“It’ll be a spring baby, then,” he said, and held her away from him.
“Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“We’ve no food here,” he said. “But I can go down and borrow a bit from our neighbor. I know him well. Just until we get on our feet.”
He went across and put on his shirt, pulled his braces over his shoulders, smiling all the while.
“I won’t be long,” he said, and left the room. She washed in the water he’d brought up while she was asleep, dressed, and went outside, just as he became lost among the trees that clothed the mound at the bottom of the slope on which the house stood.
The previous evening the darkness had been too great for her to make out anything but the contours of the terrain around the farm. What she hadn’t seen, she’d supplied with images from the ideas she’d formed earlier. Now, as the sunlight bathed the countryside, she saw it as it really was for the first time. The field, which in her mind had stretched so far, to a distant hillside, was no field at all, but a little patch of soil, perhaps sixty yards long and the same wide, thin and barren, broken up everywhere by small hummocks and projecting rocks. Before that, by the small tarn, the land was even more undulating. Wherever she turned, hummocks of bare mountain rock rose from the soil.
Even the house looked like a kind of rock, she thought. It was unpainted, with boards as gray as stone, with splits so large in places that you could put your hand into them. There was only one window in the entire north wall, and that was broken.
The barn, a stone’s throw from the house to the west, was in the same condition, unpainted too; and small, so small that you could hardly call it a barn.
She’d come to a poor smallholding.
That was the truth.
She’d become a poor man’s wife.
She walked across the farmyard and sat down on one of the rocks beyond it, lifted her face to the sun. This time she wouldn’t display her feelings. This time he wouldn’t be able to think she was whimsical, spoiled, or whatever else he thought when he looked at her like that.
When they’d eaten, Anna began to wash and clean the house, while Javan went to dig up the potatoes he’d planted with his brother that spring along the forest edge behind the barn. The pile of things she was throwing away grew each time Javan came past on his way to the cellar, and although she saw him stop a couple of times and gaze at something in the pile, as if he thought that not everything in it was fit to be tossed, he said nothing, just smiled and went on, or set down his buckets of potatoes and went over to hug her.
Her washing continued for several days, it wasn’t only the floors that needed scrubbing, but all the walls, and ceilings, and all the drawers and cupboards. She cleaned the few carpets she hadn’t discarded, all the tablecloths and all the curtains, these looked almost bashful she thought, suddenly hanging there in their original colors after all these years. As if they felt they were better than they ought to be.
In the evenings, when the day’s work was done, she took two buckets and a spade and walked across the field and into the forest on the other side, filled the buckets with earth, carried them down, and emptied them on the protruding rocks. She spent a couple of hours on this each evening. One bucket of earth made no difference, the little speck of black soil looked risible and useless, and if she raised her head and looked at all the other rocks that were there, rather like an archipelago, her project seemed even more doomed and ridiculous, and two buckets of earth made no difference, nor three, but at some point it would turn, at some point, if she just kept going long enough, the whole of the first rock would be covered, and then the next, and the next, and the next, until all the rocks on the whole farm would be covered, and then it would no longer resemble a poor man’s plot with barren, stony soil, but a proper farm.
The hours she spent with buckets in her hands were among her finest memories of that autumn. Even though she was tired after a long day, and her fingers were so stiff she could hardly close them around the handles, she experienced the world more profoundly than she did during the rest of the day: from within the forest’s dimness she could see how the country fit together, how it changed imperceptibly from one state to another, wooded hillsides, meadows, copses, fields, hummocks, escarpments. She saw how, at last, the land lowered itself gently down into the fjord, she saw the fjord, night glossy, plumb deep, she saw the mountain wall stand sheer on the other side, and she saw the sky arching over the earth with its twinkling stars.
Everything was peaceful.
Everything was good.
After standing like this leaning on her spade and looking out, her body steaming in the cold, clear autumn air, she continued filling the buckets and carrying them out onto the land for a while, because it gave her purpose, things were moving forward; in a few months it would look the way she’d imagined it.
At first Javan smiled at her undertaking. But when he realized it wasn’t just a passing fad, but something she’d eventually achieve, an anger began to smolder in him. She didn’t know him well enough to understand just what was going on. She first realized it one evening when he followed her out into the hallway and stood there merely watching her as she put her boots on. She thought he was being friendly and smiled at him when she stood up.
“I’m going out,” she said, put on her jacket and opened the door. The air outside was cold, the darkness thick, the stars clear, just as it had been all that autumn.
“Can you imagine what people think about what you’re doing?” he asked.
She went out into the farmyard, picked up the spade and the two buckets, turned to him.
“Does anybody care what I do?” she retorted.
“You want to make us better than we are,” he said. “That’s what you want. And if there’s one thing people are suspicious of, it’s that. Can’t you understand that?”
The last sentence was almost shouted, and she was frightened, it was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to her.
“The earth you’re spreading over the rocks, does nothing. It serves no purpose! Perhaps it looks good. But it isn’t good. Good things are useful. Nothing that isn’t useful is good. And you come along and start decorating the land! What could be more foolish than that! Decorating the land!”
She didn’t answer. She had tears in her eyes, but he couldn’t see them there in the darkness where she stood.
“Haven’t you got better things to do? Isn’t there enough work here already?” he said.
“I wouldn’t harp on about that too much if I were you,” she said, turned on her heel and walked up toward the forest.
He slammed the door shut behind her.
She learned a lot about him that first autumn. She learned that he worked grudgingly, he’d rather sit and chat with people. But work was something he had to do. And when he’d at last reconciled himself to it, and begun to work, it always progressed slowly. He took plenty of time, no matter what he was doing. As if the measure of it was more the time it took than the work itself. Putting out a net in the evening shouldn’t take long, it was only a matter of rowing out, casting the net and rowing back, but for Javan it took hours. The same thing when he drew it in the next morning. He would saunter down to the boathouse, have a chat if there was anyone there, row out, even his strokes were slow, she could see that from where she stood on the rise looking out across the fjord, bring in the net, and row back again. Then the net had to be cleaned. That took time. Then it had to be dried, and perhaps mended. All this while another chat was in full swing. And the fish? They had to be cleaned, salted or dried — except what they ate for dinner, for that was their staple, fish and potatoes, potatoes and fish. They possessed one cow, although the land would support at least four — the four stalls in the cow-house bore testimony to that as well — a scattering of hens, a small kitchen garden, a plot of potatoes, a few fruit trees, a dozen fruit bushes. That was all they had to live on. Anna was accustomed to better, but it was all right, they didn’t starve, but what wasn’t all right was what, to her horror, suddenly dawned on her one day: Javan was content with things just the way they were. Everything she wanted foundered on their lack of means, and she understood that. But they couldn’t just accept it meekly!