Your humble servant,
Morten Falck
What he expects of this year’s ship, if indeed a ship will come at all this year, are numerous matters, firstly including that he be summoned home by the Missionskollegium with the blessings of the most esteemed professor Rantzau, and that revocation be formally executed with all necessary documents and signatures. He sent his request by last year’s ship, prompted then by an accumulation of everyday ills in the way of sickness and fatigue. Now it may rescue him from chains and process and the shadows of the misdeeds he unwittingly has committed in this place.
And then there is the widow.
He does not wish to think of the widow.
Yet he senses that the widow thinks of him.
Is he now bound to her for all time? Will she ever release him?
These six years of misfortune and adversity have conspired against him and made him melancholy and cantankerous, they have ruined his digestion, relieved him of half his teeth and the sight of his left eye, and tested his faith. Falck yearns for home.
Home, he thinks to himself, defined as some place, no matter which, as long as it is not here. Preferably on the other side of the Norwegian Sea. A place where trees grow and may be touched, with woods one may enter and leave again. The longing for woodland in this treeless landscape is immense, like the hankering for a fresh apple or the feeling of squashing a strawberry against the palate, the pealing of church bells on a Sunday morning, or the willow warbler, whose song sounds like a fluttering leaf. He longs for a place with doors that may be closed, where walls keep out draughts and damp, a place where sunlight slants down upon the floor. And when, as now, he allows himself to indulge in such futile diversions as to consider the future, his tongue stabbing at the wobbling tooth in his mouth, he imagines securing a living in a small and inconsequential parish in some cosy corner of Denmark, or else in the place from which he hails, in the parish of Lier, the diocese of Akerhus, some few hours by the mail coach from Christiania. His father lives yet, at least until the ship comes with word from home. Kirstine is still a pastor’s wife in Nakskov. But his sister has appeared before him some months previously in a procession of the dead, a vision that cut into his heart, but which also made him joyful. She is blessed now, he thinks to himself. He wants to go home to see her grave, and his mother’s in Lier. He wants to go home to a living in his native parts, a cosy parsonage nestled among woods and undulating hills, pastures divided by dry stone walls, a view of the ford, a boat dragged up on the shore, trout nets drying in the sun, a parlour with a wife and children, three boys who honour him and a girl who loves him, offspring and descendants who will remember him without shame.
The tooth feels looser now. He tries to leave it be, but the pleasure of pestering it with the tip of his tongue is too great.
My dear brother Morten,
Since the day of Christmas Eve here at Nakskov the air has been heavy and unhealthy with fog, and hardly a day with any glimpse of sun. It accords ill with our own climate in Lier, where almost the whole time the air was clear, there was sunlight and pleasant weather. As for myself, we enjoy here the necessities of life and more, as indeed your own eyes have seen, yet I do, and shall always, long for Lier, our good father and blessed mother, the churchyard with the pretty graves of our siblings. I found greater pleasure in our modest circumstances there than in this vainglorious and self-righteous town in which I find not the slightest enjoyment and still after seven full years of marriage do not feel at home. May God mind my tongue!
Dear Morten, I ask myself often if we shall ever again see our childhood home and our father. Will I see you, beloved brother?
A ship may be laden with the future, and it may be laden with the past, mail decreeing this or another action, notifications of the past year’s events at home, condensed into half an hour of feverish reading.
Besides release from his living, he hopes for a replacement, a priest who perhaps at this very moment stands and spies towards the land as he did himself six years before. A new man in the appointment would alleviate his predicament.
Journal for this fifth day of March 1791:
Greenland is the night that separated the evening when I retired to sleep cheerful and young, from the morn when I awoke a palsied old man.
Falck moves his lips in prayer for the ship, imploring his sighting to be real and not an illusion. He prays for its crew, that they may be protected from all manner of disaster, for the letter that is to release him from this confinement, for the good colleague who is to succeed him, that he may have been spared descent into tantrum and sickness or the urge to commit himself to the sea. He prays for himself by praying for others – or does the opposite hold? – for his father, his sister, for the natives of this land, christened or heathen, for all the circumstances of life over which he has been compelled to accept he has not the slightest influence. He presses the telescope to his eye once more, stabs at the tooth with his tongue, tightens his sphincter against renewed onslaught. Let not Thine, but mine be done. No, the opposite! He stares into the fog. No ship. Amen! A gust of wind carries with it a haze that collects and condenses. It rains. The skerries vanish from sight and with them the purpose of standing here to stare.
He snaps the telescope shut and returns it to his pocket. He glares angrily at the sea, the leaden bulk of water merging with the lighter nuance of fog, the two elements that together comprise the damp climate he has now inhaled for six years. His coat grows heavy with rain. The cold spreads down his neck and out into his shoulders. He hears the rain as it falls. A grey patter. His hearing, at least, is intact. He takes off his hat, strikes it against his thigh, straightens his hairpiece and settles the hat once more upon his head.
I ought to go home.
Go, my legs!
But his legs do not obey. He remains standing, increasingly wet, on the dismal, rain-soaked cliffs. There is also the problem of his bowels. If he begins to walk after standing still for so long, a chain reaction of nervous impulses will shoot through his organism into the core of his latent peristaltic unease. The musculature of the colon is unamenable to argument, it senses any conspiracy and its revenge is harsh and prompt.
Falck stands immovable in the wind and rain. Once, he made a decision that led him to this cliff. When was it? he asks himself. Why did he do so? Is there forgiveness for the harm one causes the self?
On the outskirts of the colony he passes by the huts of the natives, constructions of peat, clay, shale, driftwood and whalebone, as well as unhewn and broken planks discarded by the Trade. There are perhaps a dozen such dwellings, which seem almost to have emerged from the ground like molehills. Jagged scraps of discarded glass have been pressed into the recesses made for windows and let in a measure of light. But the homes are abandoned, the paths dug out between them fallen into decay, hides and joists removed from the roofs. The rain falls directly down into them, washing away through openings and depositing earthy sediment on the slopes down to the ford. The dampness envelops these former homes with cold and stagnant odours, reminding him of those who lived here and the life they led, a stench of heathens, their filled urine tubs, their lice-infested beds, their always-simmering pots. The smells arouse Falck’s nostrils, bringing to his mind fresh meat and naked, sweat-glistening bodies, improprieties shamelessly perpetrated in the semi-darkness, libidinous moans in the nooks and crannies. His bowels contract, he presses a hand to his stomach, then breaks suddenly into a canter, halts, canters off again. Presently it subsides. A cold sweat is upon his brow. He wipes it away with his hand and assumes a gait more suitable for clergy.
Only from one of the peat dwellings, the one closest to the colony, does smoke still rise. Pale faces of children at the window holes. He puts on a smile and waves awkwardly. They stare back solemnly, perhaps they are afraid, or even hateful? Who knows what these people think or feel?
He certainly does not. He wil
l go in to them later in the day with his catechist, to preach Christian love and propriety, freedom through salvation, the usual lesson. He hopes it may re-establish some semblance of day-today normality.
Further on, his path takes him past a cluster of tents in which there is more life. More heathens. They have come from the south in boats fully laden. A sure sign the ship is indeed on its way. Smoke rises up from the holes in the top and coils into the fog. The tent openings are drawn aside: he glimpses people in the murky interiors. They are clad in a strange jumble of hide and colourful Danish linen, which they have bartered from the employees of the colony or ships’ crews. He cannot explain it, but their presence makes him feel rather intimidated, the unfathomable darkness they represent, their intimacy with death and unworried aspect on life. He never crawls inside one of the peat dwellings without first making the sign of the cross and pronouncing the Lord’s Prayer. And these newcomers are even more foreign and disconcerting than those who permanently inhabit the colony.
Natives journey here and settle each autumn when the ship is due, in the hope of trading. Usually they are more numerous, the tents often approaching five score, but these past winters have been harsh and unknown numbers have perished, either directly from hunger or by the rampant culling of widows and children.
A woman and a man are seated on their haunches in front of the tent. They gape at the pastor, unsmiling and without expression. They exchange some words he cannot understand, a slippery babble of sounds. He wonders if it is he they are talking about, and walks on all the more quickly, pursued by their stares. Do they know about me? Do the natives talk about what the pastor does? About the pastor and the widow? He squelches ahead in his boots and hums a psalm to cheer himself up.
Down at the bay, drawn up on to land, lies the Taasinge Slot, dark and brooding, a Danish whaler wrecked years before. Its masts and parts of the woodwork have been taken away and used for firewood and building materials, despite the colony manager having issued a ban on removing so much as a rivet. Predictably, this merely hastened the destruction. The ship was found drifting some nautical miles south of the colony without a soul on board, yet still laden with numerous barrels of good oil, and was towed here with much difficulty. The colony manager has written to its owners, but it is clear now that the whaler has entered into a pact with the land and will never leave it.
He looks up at the captain’s cabin beneath the quarterdeck, where the frames of the windows are intact, though the glass removed. He sees part of the ceiling inside. It is less than a year since he lay there within, clinging to the widow and a keg of aquavit, determined to die. He finds it to have been a happy time.
Sukkertoppen, this seventh day of August 1793
My dear sister Kirstine,
Autumn is soon upon us and all of us, Danes and natives alike, now await the arrival of the ship.
So many boats put into the colony with blubber at present that it resembles market days at Christiania. However, it is the trade that brings them, and company with the other savages; certainly not the pastor or the good Mission or the Salvation of the Lord.
My own longing to see this year’s ship is as great as any other’s. As I have already confided to you, it is my deepest hope that within a few weeks I shall be putting to sea, this same autumn once again, to be reunited with my beloved sister, if indeed she be above the soil, and to kiss her and pull her to my breast and thus make this letter superfluous. We shall then confide in each other, Kirstine. I shall be your father confessor and we shall be each other’s comfort and solace. You shall listen to my account and I am confident you will forgive me everything!
Alas, how great a burden it is to remain separated from those one loves. I think and fear that you will find me quite changed in body and soul after these last six years, and I fear even more that my nightly vision of my sister Kirstine has spoken true.
Falck descends into the colony proper, where greasy smoke from the boiling of blubber infects the air and conspires with the eternal fog to inflict upon the permanent inhabitants a chronic hacking, bloodied phlegm and viscous, soot-infested mucus. At the blubber house he remains standing for a moment, his gaze turned to the harbour. He sees the Trader over by the colony house in dialogue with his overseer. Falck ducks, then scurries across the open space between the blubber house and the store to reach the water’s edge from where the Trader cannot see him. Here, he almost collides with the smith, Niels Hammer, who comes trudging round a corner carrying what looks like a large bundle of sticks or switches on his shoulders.
Mind where you’re going, Hammer! He leaps aside so as not to be knocked down by the brawny, heavily burdened smith.
Hammer drops his bundle. It lands with a swish on top of others of the same material, long, white sticks whose kind cannot readily be ascertained. He turns and looks Falck up and down. He does not smile, though his eyes flicker mischievously beneath his brow’s protruding buttress of thickened bone.
Magister Falck. You’re as soaked as a crow.
The smith hails from Lofoten and speaks the sharp, resounding tongue of northern Norway, a fact that occasions him to speak in a manner as though they were childhood friends, which is to say inappropriately familiar and steeped with sarcasm. Falck, quite as Norwegian himself, replies in Danish.
Spare me your observations, Hammer.
He tries to get round the man, makes to his right, then left, but each time the smith steps in his way. He senses the foul stench of sweat, rotten tobacco and badly digested aquavit, and steps backwards.
Is there anything you require of me?
Is there anything the pastor requires of me? the smith rejoins facetiously.
A confession, perhaps? Falck suggests snidely. But his sarcasm cuts no ice with the smith, a notorious and unscrupulous fornicator. The Ten Commandments alone do not suffice to capture the sins of Niels Hammer, and for two consecutive years now Falck has worded written reports on his criticizable habitus and the damaging influence of his presence on Danes and natives alike, christened or otherwise. But these reports seem without effect, perhaps because the pastor’s own reputation is hardly any better, and because due to an incalculable number of other complications he is unable to report the smith for the unspeakable outrage he has committed against the Madame of the colony house. A fact of which the smith himself is eminently aware and for which reason he feels he may do as he pleases. The worst thing, however, is that Falck is wracked with guilt-tinged anxiety at having reported one of his flock.
What are these things? he asks, striving to be friendly and pointing at the heap of pale sticks.
Baleen, says Hammer. To be shipped.
Aha, says Falck. I see. Interesting. Indeed.
Whalebones, the smith adds, sensing that Falck has no idea what he is talking about.
I am familiar with the meaning of the word, Falck says.
Only now, though, does he realize what the items are. He puts his boot upon them, feels their spring as they yield beneath his sole. The bundled whalebones are bristly and as though decayed. There is something inadmissible, shameless and pastily naked about them that is at once repulsive and inciting. One can hardly avoid imagining the process of refinement to which this material will be subjected by the textile manufacturers of Denmark, and the final product that will come of it, the delicate, elastic stays of waist-cinching corsets. The journey which they are to make comprises one of the modern world’s strangest metamorphoses from nature to culture: from the plankton-filtering mouth of the humpbacked whale they bob along on the sweat-drenched shoulders of this smith to sway in the hold of a ship, are subsequently immersed in the cleansing chemical tubs of the factories, then cut and shaped and sewn into lace and fabric, finally to fulfil their destiny nestling against the waists of women, constraining undesirable flab.
The smith stares at him, the light sparkling in his keen blue eyes. He scratches his throa
t with hands the shape of shovels. Did I say something wrong? Morten asks himself. Did I make a sigh or cut a grimace? Why does he still stand here?
Indeed, he says, and clears his throat. I hear the ship will be here soon.
Der Frühling, Hammer replies. She’s out there somewhere, chopping in the fog. I saw her on my fire-watch this last night. A man sees a lot of things when he’s out in the night, Magister.
Indeed, says Falck again. Very interesting, Hammer. He is about to say something that might lead the conversation in a different and less uncomfortable direction, but the smith is too quick for him.
So the pastor might be leaving us then?
I go wheresoever the Lord calls me to go. It is no matter for your interference.
The Trader says he’ll send you home in chains for what you did.
Like I said, be good enough not to interfere in matters that do not concern you, Hammer.
There’ll be those sorry to see you go, I shouldn’t wonder, the smith says, more good-naturedly now.
And those less than sorry. Is that it?
The smith chuckles. The Magister’s in the mood for jest this morning.
I may be leaving and I may not, Falck says frankly. It depends on one thing and another. If I am called home I shall go. If the Trader wishes to initiate proceedings I shall yield. I place my trust in the Lord.
Things will be quiet here without our pastor. The smith grins.
If I were you, I wouldn’t count my blessings. And what of you, anyway, Hammer?
Me? This is my home. A land for proper men, Magister. I’m like a fish in water. My bones will rest in Greenland’s earth.
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Page 13