The Atom Station

by Halldor Laxness

  6. The mink farm

  One of the most promising mink farms in the vicinity had suffered a great loss: fifty minks had been stolen. When I arrived for my organ lesson in the evening, two close friends of the organist’s were sitting there, both of them policemen, the one self-conscious and other unself-conscious, both organ pupils. They had come straight from duty and were drinking coffee in the kitchen and arguing over this business.

  “What does it matter if fifty minks are stolen?” said the organist.

  “What does it matter!” said the unself-conscious policeman. “The rascals didn’t even have the sense to cut off their heads, the beasts are roaming around at large. A mink is a mink. It kills chickens. And destroys trout and birds. And attacks lambs. Do you want to have everything in the country stolen? Do you want to have your chamber pot stolen from you?”

  “People should have solid and immovable privies,” said the organist, “not loose chamber pots.”

  “Yes, but what if you had a gold chamber pot? Or at any rate a silver chamber pot?” said the unself-conscious policeman.

  “Some penniless innocent manages, after violent efforts, to break into a small shop and steal some shoelaces and malt extract,” said the organist. “Or manages to remove an old coat from a vestibule, or sneak into a dairy through the back door and grab the loose change left over in the till the night before, or pinch the wallet off a drunken seaman, or dip into a farm hand’s travel box and collect his summer pay. It is perhaps possible to steal our tin chamber pots, although only by special dispensation of God’s grace. But it is impossible to steal our gold chamber pots, or even our silver ones; for they are properly guarded. No, life would be fun if one could just walk out and steal a million whenever one was broke.”

  “There’s no need to go as far as saying they empty all the banks and the Treasury,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

  “I have two friends who never spurned a carelessly locked door or a back window off the hook at night,” said the organist. “By constant night-vigils for two years, and all the diligence and conscientiousness it is possible to apply to one’s work, they managed to scrape together a sum equivalent to half a year’s pay for a dustman. Then they spent another two years in jail; eight man-years’ work, all told. If such people are dangerous, then at least they are a danger to no one but themselves. I am rather afraid that my friend Bui Arland and the others in F.F.F. would think that a poor return over eight years.”

  “But yet his son goes out and steals fifty minks,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

  “My God!” I said. “Bui Arland’s son!”

  They noticed me than for the first time, and the organist came over to me and greeted me, and the two men introduced themselves; one of them was a cheery, broad-beamed man, the other a serious young man with hot eyes that peered at you stealthily. The police had got wind that little Thord Arland, the one called Bobo, and a friend of his, had stolen these fifty beasts; they had slaughtered some of them down by Ellid River, but the rest had escaped.

  “When the good children of better people go out in the evenings before bedtime,” said the organist, “and steal fifty minks to amuse themselves, or a few crates of spare parts for mechanical excavators, or the telephone wires to Mosfell District, that is just as logical a reaction against their environment as the actions of my two friends—and just as innocent. It is impossible to escape the fact that an object which lies in salt water will absorb salt. The thievery that really matters, on the other hand, takes place elsewhere. You asked whether I wanted to have everything in the country stolen; now I shall tell you a secret: everything in the country is being stolen. And soon the country itself will be stolen.”

  I was still standing with my gloves on in the middle of the room, gaping.

  “What will happen to the poor child?” I asked.

  “Nothing at all, fortunately,” said the organist, and laughed. “Unless of course the Chief of Police phones up his daddy and they chat about the younger generation for a while and laugh and then fix up the next bridge night.”

  “Worse luck,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “Brats like that should be publicly thrashed at Austurvoll.”*

  The organist laughed, amiably and sympathetically, but thought this observation too naive to answer.

  Then the self-conscious policeman uttered his first words and addressed his colleague: “Have I not often told you that they indoctrinate you with whatever sense of justice it suits them best for you to have? You have a petit-bourgeois sense of justice.”

  I was going to say something more, but the organist came over to me and put his arm round me and walked me out of the kitchen into the living room, closed the door behind us, and made me sit down at the harmonium.

  When the half hour was up and the organist opened the door to the kitchen again, the self-conscious policeman was still sitting there reading a book, but the unself-conscious one had gone away home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t be bothered going home to my suitcase. But now I’m on my way.”

  His teeth were whole, and when he smiled he looked positively childlike, but before you knew it he started frowning again and began to peer at everything in that stealthy way that makes a girl say to herself and mean perhaps something rather special: “He’s different from the others.” But yet somehow I had the impression that I knew him. Did he know me?

  “Stay as long as you like,” said the organist. “I’m going to make some more coffee now.”

  “No more coffee for the time being,” said the self-conscious policeman. “I’m off now. It’s quite true what you said: there is no sense in being a petty thief, that’s only a pastime for children—and for wretches who go on being children after they have grown up.”

  “The only conclusion not to be drawn from this fact is that one ought therefore to become a legal thief,” said the organist.

  “Ah well. I’m on my way.”

  I accompanied him out. We were going in the same direction. He was no good at starting a conversation, and I did not know what to say either. Our silence was like a fire glowing under a spit; until he said, “Do you recognize me?” and I replied, “Yes, but I don’t know who you are.”

  “I know you,” he said.

  “Have you seen me before?” I asked, and he said that he had. Then I said, “The difference is that I know you but haven’t seen you before.”

  “Of course you’ve seen me,” he said. “I was one of the men who threw the corpse into your hall the other night.”

  “Oh yes, now I remember,” I said, but yet it was not so much this that I remembered; rather I was meaning some indefinable secret relationship between us that lay much deeper, an acquaintanceship that it would not be proper to put into words. So I hurried away from that subject and started discussing the other: “Don’t you think it strange to have everything—youth, good looks, health, education, intelligence, and money—and yet go out like Arngrim Arland and be carried home in a paralysis of poison?”

  “So-called daddy-boys,” he said, “the sons of men who have cheated the populace of vast wealth—they know by instinct that they are born receivers. What are such boys to do? They have no vocation to become criminals, and no necessity to become anything else, so they go out to eat and drink poison. That is their philosophy.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “From the north,” he said. “From Hunavatn County, where all the best thieves and murderers in the country come from.”

  “Really?” I said. “Then we both own everything on the other side of Holtavard Heath; I am from the north too, you see.”

  “But have you a vocation?” he asked.

  “A vocation?” I said. “What’s that?”

  “Have you not read in the papers that country people have to have a vocation?” he asked. “The papers are always saying so.”

  “I was taught never to believe a single word that is written in the papers, and nothing except what
is written in the Icelandic Sagas,” I replied.

  “I unhitched the hack from the mower at noon one day in the middle of the hay-making,” he said. “And went south.”

  “To do what?”

  “It was the vocation,” he said. “And now I have stumbled into the misfortune of being taught to play the harmonium—by that man.”

  “Misfortune?”

  “Yes, he sees through the whole swindle,” he said. “What am I to do?”

  “Aren’t you in the police?” I asked.

  “That’s a minor detail,” he said.

  “What’s the main thing?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out,” he said.

  “We are just like any other country people in town,” I said. “But you who have a vocation …”

  “Look at Two Hundred Thousand Pliers,” he said, “that superannuated alcoholic who could once only screech. Now he has become both pious and the manager of a Thieves’ Company for Snorredda in New York. He would have bought a genuine Rolls-Royce if the British had not refused to service such a vehicle for an Icelander; so he had to buy a Cadillac. Why should I be mowing hay which refuses to dry out? Or chasing up mountains after some wild old ewe? Why can I not have F.F.F. for Snorredda in New York, like him? We are at least from the same district. Why can I not build a church in the north to provoke these sheep farmers? Why can I not become the leader of a psychical research society? Why don’t the papers print what I have to say about God, and the soul, and the next world? Why can’t I have an atom poet for a message boy? And a brilliantined god for a storekeeper? I at least went to grammar school in Akureyri; and he didn’t; and in addition to that I’m a composer.”

  “I’m sure our organist knows what we all ought to do,” I said.

  “That is precisely the misfortune,” he said. “What frightens me most of all is the thought that the same thing will happen to me as has happened to the two gods: merely from learning scales from him and drinking coffee afterwards, they have in barely a year lost their vocations; and if from lifelong habit they happen to do a burglary somewhere, they bring the money home to his house and tear it all up, singing, and throw it on the floor.”

  “Yes, he is the man I most want to understand,” I said. “I have only been with him a few half-hours, but each time he gives me a flower. Tell me about him.”

  “I have barely got through his scales yet,” he replied, “and I have scarcely started on all the coffee. But already I am almost a ruined man, whatever worse there is to follow. He makes terrible demands.”

  “Moral demands?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “You are at liberty to commit every crime in the world. He regards crime as a tasteless joke, although in fact he finds bourgeois ideals, everyday ordinary conduct, even more absurd; and heroism, whether for good or evil, he acknowledges no more than the Book of the Way. But …”

  “What sort of demands then?” I asked.

  “Briefly, the first demand is that you base poetry on objective psychology and biochemistry; secondly, that you have followed in detail every development in art since the days of cubism; and thirdly, that you acknowledge both quarter-tones and discords and moreover can find the point in a drum solo. In this man’s presence I feel like some disgusting insect. And yet he can say to an outcast like me, ‘Look on my house as if it were your own.’”

  “You must be more than a little educated yourself,” I said, “to be able to understand him. I certainly wouldn’t understand him if he started to talk like that. What’s a quarter-tone? Or cubism? Or the Book of the Way?”

  After a moment’s silence he replied, “You make me talk, and now I have talked too much. It’s a sign of weakness.”

  “But you still haven’t told me what you yourself think,” I said.

  “Of course not,” he said. “The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”

  If this man had a million, I said to myself, and if he were about fifteen years older, then there would not be much difference between him and the Doctor, perhaps none at all—their souls were of the same color; except that I did not feel weak in the knees from talking to this one as I did with the other. Both of them had in generous measure that Icelandic talent, straight from the Sagas, of speaking mockingly of what was nearest to their hearts—this one about his vocation, the other about his children. The boy I lay with for a few nights once, he never said anything. And I never knew what my father was thinking. A man who says what he is thinking is absurd; at least in a woman’s eyes.

  “May I see your patterned mittens?” I asked.

  He let me see his patterned mittens in the light of a street-lamp in the night.

  * The garden square in the middle of the administrative centre of Reykjavik, in front of Parliament House; a favorite spot for strollers.

  7. At a cell-meeting

  Next day I met the girl and the young man in the baker’s. The girl gave me a friendly smile, and the boy solemnly raised his hat.

  “I want to settle up,” I said, and handed over the money for the lottery tickets. “But you will pardon me if I doubt whether the Youth Center will be built.”

  “Why not?” said the girl and looked at me a little grieved; and I felt that I had been beastly to her by owning to this doubt.

  “I don’t know,” I said, because I did not want to grieve her further.

  She looked at the young man and said, “You’ve lived in such a Center, haven’t you?”

  “No,” he said, “but for three years I spent all my leisure in such a Center.”

  “In Russia?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “In the Soviet Union.”

  Then the girl started to laugh, she thought it so funny that I should have confused Russia and the Soviet Union.

  “Russia,” he said in explanation, “was the land of the emperors: that Satanic prison of the nations.”

  I thought it strange that he should say “that,” for I had never heard anyone use it in that way before. So I asked, “Why do you say ‘that’? Are you quoting from a book? Or is it Communist jargon?”

  He thought about it and mumbled somehting over to himself, then finally he said, “‘That?’—as far as I know it’s perfectly good grammar: that young Iceland.”

  “I’m sorry for picking you up on it,” I said. “Tell me more about the Youth Center.”

  He had such a clear and spiritual look in his eyes that I asked myself: can such innocent-looking people belong to a cell? He did not know the difference between the spoken word and books, but that was the only false note in what he said.

  “In a Youth Center youth meets in a civilized and organized fashion to enjoy all the different aspects of culture,” he said, “there is a swimming pool and a gymnasium, studios for acting and art, a tower for parachutists; rehearsal rooms for orchestras and soloists, general and specialized libraries; a workshop where boys and girls can learn welding, a printing works to teach hand printing as an art, a comprehensive technical college, a laboratory and a botany department, projection rooms, lecture rooms, refreshment rooms, sitting rooms …”

  “And a room for flirting,” I said.

  “Of course,” said the girl before she had realized it; and the boy stopped short in his list, cleared his throat and looked at her censoriously, and his mouth hardened a little.

  “Icelandic youth should not lie in schnapps-spew under the feet of men and dogs,” he declaimed. “Icelandic youth should not be nurtured on murder films and pornographic thrillers, Icelandic youth should not live in the streets where it learns to blaspheme, to shriek, and to steal. Icelandic youth …”

  “One white loaf and a kilo of biscuits,” I said.

  “You don’t believe him,” said the girl, and served me sorrowfully. I saw that I had hurt her to the quick with my frivolousness. I paid for what I had bought and was about to leave.

  “Perhaps I’ll have a few more tickets, come to think of it,” I said, before I knew I was saying it; and I felt m
yself go white the way one does when one embarks on a secret, strictly forbidden affair. And as always in having an affair, the moment one lifts one’s foot the step is taken. “There’s one thing I would like most of all,” I said, and I even got palpitations and laughed unnaturally: “and that is to attend a cell-meeting.”

  There—it was said!

  The boy and the girl looked at one another, in twofold seriousness this time, I am almost inclined to say in double-twice solemnity; there was a problem.

  At last he said, “You aren’t in the Party.”

  “What party?” I asked.

  “The Party,” he replied.

  “I’m not in any party,” I said. “But if I like the cell-meeting I might become a Communist.”

  Now they both started laughing again, and the girl said, “I’ve never heard anything like it: if she likes the cell-meeting! This is literally the funniest thing I have ever heard.”

  I walked out of that baker’s an utter fool, not even knowing the reason why until later—until after I had attended a cell-meeting.

  For although they had received my request with less than alacrity at first, thinking it complete nonsense, they changed their attitude after I had gone, or perhaps they referred the matter to the Party leadership. Next day the bakery girl took me aside and said she had been deputed to inform me that I might attend. She said I was to come with her the following evening. That night I slept uneasily, troubled by thoughts of the alarming debauchery which my curiosity or congenital depravity was drawing me into. And seldom have I suffered such a disappointment as when I actually attended a cell-meeting; or rather, seldom has anything been such a relief to me.