Today

By Vibeke Grønfeldt

January 10th, 1978.

The priest tugged the hood up over her head and pulled the bicycle along between the snowdrifts to the end of the driveway. The highway was cleared and gravelled. She looked around her, smiled to a woebegone young girl, and rode away in the fine, cutting wind. Out of the town, across the open field where the road was bare and the sand whipped tingling around her legs beneath the warm coat. She smiled inwardly.
    The priest had had her own living for a couple of years, and she still had to tell herself again and again that it was true. A living and a parsonage. She had been ordained, the way she and her mother had dreamed of ever since she was a small girl. The plans and the expectations and the talk around the table, or while they were cleaning house or sewing, still glowed in her. They were always talking about the pastor. The gentle, almost faultless pastor and her mother in the guest room.
    She had made her mother glad by becoming ordained. And she made her glad her every day by being the pastor of a parish. Every Saturday evening she phoned her and read the sermon for her and discussed it with her.
    The weekly telephone sermon continued when her mother, in 1991, was admitted to a rather expensive private nursing home, paid for by the pastor who had just had the third parish placed under her parish, had been appointed rural dean of a deanery of eleven parishes in addition to her own and had won the bishop´s confidence. Her severe demands upon herself - also when it was a question of the difficult thing of making a personal effort and paying out of one´s own pocket - was a good example for colleagues and parishoners. It didn´t take her long to rectify the alcoholic predecessor´s remissnesses.
    She had to tug and drag the bicycle through the snowdrifts on Frederik Mortensen´s lane.
    The stable and the hen house had nearly collapsed. The dwelling house´s laths and rafters had begun to give in to the weight of saturated roof tiles. It was difficult to open the door for the snow which had drifted in through the cracks. In the silent and sepulchral kitchen condensation ran down the windows and walls. Everything had assumed the same gray-brown color, except for the fresh white and blue labels on the many pill bottles that the home helper had arranged on the shelf where the clock had once stood. The distinct outline of it was still in the yellowed paint on the wall in back of them. But when she opened the living room door she was met by the billow of heat from the kerosene stove.
    - Ah, lovely warmth. I´ve come to congratulate you on the eight-five years.
    He was lying on the sofa beside the dining table in a closely buttoned shirt with a bolster over him. - Congratulate me. Yes, thanks. Thank you. He tried to get up on one elbow.
    - Don´t get up.
    - Not on your life.
    She helped him get comfortable, positioned the footstool and placed the feather bolster over his legs, so they could sit across from each other.
    The stove smelled of kerosene, the chamber pot under the sofa smelled, the cheese from his breakfast smelled. He pointed to the thermos and at the cupboard with the coffee cups. - Get the cherry brandy and a couple of glasses. It isn´t every day the pastor comes calling. And there´s something I feeling like telling you. I also need to put my estate in order.
    She hung her coat on the chair back, glad that people had always shown her confidence. Glad. Hopefully not overbearing.
    - Children are like angels, he said and the tears flowed down over the hand that was holding the glass.
    - Yes, she smiled. - you don´t have any, but you´ve got friends anyway. I know that.
    - I´ve always loved little girls, he said and looked her straight in the eye. She stiffened, knowing what he referred to. Her thoughts stopped. The pastor was gone. The breadth of view was gone. She didn´t understand herself, but she understood his confession word for word, second by second.

Translated by Kenneth Tindall