The House In The Dark E-Book

Tarjei Vesaas

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Part allegory, part fable, The House In The Dark was written in secret during the German occupation of Norway, and gives a stirring picture of how a society struggled to stay united under the strain of being watched by their invaders. Unusual in Vesaas's oeuvre in that it depicts events in wider society, The House In The Dark is nevertheless as powerful and rewarding as any novel by him

Leseprobe

The House in the Dark

Part allegory, part fable, The House In The Dark was written in secret during the German occupation of Norway, and gives a stirring picture of how a society struggled to stay united under the strain of being watched by their invaders.

TARJEI VESAAS was born on a farm in the small village of Vinje in Telemark, an isolated mountainous district of southern Norway, in 1897 and, having little taste for travel and an abiding love of his native countryside, died there in 1970 aged seventy-two. A modernist who wrote, against literary convention, in Nynorsk rather than the Danish-influenced literary language Bokmål, he is regarded as one of Norway’s greatest twentieth-century writers. The author of more than twenty-five novels, five books of poetry, plus plays and short stories, he was three times a Nobel Prize candidate, although he never won the laureate. He did, however, receive Scandinavia’s most important literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize. He first began writing in the 1920s, but he did not gain international recognition until the mid-1960s when Peter Owen first published his books in translation; since then they have appeared in many languages. Doris Lessing described The Ice Palace as a ‘truly beautiful book … poetic, delicate, unique, unforgettable, extra ordinary’. The other work of fiction which, together with this novel, is generally regarded as his best is The Birds. At the time of his death he was considered Scandinavia’s leading writer, and to this day coachloads of his fans go on pilgrimage to his farmhouse home.

CONTENTS

Translator’s Foreword

  1     In a Bewitched House

  2     High and Dry

  3     They Are Tunnelling Underground

  4     The Arrow Polisher

  5     The Brain

  6     A Glimpse inside the Stockade

  7     Frank and Freda

  8     The Sentry

  9     High and Dry

10     The Austere Face

11     The Dark

12     A Crossroads

13     On the Run

14     Inwards

15     The Heart through the Stone

16     Afterwards

17     Drawing Lots

18     The Finger

19     Acceptance

20     Henry and the Chorus

21     This Is Where They Are

In Memory of Stig

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

The House in the Dark was written in Norway during the Second World War in unusual circumstances. Tarjei Vesaas had already recorded his interpretation of the unleashing of violence on the world in 1939 in his novel The Seed, published in 1940.1 By 1945 no one doubted that the war would soon be over, but in Occupied Norway there was much uncertainty as to how it would end. In her memoirs of her life with Vesaas,2 Halldis Moren Vesaas, herself a poet and writer, relates the details of the novel’s composition and the effect on her husband and herself of the news of the ending of hostilities:

‘Tarjei, who was always inclined to imagine the worst, believed that the final struggle in Norway would be severe, and did not doubt that he would be taking part in it himself. That winter and spring of 1945 he worked more steadily than he had ever done before, or would do later. Normally he never worked at night, but now I used to wake in the small hours and see the light of his desk lamp still shining under the study door…. As usual he made little reference to what he was doing. But I understood that it must be something important.

‘One Sunday in early spring we invited our local vicar, Christen Raustøl, to come over. When the children had been put to bed that evening, Tarjei went up to his room and brought down a few pages of manuscript which he began reading to us. He seldom used to read aloud from anything he was working on, so this was a little out of the ordinary.

‘And what he read to us was out of the ordinary. It was the chapter from The House in the Dark that describes the meeting between the Resistance leader, Stig, and the clergyman, “the man who holds this extraordinary and impossible office”. I don’t think we said a word when he had finished. I don’t suppose we were able to find any…. We sat mute, moved, full of wonder. What we had heard was taken directly from the days, the dark night, through which we were living, and yet it touched on timeless problems. And how could the writer know all this?…Who are you, after all, you whom I should know so well?

‘Later he brought me the completed manuscript to read. At that time it was called The Pointer on the Wall.

‘I sat alone, reading. He kept away. For once I had not a single alteration to suggest…. Never before, when reading one of Tarjei’s manuscripts, had I felt so strongly that I was holding something exceptional in my hands. Nor something so dangerous. “This is more dangerous to have about the house than the radio,” I said.

‘And out of the house it went immediately. He made a solid zinc box for it, and buried it among the trees above the lake. Afterwards he took me there and showed me where he had hidden it, so that I should be able to find it again if he himself were gone when the time came to have it published.

*

‘And then, May 7th: the News. We ran out of doors, laughing and crying, found the flag and hoisted it. People from the farms further down the hills were working out in the fields. They straightened up and stood stock still. On the farms higher up they had no radio and could not see the flag. We wrote notes and sent the children off with them, then put the radio on the living-room table and turned it on full blast in front of the open window….

‘Of course we had to get together, everyone in the district. We had the largest living-room. The children ran off again with more messages telling people to come. And come they did, old and young: the smallest was eight months old. We listened to the jubilation in Sweden broadcast over the radio, we sang, Tarjei and I took out and read our hidden writings that no longer needed to be concealed. It was daylight on May 8th before we broke up. After a few hours it was again time to switch on the radio and open the window, so that those who were back at work in the fields could keep in touch with what was happening. And the very first thing that did happen was one of the most moving – Olav Midttun’s familiar voice: “This is the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation…”

‘All of it incredible, and all of it true. People gathered, for church services and at home. One party out at Åmot ended up at the doctor’s house, where we were offered an unaccustomed drink: real coffee. Both of us felt quite drunk as we cycled unsteadily home in the chill of the early morning, Tarjei singing so that the mountainsides re-echoed.’

If the circumstances of the book’s authorship were unusual, so was the form chosen by Vesaas for recording the Occupation years. Part allegory, part parable, on one level the novel describes the drab lives of the inhabitants of an enormous house that has suffered a catastrophe of supernatural dimensions; on another it depicts the struggle against the forces of darkness in poetic terms, combining biblical echoes with highly modem symbols. Yet there is sufficient realism and individual characterization, particularly of the figures on the side of the Resistance, to enable the reader to share the agony of their dangers, uncertainties and sufferings.

The House in the Dark was published in the autumn of 1945, along with many other hidden poems and prose works that saw the light of day during the first months of the peace. Now that we can look back on this period over a time-span of more than thirty years, it seems astonishing that the Norwegian experience of war could have been conveyed in such clear perspective by someone so intimately involved.

E.R.

1 Published by Peter Owen, London, 1966.

2I Midtbös Bakkar, Aschehoug, Oslo, 1974.

1

In a Bewitched House

If anyone should ask what this huge object is, heaving and cracking in the darkness, it is a bewitched house.

Here, beneath a single, gigantic, convex roof, are collected countless rooms and corridors and narrow passages, cut off from the rest of the world by dense, oppressive darkness. There are open courtyards inside this extensive house, but the darkness lies over it all like a crushing weight. If anyone were foolish enough to climb up on to the roof in an attempt to see something, he would simply feel as if his eyes had been torn out. He would come down again quickly and crawl away home.

The house is cracking. No one knows exactly why, or how it started, but it is cracking all the time. A silent storm is raging inside it: a mounting tension that is being encouraged, and suppressed too, until it splits apart.

It’s this darkness.

It came while the house was asleep, settled over it, and will not go away. It sprang up like a seething spring, so that the windows were blinded and mouths became dumb, and from out of the darkness came people who held power. They lit up the corridors with their beautiful shining arrows. Then they set about making their own house within the house, and at once the silent storm began wearing it down.

So that now the stifled house is cracking from within and quaking from top to bottom. It can be felt as soon as you put your hand on anything connected with it.

Then some of them are afraid that the house is going to fall, and remember in sadness what it has meant to them. The darkness presses down as if an enormous, heavy helmet were arching over everything.

But inside the broad corridors it is light enough. Between the rooms go broad passageways with light shining from glistening, gilded arrows that have been hung there.

Now and then people pause and look at them. In their heads is a hammering and a buzzing, and their temples are seething with this fearful pressure. They stand looking at the arrows. The long arrows are fastened horizontally along the corridor, all pointing in the same direction. They are pointing the way to something. They curve around the corners of the passageway to other shining, well-lit corridors between the countless closed doors. Further and further away the arrows beckon, towards something, towards the centre, where the darkness wells up. In flight, alive, the glittering arrows hang there, pointing the way to the centre. A man goes the rounds polishing them. It’s the kind of gold that needs polishing. Nobody stops to talk to this man.

Nobody seems to walk here. People cross the corridor on tiptoe. You will find life in the side passages, that are dark and narrow. In the arrow corridor everyone is in a hurry to get across. They look, afraid, in the direction in which the arrows are pointing.

Come, come, beckon the arrows, and their beautiful, naked forms are beguiling, but people scurry into the passages and cellars and into their cubbyholes.

Then a noise may be heard: a cry somewhere near. A choked cry comes from a neighbour: ‘They’ve just been there. He’s been taken away in the van.’ Someone is left behind calling his name in farewell. Left behind, grieving.

And they look out through the blank window, as if a streak of light must come. But it does not grow lighter at all, only more blank, more dense.

Now heart rests close against heart. The bewitched house has gone for a brief moment, has disappeared with its oppressive rooms. Now there is only you. Ourselves.

A single name is spoken: ‘Karen.’

No more. Let it be so, this little moment that we have on credit.

Other things, too, will become clear in a while, out of the strangely drifting dusk. His name. The man.

‘Yes, Stig –’ breathed rather than spoken, and then silence.

This is ours. We are from the beginning, where all things are created. We too have taken part in it.

‘Yes, Stig.’

‘Yes, Karen.’

Then the house cracks. It has been doing so all the time. But now they are aware of it again. Aware of what is happening, and what may be happening.

‘Let’s be alone together just a little bit longer,’ she begs, when she notices that his thoughts have begun circling.

He answers, ‘Of course, Karen.’

She is a part of the house. This thing that is wearing down the house is wearing her down too. He feels closer to her on account of it. He rests his large man’s hand on her body, as if it could still the waves and calm her heart a little. The cracking makes her clutch him tightly.

‘Why can’t there be an end to all this?’ she says in a moment of weakness.

He replies that it will surely come to an end. But it’s bound to take time.

She is caressing his body.

‘I wish we could stay like this for ever.’

It is natural for her to talk this way in times such as these. Stig is part of a hidden, desperate struggle, and nobody knows what the coming hours will bring.

‘Don’t let’s talk about that,’ says Stig curtly.

‘I know I ought not to.’

‘If I get into hot water I’ll call for you,’ he tells her unexpectedly. She does not reply from where she is lying in the darkness.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Yes. But that mustn’t happen!’ she says.

But he knows very well that she is prepared for it. She is a part of this house.

Now she is silent. It is quite dark, so he cannot see her face. As soon as she is silent she recedes into the darkness.

‘Karen.’

She is there again.

‘Yes?’

‘You must try to answer when you know I’m calling you.’

‘Yes…’ she answers hopelessly.

She starts to talk about other things.

‘Stig,’ she says with difficulty, ‘what will become of Rascal if –?’

That’s where her thoughts are. With the child Rascal asleep in his corner. Stig can only register it.

‘You’ll manage all right with Rascal,’ he answers calmly. ‘I’m not worried on that account.’

‘But…’

‘You know you will, Karen.’

She recedes into the darkness.

Stig lies there thinking about it. She is beside him, but her thoughts are with her child, as they must be. He is forced to put other matters first. The responsibility for many people and many vital tasks means he must put Karen and Rascal second. Don’t think about them. Don’t get your own affairs mixed up in it. It has become an iron law. Only in that way can the hidden struggle be continued.

She is there again.

‘I’ll try to answer,’ she says.

He replies gratefully, ‘If you do, I’ll know. And you’ll hear about it later. That you were there too.’

She does not dare ask him how. He is strange and strong beside her in the darkness.

2

High and Dry

Martin is sitting at his desk. There are stamps of all colours spread out over it. Martin is supposed to be working with them, classifying them and studying them, since it is his job but at this moment he is sitting stock-still, without even glancing at the scraps of paper.

Its not safe enough here, he is thinking. One cant feel safe. And I must if Im to work.

He listens.

The thought flashes through him: The house is cracking.

Dreadful things are happening outside in secret, he knows. But why should it concern me? Its not convenient for me. I have this work to do. I, too, wish with all my heart that we could be rid of all that has befallen us, but its not my job to join in a crude struggle against it. Let those who have the talent do so. I havent.

He listens to the cracking, to the pressure, a deep, low buzzing through the immense, bewitched house. But above all he listens to the door of his room, in case someone is tapping on it, warning him.

Three sharp taps. They can be heard on the doors now and then, sometimes here, sometimes there, a warning from the people who are active in the cellars, that you must come out and join them, that they need your help. Martin knows what it means. He knows he can expect it at any moment. Three sharp taps on the door and then out!

I wont, he thinks. If they tap at this door itll be by mistake. It has nothing to do with me. Im too deeply involved in all this.

He looks at his stamps again.

I must work and not think about this nonsense any more. Im wasting precious time.

But soon he is listening once more. This muffled, threatening cracking what is it? As if the house were straining at every joint. You could imagine that out of doors it would have looked as if the house were swaying backwards and forwards, gaping cracks appearing in the foundations. As if now, now the endless tension must snap.