We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [124]
The day Albert saw him, they'd chased Nørre all the way from Market Square down Skolegade and Tværgade and had finally cornered him up against the garden wall across from Weber's Café in Prinsegade. Albert raised his stick as though to strike them, and shouted menacingly. They fled.
"Let me walk you home," he said to Anders Nørre.
Nørre had been standing with his hands covering his ears and his eyes tightly shut. Now he opened them and looked at Albert. He lived just outside the town, on Reberbanen, where he had a little hut. He'd sit there all day long, spinning rope on a wheel, and when the rope was finished, he'd make rope yarn. He'd followed this dreary occupation for as long as anyone could remember. The general opinion was that he was an imbecile.
Albert took him by the arm, and Anders succumbed willingly.
"Have you been to church recently, Anders?" Albert asked.
Anders Nørre nodded. "I go there every Sunday."
Anders Nørre's reputation for being slow-witted wasn't based on an inability to speak. On the contrary, he had a soft, pleasant voice and always expressed himself clearly and intelligibly, and there were never problems engaging him in conversation. No: it was more the blankness of his face, which seemed incapable of expressing any emotion, and the sad, tedious existence he led. He'd lived with his mother until her death, and it was said that before that, he'd slept in her bed every night, long into adulthood. When she died, the women who laid out the body decided to leave her in her bed until she could be placed in her coffin the next day—and in the morning they'd found Anders Nørre sleeping right next to her, because when bedtime came he'd done what he always did and climbed in with her. At her funeral he showed no signs of grief. In fact the only emotion he ever showed was an overwhelming stubbornness, if you can call that an emotion. If you contradicted him or stopped him from doing something he'd set his mind on, he'd leap up and start shouting nonsense words and waving his arms—not to hit anyone, that much was obvious—but in a kind of desperation. Then he'd storm out of his tiny hut and disappear across the fields. He might be gone for days before reappearing, worn-out and bedraggled.
But there was sense somewhere inside him, and it wasn't just a little, but in fact quite a lot. The only problem was, it didn't seem to serve any useful purpose. If he was told a man's age and his date of birth, he could instantly calculate the number of days he'd lived, even making allowances for leap years. Someone once asked him how many days had passed since the baby Jesus was placed in his crib, and he'd answered promptly. When he left the church he could recite the minister's sermon word for word, for the benefit of those sailors in town who on Sunday mornings preferred the bench by the harbor to the pew.
On the first day of spring he'd take off his shoes and socks, and he'd walk around in bare feet until winter returned. In the cold season he'd root around in waste heaps and garbage bins for food. No one would have let him starve to death, but he seemed to prefer this way of life, and for that reason we'd passed sentence on him and judged him an imbecile.
Albert had always greeted Anders Nørre, but there was nothing unusual in that. Village idiots were public property. We spoke to them in a good-natured and patronizing way, were on first-name terms with them, and patted them on the back. Not that they had the right to behave that way with us.
On this occasion Albert continued to question him about the Sunday service, and Anders Nørre answered all his questions willingly. His tone of voice didn't for one moment reveal what thoughts or emotions the service might have stirred in him. Even his ability to solve complex mathematical equations had a soullessness about it. Yet there was a soul somewhere inside him, Albert was convinced of it: the embryo's of a human being whom no one