Independent People

by Halldor Laxness

  Long after the guest had started snoring, the children lay awake, the fragrance of the books still in their nostrils, savouring the glory of this new era which they knew had dawned upon their lives. But gradually their perceptions dissolved into a blissful confusion and glided imperceptibly into an elastic world, which may well be the most authentic of all worlds, though nothing seems half so irrational; especially when the animals’ necks stick out of the chimney-top and the mountain has become a beautiful Christian church with dark, creaking stairs leading all the way up to the tower. Her name was Asta Sollilja and now she proposed to go all the way up to the tower. At first she was terribly cautious and very much afraid, but since she had started climbing she would have to go on and on, higher and higher. The stairs kept on creaking and creaking. It was because she knew that her father was somewhere behind her that she was so very much afraid. Faster and faster she hurried; she must get to the top first. Finally she was terribly out of breath and terribly frightened, but it was so nice running up dark stairs all alone and climbing all the way up to the tower, all, all, all the way, no, no one would ever get to know. Then the stairway began to narrow and she bumped into the walls and they creaked louder and louder still, and then her fear grew stronger than her joy; oh, why had she had to come into this Christian church in the first place, instead of staying quietly outside where no one need fear anything, and now Father would soon catch her and would slap her face if he caught her. At last she glimpsed a chink of light above her, a door left ajar, the clock-tower, and a face was standing there, watching her approach. What face? The face of joy? No, no, no, it was another face altogether, it was the ugly old evil bookseller who had all the ugly old evil bastards; and it was he who was coming hobbling towards her on his stick in a brown shirt; where had this ugly old man got his brown shirt? So it was he who had been waiting for her with his book in his hand:

  “Here I can show you a book that is practically new and quite the latest fashion nowadays. Just take a look, little miss, don’t you think we’d like to read it?”

  She started up, bathed in sweat, her hands dripping, shaking in the grip of that uncontrollable shudder which is a characteristic feature of bad dreams and which, after spoiling a whole night’s sleep, can saturate every moment of the coming day with an apprehensive weariness of life. She heard the tail-end of her own terrified scream as she opened her eyes, jumped up in bed, gasped for breath. She heard her heart pounding like a sledgehammer falling on glowing iron. She passed a wet hand over her brow. No, no, no. There was no danger, only a bad dream. Not more than two yards away lay the guest who had come to bear them better times and to raise their lives to a higher plane; and she was going to make him pancakes in the morning so that he would feel better. Gradually her terror evaporated as she listened to him sleeping and wished him well. Yes, there’s a better time coming for all of us. And she lay down again.

  POETRY

  AND the light of learning began to shine.

  The distinctive features of the world’s civilization are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also the elephant and the country of Denmark, besides many other things. Yes, every day brought its new animal and its new country, its new kings and its new gods, its quota of those tough little figures which seem to have no significance, but are nevertheless endowed with a life and a value of their own and may be added together or subtracted one from another at will. And finally poetry, which is greater than any country; poetry with its bright palaces. Over all flies the soul, viewing the heavenly light, like an eagle in the vestibule of the winds.

  Out in the ewe-house in the mornings they often tried to find some answer to the riddle of why, after all the thoughtlessness that seemed to rule the world, there should come men who not only were acquainted with the content of books, but had actually seen with their own eyes the world that is described in print, and had, moreover, travelled it with their own foot. Not only had he seen cities and zoological gardens, he had also wandered in the woods where one finds happiness, or at least peace, and he knew the words that fit the locked compartments of the soul, like keys, and open them.

  While little Gvendur was content to meditate upon those animals which stand higher in the scale of honour than sheep, or to make an attempt to multiply the lambs by the ewes and subtract the boards in the roof from the planks in the floor, little Nonni thought endlessly of his countries, feeling that at last he had obtained valid proof of their actual existence and that he could therefore dismiss the theory that they were nothing but the idle chatter of kind-hearted people who wanted to comfort little children. And Asta Soliilja, it was she who swept on wings of poetry into those spheres which she had sensed as if in distant murmur one spring night last year when she was reading about the little girl who journeyed over the seven mountains; and the distant murmur had suddenly swelled to a song in her ears, and her soul found here for the first time its origin and its descent; happiness, fate, sorrow, she understood them all; and many other things. When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks: Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth? Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one’s pipe? No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Asta Soliilja.

  She had early had some instruction in the understanding of the complex language of the ballad poets, and this preliminary training stood her now in good stead. But there was this difference: the ballads were suggestive of barren lands, poor in vegetation, but rich in stones, whereas the new poetry was full of the blissful flowers of the spirit and a melancholy fragrance. The teacher read poetry in a manner altogether different from her fathers; instead of laying the main stress on the rhyme, and especially the internal rhyme, this man whispered his poems with a honeyed, fascinating eloquence, for he understood the secrets of the poets themselves, so that every inanimate object in the room acquired a secret, and if you passed your hand along the cold bed-boards, the wood would feel soft and warm, as if a living heart were beating within. He knew the words that she had tried to read in the clouds when she fell in love for the first time, but she had only been a little girl then, as she realized now, and it was only natural that she should not have understood the clouds, she who had looked there for something that did not even exist—He who had come to shoot on their land in those days, he knew no poems, he wouldn’t have understood poetry, the most precious thing in the life of man. The thought that even though Audur Jonsdottir had married him she would never hear a poem from his lips filled her with proud exultation. True, he had smiled, and smiled without smiling, but his eyes had lacked the twinkling brilliance of colour, his voice the confidential wiles of the man who knew poems and could whisper them in such a fashion that a tearful shiver would pass through her listening body; and dead objects would acquire souls.

  One would have thought that a young girl on a lonely croft would have been stirred most at hearing a poem that tells of virtue, or at least of sacrifice—of great souls who lived in self-denial or undertook some incredibly heroic task for the sake of some worthy object, the fatherland for instance, such as she herself had felt capable of that night on the paving last spring. But such was not the case, not altogether. The poems that touched her heart most, suffusing her with exalted emotion, so that she felt she could gather everything to her, were those which tell of the sorrow that wakes in the heart whose dreams have not been fulfilled, and of the beauty of that sorrow. The ship that in autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm; the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner’s fall—a
ll this was her poetry, all this she understood. And despite the fact that Colma’s song on the heath was nowhere rhymed, she had it by heart before she knew. Whereas one might have imagined that her favourite poetry would have dealt with love meeting love on the heath, she was no sooner in bed in the evenings than there sang in her heart lines telling of when the heath and love meet in the night, love and the heath, and the tears would soon be trickling down her cheeks, and she would feel that she was weeping not for Colma alone, and not for herself alone, but weeping with all the world in an ecstasy of love:

  Rise, O moon,

  From behind thy clouds!

  Stars of the night arise!

  Guiding light,

  Lead me to my love

  Where he rests in sleep alone.

  Soft awhile,

  Ye roaring winds!

  Soft, ye rushing streams!

  Let my song

  Resound on the hill of storms,

  Let my loved one hearken to me.

  And she would bury her face in the pillow to stifle the sound of her sobbing, for no one might discover that she was weeping because of Ossian, no one would ever think of blubbering as much as our Asta Sollilja. But why was she weeping over this poem? It was because she understood both love and the heath, like Ossian, for he who understands the heath understands love, and he who understands love understands the heath.

  And the hunter by the Mississippi. There was once a man. He was a hunter and must surely have travelled over all the world. It says in the poem that he was born in the lovely field of France—“There lived my noble parents.” Everything that is good and everything that is delightful vied in their effort to please him. In childhood he read flowers in the meadows by the Seine. Paris with its fascinating hubbub—there stood his cradle. He lived among loving brothers, and he had playmates, and the girls among them were so pretty, a thousand times prettier than Asta Sollilja:

  A dark-eyed maiden I remember

  And the love-born smile on lips so warm.

  And yet he did not find the happiness he had dreamed of, nor the peace he had so much desired, and she understood him, and loved him for that very reason, that he had found neither happiness nor peace; deep, deep inside her she loved him because he had fled. And now he sat on the wooded shores where the Mississippi rushed along:

  Where pads the wolf in forest shade

  And weary hart from hunter flees;

  Where slinking forth on murderous raid

  The dreaded panther threads the trees.

  She had always understood both poetry and other things in a way of her own. For example, she had gone to bed one night. And she was pretending to be asleep, as she always did as soon as she was in bed, but she was not asleep. She was waiting for the old grandmother to put out her candle. The moments passed. And then out of the corner of her eye she saw a man sitting up in bed, resting his chin on his hand. She surveyed the sharply hewn cheekbone, the shaggy brow above the dark, searching gaze which held at other moments the whole of poetry’s bewitching play of light and colour, and she saw also his throat bare down to the open neckband of his shirt; and he went on staring and he went on thinking, as in the poem:

  O’fer hill and dale and cold, cold sea

  I wandered far from childhood scene,

  But always peace eluded me

  Till in these lonely woods serene

  —for over his head the rotten boards of the clincher roof had become a rustling forest where deer and panthers roamed, and the Goa storm that was sweeping the snow into deeper and deeper drifts was the roar of the Mississippi in flood, and he who had fled from the lovely cities of the world was sitting here, running his eyes over his former life.

  The flower of ardent youth is faded now,

  And life grows sere, like leaves in wintry frost;

  The sable curl is flecked with age’s rime,

  The hard-won fame of former days is lost.

  No. It was neither heroes nor sacrifice nor yet virtues that she loved most; rather the poetry which spoke to her of dreams that were either fulfilled to no purpose or never fulfilled at all; of happiness that came as a visitor or did not come, of how it came and went, or of how it never came. She saw and understood this man, not in an objective way, but in her own way: in the lambent colours of poetry, with woods in the background, and penetrating everything, the roar of the world’s deepest and mightiest river.

  GOD

  AND now to tell of God.

  For two years or more she and the others had longed to make the acquaintance of God, to know where He was and what He was thinking and whether He ruled the world in actual fact.

  And now there were available on the croft two books, the Bible stories and the Catechism, which dealt exclusively with God, and there was likewise a teacher whom one would have expected to know all the principal features at least of this peculiar being who lives in exaltation far above all other beings. The story of how He created the world aroused their interest immediately, even though they received no answer to the question of why He had had to do it; but they found it difficult to understand sin, or the manner of its entry into the world, for it was a complete mystery to them why the woman should have had such a passionate desire for an apple when they had no idea of the seductive properties of apples and thought they were some sort of potatoes. But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood. When they began to question their teacher more closely about this riddle, he replied, perhaps not without a trace of irritation: “Well, I don’t vouch for it in any case.” It said in the Bible that God once came, attended by two angels, to visit a famous man abroad, but the narrative was in other respects extremely vague; what did God look like? “Oh, I expect He would have a beard,” replied the teacher without much conviction; he had been lying motionless on the bed for some time now, with his head pillowed in his hands, staring up at the roof in obvious preoccupation. Then it occurred to little Nonni to ask whether God had had any clothes on—or was He naked? “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” cried Asta Sollilja. Later He sent us His only begotten Son, that good man who told stories and performed miracles, but somehow or other the children associated it all with Olafur of Yztadale, whose interest in the incomprehensible had never earned him much respect, and both parables and miracles alike left the children as utterly unmoved as if they had been news from a country so remote that one had never even heard of it. Even little Nonni, whose love for countries was undeniable, did not wish to go there. And since, whenever they began to discuss this matter, the teacher always tried to change the subject, the children conceived involuntarily the idea that it was something rather improper. The crucifixion acted upon them as something unnaturally horrible, even though they had no idea of a cross; they associated it involuntarily with what had happened last Christmas, something that might not be mentioned, something that belongs only to the most frightful of dreams, something that makes one wake in a sweat at night, when one lies in an awkward position, or with a lump beneath one; and one looks at the window and hopes that some light will soon be showing there. Asta Sollilja closed the book with a shudder; she felt that it was all so horrible, and she hoped that her brother Nonni would not read about it until he was older, he was so sensitive. She laid the book on the shelf. They did not learn about the Resurrection or the Ascension of Jesus. God was never farther away from them than when they had read this book. Asta Sollilja had been greatly disappointed in God. Yet He did not entirely vanish from her sight until she began to read the Catechism. She was very sad and very pensive about the whole affair. Again and again she sought to wake Him up from death and to stammer forth some clumsy question addressed to her teacher. But it ended always in one more defeat for God.

  “Have you ever tried to pray to God?” she asked one day.

  For a good while h
e was reluctant to answer, but at long length it emerged that he had prayed to God. What for? Without looking up, and obviously much against his will, he told her in confidence that he had prayed to God that he might be allowed to keep his foot; he had lain in an infirmary. And then the foot was taken off.

  Asta Sollilja: “I think a man looks very nice with a foot like yours.”

  And God was finished for that day.

  The second time:

  “It says that God is infinitely good. Is He infinitely good too when someone is in trouble?”

  The teacher: “Surely.”

  Asta Sollilja: Then He can’t very well be infinitely happy.”

  He: I know that, my dear”—and suddenly losing his patience: ‘There’s not a word of it true. It’s utter rubbish. It’s meant for soft, neurotic people.”

  Asta Sollilja: “My father is hard.”

  “Yes,” said the teacher. “He’s a tough proposition.”

  And once more God had evaporated from the conversation.

  Third day: “I woke up early this morning, and as I opened my eyes I began to think about God, and I realized suddenly that He must exist. For how could anything exist if God didn’t exist?”

  After lengthy deliberation the teacher whispered: “Yes, it’s probable that something may exist. But we don’t know what it is.”

  Full stop.

  Fourth day: “Then why did God allow sin to enter the world?”

  At first the teacher seemed not to have heard this question; he lay for a good while staring blindly in front of him, as if in a trance, a thing that occurred more and more frequently every day now; then suddenly he sprang up with a startling abruptness, gazed intently at the girl with huge eyes, and repeated questioningly: “Sin?” Then he burst into a long fit of coughing, a deep, toneless, rattling cough; his face grew red and finally almost blue, the veins swelled in his neck, his eyes filled with tears. And when at last the fit was over, he dried his eyes and whispered breathlessly, “Sin—sin is God’s most precious gift.”