“Good morning,” said the organist, fresh and cheery from his beloved daily work, his mere presence a peace-giving refuge, “and be welcome.”
He wiped off the earth and offered me his warm hand, kissed me, bade me welcome to the south, flattered me, and laughed at me—“Do please have a seat, the coffee will be ready in a twinkling.”
We put my wooden suitcase under the legless corner of the sofa and sat down, and he laughed—at us for sitting on such a wretched sofa, and at himself for owning it.
“And where is Cleopatra?” I asked.
“Cleopatra took off when my mother died,” he said. “She though she might get a bad reputation off me. Cleopatra always had a petit-bourgeois streak in her, even though she was a great woman; and Napoleon the Great a great man.”
“Napoleon the Great?” said the unself-conscious policeman in surprise.
“Fancy, so you can open your mouth after all. How very solemn you are, my friend,” said the organist.
“What is a man to say these days?” said the unself-conscious policeman. “The whole nation has lockjaw. As Ugla and I were just saying, people are so innocent that they cannot believe such a thing is possible; the man in the street hasn’t got the intelligence to imagine anything like it. Just when we had finished fighting for seven hundred years!”
“Would it be impertinent to ask what you are talking about, my friend?” said the organist.
“Sell the country, bury bones,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “What else?”
“What’s all this, children?” said the organist. “Don’t you want to have any heroes?”
“That’ll be the day.” said the unself-conscious policeman. “Heroes! Not half!”
“A man who risks everything for his cause, even his good name if his cause is defeated—I do not know who is a hero if not he,” said the organist.
“Then Quisling was a hero,” said the unself-conscious policeman, “for he knew right from the start both that he would be hanged and that the Norwegians would execrate him after his death.”
“Goebbels murdered his six children and his wife before committing suicide, rather than yield to the east,” said the organist. “It is a fallacy to think that heroism is in any way related to the cause that is fought for. We Icelanders, who have the greatest heroic literature in the world, ought to know what a hero is; the Jomsvikings* are our men, they made obscene remarks while they were being beheaded. We do not doubt that in the Fascist armies there were proportionately as many heroes as in the Allied armies. The cause makes no difference to the heroism. For myself, I believe that the Icelandic nation has gained a few heroes in the last few days.”
“And if their cause should conquer, are they still heroes in spite of that?” asked the unself-conscious policeman.
“They themselves know better than anyone that it never will. It has never yet happened that those who sell a country conquer. Only those who settle a country conquer. One simply must not confuse heroism, which is an absolute concept, with the fame of the conqueror. Take Hitler, the murderer of Europe: never once throughout all his murdering did it occur to him to surrender; he even got married with the noose round his neck. That brute Goering never cracked. Some think heroes are some sort of idealists and kind-hearted people like you and me, but I tell you truly that if we incline to such an opinion it could mean that all those millions whom Hitler burned in his furnaces would be called by the name of heroes, or even those hundreds of millions of women and children who will be roasted by the nuclear bomb.”
“But what if these heroes should succeed in murdering all Icelanders?” asked the unself-conscious policeman. “A military power is not long in converting a welfare station into a nuclear station, if need be.”
“We know how things went for Hitler,” said the organist. “People are immortal. It is impossible to wipe out mankind—in this geological epoch. It may well be that a sizeable portion of the earth’s population will die in the war for a more expedient community-pattern, it may well be that the cities of the world may have to be laid waste before this pattern is found. But when it is found, a new golden age will arise for mankind.”
“That’s small consolation for Iceland, if we are razed to the ground and annihilated by those who are fighting over the world,” said the unself-conscious policeman.
“Iceland does not matter very much, when one looks at the total picture,” said the organist. “Icelanders have not been in existence for more than, at the most, a thousand years, and we have been rather an insignificant nation; except that we wrote this heroic literature seven centuries ago. Many empires have been wiped out so utterly that we no longer even know their names, because they did not keep pace with evolution when Nature was seeking a more convenient pattern for herself. Nations are not very important on the whole, and indeed it is at one and the same time a recent and an obsolete phenomenon to think of nations as political entities: to confuse, in general, countries and politics. The Roman Empire was not a country but a particular armed civilization. China has never been a country, but a particular moral civilization. Christendom of the Middle Ages was not a country. Capitalism is not a country. Communism is not a country. East and West are not countries. Iceland is a country only in a geographical definition. The nuclear bomb wipes out cities but not geography; so Iceland will continue to exist.”
“And you who are a man of culture—can you look with equanimity on them levelling all the world metropolises where culture resides?” asked the unself-conscious policeman.
“I have always heard that cities were the more valued the more ruins they had,” said the organist, and laughed carelessly over the water that was beginning to boil in the kettle. “Long live Pompeii!”
“Yes, and do you perhaps want chickweed to grow on the pile of rubble where London fell in ruins, and duckweed on the pool where Paris sank?” said the unself-conscious policeman.
“Why not rose bushes?” said the organist. “And a swan on the lake? People reckon cities the more beautiful the larger the gardens in them, so that dwelling houses can disappear between apple trees and rose bushes and mirror themselves in still lakes. The loveliest garden is nevertheless the country side; that is the garden of gardens. When the nuclear bomb has razed the cities to the ground in this present world revolution because they have failed to keep pace with evolution, then the culture of the countryside will arise, and the earth will become the garden that it never was before except in dreams and poetry …”
“And we shall start believing in ponies again,” said the girl from the north, and lay down on the sofa behind her unself-conscious policeman, and fell asleep.
* A semi-legendary, highly exclusive band of Vikings, who lived spartan and war-dedicated lives in the Baltic city of Jomsborg (now unknown) in the tenth century. They were wiped out in the battle of Hjorungavag, against Earl Hakon of Norway.
26. The house of wealth
It had long been broad daylight. My organist was cleaning up the room after all the earth work, in his shirtsleeves, with bucket and brush. I woke up under his winter overcoat.
“My goodness, how I have slept!” I said.
“You cheated yourself of your coffee,” he said. “And now it is nearly mealtime.”
“I’m absolutely amazed at myself,” I said.
“Oh?” he said, and looked at me with a smile.
“Yes, to wake up like this in a strange place,” I said.
“What is not a strange place?” he said. “We are all overnight lodgers in a strange place. But it is wonderful to have made this journey.”
“Even though the world is a den of murderers?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, “even though the world is a den of murderers. What difference does that make?”
“And though the country is stolen from under our feet?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “even though the country is stolen from under our feet. Did you expect anything else?”
“I have milk in my breas
ts,” I said.
“Go next door and do yourself up a little before we eat,” he said.
He had been out buying food while I slept, all sorts of delicacies wrapped in paper, eggs in one packet, sausage in another, dried fish in a third, butter, curds, cream; and one larger parcel which I thought contained cheese. We sat on the kitchen table and dangled our legs and regaled ourselves on these delicacies out of the packets.
Finally I spoke up and said, “Well, tell me now, what has … my young man done?”
“In our society there is only one really dangerous crime,” he said, “and that is to come from the country. That is why all the cities of the world will fall in ruins.”
“But he had a vocation,” I said. “He must have had something in mind.”
“Yes, that is one of the greastest disasters that a country person can suffer,” he said. “Take, for instance, the Maid of Orleans; all at once famous saints had started ordering the poor girl about while she was herding sheep.”
“But still, she saved France,” I said.
“That I do not believe,” said the organist: “it is a fundamental misunderstanding. Historians have proved that the saints who did all the talking were characters out of fictitious supernatural stories from Constantinople; even God himself made a fool of the girl by letting her hear the voices of saints who, as none knew better than He, had never existed. Finally the wretched girl was burned—through a misunderstanding. There is nothing so dangerous for country people as to start listening to heavenly voices.”
“Was he perhaps going to free the country,” I asked.
“No, no, thank goodness, it wasn’t as bad as all that,” said the organist. “On the other hand he once heard a voice from heaven that said to him, when he was mowing hay: If you want to become a man, you must ride south at once and become a thief.”
“To the best of my knowledge he came south to become a policeman,” I said.
“In the Edda it says that every man should be medium wise but never too wise,” said the organist. “He thought the best place to learn the techniques of house breaking would be in the police force. Country people and saints, and even God, think that house breakers make some profit out of it. I proved to him over and over again last winter that this was a fallacy, that house breakers make much less out of it than dustmen.”
“But the Northern Trading Company?” I asked.
“Yes, well, naturally an intelligent and musical person like him quickly realized that valuables are too well guarded for country people to get at them simply by climbing through a window at night. If someone wants to steal in a thieves’ community, he must steal according to the laws; and he should preferably have taken part in making the laws himself. That is why I never tired of urging him to get into Parliament, get himself the backing of a millionaire, float a joint stock company, and get himself a new car—simultaneously, if possible. But he was too much of a peasant, and never fully understood me; and that is why it happened as it did. He thought it would be enough to float a dummy company like the Northern Trading Company and have dealings with a dummy millionaire like Pliers, and buy off him a car that had been stolen many times over; whereas it has to be genuine joint-stock company and a genuine millionaire and a new car of this year’s make straight from the factory. In other words, he made blunders in all the technical details of his vocation. The obvious outcome is that he, who ought to have started by setting up house at Austurvoll, is now resident in Skolavordustig.”
“Is it possible to save a little fellow who has got on the wrong side of the law?” I asked.
“It is always difficult to save country people,” said the organist. “Penal laws are passed to protect criminals and punish the others who are too naive to understand society. But though the nature of our friend’s performance bordered on the most childish of crimes, like house breaking, it has one redeeming feature, in that his methods were near enough to general business practice to make it debatable whether to convict him would not be an insult to some of our upperclass citizens. In actual fact he only needs a little less than a hundred thousand kronur to get free.”
I pondered this for a while, but soon realized what a hopeless impossiblity this was: “My father and mother are now in their old age, and I am quite sure that though all their life’s earnings were added up they would not reach the sum you mentioned.”
“Don’t you think it right that such a man should be allowed to test the effect of his folly and obstinancy on his own body?” said the organist. “Can anything else save him?”
I had finished eating and was gazing out of the window at the withered weeds around the house, but at this question I turned towards him and said unthinkingly, “He is the father of little Gudrun, and whether he goes to prison or not he is my man.”
“All right, dear,” said the organist without laughing at me. “I did not know how you regarded the matter.”
“I didn’t know either—until now; today; particularly after the night that has just passed. But I don’t have a hundred thousand kronur.”
He smiled warily and looked at me distantly. “Bui Arland,” he said, “your Member of Parliament and former employer, would soon write you out a check for that amount …”
“I prefer to wait for my man until he comes out,” I said.
“Bui Arland is the best of fellows, we once went to school together; I know he would do it like a shot.”
“Bui Arland is the dearest man in Iceland,” I said. “Who should know that better than me, having slept with him last night?”
“Listen, dear,” said the organist. “Should we not have some coffee to follow, anyway? There are some pastries in a bag here.”
“I’ll make it,” I said. “You have done well already: bought food in many packets, prepared your flowers for the winter, and scrubbed out the house. But listen, where’s the picture of our Skarp-Hedin Njalsson with the cloven head, otherwise known as Cleopatra the Fair? How I miss her.”
“I burned her,” he said. “I am thinking of having a change of picture. A man has to do some stock taking every now and again. And you, my dear?”
“I’m going to find myself a job and get to night-school,” I replied. “And when I’ve saved up some money I’m going to start learning in earnest to be a children’s nurse.”
We drank coffee and were satisfied.
“Well,” I said. “Thank you very much. Now I’m going into town to look for something for myself.”
“Go your road,” he said. “And all the very best. And our friend in Skolavordustig—that is all settled, is it not?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s all settled: he is my man.”
This organist, whom men considered above gods, and gods above men, he who was in actual fact most remote from women and yet the only man where a woman could ultimately find refuge—before I knew it he clasped my head with his slender fingers, bent over it, and kissed my hair at the parting, right on the crown. Then he turned away and lifted from the kitchen table the parcel which we had not yet touched, and which I thought contained cheese. He unwrapped the paper with brisk movements. And it was crammed with bank-notes.
“Help yourself,” he said.
“Is that real money?” I asked.
“Hardly,” he said. “At least I did not manufacture it myself. But bring your case over here, just the same.”
“How do you imagine I could ever think of accepting all this?” I said.
“Very well, then, my dear,” he said. “Then we shall put it in the fire.”
He walked with the pile of notes into the living-room straight for the fire; I do not doubt that if he had had his way he would have thrust all this wealth into the fire right before my eyes, and then turned round to face me with a childish titter—and then never mentioned the matter again. But I ran to stop him, seized hold of his hands, and cried, “No, no, I’ll accept it.” Then he handed me the money.
“On one condition, though,” he said as he placed the money in my hands:
“that you never tell anyone where you got this money from, whether I am alive or dead.”
And while I was struggling to cram all this money into my suitcase, red in the face and bereft of speech and suffused all over with hot shame, did I not see him snipping all the loveliest blooms from his plants and arranging them into a bouquet!
“What are you doing to your flowers?” I said.
He tied the stalks together with fiber twine and handed me the bouquet with a smile.
“I know that no other bride in this country has ever been given a more beautiful bouquet,” I said.
“I shall be content if you will look at them for me while they are alive and burn them for me when they are dead,” he said. “And now goodbye, and thank you for coming. And give my good wishes to our friend.”
A slim, slightly-built man; perhaps he was not in good health; when I embraced him and laid my face on his shoulder I felt him tremble a little.
But when he had seen me to the paving, and was turning to go back into the house, he suddenly remembered something and said apologetically, “Oh, I nearly forgot, don’t come back here if you are looking for me again. I am moving today. I sold the house yesterday.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“The same road as the flowers,” he replied.
“And the flowers?” I said. “Who will look after them?”
“Flowers are immortal,” he said, and laughed. “You cut them in autumn and they grow again in spring—somewhere.”
27. Immortal flowers
When I was on my way to the prison in Skolavordustig with my case and my bouquet I happened to pass by the cathedral, and before I knew it I had blundered into the middle of a funeral; the coffin was just being carried out of church. This was no small fry that was being buried, judging by all the ceremonial; as far as I could see it was the overlords of the country, whom I had learned to know by sight last year when I opened the door to them at night, who were now gathered again, dressed in black and white, with tile-hats, in their hands: the Prime Minister and the other Ministers, the sheep-plague director, some Members of Parliament, wholesalers and judges, the mournful lead-grey man who published the paper, the bishops, and the oil-processing plant director. This little group formed a circle round an exceedingly ornate coffin, which was carried by the pick of this corps d’elite, the Prime Minister leading on one side, and on the other side the mournful lead-grey man who had published the paper; next came a handsome, virile man with grey-flecked hair and aquiline nose, horn-rimmed glasses like a mask, snowy-white gloves and a tile-hat in his free hand, quite at ease in this company. Who was he? Could it be true? Was I seeing right? Or was I still dreaming—one of those dreams of uncertain joy?
The Atom Station Page 18