The Tower at the Edge of the World

by William Heinesen

  Hannibal, whispering: “It almost looks as though they’re not here, doesn’t it. So they’re probably already carrying on somewhere. No. See. There they are.”

  “Where?”

  “They’re on the stairs, damn it. And now they’re going downstairs.”

  Yes, you can make them out in the crowd of young dancers going in and out: Vesta and Harriet, each with her sailor. They stop for a moment at the bottom of the stairs. The sailors offer them cigarettes. Harriet’s face in the sharp light of the match. Beryl eyes…!

  Hannibal (with a stifled, powerless hiss in his voice): “There, you can see what they’re like, the harpies. Just look how keen Vesta is, the bitch.”

  Vesta and the cook’s mate quickly disappear into the darkness, arm in arm.

  But Harriet, she’s not so keen; she struggles and refuses to go with her sailor, standing still and holding on to a fence.

  Your heart is beating and thumping in your chest and trying to get up into your mouth. No, she simply won’t. It’s no use the sailor pulling at her.

  And yet, then she changes her mind. The sailor holds tight on her arm and she goes with him, unresisting, shaking her head… like a reed bending before a gust of wind.

  You wish with all your heart that they could come up against the Numerator. You wish he could give that sailor one in the eye and drag his daughter off home and give her a real going over with the swab.

  “Come on, Amaldus. After them.”

  We jump down off the roof and stealthily follow the two couples, who are on their way towards the harbour. And then they go on towards the Redoubt. The sailors have their arms around the girls’ waists. Now Vesta and the cook’s mate stop; he hugs her, indeed he kisses her, in the middle of the street, beneath a lamp, long and tenderly.

  Hannibal suddenly stops and doesn’t want to go any further.

  “Come on, Amaldus. Let’s go in here instead.”

  He disappears in the dark narrow space between two boathouses, standing there and gasping, no longer even trying to hide his tears.

  “Oh, the bloody bitch. They’re my shoes she’s wearing, the little hussy. I gave her all my savings to buy them. Aye, the shoes and then a pair of stockings and a bra as well as the floor runner up there, you know. What the hell did she want with a bra? Just tell me. Her breasts aren’t so damned big that they need anything to hold them. That’s what I told her and that’s what she got so mad about, and that’s what started it all. It really didn’t take more than that.”

  Hannibal bursts out in an unpleasant sobbing laugh.

  “But just you wait, you lousy bitch. Just you wait and see what’s going to happen. And you’d better go home, Amaldus. ’Cos I want to be alone now.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Just go. ’Cos you’re all right. You weren’t engaged. You hadn’t risked anything. You hadn’t spent anything. It was nothing at all in your case. No, just you buzz off, Amaldus. I won’t say it again.”

  And so you go, and Hannibal stays behind alone in the dark alleyway. To your consternation, you hear him abandon himself to lonely tears.

  The Explosion

  How things progressed further with Hannibal on the unfortunate evening of the 27th is something you heard from his own lips the following evening to your great and genuine sorrow and anger.

  Your poor friend had first remained for a long time in the dark alleyway, torn between despair and an insatiable thirst for vengeance, but then he had made a quick decision and had gone over to the Redoubt, where the faithless Vesta and her cook’s mate were sitting on a bench in a close embrace.

  “And you see, Amaldus, I could have crept up on them and crushed the wretch from behind. But that would have been cowardly – well, you know what I’m like – no one shall ever be able to say that I was a sneak that came from behind – and so I said, ‘Ha’.

  They had a shock, and the cook’s mate got up and looked at me, foolish like. Then I said, ‘You go off, Vesta, for this is something between him and me.’ She wouldn’t, and so I went for him and knocked him down, and that was perhaps the daftest thing I could have done, ’cos now listen here: Vesta went all mad and started pulling my hair and scratching my face, and of course I made no resistance, for I’ll never lay hands on a woman, you know, however brazen and shameless she might be, so I simply turned my back on her and let her get on with it. But by that time the bloody cook’s mate had got up on his feet and he came at me from behind and knocked me down, and then they both went for me, and that bitch Vesta got hold of a piece of wet turf and rubbed me all over the face with its muddy side so I was completely blinded, and then they both trampled on me as I was lying there. But the worst of all was what Vesta said at the end, for do you know what she said? She said, ‘You just lie there, you mad wretch, for you’re crazy like Howler Hans your father, and you’ll probably end up in the klink like him’.”

  Hannibal was breathing deeply, and he shook his head in silent torment.

  “Aye, those were her last words to me, my fiancée, the girl I’ve spent everything I had on, you know. But all I can say is Thank God. Thank God that I finally got to know her. And if she comes back, ’cos she probably will, ’cos that’s what she’s like and that’s what all women are like – if she comes back after she’s got fed up with whoring with that stupid cook’s mate, well (Hannibal put his hand up to his heart) – the key’s been turned in the lock here!”

  He got up, quickly rolled up the rug and lifted the lid from one of the boxes it had been on.

  “Look here.”

  He thrust his hand down into the box: “Fireworks. She and I bought them together when things were still fine between us. We were going to have a real show on New Year’s Eve. Look, there are both rockets and Bengal Lights and Jumping Jacks, and that damned lot cost me over ten kroner. But she’s got another thing coming about those rockets, ’cos now it’s going to be you and me celebrating New Year. And do you know what: we’re going to let the maroon off as well. See, I’ve got a new piece of touch paper, ’cos I don’t think the old one was any good. That’s going to be some bang. It’ll give the whole town a shock.”

  “Yes, but where will you let that bomb off, Hannibal?”

  “Your voice is trembling, and I can well understand that, ’cos it’s going to be terrible. But you needn’t be scared; I’m not going to harm anyone, least of all her. So we’ll go up on the Ring with it all, and we’ll let the fireworks off first and then the maroon at the end. OK, Amaldus? Aren’t you looking forward to it? Why don’t you say something? Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

  “Yes, of course I am.”

  ***

  The terrifying events to be recorded here finally took place on New Year’s Eve 1914 (the same year, incidentally, as our irresponsible contemporary on a higher plane, Kaiser Wilhelm II, set his infamous Great War in train).

  To begin with it all looked as though it was going to be great fun (in both cases). There was a light, frosty breeze blowing from the north, and from the hilltops near the town and from promontories and spits down by the dark waters the red New Year’s bonfires were flaming, while rockets drew their fiery arcs in the starry evening sky. Hannibal and his old friends and co-conspirators had brought a big old tar barrel out onto the beach near the Round, where it stood lighting up and crackling in a mighty froth of sparks and sweet tar smoke, while jumping jacks and Chinese crackers were merrily going off on the rocky ground and rockets were shooting up into the sky and spreading clouds of fiery dust down over the bay. We had the maroon hidden in the old steam engine; it was to be kept until the solemn stroke of midnight, and then it was to explode inside the drum and blow the whole machine to smithereens.

  It gave you a strange bloodthirsty feeling to be inside the doomed drum, where a sole Christmas candle burned and the dreadful grey roll with the white touch hanging out lay on a box waiting for the fateful hour. No one was to be allowed in here except, for a moment, Karl-Erik, because according to Hannibal: “We
must let him experience as much as possible in his short lifetime.”

  Hannibal looked at his watch.

  “There’ll be no steam engine here in half an hour. Then there’ll be nothing left except perhaps a few bits of splintered iron, perhaps not even that. And it will go off with such a huge bang that everyone in town will have a shock. And a lot of people will be so scared they’ll pass out.”

  Karl-Erik crouches outside the manhole; he only ventures to put his head and hands inside.

  “Who’s going to light the fuse, Hannibal? Are you?”

  “No, you’re going to, of course, Karl-Erik. Are you my hajduk or are you not?”

  Karl-Erik turns pale and pulls right back from the manhole, but Hannibal has grabbed his jersey and holds him.

  “You silly twit! Of course I’m the one that’s going to light the fuse. What were you thinking of me, you silly fool? Have you ever in your life seen me behave like a bloody cook’s mate? Yes or no?”

  “No,” Karl-Erik assures him, though he still dodges away and disappears in the dark.

  Then comes the midnight hour and the great turn of the year. It feels like something with vast wings unfurling out in the darkness high above the world. Hannibal has his chieftain’s look about him as he issues loud orders to everyone to keep away from the steam engine and to stay in safety behind the warehouses at the end of the fish-drying ground.

  “You can stay and look into the manhole, Amaldus, if you dare, ’cos it’s jolly dangerous. Dare you?”

  “Yes.”

  You kneel in front of the manhole, trembling with anticipation, and you see Hannibal strike a match and put it to the fuse.

  Then off you go as fast as you can – with a strange smell of catastrophe and the end of the world in your nose.

  “Here, Amaldus. Lie down flat.”

  We lie down on the bottom of a deep fissure in the rock.

  “Keep your mouth open, otherwise you’ll get your eardrums burst.”

  So you keep your mouth open and can quite clearly hear your heart croaking in your throat. Perhaps this is your last hour, the hour of doom, the hour when the world will come to an end… and, as though in a terrible nightmare, you see before you in your mind’s eye the Tower, and the lone cloud out in the void above the abyss, God’s vast face with the angry eyes…

  But the great crash heralding the end of the world fails to materialise.

  Hannibal: “Hell. The fuse must have gone out. Or what else can have gone wrong? Perhaps the gunpowder’s too old?”

  There are the sounds of various crackers and bangers from in town, but they are only the ordinary ridiculous toy bangers you can buy in the shops.

  Hannibal’s voice shows him to be on the verge of tears.

  “I’ve never known anything like it.”

  “But it might still come. Perhaps it’s just smouldering.”

  “We’d better go up and have a look.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait a bit?”

  So we lie there and wait a little longer. Hannibal sighs heavily and in distress.

  “We saw the fuse caught, didn’t we? Didn’t you see it catch and turn black? So it must be the gunpowder that’s lost its strength after all.”

  “Is it very old?”

  “Aye, you bet it’s old. It’s from my Father’s time.”

  Hannibal leans back against the wall of the chasm and sits there with his arms hanging limply at his side and staring at the sky, where there are still a few rockets to be seen rising and exploding against the dark background. He is in pain, and he is suffering. He almost looks like an old man.

  Then he suddenly gets up.

  “Come on.”

  He has already swung himself out of the chasm and is on his way towards the steam engine. You daren’t follow. In the pale light from the stars you can see his watchful shadow approach the red light issuing from the manhole. The round patch of light looks like a rising moon that has just detached itself from the horizon.

  Now he is crouching in front of the manhole. Now he’s creeping inside it. You tremble with excitement and horror, clutching the cold stone and quite unable to move. For suppose it happened now.

  But still nothing happens.

  So it has failed. And thank God for that.

  “Amaldus.”

  Hannibal’s voice sounds broken, like a complaint.

  “Amaldus. Where have you got to? What the devil are you frightened of? It’s all spoiled. Have you got any matches?”

  “Yes, but what for?”

  “For a cigarette. I’ve used all mine.”

  Hannibal is standing there leaning against the rusty sides of the steamroller, drenched in sweat, his face all black and with a strange dead look in his eyes and with a fresh cigarette hanging from his lower lip. The Christmas candle has just about burnt down. The maroon is lying on its box amidst a pile of dead matches and scraps of paper and twisted bits of rope. The cover has been broken open with a knife; some black grains have spilled out and are lying there looking for all the world like burnt coffee beans.

  Hannibal lights his cigarette. He gives a deep sigh.

  “So it went all wrong, Hannibal?”

  Devastated, he nods through hungry clouds of cigarette smoke.

  “Had the gunpowder got damp?”

  “Not a bit. It was just too old. Damn it.”

  “Wouldn’t it catch?”

  “Yes, just a bit. But nothing really came of it. It was just a silly idea.”

  “Isn’t that smoke coming from the package?”

  “Smoke? Oh yes, there’s a bit. But it isn’t that.”

  “Don’t touch it, Hannibal.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. You can see the packaging’s broken open. It’s only a bit of paper that’s smoking.”

  Hannibal draws his dagger from its sheath, goes over and stirs the gently smoking paper.

  “No. It was just the paper smouldering a bit.”

  But this is when it happens.

  Not the great explosion. Only a long, sniggering, spluttering sound and a shower of sparks that sting your face, and a vast cloud of suffocating smoke…

  And then… at the very last moment… out of the manhole, gasping for breath and with vicious pains all over your face and hands.

  And Hannibal’s voice, choking with the smoke: “We could easily have got caught out there.”

  Then, profound silence and darkness. And voices in the dark. But finally only a desolate whispering noise that gradually dies out.

  The Generous Dark

  After that fateful and unforgettable New Year‘s night, a new and equally unforgettable time dawned – a time in darkness, or at least in deep twilight, for you lay in the hospital with ice on your eyes.

  It was nevertheless a time that only awakens happy memories when you look back on it, indeed it often produces something like a deep sense of enjoyment, linked to the smell of iodine and carbolic and – especially – the scent of steaming camomile tea that you had to breathe in for some reason or other as you lay there.

  Then there were the sounds. The sound of footsteps, the chinking of glass and metal and crockery, the assiduous, helpful bustle of the hospital, gentle authoritative voices of the nurses and of Doctor Metze. And Hannibal’s for he is in the same ward with burns all over his head and his hands, but although it is very rusty, his voice has taken on a new and almost cheerful sound. And the sound of other voices, all those heard during visiting hours and which have also acquired a new quality, a sort of strange new polish that makes it seem as though this is really only the first time you’ve noticed them. In particular Mother’s, which (as you can hear) has adopted what seems to be a far too comforting and encouraging tone (so perhaps you are going to be blind after all). But you nevertheless liked to hear this loving voice feigning that all was well rather than Father’s wordless humming and hawing – the only way in which he expressed himself during this period.

  Then there were the sounds from outside tha
t you could hear in quiet moments between sleeping and waking: the lapping of the waves on the nearby shore, the sound of oars, the squeaking of ropes and tackle, the screeching of falling anchor chains, the hoarse but self-assured hooting from the funnels on the steamship Mjølnir , the striking of the hour from the church tower on the other side of the bay… all these sounds from the light world that was no longer to be seen, but which was soon to emerge from the darkness, for the encouraging news was that, “It is not your actual sight that has been damaged, so you will soon be able to see again; you just need to be patient.”

  And then there was that unforgettable feeling of gentle hands in the darkness, of the riches they radiate. Your mother’s hands on yours – a gift more precious than sun and moon. But also Sister Mette’s hands when with firm but gentle fingers she opens your eyelids to drip in eyedrops that sting but heal.

  Then, one day you are taken home and once more you lie in your familiar gable room, but still in the dark or at least in semi-darkness, for the window is covered with a green curtain.

  But outside it’s spring and brightening days, and from the starlings’ nest up in the gable there comes a constant sound of the indomitable squawking and chattering of the first brood of hungry starling chicks. And Aunt Nanna comes with a little bunch of crocuses that she holds up to your nose so you can sense the sweet smell of earth and rain and outdoors coming from the cool petals.

  What more?

  Greyish green twilight days and black nights.

  Waiting.

  Did you lie there bored and boundlessly impatient? Did you lie there frightened and a prey to despair and sad thoughts?

  You probably did, but there is almost nothing left of this in your memories. For those who lie and wait for the return of light and life live cheek by jowl with happiness, and the abundance of their expectations scarcely leaves room for worry. All the cares and tribulations are pushed aside for the moment and are piling up to provide problems in the future – just not now, now in the sheltered hour of anticipation.