Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 32 - Hunger

If she turned her head and looked around, all she could see was wooded, impassable wilderness. But she knew that their closest neighbours lived on other smallholdings, in clearings hidden here and there in the deep forest.

As the years passed, the memories faded and the remembered echoes of the children’s voices faded more and more. And finally there came a time when she could no longer hear them at all.

At first her siblings wrote with great enthusiasm about all the new and exciting things they were experiencing. “You should have been there, Marit, you would never have believed your eyes!” But as is often the case with such correspondences, they grew increasingly sparse. Marit ended up writing long, clumsy letters without receiving any response. She struggled after writing the first few lines, for there was so little to tell: nothing ever happened at Svelten. One day resembled the next.

In the end, the influx of letters shrank to little more than a single card at Christmas, addressed to their “Dear Father”: “We hope Marit is taking proper care of you and making sure that you’re getting enough to eat and feeling well.” Marit faithfully continued to write about the day-to-day chores, about her father’s leg sore that wouldn’t heal properly, about bad years for blueberry crops, about an owl that had settled on the roof.

She never said anything about the misery she was enduring. Or about the constant sense of dread she felt whenever she was in her father’s presence. Or about how he would gulp down every drop of the porridge without checking to see whether there was enough for her, or how he was always complaining about the food and her housekeeping. About old imagined injustices, about how he took out all his frustration and fury on Marit, who was, of course, never allowed to defend herself.

Of course, she might have empathized with her old father, who had been forsaken by his sons and abandoned, not altogether well, alone on that wretched smallholding! If only self-pity hadn’t been his favourite daily pastime. If there had ever been a time when she had been able to feel sympathy for him, he himself had succeeded in subduing those feelings entirely. And with time she learned to loathe his grumblings.

She grew up to become a rather sweet girl, but she didn’t dare believe so herself. When she turned seventeen it was not uncommon for one of the neighbour’s boys to turn up at Svelten hoping for an opportunity to talk to her. One of them managed to get as far as exchanging a few words with her over the fence. Until her father caught sight of them. Wildly egotistical in his fear of losing his housekeeper, he began to throw stones at the young man and shout curses, calling him a lecher and even worse. That boy never returned, but another one came a few years later and, very gallantly, asked for her hand, whereupon the father grabbed his rifle from the wall and pursued the young man all the way to the edge of the forest.

An old widower who had been looking for a young, gentle, skilled wife decided not to pursue the matter further with Marit after hearing about the incident with the rifle. In those difficult years of transition, when she was maturing into an adult, the restlessness she felt caused havoc in her body and mind. Perhaps she had liked one of the boys? Perhaps it had been painful to see him disappear from her life?

Since then the boys had stopped coming.

Her father stayed alive for twenty years after his other children left.

In his last years he was bedridden, irritable, demanding and increasingly senile.

Marit had run the little smallholding all by herself ever since she was ten years old. At first it went well, but once her father needed to be cared for twenty-four hours a day she was unable to perform all her duties on the main farm. Every time she had to touch her father she grew nauseated – that was how much she loathed him. She had to gather all the strength she had in her soul in order to take care of him properly. Every now and then she would wonder whether the loathing she felt for him was mutual. He had never harboured particularly warm feelings for any of his children, nor for anyone else for that matter, except himself, but he must have sensed her reluctance even though she made an effort to cover it up by speaking calmly and gently. The looks he gave her when she changed him were downright malicious, and he loved ordering her about just so that he could sense his own power and annoy her. Afterwards she would go out into the courtyard with her hands clenched and a painful lump in her throat.

Someone from the farmstead usually came a few times a month to fetch butter and cheese or other goods – for which, of course, she didn’t receive any money, as it was part of the rent! But now that she didn’t have time for haymaking or tending to the dairy, or the other duties connected with the farm, somebody from the farm would appear every now and then to fetch one animal after another as compensation.

Finally they had nothing to live off. Marit had to snatch an hour or two during the day every so often so that she could go to the neighbours and beg for some milk or some dry bread.

The farmer had been threatening to throw them out of Svelten for a long time.

The death of her father transformed her lonely life. Except that it was too late now. Everything was. Her father’s perpetual, malicious grumblings had left scars on her soul, and her face revealed fatigue, hunger and a sense of constant despondency.

On top of that she had the eviction hanging over her head.

She had lived such an isolated life that she had grown to shun human company. She didn’t know where she would go if the only place she knew in the world was taken away from her.

Very few people attended the funeral. Just a few neighbours, that was all. Marit had written to her siblings in America that their father was now dead and that she herself could no longer continue living at Svelten. She asked whether any of them could send her a little money so that she could buy some clothes and find somewhere to live, and enough so that she could manage the first few weeks in the new place. Then perhaps she could find a job. She hadn’t been feeling so well for the last two years and could do with seeing a doctor. Or perhaps she could travel to join them?

She never received an answer.

Marit stayed at home for as long as she could, waiting for a letter. She had nothing with which to start her new life. She had gradually been forced to sell all the objects that had been of any value at Svelten. Now she was living off whatever kernels of barley she was able to sweep up from the threshing floor, frozen cowberries in the forest and water from the well.

At the funeral the neighbours had said to one another: “She looks rather feeble, that Marit of Svelten. And to think, she was a nice-looking girl once!”

“Yes, but she’s bound to get better now that old grumbler is dead and gone.”

“Shh! Don’t speak ill of the dead!”

They shook their heads with concern at the scrawny-looking girl by the grave. She was nothing but skin and bones. But they didn’t give her much thought afterwards, for they all belonged to the same main farm and had concerns of their own.

For the past few years Marit had suffered from pains in her right side. And with time the pain came more frequently. And grew stronger.

On lonely nights, when hunger nagged her body and worry tormented her soul, the pain felt doubly strong. Then she was forced to lie on her side with her knees pulled all the way up to her chin, and moan quietly. Or she sat doubled up, listening with fear to her body’s signals indicating that something was terribly wrong. If these positions didn’t alleviate the pain, she would get up and, straining with the effort, pace back and forth, holding on to the edge of the bed and moving her hands from there to the back of the chair, then to the oven handle and back again. She didn’t dare to let go of her grip, not even for a single moment, because she had once been on the verge of fainting and she didn’t want to risk falling and end up lying on the floor, unable to get up – that much she knew.