And my papers, Falck adds. My journal.
His journal will remain with us, Kragstedt replies. You have my word, Falck, that these papers will not be seen by any unauthorized person.
He looks at them in turn, Dahl in front of him, the Trader to his right. He takes the pen, dips it in the ink and taps it against the edge of the ink pot.
Where do I put my name?
The Overseer points again.
Here.
It is as if both of them hold their breath as he places his signature beneath the final column with a cramped flourish:
Hereby attested by Morten Falck, Priest of the Mission at Sukkertoppen.
This fifteenth day of August, AD 1793.
He returns home, staggering slightly. The defeat, the humiliation and the shock have made him weary, but as the Saviour has taught him, in humiliation there is liberation, in misfortune and grief a catharsis. If it is true, he has good reason to be glad. Indeed, he feels happy and, for the first time in years, free. Moreover, the sun now shines on the dampness of his perspiring back. In a canvas sack he carries the groceries Dahl has issued to him, among them a bottle containing one and a half pots of aquavit, his other hand bears a jug of good ale.
The grass is wet, the path muddy. The hem of his cassock drags in the dirt. He lifts it up, stumbles and drops the sack in the mud, almost spilling his ale. By some dexterity not a drop is lost. Thank God. He continues on his way, only a couple of hundred paces to the Mission house, yet today his path seems longer. He walks in the shadow of his debt and the poverty which by a few swift strokes of a pen has been imposed upon the remaining years of his life. In exchange for a measure of aquavit and ale. Thereupon more humiliation. Supplication. Ridicule. Self-contempt. Without prospect of becoming decently wed. An early death. At this moment he feels contented by the thought, relieved of responsibility and hope, and thereby free to abandon himself to the bottle that nestles in the sleeve of his vestments and the jug he balances in his hand. From dust thou hast come, he mutters to himself, to dust thou shalt return, and from dust shalt thou rise again. How can they treat a man of God in this manner? What has happened to the world that such a thing is possible? But he wishes not to dwell on it. He thinks of the bottle, of how he will remove it from his sleeve and twist the cork from its neck. The pungent vapour of alcohol in his nostrils. He will take his time, for he is in no hurry. He has the evening, and the night as well.
He puts down the muddied sack in the kitchen and finds the fire steel and flint. He takes a handful of dried heather and makes a pile in the stove, stacking the peat around it and on top. With numb fingers he strikes the steel. A fan of sparks leaps to the tinder, igniting it at once. He gets down on all fours and blows cautiously, a thin jet of hard air. A crackling blue flame flickers, rises up yellow through the peat and gradually reddens. He remains on the floor and watches it, feeling its warmth against his face. The cramped room is soon unbearably hot and in order to endure it he must keep the door open to the rain that now falls heavier than before. He stokes the fire with the poker. The smell of the pork makes the saliva well in his mouth, though he is unsure if it is due to hunger or nausea. Yet he knows it will help to eat. The thought of the aquavit calms him.
He adds dried peas to the meat, some water from the trough, and stirs with a ladle. He leaves the pot to boil, goes to his room and removes his cassock, the ruff and his wig. All of it is wet. The ruff, a gift from his father, has again lost its shape, has become limp and sticky to the touch and now resembles a pamphlet picked out of the gutter. The horsehair wig has absorbed so much rain as to double in weight, the powder coagulated into thick, mealy lumps on which the lice feed lustfully. He puts on a shirt and breeches and takes the ruff with him into the kitchen. He stirs some potato starch into cold water and dips the collar until it is soaked. With a brush he removes the worst of the dirt. Its white has long since gone, but he has no more blue with which to restore it, and he does not allow the girl who washes for him to touch an item so essential to his work. It must be crimped, and this is a job he manages himself. He finds the collar iron and heats it in the fire. He shapes the ruff carefully, taking care not to singe the material, burning his fingers instead. Soon it is returned to its intended form. He carries it back to his room and places it in its round wooden box, which he leaves open in order that the damp may leave it.
The peas are almost boiled. Dahl has endowed him with a lump of rancid butter, which is better than nothing, and he recalls the conviction of his dear, deceased mother that a person ought to consume at least a pound of dung each year. He puts a spoonful into the peas. The instant smell of ammonia from the fetid substance fills his nostrils. He can barely wait until the food is cool enough to eat and pours himself a cup of ale, which he downs in one. He belches, the yeasty aroma of the flat brew prickling in his nose. Alcohol issues out into his brain and body, concentric rings of well-being that prompt him to relax. He fills the cup again and sips at its contents. And then he eats.
He potters about in the house, in his room, in the kitchen, the parlour, putting things in their place, cleaning the stove, humming a psalm, open ing the flue so that some of the after-heat may seep into his habitation. He shovels a few glowing embers into the bucket and tops it up with fresh coal from the alcove in the kitchen. Coal produces only a minimum of smoke once it has burned down to embers, and for this reason he uses it in his lodging instead of the cheaper bricks of peat. He carries the coal bucket to his room, shakes it slightly in order that the hot coals may be dispersed among the cold, then puts it down on the thick slab of slate under the desk. There should be enough to last the evening.
He places the aquavit on the desk along with a glass. For the moment he leaves it untouched. But it is there, in all its power and glory. He hums to himself and performs a few more domestic rituals, turns the clothes on the line, tidies his bed, goes back and forth between his room and the kitchen, shakes the coal bucket again. It will soon be hot.
Outside, daylight yet remains, but rain, fog and cloud have descended upon the colony. The colony house has vanished from sight. Indeed, he cannot see a single structure from the somewhat removed situation of the Mission station. The fog is good. It will help him forget where he is. He goes back to his room.
He plucks an issue of the Christiania-Kureren from the clothes line, a publication his father sends him annually, a year’s subscription at a time, which he reads on the appropriate date, though with a delay of exactly one year, providing the issue in question has not been ruined by damp. He tears half a page from it to use as a spill. He dwells on an obituary notice, now several years old:
Christiania, the twelfth of January 1789. Our beloved mother, Birgithe Christine Falck, née Rasch, widow of long since deceased postmaster Falck of Christiania, has peacefully departed this life in Akershus, aged 88 and one half years. Notice hereof is hereby given to kin and friends by her sorrowful bereaved. Andreas Falck. Carl Falck.
A notable age. She must have come into the world in the year 1700, when Tordenskjold was still a boy and Frederik IV was king. His father has circled the notice. The deceased hails from his side of the family, the side from which Morten has taken his surname.
He rolls the paper, the notice and his name together and puts it to the coals, lifts the tiny flame to the lamp and ignites the wick. He sits, holding the spill between his index finger and thumb, watches the flame consume the printed characters, lly depart, 88 and on h, ful bereave, Carl Fal, sees his own name vanish and then lets go at the last moment, as the flame turns to ash and gently descends to the floorboards. He steps on the glow and takes out his correspondence.
He lifts the bottle of aquavit from the desk, weighs it in his hand, pours half its contents into a cup and lays out writing paper, pens, ink and sand. Evening is drawing in, the colony bell has struck nine. Now the fire-watcher will sing the hours. He tests the nibs of the pens with his fingers. They are
all soft and in need of sharpening, preferably they should be replaced. With his sharp letter opener he cuts thin shavings from them, tests them again with the tip of his finger, one after another, makes his selection and dips it in the ink, turns to the most recent page of his diary and writes for an hour or so of his visit with Madame Kragstedt. He drinks a little of the aquavit, then puts down his cup and adds a short addendum concerning the widow and his encounter with Kragstedt and the Overseer Dahl.
He takes out his lead pencil and sits down to draw, a distraction that never fails to settle his mind. He takes his little mirror and endeavours to produce a self-portrait. The result is a brooding, disabled-looking individual of suspicious intent. He looks at the drawing, looks in the mirror. The drawing speaks true; it knows something he did not. He crumples it up and tosses it into the coal bucket, takes a new sheet and draws a woman, naked and smooth-haired. She reclines with legs apart and the beholder is confronted first by the sight of her vulva, the glistening moistness of whose labia he labours upon, and beyond her genitals her abdomen, languishing breasts, her chin, mouth and eyes, her gaze. It is a satisfactory drawing, in its composition as well as in certain other respects, yet he is unable to keep it. Someone, perhaps Bertel, has been rummaging among his papers. The thought of him possibly having read his diary, especially his entry of the previous night, concerns him. He ought to begin the habit of destroying all that he writes of such nature. Libidinous drawings are perhaps not the most damaging of items, but they must nevertheless be disposed of. To the bucket with the drawing. The jug of good ale is empty, the bottle of aquavit considerably depleted. He is flushed with warmth from drinking and writing and drawing, perhaps also from an impending fever that is most likely of sexual origin.
He goes to the window, cools his heated brow against the pane and looks out towards the colony house that lies somewhere in the fog. The glass is uneven and has drooped in its frame like a caramel mixture, probably as a result of too little lead. The raindrops spatter against it. He picks out the roofs of the boathouse and the blubber house at the shore. There are no people to be seen. But the fire-watcher is about, perhaps the smith again, almost certainly patrolling at the warehouse and along by the promontory from where he will spy for the ship they await, and look out for thieves on the prowl. The crew are most likely as always in their room, passing round the ale jug and the aquavit bottle, slapping their playing cards down on the table, blustering their bids and keeping the Madame from her sleep. And then there are the mixtures in their small houses, the silent servants of the colony, among them Bertel, and the native folk in the Greenlander dwellings. They are many who inhabit the place. And Kragstedt himself, enshrouded in the blue-grey smoke of his long-stemmed pipe, or else retired to bed.
There is a knock on the door. He gets up and opens it, stares blankly into the night.
You? What do you want?
She does not reply.
He steps back, a single pace. She enters, takes off her clothes, hurriedly and yet as a matter of course, and climbs into the bed, drawing the covers over her. The woodwork of the alcove fails to creak, he notes, the straw of the mattress is silent. She looks across at him. She says nothing.
Now that you are here, I am glad, he says, then adding with a sigh: I suppose there is nothing I can do about it.
He stands and looks down at her, wearied by alcohol and defeat. Her naked body beneath his foul-smelling covers. She blinks her eyes. He bends down, stares at her, puts his hand under the covers and touches her between her legs. She is there. She is to the touch as she has always been, still and passive, cold as a rock. He retracts his hand. He can sense the smell of her, or perhaps only the recollection of it.
Sleep, he says. I have work to do. A pastor’s work. He smiles. Palasi work!
She turns over towards the wall. He tucks the covers around her. She is now a parcel waiting for him. Indeed, he has missed her.
He seats himself once more at the desk. There is still some aquavit in the bottle. He puts his finger through the ring and pulls out the cork. The sound is like a kiss. He puts the bottle to his mouth and drinks a little, corking it again with a vigorous shake of his head, a gasp and a shudder – huuh! – only then to promptly open it again and drink some more. Now he is drunk. Drunk, but still not merry. How much aquavit does merriness require? And why drink otherwise? One drinks to become merry. And he said unto them: Drink, and let your hearts be merry! He follows the Lord’s commandment, for he is a true Christian. He drinks again, small, measured mouthfuls. And now there is none left. The aquavit is inside him. It has changed places. Now it is he who is the bottle.
He puts the bottle down on its side. It rolls towards the edge of the desk. He observes it with interest. It drops and skitters across the floor without breaking. The widow sits up and looks at him. After a moment she lies down again. She is used to his excesses. He retrieves the bottle, places it once more in the middle of the desk and releases. Again, it travels towards the edge and drops to the floor with a clunk. The widow emits a sound of annoyance. He chuckles quietly to himself, feeling at once mischievous and almighty. He picks up the bottle and repeats his experiment, and then again. The bottle rolls, the bottle drops. Why does it drop? How does it know in which direction the floor is to be found? He shakes his head, the room mimicking the motion, though in reverse and with a kind of elastic delay, as though space were a frame attached to his head by means of threads. It continues to travel after he has stopped. An excellent observation. It must be committed to paper! He snatches up the pen, but is unable to coordinate his movements sufficiently to dip it in the ink pot and is forced to abandon the enterprise. Besides, he has no more paper left. He resumes his bottle game. Everything strives downwards, he thinks to himself. Everything bears within it a yearning for the depths, for the darkness and the filth that is there at the bottom of all things. Everything that is human or is created by man bears within it an inherent aversion to light, to purity, to ascension, to the heavens. We may rise up but briefly, in the faith, in will and in prayer, in sense and knowledge, perhaps even in love, yet always we will strive downwards again, to the filth in the gutter. This is the phenomenon Dr Newton calls gravity, without which all the gutters of the world would run in arbitrary directions and their dirt would consume us all. Thank you, Lord, for your wisdom!
Falck retires. He undresses and crawls under the covers to lie with the widow. Her skin is warm. He squeezes her hand, wraps himself around her body, presses his mouth to the soft, yielding flesh between her shoulders and neck. She turns her head slightly and whispers something he does not understand. He smiles. Then he says:
My wife.
I forgive you.
Do you forgive me also?
Now we shall sleep.
He knows that she is not real.
Part Two
Colony and Catechism
The First Commandment
Visionaries (c. 1785–8)
The First Commandment, as it is most plainly to be taught by a father to his family:
‘Thou shalt have no other God before me.’
What does this imply?
Answer: That we should fear and love, and trust in God above all things.
The settlement named Igdlut comprises a handful of peat dwellings scattered around a bay some way inside the inlet the Danes call the Eternal Fjord, approximately two days north of the colony. A score of individuals inhabit the place, among them Maria Magdalene and her husband Habakuk. The ford, measuring thirty Danish miles in length, comprises several perpendicular elbows, giving the illusion that at each turn it will come to an end, only for it then to continue – the eternal ford. The settlement of Igdlut, whose name means ‘the dwellings’, lies near the first of these turns. The bay is several hundred paces in extent, and its bed is of sand, allowing a person from the vantage point of the tableland to plainly pick out the shoals of fish as they pass t
hrough its waters. It is an excellent landing place for boats. The surrounding slopes rise steeply, their scrubby vegetation often difficult to penetrate, but some twenty or thirty fathoms up from the shore lie the monumental plateaus, staggered in height and separated from each other by low and rugged rocks. When Habakuk’s mother died last year they buried her there at her request, in an unmarked grave, her head faced towards Jerusalem. The spot affords a view extending all the way to the mouth of the ford and the open sea in the west, and to the jagged fells and dogged, creeping glaciers that wind towards the water in the east.
In the spring they fish for capelin, ammassat, that run into the ford in shoals so tightly organized the fish may be scooped on to the shore with sieves fastened on poles, until the rocks teem and glisten with the flapping catch. In July it is the trout, sometimes the salmon, speared with a stake of split willow armed with barbs, or else long perches made of wood to which are fastened the sharp, hooked bones of the seal. In autumn the men depart to the north to hunt the reindeer. The settlement possesses a flintlock. Habakuk, the leader, acquired it some ten years ago when working for the Trade up at Holsteinsborg. The rifle has maintained the people of the settlement ever since, but now it is in poor repair and Habakuk never uses it without fear that it will backfire and turn him blind.
Habakuk and his wife Maria Magdalene inhabit one of the dwellings furthest inside the bay, at the mouth of the river. They have lived here for some years, though originally they hail from Holsteinsborg. On occasion they talk of how pleasant it might be to live upon one of the plateaus, with a fine view to all sides. Yet to be settled so far away from the shore and the river would be troublesome. No one lives on the fell, people would shake their heads at them if they should ever move there, and they would be looked upon as peculiar. So they have remained at the shore. It is where we Greenlanders belong, as Habakuk is wont to remark to his wife. The sea is our mother and there we must remain.
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord Page 18
