The Atom Station

by Halldor Laxness

  “Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.

  “To a hotel,” he said.

  “I who gained nothing all summer except little Gudrun!” I said. “How do you expect me to have the money to sleep in a hotel? To tell the truth I don’t know what I’m doing in your car. I must be mad.”

  “How’s Gudrun?” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “She weighed ten pounds.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. “Incidentally”—and he glanced at me as we turned a corner: “I seem to recall that we were on less formal terms?”

  “Will you please let me out now?” I said.

  “In the middle of the road?” he said.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Can I then not invite you to stay the night?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “That’s odd,” he said. “I am always invited to stay the night whenever I come north.”

  He slowed the car, and I saw that we were in front of the business premises of the Snorredda company. He drove round a corner and through a gate, stopped, stepped out, opened the door for me and locked the car. And once more I was with a man behind a house at night, except that here there was no need to be afraid of anyone in the windows. He took me through a little back door, up some steep narrow back stairs laid with multicolored rubber flooring so clean that no one seemed ever to have trodden on it before; and I followed him higher and higher, I don’t know how high, perhaps up through the roof; it was like a dream—perhaps one of those dreams of uncertain joy which end in a feeling of suffocation and nightmare; or was it the beginning of my becoming a person? Finally he opened a door for me, and I stood in a little hall and could see through a half-open door into a room—leather-covered furniture, a desk in the middle of the floor, books on shelves, a telephone, a wireless.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “This is my hideout,” he said. “There’s a bathroom over there, a little kitchen here. Further in from the living room is the cubbyhole where I sleep, but tonight I shall lend you my bed and I myself shall sleep outside the door.”

  “But your home?” I asked.

  “Where in the world is shelter sure?” he said, and smiled wryly at this hymn-opening.

  “Why shouldn’t there be?” I said.

  “My wife is in California,” he said.

  “And Fruit-blood?”

  “I sent her to a convent school in Switzerland.”

  “And Jona’s Day-beam?” I asked.

  “That Smaland-American female savior had started to beat my little angel with a cudgel night and day for saying Hell. So I fired the old hag, boarded out the children, and shut up the house. It has been empty ever since.”

  The bathroom was inlaid with pink tiles and the water from the hot springs was fragrant in the tub. One whole wall was a mirror from floor to ceiling, and I stared amazed at this big strong woman who stood there with milk in her breasts, and regretted having to put on my clothes again and become a penniless girl from the north once more, and I dawdled as much as I could. At last there was nothing left but to chew some soap, and then I went out into the living room.

  He was sitting on a chair reading a book, and had fried some ham and eggs and laid the table; water for the tea simmered in an electric glass kettle beside him. He motioned to me to sit down in an armchair on the other side of the table and started to make the tea.

  And I stared at this man in a trance, this fairy tale personified: the man who owned the world, not just all the wealth that one could reasonably wish for; the man who enjoyed all the power to be had in a little country—and what is the difference between a little country and a large one except in degree?—but quite certainly endowed with soul, no less than the ponies who had once appeared to him in a divine vision; healthy, intelligent, handsome, virile, in the prime of life, his every word a poem, his every thought a joy, his every movement a game; in reality such a man is above everything on earth, a phenomenon in the sky—and how are the thoughts of an earth-bound pauper to be anything but a tasteless joke and dreary drivel in his eyes and ears?

  “Is there anything more ludicrous than a penniless girl from the north who says she is going to become a person?” I said.

  “All that you ask for, you shall have,” he said.

  I still did not have much of an appetite, but I drank the tea he had made and enjoyed it.

  “By the way,” I said, “where do these words come from?”

  “I wrote them when I learned the truth,” he replied.

  “The truth?” I echoed.

  “Yes, it’s small wonder you laugh,” he said. “You think I have become a theologian like Jona and started hopping.”

  “It depends on which truth it is,” I said.

  “Quite so,” he replied. “The religious hero says, ‘Truth shall make you free’; and in that case truth is perhaps merely the face that Jon Smyrill of Braudhouses* was born into the world—which is, in fact, a matter of dispute, historically; or that foul fellow Mohammed—which is indisputable, certainly. But that is not what I mean. Do you remember once, last year, I told you the Einstein Theory? That is not what I mean, either, even though it is proved by calculations; nor even that simple, unforgettable, and irrefutable truth of junior school, that water is H2O.”

  I said that I was becoming curious.

  “I mean the truth of myself,” he said, and looked at me without his spectacles. “The truth of my own nature. That is the truth I have discovered, and if I do not live that truth my life is but half; in other words, no life at all.”

  I asked, “Which is your truth?”

  “You,” he said, dropping into the intimate form of address. “You are my truth: my life’s truth. That is why I offer you everything a man can offer a woman. That is what I meant when I wrote to you on that card.”

  I give you my sacred oath that I lost my sight completely and died.

  “Don’t you see these rags I am in from Krok?” was the first thing I said when I came to life again; also using the intimate address.

  “No,” he said.

  “I know no languages except Zoega’s English Primer,” I said.

  “Really?” he said.

  “And play the harmonium, which in itself is ridiculous even if one plays it well; and have never had varnish on my nails nor scarlet on my lips except at the most perhaps off some red fruit-soup; and you accustomed to women who look as if they had drunk black bull’s-blood and scratched raw human flesh.”

  “Yes, all that is precisely what I meant,” he said. “That’s why I am turning over a new leaf.”

  “But when you have slept with me for a night, or two nights, or even three at the very most, you will awake from your torpor and look at me, horrified, and ask just as in a folk-tale: Whence came this witch into my bed?—and then you will steal softly away from me before dawn and never come back again.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he said, “and I shall do it.”

  I gazed at him for as long as I could, then down at my knees; but I could make no reply.

  “Do you want me to renounce everything?” he said. “The firm, the constituency, public posts, party, acquaintances, friends?—and be once again a plain penniless man of culture?”

  “I could never, never bear to have you lowered by a hair’s breadth on my account,” I said. “Besides, I am sure that though you were penniless you would carry on being what habit has made you, the man you are; and I what I am, a country kid, a housemaid, common; nothing but a longing to become a person, to know something, to be able to do something for myself. Where would a place exist for both of us?”

  “Now you must see that Patagonia is not such a bad idea after all,” he said.

  “Does any Patagonia exist?”

  “I shall show it to you now on the map.”

  “Isn’t it some barbarian land?” I asked.

  “Is it not all the same?” he replied. “Soon the whole world will be one vast barbarian land.”

&nb
sp; “And there was I, thinking that world civilization was just beginning,” I said. “I thought we were beginning to be people.”

  “The attempt seems to have failed miserably,” he said. “No one any longer imagines for a moment that it is possible to save capitalism, never mind resurrect it; not even with Poor Law Relief from America. Barbarianism is at the door.”

  “Is Communism barbarianism then?”

  “That is not what I said,” he replied. “On the other hand, Captialism will drag world civilization down with it to the depths when it falls.”

  “Iceland too?” I asked.

  He said, “There exist land and sea, divided between east and west; and the atom bomb.”

  “Has Iceland then been abandoned to—the atomic war?” I asked.

  Suddenly he rose to his feet, turned away and walked over to the radio, and switched off some Spaniard who was making a speech on the other side of the world.

  “The conflict is between two fundamentals,” he said. “The battlefield covers all lands, all seas, all skies; and particularly our innermost consciousness. The whole world is one atom station.”

  “And Patagonia too, then?”

  He had managed to find some light music somewhere on the instrument. He came over to me and sat down on the arm of my chair and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Patagonia is a different matter altogether,” he said. “Patagonia is the land of the future in the middle of the present, the land that has always been what Europe and the United States have yet to become: a wasteland where a few ignorant shepherds look after sheep. I hope you understand that the world in which I have lived is doomed and that there can be no appeal against that sentence; and further, that I do not care, that I am losing nothing if I renounce it all. The decision is yours. Say what you want.”

  * An old Icelandic scholastic “translation” of Jesus Christ of Nazareth: Jon and Jesus, the two commonest names in both countries; Smyrill, the anointed one; Braudhouses (breadhouses), from the Hebrew etymology of Nazareth.

  24. The square before dawn

  I opened my eyes after a short sleep; a light still glowed dimly in the night lamp, and I looked around me overcome with deep boredom as if in a wilderness. Where was I? And who was this man? I crept out of bed and dressed silently. Was he asleep—or was he pretending to be asleep? The door was unlocked and I stole away down the stairs with my case in my hand, and did not put on my shoes until I reached the outside door; and I walked on to the empty street in the cold morning breeze, while the town still slept.

  The street lights took the place of stars, except that they brought no message from the depths of the heavens; this was a world without depths, and I was alone—so alone that even that other persona of the self, the one that stirs shame and regret, had abandoned me; I was dull, and everything was flat: a person without context, or to be more exact, a woman without existence.

  And then I was standing once again in the square where I had stood the previous evening; that is how the opening theme reappears at the end of a musical composition, only in a different key, in a different rhythm, with unrelated chords—and with the contents in reverse; in reality I did not recognize anything any more, except my wooden suitcase. The square which yesterday had been thronged with busy people and throbbing with many thousands of horsepower was now empty and still. I seated myself on a bench in the middle of the square, tired.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Has anything happened?”

  “No, nothing has happened.”

  In this way I took part in a long and no doubt significant conversation, perhaps with some disembodied voice, perhaps with one of those personae of the self or the godhead which for so long had been lost, or had perhaps never even existed; until I happened to look up and saw a man standing beside me, studying me.

  “I thought you were crying,” he said.

  “No, no,” I replied. “I’m just a little tired; just finished a journey.”

  “Well, well, good morning, how do you do?” said the man. “Surely it’s not you, here, is it?”

  “Am I seeing right?” I said, for who should it be but my good friend and fellow pupil of the previous winter, the unself-conscious policeman, that thickset man who always saw things in the light of reality because he had such a heavy behind. And I rose to my feet as is the custom amongst country women when they greet a man and said, “And how do you do?”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I’ve just arrived in town,” I said. “From home.”

  “At this queer hour?”

  “We had a breakdown,” I replied. “It took them some time to repair it. We didn’t get here until just now. I’m waiting until it’s a rather more reasonable hour before going to wake people up.”

  “Listen, dear,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “We’ll have some coffee, of course, with our professor, he’ll hardly be in bed yet. And you can tell us how the music is doing in the north.”

  “Tell me about the south, rather,” I said.

  “Oh, my dear,” he said, “what is a man to say nowadays? Child murders in the street are no longer news, nor even if men drink themselves stupid and insensible in order to get courage to beat their wives. The order of the day now is: sell the country, bury bones.”

  I said that the only thing I knew about that was that the gods had come north to us with two crates and claimed they contained bones; but that while our pastor was rounding up a cortege, the Government had sent for the crates.

  “These wretched gods,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “It so happened that the bones arrived from Copenhagen on the very day that the representatives of the Great Power were demanding an agreement; with the result that Parliament was up to the eyes in selling on that particular day, and had no time to hold a ceremony. The Prime Minister sent a chit down to the harbor and asked for the bones to be shoved into his warehouse at Snorredda until the meeting was over. In fact, that meeting lasted well into the night, because the Commies are against the dollar, and so they didn’t manage to sell before nearly dawn. And in the meantime these devils grabbed their opportunity and stole the bones.”

  “So we have been sold?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, the sovereignty’s gone, I suppose, that’s all right. Reykjaness is going to be some special resting-place for welfare missions going east and west.”

  “And who all said Yes?” I asked.

  “You’re surely not so childish as to need to ask that?” he said. “Naturally all the fatherland-hurrah chaps said Yes.”

  “The ones who swore on their mothers?” I asked.

  “D’you imagine anyone else would want to sell our country?” he said.

  “And the people?” I asked.

  “Naturally they ordered us in the police force to prepare the tear-gas and other tidbits for the people,” he said. “But the people did nothing. The people are children. They are taught that criminals live in Skolavordustig* and not Austurvoll. Their faith in this wavers a bit, perhaps, from time to time, but when politicians have sworn often enough and hurrahed for long enough, they begin to believe it again. People don’t have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent.”

  “Yes, I suppose I knew well enough the way things were going when they began to swear oaths up north in the summer,” I said. “All trivial matters have ceased to take me by surprise. But since I have been so lucky as to meet a friend, I would like to ask you one thing: what news is there of—the Northern Trading Company?”

  “You don’t know that either?” he said.

  “I know nothing,” I said.

  “Not even that he’s up the road now?”

  “Who is where?”

  “Since you haven’t heard anything,” he said, “I doubt if I’m the right person to tell you the news.”

  “Up the road?” I went on asking. “What is up the road?”

  “In Skolavordustig,” he said.
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  “The prison?” I asked.

  “We call it up the road,” he said. “Up the road: where the small fry go. But all in good time, my dear; I believe things will improve. He got so far, in fact, as to buy the Cadillac off Pliers, his fellow parishioner. In actual fact he only blundered in one thing, despite the fact that the organist had often warned him about it, and us all: if you are going to commit a crime, you must first get yourself a millionaire, or else you are just a ludicrous person; and belong up the road; in Skolavordustig.”

  “And the firm?” I asked.

  “It never existed,” he said. “And no merchandise, either. He never, indeed, actually claimed that the merchandise existed, he merely said: the merchandise will arrive soon. And then he sold and sold everything imaginable, and accepted payment. But when at last he stood there with the money in his hands and was going to start importing the goods for his customers, Snorredda claimed priority for foreign currency. And the Government, which is one of Snorredda’s assets, had come to the decision that petty young businessmen were for the axe.”

  “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with my legs,” I said, and took hold of his arm; truth to tell I had simultaneously a feeling of nausea and sparks before my eyes, as if I were going to faint; and I asked him to halt for a moment, and dashed my free hand across my eyes to wipe away this plague.

  “I shouldn’t have started gossiping about this,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “But I’m a little tired after the journey still.”

  After that we walked arm in arm across the road and behind the buildings; to the house; and I pulled myself together enough to be able to say: “Oh well, since we are a sold people in a sold country, I suppose nothing matters very much any more.”

  “Now we’ll see what sort of mood our organist is in,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

  * The street in which the old jail in Reykjavik stands.

  25. Before and after atomic war

  Of course this favorite of fortune was in a good mood. He was working on his flowers, with sleeves rolled up to the elbow and earth on his hands, planting roses, thinning, snipping off withered leaves, weeding, preparing the ground for winter. Various plants were still well in bloom, including a few of the roses. But when one looked around, one saw that the house was emptier than ever before, the battered harmonium away, the picture gone from the wall. Apart from the flowers there was little left except the three-legged sofa which required such skill to sit on.