The Atom Station

by Halldor Laxness

  “Forgive me for being so silly,” I said, “but—blow up the police station? On New Year’s Eve? The children? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Doctor Bui Arland. “But it is always possible to think something up: New Year’s Eve is the time that reminds us most of the impotence of the self in time. Previously, children could conquer God by loving Him and praying; He made them shareholders in omnipotence. Now God has departed, no one knows where—unless something of Him is left in the Smaland-American sect. And the children raise a rebellion against the impotence of the self in time.”

  “But the police station?” I said.

  “Perhaps that is one of the symbols,” he said, “a symbol the child understands; a symbol of this enemy of the self; a symbol of this disembodied power that says: You have no share in omnipotence. New Year’s Eve—time is passing; you are not only impotent in time, but soon there will be no self at all. Do you understand me?”

  “No,” I said. “I think we need a Youth Center, that’s all.”

  He smoked and smoked, but no smoke ever appeared, and he puckered up his eyes against the headiness of the tobacco.

  “No wonder you do not understand me,” he said. “A healthy person does not understand philosophy. But you who do not understand philosophy, tell me this—what is to be done with children? A Youth Center, you say. Perhaps. Previously, when we understood the god but not the man, there was no difficulty in bringing up children. But now: the god, the only thing we understood, has betrayed us. Man is left by himself, the unknown. Could a Youth Center help in such a case? I’m sorry for detaining you like this.”

  “It gives me nothing but pleasure to hear you speak, even though I don’t understand you,” I said.

  “Say something yourself now,” he said.

  “I haven’t anything to say.”

  “A Youth Center,” he said. “Yes, it could well be. But …”

  “And now I ask for a day nursery,” I interrupted, and felt myself suddenly go hot all over.

  “Ah yes, I’m afraid we are against Communism,” he said, and yawned wearily. “We are not reflex-conditioned to it, as they say in psychology; we are conditioned against it and consequently afraid of it. But no one doubts that Communism will win, or at least I know of no one who doubts it—I can confide all this to you because the hour is twelve midnight, and a man becomes loose-tongued then, if not downright frivolous. You, on the other hand, are not conditioned against Communism and you have no occasion to be afraid of it; so for that reason you can be a Communist if you like, it’s quite becoming for a healthy country girl from the north to be a Communist—more so, at least, than being a lady. I understand you, even though I myself would rather prefer to go to Patagonia.”

  “Patagonia?” I said. “What’s that? Is it an island?”

  “Perhaps I should rather come to you,” he said: “to the overshadowed valley, the secret place, as Jon the Learned* put it. Perhaps we shall set up house and keep a ewe and play the harmonium. Good night.”

  ENJOYABLE NEW YEAR’S EVE

  “Well then, now we shall go to a cell meeting,” I said on New Year’s Eve, and took Gold-ram with me—to the organist’s. Later the boy told me that it had been the most enjoyable New Year’s Eve he had ever spent, and that he had never once wanted to blow up the police station all evening. And yet nothing really happened at the organist’s except the usual—coffee, cakes, and cordiality. The Cadillac was parked outside, and the pram stood inside the room. The gods were highly elated and said they had murdered Oli Figure to celebrate Christmas.

  “What about the Cadillac?” asked the fat unself-conscious policeman.

  “Pliers is in America,” they replied. “And we have the keys.”

  “I’ll be surprised if you don’t come a cropper over stealing the Cadillac,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

  The atom poet sang the Greek hillsmen’s song Ammanamma, which was like the howl of an extremely unhappy dog, and Brilliantine accompanied him on the salted fish. Then they sang a dirge they had composed in memory of Oli Figure:

  Oli the Figure is fallen,

  Eclipser of our people,

  The fell fiend of Keflavik:

  He wanted to sell the country,

  He wanted to dig up bones;

  Wet as a jelly-fish

  He wanted atom war in Keflavik.

  Oli the Figure is fallen,

  Eclipser of our people,

  The fell fiend of Keflavik.

  There was a country pastor sitting in the kitchen playing Ombre with the host and the two policemen; they were all in excellent humor, particularly the pastor, who had been with the gods and got some Black Death from them. When I arrived with the boy they quickly made room for him in the Ombre game, and the fat policeman, who was off duty that New Year’s Eve, gave him some snuff from a silver mull, making him sneeze, instead of serving him with tear gas in front of the police station, as he had done the previous year. The old woman went round with water in a cardboard box saying Please do, and patted us on the cheeks and blessed everyone in the world and asked how the weather was. Cleopatra lay on the broken sofa, elegantly dead, with half of her set of false teeth in her lap.

  During the dirge for the last Oli Figure the twins woke up, and the god Brilliantine had to take them one on each knee; oh, they were such blessed little darlings, with their dark eyes and that fine chestnut down on their heads; and when I looked at their faces I understood why the old woman loved mankind so unreservedly. They stopped crying when they were perched on a knee, and the god dangled them up and down and sang.

  I saw to the coffee entirely, so that the host should not have to interrupt his card game. Over the coffee the gods began to argue about divinity with the country pastor; they demanded that he should light their cigarettes for them and pray to them and preach about them in church on Sundays. The god Brilliantine claimed to be the madonna in male form, the Virgin Mary with penis and twins; and Benjamin said that he had composed the atom poem ‘Oh tata bomma, tomba ata mamma, oh tomma at,’ which was at one and the same time the beginning of a new Genesis, a new Mosaic Law, a new Corinthian Epistle, and the atom bomb.

  The pastor, a big thickset man from the west, said that the right thing to do would be to take off his jacket and give them a hiding; the Godhead had never manifested itself in fools, he said, and the devil and not he would light their cigarettes for them: “And might I inquire of the right honorable police officers how it is that self-confessed murderers are not thrown into jail?”

  The unself-conscious policeman replied, “Committing a crime is the least of the difficulties, my dear Reverend; it can be much more difficult to prove that a person has committed it. The last time these young men were up before a judge they falsely confessed to twelve other crimes as well, so that the whole matter had to be gone into afresh and no one has got to the bottom of it yet.”

  Eventually the pastor lit their cigarettes for them and was given more Black Death. The gods asked if any others wished for some Black Death? A tiny croak was heard from Cleopatra and she fluttered an eyelid; but then she died again.

  “Reverend Jon, hand me Cleopatra’s teeth for the girl twin to play with,” said the god Brilliantine. “And can I ask for a drop more milk for the boy twin?”

  Then the town clock struck twelve and the ships hooted in the harbor. The pastor stood up and went to the battered organ and played “The year has now passed into the bosom of time,” and we all joined in, and then we wished each other a happy and prosperous New Year.

  * Jon Gudmundsson, a seventeenth-century Icelandic antiquarian; a prolific writer, and deeply superstitious, he wrote a book in 1644 about the “hidden places” and “secret valleys” of Iceland.

  15. Cold on New Year’s Eve

  The boy was not at all put out when he realized that I had tricked him by taking him to an organist’s instead of to a Communist’s. He said, “I’m sure that Communists aren’t nearly as clever as organists; and the orga
nist said I could come back and solve chess problems with him whenever I liked.”

  The boy walked beside me in silence for a while and then said, “Listen, do you think these two madmen have really killed a man?”

  “Far from it,” I said. “I think they were just teasing the pastor.”

  “If they’re in contact with God they have every right to kill people,” he said. “But I don’t think they’re in contact with God. I think they’re extremely ordinary people, except that they’re mad. Don’t you think people who say they’re in contact with God are mad?”

  “That may well be,” I replied. “But I also think that people who steal minks and revolvers are a little mad too.”

  “You’re an ass,” he said.

  It was New Year’s Eve, and there were sleet showers. I was triumphant and relieved—or was I perhaps not—at having left without saying a word to that stranger, the policeman from the north; I had not even looked in his direction all night, although I had wished him a Happy New Year for appearances’ sake along with the rest of them. I should think not, indeed.

  “Let’s walk faster,” I said to the boy. “I’m cold in this raw weather.”

  He caught me up at the gate. He must either have run or taken a taxi, for he had stayed behind in the kitchen at the organist’s when we left.

  “What do you want, man?” I said.

  “I never see you,” he said.

  “To the best of my knowledge you have been looking at me all evening,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen you for nearly two months,” he said.

  “What does he want?” said the boy. “Shall I call the police?”

  “No, dear,” I said. “Hurry inside to bed. I’ll be right behind you.”

  When the boy had gone in, the northerner asked, “Why are you angry with me? Have I offended you in any way?”

  “Yes and no,” I replied.

  “Aren’t we friends?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “It doesn’t look like it. And now I’n not standing out here any longer, in the raw cold.”

  “Come home with me,” he said. “Or I’ll come with you—upstairs.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I should think not, indeed,” I said. “First I go home with you one night, because I’m a coward who knows no one, anywhere. I must probably have thought we would become friends. Then a month passes, and another month passes; it doesn’t even occur to you to telephone. Finally at long last we meet by accident, and then you think you all of a sudden need to talk to me. What do you need to talk about?”

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  “Is it not Cleopatra you mean?” I said.

  Then I walked the three or four paces from the gate to the house and opened the door. He followed me. “Wait,” he said, when I had crossed the threshold. But he made no attempt to take hold of the door against me, even though I was not holding it very tightly, nor did he stick his foot in the door when I closed it, but was left behind outside. And I walked up to my room a free woman, if such a woman exists.

  CINEMA OR SAGA?

  The house was asleep—or was there no one at home, perhaps? I opened up the rooms and switched on the lights to see what had to be done for the morning, but there did not seem to have been any party. I was about to go upstairs, when I heard someone come out of a room on the first floor; and suddenly I saw a grand majestic lady come gliding down the stairs towards me. At first I could only distinguish the outlines, a voluminous wide-sleeved fur coat and underneath that a full-length evening-gown; next I saw protruding from under the hem of the gown red-painted nails through open-toed white shoes with platform soles a hand’s breadth in thickness. She hugged the fur to her breast with one long white hand agleam with jewels, and her hair was brushed out across her shoulders in a mixture of some magnificent coiffure and natural waves; she had pancake make-up on her face, near-black lips the color of dried blood, and a sleepwalker’s frozen expression. I literally felt I was once again watching the mobile cinema at Krok: this was exactly the woman used in all Hollywood pictures to beguile country folk and the people in a hundred thousand little places, this creature who also starred in all the cinema magazines which are bought in wretched destitute homes where there is no water closet … until suddenly I saw that this was not a woman, this was a child; it was none other than Fruit-blood, alone in the house, coming downstairs to go out in this monstrous outfit, and the time nearly morning.

  “What a sight you are, Fruit-blood, what damned cinema shark are you copying, child?” I said. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  She did not look at me, but went on gliding down the stairs in the same trance, then past me through the hall on her way out through the vestibule without seeing or hearing. But as she took hold of the door handle I put my hand over hers: “Fruit-blood, are you walking in your sleep, child?”

  She stared at me with those piercing unearthly-cold night-eyes and said, “Leave me alone. Let me go.”

  “I can’t believe you’re going out, child, alone; it’s nearly morning.”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “I was just coming in. And now I am going out. I was at a dance. And now I am going to a dance.”

  “Walking—in that get-up? I said. “In sleet and slush?”

  She stared at me with those eyes in which I could never distinguish cinema from insanity, and then replied very calmly, “If you wish to know where I am going, I am going to walk into the sea.”

  “Fruit-blood,” I said. “What’s the point of this foolery?”

  “Foolery?” she said. “Do you call it foolery to die?”

  She tried to turn the door-handle, but I still held on to her hand.

  “You’re not in your right mind, child,” I said, still keeping her away from the door. “I’m not letting you go until I’ve asked your father.”

  “Ha ha, do you imagine he’s at home for festivities?” she said. “In this loathsome house? With these loathsome people?”

  “Now you’re going to talk to me, Fruit-blood,” I said, “and I to you.”

  “That shall never be,” she said, and then tried to compensate for the hollowness of that old Saga phrase in her mouth by assaulting me. She beat me a few times with her clenched fists, not with the knuckles but like a child, with the soft edge of her hands, and then she tried to bite; but I would not let her out. She did not bother to fight me for long; when she saw she was not my match she turned back into the hall, and as she stood there in the middle of the floor after the struggle she let the huge fur sink, as if she were losing hold of it, down off her slight shoulders to the floor, where she let it lie like some sort of discarded magic cloak, and became once more a slimly-built girl with awkward, loose-jointed calf-movements in her body. Then she huddled herself into a ball in the corner of a sofa so that her knees touched her chin, knuckled her hands into her eyes, and wept—at first with huge convulsions and great sighs, but changing soon into the squealing of a child. Then I realized that this was not all pure play-acting. Or was it such good play-acting?

  I tried to approach her as cautiously as I could: “What’s wrong? Can nothing be done to make it better? Can’t I do something?”

  She took her fists from her eyes and waved them about in the air as if she were whipping two churns simultaneously, screwed up her face and bawled, “Ah-a-a-ah, I’m pregnant as hell.”

  “Oh the soundrels!” I blurted out. “That’s just like them!”

  “And he didn’t dance with me all night, didn’t even look at me, and just imagine, what a swine—he went home from the dance with his wife; he could at least have controlled himself over that, he could have spared me that. I didn’t think I deserved rudeness from him on top of everything—with his wife, can you imagine it?—And me pregnant for six weeks.”

  “I thank you for telling me this, Fruit-blood,” I said. “Now we shall put our heads together.”

  “I will, I wil
l go into the sea,” she said. “How is a girl like me to live? The children will hiss at me in school, my mother will kill me in New York, the Prime Minister will sell me to a brothel in Rio de Janeiro, and my grandfather would rather lose his fish oil factory. My father will be jeered at in Parliament and the University, and the people in Snorredda will snigger into the adding machines as he walks past; and the Communists will stage a protest march past the house and say: There’s the little pregnant bitch of a Capitalist brat.”

  “I can swear to you that such a wicked word as you used just now doesn’t exist in the whole Communist Party,” I said. “It is called in the language of all decent folk to be ‘blessedly in the family way.’ In your shoes I would go straight to my father, that man of no prejudice.”

  “Never as long as I live shall I do my father that shame,” she said.

  “As if he hasn’t found a way out of greater difficulties than this,” I said. “Genteel people with morals and sensitive nerves send their daughters abroad when they get into trouble, even though uncouth people like us don’t understand that sort of thing and just have our children where we are. And now I shall tell you a little story, my girl: I think, you see, that I am pregnant myself.”

  “Are you telling the truth, Ugla?” said the girl. She sat up on the sofa and embraced me. “Can you swear it on oath? And are you not going to kill yourself?”

  “Far from it,” I replied. “But the time is coming when I shall have to go north, for my baby’s day-nursery is with Wild-ponies Fal of Eystridale.”

  She leant back from me again and said, “I’m sure you’re trying to trick me. What’s more, you’re just trying to comfort me, and that’s a hundred thousand times more humiliating than letting oneself be tricked.”