The pastor, p.9
The Pastor, page 9
He told me he was a geologist compiling a report for the government, part of a vision project he was involved in. He smiled when he said it. Vision Project. Opportunity Assessment Plan. It meant he was outdoors a lot, in the field, taking readings and making observations throughout the district, out on the plain. It was why he’d taken it on.
He stood so as to shield me from the wind. He was so tall, and I liked him being tall, so very different from me, different altogether.
I only arrived here a few days ago, he said. With a tent, a sleeping bag, and a fishing rod.
And straight away we were in the tent together in my mind, he and I, a blue tent, I imagined, and the wind was up, battering the fabric. We sat up in our sleeping bags, snuggled together, his bare arms around his knees. Only no, he was standing next to me on the road, in the frozen snow at the side of the road that led away behind him, and I looked up at him as he talked.
Being able to look at a landscape and understand it at the same time, he said. That’s what I like about geology.
He looked at me with a smile, sweeping his arm in the direction of the fjord and all the darkness that was there.
Seeing a formation, a ridge, a dip, and understanding how it got there, how it all hangs together. The ground beneath our feet, quite literally.
His voice filled me up, resonating in my mind, reverberating through my body. A soft voice, gentle and warm. Watching his mouth as he spoke made my lips tingle. His hand drew patterns in the air, an index finger outlining a landscape for me there, busy, uneven lines above the flat, dismal terrain I knew to be there, far in the distance, across the fjord.
It’s all layer upon layer of rock, he said. And what happens is that shifts occur, displacements, compressions. And all so incredibly slowly, year after year after year.
We carried on walking. He told me where his flat was, on the edge of town, one of those kept for people on assignment to the local administrative region.
There’s no transition here, he said, the town just stops and then it’s wilderness.
I knew exactly what he meant, and pictured the shallow incline leading up from the fjord on the outskirts where he lived.
I’ve never lived anywhere like this before, he said. It’s incredible. All of a sudden there are no more houses. And there’s no other kind of boundary either, no trees, nothing. Everything just leads off into the distance, and the houses are like little Monopoly tokens that have been put down on their different squares.
We passed the gate of the house. There were no lights on. We carried on walking. This is where I live, I could have said, only I didn’t. Why didn’t I?
We went past and I said nothing. It was as if I’d already decided even then. I walked at his side, watching his long legs as they strode next to mine, but it was as if I could already see him disappear, walking on into the distance until he was nothing but a small and vanishing dot.
But it wasn’t a decision. I hadn’t wanted it to be like that, hadn’t willed it. And yet it was what happened.
He seemed to sense it too. That something was gone, as if we’d held something between us and all of a sudden it just wasn’t there anymore. He fell silent, and we walked without speaking. Couldn’t we turn back, rewind, recover whatever it was, from the snow outside the gate of the house? And how come that was where we lost it?
What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just give myself over, go with the flow? What was it that made me stop and stiffen like that?
I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t, I hadn’t stiffened at all. I wanted to tell him that, to take hold of his arm and tell him, shout it out into the darkness that lay over the fjord, for all to hear me, the entire parish, the world: I’m not stern and forbidding, nor dour or difficult. Do you hear? I’m good and loving. Do you hear me? I’m a good and loving person.
I wanted to bind up a wound.
That was what I should have told him when he asked me why I became a nurse. He’d asked me that, while we were at the concert.
Or else I could have told him when we came to the little row of flats where he lived, a whitewashed brick building from the fifties, each with a little notch for a balcony, behind a green metal railing.
I pictured him there in warmer weather, saw him standing there on his little balcony at the top of the road, the last bit of the hill before the ground levelled out, standing there looking out over the fjord.
And only a bit further down was where I lived.
I sat there now, at the window in the living room, at the desk with my papers and books, the stack of bibles, in Hebrew and Greek as well as various Norwegian editions, the one I’d brought with me from Germany, which I’d often be reading, lying open.
He should have come in with me. He would have stood here in front of the desk, seen my books and understood everything. You’re not a nurse at all, he would have said.
No, I would have said.
I’m a pastor.
I visualized the whole scene as I sat at the desk, imagining what would have happened if I’d been able to go back and do it again, stopping at the gate, inviting him in. I could see him standing next to me in the room.
But I thought about it a lot when I was studying, I would have told him. That it was what I really wanted. I turned round, looking up at him in my mind. To bind up a wound. I wondered if I really should have been a nurse instead. Perhaps it would have suited me better, and been better for the world. I’d have been more use then. With plasters and bandages, a jab of morphine.
I couldn’t see the books on my desk for what they were, books of words, all I saw were lines and patterns in the way they were stacked, the colors of the spines, the green of the leather binding, the red, the grey.
We were still, everything was so still. We looked at each other in the window.
But here I am with words instead, I said.
Yes, he said.
I thought it would be a way of reaching something.
Yes, he said. His voice was so quiet.
Sometimes it is, though, I said. Sometimes there is something there, but it’s as if it’s got less to do with words than I thought. I can dig through the language and all the understandings and still find nothing to grasp there, nothing I can hold up and say, here it is.
He was standing next to me. I looked down at his hands, which he’d placed on a book. I looked at his fingers, his fingernails. Outside the window, the street light shone. Further away lay the darkness of the fjord. Night.
And I imagined I could bind up a wound, I said.
I can’t even manage that.
He was standing next to me in front of the window, but then he was gone, vanished. I looked out, seeing only the street lamp, the fjord, the darkness. And then I snapped back again, my gaze switching to the pane itself, but no one else was visible there, the image it mirrored was my own, and mine alone.
* * *
—
I got up and went into the bedroom, steadying myself on the side of the bed as I undressed, flopping down to pull on my pyjamas. I heard some words in my head, a snatch of doggerel I wasn’t sure if I remembered properly. Liv, I told myself. But it wouldn’t stop: Never a one for you, never a one for you, never a one for you, because you never knew what to do. I put the top on too, buttoning it up over my breasts, feeling my nipples brush against the fabric, thinking all of a sudden that I didn’t usually notice my breasts at all. Normally, I wasn’t aware of them. I undid the buttons again and looked at them. They were there, but that was it, as if they were of no importance, as if I couldn’t care less whether they were big or small, nice or odd-looking. Anyway, he wouldn’t care about my breasts. What mattered to him was to be close to me, as close as can be. I felt it, and imagined what it would be like. I saw his eyes. His body was so very close.
* * *
—
We stood naked in front of the window in the living room. I wanted it. I wanted to see us like that. There, mirrored in the pane, against the darkness of the fjord. I wanted to see us melted into the night, in the reflected light.
There, I said, and held his hand. There we are.
Yes, he said, there we are.
And then we stood for a few moments until he put his arm around me and drew me towards him, and he was so warm and thin, so tall, so hard. He pulled me down onto the floor and his face was illuminated by the light of the desk lamp, its light shining down into his face, his dark eyes as they looked at me, the way they looked at me as I straddled him, and then we were together, no longer apart from each other.
* * *
—
I skipped brushing my teeth. I was so tired, all I could do was fall back into the big bed one of the parishioners had been kind enough to donate when I moved upstairs into the empty flat. I lay with my eyes open, light falling in from outside. There were no curtains in the bedroom either. The nights had been dark when I first came here, but then summer had come and it was light all the time. But I still hadn’t come up with anything to cover the windows. It seemed wrong in a way, to shut out the light when finally it came. It wasn’t as if we needed to keep the rooms cool either, not a single day had the weather been hot, and I hadn’t worn a summer dress once without a pair of tights on too. The light was the only thing that was fully, completely summer. And then, abruptly, autumn had come again, the light faded, and then darkness had come, darkness all through the winter.
I lay looking up at the ceiling, at the lines of shadow in the dim light that welled in from outside, and in my mind I found myself standing under the triangular structure of the stockfish rack again, the parallel lines of the poles, first the lower rung, then the next, and the next after that.
As if I could climb to the top like she had done, before she let go and dropped. No hand had appeared to protect her, to break her fall and save her. She had dropped, then dangled abruptly above the ground, her body an incongruous lump against the regular lines of the rack.
And those lines led on into my head, lines and filaments and strands, leading nowhere, without system. And beyond lay the fjord, vast and open, and the plain on the other side, the empty fell, completely flat.
* * *
—
I couldn’t sleep. Reluctantly, I pushed the cover aside and sat up. Maybe my head needed a whisky, perhaps then my thoughts would just travel away along the lines without catching on anything? I went into the living room, the floorboards creaking under my feet. I put the warm blanket around me, sat down at the desk again, and switched on the lamp.
He’d asked me why I’d come here. It was when I’d gone back to him through the room, after the interval, when I’d weaved my way through the concertgoers, to return to him.
It hadn’t struck me then, not in the sense of having thought about it, although I could feel it, like a current of air, a draught. But now it became plain to me, the distance there’d been between us, at the table, in the midst of all that was going on. It was as if everything came apart. The glass was no longer on the table in front of me, there was no contact between me and the chair, between my legs and the floor. Everything that was so hard to explain, that seemed so out of reach, like a blur existing only at the edges, barely comprehensible, and yet at the same time so completely fundamental and clear. Somewhere, it was all clear and obvious. Somehow, it was. It was just me, unable to see it, unable to pin it down.
I opened my mouth and was about to say something, only he looked the other way. For a brief second, he looked away, at the woman at the next table who came back and sat down. Not a long look, by any means, little more than a glance. But it was enough for me to think twice, and I said nothing. As if I needed him to tease it out of me, whatever it was I was going to say. As if without him I wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. As if I needed him to look at me, needed his eyes to help me. As long as he was looking at me, I could feel my way forward. Was that really the way it was? Yes, that was how it felt. And then he’d let go, his eyes had let go of me for a moment, and it had been enough for me to fall away, to sink back into myself, close my mouth, smile and raise my glass, and skål with him.
I thought about Peter, who also wanted to walk on the water. He could do it if only he kept his eye on Jesus. It was when he looked down that he sank.
I looked at the eyes I saw in the pane. Perhaps I could speak to them, to the eyes I saw there, looking back at me. What would I have said to him? Did I even know? Did I know why I was here?
The light of the torch, in the darkness of night, in the snow, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, some thirty Norwegian miles from here. Was that why I’d come? The sound of a voice in the ear, a flutter of breath in the ear canal, sudden and brief, low, agitated voices, abrupt cries in that other language. In the morning they come, to beat them up, to break down the doors and smash the panes. The sound of a person being thrashed, the swish of the birch in the air as the strokes are delivered.
It was all so still. I looked down at the papers on the desk in front of me. I looked at the face in the window again.
I thought about what I’d written in my application for the doctoral scholarship: The lines of conflict underlying the rebellion are many and multilayered, with language as their point of intersection. The language of the Bible became the locus at which different cultures and language traditions, and imbalances of power, manifested themselves.
On the surface, the conflict was about society and power. But was that why I’d wanted to explore it? Was that why it had felt like there was something in it in which I needed to immerse myself, a dispute that was mine too, in which I stood, not on one side, but on all sides, in the middle? Was that why, because of cultural traditions and power?
No, it was something else, something to do with language. Or rather, not language itself, but something it contained, something within, at the very root of language, the core, around which the stories of the Bible revolved.
No one was without guilt. They murdered with knives and axes. They set fire to the house. It wasn’t pure, they said. But nothing on either side was pure, nothing sacred, nothing untainted. Neither side was right. That which was meant to belong to all, to be open and true, was dirty and distorted.
But there was something else. Something about the rebellion itself, the wild and ungovernable element, the part of them inside that knew something true existed. I imagined they felt it scrabbling inside them to get out. I thought about how they must have felt the need to release it, how imperative that was, and how much they wanted it, even if it meant they had to cut themselves open, the way they did with the reindeer they slaughtered, to stand with something firm in their hands, a living, gleaming, sheeny heart.
They needed to see a point at which there was something that wouldn’t fail them.
And to that end, they had need of an assurance, from the Pastor, the Lensmann, and the Merchant, that they could go to the edge of the fell and look out upon the promised land.
That they could go there and look out and see that the water was there, where they’d been told it would be, that a beck ran obliquely down through the land, that there was heather and woodland, and bogland too. That everything was there as it was meant to be. That something firm existed, which could not be altered.
But the knife passed through the shirt into the skin, into the flesh.
The flesh was only flesh.
The blood ran, and it was only blood.
And the house could be set alight, to burn to the ground.
What then was language for? What good were its words? It was no help anywhere. There were no walls, no boundaries. There was no grip or foothold.
* * *
—
I heard the dull thud of a pair of feet being stamped on the step, followed by the front door being opened, someone tramping in, shutting the door behind them. I looked at the clock before I could stop myself. It was past three. Maja had to be at work in five hours. I had the day off, having given the service the day before. Maybe she’d been out with someone and forgotten the time.
* * *
—
A few days earlier, I’d gone out onto the island. The houses there are built on the side facing inland, towards the town. The wind was blowing. I walked between the houses, there were no fences or boundaries between them, only patches of snow and the frozen ground, grass and heather. I walked between the houses onto the flatland behind them, towards the sea.
It was like walking towards a hand. The wind was a hand that curled around me, so big as to hold me safely in its grasp, the way it feels when I baptize a tiny newborn child. My hand feels like it reaches all the way around, my hand feels so big and strong, the baby’s head nestled in my palm. The wind held me like that, as if it were a great big hand, curled around my entire person.
I went out to the edge, where there’s a steep drop to jagged rocks, spray and spindrift, murky water. I stood there and saw, felt how the hand, the wind was holding me.
I could lean into it, entrust myself to it, and I wouldn’t fall.
But then the thought occurred to me that a gust could come, that the wind could suddenly turn. It would be behind me then, and blow me forwards, there’d be nothing to stop me from falling, nothing for me to hold on to. The hand that now pressed me back towards land, could just as easily toss me over the edge.
I turned around and ran back.
I’d stood there for several minutes, leaning forwards without giving it a thought, simply resting there, on the wind.
I came down over the hill to the houses again, where once more I could see the town, the fishmeal factory, the church further back, higher up.
