The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (15 page)

He hears the salute from the shore, a feeble splutter of the colony cannon and voices that cry hurrah. He hears the anchor cast, the rope run over the side. He feels the vessel turn and settle. Boots trample back and forth on the deck above him. The unloading commences. The rowing boat is swung out and gently buffets the side of the vessel. He hears Roselil low at the top of her lungs. The colony bell tolls without pause.

He lies on his back on the bunk. He has folded his hands. He looks up at the ceiling. This cabin, this ship, is still Danish ground. Invisible threads run all the way back from here to Denmark, and further still, to the home of his childhood. As yet he remains unreleased. There is still a chain. But once he steps ashore it will be broken and he will be free.

The Assumption (15 August 1793)

Falck has ascended to a cliff top south of the colony and stands looking out across the sea. It is early morning. All night the fog has had its clammy arms and pasty fingers far inside the fords, but now sudden lagoons of sunlight and clear sky appear, magnificent visions emerge only to vanish again, as surprising as illusions.

He stands with his telescope directed towards a point in the south where he has spied a two-masted ship, a brig or a ketch, several nautical miles distant. The fog has slipped from it like a silken cloth. The vessel glints in occasional shafts of light and has plainly found good wind, bursting with vigour, its sails full and taut in the sun, blowing her straight towards him. He sees the sparkle of the bow, he sees figures gather on the deck, then disperse in unknown industry. He sees the wake squirming from the aft, foam fanning out and settling. It is as dreamlike as an appari­tion and it dizzies him. He shifts his stance, so as not to lose footing, and then the ship is gone. He seeks it in the telescope, issues a groan of annoy­ance, sweeps the lens from left to right, field by field, systematically searching back and forth. The ship is gone. He lowers the telescope from his eye and squints towards the banks of fog, blinding white reflections of sun. He stares at the place he believes the ship appeared until his eyes begin to water. But there is no ship. Was it a ship? Or was it an illusion, a wishful invention brought forth by accumulated months of need, the need to see a ship?

His cartographic position is sixty-five degrees and twenty-four minutes north, fifty-two degrees and fifty-four minutes west. By his own calculations and enquiries with various ship's captains he has arrived at this position and has recorded it in his diary. An intersection of two imag­inary lines, a cross, the furthest outpost of his longings. It is this place close to the colony that affords the best views of ships arriving from the south.

Below him, restless waves wash on to a stony beach and retreat, wash up and retreat. Gusts of wind nudge gently at his back. To his right eye, the left seeing only a milky haze following a gunpowder accident some years before, he puts the telescope, a dented, tarnished ship's telescope purchased from an English whaler. By means of the telescope what is distant may be brought near or vice-versa, and in this out-of-the-way place one or the other is generally required. The lens is loose. He has tried to fasten it to the casing with putty, but without success. Therefore it works satisfactorily only when viewing the world from above, which is another reason why he has clambered his way up to the cliff.

The colony is a quarter Danish mile from the vantage point. One hour of scrambling, groaning and sweating across the rocks, hiking across gurgling stretches of bog. Here he has spent more than half the ten years for which he signed up when he was appointed to his living by the Missionskollegium. He is thirty-seven years old, a man of middle age, as old as his own father.

Lier, Akerhus diocese, Saturday,

this twenty-eighth day of August 1791

My dear son, Morten. It is with sadness that I must inform you that the Good Lord called upon your dearest mother this night and took her unto Him. Your old father is now quite alone on this Earth, as both your sister and your self are gone from the country.

He shivers in the damp, mild gusts that come sweeping over the fell to enter in through the stitches of his threadbare clothing. He stabs his tongue against a front tooth that will soon yield to scurvy. His intestines are in an uproar. He senses the ominous ripple of diarrhoea in the bowel, the quivering alarm of the sphincter. His feet are soaked in bog water from the walk up. The sensation is a pleasant one, taking the edge off the bodily infirmities that yell all at once as a reminder of his mortality. The tepid water squelches between his toes as he wriggles them inside his leaking, oil-tanned boots. The sense of giving oneself up to decay, of dissolving away, puts his thoughts at rest. To abandon oneself to the Lord, to dissolve like a crystal of sugar in the great cosmos. He raises the telescope again, puts it to his good eye and gazes out into the fog.

Where is the ship?

Sukkertoppen, this fifth day of May 1792

Most esteemed Dr Rantzau,

Having during these past years made unsuccessful application to the Trade with a view to securing more comfortable quarters of residence and premises for Service, and since now it has become impossible for me to endure dwelling any longer in this damp and cramped chamber, and therefore to continue to carry out the duties of my position, I am compelled to request that a successor to said position be secured this coming year, as in the absence of such I shall be compelled to leave it vacant. The esteemed Doctor will I trust take into account that five years of existence in such a chamber may outweigh further years in more adequate lodging and with such other comforts as many of my fellow ministers most surely enjoy. Further to justify this humble request is the matter that I have suffered the anguish of scurvy not only all this winter but also and unusually all the summer before, and without respite. And now my teeth fall one by one from my mouth, causing me much difficulty to chew the hard bread available to us in provision.

Your humble servant,

Morten Falck

What he expects of this year's ship, if indeed a ship will come at all this year, are numerous matters, firstly including that he be summoned home by the Missionskollegium with the blessings of the most esteemed professor Rantzau, and that revocation be formally executed with all necessary documents and signatures. He sent his request by last year's ship, prompted then by an accumulation of everyday ills in the way of sickness and fatigue. Now it may rescue him from chains and process and the shadows of the misdeeds he unwittingly has committed in this place.

And then there is the widow.

He does not wish to think of the widow.

Yet he senses that the widow thinks of him.

Is he now bound to her for all time? Will she ever release him?

These six years of misfortune and adversity have conspired against him and made him melancholy and cantankerous, they have ruined his digestion, relieved him of half his teeth and the sight of his left eye, and tested his faith. Falck yearns for home.

Home, he thinks to himself, defined as some place, no matter which, as long as it is not here. Preferably on the other side of the Norwegian Sea. A place where trees grow and may be touched, with woods one may enter and leave again. The longing for woodland in this treeless land­scape is immense, like the hankering for a fresh apple or the feeling of squashing a strawberry against the palate, the pealing of church bells on a Sunday morning, or the willow warbler, whose song sounds like a fluttering leaf. He longs for a place with doors that may be closed, where walls keep out draughts and damp, a place where sunlight slants down upon the floor. And when, as now, he allows himself to indulge in such futile diversions as to consider the future, his tongue stabbing at the wobbling tooth in his mouth, he imagines securing a living in a small and inconsequential parish in some cosy corner of Denmark, or else in the place from which he hails, in the parish of Lier, the diocese of Akerhus, some few hours by the mail coach from Christiania. His father lives yet, at least until the ship comes with word from home. Kirstine is still a pastor's wife in Nakskov. But his sister has appeared before him some months previously in a procession of the dead, a vision that cut into his heart, but which also made him joyful. She is blessed now, he thinks to himself. He wants to go home to see her grave, and his mother's in Lier. He wants to go home to a living in his native parts, a cosy parsonage nestled among woods and undulating hills, pastures divided by dry stone walls, a view of the ford, a boat dragged up on the shore, trout nets drying in the sun, a parlour with a wife and children, three boys who honour him and a girl who loves him, offspring and descendants who will remember him without shame.

The tooth feels looser now. He tries to leave it be, but the pleasure of pestering it with the tip of his tongue is too great.

My dear brother Morten,

Since the day of Christmas Eve here at Nakskov the air has been heavy and unhealthy with fog, and hardly a day with any glimpse of sun. It accords ill with our own climate in Lier, where almost the whole time the air was clear, there was sunlight and pleasant weather. As for myself, we enjoy here the necessities of life and more, as indeed your own eyes have seen, yet I do, and shall always, long for Lier, our good father and blessed mother, the churchyard with the pretty graves of our siblings. I found greater pleasure in our modest circumstances there than in this vainglorious and self-righteous town in which I find not the slightest enjoyment and still after seven full years of marriage do not feel at home. May God mind my tongue!

Dear Morten, I ask myself often if we shall ever again see our childhood home and our father. Will I see you, beloved brother?

A ship may be laden with the future, and it may be laden with the past, mail decreeing this or another action, notifications of the past year's events at home, condensed into half an hour of feverish reading.

Besides release from his living, he hopes for a replacement, a priest who perhaps at this very moment stands and spies towards the land as he did himself six years before. A new man in the appointment would alleviate his predicament.

Journal for this fifth day of March 1791:

Greenland is the night that separated the evening when I retired to sleep cheerful and young, from the morn when I awoke a palsied old man.

Falck moves his lips in prayer for the ship, imploring his sighting to be real and not an illusion. He prays for its crew, that they may be protected from all manner of disaster, for the letter that is to release him from this confinement, for the good colleague who is to succeed him, that he may have been spared descent into tantrum and sickness or the urge to commit himself to the sea. He prays for himself by praying for others – or does the opposite hold? – for his father, his sister, for the natives of this land, christened or heathen, for all the circumstances of life over which he has been compelled to accept he has not the slightest influence. He presses the telescope to his eye once more, stabs at the tooth with his tongue, tightens his sphincter against renewed onslaught.
Let not Thine, but mine be done
. No, the opposite! He stares into the fog. No ship.
Amen!
A gust of wind carries with it a haze that collects and condenses. It rains. The skerries vanish from sight and with them the purpose of standing here to stare.

He snaps the telescope shut and returns it to his pocket. He glares angrily at the sea, the leaden bulk of water merging with the lighter nuance of fog, the two elements that together comprise the damp climate he has now inhaled for six years. His coat grows heavy with rain. The cold spreads down his neck and out into his shoulders. He hears the rain as it falls. A grey patter. His hearing, at least, is intact. He takes off his hat, strikes it against his thigh, straightens his hairpiece and settles the hat once more upon his head.

I ought to go home.

Go, my legs!

But his legs do not obey. He remains standing, increasingly wet, on the dismal, rain-soaked cliffs. There is also the problem of his bowels. If he begins to walk after standing still for so long, a chain reaction of nervous impulses will shoot through his organism into the core of his latent peristaltic unease. The musculature of the colon is unamenable to argument, it senses any conspiracy and its revenge is harsh and prompt.

Falck stands immovable in the wind and rain. Once, he made a deci­sion that led him to this cliff. When was it? he asks himself. Why did he do so? Is there forgiveness for the harm one causes the self?

On the outskirts of the colony he passes by the huts of the natives, constructions of peat, clay, shale, driftwood and whalebone, as well as unhewn and broken planks discarded by the Trade. There are perhaps a dozen such dwellings, which seem almost to have emerged from the ground like molehills. Jagged scraps of discarded glass have been pressed into the recesses made for windows and let in a measure of light. But the homes are abandoned, the paths dug out between them fallen into decay, hides and joists removed from the roofs. The rain falls directly down into them, washing away through openings and depositing earthy sediment on the slopes down to the ford. The dampness envelops these former homes with cold and stagnant odours, reminding him of those who lived here and the life they led, a stench of heathens, their filled urine tubs, their lice-infested beds, their always-simmering pots. The smells arouse Falck's nostrils, bringing to his mind fresh meat and naked, sweat-glistening bodies, improprieties shamelessly perpetrated in the semi-darkness, libidinous moans in the nooks and crannies. His bowels contract, he presses a hand to his stomach, then breaks suddenly into a canter, halts, canters off again. Presently it subsides. A cold sweat is upon his brow. He wipes it away with his hand and assumes a gait more suitable for clergy.

Only from one of the peat dwellings, the one closest to the colony, does smoke still rise. Pale faces of children at the window holes. He puts on a smile and waves awkwardly. They stare back solemnly, perhaps they are afraid, or even hateful? Who knows what these people think or feel?

He certainly does not. He will go in to them later in the day with his cate­chist, to preach Christian love and propriety, freedom through salvation, the usual lesson. He hopes it may re-establish some semblance of day-to­day normality.

Further on, his path takes him past a cluster of tents in which there is more life. More heathens. They have come from the south in boats fully laden. A sure sign the ship is indeed on its way. Smoke rises up from the holes in the top and coils into the fog. The tent openings are drawn aside: he glimpses people in the murky interiors. They are clad in a strange jumble of hide and colourful Danish linen, which they have bartered from the employees of the colony or ships' crews. He cannot explain it, but their presence makes him feel rather intimidated, the unfathomable darkness they represent, their intimacy with death and unworried aspect on life. He never crawls inside one of the peat dwellings without first making the sign of the cross and pronouncing the Lord's Prayer. And these newcomers are even more foreign and disconcerting than those who permanently inhabit the colony.