The pastor, p.6
The Pastor, page 6
One evening when I was looking after her and it was time for her to go to bed, I went to draw the curtains and she told me not to. Daddy won’t be able to see me, she said. Do you think he’s out there looking in at you, I asked, and she looked at me without answering. I’m tired now, she said after a moment. And then she pulled the cover up and turned over to face the wall.
I stayed at her side, holding her hand as she slept. She’d scotch-taped a new drawing to the wall above the headboard of the bed. In the faint light from outside I saw it to be two straight vertical lines dissected by shorter horizontal ones. I looked at it for a while before realizing it was a ladder. She’d used a green crayon and the lines were drawn right up to the edge of the paper, as if to indicate that they carried on, that the ladder continued, and that the drawing was just a small part of the ladder, which in her imagination reached all the way up and all the way down.
I turned and went into the hall, closing the door of Nanna’s flat and going up the brown-painted stairs to my own living room. I heard the music from Maja’s room again, thumping through the floorboards under my feet, as if belonging to the wood itself. I’d blotted it out for a moment, but now I couldn’t escape it and felt unable to think about anything else.
The dark branches of the tree outside the window seemed to be straining upwards. Behind them, I could see the fjord clearly again now. The sun had come out and was glittering on the water. I went over to the desk, sat down in the chair, and gazed through the pane.
* * *
—
Out there was the fjord, and I was here, inside. I was here now. Spring had come. I tried to make my thoughts catch on something. It was as if they could find no purchase.
Spring in the little town in southern Germany with the river running through it at the bottom. Or rather, gliding, gentle and silent, under the tall trees whose leafy branches dipped towards its banks. The long, flat little island that was such a nice walk, with shady benches along its paths. Everything was so quiet there when I thought back on it. The autumn had been so hot. The town lay on the slope above the river, with half-timbered houses going back to medieval times. At the very top was the old Schloss, home to the theological faculty. From the seminar room there, I could see the green hills over in the direction of Österberg and Wanne. Smoke rose from tall factory chimneys in the distance, and there was an industrial estate too, behind the town, tucked away on the other side of the hill, but it couldn’t be seen from the Schloss or from my room, which was situated across town, on the steep street of a different rise. The town snuggled in winding, undulating landscape, nestling at a bend in the river, sheltered, concealed, secret even.
The walk home to my room took me through the old overgrown botanical garden, past the hospital and up the steeply rising street they called Hohe Steige, whose curve I followed until turning left onto Schillerstraße and then left again onto Lessingweg, where I would start rummaging for my key as I went through the unlit garden, letting myself in at the front door, climbing the stair to the second floor, and then finally unlocking my own door to step inside, cross the room to the window, and stare out. The tall, green trees in the garden blocked the view. But then the leaves fell, and in the winter I could see for miles. That was when I’d met Kristiane, sometime in February.
Yes, a year ago I’d stood there, this same body, these same eyes, by the window of that room, in late March. I thought of Maja, downstairs now with her music, a year ago, before her piercings. And the girl who’d hung herself, her apprenticeship would have been drawing to a close then, she’d have been about to qualify, the police sergeant had said so over the phone, that she’d only just finished her training. She was a welder. This time last year, she’d have been getting up early in the mornings, grabbing some breakfast in the kitchen, and getting off to work. She’d carried on living with her parents apparently. I would have to phone them.
* * *
—
Privately, I have rejoiced at the emergence and eruption of these evil forces. How much better than for it all to have remained unexposed, lurking in the darkness.
The thoughts of the pastor, long before the uprising took place.
Is it not forever the case, that we believe ourselves to have come to clarity, only to find that we have not?
I stared down at the papers on the desk, the documents. When had it begun, the revolt? Not on the morning of November 8, obviously. It had to have started long before that. Did we have to go as far back as the 1300s, to the time of the first Norwegian settlements, the earliest colonization? The documents were a collection of short, dislocated accounts, incomplete and riddled with holes. All the same, by comparing and joining them up, a crudely drawn chain of events certainly emerged.
On the morning of November 8, 1852, a group of people entered the town. They came by the frozen river, on sledges drawn by reindeer, having set up a camp on the plain and recruited from a nearby settlement, whipping and terrorizing those who hesitated to join them. Thirty-five adults were they in number, and twenty-two children under the age of thirteen years, their purpose to descend on the town and purge it of all impurity. Bearers of the faith, they would burn down all evil. They saw themselves as messengers of God embarked on a holy mission in the name of freedom, truth, and Christian awakening.
At first light they had set out, and when they arrived at around eight o’clock, day had come. Charging into the merchant’s yard they came, armed with lengths of wood and pointed fence-poles. The yard must have been cleared of snow. There stood the merchant, and the lensmann who lodged with him. For the town had no designated lensmann’s residence, the office until then having been occupied by one of the local Sami, though that particular year, for the first time, a Norwegian was incumbent.
What were the two men doing in the yard? There is no record of it. Were they loading goods? Chopping wood? Were they simply standing there, talking and smoking?
The merchant was beaten to death on the spot, on the icy ground of the yard, with clubs and poles. The lensmann escaped into the house, barricading himself in an attic room. Reports suggest that he was already injured. They found him a couple of hours later. They had laid their hands on an ax by then, and used it to break down the door before bearing down on him. Was he lying in the cot, bleeding into his furs? Or was he leaned across it towards them, on his knees, as if in prayer?
Accounts say that two men gripped his arms, and that one plunged the knife into him. Later, it was reported that the blade was so blunt the knife had to be knocked in with a length of firewood.
Then they ransacked the house and the merchant’s store for all that they might be needing after they transported their prisoners back to the camp on the plain. Coffee, sugar, butter, and flour. Boots of reindeer skin, woolens. Axes, knives and sewing needles. They plundered the warehouse too, and everything they took they put into the sleds.
Among them were children, who mingled with those who went back and forth, carrying their spoils from the merchant’s yard, the dead body of the merchant lying on the ground, a bloody mess, his nose bitten off in the frenzy. The rebels declared that they would leave behind what wasn’t useful to them. All that was unnecessary belonged to the Devil, they said, and must be burned. The documents reveal that the children gathered cloudberries and bread, cheese and milk, figs and turnips.
After that, they broke all the windows and started a blaze under a large sideboard using firewood of birch. The body of the lensmann burned up inside.
Women, children and servants were marched over to the pastor’s residence, where the pastor too was held captive. The prisoners were gathered in the parlor, stripped and lashed with birch sticks. Babies lay tucked in their leather-and-wood cradles, and infants toddled about in tears. Lashing was a method of religious arousal, to incite awakening. The windows of the pastor’s residence too were smashed. It must have been cold for them, the temperature outside was minus thirty degrees Celsius.
During the afternoon, help arrived from another town on the plain, some ten kilometers downriver. The two sides clashed in the fading light.
Meanwhile, those held hostage in the pastor’s residence were freed. The rebels were defeated, tied up and held in the pastor’s storehouse, men and women alike. Some were kept there until December 19, when the last transport of prisoners left, setting out on a journey that would take many hours, across the snowy plain to the sea, lying bound on the sleds behind the reindeer.
But how did it start? And when?
I became aware of Maja’s music again. What did they call it? Funk, house, rave? It sounded all the same, a continuous pounding. Like the Sami joik, the way it just kept on, as if the landscape were brought to life in the music. Or was it just me, imagining the landscape whenever I heard the music, putting something into it that wasn’t there? Was it something in me alone?
Something may have started in a church out on the island near the summer pastures in June the year before. There was some trouble there. The pastor had reported some Sami for disturbing a church service that had come close to being abandoned altogether. One of the men had got to his feet and challenged the pastor, calling him a liar and an unconverted soul. He said the pastor was a devil.
It hadn’t escalated into anything more than verbal exchanges, no one had been hurt there on the island. But there were proceedings, seven Sami initially being charged, others later in the year, fined and sentenced to days, or in some cases weeks, in confinement, on bread and water.
In October, four months after events in the island church, the pastor beat with his stick a group of Sami in the parlor of the residence. According to records, he acted in self-defence, the pastor’s own account, sent in writing to the bishop, stating that he had suddenly found himself surrounded. He must have felt threatened by them, and frightened, though he did not state as much, only that he had acted in self-defense.
Then there was the first Sunday of Advent, the same year, 1851, when a young woman caused trouble in church. Accounts suggest her to have been the sister-in-law of one of the two men later to be executed for their part in the 1852 rebellion.
On the morning of the service, a group of Sami had been summoned by the pastor to discuss the Holy Communion with the purpose of assessing whether they were genuinely repentent sinners and worthy of accepting the Communion and forgiveness in the Eucharist. The pastor’s conclusion was that they were not.
It was after this, in the church, that the woman rose as the pastor was about to deliver his sermon, jumping to her feet and accusing him of teaching false and mendacious doctrine. Don’t listen to him. How can you, who are in darkness, preach the path of light? She was twenty-four years old, and by all accounts heavily pregnant. Others joined in support of her, their clamor such that the pastor for some moments was silenced.
Subsequently, the woman was charged and found guilty of disturbing the peace of the church, and sentenced to more than a year’s confinement. Reports indicate that it was at this time that a small group – the woman herself, her husband, and his brothers, along with a few elders, parents and parents-in-law, and a handful of children – withdrew to the fells to settle there in avoidance of her incarceration.
And not until a year later, on the night of November 8, 1852, did that same group of individuals leave their exile there, harnessing the reindeer to their sleds, the justice given to them in the words of the Bible, the language they had been accorded, being their swords and shields. For does it not say there that faith can move a mountain? Does it not say that the last shall be first? Does it not say that he who prays will be saved? That for he who knocks, the door will be opened? And wasn’t that what they wanted, that the door be opened for them? That what the Bible said should come true, and come true for them too. For it says there that everyone is equal before God.
* * *
—
My hands felt cold. I sat, steeped in the noise of Maja’s music, staring at the papers on the desk in front of me, the documents, my own notes. It felt like my mind was a jellyfish, consisting for the most part of water, my thoughts suspended in the sea, propelling themselves about, contracting and relaxing, contracting and relaxing.
And what about me? Abandoning my PhD fellowship in systematic theology, leaving Germany to come up here. Such an enormous distance.
I couldn’t see when that shift had happened either, it was as if there were no clear beginnings to anything, no coming together, no fixed point, it was more like it all started in some vague kind of blur, in what lay in the darkness of the seminar room before the lights were switched on, in the great snow-covered expanse of the northern landscape, in that winter night far out on the plain.
A postcard of Saint Isabelle stuck out of the pile. I removed it and studied it. Saint Isabelle leaning forward, looking out of the frame, her gaze perhaps fixed on someone there. The image showed only her face, her brown eyes and serene gaze, as if she were looking upon a sick child. The painting was from the sixteenth century, her hair was covered and she was dressed in a nun’s habit. Or perhaps it was a nurse’s uniform, I wasn’t sure. They might have been the same then.
I thought of the convent where I’d bought the postcard that Sunday from the small selection on offer in their display rack. I’d seen a picture of the place in my department and had found a bus timetable, phoned and asked if I could come. It was late February. The bus stopped just outside the little village on the plateau, from where it was a reasonably long walk.
The convent had seemed rather run-down there among its dark fields, the naked branches of the trees. It had been colder inside than out. A heavy door in the church opened out onto a path which led to the cloister. A nun accompanied me, then with a little nod left me on my own.
The cloister ran in a rectangle around a small garden, four arcades of vaulting arches supported by columns. There, the nuns had walked in silent prayer, with their crucifixes and rosary beads. I ambled, also silent, several times around the complex. The sun came out, a weak winter sun, spilling down onto the garden, through the arches, leaving its light on the flagstones. The little patches of sunshine were warm, and I lingered there. The place was quite still.
So still it was, the way everything inside me had been still for so long, all through the autumn there in Germany, through Christmas, that long January. Mostly I was on my own. I attended the lectures that seemed relevant to my research, as well as the general seminars, occasionally having a beer with a couple of the guys from the research group I was a part of, but apart from that I went about my business, barely exchanging a word with anyone other than the woman in the shop, the librarian, and the ticket seller at the cinema where I often went in the evenings to see films I’d already seen. It felt like I’d dropped into a hollow in the ground, or fallen into a sinkhole.
And not just fallen, but fallen out of something, and fallen too far, for my thoughts seemed very remote in a way, my own thoughts. I went about in a dim and fuzzy state I had difficulty recognizing, with no idea whether it was good or bad, unable to find purchase, unable to grasp hold. I was a non-person.
That day, standing there in the cold in the cloister, in the silence there, feeling the sun on my face. I’d felt close to something. It was clear and delicate, and full of light.
Leaving the church, I’d found the postcard of Saint Isabelle in a little rack on a table along with various leaflets and such, and it was when I’d opened the church door and stepped outside with the postcard in my hand that I’d met Kristiane. It was the day her hat blew away and we ran after it, ending up laughing together at the wall, and then she’d driven me home.
No, I didn’t leave Germany to escape, but to start something else. What was it? What were you looking for, Liv?
For God? Well, if I had to use that word, then I suppose it was, yes. Though not in the form of some remote aesthetic, more as a commitment, a place to stand in life. A space I wanted to be open in my encounters with others, a space that would allow people in, and be open to all. God understood as a binding commitment to humanity. If there was something I was going to call God that would be it. But the word God didn’t enter my mind when I thought about it quietly on my own. No, I’d come here because I wanted to go into that space where I might reach others, attain a sense of peace, become one with what simply was, like the delicate light in the cloister that day. To be there within it. To be, and be allowed to be.
I’d completed my practical training, but had then gone off down the theory path, unable at that point to see myself speak to a congregation. It was as if I couldn’t utter words I didn’t yet feel to be filled with meaning, words I wasn’t sure would hold. But I was doing so now. Uttering words that seemed to resonate, but without knowing if they would hold up or simply vibrate emptily for a moment in the air between us. I was doing that now, and felt able. Or rather, it didn’t seem like I had much choice.
I spoke the words, opening them up and offering them, giving them place. I couldn’t force anything more into them. The rest would just have to come.
No, I couldn’t think with all that noise going on, couldn’t phone them with the music thudding in the background. I stood up, put some papers and books in my bag. I’d have to go to the church and do it from there.
* * *
—
Liv.
It was Maja’s voice behind me. I’d opened the front door and was about to step out, in my wellingtons, my shoes were drying by the radiator in the living room. Her voice was thin and small.
I turned. She was standing in the doorway wearing one of the black dresses she bought secondhand and remade to fit, her feet in a pair of wool socks. She was looking at me, her bright eyes. There was something about her gaze, I thought her eyes were like wounds. It felt like it was painful to her, me looking back at her, and that she wanted me to stop, at the same time as wanting me to see. And all the studs she’d had put in her face so that we’d look at them instead. Look at me, don’t look at me, look at me through my studs.
