The Missionary Oxbøl’s only love is the Missionary Oxbøl himself, Maria says. He will find punishment in time. She turns and begins to mend some clothes.
Behind her the woman chuckles and talks deliriously to herself about old Oxbøl. She calls him Pater Oxbøl and speaks in detail of the things he forced her to do and of what she would like to do to him in return. Maria regrets having brought her ashore.
When Habakuk comes home, she tells him what has happened. He is at once dismayed and angry.
How dreadful!
How barbaric!
The poor woman!
You’re as guilty as them, says Maria. You can do penance by help- ing her.
I will do whatever you believe is best, says Habakuk.
The next day two kayaks paddle out through the ford. They lie deep in the water. Each carries a passenger in the stern, their backs to the kayak man. One is the woman, the other her little daughter. The women of the settlement stand on the promontory and watch them leave. In the evening the catechist holds prayers. We are all of us guilty before God, he says. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone! When he has finished, the women break into their shrill song. Maria Magdalene sings with them.
Outside, it begins to snow.
She has not told anyone about it. But she cannot keep it secret for ever. Sooner or later she must at least speak to her husband. Or a priest. But where to find a priest? Especially now, after the colony has been moved to its present location, the clergy have neglected their district. Of course, she could speak to the settlement’s catechist. But he is too pious to her unsentimental mind and would doubtless only fall down upon his knees and endeavour to talk her into following his example; and there they would moan and wail and invoke the wounds of Christ and the like. Such matters are not for her. She loves the Lord, she has respect for the Passion, but she has no desire to wallow in wounds and blood and bodily fluids like the Brethren.
She must wait until her husband returns. He is away hunting the reindeer and has not been home for some weeks. He has taken a mistress with him, another young woman, to cook and sew and keep his bed warm. She herself is too weak to go on such demanding trips. And keeping him warm at night is something she increasingly neglects, as Habakuk frequently has complained. If you were as expert in attending to your husband’s needs as you are in the Gospel, then I would be a happy man, he says. As such, it is only right and fair that he take a mistress with him. But she wished that he did not.
She doesn’t even know when it began. It was sometime during the winter when they were still snowed in and their meat reserves were dwindling. She had these strange dreams in which a figure clad in white appeared to speak to her. To begin with she thought it was Oxbøl coming to her, that it was a nightmare, and she would wake up with the bedclothes soaked in sweat. Oxbøl is not a man with whom she wishes to spend another night. The dream recurred twice and she began to sense that it was not the old priest at all. The figure spoke, but she was unable to catch the words. Perhaps they were uttered in some foreign language, Greek or Hebrew, it was hard to tell. Though she is relatively well-read, the biblical languages are not her strong point. She can rattle off some rhymes in Latin, but that is all. When Habakuk is in a playful mood he will often refer to her as his little papist. No, the figure did not speak Latin. Nor was there anything threatening about him. She had felt there was, the first time, but then her impression changed. If anything, the figure was beckoning to her. But what was he trying to say?
Then the dreams stopped. Most probably this was common, she told herself, that dreams become particularly vivid after some dreadful occurrence. First there was the woman who had arrived and caused them such trouble. Then came the truly dreadful occurrence. Their eldest son, the pale and freckled boy, had been practising firing the bow his father had made for him, and a wayward arrow had struck his sister in the eye. The boy had run away and hidden; the girl lay on the shore, screaming. Some of the other children came running up to their house to raise the alarm. When they came to the girl, the arrow was broken, whether by her own hand or her brother’s they never found out. But Habakuk grasped the short and jagged shaft and tugged. It was a real arrow with barbs, and the point was a sharply honed piece of metal from the Trade, the type that breaks off and lodges itself crosswise in the flesh. Habakuk pulled on the shaft, Maria had to hold the girl’s head tightly, and she could feel her husband use all his might as he twisted and turned the arrow to remove it. The leather bindings succumbed, but the arrowhead remained where it was. They hoped the wound would close and encapsulate the metal inside the orbit of her eye. But the girl died in the night. The boy, her older brother, returned the next day. He acted as if nothing had hap pened, ate his food, slept on the bench, and they left him in peace.
It was some days, or rather nights, after this accident that Maria Magdalene again dreamt about the figure clad in white. She thought perhaps it was the Lord wishing to comfort her in her grief. But she did not want His comfort. If You were any good, You would have saved my daughter and spared my son from becoming a murderer; now it is of no consequence. Each day she went about the place in the presence of her son, the murderer. She gave him food, mended his clothes, stroked and caressed him, and could not help but hate him and his freckled face and foxlike eyes. And the boy could sense this; he drew away from her. They had no other children who had survived the first year of life.
Habakuk has now begun to talk of moving up on to the high ground. He pretends not to remember it was her idea. It would be unusual. Maria has never known of anyone settling more than a stone’s throw from the water. And yet there is something majestic and alluring about the plateaus. The fog does not reach there. A person can sit and watch it come creeping in the evenings and lay itself upon the water from shore to shore, pearly and lustrous, and so dense one feels able almost to step upon it and cross the ford on foot. In the mornings one may watch it drawn out to sea again. Living at the shore a person cannot see a hand in front of their face in the fog, one is blinded and incarcerated and cannot judge from where a sound might issue.
We would be closer to God up there, says Habakuk.
Maria smiles to herself.
And then the white-clad figure returns and speaks to her again. It is the middle of summer. The son has gone into the ford with his father and Maria is glad to be rid of them both. The settlement is all but depopulated, apart from the catechist and two elders who survived the last winter and now live in fear of the next.
This time she both hears and understands what he says: Maria Magdalene, do you believe all this to have come from nothing?
He has taken her up onto one of the plateaus, they must have wandered there in the dream, though she cannot recall having done so. Now he stands and sweeps out his hand to indicate the ford and the fells and the sky. She scrutinizes him, taking note of his appearance, for she has decided to commit the dream to writing as soon as she wakes. Now she sees that it is He. The Saviour. She is in no doubt. He resembles the illustrations she has seen of Him in several ways: the beard, the long wavy hair, the brown eyes, the pale skin, the coat. But the look He gives her, the expression on His face, is not as she would have imagined. His eyebrows are raised, His lips curled in a wry smile. Is the Lord tor menting me? she thinks to herself.
And then He is gone. She stands alone, high up above the settlement, which is enshrouded by fog. It is the middle of the night, yet light. A pair of ravens tumble in the air and caw. The next day she writes it all down on a piece of hide from which the blubber has been scraped. She puts the document away under her mattress. She has need of someone to consult about the dream and wishes her husband would come home soon.
Some days later the dream recurs. She is standing at His side, as though she were His equal, and He sweeps out his hand and repeats the same, perhaps mischievous question: Do you believe all this to have come from nothing?
No.
Of course not.
But no exchange comes of it. She would like to ask Him about various matters now that He is here, she would like to ask His forgiveness for being angry with Him for the death of her daughter; to ask His advice concerning her son, the boy with the freckles. But every time she is about to speak He waves his hand dismissively. He does not look at her. He looks away, out across the ford and the fells.
Do you believe all this to have come from nothing?
No, I have already said.
She ventures to examine His chest; she bends forward and draws His coat aside. And there she sees the wound. It is not bleeding, but neither is it healed. A flaming, open gash. The entry point of the Roman lance. It reminds her of her daughter struck by the arrow. She wakes up crying.
Maria Magdalene, He says to her one night, go forth and say to your people that their lives are sinful. They shall gather in number and leave the colony and the Danish drunkards and philanderers, and they shall worship the Lord.
It is the longest pronouncement she has heard Him utter. She writes it down, word for word, in the morning. Now she has covered the entire parchment with his words. That same day, Habakuk returns from the hunting.
He hangs his head and appears remorseful. They have killed several large animals; they come with the skinned carcasses and deposit them on the ground, hind quarters with legs poking up into the air, red muscle marbled by yellow-white tallow and tendons. The winter is secured. But Habakuk is silent. After he has washed the blood from his hands he goes into the house and lies down on the bench. She boils him a portion of entrails and barley oats, but he pushes the plate away and turns to face the wall. The boy comes in. She gives the food to him instead and he gulps it down. She can see that he has grown. When he has eaten, Habakuk asks him to leave.
Something has happened, he says.
Yes, she says. Something has happened. But what?
He tells her. They hunted every day, but without fortune. The animals were too far away; they were too timid, and whenever he came within range to shoot, he missed. Something was wrong; they could sense it. He stopped sleeping with his mistress, thinking that perhaps the Lord was angry with him on such account and that sleeping alone would better his fortune in the hunt. Yet still they killed nothing. Then one of the men suggested they resort to hunting magic. They made small effigies of reindeer out of dwarf birch and heather, and pronounced spells over them.
In the days that followed they killed many animals. But no one among the men was pleased. They were afraid they would be punished with sickness and accidents.
Maria is horrified. You have worshipped idols!
Yes. The Devil made us do so, am I right?
Then Maria tells him about the dreams. She shows him the parchment with everything the figure in white has said to her. They resolve to follow the commandments to the letter in order to avoid punishment. They lie separated from the rest of the dwelling house by means of a hide draped from the ceiling. It allows them some privacy. They hear the other members of the household come in bringing meat with them, which they begin to boil. The room quickly becomes stiflingly hot. Maria and Habakuk take off their clothes and lie down naked on the skin. They listen to the talk going on in the house. They whisper and make plans.
In the autumn they move up on to the high ground. To begin with they live in tents. They lift the joists from the old dwelling at the shore and carry them up the fell. They dig fresh peat and allow it to dry. They erect the walls. The wives tan the bowels of seals, which they use for windows; the men salvage the carcass of a humpback whale and lay the bones on the shore for the beach fleas to cleanse, after which they will be used for rafters and struts. They sail along the coast, which is awash with wreckage from sunken vessels, and collect what driftwood they find: planed planks, blubber barrels, wooden chests, rope and great rolls of canvas. Inside the ford the inhabitants gather together whatever they possess in the way of European building materials, boards, hasps and latches, iron hooks for their pots, but the spoils of the shipwrecks turn out to be plentiful enough for their efforts to be superfluous. They know that plundering wreckage constitutes a violation of Danish law and that they risk chains and the pillory should they be discovered, but they tell each other that this is our country, what drifts onto our shores belongs just as much to us as to the Danes, and they can come and claim it if they dare.
Habakuk constructs a long bench with room enough for each of the three couples who are to live with them to have their own spacious dwelling area. They erect a flagpole made from a jib mast, and hoist up a bowel skin decorated with a stylized impression of people dancing, hand in hand, in a ring. Their fluttering flag can be seen from afar.
Habakuk holds prayers on the plateau, in front of the new house. He tells of his wife’s latest dream in which the Lord once again has appeared before her. The Lord is pleased, he says. He rejoices in His children. He says they have chosen the path to salvation and independence, a path they cannot walk with the Danish philanderers and topers of the colony. We are ourselves now, says Habakuk, and the Lord Jesus Christ is with us!
Yes! they reply who sit listening to him. But what are we to do if a boat should come from the colony and they say that we have corrupted the faith and stolen the wreckage that rightfully belongs to His Majesty the king? For this is, indeed, what we have done!
As long as we give heed unto the Word of the Lord, nothing bad can happen to us, says Habakuk calmly, taking his time to look them each in the eye. This land belongs to us, what washes on to the shore is ours to take without permission, and no one has the right to tell us what to believe in. The Lord is with us! He speaks to my wife and I pass His word on to you.
The autumn gives up trout, salmon and reindeer in abundance. The winter stores are filled by the time the cold arrives and the ford ices over. People come to them from all corners of the district; new dwellings are built on the high ground, of peat and wood and stone. New storage pits are dug in the ground for winter stockpiles and are quickly filled. Blubber and brushwood and peat are burned for heating, but also driftwood from the shores of the skerries. The dwellings are good and warm; children are born and their mothers have milk. Then winter comes and the settlement hibernates and lies dormant. Thick, fresh smoke rises in silence from a score of chimneys high above the ford. When spring arrives no one has perished from hunger, and they even have meat in reserve when the capelin fishing begins.
That summer boatloads of new settlers arrive almost by the day. They laugh in astonishment at the sight of the plateaus on which stand houses of all shapes and materials. What is this? they exclaim. These people must be insane! And then they go ashore and build something even stranger.
Maria Magdalene dreams. She has dreamt these houses and these people, now she dreams even greater things. She dreams houses on all the rocks and thousands of people living well and in peace and harmony. She dreams a school and Habakuk says to the people: The Lord has said there must be a school for our children, so that they may learn to read and write. And so they build a school and the children learn to read and write. And Maria Magdalene dreams of a hospital for the old and sick, and Habakuk passes it on; and they devote a house at the top of the plateau to those who are infirm, and employ some elderly women to look after them. And Maria Magdalene dreams, or perhaps merely has the idea, of a communal store and a list of those who have plenty and those who are in need, and all of it is carried out; and a widow’s pension is set up for those who are left on their own, and a sick-benefit scheme for those who for a time find themselves unable to work, and a fund for those who lack the aptitude to go on the hunt, but who are able to carve figures out of driftwood and soapstone. And Maria Magdalene dreams of a church. And she says to Habakuk, The Lord has spoken to me. He says we must build a church and it shall be made of the land’s own building materials, though we may use driftwood, too, and it shall lie upon the very highest point of the highest plateau.
And thus they begin the laborious work of gathering driftwood and slate and peat for a church. The building work lasts a whole summer; hundreds of people take part. It is a fine church, facing west, to the mouth of the ford, to travellers arriving by boat, and in front of it an arch is erected with the jawbone of an Arctic whale.
What have you dreamt this night? Habakuk asks his wife.
I dreamt that we are to live in peace and tolerance with one another, she says.
He seems disappointed. Is that all?
It is the greatest of all dreams, she says.
The Second Commandment
A Meal (August 1787)
The Second Commandment, as it is most plainly to be taught by a father to his family:
‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.’
What does this imply?
Answer: That we should fear and love God so that we may not curse, swear, conjure, lie or deceive by His name, but call upon the same in every time of need; to pray, praise and give thanks.
Bertel is awoken by something cold and smooth passing across his belly. It is the hand of his wife, fumbling in sleep. He pushes it away, gets out of bed and goes over to the boy. He is sleeping peacefully. His feet have scuffed the cover from his body; his shirt has twisted around his torso and ridden up under his arms. Bertel puts it gently right again and pulls up the cover. The boy sniffs a little and turns on to his side. Concern and love. A difficult mixture. He has inherited his father’s freckles and pale skin, as well as his irregular teeth, dishwater-blond hair and the bunged-up snoring, about which Sofie has always complained in relation to his own person. In addition, the good head on his shoulders. A fine candidate for the clergy. Bertel smiles to himself. Then he tears himself away and goes down to the harbour to look at the new arrivals.
The ship lies calmly swinging at anchor in the bay, half-concealed in the fog. The colony bell tolls – perhaps it was what caused him to wake – and the crew are busy making ready for the welcome. He seats himself on top of a barrel, begs a spill from one of the native constables and lights his pipe.
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Page 20