A Twentieth Century Slave

ANNA IS A STORY of poverty--not the poverty of social and political science, defined in terms of income or power, but poverty as a simple, unchanging fact of life. Told by a Norwegian woman of eighty, and compiled by journalist Dagfinn Gronoset, this narrative speaks with misleading ease of the unbelievable suffering and humiliation that Anna endured in the mountain farmlands of Scandinavia.

Seeking to escape a childhood of drudgery, Anna married a tough young vagabond named Big Karl whom she met at a barn dance. He promised freedom and adventure, but the dream went unrealized: for seven years she followed him up and down Norway, always adrift and usually starving. She worked at various times as a farmhand and lumberjack, only to watch him disappear and squander her money.

Determined at last to leave him, she announced that she was staying at Haugsetvolden, a farm where they had been visiting. Karl didn't argue--he immediately sold her to the farmer for three hundred kroner, and disappeared for good. Anna stayed at Haugsetvolden the rest of her life, a virtual slave.

Anna's picture of life on Haugsetvolden is colorful between grim scenes of starvation and cold. Eccentric rustics, of a sort peculiar to rural isolation, make up her little family. Old-Johan, the farmer's half-brother, almost dies of a snake bite that he is too reclusive to mention. A simple woman named Jenny destroys Anna's cabin when she takes seriously someone's joke that "it ought to be burned down."

Through all of this, Anna is the settlement's work horse: she identifies as much with the farm's animals as with its people. She does the work of a "horse, a man, and a woman;" even the horse Blakken is shown more consideration. Anna goes out during blizzards to gather moss for feed, markets the farm's produce, and generally takes care of her diffident owners. Not until she and the others at Haugsetvolden reach old age is there much of a tone of tenderness between them.

Through the softened perspective of time, she reflects on her long life; her answers show no sense of bitterness, but no romanticism either:

I often wondered why I didn't have the courage to leave Big Karl. Many people asked me the same thing. My only answer was that I had been used to being mistreated since the time I was growing up. I didn't know what self-assurance was and had never dared oppose anyone.

Her life was by no means hopeless; rather, she lived in a dimension altogether apart from hope and despair. She tells of a winter night:

I noticed an outhouse by the side of the road. It was unlocked. I didn't have the courage to walk into the farmhouse close by--I wasn't up to another "No. 'I just went into the outhouse in a kind of daze and lay down on some pressed hay I found there. I had nothing to cover myself with, and the clothes I was wearing could not keep me warm. I hadn't eaten all day and had no food whatsoever with me. On nights like that one's thoughts stand still. I was glad of it because otherwise, desperation would have taken over.

PRESSED TO FIND a sense of belonging and security in her bleak existence, Anna seeks it in an ideal of service to others, to virtually anyone. While running with Karl she takes care of seven children deserted by their parents, finding other families for them. She sees a "mission" in simply being of use.

She was well aware, however, that her zeal to help was always to be abused. With Karl she felt like "a tool in his hand, some kind of working machine." But it was not much better on the farm. At Haugsetvolden she was rarely treated as more than a kept-laborer.

Still, her life there felt complete, at least in retrospect. One by one the others there died off leaving Anna alone, but she didn't feel lonely.

Haugsetvolden became the home I had dream of. This is where I have used up all I had in me and was glad to do it.

Anna lived in a cruel and narrow society, through childhood, with Big Karl, and at Haugsetvolden. She utilized the one option she had available--to work for others, rather than for only herself. And on this alone, she established a sense of meaning in her life.

The book suffers from one major problem of translation--not of the text itself, but of the wider context of the story. Few readers here will be able to fit this tale into any familiar setting--Norway is just too far away, as is the rural life Anna depicts.

But while Anna is no Nordic fairy tale, it isn't social history either. Gronoset has kept his editorial intrusions to a minimum, and so the book reads more like fiction than journalism. Anna is her own story, and not of the world around her. It demands the reader's sympathy, not for Anna's sufferings, but for her attempts to live life fully and well.