Contented soon I make my way
back to the dust whence I arrived.
Long though I toiled with little pay
of life’s good gifts was ne’er deprived.
Deep down inside my heart there lay
—same as others gained indeed—
a clew to point to me the way,
though I to it paid little heed.
This life and I o’er wages high
to blows our quarrels often came.
We leave behind now as we die
all burden, debt, demand, and claim.
Then none other than the farm advisor himself arrived in his white coat, went down the line of rams, held his tape measure up to them, and prodded them before they were weighed at the meeting house. I remember feeling fairly confident, thinking that Kútur made a fine show, and several people remarked that it was a magnificent creature I’d acquired. It didn’t hurt that his lineage could be traced to both a champion German ram and the Jökuldalur stock.
The advisor had a different opinion. He informed me that Kútur’s legs were far too long, but that his chest and back were exceptional. That’s what the esteemed advisor said: that Kútur’s legs were far too long! Anger boiled within me as he announced at the ceremony up on the ribbon-bedecked platform that Ingjaldur from Hóll’s ram was to receive first prize. To make matters worse, he recommended that we on the neighboring farms make greatest use of him during the next servicing.
Ingjaldur’s Dindill won only by virtue of having shorter legs. There was no goddamned chest on that knock-kneed, cow-hocked devil! And damned if his horns weren’t protruding so much that he couldn’t graze on flat ground. I was astounded. That potbelly! Most everyone took umbrage, and the following verse was composed and quickly made the rounds, because the advisor himself was skinny, splay-footed, and gangly to the highest degree:
If of himself the advisor took measure,
no prize he’d gain, no marks he’d notch.
Esteemed, perhaps, yet wrecking the pleasure
are lanky legs from ground to crotch.
The fact was that the land had given birth to geniuses at sheep farming. The first lesson one learned from the old farmers was to have the sheep long-legged, making it possible for them to forage on beaches in the winter and on uneven, tussocky ground. But here we had Mr. Bigshot! A university-educated man who’d learned from books in Reykjavík that sheep should be short-legged, in order to follow some worldly fashion. So people were supposed to service ewes with a ram so short-legged and big-bellied that it toppled onto its back between the first tussocks it ran into! Give me a break. That’s how Ingjaldur’s rams were. A story about this went around for a long time: once a visitor comes to the farm at Hóll and asks to see Ingjaldur, but a boy answers that his dad isn’t at home, that he’s out “uprighting the rams.”
The thing is, this is how everything that’s been built up in Icelandic culture is bungled; folk go abroad and learn some damned rubbish that has nothing to do with Iceland, but try in the name of the latest fashion to do everything they can to spoil and wreck the distinctive features that have developed here. In Italy they eat sparrows. My grandmother Kristín taught me to ask the wagtail in the spring how the future would be, and that you must never steal the wheatear’s eggs, because if you did, your fingers would become stiff and twisted. Isn’t it nicer to live with such beliefs and take delight in blessed little birds, rather than eat them just to follow some worldly fashion?
Where was I again? Oh, yes. You must remember it better than I, Helga, after we’d ferried the ready ewes down to the dulse-strewn seashore and tried to service them with Ingjaldur’s ram. There’s an old aphorism that my father said came from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, but I remember how Sheriff Magnús Ketilsson worded it: that the birth of twin lambs was brought about “by the great mental vigor of sheep who behold at once both land and sea the moment the ram releases and the ewe receives the seed.” That’s how he worded it, the dear man. And for us it paid off.
But there was no way to service the ewes with that fat belly. And that damned monotone bleat of his—such sounds truly get on my nerves. So now the farmers were angry, and we agreed to let Kútur, Bassi, and Klængur service the rest. I wrote a sternly worded letter. Expressed my doubts about the ability of the farm advisor to judge sheep. Said that I didn’t want to see my flock ruined by such an unprofitable ram as Dindill, and that this new short-legged sheep craze from the continent had no business at all in our tussocky landscape. And what would be next: were we supposed to start eating sparrows? Besides that, Dindill and the Jökuldalur ewes were too closely related, making him undesirable for propagation (according to Article 4 of the sheep booklet of Hálfdán, Helgi, and Jón, Akureyri, 1855). The sheep farmer (says the same booklet) should choose the best-looking and most well-bred ram, and this Dindill was simply not good looking at all. The creature was badly proportioned. I was sent back an even more sternly worded letter.
I stuck to my guns.
Came in my capacity as Hay Officer to check whether you were still well rounded. Behind the equipment shed we found ourselves a little nook where sunbeams fell through the cracks between the planks, allowing me to assess your body condition precisely in their light. This became our private little joke. You asked me to examine you, and I felt your rib tips, which were free of flaws, and then one rib after another, and the fullness of your back, then your pelvis and legs, down to your hocks, making you quiver like a poplar in the wind; I touched you with eager fingers, conducting a detailed survey of the curvature and amplitude of your breasts. You moaned blissfully. The vision of you naked in the sunbeams was refreshing to the eye, like a blossom on a bare cliff ledge. I really have nothing to compare to this sight. The best I can think of is when the Farmall arrived, when I pulled the crate and cardboard off the tractor and beheld the shining glory that would revolutionize our lives. See how paltry I am in my mind, dear Helga, likening you, young and naked, to a tractor. I know I’m just befouling your beauty by comparing you to a worldly thing. Yet you were a splendid tractor.
God alone knows how I preserved this vision eternally in the deepest chamber of my heart. I’ve kept it enshrined. There at the buzz saw I laid hands on your breasts and sensed their fullness in the fragrance of the new-mown hay. And the bushy tuft in pure light. My Kútur and I. We two in the sweet laps of destiny that life had granted us. When we made love. Your breasts bobbing on your rib cage. They were swans on the waves. I let fly and you moaned ecstatically, and I was soon prepared to slap my thighs against yours again. So unprecedentedly lustful I was. I was enamored. I loved everything. My Unnur as well. I floated like a nacreous cloud through the days. I didn’t mind at all working like a beast, performing both my duties as the parish hay officer and taking the dory fishing when the time was right, catching lumpsucker and setting seal-pup nets in the spring for extra income. I also added onto the sheep shed at that time. I literally leapt out of bed in the mornings. I remember when I boiled the head of a huge cod that I’d caught in the lumpsucker net. I sat there in the kitchen, sucking the splendid sweetness from the bones, my chin glistening with oily broth—and thought that your kisses were even sweeter, more luscious than this! You were so close to me when we met briefly in your barn. You with the heartfelt cordiality that comes so naturally to you alone. You said that you wanted me and asked whether we shouldn’t just run off together and have done with this district. I laughed and didn’t take you seriously at first. I tried to put words to my emotions, though I only managed fragments.
Then suddenly it came to an end.
The rut of my life.
8
Clouds drew over the sun. And it’s no secret that a woman who looks at a man the way you did, one autumn evening outside the barn, carries a new life within her. You didn’t need to say anything; everything sounded different. It was as if life itself spoke through you. Your heart trembled, weakening your voice. I felt deep sympathy for your anxiety, which natur
ally threw me off balance. It was as if a wedge had been driven into all my emotions. I was glad to know that I had sparked life and was rueful about the situation—hesitant and speechless—because deep inside, this was precisely what I wanted, to give you a child. The problems arose from our circumstances, with the slanderous tongues of Hörgár Parish out and ready all around us.
There were two choices, you said. They both looked bad to me, you know, dear Helga. You suggested that we say farewell to our lives in the countryside, move south to Reykjavík with your children, and start a new life. There was plenty of work to be had from the Yanks, and inexpensive housing was easy to find. You could get a part-time job as a shop clerk or house cleaner. It would all work out. You couldn’t imagine living next to Hallgrímur after your relationship ended. You wanted to leave, and I, Hay Officer for Hörgár Parish, Bjarni Gíslason of the great farmstead of Kolkustaðir, should come with you. In the city we could have a splendid future; the place was loaded with money, and I who was so dexterous and could build whatever it might be, repair any sort of machine, wouldn’t have any trouble finding enough to do.
No one there stuck his nose into another’s business, you said, unlike in our community. You could take sewing classes and buy material and magazines with patterns, so that you could make your children presentable. People there had manners. There you could study whatever you wanted. You had a dream, you told me. You’d read up on it. You wanted to learn ceramics, you said, and cast clay pots and mugs and art objects. You could go to the theater there and buy yourself a hot cocoa at a café. You could see other plays besides Skugga-Sveinn. In Reykjavík, there was no damned eternal, bitter-cold, gusting northern wind from the open ocean, like here. Your enticements were full of excitement and an enthusiasm that I found inspiring, and I smiled, envisioning life in Reykjavík with the luster that you gave it.
Then I remembered who I was.
Where I was.
I turned away and looked at the dung-channel leading out of the sheep shed.
You broke down and started sobbing. You remember this as well as I do. You entreated me so earnestly, with all your heart. Your words cut me to the quick. I sat down on the fence posts stacked up against the sheep shed. I pointed at the mountains around us and, forcing back tears, muttered a verse by Sigurður Breiðfjörð:
Motherland, my place of birth,
by every man beloved so true.
Where daylight brought me life and mirth,
where the child I was matured and grew.
“Don’t give me any fucking doggerel about some goddamned motherland,” you said. So foul-mouthed and assertive you could be—it made you even more attractive, but made me even less certain about what I should do. You said you couldn’t continue living there in eternal shame, under the nose of Hallgrímur and his kin throughout the district. How were you supposed to go to the Co-op like a respectable person? “There she is, the adulteress who let Bjarni knock her up while she was married to Hallgrímur.”
I said I would go to the Co-op.
No. No compromises were possible. You weren’t going to let any ugly talk of adultery go around and shouldn’t have to spend all your time denying rumors, trapped by “the parish’s slanderous windpipe.” That’s how you put it. Damn, you were good at putting things into words, my dearest Helga. I got that expression from you: the parish’s slanderous windpipe.
Hallgrímur had been intimate with you as well. If I didn’t want you, the child would be his.
I needed to think things over. I walked off across the homefield. It cut me to the quick when you informed me softly that I didn’t have much time.
For the next few nights I didn’t sleep. I lay there tossing and turning, got up and went to the sheep shed and asked the sheep whether they could imagine having a new master. I was even considering working for the Americans in Reykjavík. I told the sheep that I loved a woman. They gave me puzzled looks. I bridled my Skjóni and rode up the valley. The grass on the gravel banks swayed in the warm wind and a low cloud bank slung itself over the peaks and down the scree-covered slopes. I rode the path over the gravel bed, through the tussocky ground, past a boggy hollow and more grassy banks. I stopped to rest at the hill where the Viking settler lies and the horses never graze. Looked over the farm where Grandmother and Grandfather lived; they were so good to me when I was a child. Grandma Kristín seemed as old as the settlers of this land; in my memory she’s bathed in sweet antiquity. When she grew up there was no soap in the countryside; clothes and sheets were washed with lant, as had been done since time immemorial. She said that women today didn’t have hair, just dead tufts on their heads. In her youth, when women washed their hair with urine, their locks glowed long and thick, as she put it.
Fantastically shaped clouds passed over me in the hollow, and I always felt as if these forms wanted to tell me something, as if they had a personal message for me. Would I ever cloud-gaze in Reykjavík? Wouldn’t my senses seem barnacle-grown in relation to the beauty of life?
Should I move to Reykjavík to dig ditches or put up Quonset-hut barracks for the Americans? Give up the sheep that my father had bequeathed me and that I’d worked day and night to refine and increase, resulting in them usually bearing twins or triplets? Leave the district where my forefathers had lived for an entire millennium, to work in a city where one never beholds the product of one’s hands and instead becomes a renter and another man’s slave? Where people say time is money and spend on the theater and other entertainments what they earn in offices, wearing polyester suits? Away from the hidden people in the mountain slopes. From the places where history speaks from every hill and every hollow. Where I’d shot a fox shitting. Away from the stones that I conversed with as a child. From the cotton-grass moors and the slopes that embody ancient mystery. Why couldn’t we two thrive here in this corner of the country? Was I never again to see the luxuriant grass on the Hvaleyrarholt hayfield, which I’d cultivated? There may have been abundance and ample wealth in Reykjavík today, but tomorrow? Who knew?
I remember saying that human societies were like apples. The bigger, the less taste. I knew this from the apples that old Jensi had ordered at the co-op.
You said I knew squat about apples or Reykjavík. You always had an answer for everything. It was something to behold.
I went to visit my father’s grave and recalled the promise I gave him when he made me his heir on his deathbed. Kolkustaðir had been in the family for nine generations, and I said I wasn’t going to let the farm out of our family’s hands. My brother Sigurjón had just died of tuberculosis, my nephew Marteinn was only a child, and my sister Lilja was an invalid. Some damned thing had gotten in her head and she deteriorated steadily. Whatever happened, I knew that my soul would be here, that I couldn’t take it with me to Reykjavík.
“Up to you,” you said. If that was my choice, I’d just have to live with it!
You turned pink and pursed your lips. Your eyes. I couldn’t look into them, it was too painful.
The ties between us seemed to break in a single moment. Or did they?
You knew that it was my child, but no one was ever to find out. From here on, our relationship was finished. Never more, we two. Late one evening by the barn door, and then we were done.
Do you remember what it says in Grettis saga? Many a thing can occur at late evening.
I remember that my heart told me I loved you, when I looked at you and saw how serious and determined you were, drying your tears and telling me this, as I stood there like an upended, weather-beaten driftwood log. I just loved you more. Isn’t that what happens to a man in the presence of the one he desires most, dear Helga? Doesn’t he become a pale driftwood stump and retreat from true love?
Before I knew it, I started watching how your belly grew. From a distance. The old saying proved true, that a fire of love lit by a large flame can never be extinguished in one evening.
9
Ever since that evening, I’ve been the one who didn’t go,
the one who chose a little farm over love. I admit that sometimes it was difficult. Once, for instance, when I visited your farm as Hay Officer to inspect the hay and livestock, little Hulda came running to me and hopped into my arms. She was about three years old at the time, the poor thing, and knew me only in the way that kin recognizes kin by intuition and sense. An all-encompassing feeling of love poured over me. She had white tresses that sparkled in the sun—they were whiter than swans’ wings—and asked whether I wanted to play with her in the sandbox. In her pure kid’s voice, with wonder in her blue eyes. Then you came out and saw us in the yard; no doubt you remember this. You waved her away. Told her to stop footling around with strangers. That was the word you used—footling.
I went off to the sheep shed. Sat down on the pile of hay where we had made love not so long ago, or so it seemed to me; where what seemed like just moments ago, I watched your breasts bob on your rib cage like swans on the waves.
No matter how I tried to bear up, tears forced their way out of me like spots of blood through gauze. My sobs were distorted. I felt my will sink into my legs; they wanted to get up, march to your door, where I should say to you: “Let’s go.” These words alone. Let’s go. But I hardened my resolve. “Up onto the keel.” I thought of what kind of person I would become in Reykjavík. Destitute with you and three children. Could I love you—and your children with Hallgrímur—under such circumstances? Is it so certain, Helga, that everything would have been fine for us? I would have dug a ditch for you and filled it back up again, the same ditch all my life. I would have walked miles for you every single day, back and forth, wearing out pairs and pairs of shoes, just hoping to be able to touch you with a single fingertip. I would have eaten soap for you, if you’d asked me to. But to abandon myself, the countryside and farming, which were who I am; that I couldn’t do. It was just as well that I pulled myself together. As I was wiping away my tears there in the hay, Hallgrímur appeared in the doorway.
Reply to a Letter from Helga Page 4