The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  “Maybe it was the same for her. She was lonely and cheated on you a few times. But it was nothing. It didn’t mean anything. Isn’t that how you would have described it if she caught you in the act? Why can’t you cut her the same slack you give yourself?”

  “Come on—that’s completely different. I’m risking my life—every single day! And she just goes into the city!”

  “You know what? I don’t think your problem is jealousy. I think it’s guilt. You came out here. Maybe she wasn’t happy about that. And now she’s dead. It changes everything. Everything you experienced together becomes much more meaningful, both what you’ve said and what you didn’t say, what you knew about each other and what you didn’t know. Maybe you would have split up when you got home. Who knows? But now you’re tied to her forever. That’s how you’re seeing it right now. Guaranteed.”

  “Yeah, maybe. In some strange way, I feel like I’m married to her. I fucking feel like she’s the only one. I never felt that way when we were together. Maybe that’s how she felt . . . Actually, I think she did. But I didn’t. Actually, I thought a lot about breaking up with her. And now I’m dependent on her. Now my one and only is a woman who bought the farm.”

  Mads doesn’t talk in the mess tent, nor does he eat anything. He just sits there drawing circles with his fork in the sauce. He goes home for the funeral. Helene’s murder remains unsolved; the police can’t find any motive. Like most Danes, Helene has no enemies. The police conclude that it’s the kind of thing that happens in the nightlife: the murder of a random victim committed by an anonymous assailant with a weapon in his hand and a high blood alcohol level. It’s like a hit-and-run, only with a knife instead of an accelerator.

  When Mads returns, he says that he was offered a longer leave. And he was offered time with a psychologist. Finally they offered a discharge. He said no to all of it—he only wants to go back to Helmand.

  When he finally shows up, he’s had a soldier carrying a heavy machine gun and meter-high angel wings tattooed on his back.

  “At least out here I can shoot at someone,” he says.

  2

  Third Platoon went home for Christmas leave. On their way home, they thought a lot about being two fewer soldiers than when they headed out. It felt strange getting on the Turkish Air Pegasus in Kabul without Michael and Jakob. They even kept two seats empty for them. One final honor. A ridiculous idea, for sure, but it made them feel better. A little better. At least for a little while.

  They’ve seen family and sweethearts. Sørensen had his long-awaited reunion with Frederik and Anton, although Frederik wouldn’t talk to him at first. “He thinks that you’ll be going back soon,” said Emma, who couldn’t stop talking about how much she hates the war that night in bed. Frederik and Sørensen make up, but not without tears. Sørensen cries in guilt-tinged joy while holding the small boy’s body close, and Frederik cries in surrender to the love he has been keeping in so unnaturally. Has he gotten thinner? Sørensen wonders. “Are you eating enough?” he asks.

  Having seen his girlfriend’s expanding stomach, Sylvester tries to convince himself that his future lies here, in her baby bump. “No sex?” asks Sørensen. Sylvester shakes his head. “It’ll come back,” says Sørensen optimistically.

  The beard is gone. Sylvester would have left it out of spite, a symbol of his growing independence out here, but every time he tried to kiss her, Mette said it scratched her and turned her head away.

  Although Sylvester is only twenty-one, Mette is expecting a child, a girl who will be given what Sørensen thinks is the pompous name of Gabriella when she pops out three months later. They talk a lot about children. Sørensen senses that the timing might not be perfect. Probably only one of the involved parties planned on Gabriella—and it wasn’t Sylvester, who seems bewildered at the prospect of becoming a father. One of his many concerns is the baby’s sex. “How do you raise girls?” he asks. Sørensen feels that Sylvester hasn’t screwed around enough, hasn’t drunk enough beers, or seen enough of the world. Being stationed in Afghanistan is only one of his many projects. Suddenly he’s going to be a father, which he thinks will put a damper on things—though he wouldn’t say so out loud.

  “It doesn’t matter whether you have boys or girls,” says Sørensen in the paternal tone he tends to adopt with young Sylvester, as he refers to him in his thoughts. “You just have to be there for them. They have to feel that nothing in the world is more important than them.”

  “And yet you’re here. In a fucking war, in fucking Afghanistan,” says Sylvester, pitilessly. “So just how is it going with being there for them?”

  “Listen,” says Sørensen, sounding a lot less paternal and suddenly feeling vulnerable. “When you have children, there’s only one thing on your mind. They deserve the very best in the world. If you get divorced, you realize that now you can only give them second best. It’s the same being a soldier. Now you can only give them second best. That’s life. You don’t get to control everything.”

  Because Emma, Sørensen’s wife, needs to speak to him at least once a day, he spends a lot of time in the container where the phones are located. In his absence everything is too much for her. Even the most trivial matters turn into insurmountable problems. He puts his ass on the line every day yet never mentions it while listening patiently to her. He knows he owes her that—it’s not her fault he’s out here. In a way, he feels it isn’t his fault, either, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

  Dennis’s father gave him war histories for Christmas. Stalingrad, Berlin. “He hands them to me making a face like they’re his own damn personal memoirs.” They argue all through Christmas Eve, from the rice pudding to the dance around the Christmas tree.

  Hannah is the only one of them who doesn’t go home on leave. They had a Christmas tree in the mess tent, and there were gifts from the army. A couple of soldiers went into the kitchen to help with the roasted duck and browned potatoes. “Best Christmas I’ve ever had,” she said when the others returned, a week into January. Christmas without Mom—yes! She didn’t say that last part out loud.

  “Is something wrong?” asks Møller when he finds Simon sitting alone with a cup of coffee in the mess tent, a few weeks after their leave ended.

  The chaplain makes his daily rounds among the tables in the camp kitchen and the soldiers’ tents. Most come to tea when something is bothering them, but some won’t. They stay in their cots or sit brooding over a plastic cup of weak coffee and nondairy creamer; or they walk along the bastion surrounding the camp with their heads bent down, far from anyone’s company, which they suddenly can’t tolerate.

  “There’s just some shit back home.”

  Simon’s father was on his bike when a car hit him on his way to Tulip Food Company slaughterhouse, just outside of Vejle. He lay there for a little while before anyone spotted the bent front wheel sticking up on the side of the road. He got off with a broken leg, but the cold got him and he wound up with pneumonia.

  There’s no trace of the driver. Simon’s father has taken it personally that a hit-and-run driver struck him. “The fog wasn’t that thick, either. There’s no curve on Herredsvej—and the light on my bike was on,” he says in the phone.

  “Your father has become strangely melancholy,” says his mother after his father hobbles off on his crutch to lie down again. “Don’t tell him I said so. But can you write something to cheer him up?”

  “What should I write?” Simon asks the chaplain. “Something cheery? That I’m in a country full of characters much worse than hit-and-run drivers? Is that good enough? He didn’t know what to think when I left. Know what he said? ‘Imagine that—it takes four years to learn to be a butcher, but only one to learn how to kill people.’”

  Although none of them has ever heard of Sidekick’s big sister before, he suddenly starts talking about her. She almost burned to death in an abandoned farm on Lolland, where she was living with a bunch of freaks on welfare. In their stupor, the dopeheads probabl
y ignited something accidentally. Neighbors called for the fire truck while the freaks sat in the yard staring at the crackling fire, as if it were a fireplace video. One of them didn’t make it out, although the others didn’t know it. Sidekick’s sister had her henna-dyed hair singed, but otherwise she’s okay.

  “I could have lost her,” he tells the chaplain.

  “You’ve never thought of her that way before,” says Møller.

  Henrik is in Second Platoon. His mother is famous at Almegaard Barracks, because twice a week she takes the bus from Svaneke to bring home-baked buns. Now she has been assaulted in a home invasion. Later she describes the perpetrator as a foreigner who “looks Middle Eastern,” as it says in a big article appearing in Bornholms Tidende. Henrik has long phone conversations with her, but there’s a thirty-minute limit on all calls home to Denmark.

  “I have to run,” he says. “Others need to use the phone, Mom.”

  There’s Bo from First Platoon. His brother fell off some scaffolding and broke his neck in four places. He’s lying paralyzed in the neurointensive care unit at Rigshospitalet with a respirator in his throat, unable to speak. Then there’s Janus from the same platoon. He can’t stop thinking about his brother-in-law. A wrong-way driver came right at him on a deserted highway in the middle of the night. Fortunately he managed to react in time.

  They’re all weighed down by some loss, anxiety, or concern. A name. Something gone wrong back home. They’re a band of soldiers whose next of kin have had to face something terrible. And the chaplain listens. He thinks about what he hears and—as he refers to it later—he tries to “connect the dots.”

  They don’t know much about Møller, even though he knows a lot about them. Not that they’re particularly curious. He’s there for them, and that’s good enough. They know he’s a pastor in Bregninge, on Ærø, and that he has a wife, Agnes, and two children, Bjørn and Gorm. They’ve seen pictures on his cell phone.

  The beautiful church has a Gothic spire covered in black shingles. The island’s highest point, Synneshøj, is within walking distance, and you can sit on a bench there and fall into thoughts. That’s Møller’s expression. Fall into thoughts. “The contrast to here couldn’t be greater,” he says. That’s how they all feel. The contrast to Helmand couldn’t be greater.

  They’re not really interested in what thoughts Møller falls into when he’s sitting on Synneshøj and staring out over the South Fyn Archipelago. They’re sure that he went to Bregninge for the idyllic views. That’s what he’s really doing on the hilltop. Taking in the views.

  Actually, though, it’s just the opposite. The idyllic beauty escaped Møller when he arrived. It was the altarpiece that got him. He never talks about it when singing the church’s praises. Despite being a tourist attraction, the altarpiece is his little secret.

  The altarpiece in Bregninge Church is a large, gold-plated wood engraving that is almost five hundred years old, produced right before the Reformation. The first time Møller steps into the church, the triptych at the end of the whitewashed space is closed. The verger, who’s showing the pastor around the church, walks up to the triptych and throws open the wings. The sight is overwhelming. The sky behind the hill where Jesus and the two thieves hang on their crosses is gold plated, as are the clothes worn by the mobs of people at the foot of the crosses. They’re falling all over each other, grabbing or calling to each other. Each of them has urgent business, but everything dissolves in chaos. Knives stab at the air above the struggling throng.

  Møller can’t look at the altarpiece for too long. His eyes search for calm in the whitewashed arches and their spartan chalk paintings.

  But then he has to look again.

  Even though he appears in the middle of the altarpiece, the crucified Christ is a minor character. He’s positioned higher than the two thieves, and his head is almost outside the gilded ornamental frame. His half-hidden face is dark and brooding, as if he’s completely absorbed in his own thoughts. Møller can’t see that he wants anything to do with the faithful. He’s merely an empty hole in the middle of the teeming masses. The altarpiece depicts a world falling apart, and the man on the cross doesn’t look like he can put it back together.

  The altarpiece also reflects the time of its creation, the early 1500s, when the Great Peasants’ Revolt raged throughout Germany. For the carver, Claus Berg, the bloody events that turned half of Europe upside down could not have seemed that distant. Berg depicts his own time in the chaos: tens of thousands of simple peasants in armed rebellion, tens of thousands of misled peasants slaughtered, while their fanatical leaders are tortured and executed. For everyone, the destruction must have seemed close. The light of that conflagration in Europe glows from the altarpiece in Bregninge Church.

  Møller knows about the German peasant rebellion from his studies. It plays a role in Martin Luther’s writings when he blesses the right of the princes to kill rebellious peasants who defy the authorities. At the time, the words didn’t have any special effect on him, though he read certain passages with discomfort. Now he’s reading Luther’s writings again, not because the altarpiece reflects its creator’s time, but because he can see how it reflects his own.

  Once again there’s great unrest in the world. His country is at war. He reads Luther’s words claiming that now is the time for swords and wrath, not mercy. He reads about the rebellious peasants’ bloodthirsty prophet, Thomas Müntzer, who demands that the towers be torn down, and the similarity to his own time becomes undeniable. The great conflagration begins on September 11, in 2001, when the towers in New York crumble to the ground. He sits all night in front of the television watching the same gruesome pictures over and over again.

  That’s how it begins for Lukas Møller in Bregninge Church. He sees evidence of Luther’s words every day in Helmand; rebellion is a fire that ignites a country and then consumes it. He can see the great fire in Helmand, this barren landscape, devastated beyond repair.

  If we don’t do something, the fire will spread, even to Denmark.

  Møller doesn’t believe in the Devil, at least not as a fleshly being with horns, engulfed in the flames of hell, but he does believe in the Devil’s incarnations.

  Listening to the soldiers’ life stories, he starts to see a pattern that turns into a face. If he stares long enough, he can see whose face it is.

  3

  “I believe we need to talk,” Lukas Møller says to the soldiers, and this time it’s not one-on-one. He gathers them around the Dannebrog-decorated altar in his tent: Simon, Sidekick, Mads, Henrik, Bo, and Janus.

  Sidekick has his camera with him.

  “All of you have been dealing with some misfortune in your immediate family,” he says as they sit down across from him.

  These misfortunes are the dots. They seem accidental, but when the dots are connected, they form a face. The army chaplain has seen it.

  “I’ve seen the Devil,” he says.

  He has used the word before, when he realized that they didn’t want to hear about Narnia and hobbits and, instead, he started talking about dragons and dragon slayers. It’s the kind of word they expect from him—he is a chaplain, after all—but this time it disturbs them. They’re beginning to sense what he means.

  They’re the ones the Devil is looking at; they’re the ones he has chosen.

  The chaplain pours some tea. They never knew he had so many cups. As if by rote, they lift them to their mouths and blow on the hot surface while warming their hands. A chill suddenly passes through them.

  “You know what I’m talking about?” says the chaplain.

  They nod silently. What they’ve thought for a long time is finally being confirmed. Not when the first misfortune occurred. Not when the second misfortune occurred. But the third time. Or the fourth. Until then they’d dealt with it on their own, but then it started to resemble something. They wouldn’t have called it the Devil’s face. They don’t think or talk like the chaplain. But a suspicion began to rear its head.
Now it’s out in the open.

  “I’ve thought about this for a long time,” says the chaplain. “I know it sounds crazy, but isn’t that what this war is—a struggle against madness? And once madness has been unleashed, what does it know about borders? Someone is responsible for the misfortunes that have struck your families. They aren’t accidents.”

  They stare at him intensely. Møller can tell that his words are striking a chord.

  “Out here we know it’s no coincidence when we’re shot at. Now we can see that it’s also no coincidence when bad things happen to our loved ones back home. They go after us here. They go after us there. If they can’t hit us here, they can always try back home. We think everything is safe and sound back in Denmark. But who defends a mother walking peacefully around her house? Who defends a brother working on scaffolding? Our children on their way to school? When will they become targets for an enemy who knows nothing about compassion? Meanwhile we’re sitting here. Powerless. To feel powerless is the most horrible thing that can happen to a soldier. Not to be able to defend those closest to him. That’s what a soldier’s duty is all about—fighting for his loved ones.”

  The army chaplain is at it again. It’s the kind of blather they normally laugh at behind his back. Fighting for your loved ones—right! But now they need to hear it. They thought what was happening here was a matter between them and Tali-bob. Suddenly it’s something else, something far more confusing and frightening. There’s something behind all these misfortunes hitting their family and friends. That’s what their sleepless nights, their racing hearts at unexpected moments, their sullen introspection, and unexpected headaches are telling them.

  Yes, someone is going after them at home.

  But their powerlessness remains the same.

  “The dragon can stay in its cave—it can sleep there for a thousand years—but the dragon slayer can’t stay home waiting for the dragon to show up. He has to seek it out. We are here to slay the dragon.”