The Pastor, page 1
Copyright © Hanne Ørstavik, 2004
Translation copyright © Martin Aitken, 2021
First published by Forlaget Oktober AS, 2004
Published in agreement with Oslo Literary Agency
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
Ebook ISBN 9781953861092
Archipelago Books
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www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Penguin Random House
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Cover art by James Thomson
Book design by Zoe Guttenplan
This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Funding for the translation of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation. This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Jan Michalski Foundation, Cornelia and Michael Bessie Foundation, NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad), and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
THIS IS THE BLOOD OF CHRIST.
I stepped sideways again and poured wine into the next shiny little communion cup. I looked at the bowed heads in front of me, a row of heads, one after another. It was all just the way it was supposed to be, I thought to myself. To this place you may come, and be as one. Here you are chosen, special. You shall not be overlooked, but may dwell here. You, that was me too. We.
The altar rail was a beginning. Its semicircle was a sign that said it was a part of something larger, a circle. And enclosing that circle was another circle, which in turn was enclosed by another, larger still, a great, gleaming space, vast and infinite. It said too that we could be together here, every one of us. Here. Here you may dwell. This place is for you.
There was a silence. It seemed as if they were fanned out in front of me, as if a line went from each of their spines, stretching out into a landscape, out into the open expanse, out over the fells, out over the sea and onwards, into infinity. They had taken that landscape inside with them. Soon they would rise, would push open the doors and go out into it again, and disperse.
These people, kneeling. As if to say: we tolerate you, despite everything. Perhaps they’d even forgotten. I could have gone somewhere else, somewhere other than here, only I knew something would have happend there too. Not the same thing again, but something else I couldn’t prevent. Something inevitable from which subsequently I would have been unable to hide. Something that could be seen in my face.
It was last year, my first service here. I’d stood at the pulpit looking out upon them, the congregation waiting to hear what the new pastor had to say. My sermon was about the prodigal son: his returning home, his father who slaughtered the fatted calf in celebration, his brother’s envy, the festivities they held. I stood in my vestments, the soft-hued stole draped over my shoulders, the one Kristiane had made for me. I looked out upon them, willing them to listen, to really listen, to open themselves to what I was saying, and understand. It was how I wanted the church to be. A place in which a person returning home could be received with joy and festivity. I saw it as my task to ensure the church remained a place of welcome, so that anyone who wanted could come inside, to join not with me but with the community, and find quietude there. A place that would celebrate them. A place in which they would feel themselves accepted.
That was what I talked about. On and on I went. I didn’t feel like I was saying things properly. I had to say them again, over and over again. Rambling on. In my soft vestments, holding forth. For nearly a whole hour I went on. It had been impressed upon us during the practicum that the sermon should not exceed a quarter of an hour. No longer, preferably not even as long as that. For it’s not the words they remember. Well, a few words perhaps, a turn of phrase they happen to find useful, something that seems meaningful to them at that particular moment in time. But on the whole, they won’t remember what you’ve said, only the experience of it. So give them an experience. Do it in fifteen minutes. And never more than twenty, because then their minds will wander.
And it was true. I’d gone on far too long, and I knew it. But it was done, and there was nothing I could do to alter it.
People got up and left. Even the woman from the parish office did, the woman who’d met me on my arrival and given me the key to the house, who’d shown me around on my first day and made me coffee in the office. She stuck it out for a while, but eventually even she had to get up and leave. And others who I didn’t know yet, they too got to their feet and walked quietly out through the door. Five or six in all. There weren’t very many to begin with either.
I woke up thinking about it every now and then, which made me even more ashamed, to be thinking about that instead of something else that was more important. But I so much wanted to get through to them. I had come to them, with all my bags and boxes, my carful of belongings, had driven up only a week after Kristiane’s funeral.
I’d found the vacancy on the internet, assistant to the parish priest, phoned and then faxed them my documents. The position had been advertised several times, only no one had applied. A few days later it was all agreed. I packed and set off. All the way from the south of Germany I came, all the way up here, to this place in the far north.
It took a day and a night to drive through the pine forests of northern Finland before reaching the border. I followed the river, crossed over the fells and came to the fjord on the other side. And as I meandered through the curves of the road, the road that hugged the shore on its way towards the town, I had the feeling that I was coming home. Even though I’d never been here before. Here, in this landscape, the wide open landscape that I’d thought about and imagined, was my home. That was what I felt. I wanted it.
And that was the reason for my sermon, the reason for all my many words about coming home. I so much wanted my story to be ours, to share my experience, to give something of myself, establish some common ground. I wanted, wanted it so very much. To come to a place and be able to say we, a place where that was even possible.
But then I ruined it. Even before it started, I ruined it. Ruined what I wanted and wished for most of all. Time and again this was what happened. It seeped from inside me, whatever it was that made me ruin things, leaking out and messing everything up, consuming everyone as it went.
When I got home from the church that day I hung Kristiane’s stole away at the back of the wardrobe. I never wore it again.
And that night he was betrayed. I stood there looking down on them, hearing my voice in the echoing church. It didn’t sound like it belonged to me there. I spoke not for my own sake, but for mine and theirs together: for us.
This is the body of Christ. This is the blood of Christ. Thy sins are forgiven. Go, and sin no more.
I held out my hands. It felt like I was letting go of something, as if something departed from me as I opened my arms and held out my hands. As if by that gesture something escaped me and was gone.
That was what the year had been like. Everything escaped me. Every time I held out my hands, something escaped me and was gone.
Or rather, not everything. It was true that something did, but somewhere inside me it felt like there was still a place that could not be entirely depleted, a kind of subterranean spring that continued to bubble.
Where does it come from? Trickling forth, percolating. There, persistent and enduring.
I stood in front of the altar as we sang the hymn. And there was a peace in singing the words, a respite. Soon it would be Easter, a year since it happened.
Yes, coming here had to do with Kristiane as well, it had been a reaction of sorts, an action in reverse. In a way, it had been inevitable, I could just as well have been a piece in some board game: there I was, at the bottom of the map, southern Germany, only then I had to be moved, all the way up here. Action and reaction. As if I’d been slung too close to something, too far down, too far in, and had to be propelled back again in the opposite direction. Towards what? Towards nothing?
* * *
—
I stepped through the outer door and locked it behind me. There were panes of glass in it, set in lead, so even when it was closed you could see inside. “The church entrance is situated within a split façade, between two angular outthrusts that stand like rigid colossi of ice to afford shelter to the churchgoer.” That’s what it said in the folder I’d been sent after I phoned to ask about the vacancy. I looked up at the church. I’d never thought of the two white brick towers as colossi of ice. To me they were simply two brick towers with a space in between where you could see the sky, and a roof covering them, the kind of roof Lillen had among her Legos, a triangular piece to put on top.
The wind was blowing. It blew all the time here. I hadn’t thought of it when I applied. I could do nothing about it. There were images in the wind, they came to me when I felt the wind in my face, the images revealed themselves then.
It had been blowing the day Kristiane and I first met. It was outside the convent, on the plain between Aspenhau and Hartwald. The convent, situated there among its great, scattered trees, a wall running along its perimeter, though unable to keep the wind out. It was at the main entrance of the church there, in the arched doorway with its little terracotta figures. She was standing in the soft, black clothes she always wore, with her green eyes, a hand holding on to her peculiar hat. She was leaning backwards looking up at the figures. There was one that she wanted to touch, and she reached up, forgetting about her hat, reached up to touch the small, grimacing horned figure, and her hat blew away. It all happened in less than a second, from me opening the door of the church and stepping out to discover her standing there leaning backwards, her hand reaching up, her movement towards the figure, to her hat suddenly being swept off her head.
I stood there a moment and stared back through the panes of the door into the church interior, the wind cold on my cheeks, my ears, and I closed my eyes.
I remembered how I’d stepped forward and bent down to pick up the hat for her, only for it to be snatched up by a gust and be whisked away, on and on it tumbled. It was like a silent comedy, the two of us running around the convent grounds after her hat, in the muddy grass, under the tall trees, among the ancient brick buildings there. We started to laugh, Kristiane at first, that bright, bouncy laughter of hers, then me. I’d been so preoccupied before stepping outside, but all of a sudden I heard myself laughing, and then at last the hat came to a standstill against the wall in the corner over by the gate, and there it lay. We caught up with it at the same time. Kristiane snatched it up and dashed it against her knee to remove the mouldy leaves that were stuck to it, and then she put it back on her head and pulled it down over her brow. She looked at me and smiled with her mouth closed, smiling up at me from under her hat, for Kristiane was small. And then she started laughing again. Her laughter was like a child’s, I thought, a giggle. She looked into my eyes, and her own eyes were wide open. She seemed so happy.
It must have been wanting to play, she said. Spielen. But now, Winnifred, you must behave, she added in a strict voice, her eyes turned upwards to her hat. Du bleibst da.
She gave me a lift back into town. I sat beside her in her battered black van with the mask logo on its side. Kristiane, 41 years old, puppeteer. I, Liv, 34, a doctoral student in theology.
It was all so weightless. Meeting her, being with her like that. Sitting in the van, the engine droning, looking out at the industrially farmed fields through which we passed. So huge they were, flat, dark, empty expanses, and the great trees, in rows or clustered together, without leaves, their black trunks.
Weightless. I was so heavy myself, and all I saw in her was weightlessness, because that was what I needed. Was that it? I didn’t realize that the light in her was turned up too bright, like the sun in a film going completely white until the image disappears. Was that the way it was?
I opened my eyes. In front of me was the church. I was the pastor. I’d been living here nearly a whole year. I tried to focus my mind on it, that this was where I was now. I tried to think simple thoughts, to think clearly. It was rather a new church, as just about everything else in the town, built after the war. I turned around. From the small area in front of the building, I could see what was basically the entire town.
There was a main axis leading from the church entrance, down the steps and the little hill with its war monument, running along the main street, past the fish processing plants and the shops, continuing out to the fishmeal plant on the island. Beyond the island was the water: the sea to the left, the fjord stretching inland to the right. Facing was the other bank of the fjord, a flat strip of land, and beyond that was Russia.
In medieval times the people here lived on the island. Now the town was on the mainland, a short bridge connecting the two, a hundred meters or so in length. The island sheltered us from the wind and storms. It disturbed the view too, though I supposed only a southerner would think such a thing.
A second axis was the road that cut through it all from the inland, forging along the line of the fjord until there was no more fjord left, only the sea.
The town had been drawn up according to these two axes, one horizontal, one vertical, and its few streets laid out in a grid of parallel lines after the war, when the rebuilding started. There were photos from that time hanging on the walls at the back of the church, in the vestry, the offices. Black-and-white photos of men in overalls lugging sacks of cement. Stacks of planks. Scaffolding, and someone pointing at a man in a safety helmet. The road was little more than sand, rutted by the wheels of trucks. There was a crane.
I stood there with the church behind me and looked out, breathed in the air. The air was so fresh. So clear, it felt, and the sky too was clear, and so very bright. The wind was blowing, and the sun was out.
Yes, the wind was blowing, and at last the sky was bright, and all I needed was to stand there and become lost in thought, in all that light; superficial thought, that remained on the surface and let everything else lie, if only for a moment.
But it was no use, for she was there too, Kristiane. It was as if every surface, every plane of thought, was full of treacherous holes, and at the bottom was what churned inside me. In all the brightness, the airiness of such a day, in this little town, I could turn around and she’d be there, outside this church door, dressed in the same black clothes, in the same hat she kept having to hold on to, her arm raised, bent at the elbow. And I could see her there in front of me, and talk to her and touch her, and she would be living again, laughing and real.
But no, Liv. It’s not like that. There are things that are done and which cannot be done again. There are things that are over and which belong to the past. And you can weep and squirm and protest as much as you want, because nothing will ever come back.
What was it, that weightlessness she possessed that became too light for her to bear? Or was it merely a disguise to cover up something very heavy which I couldn’t see? Everything about her seemed so ambiguous now, so opposite, as if she’d been turned inside out. Like with her teeth. I didn’t see them at first either, not until we were in the van coming back from the convent and I saw her side-on. Her eyes were on the road ahead, her mouth half-open, and then she started to laugh about something, she was always laughing, all of a sudden out of nowhere she could just burst into laughter, and then I saw the way her teeth were bunched together, behind and in front of each other, at sixes and sevens. There were too many of them and they were oddly shaped, not flat and regular, some were narrow and pointed too, like little spires.
I noticed that the snow had melted on the big, flat surfaces of rock. In some places there was gleaming ice, elsewhere the ground was already bare, bare rock, grey and flat, standing out so starkly to the eye. It had been there all along, underneath the snow all winter, and the winter had gone on for such a long time, everything had. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now I could feel how long it had all been going on.
My eyes rested on a small tuft of yellowed grass at the edge of the rock, and I felt an urge to pull it up. I went over and crouched down, gripped it in my hand and pulled. It clung to the frozen ground. All I got were a few blades.
I stood up with the grass in my hand. The time, Liv, you’re forgetting the time. The parish coffee morning, come on. I hurried down the steps to the road. The snow was wet. I trudged more than ran, in my green wellingtons. The snow stuck to the toes. I stamped it off and pressed on. I’d popped into the vestry and changed out of my cassock and shoes, pulling on my thick brown sweater with the high neck instead. My trouser legs bunched at the shafts of my boots, and I bent down and tucked them in.
* * *
—
I crossed the road, taking a shortcut through the snow, lifting my knees high at every step as I made my way towards the little brick building with the arched windows that each came together in a point at the top.
It was one of the oldest buildings in the town, more than a hundred and fifty years old. Once, it had contained the district’s first library and it was one of the few structures to have escaped destruction by the Germans. It was poorly situated, rather out of the way, behind the big community center where there was a cinema and concert venue. But I like the coffee mornings there, I thought to myself. I like the impossible situation of the place. It was just the right size, too. It wasn’t the fault of that little white building that it had become so sequestered; after all, it had been there first. It was the placement of the community center that had been so inconsiderate, completely disregarding the little building that was already there.
