as M. A.’
‘Uhuh?’
‘That doesn’t mean anything to you?’
‘Not straight off, no.’
‘It might be Mads Andersen.’
‘Mads Andersen. You don’t mean…?’
‘Yes! Trodalen Mads. And look at the birth date. Count back nine months and you come to May 1839. The Trodalen murder, according to lore, took place on June 19th of that year.’
‘But… if your ancestral mother had a child with Trodalen Mads…’
‘She’s in fact my great-great-great grandmother.’
‘If she had a child with him…’
‘… then I’m a direct descendant of his, yes. Although we’ve never thought of announcing that in Firda Tidend, if I can put it like that.’
‘But M. A. could stand for something quite different too?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. But this is where oral tradition comes in. The secret inheritance, to use a more formal expression. You see my mother told me, when she gave me the bible, that her mother had told her that her mother in turn had passed down this inherited account of our spooky past, and that she swore with her hand on the family bible that this was how it was, may God himself strike me to the ground if I’m lying… she said.’
‘And that account says…?’
She rolled onto her side, put her free arm around my neck, held me tight and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Promise me first, Varg, that what I’m telling you now you will never tell another soul!’
I returned her gaze. ‘I certainly can’t swear on the book and beg God to strike me to the ground if I should lie, but…’ I put my hand on my heart. ‘I promise by all that I hold sacred, I won’t do that. What you tell me here and now will never go beyond these four walls.’
She scrutinised me long and hard, as if searching for lies and ignoble ideals in my eyes.
‘But you must’ve told… Tora?’
‘Not yet. Won’t be for a long time yet. If I tell you now, tonight, there are only three living people who know about it. My mother, me and you.’
‘And to what do I owe the honour? I wasn’t that good, was I?’
‘No, not that good…’ she teased with a smile, only to turn serious again straightaway. ‘I’m telling you this because in some way or other it may help us to understand what happened here this week.’
‘I see! Now I’m even more curious.’
‘That was the idea.’
‘Tell me then!’
‘I’m going to…’
36
She took me with her to Trodalen during the fateful summer of 1839. ‘The story about Trodalen Mads, the alternative version,’ as she called it, with a tiny smile. She told it in such a vivid way that I could see it unrolling before me, like a film: a flashback of almost one hundred and fifty years.
Mads Andersen was twenty-one years old that year. He was medium-height with a strong build, dark hair and melancholic predisposition, not unnatural for a young man who had grown up on an isolated farm in Trodalen with no one else except his parents, his sister and an adult serving maid. When he went to the priest, he got to know the eldest son of a family from Angedalen whose name was Jens Hansen, and Jens had a sister, Maria, who was four years younger. She was a quiet girl, a willing worker, industrious, who from early childhood had worked with her mother in the fields in the summer. She was at home in the mountains and could, even on Sundays, walk there on her own without any fear of what she might meet. After getting to know Mads, she used to walk all the way to Trodalen; not often, perhaps every other month, and they didn’t always bump into each other. How could they? There was no one to whom they could entrust messages, and she didn’t dare send a letter the few times the post went all the way up to Trodalsstrand.
According to what was passed down from Grethe’s ancestors, a romance sprang up between Maria and Mads that winter and the spring of 1839; and the winter up in Trodalen was long, the snow didn’t begin to clear until the end of April, even in June there were still great drifts left along the sunless mountainsides by the black mirror of Lake Trodalsvatn. There was something ominous and compelling about the lake, as though it, even at that time, concealed secrets it would not give up, memories of the past that were forever sunk beneath the depths. Mads often roamed in the mountains, hunting birds, deer or other game. He had set snares which he checked at regular intervals, and on not so few occasions during these wanderings he came to the mountain ridge at the end of the lake whence he could look down on Angedalen, at the farm where Jens and Maria had grown up. Sometimes they met there, he and Maria, and when May arrived and the sun began to warm, they embraced each other tenderly and vowed eternal fidelity
…
‘… My mother told me,’ Grethe said, still with her hand on the bible, as if the images were growing directly from the thin page where the family line had been drawn up.
‘Did she also tell you what happened on that June day when Ole Olsen Ottern?s was killed up there?’
‘That’s precisely the point of all this, Varg, my love. Now listen to the valley drama…
‘When there is a confession it very soon becomes the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about past events. But in this case there was another version, hidden and clutched to the bosom of six generations of women, like a secret shame, kept alive by the family’s bad conscience about what really took place.
‘The second version of the Trodalen murder went as follows. On this particular Wednesday Maria Hansdottir had fled her life on the farm. Perhaps she was hoping to meet Mads again on this beautiful sunny summer’s day. The heat was making her blood pump extra hard through her veins, so much so that she could hardly bear being down on the farm, she just had to be up in the mountains where the person who was in her thoughts day and night was to be found. But ill luck was to have it that when she had climbed up to Trodalen and was on her way down to the lake, she bumped into Ole Ottern?s, the dealer who only a short time before had taken his leave of Mads Andersen in Trodalsstrand. They stood and exchanged a few words, then she tried to move on. The dealer would not budge. Perhaps it was the summer heat that had gone to his head, too; perhaps it was the long period of abstinence that caused him to make a grab with lustful hands for the young girl. He was strong, strengthened from walking in the mountains. She struggled, screamed for help, the way the Arctic loon screeches at the steep faces of the mountains. But he would not let go. He burrowed up under her clothes with his strong hands until she screamed with fear and pain. Then she seized a rock lying on the ground and brought it down hard on the dealer’s head — once, twice, three times! His rough hands let go of her body and he began to slip to the ground. Once again she struck, in fear and fury, until Ole Olsen Ottern?s lay lifeless before her.
‘Then she was gripped by a fear greater than anything she had ever felt before. She knew now that she had committed a deadly sin, and that the gates of hell would open and swallow her up as soon as her time had come. She was sentenced to eternal unrest, eternal fire, and the fear she felt now was so strong that she thought she would drop down dead on the path she was treading with such quaking feet. There was only one way to go she knew of: down to the water, down to a certain death.
‘However, Mads Andersen was coming to meet her. He had heard the cry of the Arctic loon, and he recognised the sound. Now he took her in his arms, held her tight, let her tears flow and ebb, and eventually followed her to where Ole Olsen lay, to see what wretched state he was in.
‘She stood at a distance watching Mads examine the lifeless body, and when he came back down to her, she realised from his posture that all hope was gone.
‘But then he gave her fresh hope, indeed he redeemed her, took her sin upon himself and said: Let me take care of this, Maria. Just go home. I’ll drop Ole Olsen Ottern?s into the depths of the lake, and may he never return! Maria left him there and then, and that was the last time they spoke together. Later she was to see him only once, when after five days he was taken to the village by men from the neighbouring farm and from there to Forde with
