“Kierkegaard sought me out more and more.”
REGINE OLSEN
“The period of falling in love is surely the most interesting time.”
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Two days later, Søren walked into the Olsen’s open house behind Fritz. Regina smirked. The poor man was obviously besotted.
But somehow Regina never got a chance to speak to him. Every time she turned around, he was talking to her parents, her brother, or her sisters. Whenever Regina joined the conversation, thinking, Poor Søren. I should be kind to him, Søren melted away. At first she thought it a coincidence, then she wondered if he was angry at her, and finally it dawned on her that he was ignoring her on purpose. Wretched man.
This went on for a year. Not only did Søren accompany Fritz to every single Olsen open house, he also seemed to walk the same routes through the city that Regina did. She saw him when she crossed bridges, when she walked through open squares, when she strolled in the parks.
He really should stop coming to her house. What was the point, if he wouldn’t talk to her? He was beginning to disturb her peace. She had to work so hard in her times alone with God to achieve that peace in the first place. But the way Søren Kierkegaard seemed to circle in closer and closer to her conversations was getting under her skin. Sometimes she even had to double her time with God just to stop thinking about how annoying Søren was.
It was all his fault. He wouldn’t talk to her, but he seemed to take in every detail of what she wore, who she spoke to, and whether she was bored or happy. She could tell by the hungry way he watched her across the room. And Søren seemed to charm her parents so much that Regina found herself trying to overhear what he was saying to them instead of listening to whatever Fritz was whispering in her ear.
In the summer, after Marie’s wedding to a wealthy, self-satisfied banker named Johan, the Olsens went to the country to visit friends. One gray Wednesday afternoon, Regina took a stroll alone down a country lane in Lyngby. As she walked, she lifted the skirt of her pale blue gown to keep the hemline clear of the mud. Hedges in need of a trimming sent thin, skeletal arms spiraling down on her. Stinging nettles lurked at the base of the hedges. Wan white wildflowers wilted beside the nettles, their petals lacerated by the recent rains. Every now and then, through a gap in the hedge, she caught a glimpse of meadow sloping down to the stream by Sorgenfri Forest. She kept having to tilt her chin to admire the view from beneath the brim of her straw bonnet.
The brim was as wide and round as a duck’s bill. A sky blue satin ribbon encircling the crown of the bonnet matched the sky blue satin ribbon encircling the high waist of her gown. The gown came to a V in front, and had narrow white ruffles around the neckline and its short puffed sleeves. Anna had pulled the dress off of the laundry line this morning and ironed the ruffles so that they made soft, undulating ripples in the wind. From the way the dress wrapped itself around her, Regina was aware that it accentuated the strengths of her figure as few dresses ever do. It really was too bad that no men were around.
A flock of sheep clattered down the road toward her. Bleating, they blocked the narrow dirt lane. “Sorry, miss,” the farmer said. He wore ancient, shapeless brown trousers and an open-necked, cornflower blue shirt that billowed around his arms. Thick wrinkles punctured his deep leathery brown skin. He showed touching respect, Regina thought, by looking down as she turned into Pastor Ibsen’s churchyard to let the sheep pass.
Regina eyed the churchyard with disdain. She took in the gray stone parsonage, the muddy pond, the wan grass, the tall, yellow and pink flowers sagging by the church wall, the moss-covered bench beneath a row of sallow linden trees, the goose droppings liberally spread across the ground, and she pitied the wife of the parson who lived here.
A scuffling noise made her spring round. Søren Kierkegaard came bounding toward her from the gap in the hedge. The ducks and geese began to quack and flap their way into the murky pond water. Regina tucked one stray hair beneath her bonnet and looked away. Mossy fronds moved gently from the rocks at the water’s edge.
“Miss Olsen,” Søren cried.
“Mr. Kierkegaard. What a surprise.” You annoying man.
“No surprise to me,” he said.
“Really? Did you follow me here, then?” she asked with sugary charm.
“Of course,” he said. He stared at her, his pale, fine face melting into a vulnerable expression.
Regina’s mouth dropped open. She quickly snapped it shut again. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“Didn’t you guess? I follow you everywhere.”
“Please don’t tease me,” she said. Suddenly she wished her dress did not cling quite so tightly, that the ruffles did not undulate quite so wildly. The dress spoke a language that undermined the frostiness of her tone.
“I’m in earnest,” he said. “I’ve been following you for years. Didn’t you think it strange that you ran into me so often?”
“Yes. No. What are you talking about?”
“How you saw me everywhere, but I never spoke to you.”
“You seem to have changed your tactics,” she said. She tried to look stern, but his confession made her feel so wonderful she couldn’t help grinning.
“I know,” he said. Then he paused and tried to look sheepish. “But I must confess. I didn’t really follow you. I come to Lyngby every year. I rent rooms at Bleach Farm, as do my cousins.”
She was ashamed. For a moment, she’d believed him. “That was cruel,” she said. “I told you not to tease me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t tease you again. You see, sometimes I just can’t help myself.” An emotion bearing a suspicious resemblance to pride quivered on his face. “May I accompany you?”
“In my turn around the local duck pond? If you insist.”
He held out the crook of his elbow. For a second, she hesitated. What harm could it do? She took the elbow he offered her.
Instantly, his body became as tense as a taut wire. He pinned her hand against his side. “Miss Regine Olsen,” he said.
“Please, call me Regina. Everybody does,” she said, trying to pull her hand loose. He squashed it tighter against his side. She’d have to yank her hand away to get it free.
“Not everybody, Miss Olsen. Not everybody.”
She looked at the duck pond, embarrassed. She’d never seen such a change. For a year he’d ignored her, and now this?
“How do you like this pastoral scene, Miss—Regina— Olsen?”
“It’s pastoral,” she said.
“Could you see yourself here?”
“I am here,” she said, tilting the huge brim of her bonnet so that she could see his face. What an infuriating bonnet. It was completely in her way. She could see the delicacy of his skin, how smooth his face was, how expressive his lips. But she could not see his eyes. She buried her face beneath her bonnet. Who wanted to see him anyway. He was toying with her. The cad.
She tried to pull free again. He tucked her hand in closer and said, “What I mean is, could you see yourself here as the wife of a country priest?”
“That would depend, Mr. Kierkegaard.” Dragonflies soared around her, seeming about to hit her but always swerving at the last moment in their weighted elegant way.
“On what?” Without meaning to, the motion as quick and supple as a snake slipping through the grass, she twisted her neck to scan his face again. His eyes, bright and clear and brilliantly blue, stared back at her.
“On the country priest, of course,” she said.
He laughed, and his eyes danced with false modesty. “What if the priest were handsome? Intelligent? Thoughtful, but secretly—only to those few he loved?”
“A parson would have to love everyone,” she said, a blush rising to her cheeks. Don’t let him make a fool of you again.
“That’s the problem,” he cried, leaping forward with such excitement that he dragged her along. She pinned her bonnet down with her free hand to prevent it from sailing into the water. “That is exactly the problem—loving everyone! I have wrestled with it!”
“I’m sure you have,” she said. “Isn’t that the problem for all of us?”
An image rose before her of Søren Kierkegaard in a black frock, standing at the door of a little country church, with ducks quacking and geese flapping their wings, and of herself standing at his side, nodding her head demurely to their parishioners. She would be the perfect wife of a country priest. Perfect. She could advise all the women in the congregation with her godly, wise thoughts. She could bring Søren hot tea while he wrote his sermons. She could even add a few insights of her own.
Regina tried unsuccessfully to yank her hand free again. She had to get away from this man.
“The trouble is, so few men have a true religious need,” he said. “Their miseries are purely of this world. I would be bored sick.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Aren’t their physical needs important, too? Jesus didn’t just preach. He healed people.”
“All symbolic,” Søren said, waving one hand. “The thing is to love people in the abstract—the idea of them.”
“Perhaps, deep down, you don’t really want to be a priest.”
His eyes darted sideways. “Miss Regina Olsen,” he said, inclining his head to the side. “Over that stone wall, I hear a flock of Olsens about to descend upon me, and I must speak my mind quickly.” Regina heard them then, her father’s hearty, almost fake laugh, her mother’s pleasant voice, and Olga’s sarcasm. She suddenly wished they would go a different way.
“I stand at the beginning of my life—of my essential life,” Søren said, speaking in a low, urgent tone. “I have just passed my theological exams. Before I begin my dissertation—on irony, of course, of course—I am going to embark on a pilgrimage to my father’s birthplace. It is my prayer that there I will find the idea for which I can live and die, that I will find what truth is, and whether I shall …” He paused and looked down at her. “Shall I marry?”
Strange creatures—larger than the dragonflies, or even the ducks—seemed to cavort in Regina’s stomach. Was he going to propose?
If so, would they live together in his bachelor apartment? Or would they move back to his father’s house with Søren’s brother, Peter Christian? It could be such a beautiful home. If she put in some flowers and changed the color of the … What was she thinking? Horrified by the insidious turn her thoughts had taken, Regina shook herself back into the present, outside the parsonage—a world where she had an understanding with Fritz Schlegel.
Søren scanned her face and seemed satisfied. “May I call on you, Miss Regina Olsen,” he whispered, “when I return?”
“You may no longer want to,” she said, trying to disguise how his words had made her feel as light as her blue dress fluttering on the clothesline that morning, “after all that soul searching in Jutland.”
He giggled, a high-pitched, schoolboy giggle. “True! True! But if I still want to … , may I?”
Regina Olsen gave Søren Kierkegaard something she had already given. “Yes,” she said. “You may call on me.”
Søren took her hand from beneath his elbow, turned it over, and pressed his lips upon her palm. She shivered, despite herself. “Today is Wednesday,” he said, as he released her. “I will revere Wednesdays always.”
Then he scuttled down the incline toward the hedgerow. His black coat flapped around him, and his arms swung at his side. His joints seemed so loose that she wondered if they were attached at the sockets at all.
Just as Søren reached the gap in the hedge, he lifted his hat and nodded in the direction the farmer had gone with his sheep. “I shall try to avoid following the flock,” he yelled.
He cackled—a thin, high, happy laugh—and she smiled back. Then he disappeared. Her eyes retained the image of him standing in the gap for a few seconds longer.
She turned back to the parsonage. The sky shone with a deep blue brilliance. A pastiche of billowing white clouds soared above, each backlit by a stream of sunlight. The stones of the parsonage glowed with a chalky gray purity. The wind rippled through the fields beyond, making the translucent green stalks dance and shimmer. The stream carved a magical ribbon toward the distant forest.
Regina raced around the parsonage yard. The ducks were adorable, simply adorable. The pond was so quaint. The linden trees were stately, marvelous. The parsonage was a beautiful place, a wonderful place. What a lucky woman Mrs. Ibsen was to live here.
Above the hedgerow she could see the top of Søren’s black hat bobbing in and out of sight. Dreadful man, she thought.
And on her fingers, she began to count the days until their return to Copenhagen.