Platen was buried one windy Sunday afternoon of sunshine and drifting cumulus clouds. The summer breeze blew through the grass and bushes in the churchyard and got under the minister’s cassock so that he had to stand and hold it down like some prudish woman, and the sound of the hymns came in waves so that at one time it was deafeningly close and at others almost completely inaudible in the blue depths behind the churchyard wall. Finally, Uncle Hans’ girls’ choir sang, “My life is a wave”.
Many tears were shed, and you yourself had to stand and grind your teeth to keep your emotions in check. But your sorrow was not so much due to Platen as to something quite different. For that very same day, you had been told that Merrit was soon to leave the country. Her father, who had been captain on the Christina for some time, was now to be captain of another much bigger ship sailing to the West Indies, and his wife and daughter were now to live in Copenhagen.
But you hadn’t really had time to grasp the fact that Merrit was to go away and that your ways would part, perhaps for ever. After the funeral, you went up through the fields to the Willow Grove, and here you lay down in the grass and stared up into the moving skies while abandoning yourself to – well, to what?
***
To a certain pleasure containing an element of pain – that is probably the best way to describe it on looking back with the wisdom of old age – demonstrating the truth of the saying that the only really happy love is unhappy love.
Of course, you didn’t think like that in those days. Your thoughts were warm dreams of desire and enamoured visions: see, there she comes, all in her summer dress with the wind in her hair (a reasonable description, though not quite right, for myth has already started to come into play with her).
“Merrit. Are you here?”
“Yes, ’cos I knew you were here.”
And she sits down with you in the grass, smiling, but with red rings round her eyes, for she has been weeping. You take her hands.
“Merrit. I knew you’d come.”
(Alas, this was all lies, sweet lies that are like stolen fruit that rots even before you have eaten it.)
“Amaldus. Won’t you kiss me? Yes, like that.” Whoo-oo-oo… now you are out floating with your earth girl.
(This was not a total fabrication, of course.)
And so we float out in the late summer’s day, low over the soughing fields with all their nodding flowers, right out across the whispering heather on the dark heath… towards the west, towards the west where the sea extends quietly foaming and endless. And now the entire web of inventions is suddenly the truth, the truth because it has been endowed with the transcendental dimension of poetry!
Then the sea roars almightily below us, vast, stretching for mile after mile as I look into her green stare eyes and love her. And this continues into the ferocious, desolate evening space over the sea, and perhaps into eternity, indeed perhaps into death, for perhaps it will be best that we never, never return, but… but…
“Amaldus! Are you here?”
You look up and encounter Aunt Nanna’s smiling eyes. Keil the photographer is standing behind her. They are both still dressed for the funeral, but Aunt Nanna’s face is radiant. Keil has a camera in a strap over his shoulder.
You stay there lying in the grass completely flustered, wanting most of all to jump up and run off.
“No, stay where you are, Amaldus – we’re only out to take a few snaps in the good weather, and you look so funny lying there all on your own and thinking.”
There is the sound of a click, and there you are, preserved to all time with all your agony.
And so your yearnings and dreams are gone; they are as though torn to shreds by the wind and already far away in the blue sky.
***
But they come back; indeed, they will pursue you for years – like some unforgettable melody that is fixed in your ear and which you occasionally become aware of and lose yourself in – and at that moment nothing else exists except just this melody, for everything else (including what is known as unassailable reality) fades away and is lost…
Poetry always has the last word.