand.

  Outwardly it was the simple plucking that we did not pay much attention to, we who were born without much appreciation of music.

  Early winter darkness out of doors. An early winter’s night, a long time until bedtime.

  It was snowing out of doors. Snow, snow the whole day long, snow floating down invisibly and incessantly. We had no outside lamp.

  The living-room window pane squinted indifferently out into the snowstorm. The lamp indoors cared nothing for snowstorms and difficult walking conditions and unploughed, snowed-up roads. The oil lamp indoors burned, muted and cozy.

  But someone was going out tonight, in spite of the weather. Out to the music. Snow had never yet shut her out from the music that sang inside her.

  Under the lamp she is practicing her alto melody, plucking at a long wooden, stringed instrument, plucking through her homework. She will take the melody with her out into the snow and the darkness, her skis dragging heavy on her feet. Determined to reach the others with her melody this evening.

  We listen and we know this. We think it strange that she should want to go out in such weather.

  Her husband says, “Are you going out this evening?”

  She does not understand. She is filled with the melody.

  “Of course, why not? We’re going to sing.”

  “Yes, yes,” he says.

  He is lying over on the bed with a book in his hand, the tall master of the house. It is not a strenuous time of year; on the contrary there are long evenings when you can enjoy yourself with a book. It is possible to read, you are not too tired. And you have the energy to share the music, if you understand it. We are aware of how much better it is to be alive in the dark, cold winter snow, than in the busy summer with an aching body.

  He has read many books aloud to us, that severe man over there on the bed. To our great delight. But this evening he is reading to himself, since the melody is plinking.

  He has not finished with the subject of going out into the tiring snow.

  “In this weather?” he says.

  “It would have to be very bad,” she replies quickly.

  She is immersed in the melody. The rest of us do not know what it means. The man with the book cannot imagine it either. He is like his sons. There is a slight edge to his voice as he continues, “Well, I can’t make it out.”

  She tumbles out of the melody and says bitterly, “I know you can’t.”

  “No, I think one ought to rest when one has the chance.”

  He cannot be so very tired this evening, surely. But he always has a bad back to plague him and set limits.

  “It’s no use, whatever you say,” she tells him and puts an end to the little quarrel.

  Silence in the living-room. The melody has been shattered. The maid sits as if she did not exist at such moments. The rest of us, little as well as half grown, have heard similar exchanges many times. The eldest thinks, as so often before: What’s the matter with them?

  It shouldn’t be like this.

  Will he go with her? No.

  We understand what the talk is really skirting: the snowed-up road to the village. The man does not consider he can face going out into the storm to make a ski track over to the music. It is probably true that he is tired out and ought to rest his back. Over to the music – it’s not a matter of life and death to get there.

  He clears his throat.

  Is there more? We wait.

  “Well, well,” is all he says. It sounds like a kind of announcement of his intention to stay where he is.

  He takes up his book with a jerk, a favorite book that he has read many times. The plucking on the string has started again too.

  * * *

  —

  SHE GOES OUT into the chaos of snow, accompanied by the melody.

  The melody is all about her. The melody must never, never leave her.

  We are left sitting, but in a way we accompany her too. We are not afraid of anything happening to her. She has skis on her feet, and she is a good skier and accustomed to using them. The yellow album was given to her as a ski prize once. Everyone knows she will manage to get there in spite of the bad weather. And yet….

  Brush it aside.

  The melody goes before her in the darkness too.

  A strange thought, but you can see it clearly. Both of them are out there together.

  We glance at the tired, silent master of the house with his books. He has put the book down and is staring at something on the ceiling.

  He is uncomfortable.

  We can see that. You learn to know the faces you have in front of you every single day. We are careful about what we say and do not say now.

  After a while he coughs, swings himself off the bed, slips into his boots, and goes out.

  Did he go after her? What a relief!

  No. He comes back in again at once. He has not put on his outdoor clothes either. We do not notice that in our initial astonishment.

  “Is it just as nasty outside?”

  The youngest asking in all innocence. His father answers quickly, “Nasty? Have I said it’s nasty? Oh no, I’ve seen much worse.”

  He looks searchingly at the child, takes off his boots and stretches out full length on the bed, letting the book lie.

  Go out after her? Oh no, he’s too stiff-necked to do that, the eldest one has learnt. It would have cost far too much to follow her, to overtake her and make a ski-track over that comparatively short distance.

  But what is it that comes over them sometimes?

  Easy to see her now: with the plinking melody for company, making her way through the drifts, steadily and surely. Over to the house with the many lamps and all the melodies. He sees her like this too, the man with the closed book.

  One understands a little more each day. But there is a dark core that one cannot crack – and that’s where the answer to the puzzle lies.

  We can only see her, simply and straightforwardly, making her way through the drifts. She arrives safely at her meeting with the melody. She goes in and is received with unreserved happiness. And now she is happy herself. And then we know nothing more until we see her again tomorrow morning.

  Then she is back in place, serving us food. Food for us everl
astingly, morning, noon and night. By the time she came home yesterday evening we were sleeping bundles, sailing in dreams above bottomless whirlpools.

  * * *

  —

  DID I SAY SIMPLY?

  Years later one thinks about such evenings, and sees her in the storm. No, not simply.

  The hidden thing that is the melody is about her: the man she is bound to; the children who have sprung from her womb; the hard, rigorous law that pulsates in the darkness together with the melody, the law about carrying out the duties one has taken upon oneself – all this is part of it too. She is in the middle of it all, forced by life.

  Someone like her, having made a promise, would probably never go back on it, as long as she had the strength.

  Her skis must be sinking deep into the new snow. She certainly won’t let it bother her. She has gone that way so many times that she doesn’t even see it. She is going to a brightly-lit room with music and friends filled with music. She will come as a bonus to their happiness, bringing her own alto melody with her.

  Those left at home cannot go with her, but she insists on having the music there. It shall be there as long as I am there in that house. My house shall be a house where there is room for the music too.

  This is probably what she is thinking as she moves along in the storm.

  I shall win him over, she must be thinking. I shall not give up, she must be thinking. I shall leave my mark on my home. Are we too dissimilar? perhaps she is thinking.

  If he had gone too and cleared a track for her she would have been immensely happy and immensely embarrassed. Perhaps mostly embarrassed.

  * * *

  THERE WERE MANY TREES in the farmyard. Splendid trees had stood there when the eldest was a little boy.

  When he was a little boy and could say out loud like an easy wish: Wind in my trees. Although he did not use those words exactly.