The Magus, A Revised Version (49 page)

I glanced from Conchis to Julie and back; but neither of them showed any sign of noticing the oddness of this weaving of the past and the alleged present. I pressed against her foot. She returned the touch, but then moved her foot away. The story caught her, she was not to be distracted.

‘
I asked at once if a doctor had ever seen him. Nygaard shook his head, as if his opinion of doctors, at least in this case, was not very high. I reminded him that I was a doctor myself. After a silence he said,
“
I think we are all insane here.
”
He got up then and went out. However, it was only to return a few minutes later. He had fetched a small sack. He shook its contents out on my camp-bed. I saw a litter of rounded stones and flints, of shards of primitive pottery with bands of incised ornament, and I knew I was looking at a collection of Stone Age articles. I asked him where he had found them. He said, at Seidevarre. And he then explained that the farm took its name from the point of land. That Seidevarre was a Lapp name, and meant
“
hill of the holy stone
”
, the dolmen. The spit had once been a holy place for the Polmak Lapps, who combine a fisher culture with the reindeer-herding one. But even they had only superseded far earlier cultures.

‘
Originally the farm had been no more than a summer
dacha,
a hunting and fishing lodge, built by his father
–
an eccentric priest, who by a fortunate marriage had got enough money to indulge his multiple interests. A fierce old Lutheran pastor in one aspect. An upholder of the traditional Norwegian ways of rural life in another. A natural historian and scholar of some local eminence. And a fanatical lover of hunting and fishing
–
of returning to the wild.
Both his sons had, at least in youth, revolted against his religious side.
Henrik, the elder, had gone to sea, a ship
’
s engineer. Gustav had taken to veterinary work. The father had died, and left almost all his money to the Church. While stayi
ng with Gustav, who had by then
begun to practise in Trondheim, Henrik met Ragna, and married her. I think he went to sea again for a short time, but very soon after his marriage he went through a nervous crisis, gave up his career, and retired to Seidevarre.

‘
All went well for a year or two, but then his behaviour grew stranger and stranger. Finally Ragna wrote Gustav a letter. What it said made him catch the next boat north. He found that for nearly nine months she had managed the farm single-handed
–
what is more, with two babies to look after. He returned briefly to Trondheim to clear up his affairs, and from then on assumed the responsibility of the farm and his brother
’
s family.

‘
He said,
“
I had no choice.
”
I had already suspected it in the strain between them. He was, or had been, in love with Ragna. Now they were locked together more tightly than love can ever lock
–
in a state of total unrequitedness on his side and one of total fidelity on hers.

‘
I wanted to know what form the brother
’
s madness had taken. And then, nodding at the stones, Gustav went back to Seidevarre. To begin with, his brother had taken to going there for short periods to
“
meditate
”
. Then he had become convinced that one day he
–
or at any rate the place
–
was to be visited by God. For twelve years he had lived as a hermit, waiting for this visit.

‘
He never returned to the farm. Barely a hundred words had passed between the brothers those last two years. Ragna never went near him. He was of course dependent for all his needs on them.
Especially since, by a
surcro
î
t
de
malheur,
he was almost blind. Gustav
believed that he no longer fully realized what they did for him. He took it as manna fallen from heaven, without question or human gratitude. I asked Gustav when he had last spoken to his brother -remember we were then at the beginning of August. And he said shamefacedly but with a hopeless shrug,
“
In May.
”

‘
I now found myself more interested in the four people at the farm than in my birds. I looked at Ragna again, and thought I saw in her a tragic dimension. She had fine eyes. Euripidean eyes, as hard and dark as obsidian. I felt sorry for the children too. Brought up, like bacilli in a test-tube, on a culture of such pure Strindbergian melancholia. Never to be able to escape the situation. To have no neighbours within twenty miles. No v
illage within fifty. I realized w
hy Gustav had welcomed my arrival. In a way he had kept his sanity, his sense of perspective.
His
insanity, of course, lay in his doomed love for his sister-in-law.

‘
Like all young men I saw myself as a catalyst, as a solver of situations. And I had my medical training, my
k
nowledge of the still then not ubiquitously familiar gentleman from Vienna. I recognized Henrik
’
s syndrome at once
–
it was a textbook example of anal overtraining. With an obsessive father identification. The whole exacerbated by the solitude in which they lived. It seemed as clear to me as the behaviour of the birds I watched each day. Now that the secret was revealed, Gustav was not unreluctant to talk. And the next evening he told me more, which confirmed my diagnosis.

‘
It seemed Henrik had always loved the sea. This was why he had studied engineering. But gradually he realized that he did not like machinery, and he did not like other men. It began with miso-mechanism. The misanthropism took longer to develop, and his marriage was probably at least partly an attempt to prevent its development. He had always loved space, solitude. That is why he loved the sea, and no doubt why he came to hate being cramped aboard a ship, in the grease and clangour of an engine-room. If he could have sailed round the world alone … But instead he came to live at Seidevarre where the land was like the sea. His children were born. And then his eyesight began to fail. He knocked glasses over at table, stumbled over roots in the forest. His mania began.

‘
Henrik was a Jansenist, he believed in a divine cruelty. In his
system, he was elect, especially chosen to be punished and tormented.
To sweat out his youth in bad ships in filthy climates so that his reward,
his paradise should be snatched out of his hands when he came to enjoy it. He could not see the objective truth, that destiny is hazard: nothing is unjust to all, though many things may be unjust to each. This sense of God
’
s injustice smouldered in him. He refused to go to hospital to have his eyes looked at. He became red-hot for lack of the oil of objectivity, and so his soul both burnt in him and burnt him. He did not go to Seidevarre to meditate. But to hate.

‘
Needless to say, I was eager to have a look at this religious maniac.
And not altogether out of medical curiosity, because I had grown to like Gustav very much. I even tried to explain to him what psychiatry was, but he seemed uninterested. It is best left alone, was all he said.

I promised him still to avoid the promontory. And there the matter was left.

‘
One windy day soon after, I had gone three or four miles south along the river when I heard someone calling my name. It was Gustav in his boat. I stood out from the trees and he rowed towards me. I thought he had been netting grayling, but he had come to find me. He wanted me after all to look at his brother. We were to remain hidden, to stalk and watch Henrik like a bird. Gustav explained that it was the right day. Like many afflicted with near-blindness, his brother had developed very sharp hearing and so the wind was in our favour.

‘
I got into the boat and we rowed to a little beach near the end of the point. Gustav disappeared and then came back. He said Henrik was waiting near the
seide,
the Lapp dolmen. It was safe for us to visit his hut. We made our way through the trees up a small slope, passed over to the southern side, and there, where the trees were thickest, in a depression, was a curious cabin. It had been sunk into the ground, so that only the turf roof showed on three sides. On the fourth, where the ground fell away, there was a door and a small window. A stack of wood lay beside the house. But no other sign of any employment.

‘
Gustav made me go in while he stayed on watch outside. It was very dark. As bare as a monastic cell. A truckle bed. A rough table. A tin with a bundle of candles. The only concession to comfort, an old stove. There was no carpet, no curtain. The lived-in parts of the room were fairly clean. But the corners were full of refuse. Old leaves, dirt, spiders
’
webs. An odour of unwashed clothes. There was one book, on the table by the one small window. A huge black Bible, with enormous print. Beside it, a magnifying glass. Pools of candle-wax.

‘
I lit one of the candles to look at the ceiling. Five or six beams that supported the roof had been scraped pale and along them had been carved two long brown-lettered texts from the Bible. They were in Norwegian, of course, but I noted down the references. And on a cross-beam facing the door there was another sentence in Norwegian.

‘
When I came out into the sunlight again I asked Gustav what the Norwegian sentence meant. He said
“
Henrik Nygaard, cursed by
God, wrote us in his own blood in the year 1912.
”
That was ten years before. Now I will read you the other two texts he had cut and then stained in with blood.
’

Conchis opened the book beside him.

‘
One was from Exodus:
They encamped in the edge of the wilderness.
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a
pillar
off
re.
The other was an echo of the same text in the Apocrypha.
Here. From Esdras:
I gave you light in a pillar of fire, yet have you for
gotten me, saith the Lord.

‘
These texts reminded me of Montaigne. You know he had forty-two proverbs and quotations painted across the beams of his study roof. But there was none of the sanity of Montaigne in Henrik. More the intensity of Pascal
’
s famous
M
é
morial
–
those two crucial hours in his life that he could afterwards describe only by one word:
feu.
Sometimes rooms seem to imbibe the spirit of the people who have lived in them
–
think of Savonarola
’
s cell in Florence. And this was such a place. One did not have to know the occupant
’
s past. The suffering, the agony, the mental sickness were as palpable as tumours.

‘
I left the cabin and we went cautiously towards the
setde.
It came in sight through the trees. It was not a true dolmen, but simply a tall boulder that wind and frost had weathered into a picturesque shape. Gustav pointed. Some fifty yards away, on the far side of a clump of birches, hidden from the
seide,
stood a man. I focused my glasses on him. He was taller than Gustav, a thin man with rough-cut dark-grey hair and beard and an aquiline nose. He turned by chance and faced us and I had a full view of his gaunt face. What surprised me was its fierceness. A severity that was almost savagery. I bad never seen a face that expressed such violent determination never to compromise, never to deviate. Never to smile. And what eyes! They were slightly exophthalmic, of the most startling cold blue. Beyond any doubt, insane eyes. Even at fifty yards I could see that. He wore an old indigo Lapp smock with faded red braid round its edges. Dark trousers and heavy snout-ended Lapp boots. And in his hand he held a staff.

‘
I watched this rare specimen of humanity for some time. I had expected to see some furtive creature, someone who mumbled to himself as he crept through the trees. Not this fierce blinded hawk of a man. Gustav nudged my arm ag
ain. The nephew appeared by the
seide
with a bucket and the milk-can. He put them down, picked up another empty bucket that must have been set there by Henrik, looked round, and then cried something in Norwegian. Not very loud. He evidently knew where his father was, for he faced the clump of birches. Then he disappeared back through the trees. After five minutes Henrik began to walk up towards the
seide.
Quite confidently, but feeling his way with the end of the staff. He picked up the bucket and can, placing the staff under his arm, and then started back along the familiar path to his cabin. The path brought him within twenty yards of the birch-scrub behind which we were standing. Just as he passed us I heard high overhead one of the frequent sounds of the river, a very beautiful one, like the calling of Tutankhamen
’
s trumpets. The flight cry of a black-throated diver. Henrik stopped, although the sound must have been as banal to him as the wind in the trees. He stood there, his face turned up towards the sky. Without emotion, without despair. But listening, waiting, as if it might be the first notes of the herald angels telling him the great visit was near.