Thus the winter of the eclipse passed.
Then came, “the spring when everything became different”.
Not everything, of course. The sun shines and the rain rains as usual; the sea glistens and sparkles; ships come and go. The wind howls in the gables and the fences out in Jutta’s father’s grassland, and the midges dance in freshening weather above the burbling brook. Yet nothing is, “as it used to be”.
“As it used to be” and “long ago” had already entered your life. Once long ago, Merrit sat out in the rain in the green hills. Once long ago we balanced with outstretched arms across the Life Bridge. And long ago – and this really is long ago, for it was in the very beginning of time – there was a Tower at the furthermost Edge of the World. Now, there is no longer any furthermost Edge, for the World is round and there is no Edge to it. But instead of the mist-filled abyss, where God’s Spirit used to hover over the waters, something even more overwhelming has appeared: the star-filled Space in which the Earth sails around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth.
When the wind is blowing and the air is full of scurrying clouds, especially towards the evening, you can feel the Earth sailing.
On one such sailing evening, you met Merrit carrying her music case under her arm and on her way out to Andreasminde.
“Come with me, Amaldus. Then I’ll play that piece you know. The scale, you know. Our scale.”
“Oh, that one.”
“Yes, and then afterwards you can take me home, ’cos do you know…?”
Merrit is wearing her stare eyes. She comes close to me and touches my hand, and I can feel her breath in my ear.
“Platen’s terribly ill; he might die tonight.”
We walk past Madame Midjord’s little house, where Platen lives. There is a light in his bedroom window in the gable. You were up there once with a bag from Uncle Hans (a bag in which there was something that gurgled). Platen lay fully dressed on his bed, fat and heavy and slightly blue around his nose and with kindly eyes that stood out a little and had red veins in the whites. It was a very little room; its sloping walls were covered in flowery wallpaper, and his duvet cover was also flowered, and Platen winked merrily at you:
“That’s lovely, my boy. You have your uncle’s kind, bright eyes, and that’s something you can be pleased about. Come on, you and I are going to have a little drink.”
And he put two glasses on the table and poured something clear and thin into one of them and something red and thick in the other, and then he nudged you and said, “Cheers”.
Merrit’s elbow and shoulder against your arm, and her whispering voice: “Perhaps he’s dying at this very moment. Your uncle and Selimsen are up with him to help him when he dies.”
“What do you mean: help him?”
“Oh, just be with him and hold his hand.”
Grandmother sits staring into the air and it seems her thoughts are far away.
“Aye, it’s a pity about Platen. He’s such a splendid man. But he’s so weak, so weak.”
The candles are lit on the piano, and Merrit’s fingers hurry up and down the black and white steps of the scales while you sit looking through one of Grandmother’s picture books without seeing the pictures. And the wind howls in the gable, and clouds filled with gloom scurry across the pale sky at dusk, and you have a salt taste in your throat from unspoken apprehension. Not emotion concerning Platen, but something else. This something else is Merrit, sitting there and playing “our” scale while Grandmother sits deep in thought with her eyes closed behind her glasses, sunk into reverie and far away in her thoughts…
When on our way home we passed Madame Midjord’s house, quiet singing could be heard through the open gable window: “Am I born, then I will live.”
Merrit stopped and listened.
“Then he’s not dead yet. Amaldus.”
“Yes?”
Then you feel her cold arm round your neck and her warm cheek against yours. But only for a moment, then she nudges you and pulls at your jersey.
“No. Come on. I’ve got to hurry.”
***
You lay for a long time that night unable to sleep, thinking of what Platen had said on that occasion when you drank to each other and of the sweet taste in his raspberry juice. But that was not all that made you lie there clutching your pillow and making it damp and warm with your tears. That was something quite different. And that quite different thing was her.
And the tones of the melodic minor scale ran up and down their steps as you lay there and whispered her name down into your clammy pillow.
***
However, Platen did not die until some months later. He died on the longest day of the year. He died late in the morning, just as the schooner the Christina had arrived and dropped anchor in the roads and lay out there with its masts and its yards and its gilded figurehead, and the sun was shining at its brightest and all the Rømer grounds out near the Ring were white with drying fish.
He died while we boys were out playing Robin Hood and shooting our bows and arrows up in the fields near Ekka’s well house.
Then Ekka came out of her house and stood peering down over the town.
“Can you boys tell me whether Rømer’s flag is flying at full mast or half mast?”
“Half mast.”
“Then Platen’s dead.”
Then we stopped playing because Platen was dead.
Erik August von Platen was the full name of the man who had now died. Ekka told this and that about him in a sad voice, on the verge of tears. He came from a fine, extremely wealthy family, but they had disowned him because he couldn’t look after his money and frittered it away in his uncontrollable desire for drink, poor man. Then he came here on the Christina and settled down in Mrs Midjord’s house, and Mrs Midjord earned a lot of money for taking care of him. He was drunk most of the time, but otherwise he was always nice and kind. But then he fell ill, and the doctor couldn’t cure him of that illness for it was something to do with his bowels, which were entirely eaten up by all those glasses of strong schnapps. Then they sent for Fina the Hut, and she came with some herbal mixtures, and they were a help, but only for a time. Then you could see Platen sitting in his basket chair outside Mrs Midjord’s house when the weather was good. There he sat, rocking his white walking stick and talking to folk passing by. Aye, he was always in a good mood. God rest his soul…
***
Later that day, Uncle Hans came and told us about Platen’s last hours and sat there with tears running down his cheeks as he spoke. He had sung Platen to sleep, indeed, he had sung him into his last sleep. He had at last sung his favourite song, ‘My life is a wave’. Then Platen had said, “Goodbye, Hans. Now I’m going into my tapestry.”
Those were his last words.
Aye, strange words. And the very moment his soul departed, Selimsen, who was on his way up towards Mrs Midjord’s house, had seen a white mist floating above the roof of the house, a mist in the shape of a man with his arm raised.
Father: “Of course.”
Mother: “What do you mean: of course, Johan?”
“Well, Selimsen had naturally had a drop to mark the day!”
***
Then Mrs Midjord came; she was wearing a mantilla of black spangles and smelled of lavender and it was quite obvious she had been drinking rum, and she wept a great deal and held Uncle Hans’ hand.
“He was as good as the day is long, was Platen. He had such a gentle nature.”
Mrs Midjord unwraps something from an embroidered handkerchief. It is a piece of jewellery, a gold ring set with a blue stone. She holds it up in the light so they can see how the stone shines.
“A real sapphire. He gave it to me.”
Then we boys went down to the mouth of the river where Johan the carpenter was standing in the sunshine outside his workshop, planing wood for Platen’s coffin. Here stood The Wise Virgins and Spanish Rikke and some other girls and married women talking to each other in plaintive voices.
“He was so kind and so charming, but so weak, so weak.”
“He was a poor soak.”
“No, Rikke, you can’t say that sort of thing now he’s standing before God’s throne.”
***
That evening, a great many people had gathered in the garden of Andreasminde, sitting in the summer house with their glasses and remembering the dead man, and Uncle Hans and Selimsen sang, “My life is a wave”, and Selimsen went indoors to Grandmother and asked her to play a funeral march. (Grandmother played the one by Mendelssohn – and when the dark, agonising sounds came floating out of the open window, you had to hide yourself and your emotion in a flowering red-currant bush.)
Then night fell, although the sun still shone on the red flakes of clouds high up in the air.
But on board the Christina, the sailors were playing the accordion, and you could hear there were girls on board and that they were dancing and fooling about even though Platen was dead.
Mother closed the window.
“That’s something you ought to have been able to stop, Johan.”
Father stood with his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and with an extinguished pipe between his teeth.
“There’s no reason to be so miserable just because the poor feckless idiot has finally got what he wanted.”
“What do you mean by wanted, Johan?”
“Well, drinking himself to death. But let’s hope it can be a lesson for that crazy brother of yours.”
Then you glance at Mother and see the pain in her eyes and feel a wave of sympathy of which you are also a little ashamed of at the same time.