I.4

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]

Helander

Knudsen would help, thought Father Helander, Knudsen wasn't foolish.  He bore no grudge.  He'd help against the common enemy.

No sound or echo came from outside.  There was nothing more empty than St. George Church Square in late autumn.  Helander  prayed intensely against the emptiness for a moment.  Against the three already leafless lime trees in the corner between the transept* and the choir, against the mute dark redness of the brick wall, whose top he couldn't see from the window of his study: the southern transept of the St. George Church.  The grounds of the square were a bit lighter than the brown-red bricks of the church and the parsonage and the humbler houses that were attached, older houses made from fired bricks, houses with small stepped gables and simple houses with glazed woodbrick roofs.

No one ever walks over this square, thought Helander, gazing down upon the cleanswept pavement.  No one.  It was an absurd thought.  Of course people walked over this dead corner of the church square too, where the parsonage stood.  The foreigners who came to the ocean spas in summer, in order to visit the church.  Members of his parish.  The sexton, father Helander himself.  Nevertheless, thought Helander, the square was wholly lonely.

A place as dead as the church, thought the priest.  Which is why only Knudsen could help.

He raised his gaze to the transept wall.  Thirty thousand bricks, a naked board without perspective, two-dimensional, brown-red, slate-colored red, yellow-red, blue-red, and finally a single, darkly phosphorescent red one, without depth, hanging before Helander's window, his decades-long antithesis: the board upon which the writing that he awaited never appears, so that he paints it with his own fingers, always erasing the text and writing new words and characters.  The grounds of the square waited upon steps that never sounded; the brick wall upon writing that never appeared.

In this way, Father Helander unjustly put the guilt upon the bricks, the dark bricks of the houses and the church.  His ancestors had come with the journeying king from a land in which the houses were built from wood and colorfully painted.   In that land, one's footsteps crunched cheerfully on the gravel in front of the wooden parsonages, and the Word of justice and peace was carved on the beams.  Happy dreamers, his ancestors were, when they were tempted to venture to a land in which the thoughts were dark and intemperate like the stone walls of the church in which they began to preach the true Word.  It wasn't heard, the true Word: the darkness remained stronger than the small Light that they had brought out from the friendly land.

The dark thoughts and the excessive brick churches were guilty for forcing him to go and seek help from Knudsen, thought the priest.  His fierce, reddened, passionate face grew darker.  His prosthesis creaked as he went to the desk to take the key to the parsonage out of the drawer, and he felt the pain in his stump that had for some time now had made itself noticed whenever he took a step too quickly.  The pain was stabbing: it impaled him.  The priest stood still and balled his fists.  And after a while, when the spear had slowly retreated back, he had the feeling as if, behind him on the church wall from which he had turned away, the writing that he was waiting for, appeared.  Carefully, he turned.  But the wall was as empty as ever.

*Classically, churches were built in the shape of the cross.  The nave is the long, "upright" bar of the cross, while the transept is the horizontal crossbar.