Independent People

by Halldor Laxness

  “Anyway, one thing you can be certain of is that I could mix a better bottle for your Finna than those blasted camphor-slops you get from old Finsen. He and Tulinius Jensen are a couple of birds out of the same nest. To the best of my knowledge he’s never done anything in die Althingi but have quays built for the merchant. They’ve already stung the Treasury for subsidies for two piers that were reduced to sand by the breakers as fast as they were built, of course, so now they’ve decided to milk them for another hundred thousand crowns to build a breakwater stretching out to somewhere near the horizon as a bulwark for the ruined piers. And who pays for all this building and construction that’s thrown to the waves as if it were refuse? We farmers, of course; plucked to the bone in direct and indirect taxes to the Treasury. No; if the Icelandic farming community is not to become the miserable doormat of merchant power, then we farmers must unite in defence of our interests the same as they started doing in Thingey over thirty years ago.”

  He stood up, stretched, and began winding his muffler round his neck.

  ‘Well, well, little girl,” he said, halting in front of Asta Sollilja; and his eyes were so warm and his hewn features so strong that the child blushed all over and her heart began hammering against her ribs, “I think I'll give you a couple of crowns; young ladies sometimes like to have some money for hankies.” He took a real silver coin out of his purse and gave it to her. She had long been afraid of the Bailifif, but never so much as now. The boys he did not even look at. Then he buttoned up his jacket.

  “A hundred and fifty for the cow and never a cent more,” he said. “And hay according to agreement.”

  EVENING

  SOON the dusk falls. The boy no longer feels sure of himself after the day’s song and story, no longer dare leave his legs dangling over the edge of the bed, but huddling up because of the world’s hidden powers, knits without venturing on the slightest movement. His grandmother and his sister stand with their backs to him, piously attentive to the ritual of their cooking. The brushwood is spitting sullenly, filling the room with a dense smoke that makes his throat smart; it is in this smoke that there dwells the poetry of day, with all its furious gales, its ravines and its spectres per nostra krimina. Though the quarrelsome voices of the elder brothers may occasionally be heard from the outskirts, they afford him no relief, and in these oppressive surroundings the stitches become more and more netlike; his left index finger has long been dead from sticking straight up in the air. In the dusk the room’s dimensions seem to increase still further; no earthly power can bridge them now. Remotest of all is his mother. Even her heart seems to have disappeared irrevocably in the plumbless depths of this fog which is instinct with the poetry of life, the poetry of death.

  Supper was tense with exertion and a frozen silence. One or two of them stole a glance at Bjartur, then at each other. Asta Sollilja scarcely touched her food. Presently they had all had their fill of salt coalfish, the potatoes were finished, no one wanted any more of this morning’s porridge. Asta Sollilja began to clear the table; she had an amazing squint. The elder brothers said something nasty in a whisper, and the mother said: “Parlings,” also in a whisper. The old woman took her needles down from the shelf, and from the middle of her story spoke these words aloud: “Moo now, moo now, my Bukolla, if you are alive at all.”

  “Eh?” demanded Bjartur crossly from his bed.

  “Pluck a hair from my tail and lay it on the ground,” mumbled the old woman into her knitting without explanation. In the silence it was like the crackle of frost. The boys had started knocking one another about near the hatchway. Halting suddenly in front of her father with a plate in her hand, Asta Sollilja looked at him with the straight eye and said:

  “Father, I want to learn.”

  The ice had been broken.

  “I didn’t do any learning before the winter that I went to the minister’s and read Orvar-Odds Saga while I was being taught my catechism,” replied Bjartur.

  “Father, I want to learn,” insisted the girl, lowering her head and drooping her eyelids, her throat and mouth twitching slightly, and the fragile plate in her hand.

  “All right, lass, I'll spell through the Bernotus Rhymes with you.”

  The girl bit her lip a little and said:

  “I don’t want to learn the Bernotus Rhymes,”

  “That’s strange,” said Bjartur. “What do you want to learn, then?”

  “I want to learn Christianity.”

  “You can learn that from old Hallbera.”

  “No,” said the girl, “I want to go over to Rauthsmyri, like the Bailiff said.”

  “And what for, do you think?”

  “To learn to know God.”

  “None of your nonsense,” said Bjartur of Summerhouses.

  “I want to go to Rauthsmyri all the same.”

  “Oh, indeed, my lass,” he said. “But it so happens that I’d sooner bring Rauthsmyri children up myself than allow the Rauthsmyri folk to bring up mine.”

  “I want to go to Rauthsmyri.”

  “Yes, when I’m dead.”

  “To Rauthsmyri.”

  “Your mother wanted to go to Rauthsmyri, too. But she would rather die than give in to herself, and she died; there was a woman for you. Rauthsmyri is Rauthsmyri. I went there when I was eighteen, thirty years ago, and I’ve never straightened my back since; and they haven’t finished with me yet. Now they’re threatening to force a cow on me. But your mother died in this room here, without letting anybody offer her anything. She was an independent woman.”

  Bjartur was very proud of this wife of his, thirteen years after her death. He was in love with her memory and had forgotten her faults. But when he saw by her daughter’s quivering shoulders that she was weeping over her washing-up, he remembered once more that women are more to be pitied than ordinary mortals and need daylong consolation. Then again, if he had a tender spot at all in him, it was for this crosseyed slip of a girl with the lovely name, whom sometimes he gazed at on Sundays and sometimes protected from the rain in summer, both without remark. So he promised to teach her to read tomorrow, so that they wouldn’t have anything to complain about at Rauthsmyri. “And we might be able to buy ourselves Orvar-Odds Saga this spring. And even a hanky.”

  Silence.

  “You ought to hand that money over to me, girlie. It’s Judas money.”

  No answer.

  “Who knows, perhaps I have a rig-out for you, wrapped up in my Sunday coat down in the chest. But you’ll have to get a move on and grow up for the spring coming.”

  “Moo now, moo-cow.” muttered the old grandmother to the spindle as she kissed the pipe.

  “I won’t have this nonsense in front of the youngsters, Hallbera,” said Bjartur sharply.

  “Pluck a hair from my tail and lay it on the ground.”

  Asta Sollilja’s tears continued to fall on the dishes.

  “I’ve been thinking.” said Bjartur, “that since you’re as old as you are, it’s about time I gave you a lamb to call your own. There’s one yellow-brown ewe with a tufted nose that isn’t unlike my little girl.”

  For some moments he stood looking half in embarrassment at that slender body which had its own longing in a valley so thick with snow, and which wept and would not be comforted; then he went over to her and stroked her for a few moments as if she were an animal—this little flower.

  “When the spring comes,” he said, “I'll let you go down to town with me. That’s much better than going over to Myri; you can see the sea and the world in one and the same journey.” And when he touched her like that, she was sorrowful no longer, and forgot her sorrow, it was so seldom that he touched her. She nestled up against him and felt that he was the greatest power in the world. There was one happy place on his neck between his shirt and the roots of his beard; when her mouth was quivering hot with tears, she would yearn for this place, and find it. Thus would life’s animosity disappear, perhaps all at once; only a moment in the dusk and it was gone.
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  Presently the lamp was lit.

  The little world of humans that eked out its existence there in the oblivion of the frozen wastes was once more its normal self. Bjartur whittled away at a crosspiece for a hay-box, testing it repeatedly for size, with moss and chips of wood in his beard and half a line of poetry on his lips at long intervals. The older boys were teasing wool. They were examples of two diverse temperaments; the elder frizzy-haired and long of limb, a tortuous, inexplicable soul; the younger thickset and, as is usual with self-willed people, enthusiastic and quick-tempered. The elder used to make faces behind his father’s back. In the middle of the day he would sneak into the house and scratch the table with a nail, looking foolishly and obstinately at his mother between whiles and knocking his knees together as he sat. The middle brother would hold his eyes open with match-sticks of his own accord and would keep on working till he fell over unconscious. They teased and teased and kept on digging one another in the ribs; it would probably end in blows. And Asta Sollilja added another round to her shift, pooh, she was only half a human being, there was this and that wanting on her, and the slightest thing set her off howling, no one would dream of howling the way she did. At last she had finished howling. Mother, on the other hand, was no better today, everything the same as yesterday and the day before. Perhaps the Bailiff could mix the medicine that would cure her?

  And the wheel went on spinning through time’s expanse.

  Little Nonni was no longer thinking of evening, and though it had come, he did not regard it. Family and cooking utensils alike glided gradually out of the range of his senses; the dimensions of the room expanded into improbability itself, where nothing was any longer possible; how could anything be sillier than an expanding room? Even the sound of Grandmother’s wheel had lost the qualities of proximity; it was like some far, far wind whistling among unknown crags; her cheek fringed by the hood dissolving into irrelevant fog. Was our Sola sent over to Utirauthsmyri to learn to know God? Or did she get a cow? No, it was only the dog by the hatchway, yawning and scratching itself and striking the wall before it curled up. His mother was only a mute recollection of some indistinct world-song, some goal or other that one had been longing for all day long but had now forgotten. Oh that we were there, oh that we were there! The hour that held the goal of all desires was approaching, though none in particular had been fulfilled.

  In such a fashion would evening come, before one had realized that the long day was over. It came in disguise, in images that dissolved and faded away. And the boy faded out of time along with the other images that were fading away.

  His grandmother unlaced his shoes.

  LITERATURE

  Once I loved a maiden shining

  (Mineso long ago), Round her forehead fair locks twining,

  Sweet her voice and low.

  Warm her eyes, so brightly gleaming

  (Tender were her vows),

  As the radiant sun were beaming

  Underneath her brows.

  In her cheeks the red blood beckoned

  (Red blood in the snow). Naught of doom in love I reckoned;

  Doom fell long ago.

  In the earth they laid my dearest

  (In the earth laid low). All my life is labour drearest,

  Lonely now I go.

  WITH this maid-song from the Jomsviking Rhymes, Asta Sollilja began her education. When she had spelled her way through one stanza, Bjartur leaned back in his chair with half-closed eyes and chanted. Every verse that she read she learned by heart, the chant as well, humming them away to herself whenever she was alone. All the love-songs in this group of ballads were addressed to the same girl; she was called Rosa. Asta Sollilja never inquired who the girl commended so highly by these songs might be, but she saw her together with her father, and loved her with him in the primitive, rugged language of the Rhymes, reminiscent of nothing so much as the pious but despairing cuts in the carving of her grandmother’s spindle-holder. Her notions about how poetry is composed and circulated were vague: she could not distinguish between the voice of her father chanting and the love that lived in the heart of a poet who died in a distant century, but looked at her reflection in the water-bucket in a childish desire to make herself resemble the maiden shining, who in the earth was laid low.

  But once they left the maid-songs for the ballads themselves the going became much heavier. Here Bjartur’s explanations did little to dispel the obscurity and knit the few intelligible passages together; the inexperienced reader wandered lost and despairing in an unlit fog of unpronounceable words and difficult kennings that seemed to lack any sort of connection—the Jomsviking heroes, their voyages and battles, were far beyond her meagre imagination. And when the story turned to the lives of the Jomsvikings, her father read it to himself only and laughed, my God, what wenching, then closed the book and said it did young people harm to hear about such things, it’s smut. Finally the wenching of the Jomsvikings developed to such a pitch that they had to give the book up altogether. Her father produced the Bernotus Rhymes, they are much nicer for youngsters.

  “Why can’t I hear anything about wenching?” asked the girl.

  “Ehr?”

  “I want so much to hear about wenching.”

  “Hussy,” he said, and slapped her face; did not talk to her for the rest of the day. After that she never dared refer to such things openly. And when she had reached the passage in the Bernotus Rhymes where the disguised hero visits the bedroom of the Princess Fastina, who has been honoured with the name “Rosary-thwart,” she blushed. Bernotus said:

  Since I saw you, noble lady,

  Never can my heart find rest;

  So to love you, that is best.

  Slow she answered: Hear my promise:

  Love to me is but a name,

  Till your touch awakes the flame.

  And there they sat all night, the Princess and the knight, till the sun rose. Asta Sollilja said nothing, not a word, and was careful not to look up. But in the evenings when she went to bed she would draw the blanket over her head, and the little living-room in Summerhouses no longer existed; rather was Fastina, fair-fingered Rosary-thwart, sitting in her bedroom thinking of the knight who conquered all and waiting for his return.

  Long, long was the wait she had at home, after Bernotus had had to flee the wrath of the King and had wandered to Borney, where the worst villains in all the world were sent to destroy him. And she sat at home in her bedchamber, alone, while he struggled alone on a distant strand against innumerable foes, one against all.

  Stout in arms the strand he trod,

  Dauntless swapt his doomed foes;

  Swung his brand with single hand,

  Clave the knaves from neck to toes

  The gory spear at Thorleif aimed

  Through the air a vengeance bore;

  The braggart’s spirit soon it tamed,

  Pinned him howling to the shore.

  Grim he waded seas of blood,

  Dealing death with baleful blows;

  Hewed off heads till none withstood,

  Round him piles of corses rose.

  It was her father chanting.

  She peeped out from under the blanket, and there he was, still sitting on the edge of his bed, when all the others had gone to sleep, mending some implement or other. No one stirred any longer, the living-room fast asleep; he alone was awake, alone was chanting, sitting there in his shirt, thickset and high-shouldered, with strong arms and tangled hair. His eyebrows were shaggy, steep and beetling like the crags in the mountain, but on his thick throat there was a soft place under the roots of his beard. She watched him awhile without his knowing: the strongest man in the world and the greatest poet, knew the answer to everything, understood all ballads, was afraid of nothing and nobody, fought all of them on a distant strand, independent and free, one against all.

  “Father,” she whispered from under the blanket, for she was convinced that Bernotus Borneyarkappi was he and no other and that she
simply must tell him. But he did not hear.

  “Father,” she whispered again, and did not know her own voice. But when it came to the point, she dared not say it; when he looked at her, a tremor passed through her, all of her, and she retreated beneath the blanket with loudly thumping heart. Maybe he would have slapped her face as he did in the Jomsviking Rhymes. She was lucky not to have told him.

  He went downstairs to see to the lambs before retiring. She counted his footsteps on the ladder, he hummed to the lambs, she followed everything attentively, he came humming up the stairs again, her heart was still thumping.

  Though words alone can never sway

  Your heart, my lady bright,

  Know that my songs shall be alway

  Of you and your delight.

  When she peeped out again he had put out the lamp. Night.

  THE SEA-COW

  IT was in the snow-lit brightness of one tranquil day early in March that there befell great events, never afterwards to be forgotten. Those who have experienced such a thing will know what it means. There was movement in the west, on the ridge, extensive, mysterious. The boys, who by now had also made the acquaintance of the Rhymes, maintained that it was a troop of berserks on their way to join battle. Here was no small relief in the monotony of mid-winter, when even a man with a stick is a phenomenon. Slowly the troop wound its way down into the valley. Both little Nonni and Asta Sollilja had climbed to the top of the snowdrift at the door. Even Grandma scrabbled her way up the eighteen snow-steps to the top and shaded her eyes with her hand. It was a cow.

  “Yes, it’s a cow all right,” cried the boys.

  Last to join the group was Bjartur himself, grey with hay-mould and foul of temper, there was no room for cattle here, he wasn’t going to have the hay taken from his sheep like this and thrown to cattle, nor had he any desire to take the stall away from his horse, to which he owed more than to any animal alive except the bitch, and hand it over to a strange cow—whereupon he disappeared and did not show himself again before a formal demand was made for his presence.