Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
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Overview
Tamed only by her tutor, who is able to reach her through music and draw out her gift for mathematics, Dina remains private and closely guarded, while her unconventional behavior and erotic power enchant and ensnare those around her. At age sixteen, she is married off to Jacob, a wealthy fifty-year-old landowner, who later dies under odd circumstances. Wrestling with her two unappeased ghosts, Dina becomes mute and then emerges from her shock to run Jacob’s estate with an iron hand . . . until one day a mysterious stranger, the Russian wanderer Leo, enters her life and changes it forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628722574 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2011 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 985 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
In the thought of one who is at ease there is contempt for misfortune; it is ready for those whose feet slip.
— Job 12 : 5
I am Dina. Who is awakened by the screams. They stay in my head. Sometimes they gnaw at my body.
Hjertrud's image is split wide open. Like the belly of a slaughtered sheep. Her face is the screaming, where everything comes out.
It began with the sheriff bringing him along when he returned from the autumn Assembly session. The smith was a real find! From Trondheim. A magician at his trade.
Bendik could forge the most unusual things. Things that could be used in so many types of work.
He forged a device for the grinding wheel that would pour seven spoonfuls of water on a scythe blade for each ten turns of its crank. Made locks that stuck if someone who did not know the mechanism tried to open a door from the outside. And he also forged the most beautiful plows and fittings.
People called the smith Long Jaw.
The moment he arrived at the sheriff's estate, everyone understood why. He had a long and narrow face and two enormous eyes.
Dina, who had just turned five, raised her gray eyes when he entered the room, as if wanting to forestall him. She did not seem exactly frightened. There was just no need to become acquainted.
This dark-eyed man, who was said to be a gypsy, gazed at the sheriff's wife as if she were an expensive object he had purchased. And she obviously did not mind.
After a while, the sheriff wanted to stop giving the smith more work. He thought things were taking too long.
But Bendik remained under Hjertrud's gentle smile.
He forged ingenious locks for doors and cupboards, and the watering system for the grinding wheel. Finally, he forged new handles for the huge kettle in which the women boiled the laundry in lye.
Onto the handles he fastened a device that made it possible to tip the kettle forward, notch by notch, so the lye ran out gradually. The entire operation could be done easily, controlled by a lever on the kettle's hanger.
Now the women had no worry about maneuvering the frightening black pot. It could be lowered, turned, and tilted with miraculous ease, thanks to the smith's wonderful ingenuity.
One could stand on the floor and control the entire operation with no fear of getting near the steam or the boiling contents of the pot.
Dina followed her mother into the washhouse one day just before Christmas. It was a big washday. There were four women working, and a hired man to carry water.
The buckets filled with slush and ice were brought in and dumped into large barrels by the door with a cheerful splash. Later everything melted in the huge laundry kettle, and steam filled the room like a night fog.
The women wore only shifts with unbuttoned bodices. They swayed and splashed and gestured. Had bare feet in wooden shoes and rolled-up sleeves. Their hands were as red as newly scalded baby pigs.
Below their tight kerchiefs, their faces were covered with sweat. It ran in rivers down their cheeks and necks. Then flowed into larger riverbeds between their breasts, and disappeared into their damp clothing, down to the underground.
It was while Mistress Hjertrud was giving orders to one of the servant girls that Dina decided to look more closely at the mechanism that made everyone so proud.
The kettle was already boiling. The odor of lye was anesthetizing and familiar, like the smell of the toilet buckets in the upstairs hallway on warm summer mornings.
Dina clasped her small hands around the lever. Just to know how it felt.
In a flash Hjertrud saw the danger and rushed over.
Dina had not known enough to wrap a rag around her hand as the servants did. She burned herself badly and quickly pulled her hand back.
But the lever had already moved. Two notches down.
The angle, directed at the lowest point on the kettle, determined Hjertrud's fate.
The pot emptied the amount specified by the lever's position. Neither more nor less. Then it stopped. And continued boiling on its hanger.
The stream of lye first reached her face and breasts, with absolute precision. Then rapidly sent scalding rivers down the rest of her poor body.
They came rushing from everywhere. Pulled off Hjertrud's clothing.
Dina was inside fluttering steaming images. They showed large patches of skin and scalded flesh coming off with the clothing, which reeked of lye.
But half of her mother's face was spared. As though it were important that Hjertrud come to God the Father with sufficient face so that He could recognize her.
Dina shouted, "Mama!" But no one answered.
Hjertrud's own screaming was enough.
The pink opening spread and covered nearly all of her. She was glowing red. More and more, as they gradually pulled off her clothing and her skin accompanied it.
Someone poured bucket after bucket of icy water over her.
Finally, she sank to the rough wooden floor, and no one dared to help her up. You could no longer touch her. No one could reach her. For she had no surface.
Hjertrud's head tore open more and more. The screaming was newly sharpened knives. Which cut into everyone.
Someone took Dina into the yard. But the screams were in the outer walls too. Rattled in the windowpanes. Trembled in the ice crystals on the snow. Rose with the greasy smoke of the chimneys. The entire fjord listened. There was a faint pink stripe in the east. Lye had also spilled on the winter sky.
Dina was brought to a neighboring farm, where people stared at her. Intently. As though there were a crack in her that could be opened and searched.
One of the servant girls spoke baby talk to her and gave her honey straight from the jar. She ate too much and vomited on the kitchen floor. With disgust all over her face, the girl cleaned it up. Her scolding sounded like a frightened little magpie shrieking under the gable.
For three days, the sheriff's daughter stayed at the home of people she had never seen before. Who stared at her the whole time as if she were a creature from another planet.
Now and then she slept, because she could no longer endure all the eyes.
At last the sheriff's farmhand came to fetch her in a two-seated sleigh. Wrapped her well in a sheepskin rug and brought her home.
At the sheriff's estate, everything was silent.
Later, in the servants' quarters, when they had forgotten her under a table, she learned that Hjertrud had screamed for an entire day before she became senseless and died. Half of her face had no skin. Also, her neck, right arm, and stomach.
Dina was not sure what it meant to become senseless. But she knew what sense was.
And she also knew that Hjertrud had personified sense. Especially when Dina's father raged and shouted.
"Our wisdom is received from God. ... All gifts come from God. ... The Holy Scripture is the word of God. ... The Bible is the merciful gift of God." Hjertrud said such things every day.
That she died was not too bad. Her screaming, and that she did not have skin, were worse.
Because animals died too. On the sheriff's estate they always got new animals. Which resembled one another to the extent that they could be mistaken for one another. And which, in a way, were the same year after year.
But Hjertrud did not come again.
Dina carried around the image of Hjertrud as the split belly of a slaughtered sheep. For a long time.
Dina was very tall for her age. And strong. Strong enough to let go of her mother's death. But perhaps not strong enough to exist.
The others had command of words. Easily. Like oil on water. Reality existed in the words. The words were not for Dina. She was nobody.
• • •
Conversations about the "terrible thing" were forbidden. But still they occurred. Servants had the right to do precisely that, to talk in low voices about forbidden things. Suitably low voices. When children seemed to be sleeping angelically and one was not responsible for them.
It was said that Long Jaw never again forged ingenious mechanisms for wash kettles. He took the first boat south to Trondheim. With all his unfortunate, clattering tools in a chest. Reports preceded him. About the smith who forged objects that scalded people to death. They said he became a bit odd because of it. In fact, downright dangerous.
The sheriff had the smithy and the washhouse, including the chimney and stove, leveled to the ground.
It took four men with large sledgehammers to do the job. Four additional men carted the stones down to the old jetty, which was a breakwater for the pier. It was now several yards longer.
As soon as the frost left the ground, the sheriff had the plot seeded. From then on, the raspberry bushes grew wild and unrestrained.
During the summer he traveled to Bergen on Jacob Grønelv's cargo boat and stayed away until he had to attend the autumn Assembly session.
So Dina did not exchange a word with her father from the day she scalded her mother to death until he came back from the Assembly more than nine months later.
At that time, the maid told him Dina had stopped talking.
When the sheriff returned from the Assembly he found a wild bird. With eyes that no one could capture, hair that never was braided, and bare feet, even though there had been frost at night for some time.
She ate food wherever she happened to find it, and never sat at the table. She spent her days throwing stones at people who came to the estate.
Naturally, she often got boxed on the ears.
But in a way she controlled people. She could just throw a stone. And they would rush to her.
Dina slept several hours in the middle of the day. In a manger in the stable. The horses, who accepted her, carefully ate around her sleeping body. Or brushed their large muzzles against her momentarily to pull hay from beneath her.
• • •
She did not move a muscle when the sheriff's boat landed. Simply sat on a rock, dangling her long, thin legs.
Her toenails were incredibly long, with ingrained strips of dirt.
The servants could not manage her. The child simply refused to be in water. She would scream and escape out the door, even with two people trying to hold her. Nor would she go into the kitchen when anything was being cooked on the large black stove.
The two housemaids made excuses for each other. They were overworked. It was hard to get help. It was hard to control such a wild, motherless child.
She was so filthy that the sheriff did not know how to act. After a few days, he overcame his aversion. Tried to touch her stinking, snarling body to see if he could make contact and turn her into a Christian human being again. But he had to give up.
Besides, in his mind, he saw his unfortunate Hjertrud. Saw her poor, burned body. Heard her mad screams.
The fine German doll with a porcelain head was left lying where it had been unwrapped. In the middle of the table. Until the maid was ready to set the dinner table and asked what she should do with the doll.
"God knows!" said another servant, who was in charge. "Put it in little Dina's room."
Much later, a farmhand found the doll in the dungheap. Ruined almost to the point of being unrecognizable. But its discovery was a relief. There had been anxiety about the doll for several weeks. The sheriff had asked Dina about it. When she gave no sign of knowing its whereabouts, it was presumed lost. Everyone was under suspicion.
When the doll was found, the sheriff took Dina to task. Sternly demanded to know how the doll ended up in the dungheap.
Dina shrugged her shoulders and started to leave the room.
Then she was spanked. For the first time in her life. He put her over his knee and spanked her bare bottom. The hardened, cursed child bit his hand like a dog!
But something good came out of it. After that experience she always looked people straight in the eye. As though she wanted to know immediately whether they would hit her.
It was a long time before Dina received another present from the sheriff. To be precise, the next gift was the cello given at Mr. Lorch's request.
But Dina owned a small, shining mother-of-pearl shell, the size of her little finger. She kept it in a tobacco tin in an old shaving box.
Each evening she took it out and showed it to Hjertrud. Who sat with her face turned away to hide her disfigurement.
The shell had suddenly caught Dina's eye one day when she was walking on the beach at low tide.
It had tiny, gleaming pink grooves and was delicately multicolored at the lower part. And it changed colors according to the time of year.
In the lamplight it gave out a faint, shimmering glow. While in daylight, by the window, it lay in her hand like a small star. White and transparent.
It was the button in Hjertrud's heavenly kirtle. Which she had thrown down to her!
It would not do to miss Hjertrud. You could not miss somebody you had sent away yourself.
No one ever mentioned that it was she who started the tilting mechanism on the laundry kettle. But everyone knew. Including her father. He sat in the smoking parlor. Like the men in the old pictures on the walls. Big, imposing, serious. With an utterly flat face. He did not talk to her. Did not see her.
Dina was sent away to a cotter's farm called Helle. They had many children there and not much of anything else. So it was good they got a child in the house who yielded a profit.
The sheriff paid handsomely. In money, in flour, and in the reduced work required of the cotter.
The idea was that the child should learn to speak again. That it would be good for her to be with other children. And that the sheriff would avoid being reminded of poor Hjertrud's death every single day.
The people at Helle tried to approach little Dina, each in turn. But her world was not theirs.
She seemed to have the same relationship to them as she had to the birch trees outside the house, or the sheep that grazed on the twice-mown meadows in the fall. They were part of the physical landscape in which she lived. Nothing more.
Finally, they gave up and went back to their normal routine. She became part of their everyday life, like the animals, which required a minimum of care and otherwise managed by themselves.
She did not accept any of their overtures and rejected every attempt at human contact. And she did not speak when they talked to her.
When she was ten years old, the pastor took the sheriff to task. Urged him to bring his daughter home and give her the proper environment for her social status. She needed both upbringing and education, the pastor said.
The sheriff bowed his head and mumbled something to the effect that he had, in fact, been thinking along those lines himself.
Once again Dina was brought home in a two-seated sleigh. Just as mute as when she left, but with considerably more meat on her bones. Clean and presentable.
Dina was given a tutor who had the dignified name of Mr. Lorch and who did not know Hjertrud's story.
He had interrupted his music studies in Christiania to visit his dying father. But when his father died, no money remained for him to return to school.
Lorch taught Dina to read numbers and the alphabet.
Hjertrud's Bible, with its millions of complicated signs, was diligently put to use. And Dina's forefinger went along the lines like a Pied Piper, causing the small alphabet creatures to follow it.
Lorch brought with him an old cello. Wrapped in a felt blanket. Carried ashore like a large infant in secure arms.
One of the first things he did was to tune the instrument and play by heart a simple hymn.
Only the servants were in the house at the time. But they later told the details to anyone who wanted to know.
When Lorch began to play, Dina's gray eyes rolled as if she were about to faint. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she pulled at her fingers so the joints cracked in time with the music.
Mr. Lorch stopped in alarm when he saw how the music affected the child.
Then it happened. The miracle!
"More! Play more! Play more!" Dina cried out. The words were reality. She could say them. They existed for her. She existed.
He taught her the fingering. At first her hands were far too small. But she grew quickly. After a while she had mastered the instrument so well that Lorch found courage to suggest to the sheriff that Dina ought to have a cello.
"And just what would the girl do with a cello? She should learn to embroider instead!"
The tutor, who was outwardly frail and anxious but inwardly tough as an unopened nut, modestly pointed out that he could not teach Dina to embroider. But he could, on the other hand, teach her to play the cello.
That is how a cello, which cost many speciedaler, came into the house.
The sheriff wanted the instrument kept in the parlor so that visitors could clasp their hands in admiration.
But Dina had a different idea. The cello was to be kept in her room, on the second floor. For the first few days she carried it back upstairs each time her father ordered it moved to the parlor.
The sheriff soon tired of this. And an unspoken compromise was reached. Whenever cultured people or other important guests came to visit, the cello was brought downstairs. Dina was summoned from the stable, bathed, dressed in a long skirt and bodice, and required to play hymns.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dina's Book"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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