The Tower at the Edge of the World

by William Heinesen

  But then after all, Hannibal starts talking about this and that, though he uses such a strange, enigmatic language that it’s really impossible to get much out of it. But it’s all about Uncle Hans and his friends and various girls and women.

  The Schooner – you know, that big, good-looking woman, surely you know who I mean? Have you noticed how fat she’s got?”

  Here, Hannibal draws a big curve over his stomach.

  “It’s Selimsen that’s blown her up. Girls can be blown up just like balloons. And then they burst one day. And then there’s Dolly Rose; at least you know her. She’s our uncle’s. He’s got her. He gives her both clothes and money. Oh, but now I’ve said too much already. ’Cos when all’s said and done uncle’s a nice person. But Dolly Rose’s only sixteen. And I wonder what her mother, Fina the Hut, thinks about all that? Perhaps she’s pleased? Perhaps she’s put a spell on our uncle; that’s what some people say at least. All I know is that if I’d been him I wouldn’t have been so daft. I’d have kept my hands off Dolly Rose.”

  Hannibal has assumed his chieftain’s mien and looks grown up and stern.

  “And as for Keil, the photographer, he’s a gutless twit, even if he’s a hundred times a lieutenant. But he’s got lots of them, I can tell you. He gets anyone he wants, ’cos they’re all mad about him – and Aunt Nanna’s one of them. As for Platen – no, he only comes here during the day, ’cos he’s a much finer man than the others, even finer than our uncle, and almost even finer than your Father. For Platen’s a baron. And then he’s extremely well off. Yes, good Lord, he owns an entire mine in Sweden. But then he went on the bottle and so they sent him up here, ’cos they’ve said he can’t look after his own affairs. But he never comes out into the Factory except to sit and play his cello. Listen.”

  Hannibal gets up.

  “He’s there now. Come on.”

  The distant, deep sound is coming from inside one of the empty halls. Through the crack in a half-open door you can see Platen sitting on a folding chair, bent over his cello and you can see his fingers on the fingerboard and the bow going to and fro. Then he turns a little to allow you a glimpse also of his beard and eyebrows as they catch the light from the windows up there and then his smiling features. He is sitting there with a delighted smile on his face as though he was together with someone with whom he was having an amusing, cosy chat. But he is quite alone.

  “Why’s he sitting there playing all on his own?”

  “Because it sounds a lot better here than up in Mrs Midjord’s little house where he lives. Can you see his bottle? He’s always got to have it with him, otherwise he gets DTs.”

  “What’s DTs?”

  “It’s something you die from.”

  Platen plays and plays, and the music comes in great waves from the reddish brown cello, as though full of subdued light and profound delight. You can feel the deep sounds right down inside you.

  Platen is sitting here in the dark, clammy rock, smiling and enjoying himself all on his own.

  He’s a feckless idiot. They are all feckless. Good-for-nothings. Good-for-nothings.

  ***

  You don’t quite like Uncle Hans being called feckless, for you like him. Uncle Hans is always kind and good-tempered and he’s always busy doing something amusing and exciting.

  He takes you out sailing in his fine yacht the “Nitouche”. Then he’s a sailor with a shiny peaked cap or wearing a sou-wester. And when he’s out riding in the mountains he wears riding breeches and leather gaiters. But when they are giving a concert out in the Factory and Uncle Hans stands conducting the “Ydun” girls’ choir with his white baton, he is in “tails”. Then they clap and Uncle Hans bows and smiles and points to the girls with his hand to show that the honour is theirs. And when they put on a comedy, there is no one like Uncle Hans to make people double up with laughter or weep with emotion.

  But Father is angry with Uncle Hans and addresses some harsh words to him and he doesn’t care whether others hear them as well:

  “You’ll never grow up! You think everything’s a game. But the jar’ll float on the water so long that it will come home without a handle.”

  Then Uncle Hans says nothing and makes no effort to defend himself, and he doesn’t even look angry or hurt.

  Later, when Father has gone, you hear Uncle Hans say to Mother, “I’ve really always liked the idea of this jar floating on the water instead of standing on the shelf filled with pickled gherkins.”

  ***

  But the biggest of all the feckless idiots is after all Uncle Prosper, who just stands by his duck pond and feeds his ducks.

  There is a little brook that hurries through the garden at Andreasminde. It comes from somewhere up in the mountains and the great green grasslands. Once in the garden, it hides beneath the dense foliage of the redcurrant bushes, but it turns up again further down, and this is where Uncle Prosper has his duck pond.

  Uncle Prosper’s duck pond is divided off from the garden by means of a tall fence “so that we don’t have to look at all that mess”.

  Uncle Prosper is Mother’s uncle. He is quite small, indeed really not much more than a dwarf, but he has a big white handlebar moustache. He looks pretty strange in general, for he also wears smoke-coloured glasses and almost always goes around in sea boots.

  Uncle Prosper has deep furrows across his brow like someone who has a lot to think about, but what he is thinking about is the duck pond and the ducks.

  “It’s a pity for Uncle Prosper. You must always be kind to him and not laugh at him.”

  Uncle Prosper has a “workshop” in the cellar of Andreasminde; here there is a table full of coloured pieces of paper and jars of paste, and on the wall there hangs a photograph of an old man with mutton chop whiskers; this is Uncle Prosper’s father, “Old Rømer”, who is your great grandfather. Old Rømer has fierce eyes, but still he looks as though he can’t quite refrain from being secretly slightly amused at his impossible son Prosper.

  Uncle Prosper loves to feed his ducks. He stands by the pond with his bag of bread and calls them each by name, for he has a name for each of them: Rabbirap and Rabbisnap, Big Malene, Old Malene and Little Malene, Andrik and Mandrik and Topperik and whatever. They come swimming along with their heads on one side looking at Uncle Prosper with one eye and curtseying politely.

  Inside the wash cellar there is a big basin with running water, and swimming around here are Uncle Prosper’s yellow ducklings that are not yet big enough to go out into the pond, where the big tomcat “Shitty Frederik” (that’s the name Uncle Prosper gives to this fierce, predatory cat that can both swim and dive) goes around looking for an opportunity. Uncle Prosper is particularly fond of the ducklings; they are the apples of his eye, and he often stands and plays his little flower-decorated ocarina flute for them.

  The eggs that Uncle Prosper’s ducks lay are taken up into the kitchen and boiled or fried for him personally, for no one else likes duck eggs. But some of the eggs are “blown” and covered with coloured and golden strips of paper and tiny cutout figures and hung up on the wall to be used as birthday presents and gifts.

  When the weather is good in the evening, Uncle Prosper sits in a basket chair near the pond and smokes his long pipe. He will not be wearing his sea boots then, but will be in a dressing gown and skull cap and embroidered slippers as he sits and makes himself comfortable. Occasionally, he will leaf through an old picture book about Struwwelpeter and sit and chuckle through his beard and pipe smoke as he settles down in a seventh heaven.

  ***

  Grandmother – is she feckless, too? Perhaps and perhaps not.

  “Grandmother’s so naive.”

  “What’s naive?”

  Mother hesitates for a moment over her ironing.

  “Naive? It’s when you think too well of everybody. And when you’re too kind. And when you let others take advantage of you.”

  Mother and Aunt Nanna go on talking about how poor Grandmother has “let others take a
dvantage of her throughout her life”.

  You sit there, half listening, while you are playing about with your schooner the Christina, whose name plate has come loose and needs to be fixed again with some glue you’ve borrowed from Uncle Prosper. A few strange words fix themselves in your mind, and you can’t help wondering about them afterwards.

  Your grandfather, whose name is the same as yours, Amaldus, – this grandfather was “a bit of a rake”. And “dissolute”. And a “toper”. And poor Hans takes after him, unfortunately. And (here you prick up your ears) he was a “ladykiller” as well.

  “Yes, he was, Nanna. He couldn’t leave a skirt alone. And of course, Mother had no idea. She simply adored him. So did everyone else. Aye, ’cos he had a way with people. Everyone adored Father. Just as they do Hans now.”

  ***

  So Grandmother is naive (a lovely new word even if there is something rather sad about it) and she “lets everyone take advantage of her”.

  Grandmother is small, frail and very short-sighted, but when she sits at her piano and runs her small hands over the keys, it is simply wonderful to hear how she can make the big piano sound and how, through her glasses, she can work out all those countless black dots and curious forks and hairpins on the pages of the old music books. (In those days you didn’t yet know that your Grandmother had had a strict musical upbringing in her native city of Copenhagen and that it was the original intention that she should have a “musical training”.

  Sometimes, usually on Saturday evenings, Uncle Hans and his friends come and make music together with Grandmother. And sometimes the Ferryman and his two sons come with their horn and violins and Platen with his cello. This is when they are to rehearse for an evening concert in the Factory. On such occasions, all kinds of people meet in the veranda room in Andreasminde. Pastor Evaldsen’s male voice choir comes as well, and so does Uncle Hans’ “Ydun” girls’ choir to have their voices trained.

  Then Grandmother is “really very much in demand”, but she often becomes so tired that during the pauses she has to sit and collapse in her rocking chair and smell some invigorating scents from her “potpourri jar”.

  Then she sits and rocks a little and relaxes, but a moment later she is up again and with eyes radiant behind her glasses is once more a feckless idiot among the other feckless idiots.

  Grandmother’s toy theatre stands behind the round flap on the desk in the dining room at Andreasminde. It is her father’s work. He was a horn player in the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, and his delightfully painted and gilded toy theatre is “like the Royal Theatre right down to the least little detail”. And the small coloured cardboard figures that are arranged on the stage are all well-known actors and actresses that Grandmother saw as a child and young girl and about whom she has so much to tell – “Mrs Heiberg”, “Phister”, “Anna Levinson”, “Herold” and lots of others.

  The toy theatre is a gem that no one is allowed to play with, but people are very welcome to look at it and listen to Grandmother telling what it is the tiny figures are doing. Sometimes it’s an opera, and then Grandmother plays the piano and in a cracked but warm voice sings the “arias” and “recitatives”.

  Grandmother would most of all herself have liked to be a singer – but fate determined otherwise.

  But (as Mother told me later, when Grandmother was long dead), one of the small figures on the stage of the toy theatre was Grandmother herself. And sometimes during the evening when she was playing with her figures she pretended to be an opera singer and would sing Cherubino’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro.

  But sometimes Grandmother sits all hunched up in her rocking chair and is so quiet and so far away in her thoughts that she looks almost like a cardboard figure. Then she mustn’t be disturbed, but be allowed to sit and dream.

  “What does Grandmother sit and dream about?”

  “About Copenhagen and the royal palace and the King’s Garden. And Kongens Nytorv and the Royal Theatre…”

  The Little Singer

  Then, one day it is Aunt Nanna’s eighteenth birthday.

  For a quite special reason, this day has been inscribed in your memory, so that you even remember the date: the 7th of April 1907. For that was the day when, for the first time, you found yourself in a room together with Merrit.

  Aunt Nanna’s birthday was on the same day as that of her sister Kaja, who was two years older than she. This double birthday, which was celebrated out in Andreasminde, was a particularly festive event; there were usually lots of guests, and they sang and danced and sometimes performed children’s plays.

  It was Grandmother’s idea that little Merrit should come on that day and sing for the birthday guests. Grandmother gave piano lessons, and the eleven-year-old Merrit, the youngest daughter of a mate by the name of Svensson, who for some time had been Grandmother’s pupil, had entranced her with her ear for music and especially for her singing voice.

  And there you have Stare-Eyes, the girl from the church, standing by the piano and singing in a voice like the fine, white sand that runs through your fingers (that was how it seemed to you). She is wearing a pale blue dress and has a blue bow in her flowing hair and she isn’t the least bit shy even though all eyes are turned towards her…

  Nor have you forgotten what she sang, and you can easily name it even now: first there was an old romance from Grandmother’s young days called Rest in the Forest, then Aladdin’s lullaby by Heise and finally Cherubino’s aria from The Marriage of Figaro (though only the first part). That was the star piece and it had to be performed twice. Then there was enthusiastic applause; Grandmother’s eyes shone with delight and Uncle Hans came and lifted the little singer up and carried her into the dining room (where there were two birthday cakes on the table, each with a little dancer on top) and put her down in a place of honour alongside the two birthday girls.

  “But she’s an affected little thing even so,” said Aunt Nanna later when we were at home again.

  A Bright, Frosty Evening at

  New Year 1974 and I

  (Amaldus the Ancient, the Survivor and the Reminiscer) have just returned from a lonely voyage of discovery beneath the starry vault of heaven.

  I took Father’s ship’s telescope with me, and the object of my excursion in the universe was to catch a glimpse of the comet about which they are writing and talking so much at the moment.

  I couldn’t capture it. But then there were so many other things to linger over in wonder and delight. All these twinkling eyes in the night that you got to know and love in your youth are familiar to you now as they were before and make you feel at home in the world. The steadfast seven lanterns of the Great Bear seen through a swirling foam of Northern Lights! Aye – it is still out there, that imperishable array, and the objective of its vast progress through Space is simply to greet you and delight your spirit by communicating to your perishable earthly Present an aura of eternity.

  Those are your thoughts as, happy and excited, you sit there sharpening your pencil over the pages of your sketch book and shake the shavings down to join the ashes in your ashtray.

  Happy and excited, yes indeed: and there are two reasons for that, for in our story we are now approaching a time of happiness that passes all understanding…

  Ah, how am I to describe that?

  One thing is certain, and that is that we are now in the middle of a great, scorching hot summer, surrounded by all its delicious scents and sounds. The perfume of grass and moss and all the plants in the field, the scent of bread and milk and peat smoke, stable and hay and washing that is hung out to dry in the evening air.

  The sound of the curlews’ warbling in the bright daylight and the deep dusk-like shawm of the snipe and the delicate notes from Grandmother’s old piano!

  And through it all: tremors of wild infatuation, a childish, dawning, still contained and shy Eros. But mighty indeed, mighty indeed.

  For this whispering summer was entirely dominated by thoughts of Merrit.

&
nbsp; The Life Bridge

  Father and Mother are to go to Scotland on the Christina, and Aunt Nanna is going with them.

  It is decided that you and Little Brother are to go and live at Andreasminde; then a girl called Jutta will come and look after Little Brother, for Grandmother hasn’t time for that – she has to see to her piano and her pupils, and the two aunts Kaja and Mona can’t neglect their jobs in the Rømer Concern.

  ***

  Jutta lived close to Andreasminde, in a long, low, black-tarred house in the middle of green slopes with their profusion of waving grasses and nodding flowers, and in the midst of the whispering summer. Belonging to the house were a barn and some stalls in which the cows Star and Grima and the horse Jupiter were kept.

  Jutta’s father’s grassland extended from the fence around Andreasminde right up to the great outfield fence at the foot of the mountains, where the heather took over. In this green and stony stretch of land there were hills and valleys and great rocks topped with blueberry and ling and there was a swift-flowing little stream along the banks of which you could lie in the grass and look up into the sky with its gently flowing clouds and lose yourself in its blue chasms and in the delighted gurgling of the mountain stream.

  There was a bridge consisting of a single plank across this stream. You could balance your way over it as on a knife edge, so the bridge became known among folk as the “knife bridge”. We, however, understood that as the “Life bridge” and as such it came to be known.

  This Life Bridge still haunts my dreams to this day; indeed, even during wakeful hours I can lose myself at the thought of it and relive the prickling sensation it caused in me when I balanced my way across this narrow bridge with outstretched arms and “with my life in my hands”. It was a bridge that led nowhere except to the other bank of the stream and which was of no earthly use, for without getting your shoes wet you could easily jump from one stone to the other in the little stream, and in any case you could wade across it.