Mysteries (38 page)

Happy and exalted, he ran down the stairs and entered the dining room. He was still singing. Then by mere chance his jubilant high spirits were promptly dashed, making him feel embittered for several hours. He sang as he ate a hurried breakfast, standing up at the table; though he was not alone, he didn’t sit down. When he noticed that the other two guests were sending him angry looks, he quickly apologized: had he noticed them before, he would have behaved more discreetly. He neither saw nor heard anything on such days! Wasn’t it a glorious morning? Why, the flies were buzzing already!

But he received no answer, the two strangers looked as displeased as before and went on with their dignified political discussion. Nagel’s mood plummeted. He fell silent and quietly left the dining room. After visiting a shop down the street to get some cigars, he set out for the woods as usual. It was half-past eleven.

People never changed, did they! There they sat, those two lawyers or agents or landowners, or whatever they were, discussing politics in the dining room and looking hateful and sour just because he happened to be humming for joy in their presence. Chewing away at their breakfasts with an exceedingly reasonable air, they couldn’t tolerate being interrupted. Heh-heh, they both had swag bellies and fat, pudgy fingers; their napkins were tucked under their chins. By rights, he ought to go back to the hotel and taunt them a little. What sort of high and mighty gentlemen were they anyway? Agents in grits, in American hides—God knows if it wasn’t in cheap crockery. Truly something to bowl you over! And yet they had put an end to his happy thoughts in an instant. They weren’t even particularly good-looking! Well, one of them didn’t look too bad, but the other—the one with the hides—had a crooked mouth that only opened on one side, so that it reminded you of a buttonhole. He also had a lot of gray hair growing out of his ears. He was ugly as sin, pfui! But, of course, one mustn’t express one’s joy in a snatch of song when that man had his face in the food trough!

No, people never changed, they certainly didn’t! The gentlemen discuss politics, the gentlemen have noted the latest government appointments; thank God, it wasn’t yet too late for Buskerud County to be saved for the Conservatives! Heh-heh, how amusing to observe their mine owners’ faces as they said it. As if Norwegian politics were anything but rotgut wisdom and peasant flimflam! I, Ola Olsen from Lista, agree to a compensation of one hundred and seventy-five kroner to a widow in Nordland, provided I get in return a parish road at three hundred kroner in Fjære parish, Ryfylke County. Heh-heh, flimflam.

But start up a merry song and disturb Ola Upnorth in his parliamentary business, and all hell breaks loose! That gets you into big trouble. For mind you, Ola is thinking, Ola is pondering something. What is he up to? What bill is he going to propose tomorrow? Heh-heh-heh, there he is, a trusted man in Norway’s minuscule world, elected by the people to contribute his lines to the country’s royal farce, dressed in the sacred national shaggy-goat style, puffing away to his heart’s content at his chewing-tobacco pipe, his paper collar soggy with true and honest sweat! Out of the way for the chosen one, stand aside, damn it, give him some elbowroom!
⁴

Good Lord, how those fat round zeros make the numbers big!

Anyway, that’s the end of that. To hell with the zeros! You eventually get tired of humbug and can’t bother to touch it anymore. You take to the woods and lie down under the open sky; it has wider spaces, more room for the stranger and for the flying birds.... And you find yourself a lair in some wet spot, lie down on your stomach on the damp boggy ground and positively revel in getting badly soaked. And you bury your head in reed grass and spongy leaves, and crawling insects and worms and soft little lizards creep up your clothes and into your face, looking at you with their silky green eyes, while from all around comes the calm,
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silent soughing of the woods and the air, and while the Lord sits on high staring down at you as though you were the most fixed of all his
idées fixes.
Ho-ho, you begin to warm up, experiencing a rare, strange infernal glee the like of which you have never felt before; you do every wild thing imaginable, confound right and wrong, turn the world topsy-turvy and feel delighted by it, as though it were a meritorious deed. Why not? You are subject to peculiar influences and give in to them, letting yourself be carried away by desire and by a hardened joy. Everything you used to sneer at, you now feel an inordinate need to exalt and praise to the skies: you gloat over seeing your way to fight a royal battle for universal peace, you might want to appoint a commission for improving the footwear of mail carriers, you put in a good word for Pontus Wikner and vindicate the cosmos and God in general. To hell with the true interconnectedness of all things, it doesn’t concern you anymore; you let out a roar at it and let things take their course. Ho-ho and hooray, the sun shines on the brae! That’s right, you let yourself go, tune your harp and sing psalms and p-songs that defy all description!

At the same time you let your inmost being drift, given over to the worst gibberish. Let it drift, let it drift, it’s so pleasant to give in without a struggle. And why put up a struggle? Heh-heh, shouldn’t a stopped wanderer be allowed to spend his last moments as he sees fit? Yes or no? Period. And you arrange matters as you see fit.

There is something you could do, though: you could bring your influence to bear in favor of the Home Mission, Japanese art, the Hallingdal Railroad, anything whatever, as long as you bring your influence to bear in favor of something, help something get started. It dawns on you that a man like J. Hansen, the respectable tailor from whom you once may have bought a coat for Miniman—that this man has enormous merits as a citizen and a human being; you begin by venerating him and end up loving him. Why do you love him? From inclination, from spite, from hardened joy, because you are affected by and give in to certain peculiar influences. You whisper your admiration in his ear, you sincerely wish him lots of cattle and sheep and goats, and as you leave him, God help me, you slip your lifesaving medal into his hand. Why shouldn’t you, once you have begun to give in to those peculiar influences? What’s more, you even regret that you may at one time have spoken disrespectfully of Ola Upnorth, elected Storting representative. Only now do you leave yourself at the mercy of the sweetest madness—ho-ho, how you let yourself go:

Look at what Ola Upnorth has accomplished in the Storting for Ryfylke County and for the kingdom! Little by little you begin to appreciate his faithful, honest labor, and your heart melts. Your kindness runs away with you, you cry and sob with compassion for him and swear in your heart to make twofold, even threefold, amends. The thought of this graybeard from the struggling, suffering folk, this man in the modest shaggy coat, spurs you to such a wild, blissful desire to do good deeds that it makes you bawl. To make amends to Ola you malign everybody else, the whole world, take pleasure in despoiling everyone else for his benefit, and search for the most extravagant, glorious words to extol him. You actually say that Ola has done most of the things that have been done in this world, that he has written the only treatise on spectral analysis which is worth reading, that in the year 1719 he single-handedly turned up America’s prairies, that he invented the telegraph, and that, to top it off, he has been on Saturn and talked to God five times. You know very well that Ola hasn’t done all this, but in your desperate kindness you say nonetheless that he has done it, he has done it, and you shed hot tears and swear, viciously damning yourself to the worst torments of hell, that it’s precisely Ola and no one else who has done it. Why? Out of kindness, to make reparation to Ola many times over! And you burst out singing to give him a huge reparation; indeed, you sing a bawdy, blasphemous song to the effect that it was Ola who created the world and put the sun and the stars in their orbits, and will maintain it all from now on, adding a slew of horrible curses to vouch for its truth. In short, you allow your mind to abandon itself to the most singular, most charming excesses of kindheartedness, to the point of the most subtle whoring around with oaths and outrageousness. And every time you’ve come up with something truly unheard-of to say, you pull your knees up under you and chuckle with glee over the happy amends Ola will finally get. Sure, Ola shall have it all, Ola deserves it because you once spoke disrespectfully of him and now regret it.

Pause.

How was it, didn’t I once tell a stale joke about a body that—well, that died—wait a moment, it was a young girl; she died thanking God for the loan of her body, which she had never used. Stop, it was Mina Meek, I remember it now and feel ashamed from head to foot. How often we talk through our hats, saying things we later regret and groan with shame at—oh, the shame of it makes us stop in our tracks and let out a scream! True, Miniman was the only one who knew about it, but I’m ashamed of it on my own account. Not to mention an even more disgraceful blunder I once made that I’ll never forget, having to do with an Eskimo and a letter case. Ugh, go away; good God, it’s enough to make you sink into the ground! ... Quiet, keep your wits about you, the hell with scruples! “Behold the congregations saved by the cross that Jesus bore, gathered from all the nations in glory for evermore, in heavenly glory for evermore.” Do you get me? Oh God, how boring it all is, Gawd how boring it all is....

On entering the woods, Nagel threw himself down on the first patch of heather he saw and covered his head with his hands. What a turmoil in his brain, what a swarm of impossible thoughts! After a while he fell asleep. It was no more than four hours since he’d gotten out of bed, and yet he fell asleep, dead tired and exhausted.

 

 

When he awoke it was evening. Looking about him, he saw the sun going down behind the steam mill at Indviken Cove, and the small birds darting from tree to tree and singing. His head was quite clear—no more confused thoughts, no bitterness, he was completely calm. He leaned against a tree and thought for a moment. Should he do it now? Why not sooner rather than later? No, he had several things to take care of first: write a letter to his sister, leave a small memento in an envelope for Martha; he couldn’t die tonight. He hadn’t paid his hotel bill either, and he would like to remember Miniman, too, with ...

He headed back to the hotel, going dead slow. But tomorrow night it would be done, around midnight, without any fuss, quickly and to the point, quickly and to the point!

At three o’clock in the morning he was still standing by the window of his room looking out on Market Square.

AROUND TWELVE O’CLOCK the following night Nagel finally left the hotel. He had made no preparations, though he had written to his sister and put some money in an envelope for Martha; his bags, his violin case, and the old chair he had bought stood in their usual place, and some books were lying around on the table. And he still hadn’t paid his bill; he had completely forgotten about it. Just before he left the hotel, he asked Sara to dust the windows before he came back, and Sara had promised to do so, though it was the middle of the night. Then he carefully washed his face and hands and left the room.

He was calm all along, almost listless. Goodness, why play it up and make a fuss about it! A year sooner or later didn’t make any difference; besides, he had been thinking about it for a long time. And now he was sick and tired of all his disappointments, his many failed hopes, of the humbug everywhere, the subtle daily deceit on the part of everyone. Again he happened to think of Miniman, whom he had also remembered with an envelope with something inside, though his suspicion of the poor decrepit dwarf never left him. He thought of Mrs. Stenersen who, sick and asthmatic, cheated on her husband right to his face without batting an eye; of Kamma, that money-grubbing little tart who stretched her false arms out for him wherever he went and was constantly rummaging in his pockets for more, always more. East and west, at home and abroad, he had found people to be the same; everything was vulgar and sham and disgracefully perfidious, from the bum who wore his healthy arm in a sling to the blue sky overflowing with ozone. And he himself, was he any better? No, no, he was no better himself! But now he was really at the end.

He walked by way of the docks to have yet another look at the ships, and on passing the last pier he suddenly removed the iron ring from his finger and tossed it into the sea. He saw it hit the water way out. There! At the last moment, one did at least make a small attempt to rid oneself of humbug!

He came to a halt at Martha Gude’s little house and peeked through the windows for the last time. Everything was as usual in there, quiet and still, and nobody was to be seen.

“Goodbye!” he said.

And he went on.

Without himself being aware of it, he bent his steps toward the parsonage. He only realized how far he had come when he made out the yard, looking like a clearing in the forest. He stopped. Where was he going? What was he doing on these paths? A last look at the two windows on the second floor, a vain hope of seeing a face that never appeared? No, never—he wouldn’t go there! To be sure, he had been minded to do so all along, but he just wouldn’t! He stood there a moment longer, looking wistfully at the parsonage yard—he wavered, a prayer going through him....

“Goodbye!” he said again.

Then he turned abruptly and took a side road that led deeper into the forest.

Now he simply had to follow his nose and settle in any old place. Above all, no calculation and no sentimentality; look what Karlsen had come up with in his ridiculous despair! As if this trifling matter was worth making so much fuss about! ... Noticing that one of his shoelaces is undone, he stops, puts his foot on a tussock and ties it. A moment later he sits down.

He had sat down without thinking, without being aware of it. He looked about him: big pines, big pines everywhere, here and there a cluster of juniper, the ground covered with heather. Good, good!