course, Anna—only, right after the birth, to be hit by a violent coughing fit, during which she coughed her soul to death. Just as he heard the child cry out, Thorvald saw the soul rise upward and soar through the cracks in the ceiling like a big white bat. When he christened his daughter, the only witnesses were his housekeeper and the church frescoes.
That same autumn he fell victim to dreadful saltwater sores, which the wind from the sea prevented from healing. When it rained heavily on the patch of earth on which—with great difficulty and with fortune, it seemed, smiling upon him—he had managed to grow some turnips, and when these were then covered by three feet of water and rotted away within the week, the first of the villagers turned up at church to lay bets on how long the pastor would stick it out.
During the winter, Lavnœs was hit by a cyclone whose icy winds swept past at lightning speed, freezing the crests of the waves. Like miniature icebergs, these then crushed several of the boats in the harbor. The same winds sent one of the parsonage gable ends flying sky-high and showered the area with a lethal hail of rock. In their wake they brought so much snow that—when it was melted the week after by high summer temperatures quite unnatural for mid-November—it flooded the parsonage and the church, forcing Thorvald Bak and his baby daughter and his housekeeper to take to the attic in one of the wings.
On the first Sunday after the flooding, when, despite everything, he still succeeded in sailing to the church in a flat-bottomed barge of his own construction, and—standing on the altar in seaboots that reached to his crotch—gave his sermon for the crowd of people who had sailed to church, all bets were off. No one in Lavnœs had dared to bank on his being there. There were those who were genuinely shocked by that Sunday. The widespread betting was an expression of how they looked at life: as a chain of coincidences in which the only sure thing was suffering. There were many in the village who threw the dice every morning to see whether they should get up or stay in bed on their seaweed mattresses and await the day’s quota of pain. What the people who had come to church now saw was Thorvald Bak’s serenity. For the first time ever they did not play cards or drink in the organ loft. Instead, they listened to the sermon.
They heard themselves. They rediscovered words they themselves had spoken and songs they themselves had sung. In Thorvald Bak’s description of hell they recognized Lavnœs, and when he painted a picture of heaven they remembered the dreams they had clung to during all those get-togethers and Christmas parties and spring revels. Then still more turned up at church, and there were those who asked to receive Communion at the Lord’s table—which had by now dried out—and so the conversion began. It happened, not because Thorvald had put the people of Lavnœs in touch with another reality, but because, in his serenity, he was stronger than anyone they had ever come across and because his euphoria was more powerful and more imaginative than their own. They converted because they could see that Thorvald Bak was in the hands of the same forces as themselves, and they took to religion with the same energy and obstinacy with which they had searched for the stairs to hell. They developed an unbelievable level of patience in which they could, with exalted tranquillity, watch the waves rise, topple their fishing stakes, and carry them, nets and all, out to sea, while they did not lift a finger because it was Sunday and they were observing the Sabbath and keeping it holy. Thereafter, with heartfelt joy, they could thank the Lord for having chosen them to suffer, rather than the people of the surrounding towns or of Mørkhøj, whom they had, for one hundred years, thought of as the menacing, wingèd monsters who made leaving Lavnœs a dangerous business. Now, however, Thorvald Bak could reveal
That same autumn he fell victim to dreadful saltwater sores, which the wind from the sea prevented from healing. When it rained heavily on the patch of earth on which—with great difficulty and with fortune, it seemed, smiling upon him—he had managed to grow some turnips, and when these were then covered by three feet of water and rotted away within the week, the first of the villagers turned up at church to lay bets on how long the pastor would stick it out.
During the winter, Lavnœs was hit by a cyclone whose icy winds swept past at lightning speed, freezing the crests of the waves. Like miniature icebergs, these then crushed several of the boats in the harbor. The same winds sent one of the parsonage gable ends flying sky-high and showered the area with a lethal hail of rock. In their wake they brought so much snow that—when it was melted the week after by high summer temperatures quite unnatural for mid-November—it flooded the parsonage and the church, forcing Thorvald Bak and his baby daughter and his housekeeper to take to the attic in one of the wings.
On the first Sunday after the flooding, when, despite everything, he still succeeded in sailing to the church in a flat-bottomed barge of his own construction, and—standing on the altar in seaboots that reached to his crotch—gave his sermon for the crowd of people who had sailed to church, all bets were off. No one in Lavnœs had dared to bank on his being there. There were those who were genuinely shocked by that Sunday. The widespread betting was an expression of how they looked at life: as a chain of coincidences in which the only sure thing was suffering. There were many in the village who threw the dice every morning to see whether they should get up or stay in bed on their seaweed mattresses and await the day’s quota of pain. What the people who had come to church now saw was Thorvald Bak’s serenity. For the first time ever they did not play cards or drink in the organ loft. Instead, they listened to the sermon.
They heard themselves. They rediscovered words they themselves had spoken and songs they themselves had sung. In Thorvald Bak’s description of hell they recognized Lavnœs, and when he painted a picture of heaven they remembered the dreams they had clung to during all those get-togethers and Christmas parties and spring revels. Then still more turned up at church, and there were those who asked to receive Communion at the Lord’s table—which had by now dried out—and so the conversion began. It happened, not because Thorvald had put the people of Lavnœs in touch with another reality, but because, in his serenity, he was stronger than anyone they had ever come across and because his euphoria was more powerful and more imaginative than their own. They converted because they could see that Thorvald Bak was in the hands of the same forces as themselves, and they took to religion with the same energy and obstinacy with which they had searched for the stairs to hell. They developed an unbelievable level of patience in which they could, with exalted tranquillity, watch the waves rise, topple their fishing stakes, and carry them, nets and all, out to sea, while they did not lift a finger because it was Sunday and they were observing the Sabbath and keeping it holy. Thereafter, with heartfelt joy, they could thank the Lord for having chosen them to suffer, rather than the people of the surrounding towns or of Mørkhøj, whom they had, for one hundred years, thought of as the menacing, wingèd monsters who made leaving Lavnœs a dangerous business. Now, however, Thorvald Bak could reveal
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