The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (35 page)

Stop this atrocity!

Out of the corner of his eye, Bjerg sees a dark figure come striding up to him. Falck. The pastor puts out his hand.

Give me the whip.

Mr Falck, says Kragstedt. I must request you to step back. You are in the way.

Falck darts forward and snatches the whip from Bjerg's hand. Enough! he says. The blame is yours for this man's error.

Bjerg suddenly feels weak. He stands with his arms at his sides.

The prisoner sings:
O carnal desire! Thou tempting, consuming and treacherous fire.

Give back the whip, Mr Falck, says Kragstedt. Or I shall make sure you receive a taste of it yourself.

Falck stares at him. Come and take it, costermonger, if you are man enough.

I warn you, Magister. You are interfering in the execution of a sentence sanctioned by the king.

And you are a poor husband, Falck rejoins, leaving your wife without protection when you are away.

Priest, you are plainly drunk.

Then fare thee, farewell!

Rather drunk than sober, if it is to be on the Trader's conditions.

Hammer approaches the priest. Falck sees him and steps back. I will not give you the whip, smith.

That will not be necessary, says Hammer. He walks up and takes it from him, then hands it back to Bjerg.

I yearn for the solace from sorrows and harm, of Abraham's arm.

Eleven!

By the time the twenty lashes have been delivered, the prisoner has ceased to sing. He breathes irregularly and with a choked sound, and hangs limply in the ropes. Blood from the wounds in his back trickles into the mud. The people disperse.

In the night, Bjerg hears hymns sung from the whipping post. They peter out before sunrise. Yet the silence is quite as unbearable as the song. He rises from his bed and goes there.

Here, he says. Drink this.

Didrik empties the flask Bjerg holds to his mouth.

He goes home again, but cannot sleep. He returns to the man and sits down in the rain. He feels he is closer to Rosine by sitting with her husband. He rattles on about the journey, his falling in love and what he felt in the church when everyone turned against him.

At six o'clock the fire-watcher comes by. He bends down over the prisoner, emits a grunt of dissatisfaction and informs Bjerg that the delinquent has expired.

Rasmus Bjerg walks home. He lies on his bed and stares up at the ceiling.

The Fifth Commandment

An Expulsion (Autumn–Winter 1788)

The Fifth Commandment, as it is most plainly to be taught by a father to his family:

‘Thou shalt not kill.'

What does this imply?

Answer: That we should fear and love God, so that we may not hurt or afflict our neighbour in his body; but we should help and further him when he is in bodily need.

Haldora Kragstedt sees a woman in the large mirror of her bedchamber. She studies her profile, how she turns to the left, turns to the right, smoothes her hands over her gown, and she feels a tinge of nausea, acidic fluids that make her insides seethe and gurgle. Somewhere within her, in the contorted recesses of her female body, beneath the corsets and the physical exterior, the bulging abdomen and the extravagant flourish of pubic hair, the smith sits moping. She sees him, curled up and sleeping. He is inside her; it is not some feverish dream. He is real. He has entered her. Now he will not go away again. A whole life together with the smith, she thinks, the smith feeding from my breasts, the smith lying in my bed, seated at my table. To kiss the smith goodnight every evening for twenty years. There must be something to be done.

She has experimented with the laudanum she receives from her husband so that she might sleep and gain colour, though in small doses, so as not to become addicted. She downed the flacon in one gulp and slept like a log for a night and half a day. The smith sits there yet. She applied the substance locally, squirting it into her vagina, a difficult manoeuvre and moreover utterly without effect. Now she has ceased to take the medicine, which has triggered a rather promising bout of diarrhoea and a cheering sensation of being encased in pain from top to toe, as if she were wearing a heavy coat of chain mail. But the smith remains seated. He takes nourishment from her and grows. Still he sits, curled up, his cheek resting on his knees, in the deepest sleep. But soon he will begin to move. He will stretch out his legs, extend his arms and step into char­acter. The thought of it is unbearable. She has tried to incite Kragstedt to brutality; she has flung herself over the table and hurled filthy obscen­ities at him, with her bare, shining arse in his face, only for him to gape incredulously from within a fog of distraction.

Whatever is the matter, my dear? he enquires. Is it the impending months of darkness? Are you bored? Desist, you make me shameful. Stand up, arrange your clothing. The maid might come in at any moment.

She glares at him in fury. He pats her cheek. She says something about his manliness, or lack of it. He smiles absently, bent over his ledger. She smashes porcelain. He drums his fingers and looks out of the window. I think, he says, that if we establish a whalers' guild at the old colony the catch would be most lucrative for the district. What do you think, my darling? I have already spoken to a number of skippers from Hol ­steinsborg and they agree with me. Have you now taken up handicraft? Well, that is certainly a sensible way to while away the winter.

She finds her knitting needles, takes a selection of various lengths and thicknesses with her to the privy and blindly jabs them up inside her. She detests touching herself – the smell, the sticky fluids of her body – but she must. She inserts a needle, more carefully now, feeling for the soft, elastic bung that is uppermost, then thrusting sharply. She screams with pain, then bites her lip and looks down. There is some blood, a few small drops running down the implement. She cries with joy. That evening a further three clear, red spots on the towel. In the morning the bleeding has stopped. The smith remains seated. He is utterly secure. He grows.

She has considered the possibility of confiding in her husband, but realizes it would lead to changes in their life together whose magnitude she cannot imagine and does not even care to address. Either Kragstedt would do something about it and have the smith, the child's father, punished, thereby making the matter common knowledge, not just in the colony, but elsewhere too, among those at home, family and friends, indeed almost anyone. Her humiliation would be his defamation. They would never be able to return home again. Or else, and rather more prob­ably, he would do nothing, the consequences of which would be less dramatic, but quite as unbearable within their marriage. And besides, she would then not be able to do what she intends to do now.

She goes to the source himself, to the smith, so that he might expel the smith, with a glowing hot chisel, for instance, or whatever his instru­ments might be called.

He stares at her. And the child is mine?

She goes through the workshop like a fury, finding sharp implements that seem suitable. He follows her and removes them from her hands.

Whose would it be otherwise?

The Trader's? He is your husband, after all. And it feels like yet another assault that he, a man who ought to be led to the gallows, should have the nerve to speak so confidentially to her, so sensibly and reprovingly.

She finds an iron rod of one ell's length and holds it up in front of him, waves it about in the air. This, she says, with an angry smile.

He takes it from her and puts it down on the pile. He sighs. Madame Kragstedt, what you are asking me to do, I cannot. I am no barber surgeon and I am no quack or abortionist either. If the poor child got in there, then it must surely in the name of Jesus be allowed to be born.

Never! I should rather swallow a spoon of gunpowder and a burning taper.

It would hardly become you well, Madame.

Then take me. He is hereby permitted to do with me as he did before.

The smith looks upon her with pity. Do not speak like a whore, Madame Kragstedt. It does not become the lady.

What is the matter with him? He sounds like his postil has gone to his head, or perhaps he has succumbed to the prophetic reveries that flourish in the district?

Please be so kind as to leave the workshop, Madame.

Is there nothing he can do? He is the one who got me into this pre ­dicament!

He stares at her. He exudes repugnance and disgust, as though she had brought a foul smell into his workshop. Then he says: Charcoal is said to be a means against unwanted circumstances, though you never heard it from me, Madame.

The door slams shut like a peal of thunder as she leaves.

She eats charcoal, munches a lump of it as though it were an apple. It tastes of salt, stings the tongue and burns in her throat. She sits down to wait for the effect. It occurs in the evening; she becomes dreadfully ill. She bends over the toilet and opens her mouth and her vomit comes out, a thick green plume. She falls to her knees and convulses. She puts her cheek to the seat and feels her body become limp and devoid of feeling. She drifts away. Kragstedt must have found her lying on the floor, or perhaps it is one of the colony crew. She rocks in his arms when she wakes. They are on their way home. He tells her that she must no longer be compelled to use the crew's privy, it is a cold and despicable place. I shall have one built for you behind the house. She lies in bed for several weeks, trembling with stomach cramps, wrenching tar and bloody green gall from the knot of her insides into the white enamel washbasin. She sees how her skin becomes yellowed, retreats from her fingernails and tightens over her bones, and she thinks that if I do not die, then
it
, at least, must surely perish. But it does not perish. And she does not die. They survive together. The smith is rooted within her. He will not leave her, at least not yet. He seems to be the only part of her to thrive.

The young native girl tends to her while she is confined. Sofie, their maid, refers to her as her sister, though they would seem not to be related at all, and despite the fact that she still seems to care little for her. Haldora cannot see the reason in it. The girl looks after her personal needs and spends most of her time with her in the bedchamber. Late in the evenings, however, she leaves and returns home, to wherever that may be. Sofie says she has a child to take care of, and that she hails from somewhere in the outlying district where she has experienced terrible things. Now she has come here to become a good Christian. She attends the priest and receives instruction from him. Sofie inserts a suggestive pause at this point and Haldora wonders if there might be anything inappropriate about the relationship between Falck and the girl. She feels revolted by the thought of a native together with a white man, as though it were a kind of sodomy. But of course it would not be the first time such a thing occurred. Perhaps she will ask him about it at some future opportunity.

From early until late the girl is at her side. Haldora speaks to her; she finds comfort in confiding in this unwitting and savage individual, who presumably does not understand a word of what she tells her. At any rate she utters not a peep. She gives her some of her clothes, a shift, some stockings, a pair of shoes. They lie together in the bed; they hold each other tight and it soothes her to feel the warmth of another human being who is not her husband and not the smith. Sometimes they fall asleep and wake with Kragstedt standing in the door, staring at them with a question mark on his brow.

She seems like good company, the little native pet I found you, he says.

Haldora Kragstedt withers away during the summer and autumn, but her belly swells. She feels the smith begin to move within her, at first a bubbling sensation in the intestines, then movements more distinct and abrupt. The girl puts her ear to her abdomen, her eyes vacant as she listens. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, she says. She presses her hands to the Madame's belly, burrowing her fingers into the flesh, bundling the smith back and forth. Then she holds up her thumb and index finger and shows Haldora how big she thinks the child to be.

Child, go away! says Haldora and makes a downward scooping movement with her hands.

The girl shakes her head. She smiles. No, no, child not go away! Child ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum!

I should never have taught you Danish, Haldora says.

You didn't, says the girl. The Missionary Oxbøl did.

Some weeks after Morten Falck has returned home from his long autumn trip, she writes him a note and sends the girl over with it.

The priest appears from out of the snowstorm, tired and coughing after his visitation, a detailed and lengthy account of which is soon forthcoming.

It sounds like the Magister has had some adventure, she says.

I erred, he says. The Lord would have it that I erred. A poor man lost his life because of my error. It is no easy matter with which to come to terms. I incline to think I was guilty of arrogance. Now I have received my punishment and bow my head in humility. He doubles up in a fit of coughs.

She thinks that she at least is not alone in pangs of conscience. She heard the screams of the man they punished. She felt it was she who screamed. She heard the lashing of the whip. It was she on the receiving end. She felt the sticky tongues of the instrument tear the skin from her back. Bound to a pole, she thinks to herself, with one's shirt ripped to shreds and all the body's most intimate functions placed on display. This is how it feels to be involuntarily fertile.

Madame's husband tells me you have been unwell and melancholy for some time, says the priest.

She has risen from her bed to receive him in the parlour. They sit at the dining table, he on the bench, she in a leather-upholstered chair, a blanket wrapped around her, her robe gathered in makeshift manner like a dressing gown. The chambermaid comes in with a jug of ale and pours two glasses. Madame Kragstedt notes that she exchanges glances with the priest, and that he smiles and nods to her.

This is not easy, she says.

No, indeed, he muses out loud, and then sighs. What is not easy, Madame Kragstedt?

To tell the Magister of my troubles.

Hm, I see. He sips his ale and watches the girl as she leaves.

I know not where to find strength to tell of them, Mr Falck.

Are you ill? he asks. You do not look well, Madame Kragstedt.

No, I am not ill. Unfortunately. I wish I was.

Do not say that. Good health is a blessing that may be swiftly removed from us. He gets to his feet and wanders about the room, studies a picture on the wall, examines the grandfather clock, pulls the curtain aside and looks out of the window. He sighs again, heavily.

The Magister received instruction in the medical sciences when he was a student, did he not?

Yes, a little, but no more than that. I am familiar with the human anatomy, both the female and the male.

Have you experience in surgery, Magister?

Some. Not much. He sits down again at the table. He looks at her. What sort of surgery do you have in mind, Madame?

The sort that removes something unwanted, she says.

The priest falls silent. He looks rather pasty, she thinks. And seems not to be in the slightest bit interested in her problems.

I have removed tumours, he says, some as big as cauliflowers. But the patients were already dead, you understand. The procedures were dissec­tions, so I am not sure they would count.

She closes the gate on her secret, abandons the idea of involving him in it. She sits with her elbow resting on the armrest, forehead cupped in her hand. Her hair hangs down over her shoulders. She feels her tears trickle down her cheeks, tiny rivulets. She takes out a handkerchief and blows her nose.

All at once the priest becomes aware of her distress. He comes over, kneels at her chair and takes her hand in his.

Madame Kragstedt? Oh, dear.

Yes, she says, and breaks into laughter.

What on earth is the matter?

I have got myself into trouble, she sobs. I haven't a clue what to do about it.

He draws up a chair and sits down, still holding her hand. Tell me.

It's terrible.

You cannot shock me, he says.

Are you certain?

Try me! He sounds like he is full of expectation.

It happened when you were away on your trip this spring, she says, and my husband was in Holsteinsborg.