Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (52 page)

For the white-armed lady he waited long.

“Volundarkvitha,”
ca.
9th cent.

Inside the tiny white house, he sat at the head of the table, listening to the seagulls, his stare fettered from below by the white lace tablecloth, whose flower-whorled spiderweb knew how to trap his eyes, and occluded by the low-hanging lamp, whose candle never guttered within that scalloped breast of glass. Unblinkingly he peered through the windows curtained with white lace, and across the narrow lane at the other white houses. Again it began to rain. Silver drops clung to the windows.

He could hear somebody cutting wood.

In nearly every window of each of the other white houses he could see a potted plant beneath the white curtains. All of the pots were white. One window presented a narrow-necked green vase and a green watering can. He liked that window the best without knowing why.

Up the street came a man, who stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, and gazed right into the window. The one at the table wondered how deeply he could see, and when he would go away.

The man went away.

There was a white-haired old woman in white, bent over her walking stick, who used to pass by twice each day, first going left, then going right. She never raised her head. He grew fond of her, and then one morning she passed to the left and never returned again.

Closing his eyes, he heard rain splashing on the cobblestones. He looked up. Now the other white houses were going grey; the windy day was fading.

At night the rain prickled and pulsed down on the roofs of those little white houses, spattering loudly on the cobblestones, shining on the windows between the greenish-white curtains; now it sounded like marbles on the roof, and over the table the lamp began to twitch. The trees shone
almost day-green in the streetlights; the windows of the other white houses were black. He sat at the table staring.

At the center of the tablecloth's lace spiderweb lived the white spider named
Hungry,
who also waited; whenever the man tired and lowered his head, or found himself allured by one of the lovely white links of spider-chain, then, no matter how fiercely he struggled, bit by bit Hungry pulled his gaze inward. To a heartless stranger their contest might have appeared playful, for the man's head spiralled round and round. When Hungry had finally dragged him to the center, so that he must look upon his enemy, the battle was done; and the great spider, which had disguised itself as a many-whorled lace flower, rose up, leaped upon the man's face, and sucked all the life out of his eyes. Hungry was greedy, but not impatient, so it took longer than one might imagine before the last desiccated sinew of hand or foot had been reeled in through the eyesockets of the miserable skeleton that sat there. Even then, Hungry hesitated to go away, for his victim's brain endured within. But against the skull's forehead a magic jewel had been strapped—the gift of the woman called White Arms. Hungry could drink; any flesh he could suck until it liquefied, and retracted into his star-shaped mouth; and he could sting, but he could not bite, and so the jewel and the leather circlet which held it, being grooved into the bone itself, remained impervious to him. Thus after awhile Hungry grew sleepy, returned to the center of the tablecloth, and closed his red eyes. Then, slowly and wearily, stalks of nerve, meat and vein began to grow down from the man's brain, until he was whole again. As soon as he was able, he jerked his head up from the tablecloth. Hungry still slept, and therefore could not keep him. Because his heart regenerated last, the man was spared from his anguish until he sat upright. But even when he could not feel, he remained condemned to think. He thought considerably about Hungry, as one might imagine; and doubtless Hungry thought about him. They were neighbors, like those two women whom every day he saw chatting with a white picket fence between them.

A redhaired woman opened the white picket-gate, reached up, dreamily caressed a leaf from the maple at the side of her house, strode into her back garden where he could no longer see her, then presently emerged, lowering her head against the wind as she unlatched her picket-gate. Suddenly she raised her head and peeped into his window, the instant enduring more than long enough for him to read the horror on her face. To her, he was a skeleton hedged with fire. She strode quickly away, down the cobblestoned lane toward the harbor and the seagulls which he could never see. He owned one window at the lefthand edge of his vision, whose curtain's lace flowers and diamonds dulled down the white light. Waiting, sitting, he hoped that in the instant of framing herself there she would look back at him, even in horror. She did not, and never returned home.

Humiliated, he told himself: I hate the others who are not as I.

Sitting in the darkness, the hanging lamp now resembling a polished tuber or a skull in chains, he inhaled the ancient smell of the house, although his chest never moved, and he gazed out through the windows into the sloping, streetlit lane called Bergsmauet, whose cobblestones he could see only by day and only through the righthand window, his room leaking darkness through the triangular wounds between curtains; there the greenish light held its own. He studied the faint shining of streetlight and moonlight on the tablecloth. Just inward of the wave-patterned edge ran a zone of doubled columns adorned with berries and connected to each other by many thin cross-lacings; then came the girdle of wheel-flowers beyond which it was not safe to look; when he tired, and his head began to sink, he counted the horizontal stitches between the double columns; there were sixteen, and when he obtained a different number he knew that he was worn out, and then Hungry might get him. Heartsick, he sat among pallid self-assertions of the unlit candles, the lampshade, the well-mated borders of old prints in their dark frames on the wall, and the scaly, glistening anomaly of the one lace curtain which received the most streetlight; he awaited his lady with the white arms.

His white-armed lady had departed him at dusk, their shadows large against the pine wall upstairs when they stood kissing. Called away by a spell, she pulled off her black nightdress and stepped into her long blue dress. She promised to return whensoever she could, while for his part he swore to wait for her. Her shadow withdrew from his; and he followed her down the steep narrow stairs, bending his head. She undid her jewel and fastened it around his forehead. She unlocked the door. She was the one with white arms, the woman in the long narrow blue dress. She descended the three slate steps, the point of her fringed cape hanging down her back. He locked the door. He stood by the window watching her stride out of sight. Then he sat down at the table. On the instant of her arrival within the many-toothed gate fashioned by those who hate the light, he found himself fettered. She had been his bride. He awaited her, remembering the time when they used to make a shadow together.

Again the chain-hung lamp was shining, for it was day. He sat there, a skeleton at the table in the white house, never denying that his death was of his own making, but wearying of the eternal misery of his loneliness in that narrow white grave. The red gaze of Hungry burned his breast invisibly. White Arms did not come. Casting his heavy eyes upward, he felt newly shocked at the way that his face oozed and snarled in the glass of the antique mirror. Behind the picket fence, the neighbor's maples, still green in defiance of the season, began to sway. Hungry awaited him as patiently as ever a woman wefted her warp. He resisted. His neck could not endure his head's weight much longer. Bitterly he glared around the walls at the faded oval portraits, the life bleached out of those fog-white unsmiling faces. He closed his eyes, then quickly opened them. Already his head was tilting down, and the girdle of wheel-flowers ranged across the world. In terrified defiance he craned his head back up, barely in time, and stared out the window, awaiting his bride of the white arms. Had he been capable of locking his elbows on the table and cradling his chin in his interlocked hands, he could have held out longer. The misery grew up into his chest like cancer.

Among other women, whose hair was the color of sunset, of copper, of yellow butter, white butter or honey, or even as orange as egg yolk, White Arms was the rarest, for her hair was as gently white as the winter sun. When they went up the steep stairs, her breath tasted of sweet butter. The one window was on her side of the bed. His side was by the stairs; he gave her the window, because her arm grew utterly
white
where the autumn sun fell on it. By night the pallid extremities of the bed remained barely visible even to a long-accustomed gaze, the weak projection of the windowpanes on the wall no more than patterned deficiencies of the darkness, while some narrowly clotted form stood on the verge of stirring in the mirror's greyish obscurity, beside the black rectangular tombstone of the doorway to the bedroom which would have been their child's. Sometimes there was moonlight to brighten her arms while she lay beside him. Then the moon departed them, and they listened to the rain-wind plucking at the windows.

His head could no longer stay upright. He had already passed beyond the tablecloth's wave-patterned edge. Seeking to delay his inevitable progress through the zone of doubled columns by counting the fifteen or seventeen horizontal stitches between them, his glassy gaze nonetheless devolved through the girdle of wheel-flowers; and although he struggled to regain the front windows through which he might even then see White Arms returning to him, although he wished that it were day, for then the dull glare of the hanging lamp stimulated his consciousness by stinging his eyes, his wishes and intentions could not save him from meeting the stitch-bristling lacy white arms of Hungry, which rose up at once to grip his face.

Now it was autumn again, or remained so, the sky as faint a blue as the veins in his white-armed lady's neck; and he had cohered once more; even his heart must have taken new root behind his breastbone, for hate and anguish pressed there. This time, he said to himself, I will hold out
and hold out. Hungry can do nothing by himself. It is my weakness which empowers him. I will try to starve him.

Closing his eyes, for the first time since she had gone he squeezed away all memories and hopes of the white-armed woman, forgetting her in her long blue narrow dress which the sky sometimes matched, so that he grew as still as those potted flowers which looked out the window at the whipping leaves of autumn, his death a barely perceptible nausea, forgetting her whiteness in her black nightdress when she lay beside him upstairs in that bedroom as rawboarded as a coffin, and her white arms, her white arms, and her white hand sleeping across the breast of that sad black dress so sweet with her smell, and the way that when raindrops struck the dark harbor their compact white ripples rode the waves for a good instant, becoming as immovable as the wall built of clay bones, the silvery sun greying down the white picket fence across the lane even as it yellow-stained the lace curtains, and something struggling to get at him, caressing him like that breeze that springs up before an autumn rain, ruffling the seagulls' feathers; he knew not whether it was Hungry or the woman with the white arms; his determined refusal to remember her resembled some lichened stone disk with a hole bored through it; now he had forgotten even her white arms, considering only Hungry, commanding himself: I must starve Hungry, his stone skull tilting, the zone of doubled columns fleering at him like white riverweeds in the current, his misery withering in his breast, Hungry's red gaze stinging him, and there was someone whom he longed to remember in order to return meaning to his waiting, but he craned his skull up and back until his eyes were clear of even the wave-patterned edge, fixing his mind on Hungry, dying to kill Hungry, his own red eyes closing, his skull creaking forward, the lace tablecloth writhing into a hypnotizing lattice of hooks whose long necks looped and snaked across one another in a fashion no woman could weave; and at last his forehead struck the table.

He opened his eyes. In the center of the tablecloth was nothing but another white whorl, slightly larger than the flowers, eyeless now, and fangless.

Now he could rest while he awaited his white-armed bride.

He rose, and it was night. He unlocked the door, but descended only one step. Standing in the chilly rain, he gazed down the slant of grey cobbles at the black harbor. Had it gone dry, he would not have cared. Inhaling the various freshnesses of unseen stormclouds, he descended the second step, looking up and down the street for her, then hesitated, anxious out of habit, as if Hungry could still harm him. His tired gaze began to creep down toward the street, as if he were seeking the footprints of this white-armed woman who had gone so long ago. Going backward, he returned inside and shut the door, refraining from locking it in case she had lost her key. Awaiting her, he would sleep.

So he ascended the three full stairs, then turned the corner landing and the seven steep stairs (his heels projected into space when he climbed them), white autumn light now melting the green banister, because it must have been day; at the top he turned one more perpendicular on the bare pine floor and took the last raw pinewood step to the chamber with the sloping unpainted ceiling of smooth planks and cracked beams where on her side of their bed she lay on her back, rotten and grinning in the rags of her black nightdress, her eyesockets spuriously astonished that within her ribcage nested the spider called
Thirsty.

That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?

Ecclesiastes, 7:24

Just as it is not unheard of for a church, of all places, to get haunted, so a pious heart may come to be tenanted by evil sometime after it has been lowered under the turf; but before anyone criticizes the mechanism which makes this possible, please remember that the least pleasant aspect of being dead, its monotonous
too-lateness,
practically demands to be circumvented by souls of the slightest self-respect; for what makes life bearable is our illusion that we can undo the mistakes of our condition, be they the sins we inflict on ourselves or the impoverishments of fate; why shouldn't postmortem aspirations be the same? Now it once happened that when an orphan from Kvitsøy named Astrid Audunsdottir, poor but pious, good-looking and of respectable family, got married off by her uncle, who had thus fulfilled his obligation of guardianship in obedience to the Preacher's writ,
Better is the end of a thing than its beginning
, she exchanged a chilly, hungry existence for miserable terror, her husband being a cruel man who never passed a day without beating her. Of him it was said that he had formerly been moderately openhanded, but before he lost his youth some form of epilepsy overcame him, worsening his character. Like most explanations of the inexplicable, this but described what it pretended to elucidate; nonetheless, it served to close the question, and Loden Gudmundsson did seem better left uninvestigated. His family was comfortably off, and until recently he had kept gathering in wealth; his factors shipped timber from Ryfylke, and he also owned a dry goods store on Breigata Street. Everyone agreed that he had approached Astrid's uncle decently enough; his white beard was as clean and delicate as pipesmoke from the best quality tobacco, and his house, it was said, wore three stained glass windows; so that although no one thought him the most winning sort, at least he could be
counted on to provide for the girl. One of the most likeable characteristics of a rich man, unsleeping activity, he certainly showed, even down to demanding the briefest possible engagement, such was his eagerness to enter the nuptial state, and of course Astrid's uncle expressed no objection. Strange to tell, once the marriage had been settled he retired from business, remarking that since he now possessed both money and a wife he would as soon keep to home. At first the neighbors thought they knew why, and shook their heads to learn that even so hardheaded a man, never mind his years, could be enslaved by lust. But when Astrid first came to church in Stavanger, they looked her over, and liked what they saw, for she was not only pretty, but meek. First of all, she spoke only when spoken to, and then in a whisper. Better yet, unlike other rich women, who wore wide white skirts or crisp black skirts as they flitted across the clean wide gravel of Nedre Holmegate, she kept to the patched clothes of a thrifty islander, for which the old people praised her. One might have supposed that it reflected poorly on Loden to let her go around so; on the other hand, all men would live more easily if their own wives came as cheap as Astrid Audunsdottir! Of this Astrid it is told that she remained all her life a wondrous good Christian, turning the other cheek and praying for her tormentors, so that even the minister used to wonder whether she were feebleminded. On Sundays it remained the custom for neighbors to greet each other after worship, commenting on the weather and suchlike important subjects; but Astrid, who seemed to be getting more shy by the month, preferred to sit inside the church with the Bible open on her lap until Loden or his sister, having finished whichever pleasantries they allowed themselves, came to take her away. While awaiting them she invariably pored over a particular verse, the one in which Jesus says:
To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.
What so simple a creature could see in that nobody knew, when the minister himself could barely explain it. Her head was always bowed, in signification of her condition; and as bad as it was to be Loden's chattel from dawn to dusk, her nights were worse; for once the servants had gone to bed, he became monstrous. The best recourse was to crouch utterly still and quiet on the stairs, for if all went well he might lie brooding upon their bed, with his eyes half closed and a sour smile on his face.
But should anything remind him of her, he would darken with rage. Summoning her with obscenities, he would slap her face, pull out her hair, scratch her breasts with his long fingernails, and that was just the beginning. On a winter night as black as an iron stove he knocked out two of her teeth. By the time she had lived with him for three years, the rest had gone the same way, and her remaining patches of hair were grey. Clasping her bluish-grey hands over her Bible, she bowed her bony head, praying for him, for his sister Magnhild, and for her faraway uncle's family. Now she began to be thought of as a woman with a secret—a secret which they all knew. The neighbors saw it all that summer afternoon Loden threw a brick into her face when she came home carrying water from the well. In spite of his kicks she managed to get to her feet, and turned straightaway back to the well, since the water had been spilled. That evening the minister paid them a call, but how it turned out nobody learned, except that he returned silent and shamed. For a fact, Astrid never complained. Sometimes she even smiled a little, when a breeze brought the clean smell of ocean which reminded her of Kvitsøy. Loan her a measure of flour and she'd return you double; so people said, although how could they know, since Astrid scarcely went out enough to borrow anything, and anyhow which supplies didn't Loden keep at his store? They all felt sorry for her, without a doubt. In her fourth year she became a gaunt and crooked old cripple; her fifth was her last. People said the shroud was stained around her head, but Magnhild, who never liked her, had done such a thorough job of sewing her in that nothing was certain; and for a fact, it was best not to cross that terrible family. Whatever Loden had held against her nobody knew; perhaps it was merely the revenge of age upon youth; for, having outlived her, he quickly declined, and before Easter they dug him down beside her. At any rate, no one had any doubt of heaven for Astrid Audunsdottir, at least so long as they recollected her (and you very well know that remembrances of compliant victims are inconvenient). Loden endured more substantially in their thoughts, having left tangible property which an intelligent man might get his hands on, for example by marrying Magnhild, sourpuss though she was; moreover, Loden had been by every measure more remarkable than his wife, who in the neighbors' anecdotes had always been old; whereas him they liked to describe as being more watchful than the
verger who keeps poor men awake at church—a truthful summation, whose horror was softened by the rains of time, until he became merely comic; and what do the living like to quaff more than humor, when they lack the means to buy brandy? Eventually they even grew proud of him. And so, turning away their minds from the friendless woman in the ground, the residents of Stavanger sought to live as best they could, and no one was there on that muffled clammy Sunday morning, the white sky treasuring up rain, orange leaves blowing down from the trees in the center of the square, so that moment by moment their branches grew more like black bones; and in the churchyard, a counterpart breeze blew underground, in the neighborhood of the Gudmundsson family's graves, the soil gelatinously quaking beneath dead leaves; and by afternoon the trees in the square appeared to grow out of an island of orange and yellow leaves upon that sea of grey cobblestones, which rippled whenever the churchyard did, although far less perceptibly; but by then the autumn rain was roaring and the wind was singing, which was why all the living who could manage it sat indoors watching the fingers of water on their windows vanish behind coffee-steam and soup-steam while they prayed and dreamed; as for Astrid, her black fingers now spread out against the sky, grubbing at the orange leaves until she had awakened sufficiently to clear them away from her face. And if you find her reemergence strange, I would say to you that she befitted that autumn, which tinctured everything in Stavanger just then, even in the Vågen, where each sloop's tawny sail resembled yellow leaves dropping from a tall and narrow tree.

So she came out, and looked at herself, and thought on the days of her girlhood when she had been yellow, pink and white like the flower called
guldå.
Her mother's hair had also been yellow, they said, but Astrid could not remember her. Indeed, how much do the dead understand of anything? Ask the Preacher, and he will tell you that this matter also is hidden. Between Astrid Audunsdottir and the living past lay a single spider-strand glittering over wet moss.

Magnhild's hair had darkened when she bore children and lightened again when she grew old, until it became as blonde as when she was a child. She was proud of her hair until Astrid came. How she had hated Astrid for her shining yellow hair! Now Astrid was dead, as were all Magnhild's children. She lived alone with one servant in her dead brother's house, whose routine continued as in his time, except that the inmates burned candles more freely nowadays; Loden had never permitted anyone but himself to expend tallow.

Like most of us who have committed cruelties, Magnhild got through life by not thinking about them. On the occasions when that shield slipped aside, she could thrust out with sharp reasons and justifications; and when those failed, she simply needed to envision Astrid before her, in order to be renewed in her hatred. Just as a man who hates dogs might correctly anathematize their greed, their odor when wet, and their enthusiasm for rolling in filth, without yet explaining, even to himself, why he must hurt them at any chance, so did Magnhild cherish up her reasons as blackly distinct as the hymn numbers posted on the cathedral's wooden board, unlike Loden, who had never stooped to explanations. In brief, she despised Astrid because she loved her brother; and how he could be loveable to her and why he hated Astrid from the instant she belonged to him are two more of the Preacher's far-off and deep things.

Magnhild was in some respects an excellent woman. Her greatest pleasure lay in hearing the choir's melodies echoing and blending until they seemed to butter the cold stone pillars of the church. On that evening, which Marianne had off, Magnhild felt ill and cold, so she went to bed early, listening to the rain and that freshening autumnal wind. The beauty and comfort of the hymns she had sung in her life nourished her as she lay there reading her Bible, and presently she slept. But just before she began to dream, she made the error of remembering a certain pretty girl of long ago, who once slipped into the Domkirke to hear her neighbors at choir practice; in those days Magnhild had had a fine contralto voice, whereas this pretty Anne Kristin, the one with the long yellow hair, could not sing, and married far away, so that Magnhild had forgotten her for many a year; and one cannot blame her for missing this
innocuous girl's susceptibility to being employed as a disguised emanation of Astrid, whom it was best never to think about at bedtime.

On that evening Magnhild was dreaming of a group of hooded women in long dresses carrying water from the well. In this well lay something poisonous, and these women, whoever they were, were coming to make her drink of it. She woke up with her heart rattling in her dry old chest.

The next dream proved worse; yes, here lies the tale of a woman who lives overlooking a graveyard and one dark night hears something scratching against her window; when she parts the curtains she finds herself looking into a hateful whitish-yellow face framed in long hair, and before she can even scream, the thing has smashed out the glass with a single furious blow of its skull; then its bony fingers reach through, gripping the ledge fast; it pulls up its shoulderblades, locks its skinny arms; and in another rush it is through and biting her to death.

Magnhild woke up screaming. She lit a candle, rose and went to the head of the stairs. Something was ascending toward her; perhaps it had an osprey's white neck and dark breast. No, its breasts were as pallid as the autumn cabbages which they sell in the street near the cathedral. As for hair, there seemed to be none. It opened out long black rakes of fingers. It said: Magnhild, give me your hair, just for awhile. Magnhild, give me your hair.

With her mouth wide open, the old lady backed away, all the way into the wall, believing that she whispered the verse
I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers,
when in fact her tongue would not move. Gruesomely smiling (when it comes to ghosts, any expression is worse than none), the specter drew near to her, so that all her nightmares of her life grew as bright as the reflections of ships in the cold harbor. Its stench took root in her nostrils. She closed her eyes. But not seeing proved unendurable, so she looked, and found that the thing was upon her. Its eyes were red, its teeth had the chilly glitter of a stained glass image late in an autumn's day, and its groping fingers resembled the dark high ribs in the ceiling of the Domkirke. Magnhild now realized who it was.

It commenced to caress her head. The worst thing was the way it looked at her. Wherever it touched her, her tresses fell out. Once Magnhild had been utterly denuded, the ghost removed its skull, rolled it around the floor, and thus gathered up her hair unto itself. Replacing its death's-head
upon its spine, it rose, hovering near the ceiling and preening itself, as if it too were now one of those blue-eyed blonde Norwegian women who retain the beauty of health as they age. And it smiled with its withered black lips, which had once been pink like the bells of a
valurt
-flower.

When the dirt gave way in the Gudmundsson family plot, and several monuments upended themselves, the sexton took both helpers and commenced smoothing everything over as decently and rapidly as possible. By then Magnhild had already been dead for eighteen years, with the paint going grey on her rotting house, which no one could afford to buy; and several prominent men had erected a statue of Loden Gudmundsson, who inspired the rational modernization of timbercutting in this part of Rogaland. Around his gravestone the earth appeared especially disturbed. Feeling called upon to disprove a rumor that certain graves had been tampered with, the sexton fetched a crowbar, which turned out to be unnecessary in Loden's case, since the lid of his box had collapsed. Strange to relate, in place of the viscera which the ribcage had once contained there lay a hoard of old silver coins as variably irregular as scales of herring-skin. The sexton could not help remembering the verse which runs:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume . . . For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Magnhild and Astrid had been placed on either side of that wicked miser.