The Burning City
Through the two windows with their bright lattice-figured curtains the level sunlight of the winter morning falls in two slanting oblong quadrilaterals on the soft green carpet, and in the warm sunny spaces a little boy skips and dances. He knows but little of the world as yet. He knows he is little and is going to be big, but he does not know either that he has been born or that he will die. He knows he is four and will soon be five, but he does not know what is meant by “a year”; he still measures time only into yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
“Papa,” he suddenly exclaims to his father, who has just finished breakfast and lighted his first cigar of the day—he being a person to measure time with cigars—“papa, I dreamed so many things last night! I dreamed about the whole room! I dreamed about the chairs and the green carpet and the mirror and the clock and the stove and the shutters and the cupboards.”
With that he skips forward to the stove, where the fire flames and crackles, and turns a somersault. He considers the stove and the place in front of it as the most important and dignified things in the room.
His father nods and laughs at him over the corner of his paper, and the boy laughs back, laughs away uncontrollably. He is at the age when laughter is still only an utterance of joy, not of appreciation for the ridiculous. When he stood at the window some days ago and laughed at the moon, it was not because he found the moon funny, but because it gave him joy with its round bright face.
When he has had his laugh out, he clambers up on a chair and points to one of the pictures on the wall.
“—And I dreamed most of all about that picture,” he says.
The picture is a photograph of an old Dutch painting, A Burning City.
“Well, and what was it you dreamed?” his father asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Come, think!”
“Oh yes, I dreamed it was burning and that I patted a doggie.”
“But generally you are afraid of doggies.”
“Yes, but on pictures I can pat them nicely.”
Then he laughs and skips and dances.
At last he comes up to his father and says, “Papa dear, take down the picture. I want papa to show me the picture again the way he did yesterday.”
The picture is a new arrival in the room; it came the day before. With the other pictures around the walls the little boy has acquainted himself long ago: Uncle Strindberg and Uncle Schopaur (i.e. Schopenhauer) and Uncle Napoleon and ugly old Goethe and grandmother when she was young. But the Burning City is new, and is furthermore in itself a much more amusing picture than the others. The father humors the little boy, takes the picture down from the wall, and they enjoy it together. Over a broad estuary that winds toward the sea and is filled with sloops and rowboats runs an arched bridge with a fortified tower. On the left shore lies the burning city: rows of narrow houses with pointed gables, high roofs, churches, and towers; a throng of people running hither and thither, a sea of fire and flames, clouds of smoke, ladders raised against walls, horses running away with shaking loads, docks crowded with barrels and sacks and all manner of rubbish; on the river a mass of people in a rowboat that is almost ready to capsize, while across the bridge people are running for dear life, and away off in the foreground stand two dogs sniffing at each other. But far in the background, where the estuary widens toward the sea, a much-too-small moon sits on the horizon in a mist of pale clouds, peeping wanly and sadly at all this misery.
“Papa,” inquires the little boy, “why is the city burning?”
“Somebody was careless with fire,” says the father.
“Who was it that was careless?”
“Ah, one can’t be sure of that so long afterwards.”
“How long afterwards?”
“It is many hundred years since that city was burned,” says the father.
This is a bit puzzling to the little boy, as the father clearly realizes, but he had to answer something. The boy sits quiet a moment and ponders. New thoughts and impressions about things stir in his brain and mingle with the old. He points with his little finger on the glass over the burning city and says:
“Yes, but it was burning yesterday, and now today it’s burning too.”
The father ventures on an explanation of the difference between pictures and reality. “That is not a real city,” he says, “that is only a picture. The real city was burned up long, long ago. It is gone. The people that run about there waving their arms are dead and don’t exist any more. The houses have been burned up, the towers have fallen. The bridge is gone too.”
“Have the towers burned down or tumbled down?” asks the boy.
“They have both burned and tumbled down.”
“Are the steamboats dead too?”
“The boats too have been gone long ago,” replied the father. “But those are not steamboats, they are sailing vessels. There were no steamboats in those days.”
The little boy sticks out his lower lip with a dissatisfied expression.
“But I see that they’re steamboats,” he says. “Papa, what’s that steamboat’s name?”
He has a mind of his own, has the boy. The father is tired of the labor of instruction and holds his peace. The boy points with his finger to the old Dutch merchantmen and prattles to himself: “That steamer’s name is Bragë, and that one’s is Hillersea, and that is the Princess Ingeborg.”
“Papa,” he cries all of a sudden, “is the moon gone too?”
“No, the moon still exists. It is the one thing of all there that still exists.
