The Prophets of Eternal Fjord

by Aitken, Martin, Leine, Kim

  10 August 1795, Laurentiusdag, the Feast of St Lawrence. Morten Falck bids farewell to Professor Støvring and his wife. He takes Abelone’s hand and kisses it. She smiles, an elevated, angelic smile, then withdraws her hand from his. The professor has arranged a carriage. He arrives at the Toldboden in the late morning and steps down into a boat that rows him out to the hooker, the Hans Egede. The sky is overcast; around him rigging and sails snap in the wind. He boards the ship by the ladder, swings his legs over the bulwark and puts his feet on the deck. The captain welcomes him aboard.

  It’s late in the year for a passage to Greenland, the captain says. We must expect bad weather.

  I’m used to bad weather, says Falck, and smiles. I look forward to it.

  Well, then, I think the Magister will have much to enjoy in the weeks ahead, says the captain with a laugh.

  Falck goes below and installs himself in his cabin.

  Epilogue

  The Graves (14 August 1815)

  The fog lies densely in the ford, though it is well into morning. I am seated on the stern thwart and recall the first time I sailed here. Then, too, the fog lay thick.

  The kayak man is a mixture from the colony. They say he is the son of the former Trader Kragstedt, who returned home, following the death of his wife. Indeed, there is some resemblance. Most of them are gone now, returned home or dead. These are new times. Hammer, the smith, is still alive, though has been compelled to relinquish the tool after which he is named. He has become pious in his old age; an abiding inclination to absorb himself in the scriptures has taken possession of him, which I find praiseworthy, albeit rather comical. The present colony manager is Rasmus Bjerg, a man of substance who is kindly disposed to the Mission and moreover a friend of the Greenlander. It must be a lonely life for someone like him. He came to the country when quite young; now he is ageing and grey and has neither wife nor so much as an illegitimate child to keep him company. No one else is left from that time. Apart from myself.

  The boy says something from the thwart in the bow and I am torn from my thoughts.

  This Habakuk, he does not seem to be keen on visitors, he says with a grin. He has sent the fog out, so that we cannot come and disturb him. The fog is often thick here, I tell him. It has nothing to do with Habakuk, my friend.

  Is it true he was a sorcerer and could conjure?

  That is just talk. You should not believe such tales.

  How do you know? I see he is rather offended at having been cut down to size.

  I knew him.

  He looks at me with wide eyes. You knew Habakuk?

  He even held you in his arms when you were a baby. It is not that long since he lived. He was a tall man. And a skilled orator. Highly devout and saintly deep down. He could spellbind a crowd when he spoke. Of course, he had his good and bad sides like everyone else. There was no more to it than that. Actually, it was his wife Maria Magdalene who was behind it all. She had the brains. But they are dead and gone now, both of them.

  People say they walk again.

  That is just superstition. You should not be afraid of it.

  I’m not afraid, he says, insulted.

  We rock gently back and forth in time with the oars. The oarswomen look constantly back over their shoulders and keep the kayak man in sight. We stay close to the shore. Directly above us is the sun and a blue sky and yet the fog is at all sides, dense and dullish silver. It is indeed all very portentous and I am compelled to reproach myself, as I have reproached the boy, for being superstitious.

  The kayak man says something and points. We are here!

  The women hold their oars aloft. We glide into a bay. A raven caws from the esker. None of us speaks. The raven caws again.

  Diavalu, one of the women says. They laugh nervously.

  Presently we jump out and pull up the boat. A handful of people come down to the shore and help. Welcome, priest! Palasi tikilluarit! I recog­nize one of the men: Habakuk’s and Maria Magdalene’s son Detlef, who shot his sister in the eye with an arrow and thereby caused her death. Now he is middle-aged with children and grandchildren, a renowned hunter, yet light of skin. Another one! We are shown to the family’s house and fed soup. In return we give them tea brought from the colony. I offer my excuses before the food makes me drowsy and lethargic. I wish to go up and see the old settlement, I tell them. Afterwards, there will be devotions.

  There is hardly anything left to see, says Detlef. It was an unusual place to live, Priest.

  Indeed, I reply. They were unusual people. They tried to do things differently.

  Yes, and look where it got them, he says scornfully. We Greenlanders belong by the ford, not in the fells like ravens and foxes. It’s important we don’t forget it.

  I am an old man now, yet still adroit. My joints are hardly stiff. I ask my boy to come with me. We clamber up through the thick vegetation that lines the shore and emerge almost immediately above the fog. I stop halfway up the slope. The boy halts at my side. We look up at the plateaus that unfold between the rock.

  Was it here? the boy asks.

  Yes, it was here.

  It’s a splendid place.

  Yes, I know of no other like it. It is so magnificent. In such a place a man feels close to God, don’t you think?

  I do, he says, gazing upwards with an obliging smile.

  We stand for a while and enjoy the sun. Then we continue the ascent; he goes first, his steps light and springy.

  By the time we reach the uppermost plateau the fog has been sucked from the ford and we can see the little cluster of peat dwellings where smoke coils from the chimneys, and the inhabitants themselves as they help the oarswomen and the kayak man carry our pack up the slope. I have told them it is best to camp above the ford, so as to avoid the fog in the late and early hours, and it would seem they have heeded my advice, though it is against their nature to dwell away from the shore.

  Twenty years ago two hundred people lived here, I tell the boy.

  And now nothing is left, he says.

  I’m sure there will be something. All we have to do is find it. Come.

  We pass a couple of dilapidated peat houses and the remains of the great oven in which they smoked their salmon. Otherwise, only some patterns in the light-coloured moss show where the dwellings stood.

  While the boy explores, I sit down on a rock to catch my breath. I am in my fifties now, an old man, though sound in wind and limb. My wife and children and children’s children keep me in vigour, I suppose. The Lord has blessed me. The boy has a wife himself and three healthy offspring of his own already. So I am rich in joys as well as worries. And yet I remember to thank the Lord for each day. I live in a healthy manner, drinking no other alcohol than the colony’s fresh ale, and I stay well away from the Trade’s mouldy meat. The parishioners of the colony, also chil­dren of a kind, who come to confess their sins or simply to talk with their priest, play their own part in keeping my mind fresh.

  New times indeed. Following the unrest in Denmark, the war with the English and the state bankruptcy, Greenland had to look after itself. In many ways it was good for us. We learned to stand on our own feet. The clergy dwindled in number, some died, others were fortunate enough to find passage home. In these present years I am the only work ­ing priest along the entire coast between Godthåb and Jakobshavn. Oddly enough, such isolation has led the Mission to flourish and prompted many Greenlanders to move to the colonies to be christened and to sing their beloved hymns in the church each Sunday. I have myself composed a couple of them – this said in all modesty. I have developed quite a knack with the lute, an instrument I inherited from an old missionary at Holsteinsborg. Of him, the less said the better!

  Following the deaths of Maria Magdalene and Habakuk, the people lost interest in religious reveries. Habakuk died in 1798, she four years later. May the Lord have mercy upon their souls. The
settlement here has lain abandoned for twenty years. Everything usable – or nearly every­thing – has been carried down to the dwellings at the shore.

  I take the boy over to the graves. There are no names on them, but

  I know who lies beneath. I tell him about each in turn. I think he is incredulous that I am old enough to have met them.

  My ancient father, he quips.

  Here lies Habakuk, I tell him, and here Maria Magdalene. The graves are untouched; few people come here and those who do are mindful not to disturb the peace of the dead. Habakuk’s reputation still lives and I consider it will continue to do so for a long time yet. I stick the toe of my boot under one of the flat stones, lifting it slightly and allowing it to fall again with a thud. The boy jumps. They can’t hurt you, I tell him and chuckle. There’s no need to be afraid.

  I’m not afraid of the dead, he replies, disgruntled.

  I ruffle his hair. He laughs and flaps away my hand.

  He is grown now and has become a man. We work together in the Mission. He doesn’t like me still calling him a boy. He says he wants to be a ship’s captain, but he knows my hope is for him to be ordained as a priest like myself. A bright capacity would be wasted if he were to sail the seven seas. Besides, I would die of loneliness. He is my best friend.

  It takes a while for us to find the last of the graves. They lie up on the esker, high above the tableland, on a plateau of the fell commanding a view to the east, west and south. Three together.

  The boy flops down in the grass. He lights his pipe and puffs. Who lies here?

  Old friends, I tell him.

  There are no coffins in the soil, only three bodies wrapped in linen, two of them at each other’s side, the third and smallest at a right angle at their feet. The grass around the gravestones is tall; it bends in the wind that comes sweeping from the fell. Rosebay grows at the place and small, hardy bunches of violet flowers, whose name escapes me in my old age. I pull away some tufts and the inscriptions are revealed.

  I remember him, the boy says, smoothing his hand over the stone. He was kind and gave me books. Did you lay him to rest, Father?

  Yes, I laid all three in the ground, though they died at different times. I felt they should lie together. But go now, let me sit here a while on my own. There is something I must repay. Afterwards I shall tell you the whole story. I think the time is right for you to hear it.

  I watch him as he canters down to the tableland below. The further away he gets, the smaller he becomes and the more he looks like the boy I brought up with concern and love. The whole story? I wonder. No, perhaps not the whole story. Some of it must follow me to the grave. But the Lord knows the truth. He knows me and has blessed me. He is full of forgiveness to whoever prays for it.

  I went to the smith, old Niels Hammer, to have the stones hewn and the inscriptions cut. He grumbled about the many words. I am a smith, he complained, not a book printer! And yet he carried out the work and I managed to ensure it was done without mistakes of spelling. I know something about the smith, as I know things about most people. On the other hand, he knows something about me. He it was who received the gold and forged from it a crucifix.

  My hand is curled around its cross as I sit here at the graves on the south-facing slope. Gold washed from a river in the north. It feels warm and heavy in my hand. It is hard to give up. And yet I take it from around my neck and feel its familiar weight vanish from my chest. I have worn it for twenty years. I place it between the two graves where it belongs. It is a relief to be unburdened of it. On top of it I lay some stones, forming a kind of bridge between the graves. I brush away the dust from my hands and kneel in the heather. I say the Lord’s Prayer. I bless the graves. It is quiet here. Lichen grows in the cracks of the gravestones, but the inscrip­tions can still be distinguished, tainted green on grey slabs of stone:

  HERE LIES THE BODY OF

  MR MORTEN PEDERSEN FALCK

  BORN 20 MAY 1756

  DIED 12 MAY 1807

  Grey of Age, Toil and Endeavour in the Name of God

  Depart in Peace, faithful Friend

  And on the other:

  LYDIA PEDERSEN FALCK

  ARNARULUNNGUAQ

  CHRISTENED JENSEN

  Here laid to Rest

  By her Brother Bertel Jensen

  Ordained Priest of Sukkertoppen Colony

  Author’s Afterword

  This novel is a fantasy, constructed around events that took place more than two hundred years ago. Events occurring in the novel did not neces­sarily occur in reality, or else they did so in another place at another time, in a different sequence, with different people and in different weather. The characters are my own inventions, although some really did exist. Who can truly know a person, not least someone who, for instance, died in 1802? I have allowed myself to hazard a guess.

  The famine that is mentioned may be historically correct, but if so it is unrecorded. Several periods did occur in which the hunting failed – periods of ‘two winters without summer’ – and these most certainly were the cause of great hardship in eighteenth-century Greenland. In some cases, nine tenths of the population of an area perished due to epidemics and hunger. Nonetheless, colony people were little concerned as to whether those in the outlying district lived or died, so accounts of these times of scarcity are sporadic.

  I have tried to recreate actual places, times and incidents as exactly as possible: Sukkertoppen (1785–93), Copenhagen (1782–87), the great fire of 1795, and so on. Frequent use has been made of eye-witness accounts, though these have been tailored at my own discretion. The physical reality that my fictional characters inhabit, however, is authentic only to the extent that I have been able – or considered it suitable – to make it.

  I owe the novel’s title to the writer and historian Mads Lidegaard, a true friend of Greenland. His Danish account of the prophets’ rise and fall can be accessed online and may be compared to my own. Pastor Hother Ostermann’s more than one hundred biographies of Danes and Norwegians in Greenland up until 1814 have been an invaluable source. Clergymen with a love of writing have always been numerous, in Greenland as elsewhere. We are deeply indebted to them, because without them we would have nothing but ledgers. That said, they are by no means always impartial. Finn Gad, the author of a three-volume history of Greenland, may be a lesser writer, but he is to be praised for his sober and detailed work, even if it may seem dull in comparison. Of the Greenlandic writers, mention must be made of the catechist Peter Gundel, whose book Jeg danser af glæde (I Dance with Joy) provides insight into the plight of an intelligent and gifted Greenlander afflicted by illness in an isolated settlement during colonial days, though much later than the events described here.

  It is said that the prophetess Maria Magdalene’s correspondence with the priest, apparently a rather thick bundle, perished when it was used to light a fire in an emergency. Most likely it was cold and perhaps their letters saved a life. But in the flames were lost what to all intents and purposes was the only historical, handwritten document penned by a Greenlander in the eighteenth century. Sad, but all the more fortunate for me, because it left me free to use my imagination.

  Acknowledgements

  The Danish Arts Foundation, for its three-year grant; the Council of Danish Artists (and Jens and Lise on the island of Hirsholm), for allowing me to stay in their Artists’ Residence; the Cultural Foundation Denmark-Greenland, for financially supporting a research journey to Maniitsoq and the Eternal Fjord in August 2010; Tea Dahl Christensen, Director (until 2011), Maniitsoq Museum; Peter Henningsen, Director, Frilandsmuseet; Søren Rud, Senior Lecturer, The SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen; Simon Pasternak, Senior Editor, Gyldendal; Johannes Riis, Literary Director, Gyldendal; Jon Kyst, Akademisk Rejsebureau; Inge Kyst; Bodil Kyst; Bente Hauptmann; Aviaaja Kleist Burkal; Staffan Söderberg; Elsebeth Schiller; Tage Schjøtt, Saga Maps; Aalipaa
raq Kreutzmann; Benny Vadmand, hypnotist.