Meet Me at the Museum

by Anne Youngson

  Knowing as much as you do about those who lived long before us in unimaginably different circumstances and who have left so little, but that little so significant—knowing all this, do you not stumble over your own unimportance? I wish the English language had some impersonal pronoun, like “one,” which no one uses anymore, because that last sentence reads as if I am attributing a lack of importance just to you. To you, Anders Larsen, Curator at Silkeborg Museum, when what I want to say is, wouldn’t anyone feel how paltry their life is, knowing what you (and I mean you, here) know?

  You mentioned that I was upset at Bella’s death. It’s true, I was. I still miss her and grieve for her, but, you know, she is so completely gone—cremated, as you tell me the Tollund Man’s contemporaries were—and scattered as ashes, leaving not a trace behind. In contrast to Bella, the bog people are as if newly dead, hardly dead at all, but resting in plain sight, bearing witness to their having been, having lived.

  I am making no sense at all and will stop writing.

  Best wishes,

  Tina Hopgood

  Silkeborg

  February 21

  Dear Mrs. Hopgood,

  Do not feel you must stop writing. Your letters are making me think, and I am enjoying this thinking, so please do not stop writing. In particular, I have been thinking of what it is that makes history, the sort of history that is my special field. What lasts? What is it that determines what lasts?

  I thought first of violence. The Tollund Man and the other bog people died violent deaths. If there had been no violence, their bodies would have been burned, like the bodies of all the other people who lived at the same time. Also, if I look at the artifacts we have from the time in which they lived, I see how many of these are to do with killing. Perhaps this is why we feel ourselves (I feel as you imagine I would) to be unimportant. Because we do not live by, and are unlikely to die by, violence. This must be good. I will accept insignificance in exchange for a peaceful life.

  My second thought is beauty. Some of the other surviving objects are everyday and ordinary and have been preserved by accident. But most of them are beautiful. They were put in graves because they were the best. Or they were preserved as objects of religious significance and had been crafted with the most care and attention to beauty as a tribute to the gods.

  The preservation of an object of beauty carries meaning, I think, beyond the physical appearance, to those who look at it and handle it after those who first made it and owned it are gone. I am brought to this opinion not only because of what I feel, and notice the visitors feel, when looking at a neck torc or a fertility amulet. When my wife died, she left me a bracelet we had bought together on our honeymoon in Venice, a simple silver circle with a delicate pattern engraved on the surface; a thing to be held and touched and studied closely for its beauty to be understood. I study it now that she has gone because I have no place where I can visit and believe myself to be close to her. No grave, no urn, no place where ashes were scattered. So I see this circle as being the link between us even though we are forever apart. I mention this only in support of my beauty theory. There is no reason I could not have picked a hairbrush or a glove or a key ring, something else she touched thousands of times in her life, as the amulet to keep her close to me. But the bracelet is beautiful, as these other things are not.

  Please forgive me this intrusion of my personal affairs into our correspondence.

  Regards,

  Anders Larsen

  Bury St. Edmunds

  March 6

  Dear Mr. Larsen,

  There is nothing to forgive; I have been personal, too. I am also enjoying the thinking, so I will go on writing, hoping you will reply; but I will not be offended if you do not.

  I do not agree with you about violence. I live with violence, and it is diminishing. Of course, the maiming and killing that are a regular part of my life involve animals, not humans. But it is violence, nonetheless.

  When I was first married, the pigs were killed on the farm. The slaughterman was the husband of the landlady of the local pub and was shaped like a spider: short, round body; long arms and legs. He was set in a crouching position through years of heaving barrels up and down cellar steps and manhandling live and dead carcasses. He had no teeth and smelled of blood and slops and sweat. If anyone lived by violence, he did. Yet he is dead now, and if I mentioned his name in the village shop, they would remember him only after a pause for thought, or not at all.

  The pigs to be slaughtered were driven into a pen outside a shed in the yard. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had much to do with a live pig; they are intelligent animals, but physically incompetent. They are ridiculously easy to steer—it takes only a board held against the side of the head to guide them in the direction you want them to go. They have such limited ability to see in any plane except straight ahead that it is as though the world ceases to exist for them when they cannot see it. We have a phrase in English, “like a lamb to slaughter,” which means an innocent who is manipulated toward disaster. I have always thought this saying should describe a pig, because lambs are actually less easy to lead to their deaths than pigs are.

  I find myself wondering if this is how the Tollund Man went to his death. I look at his face (in photographs, of course) and imagine he must have, piglike, allowed himself to be led to the bog and the rope, worrying about nothing except sticking to a straight line. Was there, do you think, an executioner in the bog? A man who had been chosen or put himself forward for the job of sacrificing the man who was chosen or put himself forward as the offering to the gods? I know, I know, you deal in facts derived from objects and physical evidence. You were not there; no one who was there created an account, so how can we ever know?

  It is not violence, I would say, but sacrifice that is the key. Look at all the saints. They sacrificed themselves for their faith and are consequently part of the currency of life centuries later: in the religious calendar; in the paintings and sculptures in every gallery; on postcards; commemorated in the naming of churches, streets, squares, buildings. Of course the sacrifice has to be worthwhile, as the saints’ and the Tollund Man’s were, in the context of the time they lived in. It was a sacrifice to something greater than themselves.

  I feel I have sacrificed my life, too, but for nothing. I have sacrificed myself, firstly, to the social standards of my parents and their peers, which prohibited me from having an abortion, or having a baby and remaining single. Secondly, I sacrificed myself to the farm. My husband—his name is Edward—is satisfied as long as he has the land, the crops, the stock, and the jobs to be done in each season. I am not, but because the seasons come round so relentlessly and the jobs are so many, I cannot escape. It is so long since the sacrifice was made, I was so young at the time, it took so many years for me to realize I had made it, that I can no longer say what, exactly, it was that I sacrificed; what it was that would have given me the satisfaction Edward feels every day. Perhaps it was the trip to Denmark—that could have been enough. But the blank space in my life feels too great to be overwritten by so slight an act.

  I do not want to sound as if I am full of self-pity. I am not. I have had my moments of joy; we have had fun together, Edward and I, and are drifting toward old age in harmony. I have children and grandchildren, and they have brought me happiness. But first to not quite last, what is it that I have missed by having closed off so many choices so early in my life?

  I have just looked up from the page and seen, through the window, my youngest grandchild, a little girl not yet three years old, running across the yard and stopping to poke her glove through the cover of a drain. She is at the age when to squat is as easy as to sit down on a chair (too long ago for me to remember) and she almost had the glove past the bars when her father, my son Tam, came into sight and caught her up. He wiped her hands on his overalls and carried her off. She squealed as the pig squealed. This has made me smile, has made me happy for an instant.

  Tell me more about your wife. I w
ant to know why you have no grave, no urn, and no ashes.

  Best wishes,

  Tina Hopgood

  Silkeborg

  March 21

  Dear Mrs. Hopgood,

  The story of why I have no grave and no urn or ashes is not an easy one for me to tell, and I will save it for a later letter, perhaps, if you continue to write to me, as I hope you will, or maybe even until you visit the museum here in Silkeborg and we meet face-to-face. I can see the Tollund Man every day, if I choose, and like you, I am always moved by his look of calm. You should visit.

  Your last letter made me realize how different our lives have been. This needs some explanation, because of course our experiences would appear to be so very similar; we were both born into a postwar world and have known no conflict; we both married, had children; we have endured no physical hardship. But my life has been devoted to the past, to small and unchanging man-made objects. When I wake in the night and wonder if, after all, I have wasted my chances and should have done something different with the time and the talents I have been given, I am often terrified by how small are the things I study and how big and beyond understanding is everything they represent.

  Now you, on the other hand, have lived in the great space of the natural world, where everything changes. I mean the seasons, the soil, the business of sowing, growing, and harvesting, of animal fertility and its consequences. I wonder, when you wake in the night, are you also terrified by the greatness of what you have to deal with, day by day? Or is it so commonplace for you that you feel no fear?

  Do you wake terrified? I assume everyone does, at some time. My wife did, often, when she was alive, and I would wake to comfort her. She was never boring, my wife, never ordinary. When we talked about our fears and dreams, she made me feel in touch with what was otherwise just outside my reach. Now she is gone, and I have no one else I can talk to about such things.

  I end, as always, with an apology. This is not why you started this correspondence, to read about my views on ideas too grand for me to be able to express them as I would like to do, even if my English, like yours, was perfect.

  Best wishes,

  Anders Larsen

  Bury St. Edmunds

  April 2

  Dear Mr. Larsen,

  You are wrong. I started this correspondence because I am plagued by the same thoughts you have just so succinctly, and in excellent English, expressed. But my response to you on this subject must, like the story of your wife, wait for another letter because, first, I have a story to tell you. I have been on a journey. I said I would visit an Iron Age site in East Anglia, and I have. On the day I circled in my diary. This might seem like a small boast. I decided which day to go and I went, on that day. It is more of an achievement for me than it seems. I have the idea that other people manage their lives like a set of interlocking boxes, each piece fitted snugly to the next (like your Danish Lego, I realize, as I write this, though what was in my mind was something more crafted, less engineered and colorful), and they can move from box to box in full control and with complete confidence that it is the right time to leave one box and enter another. My life is more like a pile of timber. Random.

  Anyway, I went to Warham Camp Iron Age Hill Fort. It is about fifty miles from where I live, and I drove myself there. I did investigate buses, because I prefer a journey to feel like a journey rather than a trip to the shops, but it would have been impossible to arrange within the tottering pile of planks that I had to negotiate to make it out of the house for that long, at that particular moment. By the time I had cooked breakfast, fed the hens, dealt with the eggs, and prepared lunch, it would have been too late to set off. So I went by car. I was going to plunge in with my impressions of Warham Camp, which are batting about in my brain, demanding to be set down. But I will restrain myself, so you can see it as I saw it, having traveled there.

  It was a lovely day; enough of a wind and a frost to give it bite, blue sky and sunshine enough to give it sparkle. I was troubled by the sun in my eyes on the drive up there, kept having to manipulate the visor to block it out. I am not the sort of woman (and I suspect you would know this without my telling you) who owns a pair of sunglasses. I do not own a satellite navigation system, either, but I had memorized the names of the places I would need to pass through to reach Warham—Thetford, Swaffham, Little Walsingham—and arrived safely.

  I parked in the village. There were no road markings, but a woman came out of the house alongside the spot where I had parked, and I thought at once that she had come to upbraid me for leaving my car there. Edward and Tam, my husband and eldest son, are forever alert to anyone who seems to be treating any inch of our four hundred acres as if they had a right to it. The footpaths that run across it are a constant affront to them, and they know the rules for what you can and can’t do on a footpath to the lowest subclause. So I thought the woman had come to tell me that it was her right to enjoy the view from her garden without the inconvenience of my car in the foreground.

  “Is it all right to leave my car here?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “There are no restrictions.” And she set about pruning her roses, which was clearly what she had come out of the house to do. I asked her the way to Warham Camp. She came over and waved her shears in the direction I should take. She told me that, if I was interested in ancient earthworks, I should also go to Fiddler’s Hill Barrow.

  “There is nothing in either place except mounds of earth covered in grass,” she said. “But each of them is a pretty spot, and it’s the perfect day for it.”

  I set off. I had everything I needed in a little backpack one of my children once used as a schoolbag, and I thought it was making me stand up straighter than I would normally do, and that made me stand up straighter still and raise my head, and that made me look at everything around me as if I would be taking an exam later regarding what I had seen. As I am, in a way. Please take this letter as my exam text. Mark with red ink and a score out of ten.

  It was a narrow lane, and no cars drove past me, just a squadron of cyclists, in Lycra, talking to each other. I began to anticipate what I would see when I reached the place and realized I had no idea what to expect, though I had researched it on the internet. I began to fear that my expectations were too high and I was bound to be disappointed.

  I came to a little bridge and stopped to watch the water passing underneath it. Three women walked past me, traveling in the same direction as I was. They had walking boots and sticks and the kind of jacket that is designed for the outdoors and costs more than a sensible man would spend. This last phrase is my husband’s, and it leapt into my mind not because I felt it right to condemn these women, but to stop myself from feeling inadequate, with the zip-up boots I wear to go out and feed the chickens, a child’s rucksack, and an old quilted anorak with the stuffing poking through where I have caught it on pieces of wire. One of the women also had a rucksack, with many pockets, some of them mesh, and was tall and sturdy. The second woman was small and pretty. The third was skinny and ugly and had an unfortunate pair of trousers that were too wide and too short.

  “Beautiful day,” said the tall one as they walked past. I let them walk on a little way before I followed. I thought that they, like me, must be going to Warham Hill Fort, and I was cross. I had come here with the intention of feeling close to the people who lived here long ago; kindred, it might be, to the Tollund Man. Now I was going to have to share the place with three women who, I imagined, were simply ticking it off in a thoughtless way, adding it to the list of significant places visited. I desperately, at that moment, wanted to have Bella with me. Someone who would understand the mess of ideas in my head leading me to think this journey was an important one, to visit an earthy mound in the middle of nowhere. Unlike the women ahead of me, Bella would not be wearing the right shoes (not just on this occasion, actually, but pretty well always, Bella could be relied on to be wearing something on her feet completely at odds with the occasion). I wanted to be ab
le to say “Look at that” to someone beside me, and to know she would understand what I meant, even when there was nothing to see.

  “I’m looking,” Bella might have said. “All I can see is blades of grass, but these are the blades of grass with our feet on them, all four of our feet. Let’s wriggle our toes.”

  And then I thought, if not now, then later, I could say “Look at that” to you, in a letter. I hope you do not think it is presumptuous, my casting you in the role of a substitute for the woman who was my best friend, but writing to you has begun to feel like talking to her.

  The road passed alongside a plowed field, and from habit I paused to see if I could identify the crop that had been drilled in it. (A cereal, too early to tell what.) By the time I reached the entrance to Warham Camp, the women were out of sight. The path to the site had hedges on either side, and the frost had stayed on the grass; I could still see the imprint of their boots. I chose a route nearer the hedge, where their feet had not been, and tried to hold myself as if I felt I had a right to be there, more than the better-dressed women ahead of me.

  But when I came out into the amphitheater—is that the right word?—it mattered not one jot that there were other people, other living people, there with me. It felt like a place for the living, when I had expected it to feel like a crypt in a church, where the dead take precedence over those of us still traveling. I don’t know what it was—the burst of sky, the rabbit scrapes and molehills, the turf-covered banks so neat yet natural, as if the men who had created them might any moment come over the ridge with their scythes or shovels or flock of sheep.