He writes a few sentences. They are insincere and falsely sympathetic, and yet he genuinely feels compassion for her. Why is it so? Does the hand know something I do not? Can the pen read thoughts to which I myself have no access? Hastily, he scribbles the letter, as neutral in tone as possible, informing her that he is well and in good cheer and devoted to another. The lies are easier to write than the truth.
I cannot go back, he tells himself. I can only go forward, in a ceaseless circle, and may hope only that when the circle is complete and the motion halts I shall have arrived at the place that is best for me.
He puts the cork back in the ink pot, sprinkles sand on the paper, wipes the pen and seals the letter. Then he goes to the mail station and sends it by the westbound carriage.
His work at the school goes on. He knows he must do something, but has no idea what. Perhaps what needs to be done will do itself. Perhaps time will do the job for him. He pins his faith on time, the dogged rotation of the globe and the relentless advance of all things. Nothing continues to be the same. Time is a fall, one plunges and plummets, and sooner or later one is sure to collide with one thing or another.
The sun burns away the snow from the branches of the trees, buds appear. He goes out on to the ice and jigs for trout. When spring comes he puts out nets from the rowing boat. He fries the fish or boils them, eating them with kohlrabi or potatoes and thick dollops of butter that melt and dissolve into the flesh. He becomes fat from the same fare and from sitting down all day, fat and without cheer. To climb up the hill from the shore makes him breathless. Sometimes he goes to his father’s house and sits for a while, listening to the old man’s wretched lamentations about this or that ailment.
You’re a physician of a kind, his father says. Can’t you tell me once and for all what is wrong with me?
He looks like he would rather eat his words when Falck tells him to take off his clothes and get on the cot. But he does as he is instructed. He lies on his back and looks up at him.
Where does it hurt?
Here. And there. Everywhere, in fact.
Falck presses his hands against his father’s abdomen, he jabs his fingers under the ribs, taps his chest, listens to his heartbeat, strikes the joints of his elbow and knee with a small hammer, peers into his mouth, eyes and ears, presses on the glands of his throat, tells him to stand up and walk a few paces across the floor and back.
Father, you are in good health.
His father seems disappointed. But why does it hurt, then? Sometimes I wake up screaming from the pain. And my hand, my hand is lifeless, it prickles, look at the way it’s hanging down. He holds it up for his son to see.
It’s nothing, Father. A bit of rheumatism, that’s all, making the hand go to sleep. It is only to be expected at your age.
His father shakes his head and puts on his clothes. One of these days I’ll go to Christiania and find a proper physician who can tell me what’s wrong.
Falck asks to hold the little child. Karen brings him to him. The boy chuckles and flaps his hands with vigour on seeing his thirty-seven-yearolder brother. How lively he is, Falck comments.
The boy’s mother sits watching them. You ought to get married yourself and start a family, she says.
Who would want such an old man?
I know someone who would, she says. Should I ask her to come?
He hands the boy back to her. As he is leaving he hears his father say to Karen: I think he grieves in secret after being betrothed up there. I’ve asked him about it, but he won’t speak of it.
He does not dwell upon his past in Greenland, though seemingly it would dwell upon him. The eye of a savage keeps watch on him through a crack in the unnaturally blue sky; he senses the smell of urine tubs and naked bodies seeping out over the well-kept and excessively green grass. The yellow sun, the white clouds, the sharply outlined fells seem anything but real. He is dreaming this place, or else it is dreaming him.
He asks one of the more diligent boys to read aloud. David, Psalm 23 and onwards, he instructs. The boy commences, his bright voice enunciating the familiar verses: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Falck’s mind begins to wander. The widow is there, of course, seated over by the stove. Then speak to me, he commands. Say something! Tell me what you want. He leadeth me beside the still waters, He restoreth my soul. And yet he knows what she wants. She wants him back, like Madame Krøger, like Madame Therkelsen, Madame Kragstedt and Miss Schultz, all of them laying claim to him. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. He cannot recall the widow’s features. Always her back is turned on him. He tries to picture her face. He remembers her naked body, even in the minutest detail, a freckle, a wrinkle, the thin, red skin of her knuckles. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. But her face has faded away. If he forces himself to recall it, he sees only ordinary features that could belong to anyone. He can picture Maria Magdalene quite clearly. A light object strikes him and catches in his hair. Absently, he brushes it away. He wonders if he might write to Maria Magdalene and whether such a letter would ever reach its destination. But she is in one place, he in another, and all that needs to be conquered is distance. Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. He recalls how she recited this very verse. It was one of her favourite scriptures. That must be why he thinks of it. No, he remembers now, he has asked one of the boys to read it aloud. He sighs and wakes up to chaos, to crusts of bread flying through the air, pellets of paper, even shoes have been turned into projectiles amid a commotion of jeering and laughter. The boy at the front reads on, unperturbed. Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Quiet! he yells, leaping to his feet and striking the nearest available boy blindly on the cheek, unfortunately the one who was reading aloud, the best behaved of them all, whose voice thereby halts abruptly, accompanied by a startled rubbing of the afflicted cheek. The boy glances up at Falck with a forlorn look in his eyes. The room is now silent. The boy clears his throat. The reading continues. The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.
Rather unburdened by his outburst, despite the wrong boy having borne the brunt, he closes the school after lessons are over. But the crack in the sky is there still as he returns home, the eye observing him, the sense of everything’s unreality. He thinks he hears a heathen chuckle somewhere far off, mingling with the echo of the Psalms of David.
He begins to drink. The urge has accumulated within him like water behind a dam; now he opens the sluices, and his mouth, and tilts the bottle towards the ceiling. He buys aquavit at the blacksmith’s in the village, the place where melancholy men stand and lurk, their hands on the bridles of their horses. It tastes of raw spirits and of the myrtle that is supposed to conceal the fact, but does not. It makes him feel worse than ever before, and yet he is afflicted in a way that is new to him and he is appreciative of the variety it lends to his existence. He arranges his furniture so as to remind him of his room in the Mission house in the colony: the table in the middle of the floor, bedstead in the alcove by the wall. In the bed the widow lies and waits for him.
For a week he drinks with purpose and feels himself descend into familiar despondency and inertia. He falls asleep, slumped over the table, crosses the yard to the schoolroom and sleeps on at his desk, bombarded by pellets of paper. Eventually, he cannot be bothered to even get up in the mornings and remains flat out in his bed. The boys come and knock on his door. Magister! they shout. He stays put. Karen comes and attends to him. She scolds him, she kisses his cheek and helps him out of the alcove, and he lacks the strength to protest. She shaves him, gives him clean clothes, makes him porridge and sits with him to eat it. Yet another woman who takes pity on him. What is it with these women? What is it that attracts them to a man lying at the bottom o
f his own debasement?
If your father won’t marry me, you can have me instead, she says.
You are an odd one, he says. Over her shoulder he can see the widow seated, combing her long hair with the bone of a reindeer jaw.
He resumes his work, unable to face the nuisance and melodrama of dying as slowly as someone his age must surely be expected to die. He teaches, he walks in the forests and along the shore, ruminating. The fullness of time, he ponders, what is that? Does time fill me up or do I fill time? Am I he who drinks or he who is being drunk, and can anything be done to stop it?
Time is a dam, filling up with the trivialities of the schoolmaster’s life, which Morten Falck leads among the gentle hills of Lier parish. The dam of time swells; its waters grow deeper and deeper; years cover the bottom, months accumulate on top, weeks, days, minutes batter the bul wark as Morten Falck ambles, and the sun’s lever sweeps through the sprouting forests, drawing the chlorophyll from the ground and up into the treetops that they may bulge with life.
The dam of time bursts. He goes to his father, requests and receives a loan, and time gushes out. Its force snatches him up and whisks him away; he is standing on the deck of the packet boat that plies the route between Christiania and Copenhagen; a country sinks into the sea behind him, another appears ahead. The deck rolls, he stands firm, an exclamation mark or rather a question mark, but yet standing. The sun shines, rain falls, night falls, daylight returns, the sun shines. He drinks sour ale and eats mouldy hard tack. He feels utterly at home.
Copenhagen
From the roadstead he is ferried through the forest of masts to the yellow toll house that is the Toldboden. He sits in the stern and stares at the city in front of him, sees the smoke of the glue factories, the distilleries and breweries, the textile factories and tanneries, and some thirty thousand fires, hearths and stoves within and without the ramparts. It is as if the smoke is stuck between the steeples. He hears the harsh, rhythmic clatter of the steam engine on the Holmen, and senses the smell of the gutter, the rotting food and filthy canals. He recalls the smell that greeted him when crawling inside the communal dwelling houses of the colony, and he feels the same twinge of excitement now as he clambers on to the quayside. May, 1795. The sun bearing down upon the royal city, upon the charred remains of Christiansborg, which burned to the ground the year before, upon the verdigris of the mansion house roofs, and upon Morten Falck. He is thirty-nine years old.
He rents a room in a tall white house on the corner of Skvaldergården and Størrestræde, some few steps from the Holmens Kirke. All day long he hears the punching of the steam engine, the infernal contraption, to use its popular name. From Gammel Strand he can look across to the ruins of the former palace and is shocked to see how the blaze has decimated a structure everyone believed would stand for ever. A mountain of stone consumed like tinder. How was it possible? Not only the palace, but its whole concept, gone up in smoke. If it can burn, then anything can. Nothing is safe any more. He remembers the magnificence of the baroque facade, the great number of its windows, and the clock facing the palace square, whose bell so crisply struck the hour.
A copperplate engraver from Ditmarsken, one Jacobus Buntzen, who rents accommodation in the same building, has produced an engraving of the fire, which he shows to him. Monsieur Buntzen reveals himself to be an obliging man, some few years younger than Falck, and often he invites him in to his fine rooms on the first floor, where he listens with interest to Falck’s stories of his years in Greenland.
And it is the Magister’s intention to return to that country?
It is the only place I can exist.
Let me show you something, Magister Falck. The engraver clearly feels at home in the rooms of his landlord, an examining magistrate of the Stocks House Commission at present residing in the provinces, to whom Falck, with his ever-latent feelings of guilt, to his relief has yet to be introduced. Buntzen ushers him in to a large room whose walls are covered with black-and-white and coloured engravings, many of which depict scenes of torture and dismemberment, the breaking of bodies on the wheel, the crushing of bones, public whippings and other sophisticated means of achieving confession. The gallery is off-limits to the women of the house, servants naturally excepted, the engraver informs him reassuringly. The esteemed magistrate is a sworn adherent of the purifying powers of torture, he explains with a touch of sarcasm of which Falck does not fail to take note. He finds the inspiration and strength to carry out his duty in this room, he has told me.
I see, says Falck tamely.
Come, let me show you something else, Mr Falck. He places a hand on Falck’s shoulder and leads him on to another room. The walls here are plastered with more or less obscene engravings, mainly scenes from the colonies, purporting to be anthropological studies. Slave women copulating with goats and bulls, or with well-endowed men; a black woman whipped until she bleeds, the penis of a bewigged man in her mouth; another strung up by her feet, as yet seemingly alive, while a squirming foetus is removed through a hole in her abdomen. The smile on the engraver’s face is wide and innocent.
Note the pleasure in the faces of these women, Buntzen says, his voice now thick with sarcasm. This is how men, certain men, wish their inclinations to be considered, as imparting pleasure to their victims and therefore essentially as something good, whereby they are conveniently relieved of their guilt.
Falck says nothing. The engraver leads him over to a depiction of two people clad in garments of skin. Two Greenlanders, he sees at once, one armed with a harpoon, the other with a bow and arrow. Their faces are framed by the hoods of their anoraks. There is nothing offensive about the picture and yet apparently it has been classified as unfit for the female eye.
This one is by my own hand, Buntzen explains, copied from an old oil painting. I believe the poor savages it portrays were abducted and brought to this country in Egede’s day.
Falck leans forward and narrows his bad eye in order to study the detail. The two natives stare blankly ahead in such a way as hardly to meet the gaze of the beholder at all, though they would appear to be looking straight at the artist. There is something strangely absent about them, something secretive, which perhaps was the intention, and yet he recognizes this haze of indifference behind which the Eskimo will often retreat. Behind the two figures the artist has placed an inscrutable darkness. For some reason it is this dense, heathen darkness that Falck finds most moving. In such darkness I lived for six years, he thinks to himself, in its midst.
The engraver studies him. I hope the Magister is not ill at ease?
No, he says. Not at all.
Do you like the work?
Oh, he says, I find it quite marvellous. These people. I am. They are. My friends. What a disgrace that they should be consigned to this abominable room!
The engraver looks at him kindly. Falck laughs and dabs his eyes with his handkerchief.
I think I need something with which to fortify myself, he says. If Monsieur Buntzen would care to keep me company, I should like to offer him a glass.
The engraver pats him on the back. They retire to a serving house and have rather too much too drink. There is a musician with a lute, and the engraver turns out to possess a decent tenor and an extensive repertoire of languishing German ballads.
Copenhagen at night is a restless place. Nightmen clatter with their carts, students bellow out their songs, militia fire their guns in the air, cannon salute at odd times, street-door hags call out hoarsely for custom, bottles chink as they skate across the cobbles. He lies listening to the heavy-booted steps of the watchman, the sound of the mace striking the ground, his rusty voice, full of drunken piety: Take ye heed, watch and pray, for ye know not when the time is.
He writes a lengthy letter to the Missionskollegium and requests a meeting. A couple of days later he is summoned by messenger to appear in person at the office of one Mr Friedrich. Profes
sor Rantzau, to whom he addressed his reports from Sukkertoppen, has retired from his position and now lives somewhere in Jutland. Mr Friedrich is accommodating, though highly formal in his greeting. He is shown a chair. Friedrich seats himself behind a desk, resting his hand ponderously upon a thick bundle of documents held together by string. Falck stares at the bundle. He knows what it contains, besides his general correspondence with the college. His diary. Pornographic drawings of the widow. His account of his religious crisis. His unlawful nuptials to the widow. Everything. The past. Morten Falck in his entirety. His heart sinks and he realizes that he will never be permitted to return to Greenland, nor, in all likelihood, to ever again carry out the work of a priest.
I have not yet had the opportunity of going through the Magister’s papers, Mr Friedrich says.
Falck swallows. He briefly considers snatching the documents and running away with them.
I shall study them carefully within the next few days before addressing his application.
Falck nods. Is there any calling vacant in the country at present?
One, says Friedrich, and drums his fingers on the pile. Though our number of missionaries has been drastically reduced. It is by no means out of the question. The Magister has previously been incumbent in Greenland and it must be assumed gained much useful experience there, even if he did return prematurely. What was the reason for that, exactly?
My father called me home, he lies. My poor mother and my only sister passed away within a short time of each other. He was despairing. I could not fail him.
I see. Hm. Indeed. Magister Falck must be aware that if he should go back he should be prepared for the eventuality that the term of his employment will extend to the remainder of his lifetime.
I understand and am quite prepared. I see missionary work as my calling and destiny.
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Page 53