World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  As soon as Pétur Pálsson came to after his profound reflections beside the ruins, it was time to start thinking about the funeral.

  It was the first time for many years that it had proved possible to bring people to church in any numbers here in Sviðinsvík; actually no one had had any inclination for such luxuries since the great years of the Privy Councillor, when people went to church on the more important festivals in order to have a look at the Family. Now it was forgiveness and the nearness of the next world which drew people to the sacred place. Until now, God had been righteous, and the next world a kind of child’s toy, to soothe people who had had the misfortune of being robbed of their own world while they were still alive. The value of Pétur Pálsson the redeemer lay in the fact that he had compelled God to forgive us our debts and established the next world as a sort of station here on the estate.

  These people who were for sale—they stood there in their dilapidated churchyard one sun-white autumn day, about the time when the hoar-frost was drying on the withered grass. The menfolk roamed restlessly around in circles between the lych-gate and the church door, and had no tobacco. Half-dead women stood in embarrassed groups around neglected graves and wiped away yet another tear. Boys and girls looked around inquisitively, but did not quite dare to look one another in the face in the churchyard. The summer was past; there had been no work, at most perhaps one might have managed to scrape together enough hay for the bank’s cow which had now become Pétur Pálsson’s cow. A few had been allowed to cut peat on the moor and carry it home on their backs, but otherwise there was not much fuel, nor very much to cook for that matter. And soon it would be winter with snow hanging from the eaves and the incessant crying of sick children in the house; the days were becoming shorter and shorter. Was it any wonder that these people longed for some glimmer of light in their dungeon? With terror-stricken eyes, like helpless little children who have been thrashed, like dull-witted vagabonds who have been chased by dogs, like half-lost foreigners who have wrecked their ship on a sandy desert, these helpless people roamed around their churchyard one autumn Sunday in the hope of hearing even one word that would carry them forward through the darkness of the coming winter, the snowstorms and prolonged bad weather, over the living death that was their life. These were murdered people.

  Six veteran quarrymen walked bareheaded under the coffin, bent-shouldered and dejected, as if in the knowledge that the world’s crimes had been laid upon their shoulders, every single one, and they had to atone for them all. Behind the coffin walked the pastor in his cassock, with his family; next came Pétur Pálsson the manager and his wife, then órunn of Kambar with a red ribbon round her hair, peering about in bewilderment in the white sunshine and soon to set off for England; then the secretary and his wife and children, the doctor’s wife with her adolescent daughters, and then various members of the public who had attended the service at the manager’s house; many of them had come from distant parishes to be edified by this momentous religious ceremony.

  The men laid the coffin down on the grass while someone went to look for the key of the church. The pastor and the manager stopped beside the head of the coffin with solemn, pious faces; the last remnants of human characteristics had been brushed off them so thoroughly that there was not even a speck of dust left on the pastor’s nose.

  Then a woman detached herself from the cortege, walked over to the coffin, stopped at the foot facing the two holy gentlemen and cleared her throat slightly to call attention to herself. It was Hlaupa-Halla. The pastor opened one eye and looked at her, but the manager let nothing disturb him at his devotions.

  “Excuse me, may I ask a question?” said the woman meekly. “I don’t suppose I might be allowed to see what’s in the coffin?”

  “There’s nothing in the coffin that concerns you, Halla dear,” said the pastor.

  “I know that well,” said the woman. “My children were never buried in a coffin like that. When the life had been crushed out of them they were put into a tarred wooden box; yes, and what’s more, it often cost quarrels and rows to get even that. But it’s easy to see from this coffin that it wasn’t squeezed out of the parish.”

  Until that moment, Pétur Pálsson the manager had been completely lost to the world; he held his new hat in front of his paunch with bowed head and moved his thick lips in prayer now and again. But now he suddenly stopped praying, looked up, and said, “We don’t have to account to you for this coffin, my good woman; there are other and higher powers to whom we have to account for our deeds.”

  “Let’s not pay any more heed to things that don’t concern us, Halla dear,” said the pastor.

  “I thought perhaps it wasn’t asking too much to let the public see what the public is having to bury,” said the woman politely.

  “Luckily, your disposition is not entirely unknown to us, Halla dear,” said the pastor. “It has, you see, always left something to be desired.”

  “Really,” said the woman. “Since you know my disposition so well, Pastor Brandur, then there’s probably not much point in my trying to hide what I think. But I thought there was no need to dig up from the ground many centuries-old riffraff, incendiaries, murderers and thieves to say prayers over; I thought we had enough of them above the ground.”

  With these words she stormed away, while the holy gentlemen were left standing there with red faces.

  Then the coffin was carried into the church.

  27

  “My dearest beloved, whom I nevertheless scarcely dare to address as I do because you stand as high above me in faith in God’s mercy and redemption as the sun stands above the earth.

  “When I heard this summer that you had had to endure martyrdom for my sake, and evil people had driven you away on a stretcher over mountains and deserts because your light had shone upon me, then I said: God be merciful to me, a sinner, and give me health to lay down my life for Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated.

  “I haven’t seen your letter nor heard the hymn you composed in my honor, because both were torn up, but since the mighty heavenly Father hears even the prayers of this sinner, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, how much the more must he keep the Ljósvíkingur’s own poetry in his all-knowing heart!

  “All summer I have been looking for someone I could trust to write to you, because although I can read, particularly religious matter, I am very bad at writing because I was brought up beneath the feet of men and dogs that I would rather choose death than the humiliation of letting a great poet see anything so terrible, and now I have at last got to know a young pastor’s wife whom I dare trust with a secret.

  “I have always been looking for someone to love, like everyone else, but it’s now ten years since I began to turn to Jesus and pray to him to forgive my sins, for seldom has any person sinned as I have done, and that’s because I lay beneath the feet of men and dogs, as I said earlier, and couldn’t provide for myself because of ill health. I have never managed to rise above just earning my keep. I had often heard you spoken of as an example to all those in distress, and I had always wanted so much to see you and hear something from your own lips, but when I saw you for the first time on our wedding day this spring, I understood then what it was to have found what one no longer dared to look for. The moment you spoke your first words to me I felt I was your mother. Jesus Christ, oh, you who laid down your life for me, give me strength to lay down my life for him! Help me to come to him and I shall never, never forsake him again.

  “Since you love me, I don’t care in the least how small our hovel is. I can do a great deal of work. I am accustomed both to baiting hooks and mending nets and everything else to do with fish; yes, and I’ve even been out fishing, what’s more. I can also do everything connected with sheep and cattle and even horses. I can do all manner of washing, and I also know all about working wool, even spinning yarn, for that matter, although unfortunately I have seldom had the opportunity to do it. I can also do all the jobs involved in haymaking, and have spent many a summer
at the scythe. I have also had to work at land reclamation, both cutting turf, digging trenches and carrying stones for drainage. All these tasks I have carried out under constant threat of terrible bouts of illness and with a heavy burden of sin in my heart, but from now on I shall do everything that’s required with a glad smile so that you can compose immortal hymns about God’s mercy and the redemption of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I have now given in my notice here at Gil, so you can expect me at the end of the harvest season; I am going to try to come to you over the mountains directly, before the weather gets worse.”

  A turbulent sea, yellow moors, rain showers billowing over the withered grass, pastures bitten down to the roots, not a single flower, two ravens. He roamed about in the rain, and the letter burned in his hand like a punishment. The brook from springtime now poured past, muddy from the autumn rains, and the little lamb field from springtime was cropped close by cattle; no hay had been cut for the stack, but someone had torn off the roof of the shed and taken away the timbers, and only the roofless walls remained standing. He tried to find shelter there from the stormy squalls of autumn.

  Once upon a time there was a destitute poet in a corner and although he was not considered to be a human being, he was sometimes asked to compose a poem when much was at stake, for instance if someone wanted to conquer an impregnable heart. He himself was not allowed to come near the festivities he had instigated with his poems; someone delivered his poem to his beloved and conquered her heart with it completely and utterly; but when the invitations went out for the wedding no one remembered this living corpse in the corner under the sloping ceiling. And when other people’s wedding celebrations were at their height, another soul had appeared through the hatch at last, someone as unhappy as he himself, and they had found one another. “Poor blessed birds”—and she had sat down on the edge of his bed. A few days later he rose from the dead, a new man to a new life. A straw is of great value in sea peril, but of little value on dry land—and she was such a straw. Yes, it was impossible to deny that he had composed a hymn in her honor; he had written her a letter of proposal; yes, he had even married her, what’s more, in a supernatural way, and for that matter she referred to her wedding day as if it were an accepted fact. But nonetheless he had forgotten her as swiftly as he had married her. Is it then perhaps the intention that one should love all the women one marries? No, thank you, he thought. All summer he had not even remembered she existed. One sees a particular woman in a particular place at a particular time. One loves her above all because of the place and the time, because a woman in the first instance is a place and a time. It is like a surf that rages over the beach one day and even blots out the stars in the vault of heaven. Next day it is calm. The waves throw themselves ashore with less and less force, at longer and longer intervals, until finally the sea is stilled and the stars mirror themselves again in the flat calm.

  This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.

  If the poetess had been willing to kiss me that night, she would have saved me, he thought. She would have left in my heart a seed that would have survived the winter, and this seed would have sprouted in a new spring and become the loveliest flower on earth.

  But she had not been willing to kiss him. Her eyes were the same unresolved riddle in the darkness of autumn as in the day-bright nights of spring. But even though she had no soul, like the mermaid about which Jónas Hallgrímsson wrote somewhere, he still felt that she alone could protect him from the autumn sweetheart who was coming to him over the mountains with the stormy weather.

  28

  He had had his morning coffee in the loft early that morning and everything had been as usual—the woman at her morning tasks, the husband still in bed. When he came back at dusk, hungry and wet from having roamed around in the open all day, the loft was empty of people, all the couple’s household belongings gone. He looked round the kitchen that had been the living room of the home, and although the furnishings had never been extensive and certainly never luxurious, suddenly it was as if a whole fortune had been removed. No plates in the rack, the kettle gone from the stove, the ladle vanished from the wall, the woman’s knitting gone, likewise the cat, the friendly blue-checked curtains removed from the window. The little bench at the window was gone, too, where the poet had sat for his meals, where he had also been allowed to sit on Sundays, and the sun had shone in and white gulls had hovered over the blue fjord. He had also sat there in late summer when the nights had become longer and the moon had lent its reflection to the sea. The atmosphere of tranquil security and culture which creates a home and is above all worldly wealth had reigned there in that room that morning. When he came there tonight it was like any old closet in the loft of an outhouse. Yet the stove was still warm. It was like the corpse of a dead room.

  Ólafur Kárason was told that at noon that day the new owner of the Sviðinsvík estate, Pétur Pálsson the manager, had summoned the couple into his presence and dismissed them. The former owner who had employed them was bankrupt and sequestered, and his documents burnt. The new owner could not allow himself the luxury of having unreliable drunkards in his service in these difficult times, much less a poetess who not only refused to support the cultural efforts of the place but was also suspected of corrupting young men and even conspiring against her employer and benefactor. The couple had collected their things in haste and put out to sea in a small boat in bad weather, with one companion.

  Everything comes and goes in succession, there is no point in praying for anything, nor in begging to be saved from anything; that was how the summer passed away with everything it had given to the poet Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. In the end there was nothing left; perhaps they had even been caught by a squall and their boat had capsized. He was left standing alone on the beach; and it was autumn.

  That night he crawled into the barn and bedded down in the warm hay as on previous nights. His clothes gradually dried on him while he was thinking about the impasse his life had reached. When he eventually fell asleep he dreamed that he found himself in dire straits on a precipice. He hauled himself along narrow ledges in a vain search for a path, the cliff beetled out above him, the abyss yawned below. Again and again he woke up gasping for breath and felt he was falling. Once he thought it was day and crawled out to look at the sky, but it was pitch-dark and still raining. His disquiet and anxiety had increased rather than diminished with sleep. He wandered off to try to calm himself down, but there was no one about. It rained and rained, and he sought shelter beside a wall.

  At last it began to lighten. Other people got up, each in their own homes, and started to drink their hot coffee-water or milk-blend, or perhaps eat bread, and some, even, to have biscuits. Now when he no longer had any hope of coffee, it dawned upon him who it was who had kept him alive that summer. In fact he had never thought about the woman in the loft from this point of view before; in his eyes she had above all been the poetess, and he had never dared to associate her with the more primitive needs of human life. Now he realized that it was precisely these primitive needs of his that she had looked after at the same time as she was refusing to attend to his higher desires; yes, she had even burnt her poems rather than let him hear them.

  She had seen to his needs in such a natural and simple way that he had not noticed it. She gave him an eiderdown and bed sheets and a pillow and a blanket. Then she gave him an alarm clock so that he would not oversleep. She had given him a change of clothing, inner and outer, socks, shoes, a cap, even a handkerchief. His dirty clothes had vanished without his noticing and come back clean. If there was a hole in his socks, it had been darned before he knew it; if there was a hole in his shoes, it was patched; if his hair got t
oo long, she cut it for him. At her table he ate better than he had ever known before, milk, whey, cream, cheese, butter, sugar, fresh fish, potatoes, flatbread, meat, sugared pancakes on Sundays, sometimes doughnuts. Yes, she had even given him paper and writing utensils with which to compose his immortal poems for the fire, and to write his life story. It was she who had held a summer-long banquet for him in her taciturn, tranquil way. She inhabits a higher sphere, he had thought; but the reason why she was raised above the humdrum plane was simply that she did not shrink from any humdrum work but had it all under control without difficulty—a poet who dwelt in the high halls of beauty at the same time as her hand was automatically writing down the stupid, monotonous letters in the alphabet of human speech.

  At breakfast, when he had not tasted food for twenty-four hours, he plucked up courage and went to see Pétur Pálsson the manager. There was a new doorkeeper now and it was no longer as easy to reach the manager as it had sometimes been before—but then the estate no longer owned him any more, he owned the estate. The woman who came to the door seemed to have spent all her life as a doorkeeper for Privy Councillors. She told the visitor to wait until the manager was ready to receive him; then closed the door in his face. He tried to press himself as hard as possible against the outer door to take advantage of the shelter of the eaves. There was a smell of coffee from inside the house. His fingers were numb with cold. Finally he plucked up courage and knocked again. The same woman came to the door and looked at him as if she had never seen him before.