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The House With the Blind Glass Windows, published in Norway as "Huset med den blinde glassveranda", 1981
In prose of exceptional economy and effect, Wassmo begins the story of Tora, a young girl growing up on a remote island off the northern Norwegian coast about twelve years after the second World War. On the verge of puberty, Tora leads an intense and fiercely guarded inner life animated by her fanciful day-dreams about an unknown father and her helpless dread of the unconfessable sexual abuse to which she is secretly subjected by her mother's present husband, the loutish Henrik, when her mother has to work the night-shift at the village fish-packing factory.
Tora's family is among the poorest on the island, where the local economy is based entirely on the seasonal fishing. Along with other low-income villagers, she inhabits a shabby tenement, the house of the title, with lockless doors and separate outhouses in the backyard for men and women. Tora's mother Ingrid is the main breadwinner, doing cleaning for more prosperous folk whenever she is laid off at Dahl's factory, wearily drudging and making do while Henrik, often drunk and out of work, claims a man's rights as head of the household and uses his fists to impose his will. Tora has learned from life at home that "the strongest was the one who made decisions and was right about everything. It was important to know who the strongest was. Henrik was the strongest."
Henrik is the source of what Tora calls "the danger." But she intuits other threats to her security too, struggling vainly to comprehend what she has done to be singled out for attack. Often taunted by school-mates about her birth or her poverty, she finally learns from her Aunt Rachel, who perceives her distress, that she is the bastard daughter of a German officer, a member of the hated occupying forces, who was killed before he could marry Ingrid. Rachel rebukes her sister for leaving Tora in anxiety and ignorance about her father, but Ingrid--who was scorned and punished by the villagers for her affair with an enemy soldier--cannot bring herself to tell or explain, and Tora wistfully tries to make sense of her aunt's confidences alone, inventing a house in Berlin where she might someday go and a German grandmother longing to receive her.
Although Tora reveres the good-hearted Rachel and a school-mistress who treats her with kindness, her only real friend is a deaf-mute boy who teaches her sign-language, trusted because he is imprisoned in silence. Tora dares disturb nobody--and shrinks in particular from burdening her mother--with what she is speechlessly striving to endure. She identifies with a cat she saw once, killed and skinned by some bad boys in the village and afterwards dragged in the mud by a dog. "It had to be the cat's own fault. Because nobody owned it and took care of it. It affected people in such a way that they skinned it." The image haunts her, recurring again and again when she tries to deal with her predicament. "Nobody's cat. Nobody cared. The cat was lost in its own shame. Finally it was dragged down into the ditch."
But Tora is feisty too. Her wordless ordeal slowly builds an inner strength that, in the end, enables her deliberately to spare her mother the knowledge of Henrik's sordid acts. She learns to give and take with her playmates. And she begins to perceive a broader world around her, a space in which she may someday be safe and free. "The waves! There was so much power in them, so much tenderness. The ocean roared in a giant sea shell. Tora knew that she heard melodies that came from outside herself, from a larger context than the one she could get at Ottar's store. She knew there were more and greater truths than those they talked about there. But she couldn't put them into words. She could only feel a kind of joy at it, a joy she could take out when it got dark and she needed it."
Tora's story is interwoven with the daily life of the village and the ups and downs of its inhabitants. The men meet to talk fish, the women to talk men, and small personal dramas constantly unfold. Several scenes particularly stand out: a night-shift at the packing-plant and the exuberant Aunt Rachel's trip to the mainland, with Ingrid and Tora in tow, to fly the flag of female independence at least for one day.
The novel concludes with a striking incident. Evading Henrik one night, Tora determines to sleep outdoors and climbs up on the scaffolding erected for construction of the new dock and warehouse Rachel's husband is building after the old ones were destroyed in a mysterious fire, almost ruining him financially. Arson was suspected, but never proved, and finally the event was dismissed as an accident. But Tora now becomes the appalled witness of her step-father's stealthy trafficking with a can of gasoline. Forced to flee when the flames leap up, she escapes the burning dock in a rowboat and finds herself faced with a terrible choice: save Henrik, who has toppled drunkenly into the water, or let him drown as she fiercely thinks he deserves. Rising above her feelings, she grabs him by the hair and hangs on until the villagers racing to fight the fire can bring them both ashore.
With Henrik arrested and Ingrid woebegone, Tora discovers who is now the strongest. It falls upon her to comfort her discouraged mother and the novel ends on a hopeful note, presaging better things ahead for Tora than have hitherto come her way. "The sun was gushing in through the window like a big shining surprise... Her mother stared out the window for a moment. Then she turned slowly to Tora."
The House with the Blind Glass Windows is the first book of a trilogy about Tora, the only one of the three so far available in English translation. Considered to be one of the world's most gifted contemporary novelists, Herbjørg Wassmo recently won the prestigious Scandinavian literary award, the Nordic Prize, for the concluding volume in the series.
© Wordreign, September 1999
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