“What’s wrong, Jósep?” he asked finally.
The old man answered through his sobs (he still had not recovered sufficiently to clean up his clothes): “I was struck,” he said. “I was pushed.”
A younger child would have said of other children, “They hit me; they pushed me,” and would have named names. But after having been a luckless poet, after having lived forty years on a croft and lost seven children to the earth or to the sea, he only said, “I was struck; I was pushed.” He did not accuse anyone. The power that governed his life was impersonal.
Yes, he had been struck down into the mud in front of the barn, this fastidious man, this elderly poet. The boy pulled the bedclothes up over his head and trembled a little. He at once realized in his heart that he did not possess the kind of strength required to console an old man. One can commit misdeeds against a child and justify them in the eyes of oneself and God and the world, for life itself justifies everything and reconciles youth to everything; but nothing can make up for all the wrongs that have been committed against old people in Iceland. When the boy looked out from under the bedclothes again the old man had gone; he had only come to fetch his kerchief.
That evening the boy heard the old man’s departure being discussed up in the loft. He heard the brothers over and over again petulantly mentioning the nether regions. The housewife, Kamarilla, said that they might just as well have led out their best cow and drowned her in the deepest part of the ocean as drive away the only person on the farm who brought any appreciable amount of money into the house. Magnína was furious and snorted and sniffed in turn, until she said aloud that there would have been a lot more sense in driving away some people who were less useful guests in the larder than the old man had been. Some people, she said. The conversation quickly reached the level which was customary in that place.
Next morning the mountains were white all the way down to the sea; a bitterly cold storm was blowing, with heavy snow showers. That day the parish officer came on a visit. He brought Jósep with him, mounted on a pony he was leading by a halter. The old man had taken refuge with the parish officer the night before and asked to be transferred to another farm; but the parish officer unfortunately could not possibly think of any better place than the one where he had already been deposited. He invited his elderly visitor to stay overnight, then set him on a horse the following morning and led him to this proper place. The housewife, Kamarilla, had a drop of brennivín.* The parish officer needed capable men for his boat that winter. Magnína had a wash and combed her hair, in order to wait upon the visitor. There were cheerful sounds of welcome from the room below.
But the old man dragged himself upstairs to the loft and lay down on his bed. He had arrived at the parish officer’s house the previous day hot from his flight; but there was little warmth in the blankets of the authorities, and he had caught a chill. If anyone thought it odd that the parish officer should have led the old man’s horse on a halter, it was simply because the old man had been trembling so violently that he was unable to hold the reins himself. The widow Karítas had to be summoned to help him off with his canvas clothes. Then he pulled the bedclothes up and turned his face to the wall.
Old people are very little trouble when they are ill. They die without any fuss. In reality there is no creature on earth so alone as an old man. There is no point in fussing around old men who are ill, or trying to help them; and in this respect old men are like animals—they die as helpless as animals. This man, this fastidious old man who owned a few books in a kerchief and seven children in the earth or in the sea, and who had wanted to be a poet—how lonely and helpless he was when he died! Nothing at all was done for him in the last days of his life. And yet his death was considered a loss, for no other creature on that farm provided as much money as he had done; he had provided more than a hundred krónur a year in hard cash.
Some people might think that everything happened in storybook fashion, and that the old man died at once; but that was not what happened at all. He did not die at once, but lingered on for many days, even though he did not quote poetry and intricate kennings very much, under the circumstances. But how incredibly still he lay during those days before he died! And how incredibly little was done for him during those days before he died! Nothing at all, except that Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík propped himself up in bed every now and again and had a look at him.
Once or twice the old man, too, tried to sit up in bed and say something in his delirium. Usually he would be asking whether Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík would not care to read aloud a small section of his History of the Chinese or else a brief obituary, because the weather was so good.
“Wouldn’t you like a sip of cold water, Jósep?” asked Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík.
A long time later, the old man tried to lift his head again and said, “Listen, Guðmundur, I can look after the barn for you so that you don’t have to interrupt your work on the History of the Seven Sages.”
“You should be thinking about your late wife and children, dear, instead of talking about that devil Guðmundur who never tried to earn a living for himself or others,” said the housewife, Kamarilla.
But the old man probably reckoned that the people the housewife had mentioned could take care of themselves. He was with Guðmundur now, and he fell back against the pillow.
Soon it was Sunday. Old Jósep had lain with scarcely a movement for two days without saying anything worthy of note. Kamarilla brought out the Book of Sermons and read the Sunday lesson. “And it came to pass that Jesus said unto his disciples. . . .” Then the lesson came to an end. But when the reading was over and the last psalm had been sung, old Jósep made one more attempt to sit up in bed. His expression now was that of the dying, transfigured and bright, for the sun of another world was rising for him; his tongue, which had been fettered in his mouth for the last few days, was freed again, and his blurred speech was clear and coherent once more.
“Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík is a great poet,” he said. That was all he said. These were his last words. Soon he was dead. Kamarilla the housewife stood beside the bed and watched the man dying. He had said his last words. “Yes,” said Kamarilla, “we shall all have to say our last words some day.” She closed his eyes at once. The weather outside was fine; there was no rain. She wiped one eye with the corner of her apron, for appearance’s sake.
So now Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík had death as a companion in the next bed. There would come moments when this young invalid would have a horror of death, but now he was impressed at how quiet a visitor he was, how natural and straightforward. In reality it seemed as if nothing had actually occurred, it had all happened so politely. Old Jósep’s last words continued to echo through the boy’s mind: Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík. So distinguished was this visitor, Death, that when he approached, people involuntarily blurted out the name they held dearest. For the rest of his life the boy could see in his mind’s eye the old man dying and Kamarilla standing by his bedside, and the name Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík, so hated and so loved, sounding in the air around them. Such has been the conflict over Icelandic poets since time immemorial: some people damned them all their lives, others died with their names on their lips.
But that night the boy could not sleep. It was autumn, and he could hear the storm raging outside. In the bed opposite him lay a corpse. Yes, in his childhood that man, too, had heard the Revelation of the Deity. His whole mind had been directed toward one single harmony. When he was a child, he had lain in a green hollow in springtime and called out to The One. He had been ill, but later he had got better—for a time. Then he had built himself a cottage and had begotten seven children by his wife, but they all had vanished into the earth or the sea before he went on the parish again. No, nothing had ever happened to him; anyone who imagined that something had happened to him must be a bit lacking. Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík had been his life. Now he was a corpse. What— who was a corpse?
The
boy sat bolt upright in bed, terror-stricken, in the middle of the night, because he thought someone was whispering, “Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík is a corpse.” In other words he felt that it was he himself who lay dead at last, on the bed opposite, after this purposeless life of his, with all its dreams unfulfilled. It was so real, so vivid, that he felt compelled to deny it aloud: “My God, my God, no, no, no!” he cried aloud, over and over again in the middle of the night. Someone at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep, and the boy cowered down under the bedclothes with his heart beating furiously. He called upon God hundreds of times because he thought it so terrible to have been struck and pushed into the mud in his old age and to be dead at last without having become a poet. Gradually he became less agitated.
No, he was not dead. “I shall get well,” he said to himself. “I shall. Some day. Arise,” he thought. “Become a great poet.” He tried to forget this autumn night, looking forward instead to the day when he would arise. One morning he would wake up early. That morning he would suddenly have recovered his health. He would get dressed as if the past were over, and walk carefree out into the spring. There would be this strong, tranquil clarity over land and sea, this glossy sheen on the ocean, velvet-smooth clouds off the coast, the uninterrupted sound of birdsong, a thrush up on the hillside. The flowers would be blossoming in the homefield. And no one would be up and about except him, so unsullied was this morning; no one had set foot in the dew of this morning, no one; no one had seen this morning except him. Glorious vistas opened their arms to him alone; and he walked smiling towards the beauty of this day.
Yes, one spring morning he would wake up early.
10
Some people from another district who had got themselves ferried over the fjord brought a letter and a small parcel for the moribund soul who lay yearning in the corner under the sloping ceiling. “My dear son . . .” It was a letter from his father, writing to him from a distant fjord. So after all it was his father who remembered him even though he had once deserted his mother. His father told him to be of good heart. Unfortunately, his father said, he could not come to see him, but he said he was asking God to be with him. His father said he was in great difficulties himself, from poverty and ill health, and that he was in receipt of parish support himself, but he said that God was with him. That was why he was thinking about his son. On the other hand his mother was now an important person at Aðalfjörður and did not remember him at all, and the boy was angry with his mother and wished he could have some other mother, sometime; it could still make him weep to think that his very own mother should have sent him away in a sack in the middle of winter.
In the parcel there were three books. One was a book of poems by his father, called New Poetics, a little book, all in ballad form. There were poems about skippers, congratulatory odes to merchants and pastors, verses on tobacco and the weather, as well as a narrative poem about a remarkable and unusual drunken brawl that took place in Aðalfjörður some years back in which one man lost his front teeth, and so on. The second book was the Núma Ballads by Sigurður Breiðfjörð, printed in the old Gothic lettering.* And finally there was a notebook with a hundred blank pages, a penholder, three pen nibs, and a little bottle of ink.
At first glance, the writing materials were to him the most precious of these gifts. With them he was at last given the long-desired opportunity of becoming an intellectual and making his words immortal. Thereafter, when he himself was dead, he imagined that his poems would be published in some mysterious way, and the nation would read them for comfort in adversity, as it had read the poems of other poets before him; it was his highest wish that his poems could help those as unfortunate as himself to have patience to endure. They would say, “He has bequeathed to us sublime psalms with kennings, so that we could find the spirit.” Perhaps even his mother would then begin to feel fond of him, although it would be too late then.
It was not until he began leafing through the Núma Ballads that he began to feel doubt about the value of his own unwritten books. Acquaintaince with Sigurður Breiðfjörð’s poetry brought a new dawn of experience, brighter than any that had been before. The artificial vocabulary of the kennings in the Ordeals of Johánna and the other masterpieces by Pastor Snorri of Húsafell, which the late Jósep had liked best, at once seemed poverty-stricken and dreary now, compared with Sigurður Breiðfjörð’s pure Eddaic style and his clearly comprehensible subject matter, and above all that enchanting gift of expression that roused in the heart an incurable awareness of beauty and sorrow. Previously he had thought that all poets were glorious and that all poetry was of equal worth provided that it dealt chiefly with heroic exploits, or especially with Jesus Christ’s feats of redemption, in either a sufficiently intricate or a sufficiently religious way. “The motherland where men were born”—now he discovered in a flash that there were differences between poets. And wherein did this difference lie? Mainly in the fact that other poets seemed to have only the vaguest notion about the way that leads to the heart, whereas Sigurður Breiðfjörð followed this mysterious path quite instinctively— but without leaving behind him any signposts for other poets to follow; yes, he found his way into every heart and touched it with beauty and sorrow.
When there was no one else in the loft, the boy would sit up hastily, bring out the Núma Ballads, from under his pillow, and swallow a few verses, forgetting for the moment all his sufferings. If he heard someone on the stairs, he would hastily thrust the book under the pillow and lie back again. But the lovely lines did not fade in his mind even though someone arrived; they continued to echo and seethe there. Toward the end of winter he knew all the poems by heart, and Sigurður Breiðfjörð reigned supreme over his soul and was his refuge in all his sufferings. And so it came about that on the first sunny days of February the poet himself stepped down from the little sunbeam on the ceiling, as if from a heavenly golden chariot, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, and laid his gentle master’s hand on the pain-racked head of Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík and said, “You are the light of the world.” It was one of those dreams that make the dreamer a happy man, ready to bear with a happy heart anything that might happen to him. Tirelessly the boy thought about the poet and his golden chariot whenever he was in distress; such can be the therapeutic effect of one single dream. One day in the dark of winter, in the middle of this dreary world which was so hostile to a sensitive heart, the great poet himself had come to him in his golden chariot and had baptized him into the light:
Beaten, bruised, in fetters bound,
In darkness when in bed I lie,
To me o’er the sunlit sound
Comes Sigurður Breiðfjörð from the sky.
In his eyes a smile I see
Gleam from his chariot of gold,
The smile which once, from sorrow free,
I sang to my love of old.
In the darkness of the barn at night
I hear his voice, I see his eyes;
He summons me toward the light,
The golden chambers of the skies.
11
When the parish pauper started writing out his own poetry in a book on Sundays, it was hardly surprising that the members of the family began to look at him askance.
“He’s healthy enough for that sort of rubbish, the damned malingerer,” said the elder brother, Jónas.
“Oh, you never know, perhaps our little friend’s book might just happen to get torn to pieces one day,” said Júst.
But when they looked at him writing, their irritation was mingled with fear, as when a dog eyes a cat. Sometimes the boy felt that the dread with which the written word filled them was even stronger than the hatred they felt for mankind. And now, as ill luck would have it, a scrap of paper with the poem about Sigurður Breiðfjörð on it was blown by a draft down the stairs and fell into the family’s hands.
“Never in my whole life have I ever seen or heard such filth!” said the housewife, Kamarilla. “Nor did I ever dream that I had re
ared such a viper at my breast, who dares to accuse us of beating him and maltreating him and says he is made to sleep in the barn—yes, and other lies of this sort that I and the rest of us here will be quick to refute with witnesses and oaths if it’s your intention to let other people see these scraps of paper. But what you say about us is as nothing to the way you blaspheme about God, and you’d better know now, if you didn’t know it before, that I shall not suffer blasphemy to go unpunished in my house which the Lord has blessed for so long. And I must say that never in my whole life have I heard such depraved ideas in a young rascal, uttering the name of Sigurður Breiðfjörð in the same breath as that of our Father, for if there was ever a drunkard and lecher and dishonest rogue in Iceland it was him—not content with being sentenced to twenty-seven strokes of the birch for lechery, he even sold his own wife to a Dane in the Vestmannaeyjar Islands for a dog! And how did he end up? Little wonder that he himself died like a dog in Reykjavík and was buried there like a dog, unnoticed and unmourned.”
Ólafur Kárason, on the other hand, was convinced that this shocking tale was told not so much to let the truth be known as from a desire to make the listener a better person, for he had his own unshakable religious experience as proof that Sigurður Breiðfjörð had come to him in a golden chariot from the heavens. But what distressed him far more, not unnaturally, was the fact that he was given nothing to eat that evening. Instead, Magnína found cause to make several visits to the loft, where she huffed and snorted as if there were a bad smell in the room, and cursed the abomination and lechery that went on among some people and particularly among weaklings and wretches who could not even go to the privy without help. And when he eventually plucked up courage and remarked that someone had forgotten to bring him his supper that evening, she said, “You can just let your sweetheart in the golden chariot bring you your supper. Why should I bother myself with that? I see nothing to smile about.”
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