“I have no desire to do anything,” I said one day. “There’s nothing in life that has any value for me anymore, because I feel as if I’ve been dragged down into the muck, and I can’t get out of it. I’m telling you, I don’t even feel like pulling myself up anymore.”
When Henrik tried to take my hands, I furiously yanked them away. “Leave me alone!”
“That’s exactly what I’m not going to do. You have to pull yourself together. Of course, it’s easier to sit down and do nothing but stare into the past, but that’s utter suicide. You have to go on. In God’s name, let the dead stay buried, and take a look at what you need to do to keep on living—no matter how difficult it may be.
“What good do you think it would do if I sat down next to you to grieve? What do you think my life would be like then?
“I am by nature an honorable man. If someone had told me ten or twelve years ago that one day I would stand here, having done such and such . . . Don’t you think I would have sworn it was impossible? I have become quite an impoverished man, Marta. But what’s past is past, while the fact that I love you is now—and that is what I wish to build my life on.”
I wanted Henrik to say things like that. I wanted to see him pour out his love, see him dredge his very depths to find renewed courage to go on living, spill it all at my feet . . . until my incessant grief infected him and I could see and hear that he, too, was dispirited and despairing, and did not believe his own words.
And then at last he would leave, worn out, and I refused to give up until I had driven the life out of his love and stamped out every spark of courage and hope that he possessed.
YET HE KEPT COMING TO SEE ME. He even wanted us to get married. But now it was probably only because he thought it was his duty, so that he could offer as much as possible to me and the children.
As I watched Henrik’s love wither, I grew more and more unhappy. It wasn’t because I loved Henrik, but I realized that I was driving away the only person who cared about me. And I could see that I had done nothing but work to make him unhappy, and that once again I had understood nothing.
But I still couldn’t imagine breaking things off. I felt so ill-prepared to make my own way in the world with the children. To toil alone, year in and year out. I did not even dare think about that.
For the sake of the children I at last put an end to it. If I imagined the future—year after year going from the drudgery at school to the drudgery at home—I was filled with dread. If I thought about how it would be to live with Henrik, in the home we would share with Otto’s and my children, and about how I would have to lie and conceal all manner of things from them, then I didn’t dare do that either.
On that day in March when I plodded around Frogner Pond for such a long time, thinking until it seemed there was only one choice I could make to be able to live with myself and retain the slightest scrap of self-respect, I felt a kind of release. “After you’ve done that, you’ll have peace,” I thought. “You’ll see—things will be better.”
I don’t regret it. It’s one of the few things in my life that I don’t regret. But neither did it give me any joy. I feel just as much dread for the future. Things have not gotten any better.
I went to see Henrik. As I sat on the sofa near the balcony door and talked, and I looked at his pale, sad face in the twilight, I grew more and more unhappy. I don’t know what I said. I think I tried to explain what I’d been feeling all this time.
“It’s best if we break things off completely, Henrik. It won’t work for us to try to start life over together. We’ll just end up hurting each other.”
“Oh, no, no, no, Marta. Don’t say that—that’s not something you can know.”
“It’s all we’ve done until now,” I said.
Then Henrik grew still. “Nothing but hurt? Is that what you mean, Marta? Yes, I suppose you’re right. And yet . . . nothing but hurt?”
“Not you,” I swiftly replied. “But I’ve done nothing but cause harm. And now you don’t even love me anymore.”
“Yes, I do, Marta. Yet you may be partly right—lately I’ve thought sometimes that I might not love you anymore. But I was just tired. Now, when you come here and talk like this, I realize that I do love you. My dear, sweet . . . what would be left of me if I didn’t love you anymore?”
“But Henrik,” I said, “you can see how I am. I’ve always been so horrible to you, tormented you . . . and I don’t love you, I don’t love anyone anymore.”
Henrik buried his face in his hands, moaning softly as I spoke.
“Oh, yes, Marta, oh, yes . . . People may torment each other—but if they love each other . . .”
“Oh, Henrik, Henrik. This has to end! I’m tired, and you’re tired . . .”
“No, I’m not tired, never, ever, will I be tired because I love you so much . . .”
Suddenly he began showering me with caresses and pleas and threats, and I don’t know what else.
Finally I managed to tear myself away. He sat huddled on the sofa, sobbing, and I stood by the piano.
“You mustn’t be sad. I don’t deserve anyone’s love.”
“That may well be,” he said wearily, “but that doesn’t help me any. I can see that my love is no good, since I couldn’t make you love me in return. Because you haven’t even understood . . . It’s no use. I have no right. My love is completely worthless.”
“Henrik,” I said. “I know I ought to ask you to forgive me—ask you over and over to forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what? Because I love you, but you can’t make yourself love me? You’re not to blame for that.”
He turned away so that I wouldn’t see him weep. He went with me to the door and held my hands tightly.
“It’s best if I leave,” I said. “I’m ashamed of myself. I don’t deserve to hear a single word of farewell from you. I don’t deserve your sorrow that I’m leaving. And I can do nothing to help you. Let me go, Henrik!”
“Yes,” he said, letting go of my hands. “I know that you’re leaving. I can’t hold on to you any longer.”
And he released me, he let me go.
NO, I HAVEN’T BECOME ANY HAPPIER now that Henrik and I have parted ways. But I would have been just as unhappy if I had attempted a future with him.
It’s not true that the past is merely something that once happened long ago. At any rate, it’s not true for me.
That’s what I have been trying to do all along—to put my past behind me. Everything that has happened to me I’ve tried to see as a story that is over and done with.
But when I sit here in the evening and look back, I sometimes think that everything that happened, and all that remains visible to my eyes, is merely the outward effect. The fact that events have frozen in precisely those shapes is unimportant and almost coincidental. But underneath I can glimpse a shadow—something I can’t grasp, something I don’t even know what to name, a force of some kind.
It’s not frozen or dead. And no matter how my life turns out, how quietly it proceeds or what may occur . . . the shadow that I can’t name will follow me. It’s moving behind me, it’s breathing on me . . .
I’m tired of these useless words of mine. I use them to try and stanch the bleeding of my pain.
I remember something that happened at school during my first year as a teacher. One of the children was run down, right outside the school gate. She got shoved into the street and fell, and a beer wagon drove over her hand. She lay on the sofa in the teachers’ room while we waited for the doctor, and we struggled to bind the wound. The blood kept pouring out through all the towels we had wrapped around her hand. The whole time the poor girl flailed her other hand around, trying to tear off the bindings, as she kept screaming:
“I want to see my hand . . . I want to see how it looks.”
SIGRID UNDSET (1882–1949) was a prolific writer and one of Norway’s most beloved authors. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, primarily for her epic medieval novels Krist
in Lavransdatter and Olav Audunssøn (The Master of Hestviken in English). Her early novels and stories, often depicting educated but poor working women in the city, introduced a new style of realistic writing to Norwegian literature.
TIINA NUNNALLY has translated more than fifty works of fiction from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her translation of Kristin Lavransdatter, Volume III: The Cross, by Sigrid Undset, won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. She has been appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit and has been acknowledged by the Swedish Academy for her efforts on behalf of Scandinavian literature in the United States.
JANE SMILEY is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres and The Greenlanders, as well as four works of nonfiction. She has received the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, and in 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Sigrid Undset, Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal
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