The Tower at the Edge of the World

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The Tower at the Edge of the World Page 14

by William Heinesen


  Down here, right at the bottom, there is a raging warm current that sweeps you away on its waters, terrified and yet at the same time filled with an almost voluptuous excitement. The water isn’t boiling, but it has a kind of reasonable temperature in which to bathe, and the strange demonic fish milling about everywhere down here and following the current are sorts of mermaids with fishes’ tails and fishes’ heads, but in the middle they have human shapes, with big wet laps. They wind in and out among each other in graceful curves while staring at you with ravenous lidless fish eyes, smiling at you with half-open fishes’ mouths.

  Now the river grows narrower and the current stronger until, with a deafening gurgling sound, it is drawn into a dark, narrow fissure in the cliff, so narrow that you know it’s quite impossible for you to pass through it. Here you remain, firmly wedged; you can feel the rough, cutting edges of the cliff around your head and the sharp outlines of its teeth against your cheeks. But as you hang there, abandoned and terrified, your ears are filled with the sound of a huge cascade of loud, echoing laughter as though from thousands of girls’ voices, and then the narrow passage opens out, the walls give way and bleeding and wearied, but with a sense of indescribable liberation you feel you are again gliding along in open water and being borne on gentle hands into the brightness of clear daylight…

  The Dream of the Woman Suspended between Heaven and Earth

  That was the dream of the Magnetic North Pole.

  Then there is the dream of the woman hanging out there, the “Hanging Girl”, also unforgettable despite the passage of many years.

  The Hanging Girl is suspended on a sloping roof between heaven and earth, in an uncomfortable position, with her legs hanging out over the eaves. She does nothing to hold on, and is completely indifferent to the possibility that she could easily slip and slide down into the depths. Her head rests on her right shoulder, which is drawn up, and her hip rests on her limp right hand. Her left arm and hand are hesitatingly turned up, with half-open fingers hanging down. The semi-spheres of her breasts are pouring out over a thin piece of cloth that serves as a wet cover over her midriff. Otherwise, she is entirely naked.

  The Hanging Girl’s face hangs as well; her eyelids are half closed; her lower lip hangs down from her half-open mouth; she has a bow hanging down from her hair, limp and wet.

  (Such is the picture of the Hanging Girl as it was seen on an old page that had been torn out of a book and which you found in one of the two drawers in the desk, and, as you have subsequently been able to ascertain, it is a reproduction of Michelangelo’s famous “Morning” on the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici.)

  Your first dream about this woman was terrifying and you will never forget it: you are flying, as so often happens in your dreams; you are floating among some high roof ridges, and there, on a roof slope with beautifully carved barge boards is the Hanging Girl with her lethargic, self-abandoning face and limp arms and huge inert thighs. She moves reluctantly, as if warding you off and telling you to leave her alone, but as though guided by invisible but determined arms, you are led into her embrace, and then something terrible happens: all the hanging parts of her start to shake; she starts slipping and slides slowly out over the eaves, down into the bottomless depths, and you yourself slip with her into the boundless abyss and are lost in a kind of evil and abhorrent state of rapture…

  After this dreadful enervating dream you are long oppressed by secret shame, and at the same time you are possessed by the vision of the huge hanging girl; her picture must be taken out time after time and examined by voracious eyes, be re-experienced bit by bit: the disconsolate, weak face with the apathetic eyes and the open, sagging mouth, the unresisting lazy arms, the body’s landscape with the two arched curves of the breasts, the navel’s lonely grave in the desert, the desolate nothingness of the lap that hides something incomprehensible but desperately attractive, riches at once blissful and revolting…

  The Dream of the House of Weeping

  In contrast to the dreams on which I have dwelt here, there were the actual evil dreams, the cold ones that crept up on me with their stony gorgon eyes. One of these dreams has imprinted itself on my memory with special force. There are no longer any playful elements of any kind in this dream, and it is only about horror and pain.

  It is a raw winter’s afternoon with a darkening sky above muddy roads, and the air is full of gently falling snowflakes. What had to happen is past, and people are on their way home. You can only see them as wandering shadows in the hazy air, but you quite clearly feel their reality, the live breath that comes from their mouths and nostrils, the cold that sits on their skin and in their hair and in their nails, the warmth in their blood and entrails, the salty taste of tears in their gullets. And you know almost of all of them for they are people from your everyday life: the Ferryman and his sons, the Wise Virgins, Fina the Hut and her Dolly Rose, Hannibal and his mother Anna Diana, the artist Selimsen, Aunt Nanna and Keil the photographer… and they all have that same cold and tired expression and are looking ahead with that same gaunt stare without taking any notice of you as you make your way in the opposite direction.

  Then the crowd thins out. Finally, you are alone, and now you start to hear the moans from the House of Weeping. It comes closer and closer, but the twilight is now so deep that you can only just make out the church-like outline of the black building from which the prolonged sounds of moaning and weeping emerge.

  Then you stand there petrified, listening to the plaintive sounds that rise and fall and finally congeal into a kind of dark, complaining choral song: at first moving and full of gripping harmonies; but then the singing turns into a wild and meaningless high descant wailing that jars and hurts your ears and is more than you can stand.

  Here, the dream suddenly ends, and you wake up, drenched in sweat and filled with an agonising confusion; the alarm clock is ringing and you jump out of bed and turn on the light. It is a dark December morning, but the sky is full of clear stars.

  Then you are down on earth again, surrounded by everyday life and ordinary goings-on. Yet throughout that day and during the following days and nights you are concerned by this dream, which can’t simply be swept away as mere rubbish and something of no significance, but it has come with its symbol to stay with you for life.

  ***

  Symbol of what?

  You have thought about that a lot since. Perhaps a symbol of meaningless Fate – sorry Fate. At all events, you experienced this shattering and never since forgotten nightmare at the very decisive time when Fate for the first time took hold of your awareness and raised the shiny, inescapable blade of its knife before your eyes without your any longer daring to believe that the hand gripping the handle was that of a good and just providence .

  Lambert the Watchmaker

  God no longer sits on His floor up in the mountains carving sacred words on His tablets of stone, and no longer does He float like a cloud over the waters in the great abyss beyond the end of the world. Where is He now?

  Everywhere. In heaven and on earth, in you, in me, in our hearts and in our thoughts. He is a Spirit. The minister preaches this from his pulpit, and the teacher of religion from his desk.

  “What is a Spirit?”

  Mother lowers her sewing and sits for a moment staring ahead with clouded eyes.

  “I really don’t know, Amaldus. And I don’t think it’s any use bothering about that. I believe God is good and kind and will help and preserve us if only we sincerely ask for His help.”

  “But there are people who don’t pray and don’t believe – not only the Numerator and Denominator, but people like Lambertsen the watchmaker as well.”

  “Yes, but don’t you bother your head about that, Amaldus. We mustn’t interfere in things that only concern God. It will all work out in one way or another even with Lambertsen. You’ll see.”

  But perhaps it won’t all work out with Lambertsen. Perhaps he’ll be damned. The Wise Virgins certainly think he will. They come
to see us and are served with chocolate in the small gilt cups.

  “Aye, poor Lambertsen. He’ll lose his soul if he doesn’t repent before the Great Day.”

  Miss Louise, the oldest of the sisters, has a bit of skin from her drinking chocolate on her chin. The other sister, Matilde, wipes her mouth carefully with the tip of her serviette.

  “Yes, and isn’t it terrible to think of? To be banished into darkness for ever. Ugh, ugh.”

  Mother (shaking her head as though pleading): “Yes, Yes, but even so, although it’s hidden from us human beings, don’t you think God must have some secret plan when He lets Lambertsen be a doubter?”

  Miss Louise (emphatically): “God has given us all free will. It’s Lambertsen’s will that’s the problem. He refuses to believe. He’s heard the message and knows what it’s all about. He’s no heathen. He’s responsible for his own misfortune.”

  So Miss Louise is right and Mother simply sits there looking strangely dejected.

  Miss Louise has got a fresh bit of chocolate skin on her chin. She sits there, sighing and staring straight ahead.

  “But dear Else, how… now, you mustn’t be angry, for I’m only asking – but what about your own husband, the Captain?”

  Mother (ill at ease): “What about him?”

  “Well, he never goes to church, of course, and there are those who think he’s a non-believer like Lambertsen.”

  Mother: “Amaldus, I think you’d better go up to your room and do your homework, dear.”

  ***

  So you go up to your attic and rather uneasily watch the rain-drops dripping from the cornice and running down the window. There they are, growing until they are so big they have to fall.

  The drops are Fates. Up in the clouds sits God, letting drops drip and Fates happen.

  You sit staring at the drops of Fate until it’s all so distressing that you can’t stand it any more. Then you go out into the rain, where drips are still falling from all the eaves.

  Lambertsen the watchmaker is as usual sitting by the window in his workshop with a pocket watch in his hand and some sort of a tube fixed to one eye. The edge of his high, stiff collar cuts into his double chin. How on earth can he put up with that collar? But he can, at least, and he only ever wears that kind of collar. That must be his choice.

  Lambertsen stares through his magnifying glass into the delicate workings of the watch, just as God examines the human heart. But Lambertsen doesn’t believe in God. He refuses. He is an atheist, and that is his unhappy fate.

  ***

  Father (at the dinner table, with a very scornful look in his eyes):

  “Lambertsen, that harmless old man, in Hell? (Laughs grimly into his beard.) Aye, they’re priceless, the silly old lot.”

  Everyday Reality

  Up in the Willow Grove, some leafless bushes and trees are reflected in the little pool of rainwater that has accumulated on the level patch where grass and sorrel stand waving in the wind in summer.

  It has just been raining, and drops are dripping from the black branches and making rings in the water. The rings quickly grow bigger and disappear. They come and go, and where they meet they hurry to merge into each other. You never tire of watching the lovely game played by the rain rings in the clear water, and for a brief moment you almost feel liberated from the infinite sadness with which you are burdened. But only for a moment, and then you are again in the grip of that boundless melancholy, standing there helpless on a bleak day among the weeping branches.

  ***

  The desperation of these young years was profound indeed – nameless, for there were as yet no words to express it. But the sight of the raindrops’ agile game on the surface of the water can still today, paradoxically, produce in you a painful memory of the burden and gravity of the immense and unrelenting affliction of those young days.

  But then there was everyday reality – you could always find consolation in that, and you always came back to it, often running, frolicking, in a kind of irresistible enamoured longing.

  Everyday reality is today, yesterday and always.

  Everyday reality is the smoke that rises at noon from every chimney and drifts away on the wind.

  Everyday reality is a grey cat running across a road.

  Everyday reality is plates on the table and hands that have taken hold of knives and forks. Everyday reality is the smell of steaming washing and soap suds from a cellar entrance, and of pitch and tar from a boat that is being repaired, and of carbolineum from a new fence, and of peat smoke and fermenting seaweed and lighted pipes.

  Everyday reality is the rubicund fisherman Sigvald standing outside his privy buttoning his trousers while glancing briefly at the drifting clouds over the sea. Everyday reality is the little grocer Hans Olsen standing by scales that are almost in balance and holding two potatoes in his fingers.

  Everyday reality is the disabled but always cheerful Juliane the sexton’s wife, who sits everlastingly on her window seat in the Coffee House with a crutch shiny with wear at either side, shaking her head with a smile at the funny old ways of the world.

  Everyday reality is when people say, “Oh, how nice that it’s a girl this time when they’ve only had boys otherwise.” Or: “Good heavens, how Mrs Berg the headmaster’s wife is putting on weight.” Or: “No one in this town can make coffee like Pouline.” Or: “Good heavens, is old Rosenmeyer dead? Aye, I suppose we must all come to that.”

  The sailmaker’s needle, the watchmaker’s magnifying glass, the shoemaker’s pricker, the smith’s hammer, the joiner’s plane. A lullaby in the twilight from a window standing ajar. A hearty yawn, a roar of laughter. Tender words in the dusk from two figures sitting on the great pile of driftwood out near the Bight. All kinds of chequered eiderdown covers and slippers that are left unused at night and carefree snoring and savouring of sleep, while the rain pours down the windows…

  That is what Everyday Reality is in all its insignificance and power. It makes no claim to provide a solution to any puzzle; it only has its own excellent rhythm to offer. It’s a welcome brief rest during a long and difficult journey towards unknown and disturbing places.

  It’s nothing to boast about, for it’s only ordinary, but everyone knows it and clings to it and loves it.

  Today, the 11th of February 1974, I am Sitting by an Open Window in my Cabin, looking

  out across the world, entranced by the unusual beauty of this afternoon.

  The sun is low in the southern sky above a brownish golden sea, and in the east the snow-scattered mountain tops can be seen rising towards a sky that is pearl-like in its radiance and against which they merge and almost disappear, as though they were freely floating in the air. There is a gentle, acidic scent of moss and moisture, and the midges are dancing. But the barometer is low and a westerly gale is said to be on its way across the sea.

  Such a quiet, spring-like hour in the heart of winter is something you embrace as a costly gift, all the more precious as of course you know that it will only be transient and capricious. Transient and capricious like the gift of life itself, you think. Before long, this entire mirage will be gone like a soap bubble bursting.

  P.S.

  Gone indeed – for me, Amaldus the Ancient, whose balancing act on the Life Bridge will soon be at an end, but not for you, young reader, who with open arms and a beating heart still dance your hazardous but joyful dance on the narrow plank across the abyss.

  Vesta

  We are approaching the end of these sidelights on Amaldus’s childhood and boyhood and we are out on the edge of the mosaic of selected fragments by means of which we have attempted to establish and throw light on this little biography. But the grim story has still to be told of the two fearful enchantresses who turned up in the arena one day and wrought momentous damage, though this was at the same time accompanied by new and valuable experiences.

  ***

  Hannibal has not been heard of for some time; he doesn’t go to school any longer, but he has
grown up and is sailing as a ship’s boy on one of the small coastal boats. But today he’s below and can go ashore. He has stood waiting for you at the school gate, and it can clearly be seen that he has something on his mind, something he is dying to tell you.

  We go down to the Bight, where certain changes have been made; the “robbers’ den” in the old warehouse cellar has been abandoned, but Hannibal has found a new and better place to go to in a nearby boathouse loft.

  “Now just you see how fine I’ve made it, Amaldus. But first you must promise me to keep your mouth shut about everything you see. Do you promise?”

  Hannibal has an exuberant expression in his eyes.

  “’Cos you see, Amaldus, I’ve got a girl up there, ’cos I’ve got engaged. And you can bet your life she’s a fine girl. She’s called Vesta. She’s up there waiting for me, and I’m going to show her to you now, but then you don’t have to stay hanging around, but buzz off as soon as you’ve seen her. OK?”

  The triangular little loft is full of biting cigarette smoke. Vesta is sitting on a kind of sofa that Hannibal has made of packing cases and a new carpet runner. She jumps up and looks furious when she discovers that Hannibal isn’t alone.

  “Why have you dragged him in here with you, Hannibal?”

  “Take it easy. He’s my best friend, as true as steel, and besides, he’s my cousin.”

  So Vesta brightens up and is nice, and Hannibal sits down by her and tickles her under her arms until she squeals with doting laughter.

  Vesta is older than Hannibal, almost sixteen. She’s a tall girl, very thin and with delicate little teeth that make you think of the skull, the one the Old Poet said was the head of a girl.

  “Show him your eyes, Vesta.”

  Vesta opens her eyes wide so you can see one is blue and the other brown.

 

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