He knew that he was inflicting injury on the tree, but it felt necessary, for reasons he couldn’t explain. Perhaps the resin was a kind of pine-scented high, an aromatic stimulant he couldn’t do without. Or perhaps Jens genuinely believed that he would one day find a use for all the coagulated resin he kept in his workshop – a big, dark mass of irregularly shaped lumps that were reluctant to let go of one another. The sight brought back memories of a bag of stuck-together liquorice-flavoured boiled sweets that he had once shared with his father in a coffin. Nothing had ever tasted more wonderful than the sweets that night.
By experimenting, Jens had discovered a method for removing impurities from a lump of resin. He would place it on a piece of tinfoil which he stretched out over a metal tin and pierced tiny holes in. Then he melted the resin by holding it over a flame. To this end, he had made a delicate construction of iron rods and horseshoes on which the tin could stand. The impurities remained on the foil while the clean resin gathered at the bottom of the tin. Once the resin hardened, he would store it – clean resin in one barrel and discarded impurities in another. That way he could always take some and melt it again for whatever purpose he had in mind. And he had several. Resin had antibiotic properties and, with the right preparation, it could be made into soap or an excellent type of glue. It could even serve as a source of fuel. If he smeared impure resin on the top of a stick, he would have a torch that would burn reliably.
In his pocket he kept the small ant preserved in its amber universe. It looked as it had done all those years ago when Silas had first shown it to his sons on the north beach. And it looked as it had done millions of years before that. It had been that ant’s task to drag tiny pieces of dried resin back to the anthill to guard it against diseases. However, it was the ant’s fate to be trapped in and choked by the sticky substance and thus lose its life, if not its body.
There was something about resin which fascinated Jens Horder. It could heal, protect and preserve. But it could also kill.
For a time, the resin barrels represented the only element of order in his workshop. The eye of the storm, you could say. They were lined up next to one another like three litter bins, yet they contained the one thing he could least do without. In the middle of this chaos of cardboard boxes, sacks, tools, engine parts, rolls of fabric, cables, food scraps, newspapers, plastic bags and items of every kind and every material, the resin barrels served as a reminder that, once, all he had cared about were the trees.
But in time even the barrels drowned under things and became impossible to spot in the workshop. Jens, however, could always find his way to them, because he navigated effortlessly through his stuff. His view of order differed from the one which might prevail among the few people who opened the door to the workshop and looked inside. Eventually no one but his wife and his daughter were allowed in. And his wife never tried.
Jens Horder’s world wasn’t governed by the same systems and rules that people normally subscribe to. He didn’t know about dividing things up and organizing them. He knew about feelings and memories. A rasp wasn’t necessarily kept beside other rasps. If the rasp was one he had dug out of a pile at the junkyard once, its natural home might end up being next to the oil lamp and a uniform jacket found in the same location. It had a logic of its own.
The scythe had its regular spot up against the big map of the island on the wall behind the lathe because its shape reminded Jens of the headland that stuck out north-east of Korsted and formed a small bay. The map was almost hidden behind some boxes now, but he knew it was there and that was all that mattered. Only the north beach could still be made out in the darkness.
Before the map became obscured, Jens had spent many hours studying it with his father. Back then the island had seemed enormous to him. Together they had concluded that it was the shape of a man’s body. It had amused them to imagine Korsted as the man’s heart and the junkyard as his backside and that, if they let the trees grow wild on the Head, then this man would get even wilder hair and a beard. But the man was bald on the top of his head, where the beach was. The island was a body undergoing change, and they could change it. Into a wild man.
But while the world tends to grow smaller as you yourself grow bigger, the world outside the Head only ever grew bigger for Jens. As an adult he found it increasingly overwhelming and alien as new people arrived on the main island and different types of shops, businesses and machines appeared.
Sometimes people would come to the Head and tell him that the place needed cleaning up. That the dirt was piling up. That there were too many things around him. And why didn’t he start getting rid of all the rubbish?
And they would smile as they said it. That was almost the worst part.
The outside world became a threat, one which intruded on him and began to take over his life.
One day two women appeared in the barn and told him that he lived in an unforgivable mess, and yet there was hope because God was willing to help. God would tidy up, if Jens would love him like a father.
Jens was speechless, but he had stared hard at them and threatened them with a dung fork.
When they left, they were no longer smiling.
Jens saw something they didn’t. When he studied his landscape of objects, he saw no mess or dirt. He saw an unbreakable whole. If he were to remove a single item, he would wreck the picture.
People didn’t understand that everything he had accumulated had a place, a value – and a purpose. A yellowing newspaper which had served as wrapping for a clay vase could contain information which he might one day need, although he never read newspapers. An old harness reminded him of the time he had driven a horse and cart to Korsted. The torch would come in handy once he had repaired it. He had piles of batteries, and some of them must work, surely. The audio-cassette tapes definitely did. They had been taken from a pallet behind the radio shop and still lay in ruler-straight piles held together with shrink-wrapped plastic, which in turn could undoubtedly also be used for something. Tinned food was always good to have, should they ever fall on hard times, and he had never believed in ‘best before’ dates anyway. The smoothing plane had belonged to his father and worked impeccably. He would need the hats, should he ever wear out his grandfather’s cap. The candlestick was beautiful in its symmetry; it just needed polishing. You could always use umbrellas and so never have too many of them, and he was sure that he could mend the broken ones. That someone had once thrown away a sackful of disposable cutlery seemed incomprehensible to him. Nothing was ever for single use only and one day he was going to wash it all. The sacks of salt that he had taken from a farmer’s barn – the farmer tasked with gritting the roads – he would also find a use for. A better use than just chucking it on the roads.
Jens felt a deep sense of responsibility to preserve things. To keep things as they were. And he experienced joy, an emotional bond, with every single object he took into his care. This sense of connection stimulated him. And it exhausted him whenever someone tried to break it. It even frightened him.
And indeed it had gone wrong on the occasions when, for the sake of others – first his mother and later his wife – he had tried getting rid of something. He couldn’t do it; it broke his heart. His mother had never understood. Nor had his beloved Maria, but she accepted him as he was and knew that it could be no other way. His father would have understood everything.
In time, a particular fear began to haunt Jens: the notion that he might inadvertently discard something irreplaceable. Something hidden among other things, underneath or inside another item. Even after everyone had stopped asking him to clear up and throw things away, this fear continued to grow. Objects and fear merged together in dreamlike scenarios and he had nightmares about overlooking a baby bird newly hatched on a piece of orange peel, a small, helpless life which would be lost were he to throw out the peel. Later, in those nightmares, the bird became a baby.