Excerpts from
Dance of the Dwarves
By Anne Marie Løn
If there is a Paradise on earth, it is Willhofsgave, where I was born. The
concentration of birdsong in May, as I experience it in the Western Cemetery,
is something I otherwise only know from there. I think every day of
Willhofsgave at the moment. Irrespective of whether the weather is damp and
cold, as it is just now, the birds in their singing punctually observe the
strength of the light.
As soon as the last flower-strewn coffin had slid out, I launched out on the
bench until my feet released the pedal and I sat unthinking in my hiding place,
staring fixedly at the vacant eye of the mirror.
Then the birdsong arose; it streamed in through the open doorway, and reached
me with the scent of cool greenery and the sweetish perfume of lilies,
awakening my incarcerated thoughts and enabling me to act.
I quickly took off my organ shoes – specially made by my orthopedic shoemaker
in Store Kongensgade with a five-centimetre built-in platform and smooth
leather soles that can slide over the pedals – quickly put on my outdoor boots
and at the exit caught up with a verger to inquire the name of the deceased in
the last funeral but one.
I myself only visit the cemetery office when fetching my salary; all practical
matters are dealt with by chapel attendants from small offices in the
individual chapels. The organists are usually only provided with a slip of
paper giving the time and the hymn numbers, and so a funeral for me is merely a
series of figures and an endless repetition of the same twenty or thirty hymns.
An extremely modest task, it might be thought, if you don’t take up the
challenge of breaking the monotony by conjuring up arrangements, incorporating
variations and making something special out of the voluntary. You have plenty
of spare time in which to do that, for you know the majority of the funeral
hymns by heart, including even the most frequent of the less common ones.
When I had hailed the verger for the second time he stopped. I was by now so
close to him that he had to take a step aside the better to see me. Sparks flew
for a second between our eyes, his sluggish and mine fiery. People are often
unwilling in advance to talk to me. They have only the words to hold on to and
can’t immediately read my physiognomy because it is different from other faces
in its fundamental features and so forces them to abstract from what a given
facial expression usually means.
“I can’t remember. The papers have been sent to the office.”
I could easily see that his curiosity had been aroused when he sensed how eager
I was, so I bided my time until it came out, as I expected:
“Was there something about him, Mr Willhof-Holm?
I was suddenly overcome by a sense of embarrassment that prevented me from
uttering a single word until he obligingly went on.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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