Father’s voice (which at this moment seems to you to be alien and full of some indeterminate horror):
“There you are, Amaldus, there’s the proof that the Earth is round.”
The moonlight has become strangely dark or grey, an ominous light settles on the stone steps and on all the faces peering up into the sky.
Then something more happens – something unexpected that also makes Father start and say, “Oh, just look now.” For a long strip of light suddenly appears in the heavens, like some gigantic spear up in the sky that has been thrown from the stars to defend the Moon against the Earth’s shadow…
Little Brother (standing there dancing, with a voice full of delight): “Look, it’s all going off now.”
Father: “That was some shooting star… wasn’t it magnificent?”
Mother (sounding a little concerned): “Oh, is that really all it was? Well, in that case you can make a wish. Wish for something, Amaldus. Hurry.”
Little Brother (hurries): “I wish for an elephant.”
Father (roars with laughter): “An elephant. Well, why not?”
But then everything is silent again, an oppressed, anxious silence, while the sinister shadow of the Earth moves slowly but mercilessly forward – like a fate.
And there you stand, dizzy and horrified – but at the same time delighted, filled with a boundless sense of being out on the wildest of wild sledge rides, down steep mountain slopes and out over the edges of threatening abysses. Unease so enormous that it turns into ease, into a quiet, majestic sense of wellbeing beyond all understanding.
Mother (who can no longer stand the sight of this lunar massacre): “Can you see the Pleiades, Amaldus? And the Milky Way right at the top?”
Little Brother: “Why is it called the Milky Way? Is that where milk comes from?”
Mother: “No, it’s called that because it’s white like milk.”
Father: “It’s all lots of stars. Millions of planets and suns. Billions of them.”
Mother (in a voice that is deeper than usual): “They are God’s breath.”
And now you are very curious to see what Father will say to that. Suppose he said, “Do you know, Else? You’re just a feckless idiot.” But he doesn’t say anything, and Mother repeats in a voice that is strangely deep and emotional and almost threatening: “God’s breath, yes. The Creator’s mighty, mighty breath.”
Uncle Prosper (standing puffing out blue clouds of smoke up into the heavens): “Let heaven look after its own problems, and we’ll look after ours. The Moon’s made of green cheese and the Sun’s an Edam cheese. We knew that even as children; and we knew as well that the Earth’s a bread roll. And it’s all nothing more than our dear old Lord’s supper.”
***
Finally, the darkened face of the Moon is lit up again; a lovely bow of light emerged from the darkness, a new Moon that happily grew into a half Moon and finally into a round, dazzling and as it were full Moon all scrubbed clean and polished.
The Death of Platen
Thus the winter of the eclipse passed.
Then came, “the spring when everything became different”.
Not everything, of course. The sun shines and the rain rains as usual; the sea glistens and sparkles; ships come and go. The wind howls in the gables and the fences out in Jutta’s father’s grassland, and the midges dance in freshening weather above the burbling brook. Yet nothing is, “as it used to be”.
“As it used to be” and “long ago” had already entered your life. Once long ago, Merrit sat out in the rain in the green hills. Once long ago we balanced with outstretched arms across the Life Bridge. And long ago – and this really is long ago, for it was in the very beginning of time – there was a Tower at the furthermost Edge of the World. Now, there is no longer any furthermost Edge, for the World is round and there is no Edge to it. But instead of the mist-filled abyss, where God’s Spirit used to hover over the waters, something even more overwhelming has appeared: the star-filled Space in which the Earth sails around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth.
When the wind is blowing and the air is full of scurrying clouds, especially towards the evening, you can feel the Earth sailing.
On one such sailing evening, you met Merrit carrying her music case under her arm and on her way out to Andreasminde.
“Come with me, Amaldus. Then I’ll play that piece you know. The scale, you know. Our scale.”
“Oh, that one.”
“Yes, and then afterwards you can take me home, ’cos do you know…?”
Merrit is wearing her stare eyes. She comes close to me and touches my hand, and I can feel her breath in my ear.
“Platen’s terribly ill; he might die tonight.”
We walk past Madame Midjord’s little house, where Platen lives. There is a light in his bedroom window in the gable. You were up there once with a bag from Uncle Hans (a bag in which there was something that gurgled). Platen lay fully dressed on his bed, fat and heavy and slightly blue around his nose and with kindly eyes that stood out a little and had red veins in the whites. It was a very little room; its sloping walls were covered in flowery wallpaper, and his duvet cover was also flowered, and Platen winked merrily at you:
“That’s lovely, my boy. You have your uncle’s kind, bright eyes, and that’s something you can be pleased about. Come on, you and I are going to have a little drink.”
And he put two glasses on the table and poured something clear and thin into one of them and something red and thick in the other, and then he nudged you and said, “Cheers”.
Merrit’s elbow and shoulder against your arm, and her whispering voice: “Perhaps he’s dying at this very moment. Your uncle and Selimsen are up with him to help him when he dies.”
“What do you mean: help him?”
“Oh, just be with him and hold his hand.”
Grandmother sits staring into the air and it seems her thoughts are far away.
“Aye, it’s a pity about Platen. He’s such a splendid man. But he’s so weak, so weak.”
The candles are lit on the piano, and Merrit’s fingers hurry up and down the black and white steps of the scales while you sit looking through one of Grandmother’s picture books without seeing the pictures. And the wind howls in the gable, and clouds filled with gloom scurry across the pale sky at dusk, and you have a salt taste in your throat from unspoken apprehension. Not emotion concerning Platen, but something else. This something else is Merrit, sitting there and playing “our” scale while Grandmother sits deep in thought with her eyes closed behind her glasses, sunk into reverie and far away in her thoughts…
When on our way home we passed Madame Midjord’s house, quiet singing could be heard through the open gable window: “Am I born, then I will live.”
Merrit stopped and listened.
“Then he’s not dead yet. Amaldus.”
“Yes?”
Then you feel her cold arm round your neck and her warm cheek against yours. But only for a moment, then she nudges you and pulls at your jersey.
“No. Come on. I’ve got to hurry.”
***
You lay for a long time that night unable to sleep, thinking of what Platen had said on that occasion when you drank to each other and of the sweet taste in his raspberry juice. But that was not all that made you lie there clutching your pillow and making it damp and warm with your tears. That was something quite different. And that quite different thing was her.
And the tones of the melodic minor scale ran up and down their steps as you lay there and whispered her name down into your clammy pillow.
***
However, Platen did not die until some months later. He died on the longest day of the year. He died late in the morning, just as the schooner the Christina had arrived and dropped anchor in the roads and lay out there with its masts and its yards and its gilded figurehead, and the sun was shining at its brightest and all the Rømer grounds out near the Ring were white with drying fish.
He died while we boys were out playing Robin Hood and shooting our bows and arrows up in the fields near Ekka’s well house.
Then Ekka came out of her house and stood peering down over the town.
“Can you boys tell me whether Rømer’s flag is flying at full mast or half mast?”
“Half mast.”
“Then Platen’s dead.”
Then we stopped playing because Platen was dead.
Erik August von Platen was the full name of the man who had now died. Ekka told this and that about him in a sad voice, on the verge of tears. He came from a fine, extremely wealthy family, but they had disowned him because he couldn’t look after his money and frittered it away in his uncontrollable desire for drink, poor man. Then he came here on the Christina and settled down in Mrs Midjord’s house, and Mrs Midjord earned a lot of money for taking care of him. He was drunk most of the time, but otherwise he was always nice and kind. But then he fell ill, and the doctor couldn’t cure him of that illness for it was something to do with his bowels, which were entirely eaten up by all those glasses of strong schnapps. Then they sent for Fina the Hut, and she came with some herbal mixtures, and they were a help, but only for a time. Then you could see Platen sitting in his basket chair outside Mrs Midjord’s house when the weather was good. There he sat, rocking his white walking stick and talking to folk passing by. Aye, he was always in a good mood. God rest his soul…
***
Later that day, Uncle Hans came and told us about Platen’s last hours and sat there with tears running down his cheeks as he spoke. He had sung Platen to sleep, indeed, he had sung him into his last sleep. He had at last sung his favourite song, ‘My life is a wave’. Then Platen had said, “Goodbye, Hans. Now I’m going into my tapestry.”
Those were his last words.
Aye, strange words. And the very moment his soul departed, Selimsen, who was on his way up towards Mrs Midjord’s house, had seen a white mist floating above the roof of the house, a mist in the shape of a man with his arm raised.
Father: “Of course.”
Mother: “What do you mean: of course, Johan?”
“Well, Selimsen had naturally had a drop to mark the day!”
***
Then Mrs Midjord came; she was wearing a mantilla of black spangles and smelled of lavender and it was quite obvious she had been drinking rum, and she wept a great deal and held Uncle Hans’ hand.
“He was as good as the day is long, was Platen. He had such a gentle nature.”
Mrs Midjord unwraps something from an embroidered handkerchief. It is a piece of jewellery, a gold ring set with a blue stone. She holds it up in the light so they can see how the stone shines.
“A real sapphire. He gave it to me.”
Then we boys went down to the mouth of the river where Johan the carpenter was standing in the sunshine outside his workshop, planing wood for Platen’s coffin. Here stood The Wise Virgins and Spanish Rikke and some other girls and married women talking to each other in plaintive voices.
“He was so kind and so charming, but so weak, so weak.”
“He was a poor soak.”
“No, Rikke, you can’t say that sort of thing now he’s standing before God’s throne.”
***
That evening, a great many people had gathered in the garden of Andreasminde, sitting in the summer house with their glasses and remembering the dead man, and Uncle Hans and Selimsen sang, “My life is a wave”, and Selimsen went indoors to Grandmother and asked her to play a funeral march. (Grandmother played the one by Mendelssohn – and when the dark, agonising sounds came floating out of the open window, you had to hide yourself and your emotion in a flowering red-currant bush.)
Then night fell, although the sun still shone on the red flakes of clouds high up in the air.
But on board the Christina, the sailors were playing the accordion, and you could hear there were girls on board and that they were dancing and fooling about even though Platen was dead.
Mother closed the window.
“That’s something you ought to have been able to stop, Johan.”
Father stood with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and with an extinguished pipe between his teeth.
“There’s no reason to be so miserable just because the poor feckless idiot has finally got what he wanted.”
“What do you mean by wanted, Johan?”
“Well, drinking himself to death. But let’s hope it can be a lesson for that crazy brother of yours.”
Then you glance at Mother and see the pain in her eyes and feel a wave of sympathy of which you are also a little ashamed of at the same time.
Cadenza in the Willow Grove
Platen was buried one windy Sunday afternoon of sunshine and drifting cumulus clouds. The summer breeze blew through the grass and bushes in the churchyard and got under the minister’s cassock so that he had to stand and hold it down like some prudish woman, and the sound of the hymns came in waves so that at one time it was deafeningly close and at others almost completely inaudible in the blue depths behind the churchyard wall. Finally, Uncle Hans’ girls’ choir sang, “My life is a wave”.
Many tears were shed, and you yourself had to stand and grind your teeth to keep your emotions in check. But your sorrow was not so much due to Platen as to something quite different. For that very same day, you had been told that Merrit was soon to leave the country. Her father, who had been captain on the Christina for some time, was now to be captain of another much bigger ship sailing to the West Indies, and his wife and daughter were now to live in Copenhagen.
But you hadn’t really had time to grasp the fact that Merrit was to go away and that your ways would part, perhaps for ever. After the funeral, you went up through the fields to the Willow Grove, and here you lay down in the grass and stared up into the moving skies while abandoning yourself to – well, to what?
***
To a certain pleasure containing an element of pain – that is probably the best way to describe it on looking back with the wisdom of old age – demonstrating the truth of the saying that the only really happy love is unhappy love.
Of course, you didn’t think like that in those days. Your thoughts were warm dreams of desire and enamoured visions: see, there she comes, all in her summer dress with the wind in her hair (a reasonable description, though not quite right, for myth has already started to come into play with her).
“Merrit. Are you here?”
“Yes, ’cos I knew you were here.”
And she sits down with you in the grass, smiling, but with red rings round her eyes, for she has been weeping. You take her hands.
“Merrit. I knew you’d come.”
(Alas, this was all lies, sweet lies that are like stolen fruit that rots even before you have eaten it.)
“Amaldus. Won’t you kiss me? Yes, like that.” Whoo-oo-oo… now you are out floating with your earth girl.
(This was not a total fabrication, of course.)
And so we float out in the late summer’s day, low over the soughing fields with all their nodding flowers, right out across the whispering heather on the dark heath… towards the west, towards the west where the sea extends quietly foaming and endless. And now the entire web of inventions is suddenly the truth, the truth because it has been endowed with the transcendental dimension of poetry!
Then the sea roars almightily below us, vast, stretching for mile after mile as I look into her green stare eyes and love her. And this continues into the ferocious, desolate evening space over the sea, and perhaps into eternity, indeed perhaps into death, for perhaps it will be best that we never, never return, but… but…
“Amaldus! Are you here?”
You look up and encounter Aunt Nanna’s smiling eyes. Keil the photographer is standing behind her. They are both still dressed for the funeral, but Aunt Nanna’s face is radiant. Keil has a camera in a strap over his shoulder.
You stay there lying in the grass completely flustered, wanting most of
all to jump up and run off.
“No, stay where you are, Amaldus – we’re only out to take a few snaps in the good weather, and you look so funny lying there all on your own and thinking.”
There is the sound of a click, and there you are, preserved to all time with all your agony.
And so your yearnings and dreams are gone; they are as though torn to shreds by the wind and already far away in the blue sky.
***
But they come back; indeed, they will pursue you for years – like some unforgettable melody that is fixed in your ear and which you occasionally become aware of and lose yourself in – and at that moment nothing else exists except just this melody, for everything else (including what is known as unassailable reality) fades away and is lost…
Poetry always has the last word.
Embarkation in Cloudy Weather
At this point a brief account of the bitter leave-taking with Merrit as it played out on the grey stage of reality.
There is also a good deal of wind, but the sun refuses to shine, for it’s an ordinary miserable showery day with banks of low cloud in the mountains and with the angry cries of gulls and the smell of sacking and canvas from the grey bales of fish being taken on board the Christina in salt-encrusted lighters.
And then there is the wretched green ferry. And the Ferryman sitting there, waiting at his oars, hunched up and miserable and without his horn.
And there, finally, come Merrit and her mother, both in hooded grey-green cloaks. Trunks and luggage are brought out to the boat, and then there is the leave-taking with friends and acquaintances. Merrit looks strangely hectic and bedraggled in a cloak that is far too big for her and flaps around her slender figure, and she is so busy that she has no time either to laugh or to cry – well, for a moment an expression of despair crosses her face when she embraces and kisses Grandmother. Then it is Jutta’s turn, standing weeping for all to see: she is also given a kiss and a sisterly pat on the back. Then it is Mother and Aunt Nanna and Little Brother… and then, finally, it is your turn: a quick little smile and “all the best, Amaldus”. And then it is all over; it was nothing, nothing at all. And yet… for wasn’t there something after all? A secret glint in the corner of her eye, almost imperceptible, and yet as precious as a diamond?
The Tower at the Edge of the World Page 11