by Ida Jessen
I cannot imagine that Vigand ever visited her in his capacity of physician, and I have no idea how they got to know each other. Fru Andersen was Vigand’s chum, and he would go to see her when he needed a good guffaw. Vigand never spoke of laughing in that respect, but always of a good guffaw. She cleanses the soul as good as a bath, he would say of her too.
Few were admitted through her door. Mostly one would see her on market days in Give, where she would cause a stir among the stalls with her pithy talk and shrewd manner. The men would invite her to the public bar of the hotel to see if they could get her drunk, but she would always stop before things got out of hand. She looked out for herself. Zigzagged her way through life. She had a son out of wedlock, Jens Kristian, who had come into the world with a mat of hair all over his body, due to lack of nourishment inside his mother’s womb. Today he is a hefty redhead, as stooping as an old man. After his mother died he began to venture out on his own. Now and then one sees him in town, where he goes from door to door selling pins and pencils and the like. But for many years he was seen neither on the roads nor in town. He lay at home in his mother’s house on a sagging sofa with an old coat to cover him. On the wall next to him was a shelf for his food. Vigand said Jens Kristian had told him it was bad enough that the mice had the gall to chew on his bread, but worse that they pissed on it too. It was a comment that had Vigand in stitches if he happened to think about it.
Was he laughing at him or with him, I wonder? To him there was no difference. It amounted to the same. Fru Andersen was a tonic for his melancholy, and for that he respected her. He once said that he admired her. As I sit here now, thinking about everything and nothing, I recall that he actually went to her funeral. It was a day in May. The church was packed. The young chestnuts on the bank were in leaf. Vigand went to a funeral.
At some point, a man came into Fru Andersen’s life. His name was Nygaard and apparently he had been in the dragoons. One of his arms was missing after he fell from a cart onto a plough blade and had to have it amputated. He earned a meager income as a rag-and-bone man. The bed of his cart was always covered with a tarpaulin so no one could see what was in it. He slept here and there in barns, where he could find fodder for his horse. One might reasonably say of Nygaard that he had sunk to the bottom. He came to her a stray and remained there. They even got married.
He kept a den out by an old gravel pit, with spruce and old sacking for a bed. He lived there for periods of time to escape Fru Andersen’s beatings. That too had Vigand in stitches. Nygaard showed him the place, and Vigand found it to be a splendid solution.
Shortly before she died I took the folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen out to Thyregod Field to visit Fru Andersen, whom he had heard to be a treasure trove of folk tales and ballads. He had approached me, because we had made each other’s acquaintance during my time at the free school when he had once encouraged some of the children to tell him stories. So I took him out there one frosty day when the air was as crisp and clear as it is only seldom in these parts, where the tendency is more to dampness and wind. Heather, grass, and sand were mantled with white. A low sun hung over the flat land. Evald Tang Kristensen bustled as he went, and walked rather briskly for such a heavy man. I almost had to trot to keep up. In the distance a house appeared. ‘That must be the place,’ he said. I begged to differ. Even from afar it seemed clear that the house was abandoned and that no one had lived there for a long time. One end of the roof had fallen in. The faded beams jutted into the dark void, and as we came closer we saw holes that gaped in the walls. An entire section, the size of a gateway, was missing in the middle, and some sheeting had been hung up to stop the gap. There was a chimney, but no smoke. A ladder stood leaned against the roof, and the yard was littered with junk. We went inside and found Fru Andersen lying in her bed. She stayed there when it was cold, she said, for there was no stove in the house, and what good would a fire do anyway with the house open to the weather? But she was pleased to see us and eager to talk. There were no chairs to sit on. Evald Tang Kristensen produced his notebook and kneeled down on an old box so that he could reach the table to write, and so as not to disturb them I went outside and heard on my way the strangest screeching song, a diminishing and then abruptly rising monotone that accompanied me over the flat, frost-covered ground. Like a great, lifeless bird suddenly flapping into the sky. Without reason.
November 1
I attended church today and listened to Grell talk on the Beatitudes.
I found a seat behind the tiled stove, tucked away where I could not be seen. It was a raw and bitter day, and although the sexton lit the fire last evening, carpets of icy damp air gusted through the interior. People coughed. We are soon at that season. There was a time when all rooms were filled with coughing throughout the year. That is no longer the case. Much has happened since I came to the town, when dust and spittoons together were still a threat to us all. I was not a frequent churchgoer in those years. I will not say I am a stranger to the church, for I am familiar with it and with what goes on there, as one might be familiar with an aging aunt whom one has not visited in a very long time, and when eventually one does, one recognizes straight away the smells of her kitchen and the way in which the old armchair so snugly accommodates the frame as soon as one obliges the invitation to take a seat: everything is exactly as it was when one was a child.
And one acknowledges, too, a twinge of guilt that may indicate that some time will pass before one visits again.
Pastor Grell is no fire-and-brimstone preacher. He reads rather beautifully. His sermon touched on how, as we remember our dead, they remind us silently of the deathly circumstance of our human life. We mourn our dead and we mourn the world, we mourn others, and we mourn ourselves and the things we have and have not done, he said, and cited Kierkegaard, who says that it is the business of the mourner to mourn. Indeed, it is the mourner’s obligation; a responsibility with which he is entrusted. Salvation, he said, gives us solace, in that it does not take from us our grief, unlike happiness, which glints and glitters and is disinterested in everything but itself. I sat behind the rumbling stove and embraced his words.
After the service, I remained seated and did not rise until the last of the congregation had gone. But when I stepped out into the entryway, Peter Carlsen was talking to Grell and his wife. Carl was there too, and Dagmar and Inge, who had just returned from folk high school. The two girls are inseparable. Inge was born deaf and is for that reason also dumb, but three years ago she became blind. For a long time after that her only connection to the world was her sister’s hand. But now, Dagmar told me, both had learned braille. How on earth did they manage that? Their teachers at the school were exceptionally skilled, Dagmar said. But how could Inge learn what those dots might mean? An understanding must have developed along the way, baffling to an outsider, in the same way as no one else has ever been able to grasp the meaning of the squeezes they have given each other’s hands since they were small children. Perhaps they have been able to understand each other ever since they lay together in their mother’s womb. It is as mysterious as the great flocks of birds that suddenly turn as one in the sky. Often I have stood and watched the starlings as they angle this way and that. I have never fathomed it. They are two beautiful young girls. Fair-haired and blue-eyed, each with a long plait that falls between their shoulders.
Peter Carlsen took my hand.
“Good afternoon, Fru Bagge,” he said.
“Good afternoon, Peter Carlsen,” I said.
Nothing more was spoken, since Pastor Grell interrupted us to mention the memorial service, which he hoped had been in Vigand’s spirit. He was different now than the priest in the pulpit, as if he were intent on becoming this younger, more affable man.
I can still feel that handshake. His hand was warm.
It had gone dark when we came out. I did not proceed to the gate, but cut through the churchyard and the little opening in the b
ank to the west. Halfway home on the empty footpath, someone had placed a ghostly head in the warm slurry of Vester’s muck heap. A hollowed-out turnip with eyes, nose and mouth, a candle stump inside. A row of grinning teeth. Ha ha ha. The light flickered at me. Ha ha ha! I smiled back obligingly and went home to myself where I put some peat on the fire.
I lit the lamp.
HALLOW-EVE
The heath is desolate, though not deserted. Darkness will soon descend. It is three o’clock and the road stretches out in front of the carriage, madly winding, despite the fact that there are neither boundaries nor dwellings nor private land to take into consideration. Like a stream that meanders with age, the road meanders too. Now and then byways open out like a fan. There are deltas and tributaries, and occasionally, quite without warning or any flourish of vegetation, a stream with trickling black heathwater escaped from the sour earth. The carriage jolts and creaks. It plunges into holes and is pulled free again, continually on the verge of grinding to a halt. Brorson is on a visitation and his wife has accompanied him. They have left Thyregod Rectory and are on their way to Øster Nykirke. The light dwindles. They did not leave until rather late. It is Hallow-Eve, 1760.
“Is it wrong of me to write such a thing in my report?” he asks.
“On the contrary, it is quite appropriate,” she replies.
What is there to say of his report? It is briefer than usual. He holds his hand over the priest and parish. But of the parish clerk’s house he will write: “Never have I seen one in such miserable repair.”
He places a hand on her thigh and closes his eyes. She knows his stomach is paining him, and being tossed about the carriage in such a way can only make it worse. She strokes his aged, thankful hand. It is big and warm and open.
She looks out the window and is astonished to see an animal running alongside. At first she thinks it to be a wolf. But it is powerful and muscular, not lean and mangy like the wolves of the heath. It is black as coal.
A dog.
She strokes her husband’s hand. This is lawless country, and the night too is itself without law. Now the living and the dead go amongst each other. If the carriage were to stop and they step out into the darkness, they would sense that the night has become alive.
The dog runs with the carriage. It does not lag behind, nor increase its speed. After the horse has hauled them out of a rut, she thinks it to be gone. And yet it is there again.
Then, suddenly, it is there no more.
“Look,” she says. “It’s snowing.”
He opens his eyes and sees it to be true. Such an early time for snow. A few solitary flakes to begin with, presently a flurry. He presses his cheek to the pane and peers upwards. He whispers to himself. She finds a piece of paper and slips it under his hand.
* * *
The rectory at Thyregod is a quadrangle of farm buildings around an inner yard. Besides the priest and his wife it houses a farm boy and a servant girl of twelve years old, and the priestly couple’s youngest son, a weakling who lies in the alcove spitting blood. Moreover, there is the sister of the priest’s wife, who sits glumly on a commode from which she will not rise. There should also be a laborer on the farm. But it is the skiftedag, the day on which help may lawfully change employment, and the laborer went his way two days ago. His replacement, who was supposed to have come this morning, has yet to arrive. Often, new help exploit the day to attend to private matters and will first appear two or three days late. There is nothing to be done about it. People manage without.
The boy and the girl huddle together at the stove. All day the girl has been absorbed in a great flock of birds she noticed had come to rest on the flat piece of land beyond the bank of the kitchen garden when they got up this morning, and which has yet to move from it. The birds are the size of jays, brown and mottled, with light-colored spots. All day long the air has been full of their kra-kra-kra, but their cry is higher-pitched than the crow’s. The boy says they have come from Russia and are meant to be on their way to the Black Sea, and that they have taken a wrong turn. There is no food for them here, he says. They will die if they stay, but perhaps they are too weak now to fly on.
How does he know such things? He has said there once were great forests here, and that if one digs in the boglands one may find thick trunks of the oak that stood here thousands of years ago. He showed her a barrel plug he had carved from such a piece of wood. It is almost black, and hard as stone. He keeps it in his pocket. He says that just as the land here was once covered by forest, so it may be again at some future time. The heath as they know it will not remain for always.
“Do you think the birds are cold?” she asks.
“Yes,” says the boy. “But perhaps they are really expired souls, on their way from their graves to the kingdom of the dead. We should set an extra place at the table before we go to bed tonight,” he says. “But we can also leave some food out on the floor, it’s just as good.”
* * *
That evening there is a hammering at the rectory gate.
The priest is at his desk, weary after the bishop’s visitation. He puts his pen down on the paper, on which he has written:
God and the parishioners alike know only too well that no one here has been of means as far back as any can recall. And it is hardly remarkable, in this smallest and humblest living of the county, this most meager and impoverished of parishes…
The farm is shut up for the night.
The hammering resumes. The priest rises. He is an old man, pale with fatigue. Passing through the kitchen he encounters his wife.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Someone’s knocking.”
“We can’t take anyone in,” she says.
“Listen,” he says.
They listen.
“You mustn’t answer,” she says.
“I shall tell them to go on to the inn at Hjortsballe.”
“No,” she says.
But he goes out. She scurries after him and shouts from the doorstep: “Then send them to Sønder Farm at Dørken. Sometimes they take folk in there, and it’s not as far.”
She sees his lamp cross the yard through the whipping snow. He works the bolt aside and pulls at the heavy wooden gate. Barely a crack appears before a beast thrusts its way through into the yard. The priest staggers backwards, startled.
It is a dog.
The priest’s attention is diverted. After the dog comes a man, riding on a bull. They fill the gateway, and the priest is pressed back against the wall.
“Tell them to go to Sønder Farm at Dørken,” the priest’s wife shrieks from the doorway of the house. But it is too late. The man, the bull, and the dog are already in.
* * *
—
The bull is put in the stable. The dog remains untethered and runs around the yard. The man and the priest enter the house. The priest’s wife stands in the entrance hall and receives them warily.
The guest knocks the snow from his hat, turns and addresses her. Bewildered, she says to her husband:
“I can’t understand him.”
“He’s from the Rhineland,” her husband replies. “Fetch us some food.”
“Food?”
The priest avoids her gaze.
“Yes, food.”
The pantry is full of food after the bishop’s visitation, though to be kept, not eaten now. She instructs the girl to warm some milk and find a plate of cold porridge.
“Do you want me to take it in?” the girl asks.
“No,” says the priest’s wife. “I’ll take it in myself.”
With trembling hands she carries the milk and the porridge to the table. In the light inside, the man sits smoking a pipe whose bowl is hardly bigger than an acorn. He is thin and bears a festering wound on his forehead.
“Who is he?” she asks.
“A dischar
ged soldier,” says the priest.
“I thought as much.”
“He was in a shipwreck. When he got home, his sweetheart had made off with someone else. His knee is bad too.”
“He told you this?”
“His mind ails nothing,” says the priest.
“He’s a night-man, a gypsy,” says the wife.
“He says his name is Vater,” says the priest.
At the sound of his name the man lifts his head.
“Tell him to put out his pipe,” she says.
“There’s no need.”
“Tell him to put it out now.”
She goes to sit with her son. An unhuman warmth issues from his body. The vapors of his sweat these past few weeks have paled the woodwork of his bed. She takes a cloth and wipes his face. His hand brushes hers. He is awake and knows her. She bends over him and sees his blood spat on the wall. She wipes his face, and wipes it again.
“It’s snowing,” she says. “It’ll be a hard winter.”
He mumbles something. His breath too is burning hot, his exhausted body respires fiercely.
A thought comes to her.
“I’ll be back in a minute.” She gets to her feet and tells the boy and the girl to fill a bucket with snow and bring it to her. They put on their overcoats and go out into the yard, are gone for some time. They return with snow in their hair, their shoulders and backs speckled with it, cheeks ruddy. They put the bucket down at her feet.
“I heard you singing,” she says.
“But we weren’t,” they say.
“But indeed you were,” she insists.
“No,” they say.
So strange everything is this night.