The pastor, p.19
The Pastor, page 19
* * *
—
I hadn’t known how to connect with Kristiane again. I’d phoned, later that same night, to say I was sorry. That I hadn’t meant what I’d said, about her daughter. That I shouldn’t have interfered in something that was none of my business. That’s all right, she said. And then hung up.
After that, all I got was her voicemail. I kept leaving messages. But she never called back.
Maja on the stage, her strong frame in the slanting light from above, her eyes darkened by it, thin etchings of shadow from her shiny piercings lining her face like little cuts. And I was reminded of the group of boys who’d suddenly started walking with me that night under the tall trees, along the river in Germany. It was dark, autumn, the air was full of drizzle. I was on my way home. They walked with me, fifteen, sixteen years old, speaking an Asian language, Korean perhaps. I remembered the gleam of their narrow eyes.
* * *
—
I’m so angry, said Nanna.
She was standing at the window again, facing the grey light. I could see the masts of the broadcasting station, three masts with red and white stripes.
They’re saying they don’t know which way it’s going to tip, that she’s still so weak her condition can deteriorate. And that if she does wake up, there’s every chance she’ll try again.
Inside me I’m crying, she said, but it’s like I can’t cry anymore. I’m just angry now. The only thing I feel is this terrible urge to shake her, yell at her, hit her.
* * *
—
I left the hospital and went down the steps towards the road. The cracks in the paving were dark with ice, the air whirling with tiny shards of hail that stabbed at my cheeks. I pulled my phone out of my pocket, along with a piece of paper with a phone number on it, and called the organizer of the seminar, explaining why I’d had to leave so suddenly. He said they would pray for me. I hung up and stood there for a moment on the frozen road. As if I didn’t know where to go. Go home, I told myself. Go home and go to bed.
I’d said to Nanna that I could stay, in case she needed a break. But she’d said she wanted to be there until they were more certain about the outlook.
Like upside-down crosses, she said quietly as I went towards the door. I turned around to look at her, not knowing what she meant. It was the way Maja had cut herself, she said. Upside-down crosses, the intersections cut deep into her palms.
She could have talked to me, she said.
Why do a thing like that when you can talk, when there’s someone there for you to talk to? Cutting a cross into herself, as if it was a sign for someone to find. Was it a sign for me? Was it?
Couldn’t she just have told me?
Her words beat away at Maja’s silence as she ransacked herself, as if in the hope that an answer would fall out of her pockets, if only she turned them all inside out.
I thought about the wry smile of the suicide girl in the photo, the one where she was leaning her arm out of the car, showing off her tattoo below the rolled-up sleeve of her sweater, her bangs dropping into her eyes, the lines of her cheekbones. Her smile.
Her photo too was silent.
I stood on the icy road, and the thought occurred to me that the crosses were only upside down to us. To those of us on the outside, standing at the foot of her bed, looking at her bandaged hands as they lay on the cover. But from Maja’s perspective, looking down at her own hands, the crosses were of course the right way up. To her, holding her arm out in front of her, the foot of the cross was below the crook of her elbow, the cross itself at the top, in the palm.
But what did it matter? The blood had pumped from her veins. And what did any of our signs have to say, our images and words? They were little more than scribblings and scrawl, meaningless lines drawn in the sand with a stick, to be washed away by the waves. Always, something would come and wash them away. There was only ever the sand that was sand, the stick that was stick. Only the sea that was sea.
I wanted to lie down and let it wash over me too.
Kristiane hadn’t rung back.
Two weeks later, her daughter phoned. She’d heard my messages on her mother’s voicemail, seen my number on the display. She asked if I could come over to the theater space.
What’s it about, I asked.
Kristiane’s dead, she said.
* * *
—
Go home, I told myself. I was in the car. All I had to do was follow the road left, but I found myself going right instead, towards the church. There were houses, a few other buildings, and then the church, grey-white and solid, with the peculiar hole in its steeple, the split façade. I hadn’t paid it much attention before, but it was as if the entrance divided everything into one side and another, as if the building were relativizing itself. Why couldn’t it just be solid and whole and still? Why couldn’t it just stand there and be a church? Be what it was. Surely a church could do that?
A tense fatigue had gripped my body, I could feel it now. Soon I wouldn’t have the strength to resist it.
I unlocked the main door and went inside. A grey light fell in through the windows. I hadn’t switched the lights on.
I wanted to pray. That was why I’d come, I realized now. I wanted to pray for Maja.
I stood at the back of the church, behind the last row of benches, and looked up at the altar. There was no alterpiece as such, only a white cross, an arcade behind it. I wanted to pray for Maja. I was quite empty.
Have mercy upon me.
The words came out in a tiny squeak, preceding any thought of what I wanted to say. I began to cry, I cried like a baby, sniveling, sobbing. And all I could think were those words, as if they were the last thing left I could say.
Have mercy upon me.
I wanted to pray for Maja, and there I was praying for myself.
* * *
—
There was no one else in the vestry, the offices. I went to my desk. It felt like such a long time since I’d been there. I looked at the seal, still unborn. I sat down and put my head to the desk, resting my cheek against the back of my hand, among the papers that lay there, closing my eyes. But I wasn’t tired enough. Only heavy with fatigue, weighed down by everything, heavy.
I sat up again. I needed to prepare the eulogy for the funeral the next day. The eulogy should be brief, the handbook said. I thought about her tattoo, the heart with the arrow going through it. I thought about what the Bible says about Mary, that she had kept all the things the angel had said to her, and pondered them in her heart.
* * *
—
The plane had flown low over the waves. It was small, with room for perhaps no more than twenty passengers. I was coming from a meeting out in one of the fishing communities where there was a landing strip, a little airfield, and was on my way back to the town. We flew over the waves and I could pick them out below, each one, every tip curling forward, edged with white. The mouth of the final fjord before we came in over the peninsula, to the town on the other side.
There were two houses there, at the point of an inlet. A long, long track from there to the main road, many kilometers. Just two houses, at the furthest edge of the land. In winter, they would surely be cut off.
Smoke was rising from one of the chimneys. I saw someone pass from one house to the other. I thought I could make out that it was a woman. She was small, and wearing something red.
I lost sight of her as we flew inland, over the last of the great plains before the town, a miserly landscape scattered with rocks, at the northernmost coast, nothing there but snow and rocks and lichen.
* * *
—
I thought about the house where the girl had lived, and I thought about her parents. I pictured them inside, the mother in the kitchen, sitting there, looking out. I couldn’t place the father. Perhaps he was in the other room, the one I hadn’t seen, where the TV was. Perhaps he was watching it. Perhaps it was for his sake that it was always switched on, even when he wasn’t there. Perhaps he was watching the news, sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning slightly forwards, flicking between the channels so as not to miss anything.
Or perhaps he was chopping wood beside the house, raising the ax and striking the log, splitting it into two parts that fell away on each side of the block, the sheep lying in the frozen grass and snow behind the fence a bit further away.
I pictured the parents in bed beside each other, lying on their backs with their arms at their sides, lying quite still and staring at the ceiling.
* * *
—
I saw Maja lying on her back in the hospital bed with her bandaged arms and hands. I picked up the black receiver and dialed Nanna’s number, only to reach her voicemail again. I left a message asking how things were, telling her that I hadn’t gone to sleep and most likely wouldn’t, and that she could phone if she needed me. And then I put the receiver down.
I looked at the seal. It was only stone, a lump of stone, and yet there was a baby seal in it. I wondered what kind of stone it was, whether it was a type peculiar to the area, in the basement rock. As if it mattered. I thought about his head, the rear of his skull where his hair had thinned. I reached out and stroked my hand over the stone. It was smooth, soft, and cold.
* * *
—
I stopped in at the hospital on my way home, taking the stairs again, slowly this time, my legs aching and stiff. I went down the corridor and nodded to the nurse who emerged from the duty room to see who it was. I thought I recognized her face from church. Perhaps I’d seen her somewhere else. Cautiously, I opened the door of Maja’s room. It was warm inside, warmer than in the corridor.
My eyes latched onto the two faces, one behind the other. Maja in the bed, Nanna on a chair beside her. They’d brought in a high-backed armchair with a headrest for Nanna. She was asleep. Maja’s eyes were closed too. Careful not to make a noise, I stepped further inside, and studied them, the curves of their eyes, the different lines of their cheekbones, which nonetheless seemed in some way revealing of their kinship. The fullness of their lips. Their arching foreheads.
* * *
—
I stopped by the duty room and waited in the doorway. I leaned my head against the door frame. The nurse from before was typing at a computer, at a desk in the corner. After a moment, she swiveled around to face me.
How is Maja progressing, I asked.
She just looked at me to begin with, without speaking.
There was a smell of hospitals, the sounds of hospital equipment and footsteps, a washing or rinsing machine, something taking in water, pausing, pumping and hosing, a low exchange of voices. Monitors hummed, their graphs being drawn at different speeds, against black backgrounds.
And yet everything was so still.
We can’t really say, she said.
Maja had lost a lot of blood, and there was something about the brain and oxygen, a failure that could suddenly occur.
So we can’t really say, she said again.
She looked at me, then frowned as she considered her words.
But I’m sure she’s going to be all right.
She spoke the words so calmly and with such assurance. There was a sofa inside the room and I felt the urge to lie down on it, to lie there and curl up in her room and be looked after. I nodded.
Well, I said. Thank you very much.
I went back along the corridor, down the stairs and out, out through the heavy entrance doors, out into the wind, the cold, icy wind, down the steps to the car. My hands were freezing. I’d forgotten my gloves. I hurried to insert the key and get going before my fingers became so cold I wouldn’t be able to feel them anymore.
* * *
—
The engine turned over, the heater blasting out warm air. I’d driven across to the island and pulled over at the end of the road, where the rocks were all that remained between me and the fjord.
I’d driven around the town first, up and down the long, straight streets as the interior warmed up. I didn’t feel like going back to the silent house, and certainly didn’t want to walk anywhere in such freezing wind. I was meant to still be at the seminar, so there was nothing in my diary either. There was always something else I could do, someone I ought to look in on, but nothing that couldn’t wait. I decided it could wait.
But wait for what? I wasn’t sure, and my head wasn’t clear enough to think. My thoughts reduced to little dots, like pins stuck into a map, with nothing to join them up.
I thought about my studies, how I’d immersed myself, at home as well as in Germany. It had felt like I’d sunk into them. As if the words I read had been places I could stay for days, weeks on end, wandering about, investigating the environs, the hills and dales, listening to their clang, sensing what it was like just to be there. It had all been so real.
I looked out at the snow, hearing the wind as it gusted against the car, as if it were trying to turn it over. Three reindeer were grazing a bit further away, seemingly unperturbed by the wind, their thin legs so firmly planted on the ground. The local paper had run an article about them. Apparently, they’d been left behind when the herd had moved to the winter pasture, and had been here ever since. One of them scraped away some snow with its hoof. I supposed it was looking for lichen.
I felt so silent, as if words were animals too, moving from place to place, coming and going. Less connected all of a sudden to what they were meant to contain. What they were capable of containing. As if it all had so little to do with me. The only thing I could do was wait. Wait for them. Wait for them to be replenished. Wait for them to mean something. Bide my time, exist and wait. Accept whatever came.
* * *
—
Lillen was sitting at a desk, drawing something with a green crayon. I stood in the doorway with my boots still on. Footwear had to be left at the door, so I watched her from a distance. She’d colored nearly the whole sheet of paper green, her head lowered in concentration, her arm moving briskly from side to side, the crayon gripped in her hand.
We drove the few hundred meters back to the house, Lillen beside me in the front. I couldn’t get myself together. I had no idea what to make for dinner, or what to do afterwards. My body felt quite weightless.
I’d tried phoning Nanna again. She hadn’t answered, so I’d called the ward instead, only there’d been a different nurse on duty then. She said she wasn’t allowed to divulge that sort of information over the phone to someone who wasn’t close family. It felt like I was moving about on a thin net that was stretched out high above the ground, walking in air.
I thought about what Lillen and I could do together. I could fill the bath for her, with foam up to the brim. Only then I imagined her little body floating face down in the water. Everything was so fraught with danger. If we baked buns, she could fall off the chair she was standing on and bang her head on the foot of the old iron range. Getting out of the car, she could slip and fall over in the road, and be run over by another car. I found I was sweating.
Lillen told me they’d had a war at nursery school, and listed all the names, who’d been on her side and who on the other, and what had happened. Many had switched allegiance, it had all been very chaotic, with sympathies constantly changing and developing. She related even the most minor incident and circumstance, in the smallest and most far-flung fractions, and eventually I lost all sense of connection to what the actual conflict had been about, which was somebody pushing someone else over.
And that’s wrong, isn’t it, she said, sitting there in the front seat.
Yes, it is, I said. But what if it was an accident?
Lillen sat quietly without replying. I wondered if it was she who’d pushed the other child over. But then we were home. I pulled in at the curb and switched the engine off. I could put the car in the garage later.
It wasn’t an accident. Lillen said quietly.
I’m sure, I said.
* * *
—
Why didn’t Nanna call? Lillen had asked where she was, and I’d told her she was out, helping Maja.
I was standing at the window in the downstairs living room. Lillen was on the sofa behind me, watching children’s TV. It was starting to get dark. I stared at the trees outside, the naked branches, the darkness descending on the grey snow. A car went past.
I’d walked out towards Härtlesberg again, the same way we’d run. It was the day before I drove back north, everything was packed and ready.
I went via Heuberg and Hagelloch. The funeral had been sparsely attended. I tried to think about her as I walked, about us, and me. I tried to straighten things in my head, to understand. But I couldn’t think. Images appeared fleetingly in my mind’s eye, and I watched them as I would watch a theater performance: Kristiane bounding up the steps in front of me, turning around and laughing; Kristiane doing a little hop and laughing, her hand holding on to her hat to stop it from blowing away, laughing and laughing, with her pointy little teeth, her eyes glittering. And me, loitering like a shadow. At the fringe of every image, there I was, shadowlike and blurred. Dark and ponderous.
It was a long walk. I came to the woods and continued down the path. Her daughter had told me it was in the woods that she’d done it, though had said nothing of where exactly. It could have been anywhere. There was no one else around, no one out running or walking the dog. I followed the path for a while, through the dell where we had run. There was a mist in the air, and the vegetation was dripping wet. Everything was about to turn green.
I made dinner, set the table, sliced some bread. After we’d eaten, Lillen wanted me to play with her, with her dolls. I lay on the floor in her room, holding two of them in my hands, changing their clothes, driving places with them in the car, bringing them home again, following Lillen’s instructions. She had a big box full of clothes and accessories for them, high-heeled shoes and long evening gowns, and before long we’d assembled a whole crowd of ladies all done up to the nines, their hair brushed and shiny, flitting about from party to party.
