The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

by Aitken, Martin, Leine, Kim

  Now, striding along behind this young porter, whose voice rings out in song, returned to the land of his birth in a town edged by forest and benevolent fells, he gradually awakes from the stupor into which weeks of fatalism had thrown him. He can hardly believe it to be true. Yet the feeling of cobblestones and horse dung beneath his feet tells him it is so. He has come home.

  The inn to which he is taken is called The Weary Dragoon. Here he is given a room comprising a chair, a table and an alcove made up with clean linen and deluged with pillows and a thick eiderdown that seem to him like whipped cream, and a mattress so soft he feels as if he floats upon it. Downstairs in the serving house he seats himself at a table and is served teacakes with fresh yellow butter and four soft-boiled eggs. He is offered strong ale, but asks for milk, and the landlady brings him a whole jug. He drinks the fatty emulsion with gusto. She addresses him with a mixture of deference and motherly tenderness, her bosom perilously close to his cheek as she pours the milk for him, a quivering, ample mass, and he senses her warmth and the rank smell of her perspiration. He eats too much and goes to lie down in the soft alcove, where he sleeps until midday. Then a lunch of pea soup with sour cream, yellow-white islands of fat, pancakes folded around satiny sugar and cinnamon, and two varieties of jam. Again, he must retire immediately afterwards. He lies groaning, a cold sweat upon his brow, clutching his stomach and chuck­ling with disbelief at such a sumptuous meal. Later he rises and wanders about the town, heavy with glucose and fat.

  So many people on this autumn day of sunshine in Bergen; so many faces he has never seen, and which he will never see again, or at least not recall. This is something that had all but vanished from his memory: to be surrounded by people about whose lives and vices he is spared the trouble of concerning himself. They are and will remain strangers, dour and inscrutable, and he loves them for the fact that he need never have anything to do with a single one of them.

  Later in his room again, floating on his back upon the fluffy luxury of the mattress. He loses himself in the buttery yellow of the descending sun, a rhombus intersected by the cross of the window’s muntin on the opposite wall. The figure wanders diagonally upwards to the right, and the more it advances towards the ceiling the more its shadowy crucifix becomes distorted. Its panel turns crimson, eventually matt and colour­less, and finally vanishes. He cannot sleep and doesn’t care to read. He lies awake, listening to urban sounds, and feels already that he has lived here for a long time.

  The widow comes to him in the night. She steals silently beneath his covers, grins suggestively and nestles beside him with a contented sigh. He gets up and tells her to go, but she sleeps as if dead. He tries to push her hair aside to see her face, but no matter how much he grasps it remains concealed, pressed into the plump pillow, her body immovable on the mattress. I have eaten too much, he tells himself, and retires once more, elbowing the widow in annoyance, that she may give him room. In the morning he goes out into town and puts the dream from his mind. On his return he comforts himself with fresh-baked teacakes and eggs. He eats meticulously and without haste, licking his lips, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. For dinner are served thick slices of cold roast in jelly, with carrots, parsnip and kohlrabi, mashed and blended with fresh cream. The landlady hovers about him with her obscenely perspiring bosom and fastidious solicitude; she clucks like a broody hen and presses herself so close he cannot help but feel the warmth that is exuded from her body. He surmises the woman is in need of a husband, or else the one she has is at sea. Perhaps he is the weary dragoon, a fallen or deserted – certainly absent – soldier. He has no idea, nor does he wish to know. He yearns for the fells, away from the lust this woman will surely soon awaken in him, but which until now she has unwittingly kept suppressed by stuffing him with food.

  He asks her about the eastbound mail carriage and is told that the route has been discontinued; now only the packet boat goes down the coast and puts in to some of the settlements inside the fords. But she is willing to make enquiries. If the gentleman really is intent on journeying overland, there is a chance he might be taken up by a private carriage. However, traffic in that direction is rare, she says sceptically. Mostly the land is mountainous and inhospitable. They say the roads are infested with Gypsies and Jewish rabble. I’ve only ever been as far as Ulrikken myself, and that was far enough, she tells him.

  Falck says that his decision is made: he will go by road, irrespective of whatever hindrance it might present. He thanks her for the food, returns to his room and sleeps for the rest of the afternoon.

  The good weather does not last; the fells to the east force the moist sea air upwards, where it cools and falls as rain. Yet it is far from cold, even if the wind is bothersome when it sweeps down from the peaks and is funnelled through the streets. His walks along the wharf and among the squares afford him constant, almost incredulous pleasure. To amble, without obligation, without fear of being waylaid by officious colony managers or persistent coopers eager to be married; to wander freely among the crowd, a face like any other. At long last he senses the liberty he has always espoused, the freedom of Rousseau. Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains! He has cast away his chains. He has returned home. From street vendors he purchases good autumn apples on which he munches as he goes; he jostles at the stalls with the servant girls and women of the lower classes, bargains and gesticulates, asking questions that give rise to mirth. From foreigners he buys what they refer to as earth apples, tubers that lie baking in small fires or else are fried in pig’s fat upon a pan. These were a much-despised food when he was young; now they are commonly eaten, although no self-respecting inn would serve them. When poked from the fire by the ragamuffin merchants, they are put on a plate, split apart and served with a pinch of salt and a good dollop of butter that quickly melts and runs. He dips the pale flesh of the potato in the salty, rather astringent butter and devours it with much enjoyment and an occasional pang of guilty conscience. If his landlady should discover him, he imagines, she would surely be outraged. But his hunger is incessant; it is a hunger accumulated over several years; a room inside him that has stood empty and cold, and which now is being furnished with solid fare, and the three meals a day at The Weary Dragoon are alone insufficient. In a matter of days after his coming ashore, his insides are settled, his diarrhoea has ceased, supplanted by constipation, and he must exert himself to empty his bowels. He senses his girth has increased.

  The landlady has spoken with a farmer, who is willing to give him a place on his horse-drawn cart. No other opportunity has been forth­coming and she recommends instead that he take the southbound packet boat that will bring him to Christiania within the fortnight. Or why not stay here in Bergen?

  Why not, indeed? But he tells her about his father, who is waiting at the other side of the country, and she understands, sheds a tear and utters something about the love between father and son. There is nothing quite like it. He refrains from comment.

  Morten Falck rejoices at the prospect of watching the landscape pass by, inch by inch, from a cart.

  Tell the good farmer I shall be delighted.

  She slings two large curves of boiled sausage on to his plate. Clear juices ooze from the cut ends. She comes with the bowl of steaming hot mash held against her hip and gives him several dollops. He digs spoon­fuls of mashed mountain cranberries from a jar and sets ravenously about his meal.

  The Magister will die of hunger before his first day of journeying comes to an end.

  He laughs. Madame Therkelsen, I know you will make sure to provide me with a packed lunch for the road.

  She withdraws. He can tell by her posture that he has offended her. She already feels she owns a part of me, he thinks to himself. High time I left.

  The journey with the farmer is wet and unpleasant. The cart is open and he sits huddled on the seat beside the driver, who utters not a single syllable. A brisk easterly wind buffets his chest and presses the r
ain into the small openings of his clothing, which he endeavours to keep closed, drawing his coat around him and pulling down his broad-brimmed hat. In the hills they must climb down and walk, when crossing the wetlands, streams and dubious bridges. Several times they must stand in the rain at a ferrying place and wait to be taken across the ford on a flat-bottomed barge.

  They leave Bergen in the final hours of the night and reach their desti­nation, a farmhouse barely visible in the compact darkness, in the early hours of their third day of travel. He has exchanged only the most neces­sary comments with the farmer along the way, but when they arrive and the wife receives her husband with a kiss, he livens up and shows Falck to a room upstairs. He smiles a lot, speaks softly and with hesitation, and avoids Falck’s gaze. The wife serves them cold food. She is a comely woman, risible and chatty. She asks her husband about the journey. Did he sell his wares, how much did he get for the pig, was he cheated? He hands her his purse and she counts the coins, sorting them into rigsdalers, marks and skillings, putting foreign coins aside, then sweeping the money into a coffer before closing it. The farmer asks for aquavit; she fetches a dusty bottle and pours three glasses as heavy as lead and resembling thim­bles. They drink. Sweet aquavit, with a bitter taste of almond, and very strong.

  Falck senses the warmth return to his body; he becomes animated and tells them about his sea voyage and life among the savages. The wife shudders with rapture. She asks if the savages run about naked and chop off each other’s heads; are they to be reckoned as people or are they a sort of animal? She cannot imagine how he could hold prayers for such creatures, let alone christen and confirm them. In her view it amounts to going out into the stables to missionize to the sow, the cows and the colt. What a congregation! She laughs heartily. Once she saw a savage at Bergen. He stood chained in the square and defecated upright like a horse, while rolling his eyes. Such creatures cannot surely be made Christian, she considers. It would be sacrilege.

  Falck sleeps until noon the next day. When he gets up he sees that the farm and its fields extend across open land that undulates its way down towards the ford. And he feels he is home, even if he has yet to arrive. The rain persists, but it is not a rain that lashes and penetrates the seams of his garments, rather it is warm, soft and as tangible as silk, a kindly rain. After a brief walk he returns and knocks on the kitchen door.

  The wife greets him. The peace of God to you!

  Peace of God, he rejoins.

  The gentleman must sit himself down and have something to eat.

  He devours a plate of rømmegrøt, while she is busy with her work in the kitchen. He sits and watches her, her quick and practised movements, her strong arms. Somewhere in the house he can hear children arguing and laughing.

  Where is your husband? he asks.

  Gudmind and our eldest boy have gone into the fells to see to the sheep. He won’t be home until evening.

  He sits on the bench and studies the simple kitchen. The ceiling is low and supported by thick joists. The fire roars in the stove. The heat makes him feel dozy and yet his mind remains quite clear. Behind him, rain patters against the window. They will be soaked, he says.

  Oh, they are used to it. Here it rains most days of the year. We thank the Lord for the rain. But the gentleman had better stay until the weather improves. We can’t have him catching his death when he crosses the fells. And we’ve room enough.

  He thanks her. In the afternoon he teaches the children, tests their knowledge of the Bible and offers them a short introduction to the natural sciences. He notes that their knowledge of the proximate environment, plants and animals, nature in general, is quite exact, whereas their concep­tions of the wider world are at best medieval.

  They laugh when he tells them the Earth is round. We’ve heard that before, but if it were really round people could only live on top, and the water would run out of the ford, and then we wouldn’t be able to sail or fish.

  Their comprehension of the scriptures is at once imperturbably conceited and confused. They seem to believe that the stories of the Bible took place in a recent past inside a neighbouring ford, and they refer to the apostles and the prophets as though to recently deceased relatives. The local priest would seem to have quite singular methods of rendering theology relevant to his congregation. Perhaps he should have employed some of the same principles in his own work, he muses, but no, the Eskimo are not easily fooled. They would have seen through him right away. He tells the children about the Holy Land, the life and death of the Saviour. They smile overbearingly. Afterwards they ask him again about Greenland and the savages, whether it is true that they go about naked and simply squat down wherever when they need to defecate, and squirt out their young like fish eggs?

  He humours them and they nod, reassured that the world accords with their conception of it. He endeavours to go through the alphabet with them, but only the twelve-year-old girl displays any interest in reading. It is a shame, he tells the mother, for she would learn quickly if she went to school. But the mother does not consider it a good thing for girls to read. She herself can write only her name and yet she is happy. Falck resigns himself to this steadfast adherence to stupidity. He tires of the monotony of their cheerfulness, but nonetheless enjoys his time on the idyllic farm by the ford.

  He stays a week. During all this time the sun does not shine once and at no point does he see more of the fells than a few hundred fathoms of their lower slopes. Yet the farmer believes the weather on the whole to be better on the other side, perhaps a week’s walking to the east, and offers to take him some miles of the journey. He packs his few belongings, his chest having been sent on by the packet boat, is given cheese and bread by the wife, and bids the children farewell. Their voices ring in his ears as the cart sets out along the road that runs south beside a seemingly endless arm of the ford. When eventually they reach the final village at the head of the ford, he climbs down and says his goodbyes to the farmer.

  God bless you, Priest, the man says.

  He nods and begins to trudge southwards, where the road soon dwindles into a path that follows the course of a river upstream through a valley.

  The hike up the fell is uncomplicated, albeit taxing. A few farms lie scattered upon the esker, poor holdings of steeply sloping land bounded by drystone walls, here and there a flock of sheep. The farmers are at work burning off their fields, keeping the flames in check with long rakes, spreading them over the grass, as though painting fire with long brushes, beating them out wherever they seem on the verge of getting out of hand. The seasoned smell of burning grass settles in his nostrils and a small bubble of recollection bursts inside him, dejection, anxiety and excite­ment in such proportions as he has not felt in twenty years. I was not a happy child, he thinks to himself. I was afraid of dying. This is the first time he has acknowledged the fact. It makes him sorrowful, yet at the same time he feels more at home than ever before. Now I am returned, to these hills and mountains, to this feeling of old. He has not come back in order to be happy, but to be home.

  The summery vales are below him, which is to say that he recalls them as such once he is ascended above the treeline, where the wind is as cold as ice. Behind each peak is another; the passes that run between them are sodden and inaccessible, and the wind sweeps right through them. He sticks to the dry slopes, following the empty land between trees and high peaks in order to avoid the freezing wind. His progress is slow, but visibility is good and he makes sure always to have some feature of the landscape by which to keep his bearings, a bend in the ford further back, two peaks in alignment. By the time darkness falls he is still nowhere near the divide. On this first night he sleeps under the open sky beneath a stunted, though long-whiskered, fir tree whose branches reach to the ground. He manages to light a fire and to boil some gruel in a dented pot from a handful of oats he has with him from the farm. He wraps his blanket around him and settles down for the night, as close to the
trunk of the tree as he can get. The widow is there. She sits on her haunches by the fire and prods at the embers, causing sparks to fly into the air. What do you want? he asks, not knowing if she can hear him. You are in my head. Are you the expression of some wish or loss? A fear? We were married and you failed me, then I failed you, and now you are dead. So it is. What has happened cannot be changed.

  So what do you want, exactly?

  But he knows what she wants; it dawns on him now, lying here in this Norwegian wilderness: she wants him back. That may be, he says to himself, drawing the blanket tighter around his body, though quite out of the question. Then he thinks: But she is not real, she is only a spirit or a nightmare, a product of my own making. Does that mean it is I who wants her back? The thought terrifies him.

  He wakes early, shivering from the cold, and rekindles the fire with his blanket wrapped around him. He heats up the gruel from the evening before and feels his body come alive as the warmth of it spreads inside him. He senses the widow’s continued presence, a fug of tanned hide, train-oil lamps and urine tubs. The unbearable heat that bore down on him as he crawled into the communal dwelling house, the laughter that erupted all around, the hospitality of the natives and their merciless arro­gance, the way they always descended so relentlessly on his weaknesses. The wind is freezing. He can see that higher up snow is falling, a plume of swirling white coming off the peak like a wagging tail.