Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

‘What if Agnes has the same effect on Steina? Makes her go to the bad. Fills her head with wickedness.’

‘You’ve just said that Agnes hardly says a word.’

‘Yes, with me. But I can’t help but feel it’s another story with… Oh, don’t you mind.’

‘And Lauga?’ Ingibjörg asked thoughtfully.

Margrét tittered. ‘Oh, Lauga hates having her here. We all do, but Lauga refuses to sleep in the next bed. Watches her like a hawk. Upbraids Steina for looking Agnes’s way.’

Ingibjörg considered the shorter daughter, dutifully raking the hay into neat lines. Next to Lauga’s windrows, Steina’s rows looked as crooked as a child’s handwriting.

‘What does Jón say?’

Margrét snorted. ‘What does Jón ever say? If I raise it, he starts on about his duty to Blöndal. I notice he’s watchful, though. He asked me to keep the girls separate.’

‘Hard to do on a farm.’

‘Exactly. I can keep them as separate as Kristín keeps the milk and cream.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Kristín’s useless,’ Margrét said, matter-of-factly.

‘Just as well you’ve an extra pair of women’s hands about the place, then,’ Ingibjörg said practically. The two women fell into companionable silence.

I DREAMT OF THE EXECUTION block last night. I dreamt I was alone and crawling through the snow towards the dark stump. My hands and knees were numb from the ice, but I had no choice.

When I came upon the block, its surface was vast and smooth. I could smell the wood. It had none of the saltiness of driftwood, but was like bleeding sap, like blood. Sweeter, heavier.

In my dream I dragged myself up and held my head above it. It began to snow, and I thought to myself: ‘This is the silence before the drop.’ And then I wondered at the stump being there, the tree it might have been, when trees do not grow here. There is too much silence, I thought in my dream. Too many stones.

So I addressed the wood out loud. I said: ‘I will water you as though you still lived.’ And at this last word I woke.

The dream frightened me. Since the hay harvest I have slipped into something of my old life here, and I have forgotten to be angry. The dream reminded me of what will happen, of how fast the days are passing me by, and now, lying awake in a room full of strangers, gazing at the patterns of sticks and peat in the ceiling, I feel my heart turn over and over and over until I feel twisted in my gut.

I need to relieve myself. Trembling, I get out of bed and look about the floor for the pot. It’s under one of the workhands’ beds and nearly full, but there’s no time to empty it. My stockings are loose and slide to my ankles without difficulty, and I squat and direct a hot stream of piss into the pail, feeling the splash of it against my thigh. Sweat breaks out on my forehead.

I hope no one will wake up and see me, and I’m so anxious to finish and tuck the pot out of sight that I yank up my stockings before I’m quite done. A warm trickle runs down the inside of my leg as I push the pail away.

Why am I trembling like this? My knees are as weak as a marrow jelly and it is a relief to lie down. My heart gibbers. Natan always believed dreams meant something. Strange, for a man who could so easily laugh at the word of God, to trust instead in the simmering darkness of his own sleeping hours. He built his church from wives’ tales and the secret language of weather; saw the blinking eye of God in the habits of the sea, the swooping merlin, the gnashing teeth of his ewes. When he caught me knitting on the doorstep he accused me of lengthening the winter. ‘Do not think nature is not watchful of us,’ he warned me. ‘She is as awake as you and I.’ He smiled at me. Passed the smooth breadth of his palm over my forehead. ‘And as secretive.’

I thought I could be a servant here. Over a month has passed at Korná and already I have forgotten what will become of me. The days of work have soothed me, have given my body cause for rest, so that I’ve slept deeply, below the surface of dreams stricken with portent. Until now.

It’s true that I’m not one of them. All but the Reverend and Steina refuse to talk to me except in the briefest of ways. But how is that any different from before, when I was a low sort of workmaid, emptying the chamber pot as I will be asked to do in a few hours? Compared to Stóra-Borg this family has been kind.

But soon winter will come like a freak wave upon the shore — suddenly, with speed, obliterating the sun and warmth and leaving the land frozen to the core. Everything will be over so quickly. And the Reverend: how young he is, and how I still don’t know what to say to him. I thought he could help me as he helped me over the river. But talking to him only reminds me of how everything in my life has worked against me, and how unloved I have been.

I expected him to understand me from the start. I want him to understand me, but I’m a fool to think we speak the same tongue. I may as well be talking to him with a stone in my mouth, trying to find a language that we both understand.

The Reverend will not arrive from Breidabólstadur for another few hours — it’s still too early to rise. I fold my hands on top of the blanket and tell the strings of my heart to slacken, and think of what I will tell him.

Tóti wishes to hear about my family, but what I have told him has not been what he wants to hear. He must not be used to the gnarled family trees that grow in this valley, where the branches rope about one another, studded with thorns.

I haven’t told him about Jóas, or Helga. He might be interested to hear I have siblings. I can imagine his questions: Where are they now? Why don’t they visit you, Agnes?

Why, Reverend, I would say, the blood tie is not strong: they have different fathers apiece, and Helga is dead and buried. Jóas? Well, he’s not a man who can be put to anything, even a visit to a doomed sister.

Oh, Jóas. I cannot reconcile the dull-eyed man to the sweet blur of boy I was once allowed to love.

We were lugged along in the arms of a common mother. Which farms? Countless badstofas belonging to other men and their red-eyed wives, kind or desperate enough to hire a woman with three mouths, two of which screamed at night in hunger because they did not know it was useless.

Beinakelda first. Until I was three, they tell me. Just Mamma and I. I remember nothing. It’s all shadow.

Then Litla-Giljá. I don’t remember the farm, but I remember the man. Illugi the Black, they called him, my brother’s father. Sitting on the floor, rubbing my hands in the dirt, and then the man beside me, his eyes rolled back into his head and his body writhing on the ground like a landed fish, and all the women screaming to see the foam spurt from his mouth. Then, afterwards, the groans that came from his bed, and his sour-skinned wife pushing my face into her bony neck and saying, ‘Pray for him. Pray for him.’ Where was my mother? No doubt squatting over a chamber pot, searching for blood that would not come.

I remember the screaming. Illugi, healthy again, his great bear face roaring at his wife, who would not stop crying, and amidst them my Mamma in long skirts, throwing up on the ground.

Illugi died of that shaking sickness while he was fishing. They say he was drinking, then fell into a fit, upset the boat and drowned, tangled in his nets. Others say it was a fit punishment for a man who fished from elfish pools, but those were folks that had been at the wrong end of his drinking and fighting.

What would the Reverend make of all this?

Jóas Illugason, born at Brekkukot, the third farm. Five years old, I was allowed to hold the rag soaked in milk to his tiny salmon gums. The married folk there wanted to keep him and raise him with their own two children, and Mamma explained that I would be fostered to them too, that it would be for the best. For the next year we seven were a family, and I helped feed life into the small boy with hair as light as mine was dark. He smelt of snowmelt and fresh cream.