They sail in to the Shetland Isles and remain a few days in the bay of a fishing community. Morten Falck grasps the opportunity to collect fresh grass for Roselil. It is much needed, as the stock of hay has depleted faster than he has calculated, and much of it is rotten on account of the salt water. A cow can consume astonishing amounts, but on receiving new and succulent fodder the animal descends into a vegetative state of con tented rumination. Her yield of milk has been on the decline, but now she once more delivers nearly a whole bucket each day. The crew tease him and complain that they have been cheated of the fresh steaks to which they have looked forward to being served once he was compelled to slaughter the beast.
A couple of days after setting sail again, the wind gathers, something the captain had told him would happen sooner or later west of Scotland. The waves loom tall, catching up with the ship from behind and swelling past. It feels as if they are being sucked backwards, then forced into the air, before the deck abruptly disappears beneath their feet. But the captain is glad. The weather is with us, he says. If the wind remains where it is, we shall be at our destination earlier than usual.
Or else at the bottom of the sea, Morten says to himself.
Der Frühling, a heap of mouldering, waterlogged oak from the forests of Norway, with a ballast of wet sand whose nauseating smell seeps throughout. The vessel is held together by a quarter Danish mile of rope, some thousands of wrought-iron nails, the pressure of the water against its sides, and the prayers and curses of its crew, among them Morten Falck. He curses and spews, spews and curses. Then one day he wipes his mouth and says the Lord’s Prayer. He prays for forgiveness and absolution from his sins. Please do not let me die, Lord, without first having served Thee and atoned for my sins, committed in the wantonness of youth. Save me, Lord! Forgive my outrageous abandonment of Miss Schultz!
He knows it is imagination and hallucination, and yet it is as though the gusts of wind carry with them a fragrance of lavender.
He endeavours to read, but is overcome by nausea and feelings of guilt, and must leave his book until later. The oblong shape of the cabin and the sheer confinement of its space causes him to think he is lying in his coffin, about to be lowered into the grave. The rank smell of his own corpse sears in his nostrils. He hears the seamen shouting on deck and tilts himself out of the bunk to totter unsteadily into the air, only for them to usher him back below.
Down below, where you belong, priest!
He seats himself on the top stair and inhales fresh air through a crack in the door. It feels good. He hears Roselil lowing without abatement and thinks of how terrified she must be. But he cannot attend to her.
As the worst sea is upon them, his crisis ends. The seasickness is gone. He devours a large portion of dried fish, boiled with barley oats, is made deliriously thirsty by the salty meal and drinks several cups of the ship’s beer, spews one final time and feels restored. The storm rages for a day, then dies down sufficiently for him to attend to the cow.
Roselil? He opens the gate into the makeshift byre and expects to find her dead or dying. She lies in her own filth, yet lifts her head to look at him as he steps inside. She stands up willingly to be milked, though her flesh trembles and she provides only half a bucket. Nevertheless, there seems to be little wrong with her. He mucks out and washes her, rubbing vigorously with a rag of linen. She settles and sighs contentedly in sleep. He takes his blanket and sleeps next to her. Stars and a violet night sky are visible between the masts.
The sea remains troubled. Der Frühling meets the waves as they rise before her bows, mounts them, rolls over their crests or else remains suspended within an elastic duration of time that is drawn out or squeezed together, at once compressed and elongated, eternal and momentary, then to emerge as the swell crashes down upon her decks, the sea breaking open to spew out its foam, rushing away over the sides and surging into her wake. The ship wrenches itself free and steers towards the next wave with the deepest of groans from its hull or masts. The cow lifts its head and lows.
The Frühling loves the sea, says one of the men. That’s why she pitches the way she does.
Morten regards him with puzzlement.
She wants her nose into every hole, says the seaman.
The weather calms. Morten feels he has been on the breaking wheel for a month. An icy rain drums against the deck and will not be stopped by the good leather coat he wears, but continues through his clothing, pointed diagonals of cold that pierce the skin like small projectiles. He spends much time with Roselil, dries and warms her with blankets, rubs her hide, feeds her fresh hay. She still provides milk, though the yield has diminished. He no longer demands payment for the milk the crew receive, but reserves two cups a day for himself, heats it up, adds aquavit and drinks the mixture while it is still scalding.
Then the rain turns to snow. Midsummer snow! The captain announces that they now follow the sixtieth and presumably have the Faroe Islands on starboard. But the snow falls so thickly they can hardly see the point of the jib boom.
You’ll have to take my word for it, says the captain.
With the snow the air becomes milder, or at least feels as such. Whether it is true or not, the cold no longer goes to the marrow. Roselil has also settled and gives more milk. But the deck is covered in slippery slush that makes moving about perilous to any man’s life. He spends many hours each day in the mess, where a lamp swings from the ceiling and a stove burns. He reads his Voltaire, his Bayle, German poetry, some Montaigne and Rousseau. He sleeps a lot and the more he sleeps, the greater becomes his fatigue. Time is frivolous and unreliable. He blinks his eyes twice and half a day has passed. His entire childhood and the years in Copenhagen swirl by, scene by scene, and half an hour has idled away. He begins to wander, from bow to stern, from port to starboard. He abandons himself to the peripatetic joys in which he so delighted in Copenhagen.
The crew grow mad at this wandering priest who insists on making use of the ship in all its length and breadth, which is to say one hundred times twenty-five feet. One hundred ship-lengths are thus the equivalent of some half mile, he tells the captain, which is the minimum a grown man should commit himself to walking each day if he is to maintain a healthy constitution and keep ever-encroaching melancholy at bay during a long sea voyage.
If the Magister falls overboard, it will not be beneficial to his constitution, says the captain, even less for good humour, be it the Magister’s own or anyone else’s. A ship is not a place for strolling. Can he imagine the men going about like that?
He asks permission to climb the rigging.
Mind he doesn’t fall down and do his learned self a mischief, says the first mate, and laughs.
He clambers up the shroud of the mizzen, straddles the top and wedges himself between backstays and mast. But the sails obstruct his view and the danger of falling down constrains his movement. He realizes the deck is the better place. Besides, there is nothing to spy, other than the monotonous sea and the no less monotonous sky above it. He remains in the rig for some time until he feels discomfort in his groin from the narrow top on which he sits, and climbs down.
The weather improves. He spends most of his days seated at the deck hatch, making notes for a treatise on the satisfaction of physical and spiritual needs on long sea journeys. He intends to send the work, if ever it is complete, to a magazine such as Mr Lyne Rahbek’s Minerva, an enlightened libertarian publication, if regrettably rather dull. He believes it will make instructive reading for travellers unfamiliar with the sea, and begins to draw up a list comprising two columns of healthy and detrimental aspects of life on board a ship. Clean air, he writes in the first column. Peace in which to write and philosophize. Satisfaction of natural curiosity. Comradeship. Learning to live frugally. He moves the pen to the column on the right, ponders a moment, then scribbles what enters his mind: Drowning. Scurvy. Spiritual sloth. He puts down his pen and paper, press
es the bung into the ink pot and stares out at the horizon. There are things a man yearns for while at sea, things that cannot be written about, unless for initiated eyes only, but which any reader cannot help but think upon when reading an article concerning privation on sea journeys. Lack of female company, he then writes in the right-hand column. Lecherous thoughts. Self-abuse and, even worse, inappropriate relations with members of the crew.
Morten Falck has thought frequently of the hermaphrodite Gypsy boy while he has been patrolling the ship. The cabin boy is approximately the same age, run away to sea after his confirmation, though not an orphan, but from an impoverished environment somewhere in Jutland, so Morten has learned. He often sits opposite him when the men are gathered to eat in the mess, where the mizzen mast creaks and groans in its cylinder. His gaze meets the boy’s across the soup, he smiles at him and the boy smiles back. The freckled and pimply face of the adolescent sticks out among the weather-beaten seamen. They make him blush with their stories, but Morten notes that the boy’s presence also makes the men feel embarrassed. When they look at him they begin to boast and exaggerate, behaviour to which they are otherwise disinclined. They tell boisterous tales of escapades at sea and conquests on land.
When Morten Falck sits with Roselil, at her milking or merely keeping the ailing beast company, the boy often appears in the byre and offers to muck out. Morten gives him a cup of milk. My father had a cow, the boy tells him. It had no name, but I called her Karoline. A pretty name, says Morten. I call mine Roselil.
May I call her Roselil, too? the boy asks.
Of course you may. It’s her name.
Is it her real name?
What do you mean?
What you’re called is what you are.
And what are you? asks Morten Falck.
Carl Asger, the boy replies solemnly. My name’s in a book.
A number of the men have never been to Greenland. There is talk about the natives and what they might expect. It is the captain’s twelfth voyage across the ford, as he rather boastfully refers to it. The savages are decent enough folk, he says at the dinner table. More decent than many of the white people there, I can attest to that. But some of their habits are disgusting and abhorrent. They wash in their own filth and eat rotten meat.
Like us, says one of the crew, holding up a mouldy green slice of pork. The men laugh.
But they like it, says the captain. They don’t use salt to preserve their meat. They prefer it rotten. The worse it smells, the better.
One man asks about the föhn winds of which he has heard terrible stories.
What are föhn winds? asks another.
Warm winds from the south, says the captain and releases a squealing fart.
The men roar with laughter. Morten Falck looks down into his pea soup. Something is moving about in it. A dung beetle, fighting for its life: he sees the flailing legs. He assumes it to have landed there by accident, perhaps on account of greed, and now it struggles so as not to drown in the same substance on which it intended to gorge. He fishes it out with his spoon, then hesitates, not knowing what to do with it. The insect solves the problem itself by springing down and scuttling across the table, where a seaman’s hand squashes it flat.
They say the savages can kill a white man with their farts, says the ship’s boy.
The captain replies solemnly: So very true, my boy. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
The men around the table gape in anticipation.
One of my hands, says the captain, Iver, his name was. God rest his soul. He put his face too close to the backside of one of their women, and she bent over and blew the head off the poor man.
The ship’s boy pales. The men fall about laughing and thrash their spoons on the tabletop.
Why did she do that? asks the ship’s boy.
You see, boy, the native women are not to be trifled with. They will eat a lad such as yourself for breakfast. But you’ve no need to be afraid. I can outfart even the strongest of savages. He lifts his arse and lets out a thundering wind. The men roar still louder, tossing back their heads and hooting, howling at the ceiling like wolves and stamping on the floor in their heavy boots.
Thank you for the meal, says Morten Falck, and goes up on to the deck. He hears the mirth continue below. Shortly after, the boy comes and sits down beside him on the hatch.
You shouldn’t believe everything they tell you, says Morten Falck.
I find it exciting, says the boy. I know they’re only stories, but they’re exciting anyway. When I get home, it’ll be me telling far-fetched tales.
The deck inclines to starboard, the bow chops calmly through the oncoming waves. Tiny showers of atomized sea water pass over them and cling to their clothing.
She doesn’t care for the swell, says the boy with a nod towards Roselil. Should I go in and keep her company?
Let’s go together.
When they are sat with the ruminating cow, the boy asks: Does the pastor receive confessions?
We held a service and confessed our sins at the outset of the voyage, he says. Did you not take part?
Yes. The boy avoids his gaze.
Then why do you wish to confess now?
If something new happens, does the old confession still count?
On the ship, you mean?
I sin every day, says the boy. With the cook. We share a bunk, as the pastor knows. It’s my fault. I make him lustful. But I don’t know if it’s wrong enough to have to confess to a priest.
Morten Falck says nothing. He does not desire to listen.
The cook calls me a wanton little devil, even if I don’t much care for it, says the boy, and downs his cup of milk. But he says he can tell I like it, I can’t run away from that. He has told the carpenter. And now Jensen wants me in his bunk as well. They fight about me.
Morten Falck gets to his feet. Say your Lord’s Prayer and trust in God, he mumbles, and returns to his cabin.
In storms the crew go about the deck like ghosts. They bend their necks against the wind and rain, the sleet and the ice, and work stoically in the manner of sleepwalkers. He hears them talk behind the bulkhead when he lies in the cubbyhole of his cabin, though never are their voices laughing, nor do they sing, which he would have thought was in the seaman’s nature. To bawl out shanties in season and out. The only one among them who occasions to sing is the ship’s boy, pious popular ballads from his native home or psalms, sometimes an endless satirical song from a broadsheet, entire novels in verse. His voice is dainty and he has a good ear. The men hang upon his lips as he sings. And all the time the ship keeps its course along the sixtieth latitude towards worse and colder weather.
After a storm the sky unfolds above the ship, as blue as royal porcelain. The air grows cold and still, exceptionally cold for the time of year, with frost in the night. The crew is sent into the rigging to chop ice. A pale yellow moon wanders its curved path across the colour spectrum, from violet to blue-green to orange to red. The sails flap in the lazy yet freezing gusts that send showers of ice on to the deck from shrouds and rigging. Morten remains standing, impervious to the frozen shards that rain from above. He abandons himself to quiet mortification of the flesh and daydreams of the place to which he is bound, and the one from which he came. He learns to appreciate the bitter wind that buffets his chest.
An atmosphere of sexual excitement arises on board, triggered by the circumstance that the ship’s boy is now passed around among members of the crew. He seems to have become aware of the effects at his disposal, Morten muses, albeit he is unable to control them. Arguments flare, fistfights loom, tin mugs and plates fly through the air. The mood at table is leadened by poisonous insinuation and lowered eyes. Tales of farting are no more. Only the ship’s boy seems happy. He takes liberties, shirks his work, teases the men and makes inappropriate innuendos. Morten knows that it is his duty as ship’s
pastor to bring him to reason, but he considers his words will make no difference. He is weak, he knows he is weak, he permits himself to be weak. In the night he hears stifled cries and laughter from other parts of the ship. He pulls his coat over his head and tries to sleep.
One day of wind and rain he hears a commotion on deck. Running and shouting, the tolling of the ship’s bell. He ascends the stair and sees some of the men standing at the portside bulwark. He approaches as the ship’s rowing boat is put into the waves and four men man the oars. They do not row far. A pair of ship-lengths and they retrieve something from the water and haul it aboard. They return to Der Frühling and the boy is pulled on to the deck. He lies motionless on his back, mouth gaping, arms splayed to the sides. The men gather around him. They stand in their heavy boots. Now they are calmed. They have regained their dignity. Morten crouches down and puts his hand to the boy’s chest, then places his ear to it and listens, his fingers feeling at the artery of the neck. He gets to his feet and shakes his head. Someone tosses a sweater over the boy’s face.
It began early this morning, the first mate tells him. The boy behaved like an unruly child at breakfast, commenting obscenely upon his shipmates and flicking lumps of porridge at them from his spoon. The cook lost his temper and lashed out at the boy with his ladle, striking him on the side of the head. The boy screamed and called him a lecher and worse, whereafter he ran up to the deck, the cook after him with his ladle. They chased around the ship until the boy climbed the main mast with the cook on his heels, balanced his way out along the yard like a tightrope walker, and when the cook refused to retreat but crawled out after him, he plunged into the waves and was gone. A time passed before he floated to the surface.
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Page 10
