“Brother Edvin gathers up all the children he can,” said Father Martein with a laugh. “Then he has someone to preach to.”
“Yes, I don’t dare offer you learned gentlemen here in Hamar my sermons,” said the monk, smiling, and without taking offense. “I’m only good at talking to children and farmers, but that’s no reason to tie a muzzle on the ox that threshes.”
Kristin gave her father an imploring look; she thought there was nothing she would like better than to go with Brother Edvin. So Lavrans thanked him, and as her father and the priest followed the bishop’s entourage, Kristin put her hand in the monk’s and they walked down toward the monastery, which was a cluster of wooden houses and a light-colored stone church all the way down near the water.
Brother Edvin gave her hand a little squeeze, and when they glanced at each other, they both had to laugh. The monk was tall and gaunt but quite stoop-shouldered. The child thought he looked like an old crane because his head was small, with a narrow, shiny, smooth pate above a bushy white fringe of hair, and perched on a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was also as big and sharp as a beak. But there was something about him that made Kristin feel at ease and happy just by looking up into his long, furrowed face. His old watery-blue eyes were red-rimmed, and his eyelids were like thin brown membranes with thousands of wrinkles radiating from them. His hollow cheeks, with their reddish web of veins, were crisscrossed with wrinkles that ran down to his small, thin-lipped mouth. But it looked as if Brother Edvin had become so wrinkled simply from smiling at people. Kristin thought she had never seen anyone who looked so cheerful or so kind. He seemed to carry within him a luminous and secret joy, and she was able to share it whenever he spoke.
They walked along the fence of an apple orchard where a few yellow and red fruits still hung on the trees. Two friars wearing black-and-white robes were raking withered beanstalks in the garden.
The monastery was not much different from any other farm, and the guest house into which the monk escorted Kristin closely resembled a humble farmhouse, although there were many beds. In one of the beds lay an old man, and at the hearth sat a woman wrapping an infant in swaddling clothes; two older children, a boy and a girl, stood near her.
They complained, both the man and the woman, because they had not yet received their lunch. “But they don’t want to bring food to us twice, so here we sit and starve while you run around in town, Brother Edvin.”
“Don’t be so angry, Steinulv,” said the monk. “Come over here, Kristin, and say hello. Look at this pretty maiden who is going to stay here today and eat with us.”
He told Kristin that Steinulv had fallen ill on his way home from a meeting, and he had been allowed to stay in the cloister’s guest house instead of the hospice because a kinswoman who was living at the hospice was so mean that he couldn’t stand to be there.
“But I can tell they’re getting tired of having me here,” said the old man. “When you leave, Brother Edvin, no one will have time to take care of me, and then they’ll probably make me go back to the hospice.”
“Oh, you’ll be well long before I’m done with my work at the church,” said Brother Edvin. “Then your son will come to get you.” He took a kettle of hot water from the hearth and let Kristin hold it as he attended to Steinulv. Then the old man grew more tractable, and a moment later a monk came in, bringing food and drink for them.
Brother Edvin said a prayer over the food and then sat down next to Steinulv on the edge of the bed so he could help the old man eat. Kristin sat down near the woman and fed the little boy, who was so small that he couldn’t reach the porridge bowl, and who spilled whenever he tried to dip into the bowl of ale. The woman was from Hadeland and had come with her husband and children to visit her brother who was a monk at the cloister. But he was out wandering among the villages, and she complained bitterly about having to sit there wasting time.
Brother Edvin spoke gently to the woman. She must not say that she was throwing her time away when she was here in the bishop’s Hamar. Here were all the splendid churches, and all day long the monks and canons celebrated mass and chanted the offices of the day. And the town was so beautiful, even lovelier than Oslo itself, although it was somewhat smaller. But here, nearly every farm had a garden. “You should have seen it when I arrived in the springtime,” the monk said. “The whole town was white with flowers. And since then the sweetbriar roses have bloomed . . .”
“Well, what good does that do me?” said the woman peevishly. “And it seems to me that there are more holy places here than holiness.”
The monk chuckled and shook his head. Then he rummaged around in his straw pallet and pulled out a big pile of apples and pears, which he shared among the children. Kristin had never tasted such luscious fruit. The juice ran out of her mouth with every bite she took.
Then Brother Edvin had to go off to church, and he said that Kristin could come along. They cut across the cloister courtyard, and through a little side door they entered the church’s choir.
Construction was still going on at this church too, and scaffolding had been set up at the juncture of the nave and the transept. Brother Edvin told Kristin that Bishop Ingjald was having the choir renovated and decorated. The bishop was immensely wealthy, and he used all of his riches to adorn the churches of the town. He was an excellent bishop and a good man. The friars of Olav’s cloister were also good men: celibate, learned, and humble. It was a poor monastery, but they had received Brother Edvin kindly. His home was at the Minorite3 cloister in Oslo, but he had been given permission to beg for alms here in the Hamar diocese.
“Come over here,” he said, leading Kristin to the foot of the scaffolding. He climbed up a ladder and rearranged several planks high above. Then he went back down and helped the child to ascend.
On the gray stone wall above her, Kristin saw strange, flickering specks of light, red as blood and yellow as ale, blue and brown and green. She wanted to look behind her, but the monk whispered, “Don’t turn around.” When they stood together high up on the planks, he gently turned her around, and Kristin saw a sight so glorious that it almost took her breath away.
Directly opposite her, on the south wall of the nave, stood a picture that glowed as if it had been made from nothing but glittering gemstones. The multicolored specks of light on the wall came from rays emanating from the picture itself; she and the monk were standing in the midst of its radiance. Her hands were red, as if she had dipped them in wine; the monk’s face seemed to be completely gilded, and from his dark cowl the colors of the picture were dimly reflected. She gave him a questioning glance, but he merely nodded and smiled.
It was like standing at a great distance and looking into heaven. Behind a lattice of black lines she began to distinguish, little by little, the Lord Jesus himself, wearing the costliest red cloak; the Virgin Mary in robes as blue as the sky; and the holy men and maidens in gleaming yellow and green and violet attire. They stood beneath the arches and pillars of illuminated houses surrounded by intertwining branches and twigs with extraordinary, bright leaves.
The monk pulled her a little farther out toward the edge of the scaffold.