The poet listened not entirely absentmindedly to this story, which in Örn Úlfar’s mouth was long, colorful and dramatic, told with much embroidery and innumerable digressions—definitions, deductions and conclusions—which were totally alien to the poet’s empirical and objective way of thinking. The visitor’s impassioned story, told in a temperate, almost whispering, voice across the poet’s dying child, gave a human content to the chilly solo of the cold night and sustained the poet through that jungle of waking nightmares which otherwise this lonely night would have brought while the sweetest light of his life was being extinguished. What his friend actually said did not matter all that much—the poet was deeply grateful that his voice should be there under his roof on this particular night. When the visitor had been talking far into the night, with the poet gazing into the blue and listening, the poet said: “I am so grateful to the Almighty for letting me hear a noble-minded person talking, tonight of all nights, and letting me forget that man is a creature of dust.”
Örn Úlfar looked sharply at his friend with renewed attention and replied in a different register: “A normal person is noble-minded, but I am not. And man isn’t a creature of dust.”
“You always belittle yourself, Úlfar—that’s a characteristic of good people. They feel they never do anything for anyone. Love for others is as much a part of their natural life processes as eating and drinking.”
Örn Úlfar sat thinking for a long time without acknowledging the handsome compliment he had been paid by his friend. And when he eventually replied, it was quite out of keeping with the dispassionate, hesitant stillness of the night: “I don’t believe in love,” he said. “I don’t even know what love is.”
“Love?” said the poet, a little unsure of himself at having to define such a commonplace thing without warning, and repeated the word in embarrassment: “Love, that’s feeling for others—as I feel for my child when the waves of suffering break over her.”
“Man has only one characteristic that equals the most commendable qualities of animals, one mark of nobility above the gods; he chooses justice,” said Örn Úlfar. “He who doesn’t choose justice isn’t human. I have little fondness for that pity which the coward calls love, Ljósvíkingur. What is love? If a loving person sees someone’s eye being gouged out, he howls as if his own eye were being gouged out. On the other hand he isn’t moved at all if he sees powerful liars utterly rob a whole people of their sight and thereby their good sense as well. If a loving man sees a dog’s tail being trodden on, he suffers as if he himself had a tail; on the other hand, it doesn’t touch any string in his heart if he looks upon demented criminals trampling half of mankind into the dirt.”
“But because of this pity for mankind, God sent his only begotten Son to suffer on the Cross—don’t you then see anything magnificent in that ancient story, Örn?”
“Yes,” said Örn Úlfar, “that pity for mankind should have caused the death of the god.”
“Don’t you think it right, then, that I should feel pity for this little child who lies here at death’s door between us?” asked the poet.
“It is justice, not love, that will one day give life to the children of the future,” said Örn Úlfar. “The battle for justice is the one thing which gives human life rational meaning.”
“Örn,” said the poet, “hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s possible to fight for justice until there’s no one left alive on earth? ‘Though the world should fall, justice shall conquer,’ says an old proverb. I can’t imagine any proverb more suitable as a motto for lunatics. If the battle for justice calls forth Armageddon, Örn—what then?”
“You’re quite right; the battle for justice will call forth Armageddon,” said the visitor.
“Justice is a cold virtue,” said the poet, “and if that alone is victorious, there will be little left to live for in the world. Man lives first and foremost by his own imperfection and for it.”
“Man lives by his own perfection and for it,” said Örn Úlfar.
“You cannot deny, Örn, that man is by nature indigent,” said the poet.
“Man is by nature rich,” said the visitor.
“Look at that little child lying there between us . . .”
Örn Úlfar did not look at the child, but replied at once: “There is nothing so inevitable and natural as dying. Death should be as welcome to man as everything else that comes at the right time. A normal person isn’t afraid of death, either. Christian cynics who maintain that man is sinful have used death to frighten him with Hell; that is the propaganda of misanthropy. You said just now that man was a creature of dust, but that, too, is a Christian vulgarity, a Christian superstition, a depraved, perverted attitude. Man is first and foremost the being that has raised himself above the dust. Burying people in the earth isn’t hallowed by someone believing that man is related to earth, but because those who bury people despise man and equate him with the basest thing they know. Physically, man is mainly water; although twenty per cent of him is a compound of other earthly substances, he is in a certain sense a water-being; but his vitality depends primarily on air. But in the first and last instance, man is a fire-being. He is the being which stole fire from the gods, and whatever he is, he is because of fire.”
Outside the night wind whispered at the eaves and doorways, the intended’s light snoring was a voice from another sphere, the child slumbered on in her deep coma and the poet bent over her bed, his thick red-gold hair flowing over his brow and cheeks. And when he looked with tired eyes at his friend sitting on the other side of the sickbed, he felt as if Örn were talking to him from an infinite distance, the gap between them mystical and unbelievable, beyond measurement, unrelated to exterior proportions, and yet the two of them were an indispensable condition for one another, two poles. The poet said: “Tonight when I listen to our voices in this strange calm which is touched with the presence of death, even though the breeze is rustling so innocently at the door and the roof, I feel as if we were two gods on the clouds of heaven, with mankind dying between us.”
Then the poet suddenly noticed that the little girl had opened her eyes and was looking at him. She was awake. There was life and health in her face again, her lips moved, he felt she was going to say something to him. He bent down over her and kissed her once again on the brow.
“Daddy,” she suddenly said aloud in a clear voice which went through the house like a ray of sunshine and summoned everything to life and lit up the shadows of night after the long whispered conversation of the two friends, the toneless susurration of the wind. “Daddy and little Maggie will go down to the beach . . .”
“Soon the spring sun will be shining through the window, my darling, ” said her father. “And then we’ll get up early one morning and go down to the beach to look for shells: broad cockleshells, and narrow mussels, and fine pink scallops, perhaps even sea snails.”
Then she smiled at her father in deep joy and said nothing more, because now everything was complete and perfect. How rich she was, how profoundly happy to have him still and to know he was beside her, loving and wonderful, to feel his soft, kind hand on her brow and his dear eyes shining upon her; and to have this wonderful journey to look forward to with him one sun-bright morning. Her eyes grew heavy again, certainly, but the smile never left her lips any more. Then there was silence for a long time. Örn Úlfar sat motionless on the other side of the bed and gazed into the distance without expression as if none of this concerned him at all; or as if it concerned him too much for him to want to see it. A little later a few spasms went through the child’s body once again; and then nothing more. The poet took his hand from her brow. Her eyes were only half-closed, and the smile was still on her lips. The poet looked at her and her smile for a while and whispered to himself over and over again, nodding his head a little as if in agreement: “I bid him welcome, I have always known he is a good friend.”
Then he closed her eyes with his slender poet’s fingers.
13
The pastor saw many obstacles to burying a child for the poet under these circumstances; it was out of the question to lend him money for a coffin—it required more than a little impertinence to ask such a thing of a poor servant of the Lord on top of everything else. These were difficult times; there was civil war in the air; and the dust gathered by the pound on the pastor’s nose, as well as all the fluff on his sleeve. He had suffered a great sorrow, in that a large plaid blanket he had placed at the bottom of his silage-pit last autumn, to save pressing and perhaps even cutting off the nap, was found missing that winter when all the hay in the pit had been used up.
“The people no longer walk in Christ,” said the pastor.
When the poet pressed him further, the pastor said bluntly that his conscience as a pastor would no longer allow him to carry out his clerical duties unless he had some guarantee that he would be paid; pastors had to live no less than poets and he was not obliged to bury anyone unless the funeral fee was paid in advance—let alone provide the coffin. The poet looked at the pastor with deep, serious eyes, and asked: “What would Christ have done in your shoes, Pastor Brandur?”
The pastor blew a pound of fluff off his arm and said sharply, “I won’t have that sort of talk in my house! How dare you prattle about God here, my man? I have good reason to believe that you have no faith in God. Those who talk like you have no faith in God.”
But the poet had not the courage to quarrel with the rural dean about God: “I’m afraid I don’t know who has more faith in the other, I in God or God in me,” he said. “But one thing is certain—relations between Him and me have never been other than good. But as regards my worldly difficulties, I feel I have to turn to men rather than to Him.”
“Yes,” said the pastor, “I hear the tone, and I recognize it. It’s the tone of the Russians, that awful, terrible tone. Have no faith in God but demand everything from men; that’s their watchword. Respect for the purses of those who do something for industry simply doesn’t exist. But to compose chronicles about sheep stealers and men who maltreated their wives and were louse-ridden into the bargain, and all sorts of riffraff who never existed here on this estate—that kind of thing calls itself modern literature and expects to be admired! Anything goes if it serves to disgrace the village as much as possible and demean its reputation elsewhere!”
“Really,” said the poet. “Well, I think I’d better be pressing on. My heartfelt thanks and apologies.”
When the pastor saw that the poet was truly humble he softened a little and said, as he saw him to the door: “The only thing that occurs to me, since everything else has failed, is old Jón the snuffmaker on the French site. He’s a splendid and honorable man; the one man, apart from our manager, who has shown how far one can get in life if one makes a practice of never making demands on others. For nearly forty years he has chopped snuff for God and man from six o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night. His reward was that when the Frenchmen left the estate they gave him that large site farther out, along the bay, for having looked after their equipment while they were stationed here. And two years later he sold the land to the Privy Councillor for a fortune. Such men are a model for other people and uphold the good name of the village, and these are the kind of people one should write books and compose poetry about, not dishonest scum and naked vagabonds. It’s about men like our old Jón that the Lord has said, ‘Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.’ ”
The plutocrat allowed himself only one luxury, and that was pitch. He tarred his shack every year while other houses were allowed to become discolored from weathering. Inside there was a stink of lamp smoke and oil, sour snuff and ammonia. The snuffmaker was sitting on his bed under the small window; he was a grimy, gray-bearded man with incipient cataracts in his eyes, dressed in rags, and he was shredding a coil of tobacco with blue, bony hands knotted with veins. At the head of the bed there was a blue coffee pot on an oil stove, and in front of him a four-legged tobacco-cutting table. The plutocrat spat on the floor. Then he reached up to a shelf above him where the tobacco-jar stood, and asked:
“D’you want twenty-five aurar or fifty aurar worth?”
“I’m afraid I don’t take snuff,” said the poet.
“Eh?” said the plutocrat.
The poet repeated his apology.
“Who are you?” asked the plutocrat in surprise.
The poet said who he was.
“No one gets anything for nothing here,” said the tobacco king.
“I’m just paying you a call because the pastor has spoken to me so often about you.”
“The pastor?” said old Jón the snuffmaker, and began to be wary. “Tell him that the church will come when I’m dead, and not before. I want to be left in peace while I’m alive. I don’t want any fuss. It’s becoming impossible to stay here for all the whining and pestering. I’ve never had anything for nothing.”
“Oh, I had no intention of pestering you for anything,” said the poet, “but it occurred to me that you would have many stories to tell, like so many elderly men, and I would very much enjoy hearing a part of your life story some time. Perhaps I could even write something down for you, if you thought it worth preserving for posterity.”
“No,” said the old man, “I don’t want to have anything written up. Everything that needs to be written up has been written already, and that was done by the late Snorri Sturluson. I have my genealogical tree and that’s enough for me. I am a direct descendant from the late King Haraldur hilditönn (War-tooth).* These modern people in this country nowadays, they’re nothing but dishonest rogues and idlers. In my heyday I dealt with Frenchmen. Tell the pastor they won’t get a church from me until I’m dead.”
“But you must have some pleasures in life, like other people?” said the poet.
“No one is happy before his dying day,” said the old man.
“I lost my child last night,” said the poet.
“Yes, that may well be so. I’ve never had any children,” said the old man. “I’ve never tied myself to anyone’s apron strings.”
“I didn’t mean to have children either,” said the poet. “I’ve always felt I was a child myself, and still do. And yet before one knows it, one has started to live life nonetheless.”
“I’ve heard you’re a wretch,” said Jón the snuffmaker.
“Yes,” said the poet. “That’s quite true. I’m a wretch. But who isn’t a wretch, come to that. Man is a wretch.”
“Oh, the men of old weren’t wretches. Göngu-Hrólfur (Walker-Hrólfur)* conquered Normandy, I was told that by the Frenchmen. And old Órvar-Oddur (Arrow-Oddur) was eighteen feet tall, and lived for three hundred years.* And I’m kept busy chopping snuff from morning to night despite all the damned whining a
bout starvation in the community, yes, and often have to get up in the middle of the night, what’s more, to get out the snuff-bag. But a church they won’t get before I’m dead.”
“It’s obviously hopeless to suggest that you might give a little help to someone in difficulties,” said the poet. “Perhaps I could pay you back later, if only by composing a poem about you?”
“I never help those who are in difficulties,” said Jón the snuffmaker. “Wretches have never made good, and never manage to make good even if they’re given some help. If I give help to anyone, I give help to people of substance. Then one knows what becomes of the money. Wretches—that’s like throwing money into the sea.”
“But when we stand outside in the winter cold, bent double, and even the earth is locked against our dead children, let alone heaven?”
“I don’t feel sorry for anyone,” said Jón the snuffmaker. “They can die for all I care. It’s only right that those who can’t stay alive should die. I’ll die like a shot the moment I can no longer stay alive. And no one will help me, neither on earth nor in heaven.”
“Then why was Jesus Christ born if we are not to help one another in distress?” said the poet.
“Jesus Christ can help his own wretches himself,” said Jón the snuffmaker. “And He won’t get the church before I’m dead.”
“But what do you say, Jón, to letting Jesus Christ build his own churches when you’re dead, and you use your money while you’re alive to help your fellowmen when they’re in difficulties?”
“I’ve never had any fellowmen and don’t want any; you won’t catch me out that way,” said the old man. “They’re all the same damned rabble; the one’s as bad as the other. I don’t care a damn what happens to them.”
World Light Page 48