I asked if she wanted to get married, but she did not know what to make of such an unseemly suggestion: “The very idea!” she said. On the other hand she confided to me, when we were in bed with the light switched off, that her dream of the settled life was a little flat with a living-room and bedroom, carved Renaissance furniture, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower, and then to fix herself up with three steadies: one a married businessman with a little money, approaching his silver wedding; a seaman who was only ashore every now and again; and an educated young man who was engaged to an upper-class girl.
We discussed this idea at some length until we grew sleepy, and soon we lapsed into silence, until she said in the darkness after a good while, when I thought she was asleep, “Well should we not be saying our Lord’s Prayer now?”
“Yes,” I said. “You say it for both of us.”
She recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then we bade one another Good night and went to sleep.
* The first month after midwinter, from mid-January to mid-February.
18. Gentleman behind a house
Although up-to-date writers say that it has a bad effect on children to rock them, I had all at once begun to take notice if there were something in the paper about cradles, even if it were only a cradle for sale. And now it was reported that the Town Council had defeated a Communist proposal to build a day-nursery. “Women” wrote to the papers and said that it would increase immorality in the country if such projects were subsidized from the public purse; the proper nurseries were the homes of true Christians and others of decent morals. But, I asked, why should there be nurseries only for the children of true Christians and those of decent morals? Why should there not be nurseries for the children of non-true Christians with wicked morals, such as me?
“We live in a society of people who have only one wish dearer than to care for rich children, and that is to kill poor children,” said the Communist. “A few generations ago the rich were so powerful, even though they were still lice-ridden, that about half of all the children born in Iceland died. If the masses had no solidarity, the children of the poor would still be dying; and if we did not continue to strengthen this solidarity the rich would still be persecuting the poor and their children with direct measures taken in the name of Jesus, with scourgings and drownings, just as before. The opposition to a day nursery for the children of penniless mothers reveals clearly their way of thinking; they only need the lice to be precisely the same as in the days of the Fornication Act.”*
I asked his friend, the bakery girl, “What would you do if you had a baby?”
Her smile vanished suddenly and her eyes widened, and she glanced questioningly at her Communist.
“It’s safe to tell her,” he said.
A woman asked for rye bread, and a girl for a cream cake, and then the shop was empty.
“Come this way,” said the girl, and opened the flap of the counter and invited me inside; she took me through a tiny dark box-room, combined storage room and washroom opening out into a yard. There was fierce rain from the east, and black storm clouds were overhead. Outside in the mud stood a pram with its hood up and a sack spread over the whole thing to protect it from the worst of the weather. The bakery girl lifted the sack aside and, smiling, peeped in under the hood.
The baby was wide awake, and stared up from the bedclothes with huge eyes. When he saw his mother he squealed and kicked and pulled with all his might at one of his thumbs.
“My little darling,” said his mother, and looked at her boy, entranced for a moment in the middle of the day’s work, with black storm clouds over the back yard.
“Look what intelligent eyes he’s got,” I said. “What a fine gentleman he must be.”
“If they found out that I keep him here I would be sacked,” she said.
In the front of the shop an impatient customer had started to pound the counter.
ALL THE DOCTRINES OF THE WORLD—AND A LITTLE MORE BESIDES
Doctor Bui Arland came home smiling, with water streaming down his face, took off his soaked overcoat, and said, “Well, now there is good news.”
I waited.
“I think I can say with certainty that I have at last managed to squeeze a few thousand kronur out of Parliament for your father and his church.”
“Oh?” I said.
He looked at me in amazement.
“And you do not throw yourself round my neck?” he said.
“Why should I?”
“For joy,” he said.
“I have learned that Luther was the coarsest man who ever lived,” I said. “So I have dropped the faith.”
“Well I’ll be damned!” he said, and took off his coat and wiped the water from his face, took off his spectacles and dried the raindrops off them. “By the way, can we still not believe in the man even though he sometimes said rectum and bumbus in abominable German instead of Latin when he was engaged in disputation over the Holy Spirit? Or mentioned the genitals of an ass in some mysterious connection with the Pope? He was still enough of a peasant to take Christianity seriously in the middle of the Renaissance, when the whole of Europe had stopped doing so; and rescue the movement; apart from the fact that he was fond of singing, like so many German peasants, poor wretch.”
“I didn’t know you were a Lutheran,” I said.
“No, I did not really know it myself either,” he said, laughing. “Not exactly. I had thought that I stood nearest to the one man in Christendom who demonstrably believes in nothing at all, namely the Pope. Except that I have made it a rule for myself to support old Jesus in Parliament, mainly because I agree with our uncrucified Jew-dog Marx that the Cross is opium for the people.”
“In other words you are a materialist,” I said.
“Why, what a long time it is since I have heard that word—in that denotation,” he said. “We political economists use words, you see, in a slightly different sense. But since you have asked me in all sincerity about my religious beliefs, I shall answer you in the style in which you ask. I believe that E equals me squared.”
“What sort of rigmarole is that?” I asked.
“It is Einstein’s Theory,” he said. “This says that mass times the velocity of light squared equals energy. But perhaps it is materialism to hold that matter as such does not exist.”
“And yet you take the trouble to procure money to build a church up in the far valleys for practically no one,” I said.
“When I discovered some years ago that your father believed in ponies, I vowed to myself to do everything I could for him. You see, I once had a religious revelation, rather after the manner of the saints. In this revelation it was revealed to me that ponies are the only living creatures that have a soul—with the exception of fish; and this is due, amongst other things, to the fact that ponies have only one toe; one toe, the ultimate of perfection. Ponies have a soul, just like the idols; or the paintings of some artists; or a beautiful vase.”
How smoothly he talked of the loftiest matters, almost absently, with that amiable civilized smile that was never quite free from sleepiness and could moreover sometimes end in a yawn, as indeed it did now; and he took out a cigarette and lit it And while I contemplated him, the earth vanished from under my feet and my feet from under myself, and I had to muster all my strength not lose touch with substantiality altogether. I braced myself and said, “I heard today that the rich were once again going to make famine and murder the fate of illegitimate children, and pass laws that their fathers should be flogged and their mothers drowned—if only they dared to in the face of solidarity of the mases. Is that true?”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled amiably. “All For Virtue is our slogan, my good girl. Our wives want to have legitimate children, at least on paper; and preferably no competition. It is an an attack on the wives’ class to have day nurseries.”
“I do so want to put a question to you,” I said.
“I wish I knew the answers to everything you asked,” he said.
“That is a difficult question,” he said, and scratched himself behind the ear. “I do not think I am far enough advanced to be able to answer it; at least I would first need to go behind a house.”
“Why does Parliament and the Town Council not want my children to have a nursery like your children? Are my children not chemically and physiologically as good as your children? Why can we not have a society which is just as expedient for my children at it is for your children?”
He came right over to me and put his hand on the nape of my neck under the hair and said, “What has happened to our mountain-owl?”
“Nothing,” I said, and hung my head.
“Yes,” he said. “You have started thinking in a tight little circle from which you cannot break out. What is troubling you and getting worse every day?”
“I’m going,” I muttered into my bosom.
He asked where, and when.
“Away, at once,” I whispered.
“Tonight?” he said. “In this weather?”
“You have cast your vote against me and I have no home,” I said; and then I told him what had happened to me and turned away, and he stopped smiling and there was a silence. Finally he asked, “Are you fond of the man?”
And I replied, “No. Yes. I don’t know.”
He asked, “Is he fond of you?”
“I haven’t asked him,” I said.
“Do you want to marry each other?” he asked, but I could not answer such an absurdity except by shaking my head.
“Is he short of money?” he asked. “Can I do anything for you?”
I turned to face him again and looked at him and said, “I have now told you something that I have not even told him, and more I cannot do.”
“May I then not ask anything further?”
“I don’t even know what kind of a man he is,” I said, “so there is no point in asking. I am a girl, that is all there is to it. And you have cast your vote against me. If I did not have my old and penniless parents up north my child would be born a convicted outlaw, as it says in the Sagas, not to be fed nor forwarded nor helped nor harbored.”
He looked at me questioningly, almost timidly, as if he were seeing a danger he had long feared from afar suddenly loom close, and repeated in the form of a question, rather foolishly, the words I had just used—“Did I cast my vote against you?”
But when I was going to walk away he followed me and said, “Do not be anxious, you can get from me all the money you want, a house, a nursery, everything.”
“You cast your vote publicly against letting me and others like me be called people, but want to make me your beggar in secret …”
“Why in secret?” he interrupted. “Between you and me there is nothing done in secret.”
“No, now I am going, to have my baby with my own money,” I said. “Anything rather than accept money secretly from someone.”
I had no sooner got to my room than he had followed me, he even opened my door without knocking. Previously his face had momentarily tightened a little; for a while he had perhaps been on the verge of defending his point of view against me in earnest, but now his face had relaxed and he was once again gentle and unassuming, with that expression of candor that sometimes made him look more childlike even than his children.
“If I know our Red friends aright,” he said, “it will not be long before they bring this matter up again. Perhaps it will be dealt with differently next time. I shall talk to my brother-in-law and other strong men in our party. There shall be a day nursery, good heavens, never fear.”
“But if your brother-in-law says no?” I asked. “And the wives’ class?”
“You are making fun of me now,” he said. “Go ahead. The only consolation is—I do not consider myself much of a hero. But I promise you that in this matter I shall behave as if I were inspired by a woman …”
“A pregnant housemaid,” I corrected him.
“A woman whom I have admired from the very first moment,” he said.
“Yes, I once heard a tipsy man say that I was one of those women whom men want to go to bed with, without a word, the minute they see her for the first time.”
He came over to me and embraced me and looked at me.
“There are one or two women so made,” he said, “that a man forgets all his former life like a meaningless trifle the moment he first sets eyes on her, and is ready to sever all the obligations that tie him to his environment, turn around, and follow this woman to the end of the world.”
“No, I will not kiss you,” I said, “unless you promise me never to give me money, but let me work for myself like a free individual even though I am acquainted with you.”
He kissed me and said something.
“I know that I am terribly stupid,” I said afterwards. “But what am I to do? You are not like anyone else.”
* In 1564 the Danish Governor of Iceland proclaimed a law under which adultery was to be punished with the death penalty.
19. Church-builders
Out of sight in a hollow to the east of the farm knoll rose the church; with a grassy slope behind the chancel. They had begun pouring the concrete the previous autumn, but had not had the money to buy a roof. The walls had stood in their molds until now, springtime, when the money started to arrive from the Treasury to buy a roof. I was sitting down in the gulley beside the stream, where the smell of the reeds is stronger in winter than in summer; it was here that we had played as children with sheep’s horns and jawbones, and filled a rusty tin can in the stream with the sort of water that could just as easily be cocoa, or mutton broth, or schnapps. And later there stood a tent here on the bank for three late-summer nights. And as I sat there I could hear above the murmur of the water the hammering of the church-builders alternating with the cries of the golden plover.
A long time ago there had been a church parish here of twelve farms, some say eighteen, but during the last century the church was abandoned. Now another church was rising here, even though there were only three farms left in the valley—and the third farmer, Jon of Bard, the head carpenter, only counted as half or scarcely that, having lost his wife and with his children away in the south and fire no longer kindled in the farm except for the fire that burned within the man himself; and his faith the sort of horseman’s faith that it would be more accurate to connect with the phallus than with Christ. Bard-Jon never called a church anything but “God’s window-horse,” nor the pastor anything but “the stallion of the soul-stud”; and neither I nor others were ever aware that he knew any other prayer than the old Skagafjord Lord’s Prayer which starts like this: “Our Father, oh, is that blasted piebald foal not tearing around all over the place again …” And that prayer he would mumble to himself all day long.
And Geiri of Midhouses laughed—that laugh that would suffice to build a cathedral, even on the summit of Mount Hekla. This many-childrened man, our neighbor, the other main farmer in the valley, was the incarnation of the most potent point of view in the world, the point of view that no argument can affect, neither religion nor philosophy nor economics, not even the arguments of the stomach, which are nevertheless always more sensible than the arguments of the brain, not least if it is the stomach of our children that is talking: this man said that he would never depart from this valley alive, accepted his pauper’s grant, and laughed. He said that he hoped to God that if he had to bury any more unbaptized children it should be done at the church where Iceland’s greatest man of renown had been baptized. He said that he himself was looking forward to lying for all eternity in one of those pleasant dry graves here in the uplands and rising from it when the time came in the company of the poets and heroes of old, rather than in a damp and tedious grave farther down in the district amongst the farm-louts of today and slaves who fished the seas.
For most of the day they would discuss the Saga heroes over their carpentry.
Bard-Jon was a particular devotee of those heroes who had lived on moors or on outlying skerries. He did not admire above all else the hero’s poetry, but rather how long the hero could hold out along against many in battle, quite irrespective of his cause; it made no difference to Geiri whether the hero was in the right or in the wrong. As a rule, heroes were in the wrong to begin with, he would say; they became heroes not through any nobility of cause, but simply by never giving up, not even though they were being cut to pieces alive. Of those heroes who had lived in the wilderness as outlaws he loved Grettir the Strong best of all, and for the same reasons as are enumerated at the end of Grettir’s Saga: that he lived longer in the wilderness than any other man; that he was better fitted than all other men to fight with ghosts; and that he was avenged farther away from Iceland than any other hero, and what’s more, in the greatest city in the world, away out in Constantinople.
My father’s heroes were cast in a more human mold; they had at least to be lineal progenitors before they could engage his full confidence, and more especially they had to be poets. Mountains and outlying skerries were not the right setting for his heroes. This man of integrity, who had never taken a wrongful farthing’s worth from anyone, never found it remarkable that these heroes should have sailed with gaping dragon-heads and open jaws to Scotland, England, or Estonia, to slaughter innocent people there and plunder them of their possessions. Nor did this courteous upland farmer think it a blemish in the hero’s conduct that he squirted his vomit into people’s faces, bit people in the throat, or gouged their eyes out with his finger as he walked past, instead of raising his hat; and a Saga woman could be none the less noble for having a destitute boy’s tongue cut out for eating off her dish. I do not think there was a single incident in the Saga of Egil Skalla-Grimsson which was not more absorbing, nor indeed better known, to my father than all the important events that had taken place in the country during his own lifetime, and scarcely a couplet ascribed to Egil which could not come dancing off his tongue.
The Atom Station Page 13