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The Tower at the Edge of the World

Page 13

by William Heinesen


  It was dreadful to see the well kept, newly painted ship running in on the breakers and finally coming to rest on its side, overcome, pressed violently against the rocks and with its masts sticking obliquely up into the air. And almost worse was the sight of Father’s distorted face – he stood there with open mouth and showed all his big teeth in a massive smile, but it was a smile of fury and pain, and his eyes showed he was not far from tears.

  From out in the surf there came some penetrating sounds sharp like shots; this was the ship’s bowsprit being broken and shattered. But now it was already so dark that it was almost impossible to distinguish the poor vessel, which was now no longer a ship, but a wreck.

  Not until morning was about to arrive did the gale abate. In the growing light it was possible to see the pitiful stripped remains of Goodwoman’s tortured hull, without masts and bowsprit and with a bared frame behind the splintered bows. Flotsam was being rocked everywhere on the great swell, and far up among the houses there lay bits of wreckage scattered among pieces of sea wrack and ramalia and dead fish.

  ***

  There was not much to be saved from the wrecked ship, which had “met its fate” and now lay overturned and firmly fixed among seaweed-covered cliffs, with its keel sticking out of the water so that from the shore you could see the empty interior of the hull through gaps and cracks in the smashed deck.

  The gale that night had wreaked havoc elsewhere as well; a lighter and two smaller boats had suffered the same fate as the sloop, and out on one of the drying grounds near the Ring one of the storehouses was without a roof. But all this was as nothing compared with the catastrophe that had occurred that same night off the steep mountainsides on the southern coast of the island, where a large foreign ship had gone aground and been wrecked – losing everyone on board.

  It later turned out that it was a Dutch merchant vessel, the Moorkerken that had met this grim fate; but no one knew that at the time. In general, no one knew anything at all until wreckage from the lost ship and the first bodies of the drowned sailors began to wash ashore.

  During the following days and weeks ever more broken bodies were washed ashore. They were sewn into sacking and taken to the porch of the church.

  It was a time of dark days and pale faces and the slow ringing of church bells. The first of the drowned men to be buried were accompanied by a large gathering at the graveside; on the next occasion the assembly was smaller, and as for the last two burials, which took place in rain and sleet, the priest and the grave digger were the only ones present in the churchyard apart from the six pallbearers; but both Father and Michelsen and the two navigation instructors were among the pallbearers, as they wanted to do the “final honours” to the unknown drowned sailors.

  Fate

  Fate is and will always be the strangest of all words. Fate is the grimmest of all grim things. “Inscrutable are the paths of fate,” “No one avoids his fate.” Many people are, “pursued by an evil fate”.

  Gerlak’s children are pursued by such an evil fate. It is with them as it was with the Window Man’s children – they are carried away one by one when least expected, and then they die; there is no escaping it: they have “consumption”, and that’s their fate. This evil fate doesn’t come at once, but it lies in wait. They jump around and dance, play and fight like other children and don’t look at all different, but one day the cough catches them, and then “you know what to expect”. The four eldest children have been taken by it, and now the next, a little ten-year-old girl is simply lying there awaiting her fate.

  But the son, Karl-Erik, who is eleven, is still running around playing “Come home, dear birdie” together with other children, as though all was right with the world.

  Come home, dear birdie

  Come home, dear birdie

  So sing the children, keeping good time and singing together, so loud that it echoes among the houses. But then, suddenly, it is as though it’s no longer the happy playing children’s voices you hear, but quite different voices – for now it’s the dead siblings calling to Karl-Erik from their graves.

  “You mustn’t think so much about it, Amaldus. Those children are with God, and they are all right, far better off than they were down here on earth.”

  “Then why do they have to be down here on earth first and be ill and feel awful?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s a meaning to it, but we human beings don’t understand that meaning.”

  But what if there isn’t a meaning? And what if there isn’t a God? A thought you daren’t think, but which you think even so. And then for a moment it’s as though you grew all stiff inside from sorrow and horror.

  Gerlak the shoemaker lives in a tall, narrow house on The Steps, one of the steep alleyways leading down to the water. At the top of the gable looking out across the water is the little attic room where Karl Erik’s sister Leonora lies ill, and as it grows dark you can see the lamp being lit behind the red curtain. The narrow gable stands out black and tower-like against the fading evening light in the west. Then the evening is filled with sorrow, sorrow and fate, sorrow and fate. Then you have to think about the Big Sluggish Beast that Merrit once told you about. Then it is that this strange beast with the sorrowful, begging eyes comes slowly along through the dusk.

  Then it is good to see the Moon rising from the sea. Oh, just look how huge and red it glows behind the dark horizon in the east. For a moment it disappears in the clouds, but it peeps out again and reveals its delightful red face between the blankets of clouds, lying watching out there in its vast bed like someone lazing about and unwilling to get up. Yet before long it pulls itself together and sets out on its vast nightly expedition across the heavens, refreshed and in fine spirits. And so round, so round!

  And the Earth is round like that as well. And the Sun. And all three of them, the Moon, the Earth and the Sun, all three of them sail along on circular paths around each other as though playing some magical and beautiful game out in the heavens.

  Diamonds in the Dark

  Low clouds, grey, sombre days.

  Not all of them are just grey – some conceal remarkable colours. The drifting clouds have a touch of rust red, olive green, muddy brown or stone grey, and the light can have a hint of a cold blue like newly hardened steel. And the sun will occasionally reveal itself as it sets and emit a smouldering, subterranean light over the sea and the weather-beaten land.

  ***

  It was about this time you were given your own room, a room in the loft with a sloping wall on one side. It had long served as a lumber room, but it had been cleared out now and painted and papered, and the floor had been covered with fresh linoleum. This linoleum had a pervasive smell that haunts your nose to this very day, a nauseating smell of affliction bordering on despair, and yet with an element of hidden delight: yes, thus and only thus, is the scent of your early youth!

  By the window a worn and disfigured but solid old writing desk with an inkwell and a blotting pad and beneath the sloping wall an iron bedstead, and if it’s cold in the winter there is a paraffin stove for you to light. In the dark, the patterned top of the little stove projects a delightful flower garden on to the sloping wall. In addition, there is an iron washstand with a wash basin and soap dish. There is a bookshelf on the upright wall and above this a tear-off calendar and a dirty, faded chart of the Norwegian Sea. There was originally a mirror, too, but you’ve put that away in a corner and turned it to the wall, for who in the long run can put up with the sight of his own dejected face with all those red spots on his forehead…

  But the idea here is that you should be able to sit undisturbed and do your homework in peace and quiet and develop gently in the way of a hyacinth bulb in the half light beneath its pointed grey cover.

  And you would perhaps have been able to find peace and quiet if external things had been all and you had not constantly been disturbed and alarmed by mystifying volcanic forces within you – disturbing dreams and delusive visions, disquieting, shapeless
thoughts struggling furiously to escape from the imprisonment imposed on them by their immaturity.

  The tear-off calendar on the wall, with its big, sensible numbers looks quite ordinary and harmless, but it could well be one secretly initiated in Fate’s intentions. Fate holds all our days in its hand. The future is hidden in the block of slips yet to be torn off.

  On the back of these slips there is an abundance of printed texts, a verse or a proverb, and if you have once decided that they are warnings and signs sent by Fate, they acquire a sort of magical power. One evening, with a beating heart you turn over the slips for your birthday, the 11th of June, to see what this oracle calendar might have to tell you about your own fate. It’s a verse and you immediately see that it has something to do with “fear” and “death” and wonder at the last moment whether it would perhaps be better to let the calendar keep its knowledge to itself. But then your eyes have been there after all and seen the message:

  I know now fear as ne’er before

  As though I stood at death’s dark door

  And had to enter and fall down

  In darkness and in fear alone.

  Pushed forth I am with stormy haste

  O God, oh God, pray hold me fast.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Mother (with a checked tea towel over her hair and her sleeves rolled up, busy mixing flour and egg yolks for a cake mixture): “Well, that’s a lovely message, Amaldus. You should be pleased to read that on your birthday. And don’t you go and worry about fate. Everything is in God’s hand even so. He decides on everyone’s fate.”

  “Even bad people’s?”

  Mother gives you a worried look.

  “Amaldus, you are so good at reading, you ought to read your Bible a bit more. You can always find consolation in the

  Word of the Lord and learn from it.”

  Mother hesitates and as it were looks a little dubious.

  “But you’d probably best not read everything, for there’s a lot you don’t understand yet. But read Genesis and Christ’s parables.”

  “But what ought I not to read?”

  “Well, the Book of Revelation for instance.”

  “Why not?”

  Mother wrinkles her brow: “Because you simply wouldn’t understand it. No one does.”

  “Does it say anything about Fate?”

  “Yes, about the Fate of the whole world at the end…”

  That sounded exciting, and you devoured the Book of Revelation and were whirled down into its yawning abysses with their mysterious sea monsters and angels blowing trumpets and its hosts and vials of wrath.

  ***

  Then the curious thing happened that while you of course had to tremble and shudder, you fundamentally liked the Book of Revelation, this, the most violent and uninhibited of all fairy tales; indeed you gradually came to love it, the craziest of all biblical writings. The hair-raising visions not only filled you with fear, but also with a certain warm excitement like the one that comes over you during a great thunderstorm, or during the resounding silence that follows when the sea settles again and captures the tranquil, vast firmament in its mirror.

  Even to this very day, I associate a festive sense of exuberance with the description of the Holy City, the dwelling of Eternity, where it is so bright that there is no need for either Sun or Moon. And the names of the costly stones with which the city walls are adorned, you can still remember in their right order far better than you can remember any times tables or reigns of the kings: sapphire, chalcedony, emerald, sardonyx, sard, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, hyacinth, amethyst – all those lovely words, of which you then only knew emerald (Merrit’s) and sapphire (Mrs Midjord’s), and then hyacinth, although only in the sense of a flower…

  “But what is sardonyx?”

  “I’ve no idea. You’d better ask Grandmother.”

  “And chrysolite? And amethyst?”

  “Well, amethyst is a violet-coloured diamond. Nanna, show him your amethyst.”

  Aunt Nanna fetches a brooch containing a bluish violet stone. It shines in the light from the dark, wintry afternoon sunlight and smiles like a gentle little eye.

  “But unfortunately it’s only an imitation. The amethyst’s only glass.”

  Of course, Grandmother knows lots of jewels, although not all of them, but the ones she knows she looks up in a big book on the bookshelf. Then each of these costly stones is seen in its own colour and splendour, so you can clearly imagine the sacred walls’ foundations in all their magical grandeur: the blue sapphires, green emeralds and bluish green beryl, the yellow topazes, the red sardonyxes and the olive green chrysolite, and the chalcedony, in which a whitish grey eye glows with a golden interior fire.

  And still with your mind full of this glorious resplendence, you return to the melancholy and gloom of your miserable cave, in which confused thoughts and unread exercises await you, and where the little tear-off calendar hangs threateningly on the wall and boasts of its gift of prophecy…

  The Wise Man in the Tower

  Then there were the dreams. They flourished during this dark time as never before, the nocturnal ones as well as the daydreams, and some of them have still not quite faded – for instance the dream of the wise man in the tower!

  This tower, the wise man’s tower, doesn’t stand at the end of the world, but in some distant and inaccessible place on the wide curvature of the earth. It is the dream of the Wishing Tower, a consoling waking dream to which you abandon yourself, yearning and with a mixture of sweetness and pain.

  This Wishing Tower stands on the top of a mountain. There is always sunshine and a clear sky here, and the Wise Old Man sits up there in his round turret room with all his books and writings.

  A spiral staircase leads from this chamber up to the cupola at the top of the tower, where the great star telescope stands.

  The wise old man must have a name. Tycho Brahe is a good name.

  Tycho Brahe was certainly not always a happy man while he lived on earth. From Miss Gudelund’s history lessons at school we know that he was exiled and had to leave his two wonderful castles of Uranienborg and Stjerneborg and settle among foreign peoples in a distant land. But now he is happy in his sky tower…

  We also know that Tycho Brahe had a nose made of silver.

  When night falls on the world and the sky is filled with starry constellations, the wise old man stands at the open peephole in his sky tower and turns his telescope while enjoying breathing the night air through his silver nose, which sparkles in the light from all the distant twinkling galaxies.

  He reminds one of the Old Poet; indeed, the two are fundamentally the same person; they have the same kind of silvery beard and black bushy eyebrows that go up into their foreheads when they abandon themselves to deep thought. And they are both finished with the world and its troubles and torments and smile at the foolish acts of the feckless and at the arrogant self-assuredness of the bright.

  The old thinker and astronomer stands in his lonely tower and listens to the harmony of the spheres (there is something called that, something related to the melodic minor scale). The wise old man is so wise that he simply knows everything, rather like God, but in a different way, for he isn’t just a distant, inscrutable spirit, but also a human being like the rest of us; he can laugh and hum, drink tea and perhaps drink beer as well, and he can have an afternoon nap, something that he needs when he has been up for a long time during the night.

  Aye, this Wise Man knows everything; he has no need to lie in bed and sigh, with his face buried in his pillow and feeling all confused.

  You like this dream about Tycho Brahe so much that you have to tell Little Brother about it. But Little Brother, who is now ten years old and also goes to school, isn’t the right person to tell your dreams to. He looks askance at you and asks questions that put you off.

  “How high is the mountain the tower is on?”

  “It’s very high.”

  “Yes, but how many feet
high?”

  “Eighty thousand or perhaps rather ninety, or perhaps a hundred thousand.”

  “Well then, how do you get up there?”

  “You don’t need to. You are simply there.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.”

  “But how do you get food and all that sort of stuff up there?”

  “It’s brought up by balloon.”

  “Yes, but if the balloon bursts or catches fire, or if a gale blows it away?”

  “There aren’t any gales in that country.”

  “Well, but who pays for all that? It must cost a lot. Have you thought about that, Amaldus?”

  And Little Brother shakes his head in despair and can’t be bothered asking any more.

  The Dream of the Magnetic North Pole

  That was the dream of the wise man at the top of the mountain. It was a good dream; it covered a lot; and it still keeps coming back a generation later like some beloved old melody (the Sicilienne from Bach’s flute concerto, which the Ferryman’s son Hans used to play at that very time together with Grandmother!)

  And then there is the dream of the Magnetic North Pole.

  It’s a nightmare, but not one of the worst kind, for it still has a happy ending.

  You’ve heard your father and Michelsen talk about the magnetic north pole, that strange place up in the Arctic Ocean that all compass needles point to. But in this dream, the Magnetic North Pole is a huge crater in the ice, so deep that it stretches almost down to the fire at the centre of the earth, and this crater draws you irresistibly, more and more powerfully the closer you come to it. Ever more quickly you are swept through the stormy air and sleet across the whole expanse of the northern sea and onto the eternal ice and the Polar skies filled with the Northern Lights until you reach the fateful place where you are irresistibly drawn down into the depths.

 

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