Excerpts from
Today
By Vibeke Grønfeldt
TWELVE O´CLOCK
Deep within the arterial system, in the dark warmth of the head, a new sort of turmoil is born. A large and pliant vessel in the left-hand parietal lobe yields to the force of the flow and expands. The expansion exerts a faint pressure on the surrounding brain tissue.
The man knows nothing of this. But senses all of it. He carries on working in the warm spring air. Shifts his sacks, lifts them and empties them. He´ll soon be done with planting the potatoes. He bends over, is aware of a heaviness on the left side of his head and sings, as he always does in the field. A song he learned when he was a boy.
For forty-five years the order and peace of another world has reigned in the silence of his skull. That soft, mollusc-like matter has carried out tasks both big and small on the man´s behalf with equal ease. A constant process embodying the sum of all life experience. Second upon second for millions of years. The pressure in the smooth-walled anterior vein increases. It expands more and more. The healthy grey and white brain cells function with minutest precision.
With a deft hand the man sifts through the potatoes. Every finger joint playing its part in separating large from medium-sized or small tubers. The sound from the diseased. The man sings: The bird in the forest, o´er field and hill - sings at the dawn and at twilight still, slumbers as sweetly on rocky mound, as under the eaves on twigs and down. He knows all of the verses by heart and can recall each place where he has heard them and sung them. While he listens to the lark, the lapwing, the gulls. Smells the grass and the soil. Feels the last trace of winter chill and the first warmth of summer on his face.
He hoists a heavy sack up onto his back and gazes across the field. The pressure on the vein is tremendous now. His blood sings.
The blood vessel can stretch no further and the distended walls stiffen as they strain against the tissue.
The man takes a couple of steps with the sack on his back, sets it down and climbs up onto the back of the trailer to move the last few sacks over to the edge, where he can reach them from the ground. He straightens up in the fresh breeze. The swollen vein in his head bursts. He feels a great, but momentary, sense of relief before falling down off the trailer, down onto the soft topsoil that he has harrowed with such care.
Blood gushes out into the pale matter, washes over the inner side of the cranium, seeps down into the the brain. He cannot move his head or his arms. One leg still. Not for much longer.
The flood abates, but does not stop. He hears a sound he has never heard before.
The area surrounding the burst vein is black. He can no longer speak, but he cries out as the cells of the speech centre drown in blood. This strong man cries out loud and long.
The voices round about him grow faint - then suddenly shrill. Then they are gone. They are drowned out by a thundering inside the cranium, as the haemorrhage spreads and fresh blood wells up in a forked artery close to the tattered vessel.
His body tenses, then goes limp. The man cannot see. Inside his head, and all around it, there is darkness.
Almost half of the brain is drowned in blood.
Time stands still. The heart pumps and the forked artery behind the left ear ruptures. Blood pours out of yet another gash, more than two centimetres long.
The darkness lifts. The man is dead.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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