chapter nineteen

Tiny Tim

 

It had only taken his mother a few hours of pacing to draw the compass. She had tied a ten metre length of rope to an ice-axe embedded in the ground and had then begun the long walk. Frank had rather uncharacteristically failed to take note of the exact number of revolutions she performed, but he estimated it to be between fifty and seventy five, and had therefore covered a distance of between 3141.59 and 4712.39 metres in stepping the circle into the frozen earth. She then retired to the central point and waited for the moon to rise. As it leaked the smallest arc of reflection across the black chord of ocean she laid the rope as a radius to the distant light and placed the logs where it touched the circle. This representing a lunar north she crossed the circle and placed other logs at the cardinal points.

 

The incantations had begun. Frank’s father joined him at the window; the boy not yet six years of age perched on a cushioned ledge below the sill, the man leaning across him and letting his huge forehead rest on the condensing glass. Neither of them could hear the Sámi words from within the house, but the ritual was familiar in two ways; because it was repeated at every winter solstice and because it touched some prehistoric unconscious, some unremembered memory of shared beliefs.

 

 

Oscar Kørner returned to his maps and more conventional compass points. Frank picked up his book, an illustrated edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Since his father’s library was eclectic in topic and language the five year old Frank could read well in French, German, Russian and Latin as well as his native Norwegian. He allowed it to fall open and of course found himself looking at his favourite page, one carrying a plate of the Cratchit family celebrating around the Christmas tree with the invalid child on a three-legged stool, content in the bosom of his family.

 

Frank’s father was an enthusiastic reader of Dickens, approving of his egalitarian views and Hard Times had been Frank’s nightly story when he was not yet able to read for himself. Oscar Kørner had even met the author in Switzerland in 1846 and claimed, not without justification that the characters of Florence Dombey and Captain Cuttle were based upon himself and his new bride Sylvia; “a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book”.

 

His absorption in the illustration was disturbed now by the same wandering princess producing a wild ululation and stamping as she lit each of the four piles of logs around her lunar circle. He felt the pagan energy, and looking up he saw that his father felt it also, but it was a cold energy; an energy born of the vacuum that was before Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. It was of the same ethereal stuff as Tiny Tim’s empty chair. He looked again at the plate and saw the frigid heart of his own family exposed utterly by contrast. He closed the book forever and gazed with numb disinterest as his mother screamed her terror into the longest night.