Marta Oulie: A Novel of Betrayal by Sigrid Undset
The next morning, when I came out to the street with my schoolbooks under my arm, Otto Oulie was standing on the corner. He looked deep into my eyes, took the essay books, and said: “To think that you’re willing to be my sweetheart, Marta!”
That made me burst out laughing. “Yes, just imagine!”
He later confided to me that he had spent a long time pondering what he should say. “I was so terrified when I got home, because I hadn’t managed to say anything!”
He met me again at two o’clock. The following day we ran into Henrik on Pilestrædet. Otto rushed toward him, saying, “Congratulate us, old boy!”
We took a walk together every day after school, and in the evening I would go to meet Otto at his office. We agreed that we would get married during the summer holidays. Otto had eighteen hundred kroner, and I would keep my position as a schoolteacher. It was all going to be splendid.
I WAS TAKEN COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE. But not by Otto. Rushing springs had opened up in the very core of my being. I sat and listened in rapt amazement to the new music during those long evenings after we had said good night to each other and I was home. I simply sat and listened.
Back then, the fact that we were so different was something that I viewed as a joy. I walked around in a state of perpetual, delighted astonishment that the two of us, who were so different, had found each other.
Our school’s drawing teacher was engaged to one of my former classmates. She came to visit me in my lodgings and plagued me to death with her talk of love.
“Oh, but isn’t it wonderful? Oh, to have someone who understands you completely. Someone you can talk to about everything—simply everything!”
She and her sweetheart would walk along Kirkeveien and talk about simply everything.
“You know what, Marta? In my opinion trust has to exist if there’s going to be anything ideal about love. If there’s no true spiritual connection, what does the whole thing matter? Tell me that!”
“L’amour sans phrase,” I said and laughed smugly. Love without words.
“Desire is what I call it, pure and simple. And it’s quite bestial—oh, forgive me!”
“I beg your pardon,” I said and laughed even harder.
L’AMOUR SANS PHRASE. I walked around repeating that to myself when I was alone.
Love, love . . . There was nothing else in life that was worth living for. I loved so fanatically that it never seemed possible to immerse myself enough in my own love.
And I could feel how this love, day by day, made me beautiful and lively and radiant, giving me an unexpected awareness of life, making me bold and merry and infinitely superior.
Oh, I had been only a precocious child up until then, and suddenly I was young.
Everything I had read and everything I had learned continued to give me joy, but I also felt that such things were merely a means, not a goal. They were weapons good to have as I made my way through life. But love—that was life itself.
I felt so vital back then that I never doubted my own love or Otto’s, or whether it was enough. I needed someone to love and who would love me—not a man who would “understand” me. Oh, how right I was then, with my contempt for the simple-minded, ill-mannered female howling for “understanding.” Those women just wanted a man to be like a watchmaker, tending to their tedious, distorted little brains and wasting his time by coddling their vanity.
Oh, we women who feel misunderstood. We could probably go through an entire regiment of men, and it would still do little good. It’s when the heart begins to wither, when we ourselves no longer understand, that we start to scream for understanding.
In those days I understood Otto. I didn’t fully recognize how clearly I saw him exactly the way he was. I demanded nothing from him that he wasn’t capable of giving. He hadn’t grown up in a home among anemic academics, or lived among Aunt Guletta’s mahogany furniture and beadwork. His father was a lumber dealer, and he was a businessman with all his heart and soul. He was also an athlete and outdoorsman and felt at home in his childhood surroundings, where I walked, enjoying the atmosphere and lighting, up there in “our” woods. Fresh air and sunshine flooded over me as I sat with my books, and God knows I pushed them aside and ran out into the bright world.
I don’t think any man was ever more gentle or kind toward a young girl he loved than Otto was in the midst of our ungovernable love. And that’s the way he has been in all the years that we’ve lived together.
If he had suspected that I didn’t think he understood me, I know he would have honestly and sincerely tried to meet me halfway: that is how exceedingly conscientious Otto is. Yet since he never did anything to hinder me, but, on the contrary, thought everything that I was interested in was so splendid—women’s rights and public education, and the like—he naturally assumed that everything was fine. He admired me as “furiously intelligent,” just as he admires everything that he loves: the children and me, Henrik, his parents and siblings, his home, garden, and cabin, everything that’s part of his world.
Later I grew annoyed with his constant, uncritical admiration of everything that belonged to him. But it was back then that I was right, when I saw only how handsome he was in his lively trust and joy.
Never mind that many a time he judged harshly and took a narrow-minded view when he didn’t understand something. He was vigorous and kind and strong, and then it’s easy to look only at the surface and not see deeper. Now I take a more lenient view of many things, but that’s because I too am guilty. When I was young and innocent I was a harsher judge.
We keep learning all our lives—but God help us what we learn. To understand everything is supposed to mean to forgive everything; if so, then may God spare me from those people who forgive too much. That’s merely something we say to console ourselves when life starts to leave its mark on us, and we have done various things that we would have been ashamed of in our better days. Or else we don’t have the courage and energy to live according to our own temperament, and so we relinquish some of our demands. But in the long run a person receives in accordance with what he demands. The young are single-minded. For them there is only one path to salvation, and if they are any good, that’s the road they take. Later you catch sight of other paths, and you think that one is in fact just as good as the other. Then you sit down and say: they’re all much the same. It’s easy to put the blame on tolerance and understanding when you no longer feel like doing anything with your life. But it takes single-mindedness and tenacity to achieve something, because aspirations are required, and that is the way of youth.
July 20, 1902
Today I sent the boys away for the first time. They’re going to stay with their Aunt Helene for a month. They looked so sweet in their new blue Norfolk jackets that I had made for them with all those pockets.
After we saw them off on the train, Ingrid and I went to visit Otto. I wanted to show him the little girl who looked so lovely. I had to console her a bit because she didn’t get to travel, and so she was allowed to wear her rose-colored dress with red bows in her shiny, copper-red curls. She looks good enough to eat, her skin is so radiant. I can hardly stop once I’ve started kissing her slender white neck, which vanishes inside the pink neckline of her dress. And those pretty lips and those big, light-brown eyes . . .
She bustled and scurried around us as Otto and I sat on a bench in the park and talked. He was in very good spirits today.
Never before has the view from up there been as beautiful as it was today. Maybe it was because of the sun. This miserable summer with its endless rain can make even healthy people feel ill. Below us the town and the big, open green slopes down near the fjord and the enclosing embrace of the low ridge of mountains, but so vast that it doesn’t feel confining. Today the fjord was quite bright, like silver, and a damp mist hovered over everything.
As we sat there, Otto and I, and he put his arm around me, the two of us slipped into a wistful feeling of happiness, gentle and delicate.
?
I had the same thought. I have a husband and children, after all. An infinite amount of joy and riches still awaits me. No doubt there will be difficult and trying times for us now that Otto is getting well—but so what? I think I’ll be happy just to be allowed to work and toil—and know that I can work for my beloved family. They will never know how far away from them I once strayed. I think that the memory of my confused wandering in a desolate and hopeless land, and the memory of the shame I brought upon myself, will gradually fade and sink to the bottom of my soul. It taught me something: that I must protect with ceaseless devotion every opportunity for warmth and happiness in our home. I have paid with the dearest of lessons, but not in vain. A woman’s purity is not merely a cliché: it’s an infinitely precious treasure. I know that now. Maybe now I’ll be able to give the others more than I ever could before; maybe I’ll be more attentive to every little stirring in their souls—most of all in the children.
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG GIRL I always thought that being a mother must be the greatest thing in the world. I thought it was so marvelous that when it happened to me, I could hardly believe it. When I was expecting Einar, I felt so overwhelmed that I was almost ashamed, because it really was as though there were nothing else in the world. The child I was carrying filled my thoughts night and day. I was determined to take it all very sensibly and naturally—good Lord, it’s what happens to every female, after all. Yet I also dreaded it terribly. I wanted it so much, with every fiber of my being, even if I had to die.
Although I love my children as dearly as any mother does, and although I think that I’ve loved them with such warmth and kept watch over every little development of their lives, there are still so many details that Otto noticed before I did, traits peculiar to each of them that he called to my attention. It’s true that I’ve also had interests other than my children, but I feel absolutely positive that those interests have never robbed them of the slightest bit of my care. That didn’t happen until I started to become so self-absorbed, examining what was missing from my own happiness. And they love me in return, more than most children love their parents, I think. Yet the relationship between them and Otto is much more spontaneous. I suppose that’s because he’s a more spontaneous person.
And they are so like him—Einar to such a degree that it’s comical, even in his mannerisms. I noticed so plainly his energy yesterday and today. He wanted to pack his own things and Halfred’s too, and when he stuffed the tickets and coin purse and handkerchief and padlocks into his pockets and repeated my instructions on what they were supposed to do when they changed trains in Hamar, he looked just like a miniature Otto.
Halfred doesn’t resemble his father as much. Nor does he have red hair. “He’s your son,” says Otto. “He’s always pondering the nature of things.” At any rate, he’s constantly asking questions, often about the oddest things, and he always wants to know “but why?” If I tell him not to ask so many questions, he only says, “But why shouldn’t I, Mother?”
Åse also resembles Otto. That makes me very uncomfortable. I’ve read about something like that in a French novel, but I didn’t think it was possible.
July 21, 1902
I went to visit Otto early today. We went out and sat on the same bench as yesterday. And as we were sitting there, along came Henrik.
He wanted to talk to Otto about something to do with the business. I got up to leave, but of course Otto wouldn’t hear of it. He said I might as well stay there and then go back to town with Henrik.
So all three of us walked along the garden path, talking. Otto had his arm in mine, and Henrik walked on the other side of me. Otto was cheerful and boisterous and complained that he was getting fat. “And here’s Marta, who always falls for thin people. I suppose you won’t want to be seen with me anymore, will you?”
I can’t help feeling furious that Henrik is able to keep himself under such tight control. That he can walk along and talk in such a natural manner with me and Otto.
Now I’m almost as unhappy as I was before. I had worked my way into a quietly joyous state of hope as I immersed myself in all the memories of our love. I had started to believe in the future. Then Henrik shows up. And he’s going to be part of any future. I can’t imagine how I could possibly avoid him.
July 22, 1902
Otto didn’t view our relationship the same way I did, back then. For me it was merely eroticism, but for him it was also a terribly serious responsibility.
I don’t think it ever occurred to me to tell him how I had lived my life before I met him, or what my thoughts or opinions had been. On those occasions when we talked about such things, it was Otto who initiated the discussion.
“Listen, Marta,” Otto said one day. “I’m not a Christian, per se.”
I remember that this was on a Sunday in early March. We were skiing in Nordmarken. Brilliant sunshine and the forest heavy with snow. In front of us was a small white meadow, a bog, crisscrossed with ski tracks. In the shadows the snow was deep violet. We sat down to rest and ate oranges. Right across from us a creek murmured beneath the ice, and the trees all around were completely covered with frost. Some were entirely frozen in thick, clear blocks of ice. I had pointed out to Otto a frozen sapling, asking him whether he thought it would ever sprout leaves again, and that’s what we had been talking about.
“Not a Christian, per se” was, by the way, an excellent way of putting it. He explained what he believed and didn’t believe in an earnest tone of voice, as if he expected to be contradicted. He thought it served no purpose for the pastors to come and demand that you should believe, just believe in everything it said in the Bible and then you would be saved. And if you used your common sense, you were condemned. You were supposed to believe in such things as the story of the devil creeping around among the apple trees and duping people into stealing, or the idea that God told Noah how he should build and tar his ship.
It was Otto’s common sense that had rebelled. He refused to believe what others taught him without questioning anything. In fact, he criticized them rather sharply. But to view Christianity as a religion in the same way as he viewed all other religions had never occurred to him. He concluded by saying: “But I do believe in God, of course.”
“Well, I don’t,” I said.
I proceeded to explain what I believed and didn’t believe: not in any kind of personal God, because “the world is much too unjust.”
“I’ve often thought the same thing,” said Otto. He was lying on his side in the snow and looking up at me, almost shocked.
“The world is much too big, Otto, and we’re too small. And life doesn’t take us into consideration.”
“Don’t you believe in eternal life, then?” asked Otto quietly.
“No.”
That evening, as we ended our day of skiing the way we ended all our excursions, with Otto having tea up in my room, he started talking about this topic again. He stayed much longer than usual—he, who was normally so meticulous about leaving at a “suitable hour.” When he left, he said, “Actually, I don’t think it’s good that you know so much more than I do, Marta.”
I felt a little ashamed after he left. We might never have talked about this topic—maybe not until after we were married. And this was partially because I had, in a way, underestimated Otto with the arrogance of the middle class toward a country boy. I’d witnessed a little of this in the relationship between Henrik and Otto; in many areas my cousin felt that he alone was entitled to an opinion, and he would practically brush Otto aside whenever he expressed his own view. Now that suddenly made me angry. We had no right to do that, neither he nor I. Oh, the stupid snobbishness of a graduate, scornful that Otto was “only” a businessman. That’s the way I had described him in my mind—as prelude to my joy over the splendid, wonderful outdoorsman, that strapping fel
I felt this even more strongly on another occasion later on.
This was shortly before our wedding. We had gone to see the apartment, and I remember that Otto was preoccupied with what we called the “Turkish corner,” which had a low bench fastened to the wall and a little table. There we would drink our coffee, and there were going to be tapestries covering the wall behind.
“Blue,” said Otto. “A proper, vivid cornflower blue. And lots of cushions in all shades of blue. Blue, that’s the color that suits you best.”
It had rained in the afternoon, and now, toward evening, the air was as humid and warm as in a greenhouse and saturated with the scent of flowers. The whole town was fragrant with chestnut blossoms and lilacs, and as we headed up Kirkeveien, it was quite overwhelming—that bitter smell of birch leaves and the scent from the flower gardens. I could distinctly make out the delicate perfume of peonies, reminiscent of polished wooden objects from Japan, but even stronger were the chestnuts and lilacs. I remember noticing how lovely the pale lavender lilacs looked against the heavy, blue-gray clouds that were retreating eastward.
I think the world was more beautiful that evening than I’ve ever seen it since. We reached the hill across from Vestre Aker parsonage. In the late afternoon sun everything was golden: the tufts of cloud in the blue sky and the gnats hovering over the creek below and the willow trees along the road. The meadow glistened with moisture in the sunlight, as did the crowns of the trees, dripping with sparkling droplets, as well as the old blue tile roof of the parsonage. Over the garden fence hung white lilacs, and the telephone wires ran past, glittering gold, like the strings of a great golden harp.
We went into the grove across from the parsonage. It has always been one of my favorite places, that little grove on the Blindern estate with the walled cemetery up on the hill. Back then I thought the circular stone enclosure looked like the ruins of a castle, and in the delicate grass beneath the leafy trees grew the fragile, pale green herbs called moschatel.