My scene X
My grandma’s castle-sized farm had burnt down to the ground. Nothing remained except ashes, and I imagined that all the clothes and linen in the whole world could be washed with this pile of ash, which rose up like a grey-black hill in the landscape. I also imagined that the frightful, quivering lightning that had struck the magnificent farm must have hit my paternal grandfather on its path downwards. His head was not full of ash, but a ghastly tangle of smoky thoughts and threads of speech.
I was afraid of my grandpa, even though he pottered around harmlessly in his strange attire – he never came and visited our home. I was not aware that my parents had debarred him, perhaps even my grandma, but I knew that my father reproached him – before he had gone mad – as well as my grandma for never allowing him to go to a secondary school. Had they done so, he would not have had to work with glue-horn, stitch-marker and sole-stitching awl all day long. My father was bitter at having been made a shoemaker’s apprentice, and he looked at my schoolbooks like a child eyes a sugar pretzel. On the few occasions I saw him smile, it was when he read aloud to me from The Arabian Nightsor Holberg’s comedies.
One day, my grandfather stood outside the school, as if he had been waiting; he stepped forward and addressed me among the other children. He had taken his cap off, which was not an ordinary cap, but a hollowed-out lump of wood. He had made it himself, just as he had his enormous clogs, bound with string to his feet, which were stuffed into dirty woollen socks beneath knickerbockers made of homespun cloth. In his hand he held his long walking stick and over his shoulder, his clay food pot on a rope. I felt myself lucky that he hadn’t put on his leather mask. He was very polite, used the courteous form of address, spoke to me as if I was a fine stranger, almost the child of a baron. He asked me if I liked it here in Odense? If it was possible for me to get used to the language? He also talked about long, yellow distances, and about the time we rode together on an ass – it was hard to make head or tail of any of it. While he spoke, he tapped the tip of his nose as if to make sure that it was still there. I had no idea what I should say or do, and this increased my grandfather’s confusion, and it ended with his making a very deep bow and going away. He looked back over his shoulder several times, as if to see if I was following him. A boy asked:
‘Do you know him?’
I just shook my head.
‘It looked as if he knew you,’ another boy said.
‘I don’t really know him,’ I answered.
‘He was stark raving mad, at any rate,’ a third boy said. ‘He must have made off from Greyfriars.’
It lay on the outskirts of the town, Greyfriars Hospital. It was here that the poor and the insane lived. It sometimes happened that my grandma took me there when she was to tend the garden, and I was all ears to hear the stories the old women told. The good-natured among the insane were allowed to walk about the place freely, but others were locked in and wore straitjackets made of sail canvas. While my grandma was working in the garden, I often used to play with the pea vines or the heads of flowers, and the mad inmates used to look as curiously at me as I did them. […]
My scene XII
Let me say a bit more about story-telling.
I was sitting in the garden at Greyfriars Hospital to recover after having taken my madness temperature once more, with a reassuring result – but the weather also helped to boost my mood barometer. It was spring, the birds were singing with their well-rested, greased beaks and the blossom and leaves were coming out literally in front of my eyes, as if they were spectators streaming into a hall – all of them in their very best, freshly creased finery – for this was a great, sensational event, to be allowed to experience Hans Christian Andersen sitting in real life on a bench!
I was tinkering with the idea that merely by the belief of my gaze and the warmth of my heart I could make the anemone unfurl before my very eyes. I stared at the green bud at the end of the stem until my eyes felt like glowing coals, and I thought I could just make out the slightest white pencil stroke , two petals that bared themselves a tiny fraction, and because of this I had not noticed the madman who was suddenly standing in front of me.
He wanted to know what sort of a person I was, while I preferably did not wish to know the slightest thing about him. He was wearing worn-out, dirty clothes, had black nails on the hand in which he was holding some purple hyacinths that he must just have pulled up from the soil. I was afraid of what he might possibly think of doing to me. He repeated his question, and I invented a name, while I wondered how he had managed to slip out of the innermost yard. Had the wardens, like me, been too preoccupied with the first signs of spring?
He inquired more closely into my life circumstances, and I did not dare do a bunk, for it was sure to be with madmen as with bears: if one started to run, one would immediately be seen as prey. Our teacher had told us that animals act on the basis of natural urge. If I ran away, a bear would see something not all that different from a fried chicken on two legs – and what would I not be transformed into in the eyes of someone stark staring mad?
I scarcely dared to breathe and not at all to turn my head to try and see if my grandma was at work somewhere in the garden. Scared as I was, I had to keep the madman at bay by talking to him until the wardens came running with rope and straitjackets. Perhaps my grandma had just caught sight of him and hurried away to fetch help.
I shook as if I was on the verge of emerging as I don’t know what. So I became the son of a count. I was a count’s child, yes, and more than that, something of a princely lad. I told him about the castle that I lived in and, to gain some time, gave it extra towers, stately halls and gilded slippers.
I was fond of being nicely dressed and on that day had some pieces of silk attached to my chest as a waistcoat, a scarf round my neck and water-combed hair. I was quite natty, absolutely not your Mr. Common-or-Garden, and certainly more than elegant enough for a madman to be able to recognise splendour and noble birth. I had hoped that this would scare him off – having to speak properly to a real prince – but, on the contrary, the insane creature only seemed to be even more interested, but also more than visibly impressed. I told him that a royal carriage with two lackeys was waiting just outside the garden, and that these two young, tall and strong servants were on their way to fetch me right now, but not even this induced him to leave. As an audience, though, he was not bad at all, despite the fact I was scared stiff of him. He laughed, duped, each time I expanded on the fine state I lived in. But when he started to insist on details, such as this actual location of this castle – even to ask for its address – a shiver passed through me.
I had heard my grandma and my mother talk about one of these raving lunatics that had escaped from his cell. That he had immediately lurched through Odense making for the house where his family lived. When no one opened the door, he had smashed a window pane and had crawled in, after which he had slit the throats of the entire family with a piece of glass – both parents and the entire flock of younger brothers and sisters – before he himself had died from loss of blood. My mother claimed that he must have wanted to take revenge for his family allowing him to be placed in Greyfriars Hospital. My grandmother claimed that the family had done right in having him committed to Greyfriars Hospital – especially in the light of the fact that they had moved further down the street many years previously, and the madman had thus murdered the wrong family.
It burnt down! I said. The castle? the madman asked? Yes, the castle, I said, but when I saw the disappointment etched in his crazy face, I explained that it was only part of the castle that had been struck by this frightful lightning. The rest was still there in all its magnificence and splendour, but therefore a bit difficult to locate geographically. Have you moved the castle? he asked. You could perhaps put it that way, yes. Much of the time it was actually … on wheels. Exceptionally practical, I explained, if one wishes to enjoy a little sun in southern climes.
Now he laughed until that the tears came to his eyes. He was really raving mad, and I was still afraid that he would pull a shard of glass out of his dirty jacket, so I kept on talking.
Thought the servants had to remember to tie down all the gold firmly when we moved, for no matter how beautiful golden slippers were, it was downright uncomfortable to get them in the back of the neck.
That helped. The madman’s body creased, as if he himself had been hit in the back of the neck. He took his leave and stumbled off along the path with his bouquet of flowers and with a shrill peal of laughter.
I could now once more breathe in through my still intact neck, and at the same time my grandma came with her small barrow. She was eager to know what I had talked to the doctor about.
A doctor? But he was quite mad! I objected. Oh no, he’s one of the very best doctors in the country, my grandma said. We are very lucky to have him here at the hospital. But his shoddy clothes? I went on. It was really such a lovely story, my grandma continued, that the good doctor, every day after work, from spring to autumn, took off his white coat, donned working clothes and picked flowers in the garden, which he then took home to his wife and children, who he loved more than anything else in the world. Fully finished with my story-telling, I gazed for a long time down the empty path.
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