“She touched me to do me harm.”
“They’ve killed a lot in that way.”
Ole Morske builds small ships. He has several lovely ships standing on a shelf, schooners and sloops, fully rigged and shining with varnish and paint. Anton, the warehouse clerk, takes you up into the Sail Loft one day and shows you these fine ships. Ole Morske sits sewing a sail; all you see is the back of his woollen jersey and the old crumpled cloth hat he always wears.
In a corner of the big room stands Rydberg’s Horn. Rydberg’s Horn is a fog horn; it has a green horn and a handle, and when the handle is turned it makes a sound that is so terrible that you can go mad from hearing it.
“Is it Rydberg’s Horn that made Ole Morske mad?”
“Ole Morske’s not mad; he’s just odd. He became odd when his wife ran away from him. He was quite out of his mind for a time then.”
“What’s mind?”
“It’s what you think with.”
“Did Ole Morske think a lot about his wife?”
Aunt Nanna purses her lips and blows in your face: “Yes.”
One day, Anton came with two little ships, presents for you from Ole Morske. You were so incredibly happy at this and insisted on going up into the Sail Loft to thank him. He said nothing, and neither did he look at you, but his stubbly face was one big smile.
***
The Window Man often goes to the churchyard and potters around his six graves. Angelica goes with him and wanders around collecting mother-of-pearl from the crushed shells between the graves.
But early one morning, all the lowest panes of the church windows have been smashed, and the Window Man sits on the church doorstep with bleeding hands, swinging the diamond backwards and forwards like a pendulum.
“Poor man. Now little Angelica’s dead as well, and he’s gone completely out of his mind.”
“Sad fate, sad fate.”
(The Window Man got his mind back, but he’s not the Window Man any longer, just an ordinary joiner, for he can’t stand the sight of glass.)
***
That was the Glass Room and the Sail Loft. Then there’s the Compass Room in the deep Storehouse cellar. This is where the Ship Men sit around a little table, drinking beer from blue tankards. They sit and laugh and thump the table and sometimes they quarrel and fight. But sometimes they sing and are happy.
The Ship Men are father’s men, and you know them well. They sharpen your pencil, which is red at one end and blue at the other, and one of them can draw bearded faces with pipes in their mouths.
Sometimes there are also strangers sitting around the table in the compass room. One day, they are Frenchmen; they have black beards and the whites of their eyes are very white. Some of them are wearing flat red bonnets, and some have silver crosses in chains around their necks.
The Frenchmen have caught a dead man in their net, a corpse. No one knows who the dead man is.
The corpse has been put in the church and is to be buried. It’s very sad, but the Frenchmen aren’t sad; they are merry and make a din and sing about how they were enjoying themselves. They are happy because it’s not them who are dead and turned into corpses.
The corpse was buried the next day, but by then the Frenchmen had gone. But nevertheless a lot of people accompanied the dead stranger to the grave, and Mother was one of them.
“For it could have been any of us. It could have been your father.”
***
That was the Compass Room. Then there is the Bedroom.
The Bedroom is a small wallpapered room high up in the southern end of the Storehouse. There is nothing here except a dusty table and an old blackened mirror on the wall above the table.
“Who sleeps here?”
“Nobody.”
When you look at yourself in the black mirror, you don’t see yourself: all you see is a grey shadow. That is Nobody.
Nobody sits on the empty table. Nobody stands at the gable window and looks out across the bay with its boats and ships and out across the sea and the horizon.
Behind the horizon lies the Big World, which Nobody can see. That’s where the Eiffel Tower is and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and further away there are the Egyptian Pyramids and the Tower of Babel, and furthest away of all, the Tower at the End of the World.
During the night, the half moon drifts slowly across the heavens like a capsized boat with no crew.
That’s when Nobody opens the window and stands and stretches. He stretches his long arms out like wings and floats out into the night and looks in through all the bedroom windows, and if you are lying there awake and outside the window can see a face with big sad eyes, that is Nobody.
That’s when Nobody smiles at you for a moment, lonely and poor, before he floats further off across the world with its towers and spires and further on through the cold rooms beneath the stars by the Furthermost Edge.
Afterwards, he comes back to his bedroom with its faded and discoloured wallpaper. Here he sits on the table beneath the black mirror, huddled up, with long arms round his bent knees.
Fortune
Then there was the Coffee House!
The Coffee House is a cosy little tarred building with a turf roof and small windows and a sooty chimney from which a great deal of smoke emerges.
Inside the Coffee House stands the big oven in which the coffee beans are roasted and the mill in which the roasted coffee beans are ground. This is where one-armed Coffee Pouline and her blind sister Anna work for the Rømer Concern, and here there is also almost always a third sister, Juliane the Sexton’s wife, to be found. She sits on the bench near the low window, slumped between her two crutches, for she is paralysed and can’t support herself on her legs. But the tiny bright eyes in her rough, as it were coffee-roasted face are full of laughter, as though she were sitting there thoroughly savouring all the funny things that happen in the world.
Juliane the Sexton’s wife has also had a sad fate: her husband, Julius the Sexton was taken by the surf and drowned one stormy evening out near the White Sands Cove, where he had gone to rescue some driftwood, and that same year Juliane herself fell down from a stack of fish drying out on the Ring and broke both her thighs.
But Juliana nevertheless retained her good humour, which is fortunate for her and a blessing.
And Coffee Pouline and Blind Anna are also full of good humour, and they chat away while the beans are roasting in their drum and the flywheel in the coffee mill flies. Anna’s eyes don’t look blind at all, and she almost always laughs and smiles as though she is looking forward to something that is coming to her.
Now and then, the three sisters are visited by Spanish Rikke, who always has so much to tell them about what is going on in town. Then the coffee pan is put on the hob, and Pouline fetches four flower-decorated bowls from the wall cupboard, or five if Jacob the Baker happens to come in from the store bakery to have a snack. Jacob the Baker usually has a big, greasy paper bag with him that is full of cut-offs from Danish pastries and sugar buns.
Aunt Nanna, too, is often in the Coffee House. She sometimes comes to have her fortune told. Coffee Pouline is a fortune teller and can read the coffee grounds. Then everything goes quiet and there is a slightly uncomfortable feeling in the Coffee House while Pouline examines the bowl, and then Aunt Nanna sits there radiant and shivering and with her eyes closed for as long as it takes.
“If it’s anything nasty, Pouline, you mustn’t tell me, you know.”
“Nasty and nasty – you never know, Nanna, but one thing I can tell you and that is that you’ll have a suitor before this winter’s out, and he is well dressed and wears a hat and a watch chain and all that, and he has a flower in his buttonhole and… what on earth is that? A pistol? No, nonsense, it’s just a big cigar in a very fine cigar holder!”
Then Pouline pushes the bowl away and gives Aunt Nanna a tap on her bottom.
“And then the rest is up to you!”
Juliane the Sexton’s wife: “Big cigar in a cigar holder
! Did you hear that, Anna?”
Blind Anna (delightedly): “Yes, and a flower in his buttonhole.”
***
Above the entrance to the Coffee House there is an old, worn horseshoe. Coffee Pouline herself found it and persuaded the Storehouse Keeper Anton to nail it on to the door frame.
“Yes, but why does it have to be there?”
Aunt Nanna (still a little radiant): “Because it means good fortune.”
The Wise Virgins
Out on the coast along the bay, there is a row of black huts, all with their gables out towards the water, and in the evenings the sleepy light from the small windows in the gables is reflected and reproduced in countless shapes in the dark waters, twisting and twirling like eels.
The Wise Virgins live behind one of these gable windows.
They sit beneath their lighted wall lamp in the spotless kitchen, where the kettle sings on the stove and the cat lies in a straw basket with its kittens.
They sit reading the Holy Scriptures. They read about the End of the World and the Last Day that is soon to come. No one knows when, for it comes “like a thief in the night”.
The Wise Virgins are poor and have nothing to live on except charitable gifts from good people, for they don’t work for their food, but simply sit reading the Scriptures. “For every day could be the last.” Now and then they draw the red checked kitchen curtains aside and look out to see whether there are Signs in the Heavens.
No, not yet. There is only darkness and the whispering waters and the lantern in the Redoubt.
It happens that a strange light can be seen in the sky, as though something very big is approaching bathed in light. But then it’s only the Moon rising behind the horizon.
Fina the Hut
The Wise Virgins are sisters. They are not only wise, but they are also good, for they want to help to save everyone from damnation on the Last Day. So they go around proclaiming the words of the Scriptures.
Most of all they would like to save Fina the Hut, for Fina is their very own sister. But she is a poor child of sin.
Fina doesn’t live together with her sisters; she has her own house. It is known as the Hut. People turn their noses up at the Hut. It’s a small whitewashed house with partly tarred walls and a turf roof, and it stands in the middle of a lovely garden full of flowering bushes and green vegetables.
Here live Fina and her daughter Rosa, who is known as Dolly Rose because she looks like a doll, a red and white doll of the kind that can close its eyes when it is laid down. Dolly Rose’s cheeks are red like redcurrants, and her eyes the colour of gooseberries. She always dresses in her Sunday best. She often stands by the gate of the Hut garden, staring up in the air with her big doll’s eyes.
Fina the Hut makes a living from her garden, selling flowers and green vegetables to people. And she makes wreaths and helps at weddings and funerals. And she can foresee the future and conjure spirits and “play tricks” with people she doesn’t like. So everyone is nice and kind to Fina and her Dolly Rose, for they are afraid of having a spell cast on them.
The chervils in the Hut garden are full of white flowery hands that all clutch at the wind. In one corner of the garden there is a bed full of flaming red poppies. If you stand and stare long enough into the red blaze of flowers, you lose yourself.
There are long, dangerous claws on Fina’s hoe, which is left in the dark green bed of parsley.
Fina the Hut herself is small and neat, with rosy cheeks and a nice smile on her lips and often with a dewdrop on the end of her nose. She hands you the bunch of parsley with the curly leaves and accepts her few coins, and perhaps she will pat your head and bless you, and then you can feel her dangerous hoe-like fingers in your hair for the rest of the day.
In the evening, when the blaze of poppies has been extinguished and the dusk is like a green lake between the tall chervils, the lamp is lit behind the curtains in the windows of the Hut. Then you can see a big bird standing in the garden flapping its wings and shaking earth and dust from its feathers, and then Fina opens her window and smiles sweetly at the black bird and lets it into her kitchen.
“Who’s telling you all those tall stories about Fina, Amaldus?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, it’s all a lot of nonsense, for Fina’s no witch, but a nice, kind little person.”
Silence.
“Why does Fina have a dewdrop on the end of her nose?”
“It’s because evil tongues are so busy telling stories about her.”
But Fina the Hut is a witch even so. And perhaps her Dolly Rose is a princess under a spell. And perhaps a prince will come one day and free her from Fina’s hoe-like claws.
The Old Poet
In that tall house on the slope near the lake lives
The Old Poet. The Old Poet’s thin face is yellow like faded paper. His mouth is hidden beneath a silvery white beard. His eyebrows are two black tufts. They shoot right up into his forehead when he’s thinking.
He speaks only rarely, but he coughs a lot, for he has consumption. He always wears a slight smile. “He wonders at the world.”
He pats your cheek with a veined hand and he winks at you as though you have a secret together, but he doesn’t say much.
The place where the Old Poet’s house stands used long ago to be a churchyard. In his vestibule he has a barrel full of the dead people’s bones that he has gathered while digging his garden. There are skulls, too, with dark eye sockets and big grinning teeth. The Old Poet has painted a black cross on the barrel. So it’s a holy barrel.
The mouldy bones are in their holy barrel waiting for the Last Day, when they will arise and turn into living people again.
Then they will come and press the Old Poet’s hand and say thank you to him for his kindness, and he will smile to them and say, “Don’t mention it.”
Howler Hans
One house is neither tarred nor painted and doesn’t have grass on the roof like other houses in town, but is unpainted and has a roof of iron. This is where the furious man Howler Hans lives.
Howler Hans is small, broad-shouldered and bald. His nostrils are big and open. His eyes are blood red.
Howler Hans isn’t his real name, but a nickname.
Howler Hans lives alone in his house. His wife Anna Diana had to run away from him with her two children, for he is dangerous when he is in a temper.
Howler Hans stands in his doorway and talks or sings. He talks of Judgement Day and the Great Beast that will rise from the sea and of the evil spirit that entered the herd of swine. Sometimes he just grins or roars.
Sometimes Howler Hans rages in his empty house and breaks everything and throws saucepans and chair legs out of the window.
Howler Hans is not like that all the time, however, and when he is free from the evil spirit that rages in him, he works decently in the quarry, where the stones for the new savings bank are blasted out of the rock face.
But one day a package full of dynamite was found to have disappeared from the quarry, and so the alarm was raised and Howler Hans’ house was searched from attic to cellar, for the previous evening someone had seen the crazy fellow leaving the quarry carrying a square package in a sack on his back. That was the package of dynamite.
That package was never found, although Howler Hans later confessed that he was the one who had taken it and hidden it in his cellar. So people went around for a long time afraid of some nasty accident happening.
But then, one early morning, while Howler Hans was still asleep in bed, six serious men came and fetched him. He was bound fast on a ladder and carried out to the Madhouse. There, he could be heard singing and shouting behind the iron bars on the tiny windows.
The strong man known as China Hans, who looks after the lunatics, says that Howler Hans has torn all his clothes off and goes about naked, fighting and biting at the evil spirit that has taken possession of him, and that he is so sweaty that he slips out of your grasp like a slippery fish if you try to catch
him.
***
The minister came one day and said a prayer over Howler Hans, but he couldn’t cast out the evil spirit. Fina the Hut is the only person who can do that, but she isn’t allowed, because she “does magic”.
One evening, China Hans nevertheless sent for the girl from the Hut. She came with a bag of green leaves that she stuck on the madman’s wet forehead.
Then he fell quiet for a week, but on the evening of the seventh day, he was dead.
The Sorrows of Little Brother
The porcelain dog, “White Freja” is white with some gilt on it, and it is so big that you can sit and ride on its back. But it is usually to be found at the bottom of a cupboard and it only sees the light of day when the Wise Virgins are there on a visit. For it was a wedding present from the Virgins and they mustn’t know that it is usually hidden away in the cupboard.
“But why does it have to be in the cupboard?”
That question doesn’t produce a real answer. Mother wrinkles her nose a little. Little Brother can get the porcelain doll out and have it to play with.
Little Brother is now so big that he can sit and ride on the fine dog, for which we think of a name, calling it after the poodle known as Freja that belongs to Lambertsen the watchmaker. But since Lambertsen’s Freja is black, ours is called “White Freja”.
On White Freja’s back you can ride out into the “wide world”, which we imagine is a white world with some gilt in it. Everything in this white world is white and shiny and sparkling, but as fragile as glass. All the houses are white, but they have gilt roofs and doors, and all trees and bushes are white, but they have leaves of gold.
This is a game for rainy weather and it’s only played on dark and wet days when you can’t play out of doors.
On the shelf above the chest of drawers there are three white ladies with no clothes on, and they are the “Three Graces”. They look very fine, but there is something not quite right about them, for their willies are missing. And not only are the three ladies naked, but they are blind as well, for they have no dots in their eyes to see with.
The Tower at the Edge of the World Page 3
