Of course, when we got there, it was before the event started, and I felt foolish for having had all these thoughts on the way. The place was full of all manner of people working away to put up tents and stages, toilets and food stalls. If you had lined up everyone on the site that first day, I would have been the least remarkable. It is often the case that when I am most anxious about how I will be remarked upon by other people, I turn out to be the most likely not to be noticed at all.
I stayed for the whole day, providing food and hot drinks to Andrew and his friends as they moved the bales into position and fashioned a castle, with battlements reached by a staircase of small bales with wooden boards on top to form the steps. When they had finished, I climbed up to the top and looked down at the activity below me, then out at the flat, flat land, the green and gold of the crops in the field, the dark mass of trees and thick black lines of hedges. They had taken so much time to build the castle that the first acts were tuning up as we sat on the top. They wouldn’t be opening the structure to visitors until the next morning, so we had the grandstand view all to ourselves. The atmosphere was changing as darkness fell and the people working with purpose finished their tasks, and the crowd of people looking only for pleasure grew larger and larger below us. Then the music started and I was too enthralled to leave. I stayed until Edward, not normally an anxious man, phoned to ask what exactly I thought I was doing, staying away so long. I knew what it was I was doing. I was being absorbed, mind, body, and spirit, into the vibrations created by the music and the crowd; I was wired up to the energy of thousands of people sharing the sound. If I looked beyond the edge of the festival site, before the light faded, at the surrounding farmland, and tried to imagine that music being created with only the fields around it, without the pack of people in constant motion, the smells of the food cooking, the occasional shouts and cries and laughter from festival-goers arriving late, it would have been no more than noise. And it was so much more than noise. It was utterly absorbing, but even as I was part of it, before I climbed down the straw staircase and into the car to drive back to the farm, I felt as if this were something I had missed. Unlike the opera, which I held out for myself the promise of finding again. I thought this was something it was too late for me to be part of the way the people on the ground below me were part of it—whether they were young or old, they were, I felt sure, able to understand and experience what was happening here in a way I could not. But I did feel this once.
It is important not to be too greedy, as you say. Enjoy the raspberries you have found. I can see the Clerodendrum in flower from the window as I write this.
Write soon.
Love,
Tina
Silkeborg
August 17
Dear Tina,
You understand music, although you have had so little to do with it. You describe so well the sensations of being involved with the sound of live music, when it is in a big space, or there are many, many instruments or voices creating it. As I told you, I sing in a choir and we perform in the largest church in Silkeborg. It is not because the music we are singing glorifies God; it is just the best place in Silkeborg for choirs to sing. When I am performing, I feel, as you describe it, “wired up” to the energy of the people singing around me. (I am hoping my English is improving as I write to you. If it is, it will be because you use such expressive language and I am catching the rhythm of it, as I catch the rhythm of the music from the other members of the choir. Perhaps we are beginning to sing in tune?)
In July the choir put on a concert of light opera. Songs by Offenbach, Lehár, Danish folk songs. They were cheerful, tuneful songs and easy to sing, easy to listen to. It is the kind of music I might sing to myself, though not out loud, as a distraction from the wind or the rain as I pedal to work. That is, not grand or uplifting, but comforting. The church was full every night with people who had paid for a seat, and this is not always so. Also, the audience was happy, applauding loudly and asking for encores. This, too, does not always happen. The concert finished before dark, which comes late in July, and while it was still warm enough to walk around the streets and sit outside the cafés. The audience and the performers came out into the square in front of the church and mixed in with the other residents of Silkeborg already there, enjoying the warmth and the light, sitting in the cafés and bars and talking about the music they had heard. Altogether, you could say, as the director of the choir did say, to us and to the newspapers, it was a big success and brought happiness and laughter not only into the church but also to Silkeborg town center. But, although it was enjoyable, I do not think it was the same as the sensation you describe when you visited the opera and went to the festival. It was too simple.
I prefer the concerts that have more complex music, maybe less tuneful, harder to learn, harder to sing, harder, I suppose, to listen to. Then I am buried in the notes and the other voices producing a harmony that seems to occur without any of us making an effort to produce it. I am outside myself and inside the music. I have never expressed this before.
As a rule, we, the choir members, meet together and rehearse, meet together and perform. Some of the members are friends or become friends. Most of us talk to each other only about the music or the small problems of being part of the choir—the cold drafts in winter, the lack of time, and so on. I wonder if Jürgen, who stands to the left of me and is an engineer with an electricity company, or Martin, who stands to the right of me, a teacher of history, feel as I do. I should ask them. But I am not likely to do that. It is partly because they would think it unlikely I would do that, which makes it unlikely I will. We may want to be other than we are, but we do not want to unsettle the opinion people have already formed, maybe to replace it with a lesser opinion.
I understand why it was not possible for you to enjoy the CD of Madama Butterfly, hearing it in fragments, with distractions, when the music is new to you. You need to discover it, first. To listen to it with proper attention. Then, when it has become familiar, each note will unfold as you expect it to and you can take pleasure from hearing just a few bars, because you will have a memory of the beauty of the whole piece.
I have a photo of my unborn grandchild. His—or maybe her; Karin knows the answer but has not told me—face and skull have something of the Tollund Man about them. Essential. Reduced to the elements of what is human, but so powerfully present, it is amazing to feel I cannot at once reach out a hand and hold his.
Write soon.
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
August 23
Dear Anders,
There is a rumpus in our house. It turns out that Sarah was right—though I still think her deduction was faulty. Mary and Vassily do not intend to stay. They have bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Inverness and they are planning to live in a trailer while Vassily builds them a house on it. Mary has accepted a job with a firm of accountants in Inverness and will come out of the trailer each morning in high heels and a white blouse, with a briefcase, and go into the town. Vassily will come out in his overalls and set the cement mixer going.
They arranged all this during a couple of trips to Scotland that the rest of us assumed were just holidays taken up with walking and sightseeing and drinking whiskey. Edward is beside himself. (What an odd phrase that is, but I can’t think of another way to put it. It implies a mixture of anger and frustration that gnaws away at you until you cannot comfortably occupy the space your body takes up.) For one thing, he believes they have behaved in an underhand way by arranging it without telling anyone—that is to say, without telling him—what they had in mind. It would have surprised me if they had told us. They are not given to chatting about themselves (or anything else), and if they had overcome their natural reserve, then letting Edward know in advance would have unleashed an unbearable torrent of words, many of them abusive. My husband has never understood the distinction between talking to people and talking at them.
Edward’s second complaint abou
t Mary and Vassily is that they are leaving him in the lurch. This is a more serious aspect, as far as he is concerned. They do not leave for another month, but however much time he had, it would never be enough to find a replacement accountant to do the books, or a replacement handyman to do the chores.
The third, and most serious, issue is that it will cost him money. Mary and Vassily were comparatively cheap. It does mean, I point out to him, that we can generate an income by renting out the cottage they have been living in. This does not mollify him. He despises the money gained by, as he puts it, “farming tourists.” It is an effete sort of way of making a living, suitable for people raised in towns who don’t like hard work. Not to be compared with money made by sitting in a tractor cab and claiming subsidies. Not as satisfying as saving expense by extracting labor from your family at little or no cost. I know that renting out vacation homes is hard work, because I do most of it. It is fruitless to say so. Because the real objection Edward has to this particular piece of diversification is that he doesn’t like the guests. Whoever they are. He does not want them in his farmyard, however pleasant, interesting, or interested they might be. And many of them are all three. He prefers the ones who stay indoors all day watching television. There is enjoyment to be had from despising them.
For the first time I am thinking I may not send you the letter I am writing. I am ashamed of myself for expressing so much bitterness. Only, I do hate conflict. (I can picture my mother nodding, knowingly.) I am weary of trying to smooth things over.
* * *
If I destroyed the first half of this letter, it would be to disguise myself from you, and I do not want to do that, so I will send it. I wrote it all down after the news had been broken and the storm was raging. I will carry on now, in a calmer way.
When I think back to what I have said to you about my children and the way I have thought about them, which I only properly understood by writing to you, I realize that I have been wrong to believe they were happy to have grown up on the farm and to be living and working as adults, on the farm. I have spoken to Mary and asked her: Why? Why go? Why Inverness? She said:
“Because I want to know what it is like to live somewhere else. To live in a city. To work in an office.”
“And if you don’t like it?” I said.
“Then we can change,” she said, smiling at me. “Whatever. Nothing is so fixed it cannot be altered.”
Did I know that, when I was her age? Do I believe it, even now? As she said these words, the picture in my mind was of the Tollund Man, still and silent, fixed firmly for millennia in his bed of peat. Then I thought of the words we have used to each other, you and I, in describing our lives—mine bound up in the relentless timetable of food production, yours buried in the fossilized remains of the past. It is hard for us to say, isn’t it, that nothing is so fixed it cannot be altered? The seasons do not linger waiting for it to be convenient for the sowing and the harvesting. The artifacts you study are what they are. They represent a moment in time. They have no scope for change; that is why you study them. That is why they are useful for telling us things we might otherwise never have known. I begin to think we have been misled by the types of lives we lead into overlooking our personal potential to be other than we have always been.
I have thoughts to share with you about music and about the likeness of a baby in the womb, but I will save these up. I will be joyful in my next letter. I will find something to point out to you. “Look at that!” I will say, and I will be happy to imagine you looking at it.
I can’t tell if you are beginning to write like me; I don’t know how I write. The words just tumble out onto the page. When I read the words you write back, they sound like you, singing in a tune I have become familiar with and which is therefore comforting.
Love,
Tina
Silkeborg
August 30
Dear Tina,
I love the words you use. I have had to buy a bigger English dictionary to be sure I have understood everything you say to me. “Rumpus.” This is not a word I have heard before and I am pleased to have met it. I have looked it up in my dictionary and it tells me it means a noisy or violent disturbance. It is enjoyable both as a sound and as a word meaning something I did not previously have a precise name for. There was a rumpus in the museum yesterday, which I will tell you about. But first, your daughter’s decision to go to Scotland.
Like your husband’s three reasons for not liking her decision, I have three reasons you might consider this change to be a good thing. Number one, you will have somewhere to visit. I have the pleasure of the journey and experiencing the difference between the places my children live and the place I live, as well as the joy of their company when I reach them.
Secondly, there are mountains in Scotland, and do you not sometimes long for mountains? We both live where there are none, and although I would not want to live among them, I love the way they make me feel when I visit them. When I was twenty years old, I had a friend who took up mountain climbing. He was attracted to all dangerous sports—bobsled, hang-gliding—and for the sake of our friendship, I did several things I would never otherwise have done and do not wish to do again. When he started climbing, I went with him to the Alps. I have never forgotten the feeling of being on the extreme edge of the world, only the rock face so close and the valley so far, far away, and in between, nothing at all, only air and sky. I recover something of the thrill of those moments when I come among mountains. I remember the fear as well, of course, and am pleased I do not have to experience that again.
In the third place, you told me how happy it made you to see your daughter happy in her new marriage, and how this was something you had wanted for her and had not known how to give her. With this move to Scotland, is she not stepping deeper and deeper into happiness and fulfillment? After finding someone as a lover and companion, going with him to explore other ways of life than the one she has always known? I think so.
* * *
Now, the rumpus. I was walking through the museum, going back to my office after a meeting to discuss money. Much of the work I do is involved with money. It is not my job to raise money or to manage it, but day to day it is the matter always under consideration. Sometimes there are meetings about what the museum might buy, or special exhibitions, and I enjoy these, even if the discussion is mostly about the cost. The cost is important and cannot be ignored. But most meetings are about how to make a budget stretch around all the things that need to be done—cleaning, maintenance—and still have something leftover to progress the real work of the museum. This meeting, yesterday, was one of those.
It was in our new building, where the Tollund Man is kept, and my office is upstairs in the old part (very old, in comparison to the rest of Silkeborg, but still built seventeen hundred years after the Tollund Man died). There is an open green space between the two, with benches where visitors can sit and enjoy the sun, and I was looking forward to the brightness, after the gloom of the meeting room. Also I wanted to hurry back to be doing the work I like to do, so I was walking quickly toward the door when I heard the most desolate wailing from the room where the Tollund Man is on display. It was a child crying. I had been thinking, for much of the meeting, of the image of Karin’s baby. I have it in my briefcase now. (With the feather from a wing of a female pheasant. Both things make me happy.) I had been thinking about the image as a child I will one day know, but also of the likeness of this image, of someone not yet born, to the body of the Tollund Man, centuries dead. Because I had been thinking in this way, the sound of a child crying from the room where the Tollund Man lies made me turn aside to find out what it was that made this child so unhappy.
A little girl in a very pretty dress was standing in front of the Tollund Man weeping as if she had no hope of ever being comforted. Her mother was talking to her, holding her hand, trying to soothe her. A museum attendant was close by with his arms folded, asking the mother to please prevent her child from upsetting
the other visitors. By the time I arrived, the girl was almost exhausted and had, in any event, started to sob and hiccup in place of wailing. I asked the mother what it was that had caused her such grief, and she said:
“She wants the Tollund Man to wake up and talk to her. The lady at the desk said she would be able to ask him questions, and she doesn’t understand why he can’t answer. She thought maybe he was just asleep, and I told her he was never going to wake up.”
I should explain that there is an interactive panel outside the room where he is kept, and it is possible to find out more information from this, about the Iron Age, about the body, about the process of finding and preserving him, and so on, by tapping on the question marks. This is what the receptionist would have meant when she told the girl she could ask a question.
“He could be asleep,” I said. “I have often wished he would wake up and talk to me. He looks like someone I would have liked to know.” The little girl had stopped making a noise and was looking up at me, but with tears still falling down her face. “What did you want to ask him?” I said.
She put her face against the sleeve of her mother’s cardigan. Her mother took a tissue from her pocket and cleaned the little girl’s face. The child looked up at me again when this was done and said:
“I wanted him to tell me a story.”
“That’s what I want, too,” I said. “We can never know what stories he might have told us if he were able to wake up.”
“Do you think he will, one day?” asked the little girl.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he wants to wake up. His life will have been quite hard. Not like yours. Cruel things will have happened to him. He is peaceful now, look. We should let him be.”
“We could tell him a story,” said her mother. “He might like to listen to one of our stories, even if he can’t tell us one of his.”
Meet Me at the Museum Page 9