by Peter Høeg
When the Count at Mørkhøj had the wall built, Lavnœs was, to all intents and purposes, cut off from the outside world. The fishing village had originally been part of the estate, but thanks to his absorption in his research work, the Count had lost any inclination to exercise his right to the first night with every new bride in the district. Then, too, the smell of fish was—even from a distance—quite offensive. So the estate wall gave a wide berth to Lavnœs, which was thus forgotten by the outside world, attracting attention only on a few occasions, as, for example, when one of the state tax collectors found his way to the village. Well, of course a tax collector—who else?
He was a single-minded sort of man, a former army officer who still felt and thought like a soldier. Having noted the fact that Lavnœs’s name was listed in the ministry registers but did not appear in the local district court reports, he fought his way through to the town on horseback in a thunderstorm, in an atmosphere so charged with electricity that it made his sword hilt sing out ominously. The storm had also transformed the village streets into an impassable mire in which floated the swollen white bodies of skinny beasts that had perished in the floods preceding the thunderstorm. The village was still numb from the wake held for the flood victims. The tax collector sought out the biggest and best-kept house and stepped inside. On a packed-earth floor saturated by the rain, an old man was sitting by an open hearth, boiling up a thin soup of seaweed from his roof. The tax collector glanced around at the furniture, which looked as if only the inveterate stubbornness of the room were holding it together.
“What do you live on?”
The old man looked blankly at him, his eyes watering in the smoke from the burning dung.
“We eat our own shit,” he replied.
The tax collector turned on his heel and left Lavnœs to its poverty.
Although Thorvald Bak had never set eyes on Lavnœs, he found the place exactly as he had seen it in his vision. As the wagon reached the first houses, the mists were dispersed by a burning sun which, by the time they had driven to the other end of the village, had dried the mud into a cracked crust, and people were sitting outside their houses, on the golden-white sand, playing cards for coins that had gone out of circulation fifty years before. Inside the dilapidated church a man was lying on the altar steps. Thorvald Bak nudged him with his foot. The man opened his eyes onto the painful light falling through the broken windowpanes and asked, “Who bought the last round?”
This man was the former pastor of Lavnœs.
In that first year, not a single soul came to church. For a year, Thorvald Bak’s wife—despite the fact that she was pregnant and was growing both heavier and more gaunt—was the sole witness to his preaching. His sermons grew ever more radiantly animated and full of conviction, despite the howling gale and the chill of the building, which left them both with the coughs and sneezes of chronic colds. At the end of the year she gave birth to a daughter—this was, of course, Anna—only, right after the birth, to be hit by a violent coughing fit, during which she coughed her soul to death. Just as he heard the child cry out, Thorvald saw the soul rise upward and soar through the cracks in the ceiling like a big white bat. When he christened his daughter, the only witnesses were his housekeeper and the church frescoes.
That same autumn he fell victim to dreadful saltwater sores, which the wind from the sea prevented from healing. When it rained heavily on the patch of earth on which—with great difficulty and with fortune, it seemed, smiling upon him—he had managed to grow some turnips, and when these were then covered by three feet of water and rotted away within the week, the first of the villagers turned up at church to lay bets on how long the pastor would stick it out.
During the winter, Lavnœs was hit by a cyclone whose icy winds swept past at lightning speed, freezing the crests of the waves. Like miniature icebergs, these then crushed several of the boats in the harbor. The same winds sent one of the parsonage gable ends flying sky-high and showered the area with a lethal hail of rock. In their wake they brought so much snow that—when it was melted the week after by high summer temperatures quite unnatural for mid-November—it flooded the parsonage and the church, forcing Thorvald Bak and his baby daughter and his housekeeper to take to the attic in one of the wings.
On the first Sunday after the flooding, when, despite everything, he still succeeded in sailing to the church in a flat-bottomed barge of his own construction, and—standing on the altar in seaboots that reached to his crotch—gave his sermon for the crowd of people who had sailed to church, all bets were off. No one in Lavnœs had dared to bank on his being there. There were those who were genuinely shocked by that Sunday. The widespread betting was an expression of how they looked at life: as a chain of coincidences in which the only sure thing was suffering. There were many in the village who threw the dice every morning to see whether they should get up or stay in bed on their seaweed mattresses and await the day’s quota of pain. What the people who had come to church now saw was Thorvald Bak’s serenity. For the first time ever they did not play cards or drink in the organ loft. Instead, they listened to the sermon.
They heard themselves. They rediscovered words they themselves had spoken and songs they themselves had sung. In Thorvald Bak’s description of hell they recognized Lavnœs, and when he painted a picture of heaven they remembered the dreams they had clung to during all those get-togethers and Christmas parties and spring revels. Then still more turned up at church, and there were those who asked to receive Communion at the Lord’s table—which had by now dried out—and so the conversion began. It happened, not because Thorvald had put the people of Lavnœs in touch with another reality, but because, in his serenity, he was stronger than anyone they had ever come across and because his euphoria was more powerful and more imaginative than their own. They converted because they could see that Thorvald Bak was in the hands of the same forces as themselves, and they took to religion with the same energy and obstinacy with which they had searched for the stairs to hell. They developed an unbelievable level of patience in which they could, with exalted tranquillity, watch the waves rise, topple their fishing stakes, and carry them, nets and all, out to sea, while they did not lift a finger because it was Sunday and they were observing the Sabbath and keeping it holy. Thereafter, with heartfelt joy, they could thank the Lord for having chosen them to suffer, rather than the people of the surrounding towns or of Mørkhøj, whom they had, for one hundred years, thought of as the menacing, wingèd monsters who made leaving Lavnœs a dangerous business. Now, however, Thorvald Bak could reveal that they were in fact miserable sinners, squandering their existence in calculated acts of ungodliness and excess. They congregated for Bible reading and confession in the ecstasy of a new day dawning. There they had the opportunity both to recall the crowning moments of their own past sinfulness and to savor the sweetness of denouncing others.
Thorvald Bak was wise enough not to interfere when these meetings developed into appalling relapses during which these saintly souls would start giving themselves alcohol enemas and singing disgusting songs, before going on to tear down the mission house, rip off their clothes, and hare around the village—stark naked and with seaweed from the roofs in their hair—on the hunt for kerosene, because the aquavit had run out. When that also had been drunk, they rubbed their gums with axle grease, which drove them right out of their minds. Thorvald Bak waited until their ravings subsided because he, too, was familiar with sin and knew how closely related it is to remorse, and remorse to loneliness, and loneliness to a longing for fellowship, and fellowship to the religious submission that brought these righteous folk even closer together. Then he could preach to them and berate them until they wept and wailed and had to put their hands over their ears, because all around them they heard the laughter of hell.
Over the years these relapses occurred less often, as the people of Lavnœs gradually became aware that they were the chosen ones, and even though this awareness manifested itself more slowly for them than i
t had done for Thorvald Bak (when his mother’s portrait fell off the wall), nevertheless it was every bit as strong. They understood that they had been chosen to suffer more than anyone else, that their fortitude was to be tested. It was then that they went back to work (after centuries of progressive idleness): to making nets and building boats and planting potatoes, obsessed with the idea that though they might have lived in poverty, they would die wealthy. In just a few years they grew tremendously tight-fisted. They resumed commercial links, severed long before, with Rudkøbing and had virtually all of their meager crops and salted fish carted off to the town while they and their children ate soup made from the seaweed off the roofs. Only in their gifts to the church and the mission house did they retain their former generosity, because they felt that this house belonged to them all, and constituted a safe way of conserving their assets.
Through all of Thorvald Bak’s early years as pastor of Lavnœs the town was obsessed by divine stockpiling. All the inhabitants were seized by the conviction that they were, by dint of their hard, fruitless labor, their exceptional powers of endurance, and their pious conversation, making a divine investment that would one day be redeemed, with interest, in the sunlit groves of paradise. Even the climate seemed, during these years, to alter, as their new love for one another and their passionate faith cast golden rays of sunlight over the frozen deserts of winter and a protective shade across the heat of summer. Brimming with fresh energy, they turned their eyes upon one another, there to drive out the sin that they sensed as a faint tremor in the subsoil and a particular smell off the sea. They put a stop to all sales of alcohol and the lethal axle grease in the town, and naturally they took away all the musicians’ instruments and put a stop to the Saturday night dances (they knew all about music and how it begets lust). Then, when Anna was six years old, all the true believers of Lavnœs painted their houses black and took to wearing the same clothes of coarse linen—its stiffness against their skin meant to remind them of the difference between good and evil, while its color, together with that of the houses, was intended, in its monotony, to ensure that eyes remained fixed on the future and were not sidetracked by earthly misfortunes. They counted the converted souls meticulously and with pleasure, and by the time Anna was seven years old only the shoemaker and the former pastor still had not been saved but lived as though dead. And just after this, the pastor did in fact die.
Thorvald Bak visited the old man in his cottage by the sea and found him lying in his own excrement, which had frozen into an icy couch. He had survived on a diet consisting solely of aquavit since being removed from his post a lifetime before. On his deathbed his lips remained sealed to the end, at which point Thorvald Bak, moved by this proof of God’s retributive will, leaned over and planted a kiss on the dying man’s forehead. At this the former pastor opened his eyes and looked up at Thorvald Bak just as he had looked up at him once before from the floor of the church, and said, “Now I know I must be Lazarus, if the dogs are licking me.”
After having hunted out sin within one another, until the fishy smell that had always hung over the village disappeared, leaving them free to sniff at an unfamiliar emptiness in the air, the people of Lavnœs turned their gaze inward, upon themselves and the sin in their own hearts, where they ferreted out every urge to exaggerate. Thus the last women to have retained any weakness for painting their skin or outlining their eyes now attended Bible study with scrubbed faces and contrite gaze. They discovered how profligate they were with words and, in rapturous unison, ceased talking, except during Bible study meetings and prayers and when it was of practical necessity. A purified silence settled over Lavnœs. Where previously they had tried to drown out the storms, they now met them with an expectant silence in which they exchanged only the minimum of practical remarks. Even these they endeavored to restrict, by weaving brief messages to one another into grace and evening prayers, along the lines of “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, Anders, remember to muck out the stables after supper, in earth as it is in heaven.”
And yet it was emptiness, not happiness, that flourished amid all this silence and faith and testifying and dark colors and loving one another and work. It was a longing for a sign. They began to feel that what they needed was some sort of divine statement of account to confirm their hope that they were on the credit side. So exhausted did they become from gazing into the future that this longing grew even stronger.
This future and the change they had wished for were presented to them by the shoemaker’s deathbed, when they saw the vicar’s daughter, Anna Bak, sit down next to the dying man’s head while still standing at her father’s side. Faced by this miraculous duplication, they closed their eyes and shook their heads, remembering, from the days before they were saved, the unreliable illusions induced by bingeing on kerosene, which they now feared had returned. But while they stood there with their eyes closed, every one of them had the feeling that the little girl was standing next to them, like some multiple expression of maternal comfort. They also noticed that odd metallic taste in their mouths, and when the light of utter purity emanating from the child seared through their eyelids, they understood that she had been chosen to bear the new Messiah, in their midst, as a reward for their self-restraint. Lavnœs would be the new Bethlehem and they would be the new disciples.
When the shoemaker’s heart stopped, they were all so filled with the Holy Spirit that they lifted Anna up onto a wagon and placed her on an improvised throne. Then, driven by the ardent faith that enabled them to see through the houses of Lavnœs, and through the blue-gray clouds that had hung over the village for weeks, and through the hills to far-off regions where the heathen languished, they pulled the wagon through the muddy streets and over the impassable drifts of shifting sand and over the heath to bring religion to the godless. At their head danced Thorvald Bak, preaching as he went, seized by mighty forces (as on the day when his mother’s portrait fell off the wall). With them, in their procession, they had brought pots and buckets, which they beat with wooden spoons in a spontaneous, insistent rhythm. “The world awaits us!” cried Thorvald Bak. But when, in the middle of the night, they reached the nearest farms, they found them deserted. Long before this, the farmers had heard a muffled racket that had been taken for the raging of a storm until the procession hove into sight. With all the dark-cowled heads and the light from the child on her weird vehicle and with the pallid faces covered with scabs from the saltwater sores forming pale, disembodied patches in the gray mist, it looked like some ghostly procession. So the farmers had packed up their belongings and fled into the hills.
As the missionaries were returning to Lavnœs through the darkness of a night into which the rain lashed white streaks of foam, they noticed how the storm yielded to Anna, so that she seemed to sit on the wagon surrounded by a protective film. Flower petals fluttered down upon those who pulled the wagon, and as they neared the sea, the clouds—which were so dense that it was almost impossible to breathe—parted, and the light from Anna’s form beamed across the sea and was sighted by a big ketch that had disregarded the dark patches on the sea chart and then been caught in the storm. The sailors saw the light and confused it with that of the lighthouse on the hill above Rudkøbing. They turned the ship around, intoxicated by the thought of their imminent deliverance, and ran straight onto the wicked sandbars lying in wait off Lavnœs, there to be smashed to smithereens. For a long time afterward driftwood and pieces of rigging were regularly washed up on the shore, along with the occasional yellow bone from which the tears of joy the seamen were shedding as they went aground still ran in a clear liquid, thick as resin. And even though these events do seem a bit farfetched—even for me; just bordering on where I would have to say, “That’s damn hard to believe”—nevertheless, that is just how those who were there at the time remember it.
At the service for the dead seamen, Thorvald Bak said that they had perished in the light of God. But, referring to the missionary work, spreading the word of God and taking
the news of the new Messiah to all the corners of the earth, he said, “The world is not yet ready. We will quietly await our reward.”
It is quite likely that Anna never really understood her own significance. She moved with a natural innocence through a world of prayers and silence, amid her own miracles and the expectations of others, and she does not seem to have noticed the crowds of people who followed her wherever she went, to protect her and stand guard over her every step and read omens in the way that she scratched her nose. All she did was smile when, in Sunday school, she was placed on a tall throne next to the Sunday-school teacher’s desk, and the other children shied away from her, dazzled by the light surrounding her and shocked at the thought of the weight that lay on her shoulders. In church, during Thorvald Bak’s services, her voice, soaring like a paradisiacal silver flute above the congregation’s chorus, sent a number of the faithful into fits. Then, as the victims were carried out—with hymnals wedged between their straining jaws to keep them from biting off their worshipful tongues—she would artlessly turn her shining eyes toward the pulpit. She seems to have been what I would call divinely naïve. When Thorvald exempted her from physical labor she spent the endless run of foul-weather days in her room, playing by herself. The wealth of gifts and toys delivered to her every day, for which the brethren had to sacrifice what little they had and once again appease their hunger with seaweed soup or by sucking on the shells washed up on the beach, do not appear to have interested her. Instead she played with a Christmas crib built out of matchsticks and raw potatoes which Thorvald Bak’s housekeeper had made for her and which was evidently sufficient for her in her solitary state. For many years Thorvald Bak noted only one predilection in his daughter, and that was her love of the sea. Now and again she would leave her room, and usually he would find her on the beach—watched over by a crowd of the faithful—gazing out to sea, playing with the bleached driftwood from the sunken ketch, or digging in the sand for fragments of the drowned sailors’ bones.
