3. The house behind the buildings
Behind the largest buildings in the town center there stood a small house which could not be seen from any street, and which no one would imagine existed. A stranger would argue, even swear on oath, that there was no house there. But there was one nevertheless, a ribbed wooden house, just one little story and loft, sagging with age—a relic of the old market-town of Reikevig. Angelica and chervil, tansies and dock, ran riot in the garden, so that one could just make out the tumble-down moldering palings here and there amongst this tall forest of weeds, still green and juicy although autumn was now well advanced. I never thought I would find this house, but in the end I did.
At first there seemed to be no sign of life about it, but on a closer look a pale streak of light could be seen at a window. I looked for the front door, but the house was set at an angle to the other buildings; at last I found the entrance, round at the back opposite the retaining wall of a large building—the street had probably lain that way in days gone by when the house was originally built. I opened the door and entered a dark passageway. At one point a gleam of light showed through a crack between door and jamb, and I knocked. After a brief moment the door was opened, and there stood a slim man of indeterminate age except that every other hair was going grey; and somehow I felt that he knew me the moment he looked at me with those clear expressive eyes, at once mocking and affectionate, from under his bushy eyebrows. I took off my glove and greeted him, and he bade me please enter.
“Was it here?” I asked.
“Yes, here it was,” he said, and laughed as if he were making fun of me, or rather of himself perhaps, but quite without malice. I hesitated about walking in and repeated, in the form of a question, the words of the newspaper advertisement:
“Organ-playing for beginners after ten at night?”
“Organ-playing,” he said, and kept on looking at me with a smile, “the organ-play of life.”
Inside, he had a coal-fire burning in a stove; he did not use the town central-heating system. The furniture consisted merely of a host of green plants, some of them in bloom, and a battered three-legged sofa with torn upholstery; and a little harmonium in the corner. A door into another room stood ajar and through it came streaming an aroma of many perfumes; the door to the kitchen was wide open and through it could be seen a table and a few backless chairs and stools, and a kettle on the boil. The air was a little heavy from the flowers, and there was more than a suggestion of smoke seeping from the stove. On one wall hung a colored print of some creature that might have been a girl had the head not been cleft down to the shoulders; she was bald, her eyes were closed, her profile was superimposed on one half of her face, and she was kissing herself on the mouth. And she had eleven fingers. I stared at the picture dumbfounded.
“Are you a farm girl?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed I am,” I replied.
“Why do you want to learn the organ?”
At first I said that I had always listened to music on the wireless, but when I thought it over I felt that this answer was too ordinary, so I corrected myself and added, “I am thinking of playing in our church at home in the north when it is completed.”
“May I see your hand?” he said. I consented, and he studied my hand and said, “You have a good hand, but on the large side for music.” He himself had a slim, long-fingered hand, very soft to the touch but somehow quite neutral and uncharged with electricity, so that I did not blush even when he fondled the joints of my fingers; nor indeed did I find it disagreeable, either.
“Excuse me, but what faith is to be preached in this church at your home in the north?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t suppose it will be anything very remarkable,” I said. “Just the same old Lutheran faith, I suppose.”
“I don’t know what is remarkable if it isn’t meeting a girl who is an adherent of Lutheranism,” he said. “It has never happened to me before. Do have a seat.”
“Luther?” I asked hesitantly as I sat down. “Isn’t he ours?”
“I don’t know,” said the man. “I have only known one man who read Luther; he was a psychologist and was writing a thesis on pornography. Luther, as a matter of fact, is considered the most obscene writer in world literature. A few years ago, when a translation was made of a treatise he wrote about the poor Pope, it was impossible to get it published anywhere, on the grounds of indecency. Won’t you have a cup of coffee?”
I thanked him but said it was really quite unnecessary, and added that perhaps I would stop playing for this scandalous person Luther if he was such a coarse man, and decide just to play for myself instead. “But that picture over there,” I said, for I could not take my eyes off it. “What is it meant to be?”
“Don’t you feel it is marvelous?” he said.
“I feel I could do that sort of thing myself—if… Excuse me, but is it meant to be a person?”
He replied, “Some say it is Skarp-Hedin[5] after he had been cleft to the shoulders by the axe Battle-Troll; others say it is the birth of Cleopatra.”
I said it could hardly be Skarp-Hedin, for he died, as everyone knew, with his axe beside him in the Burning of Njal. “But who’s Cleopatra?” I asked. “It wouldn’t be the queen that Julius Caesar married just before he was murdered?”
“No, it’s the other Cleopatra,” said the organist, “the one Napoleon went to visit at Waterloo. When he saw the battle was lost he said ‘Merde’ and put on his white gloves and went to visit a woman in a house nearby.”
Through the half-open door, from the inner room, came a woman’s voice: “He never speaks the truth.” And out sailed a large handsome woman, heavily made up and with belladonna in her eyes, wearing sheer stockings, red shoes, and a hat so wide-brimmed that she had to tilt her head to get through the door. She kissed the organist on the ear in farewell as she walked past, and said to me as if in explanation of why he never spoke the truth, “As a matter of fact, he is above God and men. And now I’m off to the Yanks.”
The organist brought out a white handkerchief, wiped the moist lipstick from his ear, smiling, and said, “That was she.”
At first I thought this was his wife or at least his sweetheart, but when he said “That was she” I was not very clear what he was getting at, for we had been talking about the woman Napoleon went to visit when he saw that the battle was lost.
But while I was pondering this, another woman came through the same door; this one was very old and lame, wearing a soiled flannel nightgown with her grey hair done up in two meager plaits, and she was toothless. She brought out a cheese-rind and a teaspoon on a patterned cake-dish, laid this offering on my knee and called me her dear one, bade me please eat and asked me about the weather. And when she saw that I was in difficulties with the cheese-rind and teaspoon she patted me pityingly on both cheeks with the back of her hand, looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Poor blessed creature.” These words of compassion she repeated over and over again.