‘Is that hell?’ she asks Diinna. ‘And that heaven, and us in the middle?’
Diinna doesn’t translate to Varr. ‘It is all here.’
As winter loosens its grip on Vardø, and their food stores stand near empty, the sun heaves itself closer to the horizon. By the time Diinna and Erik’s baby is born, they will have days flooded with light.
Maren feels an uneasy rhythm take hold of Vardø, her time finding shape. Kirke, boathouse, housework, sleep. Though the lines are beginning to be drawn more starkly between Kirsten and Toril, Diinna and the others, they pull together as men rowing a boat. It is a closeness born of necessity: they need each other more than ever, especially as food begins to scarcen.
They receive some grain from Alta, scant tørrfisk from Kiberg. Sometimes sailors stop in the harbour, row ashore with sealskins and whale oil. Kirsten has no shame in talking to them, and manages a good deal, but they are running low on items to trade, and it is clear that when the time arrives to sow their fields, no help will come.
Maren uses the between hours of her days to walk the headland that she and Erik would play upon as children, the scrubby patches of heather healing after a sun-starved winter. They will be knee high before long, and the air will be so sweet with their scent as to make her teeth ache.
At night, the grief is harder to manage. The first time she picks up a needle, the hair on her arms rises and she drops it as though scalded. All her dreams are dark and full of water. She sees Erik caught in stoppered bottles and the gaping, sea-washed hole of her father’s arm: its white, white bone. The whale comes most of all, the dark hull of its body crashing through her mind and leaving nothing good, nothing living in its wake. Sometimes it swallows her whole, and sometimes it is beached and she lies with it, eye to eye, with her nostrils full of its stench.
Maren knows Mamma has nightmares too. But she doubts her mother wakes with salt on her tongue, the sea mottling her breath. Sometimes Maren wonders whether she brought this life upon them all with her wishing for time alone with Diinna and Mamma. For though Kiberg is close, and Alta not so far, no man has come to settle with them. Maren wanted time with women, and now all her days are so.
She starts to imagine that Vardø could go on for ever this way: a place without men, and still surviving. The cold is loosening its hold, and the bodies are in turn becoming soft. Once the thaw is root deep, they will bury their dead, and perhaps some of the rifts might be buried with them.
Maren aches for the feeling of soil beneath her fingernails, the weight of a spade in her hands, Erik and Pappa finally at rest, neat in their silver-birch shrouds. She checks the vegetable patch outside their home daily, scraping her nails across the ground.
•
Four months after the storm, the day her hand sinks into the dirt, she runs into kirke to declare they can dig at last. But the words catch in her throat: there is a man planted at the pulpit.
‘This is Pastor Nils Kurtsson,’ says Toril, voice reverent. ‘He is sent from Varanger. Praise God, we are not forgotten after all.’
The minister turns pale eyes upon Maren. He is built slight as a boy.
Ousted from her usual spot, Kirsten slides in beside Mamma and Maren, leans close to whisper in Maren’s ear.
‘I hope his sermons are not so weak as his chin.’
But they are, and Maren thinks he must have done something awful to be posted at Vardø. Pastor Kurtsson is reedy, obviously unused to life by the sea. He offers no words of comfort for their particular trials, and seems a little afraid of the roomful of women who arrive each Sabbath’s Day to fill his kirke. He scurries to his house next door after each final Amen.
The kirke newly sanctified, the women take to meeting on Wednesdays in Dag’s father’s house, Fru Olufsdatter reduced to a whisper in the rooms of her too-large home. The gossip is the same, but the women are more careful. As Toril had said, they are not forgotten, and Maren is sure she is not alone in her unease about what this might mean.
The week of his arrival, the minister writes for ten men from Kiberg, Edne’s brother-in-law among them, and Maren feels an unexpected envy when they come to bury the dead. It takes them two days to dig the graves, and with the nights’ darkness shortening they work late into them. They are loud, and laugh too much for their task. They sleep in the kirke, and lean on their spades to watch the women go by. Maren keeps her head down, but still she walks past the site to watch their progress hourly.
The graves are at the north-west side of the island, dark pit after dark pit, so many it makes Maren’s head spin. The soil is heaped beside, and as Maren watches from a safe distance, she imagines the ache in her arms, the dirt tasting like a coin in her mouth, the sweat coming hard from her. It doesn’t feel right, after all the women have seen, after gathering their men from the rocks and keeping vigil through the winter, to watch someone else dig the graves. She thinks Kirsten would agree with her, but doesn’t want a fuss. She wants her pappa and brother in the ground, the winter over, and the men from Kiberg gone.
On the morning of the third day, their dead men are brought out from the first boathouse, already smelling a little, stomachs swollen in their cloth shrouds stitched by Toril. They are laid beside the open graves, stark white against the freshly turned earth.
‘No coffins?’ asks one man, plucking at the shroud.
‘Forty dead,’ says another. ‘A lot of labour for a village of women.’
‘A shroud is harder work than a coffin,’ says Kirsten coolly, and Toril’s cheeks pinken in surprise. ‘And I’ll thank you not to touch my husband.’
Kirsten sits on the edge of the grave, and before Maren understands what she is doing, she has dropped down so only her head and shoulders emerge, arms outstretched.
The men stare wordlessly at one another, and so Kirsten takes her husband herself, and disappears from view as she lowers him down. The next they see of her, she is pulling herself up, her stockinged leg flashing as she climbs out of the grave.
Toril tuts and turns away, and one of the men laughs, but Kirsten only takes a handful of earth from the mound and drops it onto her husband. Then she walks straight past Maren, close enough so Maren can see the tears on her cheeks. Maren should reach out to her, say something, but her tongue feels useless as a pebble.
‘So she did love him,’ murmurs Mamma, and Maren has to bite back a retort. Any fool could tell Kirsten had loved her husband. She’d seen them often, walking together and laughing like friends. He took her to the fields and sometimes out on the sea. If she had gone with him the day of the storm, the women of Vardø would be even more lost than they are now.
Pastor Kurtsson moves forward to bless the grave. His jaw is tight, and Maren supposes he is embarrassed that Kirsten showed her boldness before these men. ‘May the mercies of God be upon you,’ he intones in his wavering voice, saying nothing much over the man he never knew.
‘Kirsten should not have done that.’ Diinna appears beside Maren, watching the minister. Her hand rests on her belly. The baby will come any day, and sorrow grips at Maren’s throat: her brother pressed beneath the dirt before his child even breathes. She has a sudden urge to reach out and touch Diinna, to feel the warmth of her stomach and the baby inside, but not even the Diinna of before would have tolerated it. This new Diinna is hard as stone, and Maren doesn’t dare ask.