The Atom Station

by Halldor Laxness

  “Isn’t there a wireless?” asked Brilliantine.

  After a short while they were both asleep, one on the divan and the other on the bed. I removed their cigarettes, from the mouth of the one and the fingers of the other, so that they would not set themselves on fire while they slept.

  PORTUGUESE SARDINES AND D.L.

  “A symbolic event of historical significance has taken place in the life of this nation,” said the pastor. “Today this remote valley is once again the center of national life, as it once was long ago in the day when the Nation’s Darling was brought in swaddling clothes here to this Eystridale church. The champion of Icelandic freedom and the poet of our spirit is once again home in his valley; our trinity—star of love, ptarmigan, and dandelion slope—welcome anew that friend whom a blind nation lost in a foreign graveyard for a hundred years. But while he lay there hidden under no stone all his ideals were realized, and Iceland’s every cause did triumph. The Icelandic people greet …”

  There could be little doubt about it—our pastor had already composed his funeral speech, and started trying it out on me.

  “But my dear Reverend Traustik,” I said, when he had rattled on for a bit, “in our minds he has never died. That’s why we have never made a fuss about his so-called bones nor his lack of a stone in Denmark. He dwells in the blue mountain peaks we can always see when the weather is fine.”

  In the back of a big truck at the other side of the gully were two crates, each of about the capacity of a barrel; and when it was broad daylight my father and I walked over with the pastor to examine these wares.

  “Two crates,” I said. “He hasn’t half grown bulky from not existing for a hundred years.”

  “Yes, it is undeniably a little odd,” said the pastor. “But they set off in a great hurry. They say that one of the crates is undoubtedly the right one.”

  We examined the crates and found addresses printed on them: “Prime Minister of Iceland” on the one, and “Snorredda Wholesale Company” on the other—two names for the same enterprise. Then my father noticed that on one crate the following words had been tarred in Danish—“Dansk Ler.”

  “What do these words mean?” he asked.

  “Dansk Ler, Dansk Ler,” muttered the pastor pensively. “That is just like the Danes. That nation invariably tries to insult us Icelanders.”

  “It means, at its best, Danish Clay,” I said. “Should we not first take a look into the other crate? It looks more promising to me even though I don’t understand the foreign writing on it.”

  We forced up one of the planks of the lid with a crowbar, and I groped amongst the packing for the contents; and what did I pull out but a small tin, about two hundred grams in weight, wrapped in semi-transparent paper. I recognized the merchandise quickly enough from my pantry work in the south: Portuguese Sardines imported from America, that fish which the papers said was the only fish that could scale the highest tariff walls in the world and yet be sold when ten years old at a thousand percent profit in the greatest fish country in the world, where even the dogs walk out and vomit at the mere mention of salmon.

  “Miracle fish, to be sure,” I said, “but not quite the miracle we expected.”

  “We shall not open the other crate,” the pastor said then. “We shall let faith prevail there. In actual fact it is irrelevant what the crates contain. This is a symbolic consignment. At a funeral it is not the chemical contents of the coffin that matter, but the memory of the deceased that lives on in men’s hearts.”

  But by then my father had opened the second crate and taken the packing out through the opening. And it was just as I had suspected—in that crate too there was not much that was likely to enhance the nation’s prestige. But yet, if one believes that man is dust and dirt, as the Christians believe, then this was a man the same as any other; but not an Icelandic man, for this was not Icelandic dirt; it was not the gravel nor earth, sand nor clay, which we know from our own country, but a dry, greyish calcareous devil like nothing else so much as old dog’s dirt.

  “Well,” I said, “is the Nation’s Darling Danish Clay or Portuguese Sardines?”

  “Do you believe in nothing, little girl?” said the pastor.

  “A prank!” said my father, and walked off to see to his ponies.

  “Do you believe?” I asked the pastor.

  Suddenly there was a hard expression round the mouth of this cheerful kindly man who was normally the least orthodox of men, something adamant and dogmatic—I am inclined to say hard-hearted—so that I scarcely knew him for the same person; and there came a cold gleam of fanaticism into his eyes.

  “I believe,” he said.

  “Do you believe in just the same way, when you can touch it and see clearly that it is the opposite of what you thought?” I asked.

  “I believe,” he said.

  “Is it then belief to believe what one knows with absolute certainty is not so?” I asked.

  “I believe,” said the Reverend Trausti, “in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland. This clay, which perhaps preserves the sap from the bones of the freedom hero and great poet, is to me a sacred symbol. From now on it shall be an article of faith for Iceland that the Nation’s Darling is once more back in his own valley. The Holy Spirit in my breast enlightens me in this Icelandic belief. I hope that our district will never again let go of this symbol of its faith in itself.”

  Then he looked out over the valley between the mountains and said in a solemn altar voice, with an exalted glow in his eyes: “May the Lord for ever bless this our district of districts.”

  THE PONIES

  The silence woke the gods after a short while, and my mother brought them hot coffee. When they had inhaled a few more cigarettes they went out with a gun.

  It was one of those tranquil autumn days which sometimes come to the valleys, when a tiny sound awakens echoes out of distant cliffs. It was not long before the mountains on both sides of the valleys reverberated with gunfire, and this peaceful valley behind the world was stricken with panic: autumn birds dashed past in violent flight, sheep halfway up the mountain slopes formed into file and headed for the wilderness; and the snorting ponies surged away up and down the mountain.

  One of the loveliest and most magnificent events that can happen in the country is when ponies take fright, particularly in a herd. A meadow-pippit has flown past. The ponies’ fear is at first blended with play, even with mockery, amusement touched with a shudder, not unlike the behavior of the mentally ill. They trot as if they were retreating from a slow-moving stream of fire, but with lightning in every action, storm in every nerve, swinging their heads everywhere as if the front of their necks were made of elastic, gracefully flirting their tails. They can even pause for a moment, and start biting and boxing, with those romantic mating cries of theirs. Then all at once it is as if the fire has started flowing right under these strange creatures, they charge away like a storm incarnate over scree and bogs and landslides, dipping the tips of their toes for a fractional moment into the furnace that blazes beneath their hooves, cutting across waterfalls, gullys, and boulders, galloping steeply for a while until they stand trapped at last on some ledge high in the mountaintops, there to die and be eaten by birds.

  The gods returned just before noon. They had succeeded in shooting one lamb, and had dragged it between them down off the mountain; Brilliantine, this sole Luther of the present, as skilled a family man as he was an interpreter of religious mysteries with the help of the Spirit, did not venture to return home empty-handed to his wife and twins.

  My father groped for the lamb’s ear and recognized the mark of one of the farmers in the district, and said that this would come before the sheriff unless they paid for it and excused it as an accident. They found it a harsh doctrine that one should not be allowed to shoot the sheep that ran wild in the mountains, and asked what farmers lived on if they could not shoot sheep.

  A little later they toppled the crates off the truck
and called on the pastor to come along. Nothing could shake the Reverend Trausti’s conviction that they were the instruments of Higher Powers, if not manifestations of the godhead itself as they themselves claimed; he said that he was a Lutheran pastor, and that he believed those who let themselves be governed directly by the Holy Spirit and understood holy writ without the mediation of the Pope. The pastor’s last words to us as he climbed up into the truck with them were that within two days he would come back here to the valley with a congregation and some district worthies, and give the Nation’s Darling a proper funeral.

  After further consideration, the herd of ponies had left off being frightened at all and had calmed down, and were now grazing in the home pastures, on the grass fields and gravel banks or in the home meadow close up to the farm. I stood at the window in that autumn light that makes the dead and the living more sharply discernible than the light of any other season. Yes, what a well-sculptured creature the pony is, so finely carved that even if there were no more than half a chisel stroke extra the workmanship would be ruined; that curve from neck to rump, and all the way down to the fetlock, is in actual fact a woman’s curve; in the oblique-set eyes of these creatures lies buried a wisdom that is hidden from men but blended with the mockery of the idols; around the muzzle and the underlip hovers the smile that no cinema shark has ever been able to reproduce; and where is the female star who smells as wonderful as the nose of a pony? And what about the hoof, where all the world’s fingers end: claw and cloven hoof, hand and flipper, paddle and paw, fin and wing. And probably because the pony is such perfection, the pony’s token, the horseshoe, is our token of faith over all our doors, the symbol of good fortune in fertility and woman, the opposite of the sign of the Cross.

  When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted … the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret … the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology … the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal … and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye. The world-bacteria has overcome you, the countryside has turned into literature, poetry, and art; and you no longer belong there. After one winter in the company of electric floor polishers, farmer Fal’s house in the valley has become only a brief shelter for the girl in the poem Snow swirls across the hills,* in order not to die of exposure. I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.

  That same night, near bedtime, Government messengers arrived in police cars to fetch the Portuguese Sardines and D.L.

  * By Jonas Hallgrunsson; it is about a mother who is caught with her child by a blizzard. The mother dies of exposure, but the child survives.

  23. Phoning

  “I’m sorry for phoning, and so late; but I’ve come. And you wrote that I should come to you … first; at once. I have been hoping that you know of some job or other. But now I’m not going to tell how I feel over phoning like this; to be such a peasant as to take politeness seriously … not even changed out of my traveling clothes, and covered with dust from head to foot.”

  “Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament … nevertheless.

  “Yes, but do you know whether I vote for you?”

  “I was asked to take a little parcel with me in the plane south this summer on behalf of a political opponent, a woman from the Os district who has just gone south to have her gums cleaned out and had forgotten her eiderdown, and was lying in bed in the south with nothing to keep her warm in the middle of her toothlessness. I said of course, naturally …”

  “Yes, I am just exactly like that woman …”

  “Except that you have a full complement of teeth and choose me—perhaps, some time. In a word, I am your Member, whoever you vote for. Where are you?”

  “In a public phone booth; standing in the middle of the square with a wooden case.”

  “And with nowhere definite to stay the night, of course.”

  “Yes, perhaps—at my organist’s.”

  “Are you with … the little one, what was her name again?”

  “Her name is Gudrun, and she’s staying in the north until I have managed to fix myself up.”

  “And what are your plans?”

  “I want to become a person.”

  “What do you mean, a person?”

  “Neither an unpaid bondwoman like the wives of the poor, nor a bought madam like the wives of the rich; much less a paid mistress; nor the prisoner of a child society has disowned. A person amongst persons. I know it’s laughable, contemptible, disgraceful, and revolutionary that a woman should not wish to be some sort of slave or harlot; but that’s the way I’m made.”

  “Don’t you want to get a husband?”

  “I don’t want to get a slave, neither under one name nor another.”

  “But at least you want to get a new coat?”

  “I neither want to make a poor man dress me in rags nor a rich man dress me in furs, for having slept with them. I want to buy myself a coat for money which I have earned for myself because I am a person.”

  “I can cheer you up with the news that from now on no one need become a Communist for lack of a day nursery. Indeed, the new authors say that only scoundrels rock their children, and only sadists sing Hushabye Baby, so you must not think it was a painless matter getting Town Council agreement on such a perilous project. I shall not attempt to conceal it from you: we sweated profusely, and trembled considerably, even foamed at the mouth … a little; also, ‘Women’ had published reams and reams in the papers saying what a scandal it was to have the children of Communists rocked at the public’s expense. Finally, I betrayed my party over it, and another member did likewise for my sake; and, as I said, it scraped through.”

  “Well, it’s time to say goodbye and thank you for everything.”

  “Is that all—when I have become a party renegade for your sake?”

  “No, I thank you especially and particularly for your wanting me to phone; and then of course for everything else. And I beg pardon that I did as you asked. Even when you mean nothing with what you say, you can get me to do everything I don’t want to do. I know I’m a fool, but what am I to do? Well, now I’m going to go on my way, good night. My greetings to everyone.”

  “Wait a moment, I’ll drive through the square in three minutes …”

  PATAGONIA

  I think that was our conversation, as nearly as one can recall a conversation when a girl talks to a man and a man to a girl, for of course the words themselves say least of all, if in fact they say anything; what really informs us is the inflection of the voice (and no less so if it is restrained), the breathing, the heart-beat, the muscles round the mouth and eyes, the dilation and contraction of the pupils, the strength or the weakness in the knees, as well as the chain of mysterious reactions in the nerves and the secretions from hidden glands whose names one never knows even though one reads about them in books; all that is the essence of a conversation—the words are more or less incidental.

  And when this conversation was over, I felt a marvelous elation in the blood and my heart was beating as if I were high on a mountain; I had lost all substance and everything was possible from now on, with every trace of weariness gone.

  Three minutes, I thought; no, it’s quite out of the question, I’ll run. How could it ever occur to me, even though he had scribbled it lightheartedly on his card? To tell the absolute truth it had not really occurred to me at all; that whole day, on my way through unfamiliar country, I had in fact been thinking: what absolute nonsense, this was the very last thing that could ever have happened to me; I had not even allowed such foolishness to reach the surface of my thoughts; I had been look
ing at Nature out of the bus window, and had decided in my own mind where I was going to stay the night: some distant relatives in town would, out of kindness for the north country, allow a girl from the north to stay the night. But how hot my cheeks had felt; and I had not been able to get any food down in three counties, except a caramel and some burp-water in Borgarfjord. On the ferry from Akraness an extremely ugly woman had stared at me wherever I went, and I had the impression that she would walk over to me when least expected and say, “Of course you’re going to phone him.” I had wanted to hit this woman. It would be not merely rudeness to phone him, but a breach which would never be healed, and above all a surrender, I almost say the ultimate surrender, that unconditional surrender which was talked about during the war and which no victory can ever follow, ever. The ferry had slid to the quayside—and what had happened to that ugly woman? She had gone. And I had stepped from the ferry on to land—and straight to this phone booth on the square; and phoned. But as I said, now I was going to run.

  He was standing beside me in the square; he said Hello and offered me his hand with that gentle nonchalant lightness of a man whom nothing can affect—in the first place because he has a million, and in the second place because everyone is to be hanged tomorrow; such was his unique, incomparable charm.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  And before I knew it he had picked up my wooden case, that laughable receptacle made in a mountain valley where no one knew what a suitcase was—this man who flew between countries with a case made of soft fragrant yellow leather that creaked. He carried this trash of mine to his glossy burnished car that stood at the curb a few paces away. And before I knew it I was myself sunk deep in the seat beside him; and with a touch, the car rolled soundlessly off into the traffic.

  “Aren’t you afraid,” I asked, “of letting the town see such a yokel getting into your car?”

  “I am always getting braver,” he said, changing into third. “Soon I shall be a hero.”

  We drove on in silence for a moment.