I hop into the passenger seat and feel Ian and his wheelchair looming up behind me. It’s like being watched by a gigantic half-boiled prawn.
“Love … krrr … ly to see … krrr … you,” he says.
He’s got a PhD in biology, just like Andrea, and while he has no problem finding the right word, his muscular control’s so compromised that it can be exhausting for him to speak.
We talk about Torben and the hymns Solveig has selected for the ceremony, and we talk about what we think Torben must have been like before his strokes. The obituaries have described him as a powerful figure in the Ministry of Justice under Erik Ninn-Hansen, playing a key role in the Tamil Case that brought down the Conservative government in 1993. It’s difficult for us to imagine, as we’ve only known him as an affectionate klutz.
We also talk about Frederik’s coming court case. Andrea’s been convinced of his innocence from the start, and her support used to be very important to me. But I didn’t quite know what to think of it later, once it became clear to me that she believed all criminals were innocent. She’s definitely the intellectual in our group, always able to raise discussion to a higher plane. Now she says, as we drive to the church, “Four hundred years ago, people believed that the mentally ill had made a pact with the devil — meaning they were witches — and so they burnt them alive with the entire village looking on. Episodes like that from our past offend modern sensibilities, because now we take it for granted that of course the poor wretches shouldn’t be burnt or imprisoned because they’re mentally ill.
“But it won’t be very many years before people look back on our time now and think exactly the same thing about how we punish those who are cruel and violent and make foolish choices that end in crime. It’s medieval to think that these people want to be the way they are. Their brains just don’t function that well, and it’s obvious that they should enter treatment. They shouldn’t simply be locked up for years like another Natascha Kampusch.”
Ian chimes in from the back of the van. “In just twenty years … krrr … we’ll look back … on this time … as … krrr … utterly barbaric.”
They both laugh, but I don’t understand what’s so funny. Perhaps something we drove past?
“We’re living in a second … second … krrr … a second Renaissance, you know.”
“I’ve read that,” I say without turning to look at him.
Andrea parks in one of the handicapped spots close to the church and the three of us get out, but after she busies herself for a while in rearranging the blanket over Ian’s legs, she tells me to go on ahead. I get the sense that there’s something they’d like to deal with by themselves, so I make my way toward the church.
Solveig’s been very active in the Brain Injury Association, and several of her friends from there have come. Out in front of the church door I step to one side, to make room for the walking-impaired, and I say hello to Anton from our group. He’s come with his wife, who I haven’t met before. Both of them hold themselves upright and sport golf tans, fastidious hair, and expensive taste in clothes.
Anton introduces us, and his wife gives me a friendly smile, gathering her long elegant coat about her and saying, “I’ll nip in and take one of them … those things you use when … with the … that you eat with … you eat and you … here in … when you’re going to … sing with it … I’ll take one of those.”
It took a couple of days at Frederik’s rehab center for me to discover that if I wanted to chat with a patient while waiting for my husband to finish his treatment session, I should approach one of the ones who looked the most severely brain-damaged. Sometimes the ones with serious physical handicaps were brighter and more articulate than the personnel, while the patients who moved about without difficulty always had major problems with language or cognition.
After another two wheelchairs have gone in, Anton and I follow his wife into the church, and it takes my breath away. It always does: the vaulted ceilings, the carved woodwork, the chalk paintings. I can’t walk into a medieval Danish church without feeling Christianity calling to me. And I’ve been that way for as long as I remember.
For centuries, people have prayed and grieved here, suffered and celebrated, and I still can feel traces of their presence. In the churches, they abide with us stilclass="underline" the wives of farmers who keeled over in the field, the wives of fishermen who drowned in the storm. All the children and parents of the centuries’ departed. They begged and wept before God because their own lives were over now too and maybe they’d have to enter the poorhouse, maybe they’d starve, maybe they’d have to wed some rich old man.
And the joys, the centuries’ joys: the christenings, the weddings, the Sundays in August when the harvest was abundant and everyone could feel safe for the winter.
Poverty in Europe till a hundred years ago, less than three of my lifetimes ago — the tattered clothes and the teeth yanked out with no anesthetic, the diseases you got when you shared a straw pallet with rats. Back when there were no toilets, when backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk gave even young people the pain of arthritis all night long. The way life was until just a few years ago; I still feel it, here in the dark.
Christ gazes down from the cross, and Solveig’s nephew switches his iPhone to mute. For centuries, spaces like this framed Europe’s dreams and hopes and spiritual life, and now it’s all kaput. Regardless of how the chalk paintings and ancestors call to me, I know this funeral is mere show, like when Native Americans perform an ancient rain dance for tourists but no longer believe in a rain god. I’m looking around at something that’s disappeared because the fundamental delusion of God and Paradise can no longer convince us.
Is it wrong for me to be here and act as if I believe in God, now that I’ve converted to atheism? After all, that’s idolatry. Is it wrong for me to enjoy it, to let myself steep in Christendom’s seductive lies for the interval of an hour? I don’t know.
Anton sits beside his wife, and I sit next to him. Seven years ago, she was diagnosed with a tumor and required surgery in her left temporal region, which the doctors said lay on the edge of her brain’s language areas. The evening before the operation, they both knew she might never be able to speak again. In support group, he told us how she held him in their bed, looked him deep in the eye, and said, “After tomorrow, I might never be able to tell you I love you again.” They both wept. “You’re the only man who’s ever meant anything to me,” she said. “If I can never tell you that again, will you always remember that I told you tonight?”
“Yes,” he said.
And only in the group did he say that as he held her and wept, even as he knew that he’d remain with her till one of them died, he couldn’t avoid a poison droplet of suspicion that she said what she did because she might become completely dependent on him the next afternoon, and she wanted to chain him to her.
I’m turning around a little too often, looking back toward the door. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but then Bernard and Lærke enter, and I remember.
I can’t imagine that anyone notices anything — we exchange a brief innocent glance as he walks past, and we nod our little funeral nod. Others have lowered their eyes and are leafing through their hymnals to find the right page, while I shift about restlessly on the hard wooden pew.