The weight of water - Anita Shreve [15]
In one of the folders, various documents seem interspersed with students’ papers and what look to be, to judge from the titles, sermons. There is also a faded, flesh-colored box, a box expensive writing paper might once have come in. Inside the box are pages of writing — spidery writing in brown ink. The penmanship is ornate, almost impossible to make out, even if the words were in English, which they are not. The paper is pink at the edges, slightly stained in one corner. A water stain, I think. Or perhaps even a burn. It smells of mildew. I stare at the flowery writing, which when looked at as a whole makes a lovely, calligraphic design, and as I lift the pages out of the box, I discover that a second set of papers, paper-clipped together, is at the bottom of the box. These pages are written in pencil, on white-lined paper, and bear many erasure marks, which have been written over. They also bear one purple date stamp and several notations: Rec’d September 4, 1939, St. Olafs College library. Reed 14.2.40, Oslo, forwarded Marit GuUestad. Reed April J, 1942, Portsmouth Library, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
I look at the first set of papers and the second. I note the date at the beginning of each document. I study the signature at the end of the foreign papers and compare it to the printed name at the end of those written in English.
Maren Christensen Hontvedt.
I read two pages of the penciled translation and set it on my lap. I look at the date stamp and the notations, which seem to tell a story of their own: the discovery of a document written in Norwegian; an attempt to have a translation made by someone at St. Olafs College; the forwarding of that document to a translator in Oslo; the war intervening; the document and its translation belatedly sent to America and then relegated to a long-neglected folder in the Portsmouth Library. I take a deep breath and close my eyes.
Maren Hontvedt. The woman who survived the murders.
Maren Hontvedl’s Document
TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY MARIT GULLESTAD
19 September 1899, Laurvig
It is so please the Lord. I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of that incident which continues to haunt my humble footsteps, even in this country of my birth, far from those forbidding, granite islands on which a most unforgivable crime was committed against the persons whom I loved most dearly in all the world. I write this document, not in defense of myself, for what defense have those who still live, and may breathe and eat and partake of the Lord’s blessings, against those who have been so cruelly struck down and in such a way as I can hardly bear to recall? There is no defense, and I have no desire to put forth such. Though I must add here that I have found it a constant and continuous trial all these twenty-six years to have been, even by the most unscrupulous manner of persons, implicated in any small way in the horrors of 5 March 1873. These horrors have followed me across the ocean to my beloved Laurvig, which, before I returned a broken and barren woman, was untainted with any scandal, and was, for me, the pure and wondrous landscape of my most treasured childhood memories with my dear family, and which is where I will shortly die. And so I mean with these pages, written in my own hand, while there are some few wits remaining in my decrepit and weakening body, that the truth shall be known. I leave instructions for this document to be sent after my death into the care of John Hontvedt, who was once my husband and still remains so in the eyes of the Lord, and who resides at Sagamore Street in the town of Portsmouth in the state of New Hampshire in America.
The reader will need sometimes to forgive me in this self-imposed trial, for I find I am thinking, upon occasion, of strange and far-away occurrences, and am not altogether in control of my faculties and language, the former as a consequence of being fifty-two