To-day came two Greenlanders from the Raven isles and related that they had heard our King to be passed away. When I asked them who had told them this news, they would not answer me. But I think it to be their sorcerer, Apaluttork, who again is at large and practising his hocus-pocus and lies.
FROM HANS EGEDE’S JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 1731
In the autumn of 1730, King Frederik the Fourth together with his entourage and his queen, Anna Sophie, arrives at Odense Palace following a tour of inspection to Holstein, curtailed due to the King’s fatigue. He has come to the end. He is burdened by dropsy, breathless and bloated, an elderly Don Juan shivering with cold; he is, frankly put, at death’s door. As ever, one hopes for the best, a period of remission, another spring. But the spring is too distant by far and in his heart he knows he is at his final station, his final palace. In fact it is fitting. It was here that his half-brother, Christian Gyldenløve, passed away some thirty years ago, he himself kept the vigil at his bedside. But apart from having to die, he is in good spirit. The Queen is next to him in the carriage. She has dozed a while, her head upon his shoulder, and now she wakes. He squeezes her hand. It is burning hot. Or else it is he who is cold as ice.
Here we are, he says as the carriage curves up in front of the white building, its wheels crunching the gravel. The Queen yawns behind her fan, it sounds like she is about to sing, but she says only verzeihen Sie, I’m sorry, and he lifts her hand to his lips.
In a rustle of tulle and damask the Queen steps from the carriage. He shuffles sideways to the door. The Count Plessen comes fussing, wig and coat tails flapping. Dog-like, he endeavours to kiss the Queen’s hand, which she quickly retracts, then bows deeply and begins desperately to tug on the King’s arm as if the sovereign were a calf only halfway delivered.
I can manage on my own, Plessen, he says, and cannot help but emit a chuckle.
But he has spoken too soon, for manage he cannot. Not quite. He must support himself on Plessen’s arm as they dodder towards the door. Fortunately there are no steps to climb. He tries to straighten up and maintain some element of dignity, but it is clear that Plessen, the sycophantic puppet, is in his element with His Majesty’s helplessness.
Did His Majesty enjoy a pleasant journey? he enquires.
No.
His Majesty’s rooms are made ready.
Have they been heated?
Yes, Your Majesty. His Majesty will find them nice and warm.
Thank you, Plessen, my friend. He has recalled that he must treat the Count kindly, perhaps even accord him some privileges, so that he might speak favourably of the Queen to Crown Prince Christian when she becomes dowager queen and must look after herself. Christian despises his stepmother, whom Frederik made his queen consort several years before the late Louise breathed her last. Little Christian, so full of spite and bitter piety, the only person of whom he is truly afraid. And his dreadful Saxon wife, Sophie Magdalene, as ill-tempered as a German schnauzer. He is worried about what sanctions might be devised against ‘the whore’ once he is dead. Confinement to the Blue Tower, perhaps, that despicable structure which ought to have been pulled down long ago after the release of his great-aunt Leonora Christina. Plessen is the only one who can deflect this fanatic hatred of the Queen. Whether he will or not is another matter. There is so much over which one loses control when one happens to be dying. Everything comes apart like a mouldering wine-skin from which sour old wine and dregs seep like pus from a boil. One cannot even allow oneself to reveal one’s natural disdain for arse-lickers of Plessen’s ilk. And what use is it then to be king?
Her dignified figure accompanies him on his right. She does not support him. It would look like he was being dragged along between two carers. They come inside and a footman helps him upstairs where immediately he climbs into bed. His queen sits at his side. He gulps air with difficulty and perspires from his exertion.
Withdraw, by all means, he says. I need to get my breath back.
She bends down and he turns his cheek so that she may kiss him.
Sleep well, dearly beloved.
Her breasts dangle before his face. He senses her heavy odour of perspiration and lavender water and contrives to send her a dirty look. She stiffens slightly, looks at him enquiringly, only for him to turn away with a sigh. Lovemaking is the body’s laughter, sometimes the body’s tears. In any case, it is an outlet for all that is pent up inside. But he can laugh and weep no more.
Sleep well, my angel heart. Until our supper table.
She withdraws, leaving him alone. His fingers find the little Greenlandic bone figure, his household god, and he places it on the bedside table. It crouches there, staring at him, exuding an immense power which calms him.
///
I am Aappaluttoq, and I am flying. I can be in all places. I am bound by hand and feet, and the tighter the straps that constrain me, the more effortlessly I fly. It hurts. But the pain is a good pain. It focuses the mind and sets me free.
The sea is black, the sky white; the sea rises, the sky falls, and on the horizon they come together in a grey line. This is what I see when I look to the west. In the north and east stand the fells, they too white and black, though now scintillating in the sunshine of spring. There is Kingittorsuaq, the Deer Antler, rising up menacingly like an admonishing finger. It is on fire. A long plume pours seemingly from its peak. It is of course snow, not fire, not smoke, for the wind blows on Kingittorsuaq even when there is not a breath in the colony. The fell to the north-east is Sermitsiaq, the Saddle, two sharp and jagged ridges, one throwing its blue-tinted shadow on the other, like two men walking in single file. It is a beautiful and frightening fell. No one from the colony has felt inclined to climb it. I, of course, have been there many times. And between these sharp-toothed peaks stand the Malene fells, Quassussuaq, the lesser, and Ukussisaat, the greater, their sweeping lines gentle as a woman’s breasts, yet quite as dangerous as their neighbours, precisely because of their innocent and captivating appearance.
A man from the colony ascends there, for the sole reason of never having done so before. He reaches the top and is struck by the sun, and it is as if his whole skull lights up, an entire fairground of merry-go-rounds and lanterns and crackling fireworks inside his head, only stronger and without sound. He sighs deeply with delight. Of this I may tell my grandchildren. But the occasion never comes, this we know, not even to tell those of the colony this same evening. For he cannot find his way down again. The wind, or whatever it is, has erased his tracks and he wanders blindly among a system of ledges, one after another, until he comes to a point where both ascent and descent are quite impossible. Backwards and forwards he goes on his ledge, cautiously, for the rock is treacherous, he leans out and looks for a way down. But there is none, only a sheer face of ice and rock. He tries to clamber up the fellside down which he slid. What a mistake I have made, he thinks to himself with a mixture of amusement, fear and annoyance, but his feet find no foothold. And so he must attempt to climb down instead. Down he will come, by whatever means. The only question is how. But his courage fails him.
Peering over the edge again it is as if someone nudges him in the back, and with a shriek he plunges, no more than thirty fathoms, somersaulting on his way, thinking fleetingly that he sees a figure leaning over the ledge above him, a hideous face with a hideous smile, and then he lands in deep snow and discovers that he has survived the fall. He has plunged into a chimney of ice and is wedged tight. He struggles to come up, but sinks only further, feeling the walls press against his chest, the snow packing around him. He shouts and screams, but to whom? The snow fills his mouth, it fills his nostrils, as if driven by a form of human malevolence. The life seeping from him, he succumbs and floats dreamily away, as meltwater, deriving from his bodily warmth, trickles between his clothes and skin, the blood thickens in his arteries and veins, his muscles stiffen and the water becomes ice again as light glints inside his mind, tiny flashes as if from a passing thunderstorm, and thus he dies, upright like a sentry at his post, at the bottom of an ice-shaft he becomes ice himself, and no one will ever find him, and almost no one miss him at supper, for he was but one of the colony’s nameless who was to die anyway.
///
Days pass, weeks, in which nothing happens, neither deterioration nor improvement. He feels too fatigued to travel home to Copenhagen, and to die with young Christian and his sour wife at the foot of his bed is no alluring proposition. He resigns to staying put for the rest of the winter. If he lasts that long. He walks a little each day, supported by Plessen, and he is invariably present at dinner, the Queen at his side.
His old fear of the Inferno returns to him. He has enjoyed many women in his life and disappointed as many again, with the possible exception of the present queen whom he still loves. But God has punished him through her. Six children has he begotten with her, and all have perished. It is his earthly punishment. The heavenly one will be worse still. And his dread of hell is worse than ever before.
He seeks the guidance of his priest, Hersleb, whose words provide him with some measure of relief even though the man himself is an idiot. He speaks in a gentle voice and with a slightly apologetic smile on his lips which irritates Frederik, who instantly recognizes the false humility of all priests. However, he feels he is in no position to put the man in his place. The priest’s fleshy chin wobbles as he speaks, his small mouth uttering his words through pursed red lips jammed between baggy cheeks. He is in the habit of dabbing his mouth with his handkerchief as if they were at dinner, yet continuing to talk, his eyes darting uncertainly this way and that, and always he seems on the verge of stopping short, but whenever Frederik is about to say something he picks up the thread again, forestalling him with some banality or other, laughing at himself in embarrassment, plainly aware that he must soon wind things up and come to a conclusion, but droning on regardless, as if he simply cannot stop, meandering off into theological diversions utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand, backtracking, repeating something he has already said once or more, leaping onward to something else, summing up, recapitulating, reiterating, adding something new on which he feels compelled to expound, noting the King’s obvious relief at some approaching conclusion, only then to say, which incidentally, Your Majesty, reminds me of, then to be away on some new digression, increasingly ill at ease and perspiring, his eyes flickering desperately as he racks his brain for something firm which may extricate him from the confounded torrent of claptrap on which he has embarked, and the King sighs and clears his throat, he reaches out his hand and clutches the sleeve of the priest’s cassock, giving him a start, and precipitating yet another landslide of jittery theological drivel, but then eventually, as if by some miracle, he returns to something the King said to him at the beginning of their talk, about the nature of death, and feels himself measurably liberated when, as if having discovered a doorway leading out of this labyrinth, he declares one’s death-day to be of greater significance than one’s birth-day, Your Majesty, for it is verily the entrance into the heavenly life. And with that he shuts up.
But one has become so attached to this world, says Frederik rather pitifully.
When the time comes, God will release His Majesty from all that is earthly, Hersleb says. Be not afraid, Your Majesty. The Lord will receive him with open arms like his own lost son. That same evening, His Majesty will be seated at the table with all who have gone before him.
Which of course sounds promising indeed. He resolves, by a sheer act of will, to believe in it, retaining the image of the heavenly table that is being made ready for him, cheerful preparations, a light-filled hall, good food and wine, music, laughter and the joys of reunion.
Will Queen Louise be there? he asks.
She will be there too.
But I think she hates me.
In heaven there is no hatred, only love and forgiveness.
Count Plessen waits on him. Frederik can barely put up with the worm, but retains his poker-face nonetheless and continues to be civil with him. He cannot make an enemy of Plessen, who holds in his hands the fate of Anna Sophie. To fill out their time together he invites him to play cards with him in the afternoon, after their walk, before supper. That way he avoids having to talk to him. He even lets him win at ombre, and the shameless nincompoop rejoices gleefully at having beaten his dying king in a game. And so pass his days.
///
Autumn comes, and with it storms. It is an old wife who comes with the autumn. On her back she carries a sack full of wind, and she rushes about the land, as fast as an old wife can rush, her legs moving so quickly they cannot be seen, her hair fanning behind her, and then she will open her sack and let out the wind for there to be storms. The quicker the old wife has run, the stronger the wind. The spirit of the air is called Sila. Sila is not among my own spirits. But I do know her. Sila comes with the darkness, the wind and the cold. She brings the air together, compressing it, making it dense and compact. This is the darkness of winter. In darkness is pain, and pain is stillness and contemplation. But the storm, which is another aspect of Sila, released from the old wife’s wind-sack, will try to shake away the darkness with all its bluster. As if the darkness were a fog that could be dispersed by the wind. But the darkness is not a fog, and cannot be blown to the sea. The darkness is firm, it sticks to the land and cloaks its people, descending from the north, sweeping the sun below the horizon and pressing its head down into the sea until it is drowned. And when the sun is gone, Sila settles and finds peace with herself, and then comes the cold. In the cold is the final stillness and calm. This is the true winter.
///
He adores mirrors. Mirrors expand the world, doubling it, multiplying it, if several mirrors are placed at a certain angle to each other, revealing in their depths an entire litany of repetitions of this earthly life. Yet one cannot properly get to the bottom of such consecutive reflections, for the beholder obstructs his own view. Always there is a head and body in the way.
A mirror is also a portrait, though plastic as its model. Moreover, it never embellishes, never glorifies, never adorns its subject with superfluous attributes of symbolic nature. His is a face knotted with scars from the pox he suffered as a child. It looks like a lump of minced meat. It is an honest face, and true. The mirror is a portrait in which the subject grows up, grows old and dies. But the odd thing about this portrait is that the only person who can properly see it is the person whose portrait it is. This solitude, or intimacy, of picture and beholder, fascinates him. As long as I see a man in the mirror, I am here yet. For the picture is mortal. When the beholder is gone, the picture too is gone. He sometimes fears there will be emptiness. Nothing left but chairs, tables, chests of drawers, papered walls. This is the terror of the dead, to step in front of a mirror and see in it nothing but a nature morte, a still life devoid of human presence. But of course there will always be someone in the mirror. His successor in this mirror-world is called Christian. The mirror is thereby death, he thinks to himself, gazing at his reflection, and contains death’s abstract chaos.
He stands up in the salon, looking at himself between two mirrors, straight-backed and yet at ease, the sun coming in from the rear, two kings considering each other, and a hundred thousand with their backs turned. But in the mirror behind him, which reflects the mirror in front of him, they all stand staring at him over each other’s shoulders, while he himself stands between these two endless friezes of kings. His shadow is thrown onto the floor in front of him. The figure in the mirror possesses a shadow too. In fact, this shadow interests him more than the person he sees. A reflection of a shadow, ambivalence again. Like the figure of the King himself, his shadow is multiplied, projected infinitely into the mirrors’ bewildering cylinder! He finds it dizzying.
Suddenly he kicks out, an impulsive action whose reason is unknown to him, for he is not in any way enraged, and the mirror cracks from corner to corner. Yet, even though it is old and blotched with quicksilver, it does not shatter. And now, strangely and remarkably, as he steps backwards and the figure in the mirror, distorted by the crack in the glass, divided in two at the waist, likewise steps back and away from him, his reflected shadow remains stuck to the same place on the floor. And while he knows this to be an impossibility, an optical illusion caused by the sun or by the mirror’s quicksilver, he nonetheless sees his shadow quite clearly abandoned by the body from which it was cast, and with a small flutter of sunlight shining upon it, making it partially diffuse, albeit not enough to make it disappear completely.
///
The moon is in love with the sun. The moon is the man, the restless suitor. He hurtles back and forth across the sky. The sun is the woman, big and warm and lazy, the paths she wanders barely changing from day to day. In the winter she hides away, while the moon continues to tear about looking for her. Very occasionally, and there can be years in between, they meet and merge together in love, or what the Danes call an eclipse, lasting only the briefest of moments, less than an hour, and in the few minutes in which the sun at last yields to the courtship of the moon, in which his love for her is consummated, the earth narrows its eyes as if in modesty, and darkness descends.
///
The palace barber, who is also the surgeon, comes to cup him. The physician looms above him, peering over the surgeon’s shoulder to make sure everything goes by the book, literally so, for he is reading aloud from a German handbook of medical surgery. The barber-surgeon, a waggish sort, winks at his king and smiles, and Frederik smiles back conspiratorially. Let the man enjoy his work.
He has suffered an attack in the night, with fever and feebleness, pains in his chest, coughing and congestions of thick mucus. It is the damp weather that has gone to his lungs, the surgeon says. His Majesty ought to travel south and be warmed up.
Yes, if only I could, he says.
The Queen is with him. She holds his hand and is quite calm. Her serenity settles his mind. But then it is day now too. It is the nights which are bad. Their dreadful fantasies, their wispy, wandering figures, scarlet imps and perished queens.
We should properly draw off some blood as well, wouldn’t you say? the surgeon enquires, turning his head to the physician.
Cupping and bleeding on the same day? The physician seems sceptical. I’ve never known it before. Let the cups do their work.
It helps too, though perhaps it is more the hand of the Queen which helps. He fears the night and all its diableries. He fears hell while still alive.
And hell will come, even for an absolute monarch. It comes for the rascal and the scavenger, like filth and lice and consumption. Often it comes in the night. It must be the darkness itself carrying with it a poisonous vapour which seeps in through the closed windows and wraps itself clammily around the human body which lies and waits. He is assailed by choking fits after midnight and the Queen summons both the physician and the priest. The priest summons the Lord, and the physician summons the surgeon who lives inside the city. He arrives as the priest is administering the sacrament. Plessen too comes shuffling in his dressing gown and nightcap and stands by the window looking out through the curtains as if waiting for some nocturnal visit.
The surgeon measures the King’s pulse, empties the contents of his chamber pot into a round-bottomed flask which he then holds up to the light, and looks into his eyes.
No, he says. Not yet. The time has not yet come. We must let some blood.
Then do so, snaps the physician. What are you waiting for?
The surgeon takes out his needles and syringes, taps the King on the chest, presses his hand down into his abdomen and releases, causing the royal belly to wobble a moment. He prods and probes. If His Majesty will permit? he says, and lays his ear to his chest and listens. He inserts a long needle into the King’s midriff and a clear fluid begins to run into a bowl. Frederik lies listening to it gurgle and feels his strenuous breathing to be relieved somewhat. The Queen wipes his brow with a cloth she dips in lavender water. It cools him pleasantly. She looks upon him without sorrow, unpained, and with a strength in which he finds comfort.
The surgeon taps his fingers against the King’s chest and listens once more. He says there is quite an amount of pleural fluid. With His Majesty’s permission I should like to draw some of it off. He indicates with his finger.
Do whatever you find necessary, my good man, Frederik tells him.
Another needle, considerably thicker this time, is inserted into the chest, and again fluid trickles and gurgles.
It seems to be quite clear, not at all cloudy, says the surgeon. He sniffs at the fluid, dabs a finger into the bowl in which it has collected and tastes it. Good, he declares appreciatively. Very good indeed.
Frederik falls asleep and on waking the next day he feels well. He even gets out of bed, aided by two servants who help him into the great chair where he nibbles at a plate of boiled pears.
A very good day to you, says the Queen. How is my king today?
Much better, thank you. Where is the surgeon?
Downstairs in the salon, sleeping.
Send him up. I wish to reward him. Call for Plessen too. I’ve something for him as well.
A short time later, Denmark has a new baron, and Plessen is given the Order of the Elephant, the King speaking to him in private, sending even the Queen outside. And Plessen smiles graciously, his new order nestled in his pocket.
///
The snow falls thickly this autumn, first wet, later dry. All edges become rounded and soft. The colony dwellings sink into the accumulating mounds and blow their curls of grey smoke into the air where they mingle with the grey blanket of cloud which drops lower and lower, again to compound itself into the densest snow which then precipitates once more onto the roofs. The fjord is black. It consumes the snow which falls upon it, remaining unchanged in its blackness, insatiably absorbing the descending white. Along the shore the snow settles and collects into a thick porridge bobbing with the swell and forming a greyish crust that is oddly elastic, but which nonetheless can bear a person’s weight if anyone should have need to walk upon it. Now the bays are filled with ice, particularly those which face away from the open sea. When the wind is up, the waves wash into a frozen embankment which grows with every storm. And when the wind is in the north, which happens once or twice in every month, the swell is powered through the fjord, breaking up these icy banks, the rocks become black and slimy, and the waves surge well onto the land, raging and wreaking their havoc, crashing and exploding in vertical spuming columns which drop as quickly again, to be sucked back into the next assailment.
A flash of light in the night, followed by a dull thud. A salute for the King on his fifty-ninth birthday. Long live King Frederik! A toast to the King!
But I am not in the colony. I am with the King. And the King has but hours left on earth.
///
Here I am. Here I lie. It is all I can do.
The Pastor Hersleb prays and sings for me, and I hum along to show my good will. I confess my sins, which are many, receive the sacraments and the holy oil, and lie and count the minutes. The clock moves so slowly. It is quite unfathomable. Days pass, weeks, months between every movement of its hand. One could live forever like this. I doze off, and when I awake more than four hours have passed. What a relief.
I have no pain. The body has succumbed. It no longer tells me of its suffering. What’s the use? I am now separated from my own body. It has given me much pleasure, albeit also much trouble. I have always enjoyed riding, horses especially, but also the ladies. Will I ever see a cunt again, a cunt that breathes its warmth in my face and kisses me softly on the mouth? Only my mind is horny now. The body cares not. It used to be the body that ran ahead of me like a dog. It could bring most everything into jeopardy. A king ought not to have a body. Now, though, it has abandoned me. Where did it go? Ah, there it is. It lies here in the bed, quite limp and on its back.
They are all here. Plessen and his fat wife, Hersleb with his blubbery chin, the physician, the surgeon, the servants, my valet Torm. And my queen of course. She wipes my brow and cheeks with her damp lavender cloth and looks upon me with a patient expression, quite without pathos. I am grateful to her. The Greenlandic talisman is on my bedside table. It stares at me knowingly. I would like to reach out for it, to feel the smoothness of the bone between my fingers, but I cannot. Someone ought to get rid of it, or put it away in a drawer. It is pagan, I suppose. Yet I feel comforted by it. It wishes me no harm. It knows me, it knows who I am. And yet it likes me.
After midnight time passes more slowly. My lungs wheeze and struggle on, breath by breath, like the strokes of an oar, but still I watch the long hand of the clock. It has stood still for a long time now. How incredibly slow that clock is.
///
Long live Christian the Sixth, says Plessen quietly. He is standing by the curtain. His Majesty has just now arrived.
The King is dead, declares the physician.
But the King is alive. He has at this very moment pulled up in front of the palace, the gravel flying about the wheels, and Plessen sees him jump from the carriage and run to the main door. They hear his footsteps on the stair, and a moment later the door is flung open and Christian marches into the chamber, his cheeks blooming with exertion.
Where is he? Am I too late?
His Majesty is just in time, says Plessen, bowing low and kissing his hand.
///
November was windy. December was a deluge of sludge and rain, interspersed with sleet and glaze ice. Now it is January. Hard frost and still weather. The ground is slippery underfoot. Nuuk, or the cape on which the colony is situated, is girded by a thick belt of ice that makes putting a boat in the water a perilous affair. The native hunters climb into their kayaks on land then slide down over the icy embankment to all but vanish into the water, then bobbing up into view again like a cork, flapping their hands to brush the ice flakes from their gut-skin waterproofs. They paddle out across the ice-cold, silent sea, armed with harpoon, hunting float, arrows and a resolve to kill.
The native dwellings are well heated with their blubber lamps which never seem to go out, and their pots of boiling meat which seem always to be filled to the brim. The women wash their hair in the urine pots and help each other with their grooming, picking out the lice and crushing them between their nails with a small and satisfying snap; they tan and scrape hides, sew and mend, and chew the skins so as to make them soft; they lie with their men, whisper stories sniggeringly into each other’s ears, rock their children and are busy the whole winter. The men have little to do apart from when they venture out into the cold to hunt. When they are home they sit and recline on the benches, naked, glistening with sweat, and lazily allow themselves to be groomed by their women and children. Or else they tell stories, frightening the lives out of each other with tales of evil spirits crawling inside the bodily orifices of people while they are sleeping.
I am Aappaluttoq, the Red One. I am a man condemned to solitude. Some few short years ago I took a new wife, Isigannguaq, or Sara, for she was baptized, but now she too is dead. She gave birth to a child with three heads, one had blue eyes and fair hair, another brown eyes and black hair, and the third had blue eyes and black hair. Such a monstrosity cannot live of course. Nor indeed can the woman who gives birth to it. Now I am alone again. So it is to be a shaman. A shaman is the dregs, held everywhere in contempt. But they cannot do without me either.
Now they have bound me with leather straps, and off I fly. Far, far away.
Where have you been? they ask. To the far side of the moon? To the Pope in Rome? They laugh until they nearly split their sides.
I’ve been with their king, I tell them. I’m exhausted. Give me some meat.
They give me meat and fresh water. And when I have eaten I tell them. The King is dead.
Sunaaffa! they exclaim in dismay. Can the King die? What will happen to us now?
And of course the women begin to cry. A shrill wail, piercing and persistent. And this is how we Greenlanders mourn King Frederik the Fourth, long before the Danes have any idea that he is dead.