The Stages: A Novel Read online

  THE STAGES:

  A Novel by

  Thom Satterlee

  Smashwords Edition

  * * * * *

  The Stages

  Copyright 2012 by Thom Satterlee

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Cast of Characters (with pronunciation keys)

  Epigraph—From Søren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way

  Stage I—“The Set-up”

  Stage I—Chapter 1

  Stage I-Chapter 2

  Stage I—Chapter 3

  Stage I—Chapter 4

  Stage I—Chapter 5

  Stage I—Chapter 6

  Stage II—“The Crimes”

  Stage II—Chapter 1

  Stage II—Chapter 2

  Stage II—Chapter 3

  Stage II—Chapter 4

  Stage III—“The Investigation”

  Stage III—Chapter1

  Stage III—Chapter 2

  Stage III—Chapter 3

  Stage III—Chapter 4

  Stage III—Chapter 5

  Stage III—Chapter 6

  Concluding Postscript—May 5, 2013

  Appendix—The Poems of S. Kierkegaard

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  About the Author

  Other Books by Thom Satterlee

  DEDICATION:

  For Kathy

  Cast of Characters

  ~by appearance~

  Daniel Peters: The novel’s narrator, an American translator living in Copenhagen

  Mette Rasmussen (MET-ta RASS-moose-in): Former director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center

  Carsten Rasmussen: Son of Mette and Peter Rasmussen, college student at Princeton

  Jesper Olsen (YES-per OHL-son): Lutheran priest at Our Lady’s Church, Copenhagen’s cathedral

  Søren Kierkegaard (SIR-in KEER-ka-gore): 19th-century Danish philosopher, considered the father of Existentialism

  Anders (AHN-ers): Secretary at the Kierkegaard Center

  Lona Brøchner (LOW-nah BROOK-ner): Head philologist at the Kierkegaard Center

  Rebekah Wilcox: American post-doctoral student conducting research at the Kierkegaard Center

  Ingrid Bendtner (ING-rithe BENT-ner): Homicide detective with the Copenhagen Police

  N.F.S. Grundtvig (GROONT-vee): 19th-century priest, reformer, and hymn writer

  Lars Andersen: Philologist at the Kierkegaard Center

  Annette Rifbjerg (Ah-NET-ta RIFF-byair): Philologist at the Kierkegaard Center

  Per Aage Simonsen (PEER-owe-ah SEE-men-sen): Philologist at the Kierkegaard Center

  Birgit Fisker-Steensen (BEER-git FISK-er STEEN-sen): Director of the Copenhagen Museum

  Erik Thorvaldsen (TORE-val-sen): Brother of Mette Rasmussen, Danish Member of Parliament

  Morton Olsen: Branch chief of Danske Bank, Nytorv

  Susannah Lindegaard (LIN-a-gore): Specialist in forgery detection at the Royal Library

  Thor Grønkjær (TORE GRUN-care): Director of the Royal Library

  Rolf Paulsen: Homicide Team Leader, Copenhagen Police

  Sven Carlsen: Homicide Detective, Copenhagen Police

  Fru Thorvaldsen (FREW TORE-val-sen): Mette Rasmussen and Eric Thorvaldsen’s mother, a widow living alone on the eastern side of Denmark

  “There are three stages in life: the Aesthetic, the Ethical, the Religious….The Aesthetic is the stage of unmediatedness, the Ethical is responsibility…[and] the Religious is fulfillment, but note well, not the sort of ‘fulfillment’ as when one fills up an offering plate or a sack with gold coins, for repentance has instead created an unlimited space, and with it the religious contradiction: to float upon 70,000 fathoms of water and yet feel happy.”

  --Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

  (Transl., Daniel Peters)

  Stage I: The Set-up

  Chapter One

  ***

  A crowd has gathered outside Our Lady’s Church. Some stand on the porch between the Roman columns, and others congregate on the steps or on the sidewalk below. Most are dressed in dark-colored overcoats, hats, and gloves—appropriate both for the ceremony they are about to attend and for the damp-cold weather of this mid-January morning. Seeing them from the other side of the street, I estimate that about a hundred people have come for Mette Rasmussen’s funeral. They wait, like me, for the doors to be opened for family and friends. The casket is already inside the church—I know this because it is customary for mourners to file past the casket and also because I was one of six people who carried it into the church about an hour ago. I could have waited inside but instead I decided to do something I haven’t done in years: smoke a cigarette. I bought a pack of Prince, the Danish brand that was our favorite back when Mette and I were teenagers in Kolding. I had to buy a lighter to go with them, it’s been that long. Then I found this isolated spot in a parking lot across from the church and smoked three in rapid succession. At the moment I am feeling sick to my stomach. I can almost hear Mette’s voice saying, “Daniel, what were you thinking?”

  A sudden glare of light flashes off the glass doors as they are opened. The crowd begins to stir. Slowly the shape that was a mass begins to divide into separate bodies, separate pairs of legs marching toward the gap at the top of the stairs. It takes a couple of minutes before everyone is inside. I wait a while longer, watching. A bike passes in front of the church, the cyclist slowing down as if out of respect—or maybe simply curiosity. A young woman ducks her head out of the church door and looks both ways down the street. Her blond hair is pulled back with a black headband and she wears a gray scarf bunched up under her chin. She is pretty, in the simple Danish style that Mette was pretty when I met her twenty-seven years ago. Then the girl is gone, back inside the church. For a few seconds the street is completely silent—no cars, no bikes, no one walking on the sidewalk—and it occurs to me that I could turn and walk to my apartment, that no one would miss me, that Mette would understand in whatever way the dead can understand. She would say, “Det skal du selv om,” using the colloquialism that can almost be captured with the English “It’s up to you.” I feel a giddiness of freedom that passes instantly into dread. Because two things happen at once: I see Carsten, Mette’s son, walking quickly around the corner, fumbling to put his cell phone in a jacket pocket and then reaching through the gap in his coat to adjust his tie. He takes the steps two at a time. And the other thing that happens is this: I remember that besides carrying the casket into the church, I am expected to carry it out. My stomach drops, the same way a corner of Mette’s casket would if I were not there to hold it up. I cross the street and go inside.

  The line of mourners stretches down the length of the center aisle, almost into the foyer. Carsten, I notice, is not at the back of it. He has probably gone around the side and taken his seat with the nearest of kin. I don’t know the person immediately in front of me, but several places ahead is a colleague from work. She turns around and squints her eyes at me. Her look might be a question or a judgment, I’m not really sure. I glance away. No one in line is speaking. The only sound is an organ playing an adagio that I believe is from Brahms. The pipes are directly above my head, and when I look up into the organ loft I can see the organist’s black pantleg, part of one arm, the profile of a face. I move forward slowly but steadily, concentrating on keeping a polite distance between myself and the person ahead, tryi
ng not to allow too much space between us, and avoiding eye contact with anyone.

  Our Lady’s Church is the official cathedral in Copenhagen, and it is what most people would call beautiful and awe-inspiring. From the vaulted ceiling hang circular chandeliers ringed with lights. Pillars and archways line the walls, evenly spaced and evenly paired. Between each of the arched balconies I see bas reliefs of cherubim with wings folded around their faces, and I can’t miss the larger-than-life marble statues of The Twelve Apostles standing on slabs with their names carved into them, six on each side of the sanctuary. Matthew, I notice, is looking a bit confused, holding a pen above a tablet and gazing off into the distance, as if he can’t find his thought, while a diminutive, curly-haired angel stands at his feet with her arms crossed over her chest—waiting, patiently, forever. Up ahead, in the first position on the left, Paul is more resolute. He holds one hand on the hilt of a sword and with the other hand gestures to a crowd. “Look,” he seems to be saying, “we could reason together. If not, I have other means at my disposal.” The tip of the sword is visible just behind his left leg.

  I stop while the person ahead of me mounts a stair. We have come to the end of the pews and now approach the choir, where all the people who preceded us are sitting in chairs arranged in perfectly even rows, one section on either side of the altar. But before we get to them we must pass the casket, its closed lid covered in layers of white flowers. It is placed next to a statue of an angel kneeling and holding out a bowl: the baptismal font. I wait while the person ahead of me pauses beside the casket and touches it lightly, just grazing the wood with her fingertips. Then it is my turn. I feel suddenly self-conscious and awkward, like a performer who’s forgotten his lines or no longer believes in them. The problem is, I have already touched the casket, when I carried it into the church, to this very spot, and I’ll touch it again when I carry it out. Why should I do as the others have? It would be wrong to follow their rule, and wrong not to follow it. If I walked up to Mette’s casket and touched it, just lightly as the woman ahead of me has done, I would feel like a liar to myself and Mette. But in front of me are a hundred people, and not all of them know that I am a pallbearer. To them I might look like a homeless person who’s wandered into the church looking for a warm place to spend the morning. I’m conscious that I smell of cigarette smoke, that my coat has a stain on it, just under the left breast—but that doesn’t mean I’m a slob, only that I stumbled this morning while walking down Strøget with a cup of coffee in my hand. These are not facts that I can communicate quickly to the strangers in front of me. Also I realize, shamefully, my hat and gloves are sticking out of my coat pockets—that there’s something lewd about that. All the other mourners, sitting and looking at me, have taken whatever they found too warm to wear and tucked it neatly under their chairs. Alone and exposed, I stand frozen beside the casket of an old friend, an old girlfriend. I would stand here indefinitely, perhaps, if something didn’t come to my rescue. It turns out to be the priest—the mere sight of him standing off to one side in his black robe and piped collar, looking at once serious and comical, like a clown in mourning, unsticks me from my spot. I spy an empty chair in the back row and walk toward it briskly. As soon as I sit down I feel better. I place my hat and gloves in a pile under my chair and begin to do what comes most naturally to me: be the observer and not the observed.

  The priest’s name is Jesper Olsen, and unlike me he has no hesitation about standing in front of a crowd of people, and no doubts about what he should do. I have seen him interviewed on TV news whenever a story involved religion, and he has always seemed confident, truthful, reasonable, kind, and well-spoken. He is the sort of clergyman that gives the State Church a good image and makes Danes wonder if they might want to attend a service more often than just Christmas and Easter. Why not, if the priests are as likable as Jesper? Seeing him in person for the first time, vested for a service, my only surprise is that he is such a slight man: his robe looks too big for him and the piped collar climbs up his neck like a lifesaver floating around the ears of a drowning man. And yet he manages to pull off his role by standing before us perfectly still with his hands pressed together at the fingertips. His gray hair is closely trimmed and looks like a “V” spreading outward from his forehead. He has a serious look on his face, but not stern, not angry—somber and one hundred percent appropriate for the occasion. When he invites us to stand for prayer, we all do, rising from our chairs with a communal creaking sound. His voice is thin, somewhat high-pitched, and yet it conveys authority. He is speaking to God for us, thanking Him for Mette’s life, asking assistance in our sorrows, acknowledging the promises of resurrection. He prays in Danish, of course, and I catch most of it, though I haven’t been to a Danish funeral in six years and the vocabulary is somewhat specialized and outside of my usual realm. Mostly what comes across is the man’s earnestness and conviction. I doubt anyone in this church would want to trade places with him (I certainly wouldn’t) and I am already at ease about how he will handle the eulogy, when that time comes around. He will know what to say, and more importantly what not to say.

  The organ plays the prelude to“Nu takker alle Gud.” Soon, everyone around me begins to sing, but I don’t join in. It’s not that I don’t want to participate, but that my mind simply goes elsewhere, to a place that Mette, if anyone, would understand. Like me, she loved to work with words, just as I am doing now as I look down at the hymn book and start translating in my head: “Now thank we all our God / With heart and mouth and hands….” As the organ plays on, taking its breath at the end of a line, then coming back strong again, and the voices rise and fall with the song’s meter, I realize that the Danish word hænder ends with an unaccented syllable, giving the second line a feminine ending, so “hands” can’t possibly work. Mette would have a suggestion. What would her suggestion be? At the same time as I’m thinking this, on another level of my mind, I am aware that although I am only one person in a group of many who’ve come to pay respect to Mette, I feel especially close to her, as if I’m the closest. But am I? Am I closer to her than her son, her mother, her siblings, all of whom I can see seated in the row nearest to the flower-laden casket? I have no way of knowing what’s going on in their minds. They have no way of knowing what’s going on in mine. When the hymn ends and we sit back down, we are a hundred different people with a hundred different relationships to the deceased. And now one man who didn’t know her personally will speak of her. He will give what, in an older form of Danish, is called the “corpse talk,” in English “eulogy”—from Greek eu (well) and logia (discourse)—and he will likely do a better job than any of the others of us could.

  The longer he has stood before us, the more solid and reassuring Jesper Olsen has grown. His seventeenth-century priestly costume radiates dignity as he calmly tells us about Mette’s life, how this third child of an old, wealthy, respected family showed early signs of unusual promise. She was a gifted musician, he tells us, had the soul of a poet, and was always curious to learn more. In time she focused her interests in a particular direction—to understanding and elucidating the life of an important countryman, none other than the great Søren Kierkegaard. Yes, that same Søren Kierkegaard who was born in this city almost two hundred years ago and who regularly attended this very church, even delivering sermons quite near the spot where Mette’s casket now stands. For more than two decades she carried on the work of scholars who’d come before her, side-by-side with her husband, who died a few years ago, just as they were nearing the end of a major project. Though grieved at her loss, she continued on, and the work prospered. As recently as last month, she made an unprecedented discovery that would shape the future of all Kierkegaard research. She had found a new manuscript, entirely unknown, and confirmed it as Kierkegaard’s. As those close to her knew, she spent countless hours poring over this new work. Her final days, indeed her life, were full of purpose and dedicated to a good cause. Her life ended tragically too soon, but it was not witho
ut meaning.

  When he finishes his talk, Jesper Olsen faces the family members sitting in the front row. He offers them his personal condolences and tells them that the church is a place of much comfort and is always open to them. He lifts his eyes and scans across both sides of the choir, repeating his invitation to the rest of us. When he reaches me, he seems to pause and look directly into my eyes, although this is probably the effect he has on many. I glance away. When I look back, he is holding a small pail and a plastic shovel. Even though I have seen this rite performed before, it still strikes me as absurd. The pail and shovel look too much like a child’s toys for building a sand castle, and they clash with the use for which they are about to be made. And yet somehow Jesper Olsen pulls it off. In his black robe and protruding white collar, he stands up straight and sinks the shovel into the pail, pulling out a heap of rich, black dirt.

  “From earth you have come, to earth you will return,” he says, pronouncing the words in an even, perfectly balanced manner. Then he scatters dirt over the coffin, directly on top of the white flowers. A few clods dribble off the side and land on the floor, but Jesper ignores them. As he scoops another shovelful, someone cries out and I look around to see who it might be. Mette’s mother holds a handkerchief to her nose and slowly shakes her head. One of her sons reaches over and takes her hand. All, I think, is well, is as it should be. A mother should cry at her daughter’s funeral. Her son should comfort her. This is how people close to the deceased grieve and give comfort to each other. But then I notice the figure on the other side of Mette’s mother. It’s Carsten, sitting with his coat draped over his lap and his elbows propped on his thighs. Sometime during the service he has loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. For the first time today I look directly into his face and see that something is wrong. I have seen Carsten look this way before, but not in a while, not since his father died and, according to Mette, Carsten finally cleaned up his act. The muscles in his face seem too relaxed, too at ease, and his lips are stuck in a slightly upturned position, almost a grin. Sweat has matted his hair to his forehead. I realize suddenly that he has either been drinking or taking drugs, or possibly both. The reaction inside me is violent, but I stay perfectly still. What can I do? He’s on the other side of the choir, within steps of his mother’s casket, the priest’s back turned to us while he places the second shovelful of dirt onto the flowers and utters the required words, “From earth you have come, to earth you will return.”