Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

‘Björn,’ I said, ‘the baby is here. Take the baby,’ and I moved it out from under the blankets and offered it to him.

He wouldn’t take it. ‘The baby is dead too,’ he said.

I looked down at what I held in my hands, and I saw that the baby had become still, and that it wasn’t warm any more. The blankets were only warm because I had pressed them to my own body. I started to cry. Kjartan saw the baby’s little blue face, with the dried blood still clinging to its cheek, and he saw that it didn’t move, and he began to whimper. Björn watched us. I became upset, and I put the baby on the bed, and threw myself down on the floor with my face in my hands. I was wailing, and I cried out, ‘I want to die too!’

‘Maybe you will,’ Björn replied. That was all he said to comfort me. ‘Maybe you will die too.’

I lay on the floor for a long time, screaming. I remember the wooden boards — the very same ones here by our feet now — were wet and smeared with my tears and the mess from my nose. I was angry at Björn, sitting on his bed in the darkness, with his head in his hands and not crying, not screaming, not telling me to get up and stop my tantrum. He was as frozen as the ground outside. And so I screamed and rolled on the floor until my eyes were swollen and my hands stung from slapping the wood. I howled like the blizzard outside, until I remembered Inga in the loft, and then I got up and ran out of the room, tripping on my skirts and falling on my knees. I climbed the stairs to the loft and ran inside.

In our loft there was a little window in the roof, above the beams. We normally stuffed the hole with cloth to keep out the rain and snow, but it had fallen out, and let in a little blue light, although the blizzard still stormed outside. It was extremely cold in the room. My breath floated out from me in a soft cloud. A great deal of snow had blown in, and it had melted into a large puddle on the floor, and I saw that puddle first, how it threw back the light admitted by the window, so that it was bright on the floor, like a looking glass. And then I saw Inga.

In the blue light of the room her blood looked purple. She lay on a narrow mattress of hay, over the woven wadmal I had given Björn earlier, except that the cloth was no longer white, but stained with blood. Her eyes were open and they reflected the light in moist glints that made me think she was still alive. I bent down to her and cried out ‘Mamma!’ and put my hand on her shoulder, but when I touched her I knew that she was dead. Her body had stiffened, and she was cold to touch.

Her blood was everywhere. Her nightgown seemed black with it, all over her legs and the bed, but her bare shoulders were smeared in it too, and I noticed her hands, which lay beside her, palms upturned, were covered in it, just like when she’d make sausage, letting the blood clot and straining it through linen. Her face was white, too white in the dim room, and her hair had slipped from her cap and was stiff over her forehead.

I won’t forget the smell. That room was filled with the smell of her blood, and the sharp, clean scent of the snow on the floorboards. It made me feel sick to breathe it in.

Inga’s nightgown was bunched about her waist, and so I pulled it, stiff with dried blood as it was, back down over her legs so that her body was not so naked. Then I kissed her slack mouth. Finally, I pulled off her cap and pushed my face into her hair. It was the only part of her that still smelt of my foster-mother and not the blood. I lay my body down next to hers and covered my face in her long hair, and breathed her in, for how many minutes I don’t know, until Jón pushed aside the curtain to the loft and picked me up, and carried me back downstairs to bed.

And when I next woke the blizzard had stopped.

This is what I tell the Reverend. I try to tell the story in the best way I know how. I let the words come as I knit, and I snatch little looks at the Reverend’s face, to see if he is moved.

I can feel the others listening. I can feel Steina and Margrét and Kristín and Lauga stretching their ears towards us in the shadowy corner, eating up this story like fresh butter and bread. Margrét and Lauga maybe thinking that it served me right, perhaps feeling sorry for me. Steina thinking I am like her — miserable, ignored. At fault.

But because I know the others are listening, I can’t ask the Reverend what I want to ask. I can’t say, Reverend, do you think that I’m here because when I was a child I said I wanted to die? Because, when I said it, I meant it. I pronounced it like a prayer. I hope I die . Did I author my own fate, then?

I want to ask the Reverend if he thinks I killed the baby. Did I hold her too tightly? But there is no right way to ask this question, and I don’t want to put more thoughts into these women’s heads. There are some things they should not hear.

It seems everyone I love is taken from me and buried in the ground, while I remain alone.

Good thing, then, that there is no one left to love. No one left to bury.

‘WHAT HAPPENED THEN?’ TÓTI ASKED. He realised that he had hardly breathed during Agnes’s story.

‘It’s strange,’ Agnes said, using her little finger to wind the wool about the needle head. ‘Most of the time when I think of when I was younger, everything is unclear. As though I were looking at things through smoked glass. But Inga’s death, and everything that came after it… I almost feel that it was yesterday.’

Across the room, a chair scraped. Margrét gave a muffled cough.

‘I remember that after Inga died Jón was sent to fetch Björn’s relatives,’ Agnes continued. ‘I can remember lying in my bed, watching my foster-father sit on the stool Inga had used for her spindle work. He was too big for its seat. Kjartan was in bed with me, and he was sleeping all hot and heavy on my shoulder. The wind had dropped and it was suddenly very quiet.

‘We eventually heard the clink of harness from the yard outside. Then Björn slowly rose to his feet and stepped towards my bed. He scooped my brother up with one arm so I could sit, and he told me to take the dead baby, wrap its face in a blanket and put it in the storeroom.

‘The baby seemed lighter dead than alive. I held it out from me and walked down the corridor in my stockings.

‘It was very chill in the storeroom. I could see the fog of my breath before me, and my forehead ached from cold. I covered the baby’s face with a corner of the cloth it was wrapped in and laid it upon a sack of dried cod heads. When I stepped back into the corridor, a blast of freezing air hit the side of my face, and I turned to see the door open, the faces of Björn’s brother, sister-in-law and their servant appearing from the murk outside. Their cheeks were wet and shiny from sleet.

‘I remember Uncle Ragnar and Jón carefully carrying Inga down from the loft while Björn was outside, attending to the sheep. It was my job to make sure they didn’t bump her head against the rungs of the ladder. They brought her into the badstofa and set her on the stripped bed. Aunt Rósa was in the kitchen heating some water, and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was going to clean my poor foster-mamma’s body. She wouldn’t let me watch. She let Kjartan play by her feet, and she ordered me to go upstairs to the loft and help her servant, Gudbjörg.

‘When I climbed the ladder I saw Gudbjörg scrubbing blood off the floorboards. The smell made me feel sick and I started to cry. Gudbjörg took me into her arms. “She’s gone to God now, Agnes. She’s safe.”

‘I sat on the floor with Gudbjörg’s shawl about me and watched the fat of her arms wobble as she knelt and scrubbed the boards. Gudbjörg wrung out the pinked water from the rag over and over again. She kept shaking her head, and sometimes she stopped to wipe her eyes.