Excerpts from
The Gold Ball
By Hanne Marie Svendsen
One evening shortly before his planned departure, the captain sat up in his bed, called Elle to his side, and opened the chest. It was full of papers covered with words and signs that she could not read. In one corner lay a purse of violet velvet, from which he took out a piece of jewelry, a golden ball hanging by a black string of silky leather. In the glow of the candle he let the ball swing in front of her eyes, and all of a sudden she could see the whole world with all its corners and dimensions. She saw Niels Martinus climbing a mountain out of which rose a cloud of black smoke. She saw her own mother lying so quietly in her coffin, and she saw her great-grandmother Maren, whose white bones were turning restlessly in the earth far away on the mainland. She saw the island as it had once been, green and fertile, covered with an oak forest and with the big ash tree in the middle of the clearing. And she saw it again crowded with gray houses, the outlines of which were seen dimly behind a veil of smoke. But the ash tree was still there, in the middle of the island.
She understood that this ball contained time, and that the captain wished to tell her about it. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hands in hers. And, as they sat like that with the ball swinging between them, she also understood his language and everything he said to her.
From: The Gold Ball
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, New York, 1989
Translated by Jørgen Schiøtt
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