The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (4 page)

But what do these women do about their own lust? he wonders. Or rather, he knows. They go to church with it. To the priest. To me. And therefore it is important for me to be one to whom nothing in this life remains unknown. That is why I am here. He finds a measure of comfort in the thought.

The indecencies occur not only at the ramparts but across most of the city. The watchmen earn good skillings by turning a blind eye when these encounters between vendors and customers take place with all their repet­itive predictability. Toothless hags sell themselves for a few coins and will do anything for any gentleman who cares to beckon.

There would seem to be no lower limit to the age of a whore. He sees men of middle years standing back against a wall in a yard, while small, pink tongues flutter about them in the dark. The child prostitutes are often fit to drop and pale with fatigue. They entice their customer with exaggerated gestures, just as their procurers have taught them, but which appear grotesquely false to any other than he who genuinely wishes them to be sincere, the fine gentleman with a clean conscience. Most likely they consume greater quantities of semen than proper food during the course of a day. The watchmen chase them away with their maces, and yet they soon return, like the rats. It happens regularly that the watchman finds a child who is barely alive, or else dead. In these instances, they are put onto a cart and driven away. Morten does not know what becomes of them. Their bodies do not appear in the faculty vaults, for which he is grateful. His enquiring mind has its limits. Once he asked a watchman about it, only to be threatened with detention should he not keep his curiosity to himself.

He tires of spying in gateways and courtyards and along the rampart. He puts it behind him. It no longer feels important. He is twenty-eight years old. Miss Schultz will soon be sixteen. The Crown Prince, Frederik, assumes the regency and is driven about the town in an open carriage to be hailed. His father, the king, retreats into his madness, which is not of a tyrannical character in the manner of his forebear's megalomania, but quieter and more unassuming. Morten and the young mistress exchange pleasantries beneath the sycamore, sometimes being permitted to con ­verse a while before Madame Schultz appears in the doorway to call her in. He imagines, purely for the sake of experiment, the young lady bent over the bench, her dress drawn up and corset snatched apart, her arse beaming against his thrusting loin, his member vanishing into the hirsute and rankly smelling darkness between her buttocks. But the scenario does not appeal to him and is practically impossible to establish, a fact that is only to his relief. Perhaps I am in love, he thinks to himself.

He strolls in Kongens Have, a haven of grassy lawns, trees and foun­tains to which the general public enjoy restricted access. Miss Schultz and her two sisters accompany him with their mother's permission. On the gravel, midway along the wide central axis, they stand and look towards Christian IV's picturesque Renaissance palace. A succession of fountains spurt and sparkle, one behind the other. The trees are pruned and topped off. They resemble green toadstools whose stalk-like trunks have been placed with such monotonous precision that one feels gripped by some disorder of perspective. But the dizziness he feels is perhaps on account of other circumstances, such as the young ladies in his company now seating themselves on the green of the lawn. Their dresses are spread about them; they are like daisies descended from above to take up their places in the grass. He glimpses the toe of a shoe. Morten halts a few paces away. To demonstrate tact, he averts his gaze. He knows why Madame Schultz has allowed him to be out with his daughters. It is not because he is a suitor, for in her eyes he is not, nor even in his own. It is because he is taken to be a harmless and reliable student of divinity, and because the Madame clearly trusts in her fellow human beings, and in him in particular.

The splash of the fountains feels comforting now. A cool dampness is felt to drift across the lawns. A girder of rainbow appears above the neatly trimmed grass and dwindles among the topiary of the trees. He wipes his brow with a handkerchief, which he returns to the pocket of his waistcoat. Shoes crunch the gravel, a walking cane, a slim young gentle ­man clad in a green tailcoat and chalk-white stockings passes by in the company of a lady, by no means entirely young, whose lower body and legs are enclosed within a birdcage of crinoline, for which reason one cannot help but think first and foremost precisely of her lower body and legs. Her dress ruffles about her, the playful breeze toys with the pleated trim that has absorbed the dark colour of chlorophyll from the grass across which it has been drawn. She smiles while looking straight ahead with a firm expression that appears to Morten to be false or melodra­matic, but which nevertheless has prompted her gentleman to assume a rather fawning posture. The white-stockinged man seems almost to be silently begging for some favour. Miss Schultz and her sisters have wind of the drama. Breathlessly they watch the couple and take in the scene. Each time the gentleman comes up alongside her, the lady increases her pace, yet when he lags behind she walks more slowly until he catches up with her again.

Once they are out of earshot, the three girls begin to twitter. They debate and argue as to the nature of the relationship between the young gentleman and the more mature lady. Morten can tell as he listens to them that they are by no means unused to reading novels of chivalric romance. He wonders if he should lend them his
Moll Flanders
, which he read in the winter. He considers it might shake them up a bit.

What opinion has the student? says Abelone Schultz. I see he stands there smiling, as if in possession of better knowledge.

Whatever I might imagine of the relationship between these people, I shall wisely keep it to myself.

They tease him and call him Magister Stick-in-the-Mud. But when they walk on, Abelone puts her arm in his.

A finery stall in Østergade sells intimate garments and perfumes for ladies. He purchases two flacons, one of lavender, the other of bergamot, and presents them to the maid of the printer's house with a message that they are a gift to Miss Schultz. It is her sixteenth birthday. He has composed a brief letter and attached it to the parcel:
Dear Miss Schultz, please accept this humble gift and may it remind you of the most obedient of all your admirers,
id est stud. theol
Morten Falck
.

The following day the gift is returned by the printer's maid. He puts it aside. He has allowed himself to be carried away. He has revealed his intentions. The time is unripe. He must be patient. He regrets nothing. Now she knows, and the family Schultz know, where he stands. It feels liberating. It is as though he has kissed her, then passed his hand over her hip.

He watches the door of the printer's home. Abelone is in hiding, but her sisters are there, and Madame Schultz, too, spends time in the court­yard, fussing and yet in good humour. A person of cheerful disposition. He likes her and he is certain she is not unkindly disposed towards him. The two younger sisters conspicuously refrain from looking up at his window, where he sits reading in the window seat. It is plain from the manner in which they ignore him that they are keenly aware of his presence.

Morten's mother writes to him often from Lier. She, too, uses his former name, Morten Pedersen, until, in an angry letter, he instructs her to employ his new one. She does so. His father, however, continues to refer to him as
stud. theol. Pedersen
, and it is in this name, too, that he receives letters from the Procurator Gill. Yet it is his mother who writes most, once a week at least. She must spend considerable sums on the postage, both to himself and to Kirstine in Nakskov. She names with caution one or another girl who now has been confirmed or has reached a certain age, who is of sound constitution, diligent and meticulous, an obedient daughter to her parents, of good moral standing, etc. She keeps a careful eye on the parishes whose incumbents are of poor health and whose vacant living he might seek once he has become ordained. Their own pastor is not of advanced years, so the prospects are slight, but he has been kind enough to promise to put in a good word for Morten when the time comes for him to apply for a parish.
Your father is once more of ill health, she writes, and has now lain for two days without rising while com ­plaining of aches and sounds inside his head. Should he write to inform you of his imminent demise, however, take heed that he is as fit as a confirmand, and the numerous ailments of which he inclines to suffer are but imaginary.

The letters darken his mood; they make him itch and give him headaches, and he is consumed by the urge to get drunk or go to a pros­titute. He frequents a drinking establishment with Laust, who has returned after his illness, a spontaneous melancholy that almost did away with him. Now he is descended into the opposite ditch, throwing his money about, hiring carriages and insisting on paying for everything wherever they go, inviting his friends to the Comedy House, where he has rented a box. Morten sits in his velvet-covered seat. The large audi­ence and the lamps cause him to sweat. On the stage the singers stamp about, making fearful grimaces, throwing out their arms and roaring at one another. A classical Italian opera is performed. The audience com ­ments loudly on the action, boos and cries of bravo compete to drown each other out. There is a ceaseless coming and going, a slamming of doors, a scraping of chairs, chatter and the chinking of ale glasses that makes it impossible to follow what is going on. The music rises and falls, someone fires a pistol, a soprano shrieks and falls dead, gunpowder smoke drifts into the orchestra pit, the painted backdrop is hoisted up by a noisy pulley, another descends with a clatter, one hears the stage hands tramping back and forth, groaning and out of breath, the first violin shouting out the time to his orchestra and endeavouring to conduct them with his bow. Morten looks down from his vantage point upon dozens of swelling bosoms. The ladies are powdered white, beauty spots decorate marble cheekbones and the occasional breast. They fan themselves to stave off the heat. The stalls are like a warm and sunny field full of flowers and fluttering butterflies. He has the most recent of his mother's letters in his breast pocket. He thinks to himself that it is a peculiar mingling of worlds. Imagine if my ageing mother were here. He smiles to himself. The world of the theatre must be as distant from his mother's as anything could ever be. He wishes that she could enjoy it, though most likely she would be shocked and would perhaps even faint with fright. She is not the kind of person who can forget who they are and rise above themselves. She is enchained, like almost everyone else.

Afterwards he drives with Laust to a serving house, where they sit and pretend to be fine gentleman until they are ejected and make towards the ramparts, pursued by a trail of prostitutes, who stride along, arm in arm, bawling raucous drinking songs.

Then Laust is gone again. Morten hears rumour that some accident has befallen him, but learns of no details. He writes to his father, a customs officer on Fyn, though without reply. He attends a single per ­formance at the Comedy House, but it is costly and rather dull without the festive Laust to hurl insults or excessively intimate compliments at the ladies, without a box to separate him from the rabble, and he stands alone in the throng of the stalls, unable to hear or see a thing, and thinks of Rousseau and
Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains!
He cannot expel the sentence from his mind. It is as though the philosopher has placed his hand upon his shoulder and wished to speak to him in person.

The winter of 1784–5. The royal city is inundated with farm labourers and lads who have run from the villeinage of the Stavnsbånd to seek their fortunes. January brings strong frost. The hearses are busy, and the corpses that arrive at the vaults beneath the academy are well preserved, delicate almost, unsmelling and as white as snow. After Laust's disap­pearance, Morten has stopped collecting bodies around town, but he earns a small sum from his drawings, which are more detailed than ever before, and some now hang upon the walls of the academy's teaching rooms.

Morten sees the carriages come to the printer's house with young men, who bound up the step to be welcomed inside. Suitors. He is little con ­cerned with the matter. At the eleventh hour he has found interest in his theology studies and spends many hours each day at the university's library. Moreover, he has taken on work teaching small boys a couple of days a week at the Vajsenhus orphanage. Now when he goes to the Procurator Gill on the first weekday of each month it is to bring money to his account, rather than to request a withdrawal, and he receives a receipt as evidence of growing savings. He lives cheaply and sensibly and goes seldom into town. His excursions outside the city gate are made on foot and rarely further than to Valby Bakke, where he sits near Frederiksberg Palace and gazes out across the semicircle of frozen lakes and the rampart, the thoroughfare of Vesterbrogade to his right, and behind the ramparts the steeples and spires and hundreds of smoking chimneys. He has no idea what he might do when his studies are com ­pleted this coming summer. Perhaps he will continue to teach. Perhaps seek a living. But finding a living is difficult, the competition is stiff. And where would he want to go?

Winter. The frost is beneficial insofar as it freezes the city's filth and excrement, making it easier to walk about without becoming soiled in the gutter or bespattered by carriage wheels. The stench of the latrine buckets is less penetrating. On the other hand, a thick and immovable blanket of coal smoke enshrouds the city, and people die by the hundreds from lung disease or else they simply freeze to death. He himself is in good health. He has hardly had a cold since his arrival here and the various epidemics of fever sicknesses have passed by his door. The print room beneath his chamber is kept well heated, for otherwise the ink becomes stiff; and, besides this good fortune, his room is equipped with a small tiled stove, which he may light as need arises. He fetches the coals from the printer's coal bunker and pays a fixed sum each month. Apart from this, he spends much time at the university, which, though not exactly warm, nevertheless maintains a tolerable temperature. For his sake, the cold and the winter may continue. It reminds him of his child­hood and the native place from which he hails and which now more often seems distant to him.