A Change of Time

by Ida Jessen

  I had not been out all day. From the rectory I cycled up past Knudsen’s farm. The sky was big and grey. There were crows in the fields, oddly silent.

  Nature is silent at the moment, at least when the wind is still.

  I carried on through Egeskov wood, and when I emerged and could see the garden at Hedebjerg Farm, I turned down the lane and cycled homewards past Rose Cottage, which indeed stood empty. The apples have not been plucked this year, and the pond was overgrown.

  Let us peep into a home, for it is good to see what such a place looked like so long ago. It is a humble home, like most at that time. The man and the wife were young folk, the man’s elderly mother had withdrawn from the hardest work and lived now with them. It was the man’s childhood home. The farm had been handed on to them upon their marriage. The man had proceeded with pluck and great expectations, having remained at home and helped his mother for eleven years before the deeds to the farm became his. And indeed he made progress, but in his plans it was only the beginning. He felt happiness to be with his young wife and their little boy, Carl, who was six months old, and also his aging mother, of whom they were so fond The future seemed so very bright for them. True, there remained much to be improved. The soil was bare and exhausted. As yet there was no windbreak, though sapling trees and hedgerows had been planted in the fields and garden. And it was plain to see for anyone that the worst was over.

  But then he came down with a cold in the winter, and a dreadful cough that would not go away. When he retired in the evenings, the bed would shake with his coughing, and his mother endeavored to help him with all manner of household remedies, but to no avail. She began to talk of him having to see the doctor.

  By April his cough had yet to recede, and his fatigue escalated. One day that month they were particularly busy. A new cement floor was to be laid in the scullery, the work had occupied him since early morning. The cement was lumpy and had to be sieved. The air was filled with dust, and he coughed even more. An unease came over him, for there was so much to be done.

  After midday he tilled with a plough he had borrowed. When he was finished, he took it back. Then his coughing took a grip, a shiver of cold passed through him, and he quickened the horse; he needed to get home, for there was so much to be done before evening. Late in the afternoon his mother said: ‘You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’m not, but when the work is done I shall go to bed.’ One of the horses needed scrubbing and its hind leg rubbed with ointment, and because it was such a headstrong beast he had to do it himself, and the pigs were still to be fed as well. He went out into the stable and began with the horse, which pulled its leg away; he became angry with it and took hold again. But then the cough came over him, and his mouth filled with blood. Again he shivered with cold, though his body was burning hot. He hastened to the pigs. A litter of piglets had broken in to the big sow’s sty and she was furious. He stepped in to separate them and the sow mistook him for one of the young she had decided to teach a lesson; his leg bore the brunt, and he could hardly stand, never mind walk. But eventually the work was done and he could go inside.

  As he stood washing himself, the cough gripped him again and the blood welled in his mouth, and then once more the singular shivers of cold and sense of fatigue. With unsettled thoughts he went to bed. His young wife came with hot drinks and doted on him. But then again the cough returned and shook him as never before. Blood rose in his mouth for the third time. And yet it grew worse, it was as if his insides were boiling over and spilling from his mouth. The chamber pot filled with blood. It was pale red and looked like froth. Consternation ensued. His brother, Søren Peter, who had come home to help with the scullery floor, mounted his bicycle and pedalled to fetch the doctor, for the telephone had yet to come. At Dørken, the bicycle broke down and Søren Peter ran to the nearest farm and borrowed a horse. Between ten and eleven o’clock that night, the doctor arrived from Give.

  ‘We needy our husband to sit up straight,’ the doctor said to the young wife after having listened to the man’s chest, ‘so that I can listen to his lungs from the back.’ Turning to the man, who was surprised by his words, he said: ‘I want you to remain quite calm.’ ‘Am I really that ill? You handle me like a small child,’ the man said. The examination was concluded, and the doctor gave the young wife his strict instructions: ‘Your husband must lie on his back. He must not turn over in the bed. You must not lift him, nor change his sheets. No one is to disturb him, and no one is allowed inside this chamber. If anyone should come to the farm smoking tobacco, send them away. You must watch over him so that you may be at hand should he suffer further attack. One thing is very important, and that is that a window remain open in the chamber day and night so that the air can be as fresh and clean as possible.’ The doctor went into the parlor, where the grandmother sat with the six-month-old child in her lap. ‘What’s the matter with my son, is it bad?’ The doctor seemed not to hear a word.

  The brother came with the medicine. A red mixture, morphine, that settled the chest and dampened the man’s cough. There was grief in this home. It was a grief that had come so very suddenly. There the man lay, pale and still, and his young wife did not sleep. Was it really her dearest friend who lay so helpless and sick, so perilously sick that she must nurse and watch over him?

  The next day towards evening he suffered another fierce coughing fit, and again there was blood, though unlike the day before it did not come bubbling and spluttering, but instead seemed coagulated, in lumps and clots. Now there was a pain in his chest, which had not been there the day before. The doctor was sent for, but the patient was to remain still, and with ice in his mouth. Some was duly fetched from the dairy, and now there was someone at his bed day and night. Days passed. He lay in the chamber, his life in the balance. His voice was no longer strong enough to be heard, unless they came very close to him. The cough had settled itself in his lungs, and indeed all that was human in him had ground to a halt. Thus the patient lay for thirteen days, still on his back, without clean sheets, without sitting up. The priest visited, and the man received the Eucharist, and afterwards they sang ‘Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens.’

  But spring was before them, and life in the sickroom began to turn. The patient took more nourishment, and his voice was restored. Hopes rose, the man’s sheets were now changed and he was allowed to turn over in his bed, and how good it felt. The doctor said to the young wife: ‘Now let’s try to get him on his feet, and in a few days when the weather is fine he can sit out in the sun.’ And then, almost as an aside: ‘He’ll be looking after the hens when summer comes.’ The man then understood the nature of his ailment. ‘Is it the consumption?’ he asked. The doctor explained what measures should be taken and laid out his instructions so as to avoid contagion within the family. Only then did they truly comprehend what had happened. A man or woman smitten in their best age would always succumb. When the man and his wife were alone, the man said: ‘Now you must never kiss me again,’ and both of them wept.

  The man’s brother remained there and took up the work that spring. The man would repeat to himself the words of the doctor: ‘He’ll be looking after the hens when autumn comes. And,’ the man added, ‘by autumn, when the cold comes with winter at its back, I shall be in the black soil.’

  Already in May that year the weather was delightful and summery. And such fortune it was that the man had planted the saplings and hedgerows, for now he could shuffle about and lie sheltered from the wind and sun. His wife took his bedding outside into the garden so that he might lie there in comfort. These were strenuous days for the young wife. The man could see it, he noticed when she dressed in the mornings how his spouse grew skinnier by the day. One day, he lay outside under the trees and as so often before prayed for himself and those he held dear, that he might fully recover, if that is the best for me and my loved ones, but if it is not thy will, then take me home to you, Lord, as your child, and then he prayed for
his wife and child, take them in your strong hands, Lord, and my aged mother, comfort and strengthen her too. And at that moment his wife suddenly stood over him, and her tears fell into her husband’s face. She wrung her hands and smoothed his hair. I heard your prayer, and was compelled to come to you. Thank you, my dearest friend. And both of them wept.

  October 20

  Grell wished only to show me something that might comfort me. It does comfort me. It hurts me too.

  * * *

  What would Vigand think on the matter, if he saw me sitting here? How would he advise me?

  I can almost hear his voice. He is in no doubt.

  Get this mess cleaned up, and let some air in. You’re not that interesting.

  October 21

  Today I have tidied up and aired the rooms. I threw open all the windows, which sent the sea of papers on the floor of Vigand’s study into turmoil. I returned the books to their rightful places, tidied the drawers, and closed everything behind me. The downstairs rooms were thus becalmed. But upstairs are his clothes. Should I take this lovely row of soap-scented shirts with me when I move? What about his pressed jackets and waistcoats? His dressing gown and his smoking jacket that is now so threadbare at the elbows. The brown suit, the black suit, the grey suit? The shoes that carried his steady feet? Vigand was a handsome man.

  In a sudden fit, I threw out the pajamas, underwear and shaving tackle he had taken with him to the hospital. I carried the bundle down to the incinerator in the garden and set it aflame. It made a smoky fire, continually on the verge of going out. I stood and poked it with a stick, eventually deciding to leave it alone, and went back in — only to return again shortly afterwards. The fire had already died out, and was not even smoldering. Some holes had been burnt in the clothing, that was all. I doused the embers with household spirit. They flared up for a second, then dwindled away again. It was not because of rain, though the air was damp. Its greyness is without bounds. Eventually, I emptied the bottle of spirit into the incinerator and turned the contents about with the stick, and when I tossed a match into it the flames leapt up so suddenly they singed my hair. When I brush it now, little particles of grey-black descend onto the dresser.

  Hilda came at about three o’clock with some flat cakes she had baked. She called them lapper cakes. She stood on the step and patted them awkwardly as she told me about them. “Uh, t’l bae s’queet now in t’town,” she said mournfully. I invited her in for coffee. She was afraid to be a bother, and I almost had to push her into the living room. I was going to put her cakes out on the table, but she would hear nothing of it; they lacked the standard, she said. I insisted. They were drab and mushy, but tasted good. “There’s lemon in them,” I said, and she mustered a smile. And there we sat, one widow facing another.

  Hilda has become so tiny and reaches no higher than to my chest. Her features, formerly sharp, pinched to their raw essence, are now flushed and indistinct. Once, her eyes lustred as if she were forever running a temperature. Now they are dull. She alternates between weeping and laughter, entirely unprompted. “Things will be all right, they shall have to be,” she has always said. She lives on the charity of the parish. There was a time when she did jobs for people, she took on all that she could manage, and had the daylights beaten out of her when she got home. When she came here crying over her husband’s death, Vigand told her: “You’re well rid of him. You’ve been waiting for years.”

  And today she came and showed me that she bore no malice.

  When Vigand had his practice moved here to the town eight years ago, we used to see quite a lot of Hilda. She came creeping. “Uh, t’dowtor ee’ll av eneugh tae bae giddin on wae,” she would say, not wishing to be any trouble, and then lift her face to reveal a shining, swollen eye. Whenever she spoke unflatteringly about her husband Karl, she would immediately take it back. “Oh, but Karl can’t see it, and why should he, he’s a man, and such things lie beyond a man’s reason.” She was clinging to her dignity, I see that now, but at one point Vigand had had enough. Hilda had come to us with two teeth knocked out of her lower jaw, the blood hung from her chin in filaments. After he had treated her, he came in and asked me to sit with her for a while. “Let her talk,” he said. “It’ll do her good while I’m gone.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Out.”

  He put his coat on and went. Hilda and I sat in the living room. She was in a state and said nothing, but it was not her injured mouth that was foremost in her mind. She kept glancing towards the door. But Vigand was not gone for very long. After a short time we heard him return to the consulting room, and Hilda’s unrest grew. She sat there with her back straight, perspiring. I went and knocked on the door.

  “I think Hilda’s waiting,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, looking up from some papers as if he had forgotten all about us. “Tell her she can go home now. It won’t happen again.”

  “I think you should tell her yourself.”

  “No, you tell her.”

  “I imagine she’d like to thank you.”

  He sighed. He never understood people’s gratitude. It was a burden to him that people should “lean” on him in such a way, he said. Grudgingly, he went in to speak to her while I waited in the consulting room.

  Later it was rumored in the town and the outlying district that the doctor had gone to Karl Madsen and told him that if he ever touched Hilda again, he, Vigand, would personally make sure he could never raise a hand again.

  I loved him for that.

  Widows are a community. I have been aware of it ever since I was a child. It can be seen in the way they seek each other’s company, in the pews for instance, where often they will sit in pairs. They do not speak much, for they have no need, and after the service they go their separate ways. In my childhood home, the widows sat together at meals and at work in the workroom.

  It is a matter of having lived with one person for most of one’s adult life, and to have lost that person. To have been set free. Freedom is not always a good thing. There is a freedom in which one is unseen. Such is the life of the widow. When the days of mourning are gone, and grief has become tiresome to one’s surroundings, one ceases to be an interesting person and must accept the fact. Widows possess an experience that is not understood by others. They must live with becoming grey in the eyes of the world, and have lost their right of protest, for they are outside the common community.

  As outcasts they stick together. But that is not the only reason. There is a warmth there, and understanding. They are acquainted with things.

  We have our dead. Our hope is that we too will be someone’s.

  We sat in the bay window and had our coffee.

  I have no idea how long Karl Madsen kept his hands from Hilda. Vigand’s threats worked long enough for us to believe the matter to be concluded, and Vigand perhaps especially. For that reason he had no patience with her grief when it started again, by then he had lost interest and found it tactless of her to come knocking. He had repaired her once already. Why did she have to come apart again? And yet he sent her in to me, and we sat together in the living room. I was furious that Hilda became quite frightened. This will not do! I said. It must cease! You can come and live here, Hilda. You can help us out with the housework.

  Oh, but I couldn’t, she sniveled, and buried her beaten face in her hands.

  And perhaps she was right. What if Karl Madsen had come and caused trouble? Who would then have been put into the street? Not heavy-handedly, perhaps. But put into the street, nonetheless. She would have been worse off than before. And what would Vigand have said anyway, to see her trembling figure in his scullery when he came down in the mornings? To see her fussing about with winter curtains and step ladders in the living room? Or to follow, through the window of the consulting room, her exertions with a carpet beater at the rack in the back garden? He would have held me res
ponsible for her entire existence.

  What would I have said?

  “How long is it now since your husband died?” I asked.

  “Three years this April,” she replied.

  * * *

  —

  Vigand was a self-sufficient man. No, an industrious man. He became annoyed if ever he was delayed or hindered in his business. He asked for no devotion. No attention, no coddling. Only one thing did he demand: that one should always have something to do. Fussing about, which is what most of us spend our lives doing, was something for which he had no time. Nor did he ever relax. Nowadays one talks of leisure, and relaxing with one’s interests. Vigand had no interests, and could not have cared less about relaxing. The closest he ever came to such things was probably the book he wrote when he was still a young man, about tuberculosis, uncleanliness, and the curse of the co-operative movement, which as he saw it consisted of the cut-price sale of albumens and fat in return for concentrated animal feed, artificial fertilizer and field seed, and which had reached the point at which people themselves were suffering for the sake of their livestock and turnover. The dairies march onwards, he wrote, while nutrition declines in the humble abodes, and thus the way is paved for tuberculosis.

  Vigand always had something to do. But occasionally his mind clouded and he would descend into despair. I had no idea what path would take him there. If there were danger signals, he kept them well concealed. But now and then, when I came in with the coffee tray, he would be sitting at his desk and lift his head to look at me with darkness in his eyes and say: “I’m done for!”

  And I would say: “Don’t you think it’s about time you visited Fru Andersen?”

  And he would reply: “Yes!”

  She lived out in Thyregod Field. Evald Trang Kristenen had written about her. He called her the Field Wife in his book. Her real name was Terkelline Andersen, and she died some nine or ten years ago.