The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (58 page)

The Magister will die of hunger before his first day of journeying comes to an end.

He laughs. Madame Therkelsen, I know you will make sure to provide me with a packed lunch for the road.

She withdraws. He can tell by her posture that he has offended her. She already feels she owns a part of me, he thinks to himself. High time I left.

The journey with the farmer is wet and unpleasant. The cart is open and he sits huddled on the seat beside the driver, who utters not a single syllable. A brisk easterly wind buffets his chest and presses the rain into the small openings of his clothing, which he endeavours to keep closed, drawing his coat around him and pulling down his broad-brimmed hat. In the hills they must climb down and walk, when crossing the wetlands, streams and dubious bridges. Several times they must stand in the rain at a ferrying place and wait to be taken across the ford on a flat-bottomed barge.

They leave Bergen in the final hours of the night and reach their desti­nation, a farmhouse barely visible in the compact darkness, in the early hours of their third day of travel. He has exchanged only the most neces­sary comments with the farmer along the way, but when they arrive and the wife receives her husband with a kiss, he livens up and shows Falck to a room upstairs. He smiles a lot, speaks softly and with hesitation, and avoids Falck's gaze. The wife serves them cold food. She is a comely woman, risible and chatty. She asks her husband about the journey. Did he sell his wares, how much did he get for the pig, was he cheated? He hands her his purse and she counts the coins, sorting them into rigsdalers, marks and skillings, putting foreign coins aside, then sweeping the money into a coffer before closing it. The farmer asks for aquavit; she fetches a dusty bottle and pours three glasses as heavy as lead and resembling thim­bles. They drink. Sweet aquavit, with a bitter taste of almond, and very strong.

Falck senses the warmth return to his body; he becomes animated and tells them about his sea voyage and life among the savages. The wife shudders with rapture. She asks if the savages run about naked and chop off each other's heads; are they to be reckoned as people or are they a sort of animal? She cannot imagine how he could hold prayers for such creatures, let alone christen and confirm them. In her view it amounts to going out into the stables to missionize to the sow, the cows and the colt. What a congregation! She laughs heartily. Once she saw a savage at Bergen. He stood chained in the square and defecated upright like a horse, while rolling his eyes. Such creatures cannot surely be made Christian, she considers. It would be sacrilege.

Falck sleeps until noon the next day. When he gets up he sees that the farm and its fields extend across open land that undulates its way down towards the ford. And he feels he is home, even if he has yet to arrive. The rain persists, but it is not a rain that lashes and penetrates the seams of his garments, rather it is warm, soft and as tangible as silk, a kindly rain. After a brief walk he returns and knocks on the kitchen door.

The wife greets him. The peace of God to you!

Peace of God, he rejoins.

The gentleman must sit himself down and have something to eat.

He devours a plate of rømmegrøt, while she is busy with her work in the kitchen. He sits and watches her, her quick and practised movements, her strong arms. Somewhere in the house he can hear children arguing and laughing.

Where is your husband? he asks.

Gudmind and our eldest boy have gone into the fells to see to the sheep. He won't be home until evening.

He sits on the bench and studies the simple kitchen. The ceiling is low and supported by thick joists. The fire roars in the stove. The heat makes him feel dozy and yet his mind remains quite clear. Behind him, rain patters against the window. They will be soaked, he says.

Oh, they are used to it. Here it rains most days of the year. We thank the Lord for the rain. But the gentleman had better stay until the weather improves. We can't have him catching his death when he crosses the fells. And we've room enough.

He thanks her. In the afternoon he teaches the children, tests their knowledge of the Bible and offers them a short introduction to the natural sciences. He notes that their knowledge of the proximate environment, plants and animals, nature in general, is quite exact, whereas their concep­tions of the wider world are at best medieval.

They laugh when he tells them the Earth is round. We've heard that before, but if it were really round people could only live on top, and the water would run out of the ford, and then we wouldn't be able to sail or fish.

Their comprehension of the scriptures is at once imperturbably conceited and confused. They seem to believe that the stories of the Bible took place in a recent past inside a neighbouring ford, and they refer to the apostles and the prophets as though to recently deceased relatives. The local priest would seem to have quite singular methods of rendering theology relevant to his congregation. Perhaps he should have employed some of the same principles in his own work, he muses, but no, the Eskimo are not easily fooled. They would have seen through him right away. He tells the children about the Holy Land, the life and death of the Saviour. They smile overbearingly. Afterwards they ask him again about Greenland and the savages, whether it is true that they go about naked and simply squat down wherever when they need to defecate, and squirt out their young like fish eggs?

He humours them and they nod, reassured that the world accords with their conception of it. He endeavours to go through the alphabet with them, but only the twelve-year-old girl displays any interest in reading. It is a shame, he tells the mother, for she would learn quickly if she went to school. But the mother does not consider it a good thing for girls to read. She herself can write only her name and yet she is happy. Falck resigns himself to this steadfast adherence to stupidity. He tires of the monotony of their cheerfulness, but nonetheless enjoys his time on the idyllic farm by the ford.

He stays a week. During all this time the sun does not shine once and at no point does he see more of the fells than a few hundred fathoms of their lower slopes. Yet the farmer believes the weather on the whole to be better on the other side, perhaps a week's walking to the east, and offers to take him some miles of the journey. He packs his few belongings, his chest having been sent on by the packet boat, is given cheese and bread by the wife, and bids the children farewell. Their voices ring in his ears as the cart sets out along the road that runs south beside a seemingly endless arm of the ford. When eventually they reach the final village at the head of the ford, he climbs down and says his goodbyes to the farmer.

God bless you, Priest, the man says.

He nods and begins to trudge southwards, where the road soon dwindles into a path that follows the course of a river upstream through a valley.

The hike up the fell is uncomplicated, albeit taxing. A few farms lie scattered upon the esker, poor holdings of steeply sloping land bounded by drystone walls, here and there a flock of sheep. The farmers are at work burning off their fields, keeping the flames in check with long rakes, spreading them over the grass, as though painting fire with long brushes, beating them out wherever they seem on the verge of getting out of hand. The seasoned smell of burning grass settles in his nostrils and a small bubble of recollection bursts inside him, dejection, anxiety and excite­ment in such proportions as he has not felt in twenty years. I was not a happy child, he thinks to himself. I was afraid of dying. This is the first time he has acknowledged the fact. It makes him sorrowful, yet at the same time he feels more at home than ever before. Now I am returned, to these hills and mountains, to this feeling of old. He has not come back in order to be happy, but to be home.

The summery vales are below him, which is to say that he recalls them as such once he is ascended above the treeline, where the wind is as cold as ice. Behind each peak is another; the passes that run between them are sodden and inaccessible, and the wind sweeps right through them. He sticks to the dry slopes, following the empty land between trees and high peaks in order to avoid the freezing wind. His progress is slow, but visibility is good and he makes sure always to have some feature of the landscape by which to keep his bearings, a bend in the ford further back, two peaks in alignment. By the time darkness falls he is still nowhere near the divide. On this first night he sleeps under the open sky beneath a stunted, though long-whiskered, fir tree whose branches reach to the ground. He manages to light a fire and to boil some gruel in a dented pot from a handful of oats he has with him from the farm. He wraps his blanket around him and settles down for the night, as close to the trunk of the tree as he can get. The widow is there. She sits on her haunches by the fire and prods at the embers, causing sparks to fly into the air. What do you want? he asks, not knowing if she can hear him. You are in my head. Are you the expression of some wish or loss? A fear? We were married and you failed me, then I failed you, and now you are dead. So it is. What has happened cannot be changed.

So what do you want, exactly?

But he knows what she wants; it dawns on him now, lying here in this Norwegian wilderness: she wants him back. That may be, he says to himself, drawing the blanket tighter around his body, though quite out of the question. Then he thinks: But she is not real, she is only a spirit or a nightmare, a product of my own making. Does that mean it is
I
who wants
her
back? The thought terrifies him.

He wakes early, shivering from the cold, and rekindles the fire with his blanket wrapped around him. He heats up the gruel from the evening before and feels his body come alive as the warmth of it spreads inside him. He senses the widow's continued presence, a fug of tanned hide, train-oil lamps and urine tubs. The unbearable heat that bore down on him as he crawled into the communal dwelling house, the laughter that erupted all around, the hospitality of the natives and their merciless arro­gance, the way they always descended so relentlessly on his weaknesses. The wind is freezing. He can see that higher up snow is falling, a plume of swirling white coming off the peak like a wagging tail.

He says the Lord's Prayer, gathers his things together and continues on through the valley, which further up becomes a forceable pass that in the course of a few hours leads him into the promised interior. It is not raining, but now and then the dampness condenses into fog or cloud, so dense that he becomes soaked to the skin. He feels as if his very bones are laid open to the cold, that the wind blows right through him. But the effort of walking in such difficult and rocky terrain generates body heat, and as long as he does not succumb to exhaustion, and is compelled to stop and sit down, he retains some measure of warmth.

It is dark by the time he reaches the other side and he is forced to rest high above the treeline in the shelter of an overhanging crag, facing away from the wind. It has begun to snow. Wet flakes swirl around him and melt as they settle on his clothes. He must light a fire of heather, but the plant is wet through and spits and hisses like a fuse. The water is hardly tepid when he gives up and spoons the hard, uncooked oats into his mouth in the hope that a full stomach will give him warmth. But he is freezing and must get to his feet to jump up and down in the dark in order to drive the cold from his body. He lies down and falls into a restless sleep, benumbed and shivering. The widow sits on the bare rock, a short distance away. He asks her to come and warm him, or at least to make herself useful and get the fire going again, but she remains seated with her back to him, staring out into the darkness. It sounds like she is humming or perhaps muttering something to herself.

The next day he has begun to cough; he senses a fever coming on. His thoughts are unclear and he knows he must soon find proper shelter or else he will fall ill. The widow follows him, dragging her feet a few paces behind, a parody of his own fatigue. He is becoming accustomed to her presence. On the ship he was compelled to acknowledge that she did not intend to remain behind in the colony. You seek peace, he thinks to himself. You are like me, you cannot find rest. What can I do for you that would make you willing to return to your grave? He knows the answer. He does not wish to dwell upon it.

The descent is precarious. He has long since lost the path that to begin with was so apparent; now it is erased in the scant vegetation. He finds himself clambering over crags to reach lower climes, only then to be confronted with a sheer drop of some several hundred fathoms. Hours are wasted retreating back over the steep rock to find another way down. By sheer good fortune he reaches the forest before darkness and is able to light a good fire by which to warm himself and make his gruel.

I know what you want, he says. But can't you see that I've come home, that these are my fells, my forest? I know I once promised to take you with me, but now I think you should go home. This is my land, not yours. It is not appropriate for you to follow me like this.

In the afternoon he is lucky to find a track. He tries to judge the posi­tion of the sun, though it is concealed by cloud, and elects to go right, where the track appears to slope gently away. It is overgrown; a stone bridge leading over a stream has collapsed without having been repaired and he must wade to his thighs through the icy waters. There are no fresh traces of carriage wheels or other traffic. And yet it is clearly a road and must lead somewhere, probably to another that is more used. The floor of the forest teems with blueberries and mountain cranberries. They have been exposed to frost and have lost their sweetness, but make a welcome supplement to his provisions, which will soon run out. He sleeps among the trees, breaking off branches of foliage on which to lie and cover himself. He is unaware of the cold in the night.

One morning he is woken by some disturbance of the tree under which he lies. He sits up and sees a colossal beast rubbing itself in long rhythmic strokes against the trunk. An elk. It has not seen him, or else it is in such a state of ecstasy and delight at scratching its itch that it does not care. He retreats to a distance, somewhat fearful of the enormous, bony animal, yet also filled with warmth and joy at being in such close proximity to another living creature after almost a week of solitude. Moreover, it has chased away the widow. When finished with its scratching, it stands still and snorts absently. The eye that turns towards Falck rolls slightly in its socket; a tremble runs across the animal's flank, and then it plods off, leaving him even more solitary than before. He is worried about the wolves only when lying down to sleep in the open air, though he has yet to hear their howl. Perhaps the last wolf has been shot here, as in Denmark. In the days that follow, he sees a fox, a deer and a grouse. High in the air, a large bird, presumably an eagle, circles and surveys the area. He is not alone.