The Tower at the Edge of the World

by William Heinesen

  But the deep snowdrift where the sledge usually stops of its own accord – that snowdrift has gone now, and now there’s a new slope, such a long, long one. And then comes a big flat surface with lots of shining stars above, and the sledge glides on of its own accord, although there is no hill here – on and on until there is nothing but air and stars, and now your sledge is floating through nothing at all. And far away – oh, just look – far away there is a tower rising towards the heavens, and that is the Tower at the End of the World. The top is shining and sparkling like a sparkler; it looks so cheerful that you have to laugh aloud; but only for a moment, for suddenly you realise that you are alone and so far away that you will never be able to find your way home again.

  Then you wake up with a cry in your bed.

  “What’s wrong, Amaldus? Have you had a bad dream?”

  “Yes, I dreamt I was at the End of the World, the place where that Tower is.”

  New Year

  It’s New Year. So everything is new.

  All the streams and lakes are covered with ice – so where are you going to sail, my little ship, my Christmas present?

  Oh well, then it’ll have to wait.

  And then you’ll all have to wait, captain and mate, boatswain and apprentice and cook and cook’s mate (oh, all these lovely words!) while the snow snows and the frost freezes.

  ***

  Then, on the very first day of the New Year, the thaw set in; the snow melted and the ice broke up, and the little green schooner the Christina, the one with the bluish white sails, could be seen rocking there in a quiet cove beneath a flame-gold afternoon sky with great clouds and a lovely scent of earth and water.

  It was New Year, and like your new ship, everything was new. And the New Moon hung low in the sky.

  It’s Late in the Year and Late in the Day and

  Late in Life.

  The dusk is turning into darkness and the first stars can be seen. It looks like being a clear starry night.

  Before me on the table where I (Amaldus the Reminiscer, the Ageing One) am sitting to write, lies Father’s old telescopic Nelson spyglass with the highly polished brass fittings; it’s still in good condition, and I intend shortly to go out beneath the sky to turn it towards the Andromeda Galaxy, that distant universe that is supposed to be two million light years away – not something to be scoffed at when you consider that a light year is the distance light travels in a year at a speed of 300,000 kilometres a second. It gives you a delightful sense of elbowroom to stand and gaze down into this vast past, even if what you see is only a faint, dying smoking flax in the night.

  “Like the light from a horn lamp,” said the ancient Chaldeans of the light from this world behind the world, and the image remains with you, for a dark, cloudy lamp such as this was what we used to light our way long ago in our faraway childhood through murky alleyways between houses that no longer exist. It was admittedly no horn lamp, but an empty tin with greaseproof paper tied over the open end and with a stump of candle inside and a hole in the “roof” through which the candle could breathe.

  And so we went with this Andromeda mist and shone a light, somewhere far away in time, which in those days still had the dimensions of eternity.

  ***

  Who is it lighting the way with the old veiled world lamp deep down there at the bottom of time?

  A little boy and a young woman, and the young woman is his mother. They walk in the quiet evening through winding alleyways bathed in an emanation of seaweed and peat smoke, and they proceed further through hay-scented paths out to the Redoubt. There they sit and watch the darkness growing and becoming all powerful. When he holds the lamp up in front of his mother’s face it shines like a moon on her cheeks and mouth and chin. Then this face is all that is to be seen – nothing else in the whole world but this face standing out tenderly against the vast darkness.

  Then for a moment it can be anywhere at all at any time, and you are without name or history, you are simply Mother and Child, the first and the last.

  Music from the Sea

  That curious little machine with the grey roll that turns round and round and the big green horn is called the Phonograph. It belongs to Uncle Christoffer, who is a sailor and sails in foreign ships out on the great oceans. He has come home on a visit now.

  Frail, hoarse but charming music issues from the phonograph horn, music that reminds you of the rushing sound that comes from a shell or the gentle shushing sound of sea and shore in calm weather.

  Your mother and your aunts know this music well and they tell you what it is called: “Annie Laurie”, “Zampa”, “Les millions d’Harlequin” (lovely words, the sound of which will never be forgotten).

  ***

  When Uncle Christoffer went to sea again, he left his miracle machine behind. The frail wax rollers were gradually worn out, and the music became ever more distant and muffled week by week until it was finally lost in an almost tuneless soughing, a final sigh of wind and wave, as though it had once more been swallowed up by the vast, remote distance from which it came.

  Deaf Jane

  The Earth Girl Lonela is no longer a living person like you yourself and your parents and Aunt Nanna are. The Earth Girl Lonela can’t speak or smile, but only stare. She only exists in dreams.

  It’s rather different, though not very different, with Deaf Jane. She can’t speak either. But she can still smile.

  Deaf Jane always comes in the evening. She is terribly pale. She picks politely at her food. She smells of paraffin and lambskin.

  Deaf Jane lives alone. She sews for people. There is a rancid smell of grease about her sewing machine. All her little living room in Bakkehellen smells of grease and lamb and paraffin.

  There is a parti-coloured patchwork quilt on her bed in the corner and in front of the bed a white lambskin rug. On the windowsill there is a plant pot full of flowers with velvet leaves, yellow and dark blue; they are called “pansies”.

  Deaf Jane has a paraffin heater and a paraffin stove. Her fingers are thin and clammy. Her eyes glare.

  “No, they don’t glare. Jane has lovely eyes.”

  “Lovely eyes.” So that’s what lovely eyes look like. They are velvet and soft like pansies. Warm, damp, clammy.

  The tightly curled lambskin by Jane’s bed is the skin from a poor dead baby lamb.

  When Jane has settled down in the evening, she lies there with her hands folded and stares with clammy but lovely eyes up at the ceiling while she says her prayers:

  Father, upon this bed of mine,

  Cast those loving eyes divine.

  ***

  One evening, as Jane was in the hall putting on her coat, you went across and touched her. Just gently touched her hand to feel if she really was a living person.

  And then she smiled at you with her lovely eyes and bent down and quickly put her mouth against your hair.

  Stare-Eyes

  The church smells of old cupboards and drawers, of shoe polish and leather hymn books. People sit within the confines of their box pews. When they sing you can see the spirit flowing from their mouths like mist.

  In the flickering light from two big candles: the altarpiece in which the sexton and the parish clerk are lowering the minister’s dead body with its dreadfully thin arms and legs down into the grave.

  But the same minister is also standing in the pulpit. He is pale and thin and has a thin red beard and strangely sorrowful eyes like a hungry bird begging for crumbs.

  The big ship hanging under the roof slowly turns around on its cord, sometimes showing the big window in the stern and sometimes the dark gun ports. It is sailing through time. It sails and sails, and yet it always stays where it is.

  In the grey Sunday weather outdoors, the winds rushes through the withered grass on the house roofs, and the ships at anchor out in the cove pitch and toss as though in endless sorrow and sail and sail without going anywhere.

  The entire church is also a ship sailing. On the bench at the ba
ck there sit stooping seamen with melancholy bearded faces and big helpless hands full of sores and scratches. They are the church’s crew. In drawling voices they sing:

  Oh, living God, guide our ship to port.

  ***

  Stare-Eyes sits in one of the pews. That is the name you give her because she sits and stares. She always sits in the same pew, between her parents and her sisters. She stares at you, and so you have to stare back at her.

  Stare-Eyes sings so loud and clear that you can easily distinguish her voice from the others. Stare-Eyes’ hair is very long and gathered in two heavy plaits, brown tied with blue bows. She has a small nose, but big, staring eyes. She stares at you like the Earth Girl Lonela when she comes to your bed in the evenings to take you out floating with her.

  You didn’t like the way Stare-Eyes looked at you and you turned your eyes in a different direction, but even so, you couldn’t refrain from peeping at her pew to see whether those staring eyes were still there.

  Yes, they are still there, and now you also have a feeling that she is laughing as though she knows something about you or as if she knows what you are thinking about as you sit there.

  But one Sunday, Stare-Eyes was not at church, and then you missed her eyes after all.

  If –

  So much can happen in the world. Dreadful things can happen. That knowledge makes you think sad thoughts.

  Your mother can die. That is the most dreadful thing of all.

  First you fall ill. Then you die.

  Mother is ill. She lies there, quite pale and far away. Two women sit by her bed. They sit and wait. One of them is knitting. The other is doing something or other with warm water and linen.

  Mother reaches out a clammy hand to you. She smiles, but her eyes are strangely far away. There is a vase of dark red flowers on the chest of drawers. They are roses. They smell sweet and sharp so it catches your nose and makes your eyes smart. There are thorns like cat’s claws on the stems.

  “Come on, Amaldus. We’ll go out and buy some lucky dips.”

  Aunt Nanna is dressed for winter, in long buttoned boots and with a fur-edged jersey and mittens. She is radiant. You’ve heard someone say that she is radiant. It sounds funny. It is otherwise only light that is radiant. No, red roses can be radiant as well…

  The lucky dips are pale blue. There’s a shiny picture on each packet. There are “peppermints” in the packets, and then a thing: perhaps a ring for your finger, perhaps a hat made of lovely crumpled tissue paper, perhaps a piece of black liquorice or a little whistle.

  The ring cuts into your finger, the shrill sound of the whistle hurts your ears, and the peppermint taste burns your tongue. You don’t like the blue lucky dips with their rings and whistles. You want to cry at the thought of the red roses and their nasty cat’s claws, and of the silent women and your sick mother.

  When you die, you are put in the ground and lie there all on your own in the cemetery.

  “But your soul goes up to God in Heaven.”

  But that’s a very long way away, high up beyond the highest of those mountains in the distance, or far out beyond the End of the World.

  The wind is blowing in from the grey sea. It blows into your mouth and your nose so that you are blown right away in all that wind.

  At last there is nothing but this cruel wind, filled with the harsh cries of birds and the flapping of half dry clothes on a clothes line.

  And then there’s a song, the saddest of all, although Aunt Nanna is radiant as she sings it:

  And fare thee well, my only love,

  And fare thee well a while!

  And I will come again, my love,

  Tho’ it were ten thousand miles!

  For then you have to think of the red roses and their over-powering perfume and their bent cat’s claws.

  And that terrible word if –

  ***

  You didn’t sleep at home that night, but in Grandmother’s house, Andreasminde, in a deep alcove bed where Aunt Nanna slept along with her two sisters Kaja and Mona. It was a tight squeeze, and you got an elbow in your eye, but that was not why you wept and couldn’t fall asleep. It was the fault of those dreadful roses: you couldn’t get them out of your mind, and neither could you get away from Aunt Nanna’s sweet melody, “Fare thee well…”

  When you woke the following morning, you were alone in bed, but soon afterwards Aunt Nanna came in, and she was radiant.

  “Amaldus, my dear, you’re not an only child any longer, for you’ve got a little brother.”

  Later on, you went home and saw this little brother, but only the back of his neck, for he lay there with a down-covered head burrowed deep in Mother’s breast.

  The red roses were still there, but they looked all down in the dumps, for they had been given the company of some pale blue hyacinths that quite overpowered them with their perfume.

  Sailing at Dawn

  What else happened during this strange time before the Earth grew round?

  Lots of things, lots of things. For in that great gulf extending from God’s Floor in the north to the Furthermost Edge far to the south, the days are still like months and the months like years. But the world, which in the beginning was only a place where a helpless, crying refugee from nothingness sought a simple shelter, has long been a splendid playground full of exciting things, full of light and air, music and new magical words…

  Sun and Moon take it in turns to show themselves in the sky; the wind hurries by and the rain rains, the sea grows dark and then grows light; ships weigh anchor and set sail and become fading shadows and nothing at all out in the immeasurable waste, but the shadows come back and turn into ships again.

  One of these ships is the Christina, of which Father is captain. The Christina is a big schooner that is almost always at sea for it sails to Leith and Copenhagen and brings goods home to the Rømer Concern.

  You’ve already often been on board the Christina, but only when the ship was at anchor in the roads. But then one morning it happened that the Christina had an errand in a harbour on another island and you were allowed to sail on it. It was an early morning with lighthouses lit and lots of twinkling stars.

  And there you are now, standing on the rocking deck in biting cold, listening to the mainsail ferociously rumbling and thundering before giving in to the wind and unfolding in peace and a vast sense of cheerfulness.

  And now this morning ship is on its way – the creaking and groaning schooner with its masts and booms and ropes and with its bowsprit and tiller and windlass, its deckhouse and its pantry. All these new words with their cheerful names! And all of it in a pervasive scent of tar and bilge water, of fish and salt and smoke from the galley.

  And this is the sea, blackish blue and green and whitish, with the thousands of whispering and murmuring mouths of the waves.

  And the dark border out there in the far distance is the Horizon. The Horizon! The strangest of all words, so filled with terror and delight, for that is where the world ends; here is the Abyss, the vast bed where the Sun sleeps at night and the Moon and the Stars during the day. And that is where the Tower stands…

  Yes, just look: there it is, right out on the Horizon, with a twinkling star at its top.

  Now the Christina’s grey sails turn blood red all at once, for now the Sun is on its way up from its depths. And suddenly it is revealed in the east, enormously big and flaming red in the morning haze. But it doesn’t stand still; it rocks up and down like an enormous buoy, disappears behind vast ridges of breakers and emerges again, each time bigger and bigger and nearer to bursting and looking foreboding. And you are cold and your teeth are chattering, not only from cold, but also from fear; for see, the red pod around the Sun bursts, and its clear, dazzling fire bursts out and sets the sea ablaze!

  But Father, at the wheel, yawns loudly and heartily and shows his big teeth in his beard, and so everything is after all probably as it should be, and the time for the End of the World and Judgement Day hasn’t come
yet.

  No, for now the Sun turns grey and disappears in a darkening hail shower. The hailstones drum deafeningly against the distended sails and dance merrily on the deck. And when the Sun finally shows itself again, it has turned into an ordinary yellow everyday sun. It is day and normality; the world has become itself again, and the ship sails into a fjord and docks.

  The Green Storehouse

  Of all the remarkable houses in the town, the Green Storehouse is the most remarkable.

  The Green Storehouse is a tall warehouse with low-ceilinged rooms and lots of steps. It smells everywhere of tar and ropes, of varnish and tobacco and spit from chewing tobacco.

  In one of the rooms there is a little cubicle full of glass splinters. This is the Glass Room. Here stands the Window Man, cutting glass with a diamond that he has hanging in a string around his neck so that no one can come and steal it from him, for a diamond is the most precious thing in the world.

  The Window Man is a pale, serious man with red eyes and a red nose.

  The Window Man has had a sad fate.

  “What’s a sad fate?”

  “It’s when you’ve lost all you love.”

  “Has the Window Man lost his diamond?”

  “No, but he’s lost five of his six children; they all died of consumption. And the Window Man’s wife died of consumption. Little Angelica’s all he’s got left now.”

  “Sad fate.”

  When the Window Man has scratched the glass with his diamond and carefully breaks off a piece to make a window pane, the glass says “sad”.

  ***

  Ole Morske hangs out here in the Storehouse. He sits in a huge room right up at the top under the big skylight. That’s the Sail Loft. He sits there with the edging of a sail over his knees like a huge duvet. He is a sailmaker. He doesn’t answer when you ask him about anything, and so no one talks to him. But then he talks to himself and says strange things.