Excerpts from
Idealists
By Hans Scherfig
A MAN IS LYING in a canopy bed getting ready to fall asleep.
He has closed the bed-curtains, which are made of good, heavy damask from his own store. And he is resting comfortably between fine linen sheets on a first-rate Puma mattress, with a soft, lightweight, ribbed eiderdown comforter on top of him. Both the Puma mattress and the ribbed eiderdown comforter are from his own factory and the sheets from his own textile mill.
He is an energetic man who has successfully worked his way up and has established his own vast business all across Denmark. He was once a simple wool peddler who walked the country roads of Jutland with his bundle. Now he is a wholesale dealer, a manufacturer, and a country squire, and he sleeps in a canopy bed in a historic castle.
An army of wool dealers travels around the country selling undershirts for him. And when the shirts have worn out and turned into old rags, they are collected and purchased by an equally large army of rag pickers and junk dealers. And the rags are sent to the cloth factory near Præsto, where they are ripped and shredded in ingenious machines. Upholstery fabric, wool shirts. bits of curtains, old silk stockings, and tattered rags are turned into a uniform fluff of fibers, which can again be spun, woven, and dyed and made into a blue fabric, which is then stitched into those renowned, strong-as-iron navy trousers.
Unassuming little shops in Denmark´s provincial towns sell his stockings, ribbons, mittens, tablecloths, curtains, and lace. His unpretentious little Christmas calendar - with its Bible verses, helpful adages, market days, and gestation tables - hangs in thousands of homes.
He lives in a castle with ramparts and moats, where an illegitimate son of Christian IV once played hospitable host to the officers of the Swedish military and where the Swedish king himself, Karl X Gustav, once spent the night.
He owns fields and marshes and vast forests where Svend Gonge and his Danish partisans once hid out and harassed the Swedish enemy with constant attacks on their supply columns.
He is an enterprising man who buys up farms and incorporates them into his own estate. And the law that prohibits the merging of smaller farms doesn´t apply as long as he makes certain to install a farm hand as manager and one calf as livestock on his annexed properties.
He is a powerful man who holds the reins in his hand and presides over the well-being of many people. But he is modest and unassuming and humble in the face of a Providence that has made things go so well for him. He has been a good man to the church and has helped and supported the congregations and has built evangelical meeting houses here and there on his estate. And he has a small prayer stool in his bedroom; morning and evening he kneels on its canvas cushion embroidered with a white dove on a blue background and gives thanks and humbles himself before his God.
He lies there in the darkness in his historic canopy bed, reviewing the events of the day. Once King Karl Gustav of Sweden lay in this same bed thinking things over. Perhaps war will break out in the world again. Perhaps he would be wise to begin buying up horses in good time, while they are cheap.
And he also thinks about a mausoleum that he has had built for himself in a corner of the village cemetery. A burial mound in the old style, lined with glazed tiles, with bronze doors and wrought-iron grilles and a marble sarcophagus. Someday he will lie there in state awaiting Judgment Day and the last trumpet.
"Every task, however simple, sets the soul that does it free." But I beseech Thee, dear God: let me live and work for many more years to come!" And why shouldn´t he live?
Out there in the darkness someone is breathing. He hears a person breathing very softly. He turns cold with fear, and his thoughts stand still. His evening prayer has come to a halt. He listens out into the darkness; there is someone breathing outside his bed-curtains.
He has no voice left and no saliva in his mouth. He wants to say, "Julie, is that you?" But nothing comes of it. Besides, it couldn´t be Julie. His wife sleeps in another room. They have quarreled again and made a scene, and she threatened to leave. She´s so terribly high-strung, his aristocratic wife. "Oh, God! I probably haven´t been very good to her, have I? Forgive me! No! No! - Take it easy, now. Take it nice and easy. "
Someone is breathing out in the room. Very softly. There is someone in the room. And he gathers his strength and slowly sits up in bed. And the excellent Puma spring mattress does not squeak.
Slowly he gets out of bed and moves out into the room. And out in the darkness he bumps into someone.
They don´t say a thing. They make no sound. And they are unable to find each other in the darkness.
He stumbles over his prayer stool and picks it up and flings it at something. And he himself is hit by something else. The two struggle around in the darkness without being able to see. Then he is held tightly, and someone´s arms are wrapped around him. And now he would like to be able to scream for help. But hands are squeezing his throat. His ears are ringing. He thinks about his mausoleum, and much more. And he has strange dreams and nightmares in the few seconds before he dies.
From Hans Scherfig: Idealists
Fjord Press, 1991
Translated by Frank Hugus
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