by John Gardner
He lowered himself on a strand of gossamer to listen more carefully to their talk. As he listened he began to feel not only foreboding but anger. Like all human talk, it was unimportant, senseless, and took forever to get said. Their talk was so trivial he could barely keep his mind on it from sentence to sentence; and as his impatience grew by bounds, so his curious sense of foreboding grew. It would be the death of him, he thought, this inability to concentrate on stupidity not worthy of his attention. Yet surely no one, not even God himself, could keep his mind fixed on this foolish, meandering conversation in which the words of a child had the selfsame importance as the words of Lars-Goren or his wife or Bishop Brask. Still in the form of a spider, he lowered himself to the flagstones and ran nearer, scampered to within half a foot of Lars-Goren’s wife’s shoe.
Now Bishop Brask, to the Devil’s disgust, was spouting poetry. He recited in a high, thin goat-voice, rocking a little in rhythm with the words, his shadow rising and falling on the wall behind him. Lars-Goren and his wife stared into the fire, listening or dreaming. The smaller children watched the bishop with their mouths open. It was an old Swedish tale of love and war, funerals and marriages. Soon, though he fought with all his might against it, the Devil was fast asleep.
5.
THEY STAYED THREE WEEKS at the castle of Lars-Goren, sometimes riding out to watch the peasants at work or to pass an evening in one of the village inns, sometimes sitting with Lars-Goren’s family, the dog nearby, under trees or in front of the fireplace. Bishop Brask was increasingly impressed by the native intelligence of his friend—for indeed, he was beginning to think of Lars-Goren as just that, a friend, though their beliefs were far apart. Once, returning from a long ride to watch timber being marked to be cut for the coming winter’s fires, the bishop said, “You have a good life here in Hälsingland, Lars-Goren. I see how your peasants look up to you, how your wife and children love you, and I’m filled with amazement, exactly as a man might be if he visited Eden.”
They had stopped their horses side by side on a high ridge looking down over fields and the castle. The sun was low on the horizon, the sky deep red above the jagged pines. The dog, Lady, looked up inquiringly.
“Yes, it’s good here,” said Lars-Goren. He sat with his hands on the pommel of the saddle, his face solemn, waiting for the qualification he knew must come.
“But unreal,” said the bishop, with a glance at Lars-Goren. Then he looked down into the valley again.”
“Unreal?” Lars-Goren echoed.
“Like Eden,” said the bishop. “It’s a depressing thought, I admit, but inescapable.”
“I don’t follow,” said Lars-Goren.
The bishop nodded at the valley with its long shadows, the castle set on its hill like a ruby full of light. “It’s one of those dreams of innocence, this place. It’s easy enough to live justly here. What’s to prevent it? But who can live in Stockholm as you live here in Hälsingland? Or think of Paris—Vienna—Rome! The future’s with the cities; you know that yourself.” He gave an apologetic little shrug. “Cities are where the wealth is, and the power that makes your little hideaway safe or not safe. And what are the cities but hotbeds of rivalry and cunning, fear and exploitation? It’s the old story—Abraham and Lot: Abraham up there with his sheep in the mountains, Lot struggling to stay honest down in Sodom and Gomorrah. That’s where the Devil keeps house, we like to say: down in the cities where merchants show their wares by uncertain light and pine sells for fruitwood, where sly politicians thread their lies through truths and half-truths till not even they themselves know which is which. Who can help growing greedy and corrupt, in places like that? Cheat or be cheated, that’s the rule—and the rewards of shrewd cheating are visible on every hand: fine togs in every window, fine leather carriages under every lamp, fine stone houses filled with fight. Lords steal in one way, beggars and cutthroats in another, but in the end it’s all the same, rob and be robbed; it’s the norm, down there.” The bishop tipped his head, sadly smiling, his eyes queerly merry.
“Ah yes,” the bishop continued a moment later, as if answering something Lars-Goren had said, “Complexity’s a terrible thing. That’s what our retreats to the country make us see. How monstrously dull it is, every time we go back to Gustav’s court and catch up on the latest plots and counterplots, learn which new schemer has stuck his head up to tempt the axe! How rich life is here in the wilderness where people can be above-board and open with one another! How clear things become, as they were for Achilles, John the Baptist, St. Francis! No wonder your great religions come from inhospitable regions, and no wonder they tend to sicken when the wilderness gives way to the vast golden cities of Solomon. It’s the same with the arts, or so it seems to me. How fine the old Viking carvings are, or the primitive statues of Africa, or the square-cut tomb of King Edward the First of England—I suppose you haven’t seen it. But then great cities rise, artists grow wealthy, their vision grows confused and complex. What a pity! Irony comes in. Paradox. Soon the only powerful emotion artists feel is nihilism. ‘If I can’t have my Eden, I’ll destroy you all’—the same words the man of religion says when the world grows confusing and complex. ‘The axe shall be laid to the root of the tree!’ Ah yes, poor humanity! Poor Sweden!”
“I don’t know,” Lars-Goren said, surprised by the bishop’s sudden shift, “as kingdoms go—”
“Yes, I should have guessed,” the bishop said. “You have great hopes for our dear little Sweden. Why not? Why should we ever lose our innocence, like the French, the Italians, the English? We’re a race of commoners. We always were, but now especially thanks to Kristian’s bloodbath. We’re farmers, peasant villagers, priests in frayed cuffs. We have the miners, of course; an unruly crowd. But even they have a certain love of order, as we see in their meetings, if there’s nothing out there frightening them. Perhaps little Sweden will become a model for all the world, you think. The basis of a universal ethic.”
“You have reason enough to speak ironically,” Lars-Goren said, just a trifle stern. He crossed his hands on the pommel and looked down in the direction of the dog. “Your own life has not turned out exactly as you might have wished, or so I gather, and you’ve witnessed many other failures of vision. King Gustav, perhaps. He was once the kind of innocent you describe, yet now—” He sucked in his lips and mused for a moment, then nodded as if to himself. “No, on second thought, even now a part of him believes in open-heartedness and reason, I think. Why else this rage to see the Devil gotten rid of?”
Bishop Brask laughed, youthful for an instant. “He does even now believe in reason, that’s true! You’ve heard, I take it, that he’s ordered that public debates be held between the Lutherans and the Church? There’s faith in reason for you!”
“You think the dice are loaded?”
“Not at all—at least not by Gustav! The fittest will survive—naturally.” He smiled, wry and indifferent.
“The Lutherans, you think?”
“The Lutherans, yes. And after the Lutherans—” He shrugged. “A man could build a great many huts with the stones and leaded glass of Chartres Cathedral. Now that we have the printing press, and paper, and tawdry bindings, how vast the potential for, so to speak, ‘literature’!”
“Nevertheless,” Lars-Goren said, “if the Devil were out of it, and people could quietly argue things out, apply the Golden Rule with an appropriate measure of self-love, if you follow me—”
“Oh, I follow you all right,” said the bishop, and tipped his head back, looking up at the darkness above them, an empty sky made darker by the blood red glow on the horizon. “Your views are very clear, and even if they weren’t, any sensible child could construct them. It’s easy to see what you think of as good, here in the country, surrounded by your family, your faithful dog, your well-cared-for peasants: openness of heart, the willingness to tell a man frankly what you think. A man could build a whole ethic of that, as indeed the Old Testament Jews did: evil as the closing of the heart, refus
al to communicate. What was Adam’s fall but a turning toward secrecy, self-interest?”
“I’ve heard worse definitions of good,” Lars-Goren said.
“Of course you have” said the bishop warmly, leaning forward in his saddle as if trying to see into his vision more clearly. “It’s an excellent theory, or so it seems at first glance. I could argue it myself! Say a mother is beating a child before my eyes. What should I do? Should I use force against the mother? But what is the evil in the beating I am witnessing? That the child feels pain, or that the mother feels the torments of malice instead of the joy of love? Surely it’s both, by the theory we’ve just advanced. A man on his own can do no evil; evil is lack of communication between people. If I want to act, then, I should act to restore communication between the mother and the child. If I use force on the mother, do I get rid of the lack of communication? No, I introduce a new lack of communication, between the mother and myself. I must reason with her, then. But suppose that, in her fury, the mother is screaming as she beats her child, and the child is also screaming. How do I get their attention?” Quickly, to prevent Lars-Goren’s interrupting, he raised his hand. “I know, I anticipate your answer: I use force, but only such force as is needed to stop the ruckus and make the two pay attention. I use measured response. Then we sit and rea-on.
“It may be inconsistent,” Lars-Goren said, “but it’s reasonable enough. One must be sure of one’s motives, needless to say. But it seems to me a man knows when he’s acting for justice, not out of personal fury—that is, when he’s acting by the Golden Rule and when he’s not.” His tone had an edge, as if he suspected the bishop of hair-splitting.
Bishop Brask stretched his arm out, conciliatory. “Say that’s true,” he said, “though of course I’m not as sure as you are that we always know our motives. But say it’s true! You must surely see the problem it raises for me, a city man. Say there are four mothers, all beating their children at the same time, each for a different reason. Say there is also a small group of cannibals, over on a street corner off Ostengräd, not far away, preparing to put a priest in their boiling pot, and just beyond them there’s an Arab who, misunderstanding the language, believes he has just purchased some fisherman’s wife. What am I to do in this case? Whip the various offenders to submission and tie them to cartwheels till I can get to them, one by one, and argue them to reason? Suppose I do this and then you come along just as I’m tying up the last of the offenders—you come along, that is, and see me tyrannizing these innocent strangers, as it seems to you. Do you knock me unconscious to get my attention and run around untying the people I meant to reason with? My example annoys you; I’m making things more complex than they are, you think. I admit the examples are a little facetious, but life in the city may be even more complex than I’ve suggested. What is one to do to get open communication where Swedes, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Finns, and even an occasional Lapp are mixed together like leftover herring sauces, each with his own way of thinking, his own old codes?
“That’s why I said earlier that it’s unreal, this Eden you live in, this Platonic Form of right behavior. It’s refreshing, I don’t deny it! It fills a man with hope and good sense, rejuvenates his spirit. But what if it’s all snare and illusion? I don’t mean to offend you, I hope you understand! No one could be more grateful than I am for the numerous kindnesses you’ve shown me, this glimpse you’ve given me of the pastoral life. No one could be more worthy of love than your wife is—I’m honored to have met her! But you see my reservation. We like to say gloomy, grim cities are the haunt of the Devil, but tradition is against us: it places his home in the unpopulated North—perhaps some such pastoral scene as that valley there below us, shining like a garden.”
Lars-Goren smiled oddly, an expression Bishop Brask could not penetrate—perhaps annoyance, perhaps rueful acknowledgement that it might be as he claimed. With anyone else, Bishop Brask knew, he would at this point have fallen silent, withdrawing to his familiar hopelessness, for clearly he had won; but Lars-Goren had, and had had for some time, a queer effect on him, a way of forcing him—or inspiring him—to say more than he’d intended, as if arguments that only made him weary at other times took on interest when advanced against Lars-Goren. However certain Lars-Goren might be about the motives of his actions, for the bishop there was always some doubt, and never more than now. Whether he continued in the desperate hope of corrupting Lars-Goren, smashing his ill-considered optimism, or in the hope that Lars-Goren might somehow, by his stubborn innocence, “save Brask’s soul”—a distasteful phrase, to the bishop—he had no idea. It was perhaps both at once. Whatever the case, he found himself arguing on, urgently, gesturing like a man selling relics to a man with no faith in them. The dog looked up at him in alarm, and he lowered his voice.
“Who can say ideals aren’t the Devil’s chief trick?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible that in the country, secure in the love of his family, a man learns faith and serenity that outside the country can only produce madness or tyranny or both? Think about it, that openness of heart or willingness to communicate that we’ve defined as the root of all good. Let us consider what we mean by it, exactly. Where do we put ignorance in our ethical scheme? The ignorance of the miners of Dalarna, for instance, or the pirate Sören Norby. What good is the willingness to communicate in a man who’s got his facts all wrong? There may be no evil in the hearts of such people, but surely they put evil into the world. Never mind, you say; ignorance can be overcome by education—another form of communication, in this case communication between the culture and the individual. Yes, perhaps. But perhaps it’s precisely this education which makes the soul fold its wings. Perhaps education leads inevitably to weariness and despair. As we civilize a child by beating or cajoling or shaming him, do we not perhaps beat, cajole, and shame what breeds hope in a man—individual will, every man’s innate sense that he’s descended from the angels—to a dreary acceptance of what’s taken for necessity, the tiresome, dispiriting laws of the docile herd?
“I will not pursue the point; I leave it to your judgment. I ask, instead, where does madness fit our scheme? The Daljunker, for instance, convinced to the soles of his boots that he’s Sten Sture’s son. How does the culture communicate with a madman? Not only does he have his facts wrong. In defense of his sacred individual will, he denies dull reality with all his might, claiming he’s King Nero or Jesus, insisting that the infirmary or dungeon where we converse is not what it is but a castle in Spain. Or this, my friend: what of the well-meaning and canny political manipulator, a man like Gustav Vasa in his early days—the man who communicates truth, or so he’d claim, by simplification: complicated truth reduced to slogans? How in heaven’s name do we communicate with him, or with those he has taught to use his methods? There’s the future, I think. Power bloc against power bloc, lie against lie, until finally no one knows anymore that he’s lying; fact and that-which-seems-desirable-in-the-long-run become hopelessly confused, and the man who tells the truth, that is, sticks to the plain facts, is dismissed as a lunatic, or troublemaker, an enemy of the good. You think it’s reason the Lutherans have introduced into human affairs? It’s a new and terrifying tyranny—I think so. In the old days we knew who the tyrants were: King so-and-so. Bishop so-and-so. Queen X. Judge Y. The tyranny was official, however covert. We knew whom to watch. In the future every dog will have his plot and his secret arsenal.”
He broke off abruptly, watching Lars-Goren’s face, waiting for some answer. Instead of speaking, Lars-Goren, with a look of faint distress, raised his long arm and pointed into the valley. When he turned to look, Bishop Brask saw, below them, a horseman approaching, galloping as if the Devil were at his tail. They urged their horses forward, cantering down the slope to meet the man—the dog leaped up to follow—and when they were fifty yards away Bishop Brask recognized the rider as Lars-Goren’s fat groundsman.
“My lord,” the man shouted when he was near enough to make himself heard, “you must flee
at once! King Gustav has sent men—” He gasped for breath, and Lars-Goren, drawing close, reached out to touch the man’s arm and calm him.
“Take your time,” Lars-Goren said.
When he was able to speak, the groundsman said, “There’s been a massacre in Dalarna. King Gustav’s gone mad; it’s the only explanation. And now he’s sent men in armor after you and the bishop. They’re in Hälsingland already. Nobody knows what the charge is, but I think you’d better run.”
Lars-Goren nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Don’t worry yourself, old friend. We have everything ready.” He glanced at Bishop Brask, then up at the darkening sky. “Very well,” he said again, and together they started at a canter down toward the castle.
6.
IT WAS THE SADDEST OF PARTINGS. Lars-Goren’s wife and four children stood at the arch, silent, Bishop Brask crooked on his horse, favoring his back, smiling wanly, as if casting in his mind for a suitable parting line or gesture and finding nothing that would do.
“God be with you,” said Lars-Goren’s wife, her hand on the metal armor on Lars-Goren’s knee. Her nose was red and swollen like a peasant’s. As she’d helped him into his underdress and armor, then the heavy fur that made his final layer, she’d been weeping. The groundsman stood anxiously shifting from one leg to the other, again and again casting a look down the road toward the trees.
“Will it be cold in Lappland?” little Andrea asked.
“Hush,” her mother said, rather fiercely, as if the thought of the cold alarmed her.
“Don’t worry,” Lars-Goren said, smiling down at the child but speaking to put his wife at ease. “They’ll meet us at the border. They’ll know we’re coming.”
“I wish I could come with you, Father,” Erik said. “I’d be a help. You’d see!”
