ABSTRACT
Another spring day, this time in 1911. The peripatetic Kristensen continues his jaunts through the Danish countryside. As usual, his weathered bag is crammed with notebooks, pencils, pen, ink, perhaps lunch or possibly one of his numerous books which he hopes to sell along the way to a school teacher. Although the bag weighs heavily on his shoulder, the sixty-eight year old Kristensen is indefatigable. Walking from one town to the next, he makes his way to Bredsten and finally arrives at Kjaerb0lling, home to Rasmus Holgersen. Rasmus is an amiable story-teller, one who hits his stride with a good pipe in his hand. Kristensen has visited him once before, and soon Rasmus is rattling off stories:
There was a young man, he was called Poul Rasmussen, he had killed his girl friend, but what he had done had never been made public. The twenty-third of every month he’d have such an attack of madness, and it would go on for two or three days. It was precisely that day that he had done the dirty deed. But otherwise he went about and was completely easy-going. At night, he was locked in in a room with iron bars over the windows. Then they put another farm hand to watch him, he was called Simon Simonsen, he was twenty-four or twentyfive at the time when it happened, and he’d probably be about eighty now if he was still alive. He wasn’t supposed to do anything but watch Poul. He watched him for three years too. But then one night Simon went to a dance or a gathering, and when he came home late at night and went in to the farm hand to check on him, he lay like he was dead. So they fetched the doctor, but
the doctor said that he wasn’t dead. So they fetched two more and they said the same thing. Then they fetched the parson and he said the same thing too. He lay like that for six weeks. There were no doctors who would sign the death certificate, and sweat dripped down his cheeks. Then they fetched Pastor Svejsstrup from N0rup and he was alone with him for two hours. Then when he came out, they asked him what he said about it. Then he says, “There’s nothing to do with him, the Evil One has possessed him.” He was totally warm and never cold and they had forced a little food into him now and then. But then the parson and the three doctors agreed that he should be buried, and he was buried in N0rup cemetery and he had been a rich farm owner’s son.1
