The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [238]
Johanna was still of an observing turn of mind, and Gunnar often found her gazing at him. Nor did she look away confused when he met her gaze, but only smiled and went about her business as if she’d done with looking at him. She was impartial about this steady, inquisitive gaze, bestowing it upon everyone, Kollgrim, Helga, Gunnar, the shepherds, the sheep, visitors, neighbors, the water of the fjord, the sky, the grass, the drying racks with their burden of reindeer meat and whale meat. She gazed at Gunnar’s writing so fixedly that he thought she must have learned to read, although the folk at Hestur Stead were not the reading sort. He asked her if she understood what the writing said. She smiled and shook her head, and said only that the patterns of the strokes set her to thinking. Gunnar read aloud what he had written:
“In these years, the farmers of Herjolfsnes were cut off more and more from the rest of the Greenlanders, but Snaebjorn Bjarnarson and the other principal landowners of the district refused to abandon their steadings and take up available steadings farther to the north.”
“You are writing of the Greenlanders, then,” said Johanna. “It seemed to me that you would be putting down tales such as those you relate to us in the evenings.”
“I would not be sorry to do that, but indeed, the pen goes so slowly that as I make the words, first I lose the thread of the tale, and then I lose the pleasure of the telling. Those tales are meant for speaking, perhaps, while these duller things are meant for writing down.”
“This must be like making cheese. What is made in a day is eaten in a moment.”
Such observations Gunnar found congenial and even amusing, but only he knew how to listen for them. Most often, when Johanna said something of this sort, Helga and Kollgrim, when he was about, looked puzzled and said nothing. Kollgrim had taken Finn’s place as the household’s representative to the year’s hunts, and in addition to this, he often went off by himself, after birds or hares or foxes, and his skills were good enough. Folk praised them and said that Kollgrim had recovered well from both his dunking and his peculiar nature as a child. Even so, Gunnar saw that confusion still sometimes overtook him, from his dunking, and an imp still looked out of his eyes once in a while, as if calculating the possibilities for mischief. Whatever Kollgrim had learned, though, and however they depended upon him for game and whalemeat, it was obvious to Gunnar that he was not yet the hunter that Hauk Gunnarsson had been, or Finn Thormodsson. No Greenlander was, anymore, just as no Greenlander had the wit to write down the tales folk knew, as they had once written down the tale of Atli, in verse, or the tale of Einar Sokkason and Bishop Arnald. When he suggested these things, Helga and Kollgrim smiled as if he were only an old man taking all virtue for the folk of his youth, but Birgitta knew that he was not mistaken, and said further that it was well for the Greenlanders that they knew not fully how things had declined for them since the days of their great-grandfathers, when men had had time enough and pleasure enough to build such a church as St. Birgitta’s, for example, with its arched window and fine glass brought from Bergen.
It was difficult not to be fond of Helga and not to enjoy her company, for she was affectionate and merry, and stubborn on only one subject, and that was the subject of marriage. Each year Gunnar took her to the Thing, and each year it was as if she had become a different person. She kept her eyes cast down, and spoke soberly and obediently to him in every particular. He went out among the other booths and sought for likely husbands, and when he saw a man who was well enough looking and found out about him that he had a good farm and some cows left and a boat, he would bring the fellow and his kinsmen back to his booth. There he would find Helga going solemnly about her business,