The Greenlanders - Jane Smiley [62]
Skuli looked not at all like Olaf. Where one was dark, the other was fair. Where one’s strength was in his legs and hips, the other’s was in his arms and shoulders. Where one cut his hair short and went bare-headed, the other wore his hair to his shoulders with a colorful cap as it was done in Norway, at the court. Where one spoke infrequently, and then only to make a joke, the other spoke often, about every subject. Where one had lived only at Gardar and at Gunnars Stead, the other had lived in many places and seen many more. Where one would be a Greenlander all of his life, following the same habits until he died, the other would soon be gone, as he had left before. Where one’s work was always to be done and redone through the round of the year, the other fashioned now this cunning knife handle, now that clever chess piece, things that could be taken up in the hand and looked on with pleasure over and over. Where one saw the homefield and the byre and the farmhouse and the dairy and the family with Margret among them, the other saw only Margret, or, at times, he didn’t see Margret at all, but instead her hair and her eyes and her hands and her breasts, or the swell of her hips and the sway of her gait, or even smaller things, such as the fall of her cloak at one moment or the turning of her head at another. After being with him, Margret, too, saw these things—her wrist, her skirt swinging about her, and she felt a puzzlement and an exhilaration that, as it faded, she yearned to feel again.
Skuli, too, was deeply curious about Margret Asgeirsdottir, and felt keenly the change that had occurred in her between the visit of Thorleif and the visit of Kollbein, so that she was like two beings to him, a woman and a ghost of a girl or a girl and a ghost of a woman. The result was that when he was not with her he wanted to see her and assuage his curiosity, but when he was with her his curiosity was not assuaged but heightened, so that he cataloged this and that about her, but in speaking of it, lost it, and had to speak of something else. He regretted that he was not a learned man, for he had heard poems written to ladies, extolling their virtues, but he could not remember them. And he had heard a sermon once, which took as its text the Sayings of King Solomon about the Church, but these, too, he had never learned, and he was ashamed to approach Sira Pall Hallvardsson with such a request, asking the priest to inflame him with Holy Writ.
In addition to this, Margret was so unlike his wife that when he was with the Greenland woman, he could not stop remembering the other. He remembered her, and his sons, as he had been unable to do by himself, and he longed for them more and more freshly, until it seemed that only Margret, who looked and acted nothing like his wife had done (for the one was teasing and talkative and the other quiet and serious) could assuage the stab and twist of such longing. The result was that in the spring, after the ground had warmed up and Margret’s herb gathering afforded her a daily excuse for forays into the hills, Skuli and Margret lay together as man and wife, and Margret admitted that she had never in fact been with Olaf in this way since she was given at her marriage feast by her brother Gunnar Asgeirsson.
Of Gunnar Asgeirsson and his wife Birgitta Lavransdottir there is this to say, that they ceased entirely to be