World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  “Really,” said the poet.

  “You say ‘Really,’ you damned fool?” said the bailiff. “Maybe you’ll live to pay for that word in full before we are finished.”

  This conversation had its consequences for Sveinn of Bervík. The first thing Ólafur Kárason did when he went inside again was to melt his ink; then he sat down and wrote a letter to the south for the first time in his life.

  The boy’s parents had not been on speaking terms since his birth; the mother had raised the boy on her own. Ólafur wrote to the boy’s father, not just without the mother’s knowledge, but even despite her opposition. He wrote it on his own responsibility; he told his own life story and asked a complete stranger to save his own life—from being reincarnated at a new Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti. Never had this poet pleaded a case with such passion. And an astonishing thing happened, for this turned out to be one of the few occasions in life when a letter brought some results.

  More than a month later, Ólafur Kárason was in a position to take Sveinn of Bervík aside and say to him these words: “In your life will be fulfilled what I was born to yearn for.”

  Then he explained to him that the boy’s father had written to him and said he was willing to pay for the boy to be educated according to the boy’s own wishes.

  “How can I thank you for bringing this about?” asked the boy, when he had wiped the tears from his eyes.

  “My reward is to know that you will be living the reality which was my dream,” said the poet. “You’ll go to school now and become a scholar and a poet.”

  “Even if I go to every school in the country, I shall never have been in more than one school—your school,” said Sveinn of Bervík.

  They felt as if the moment of parting had arrived, and looked at one another from a fateful distance.

  “If a destitute folk poet from an unknown harborless coast should knock at your door, do you think you would recognize him again, Sveinn?”

  “When you come to visit me, Ólafur, I shall have a room of my own, and a lot of books,” said Sveinn of Bervík. “That room is your room, and all the books are your books. Everything of mine is yours. At night I shall have a bed made up for you on the divan.”

  “No, thank you!” said Ólafur Kárason with his polite smile. “I won’t want to go to sleep. We’ll stay awake all night. We’ll sit up and talk. We’ll talk about what has been the Icelanders’ illumination in the long evenings from earliest times. You will be a scholar and a poet, I’ll be the visitor who comes to learn from you. Will you promise me not to go to sleep, but to stay up with me and talk to me?”

  “Yes,” replied Sveinn of Bervík.

  “Will you promise me something else?” said Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík.

  “Yes,” said Sveinn of Bervík.

  “Will you promise not to look at me with contempt even though I am ignorant and hapless, and perhaps shabbily dressed in comparison with those you’ll be in the habit of associating with—and not to feel sorry for me, either?”

  “I will never see in you anything but the best man I have ever known,” said Sveinn of Bervík.

  “And then there’s only one thing left that I want to ask you,” said Ólafur Kárason. “May I tell you what it is?”

  “Yes,” said Sveinn of Bervík. “What is it?”

  “When we have stayed up all night, talking, and the first rays of the morning sun are on your walls, will you go with me to the churchyard and show me one grave?”

  “What grave is that?” said Sveinn of Bervík.

  “It’s the grave of Sigurður Breiðfjörð,” said Ólafur Kárason.

  “Everything I can do, I am ready to do for you,” said Sveinn of Bervík.

  “I have heard that on his tombstone there is a stone harp with five strings,” said the poet.

  4

  And so five years passed in that stealthy way in which time steals away from the heart, not only among the fleshpots and bright lights but also in a harborless bay behind the mountains, until one wakes up, questioning, from a long sleep in a dark night.

  He woke up in the depths of the night, stranger in his own life, a penitent for the sins he had not committed, his good deeds long since drowned in pity; he woke up far away from himself, lost in the wilderness of humanity and the way back too long for one mortal life. No one gave him an opportunity to smile any more, and he had not known a happy moment since he lay under the sloping ceiling at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti, sick and sore, waiting for the sunbeam. If he got up and lit the lamp and looked at himself in the mirror, he would be afraid of this beggar who lodged here with a woman fifteen years older, and a three-month-old son.

  “Who am I?” he asked. “And where?”

  And got the answer: “Your wait is nearly at an end; the life that was intended for you—lost.”

  He realized how indifferent he was to life on the morning on which Jón Ólafsson was born. The cottage was full of that silly but good-natured midwives’ humor which characterizes the atmosphere in a house where a woman has been delivered of a child. No, he said, I’m afraid I have no desire to know how heavy the baby is. And when other people had fetched a spring-balance and the baby was being weighed on it, he asked to be excused from having to read the weight. A newborn child was not a novelty any more. He had experienced to the full a child’s whole life from its birth to its death, the first crying, the first smile, the first time it said Mama, its first faltering steps, the sickness, the suffering, the wasting away, the last breath—always the same story. And he knew that on the day when he would be told to go out to borrow a little coffin for little Jón Ólafsson, he would cold-bloodedly reply with that adage from the Jewish chronicle: Let the dead bury their dead.

  But it so happened on the morning after Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík woke up in the wilderness, that a stranger came into his life; an unimportant occurrence, of course, nothing at all in the normal sense, but nonetheless the beginning of unforeseen events as is usually the case with the most fortuitous occurrences. Later, he often asked himself what hidden connection there might have been between the night’s fear and this visit which in itself was of no importance. Would I have paid any heed to this unexpected call to life, he asked himself, if the voice of the void had not reached my heart a few hours earlier? Does life call your name out loud before the anguish of death comes upon you?

  In itself, it was really one of the thousands of events which happen unnoticed in one’s life in the quiet flow of the years: A man from the Outer Nesses, Jason the lighthouse keeper from Taungar, arrived with a child for the school, and came to see the teacher to ask him to keep an eye on the child. The poor thing had never been away from home and had never been to school before, but was to be confirmed in the spring.

  A large, beefy girl gave the teacher a brawny, calloused hand molded by milking and rowing, and he saw in front of him coarse dark hair in thick braids, growing low down on her forehead; a large plump face with massive jaws and straight teeth, thick and shapeless lips, oily skin, and the eyes of a well-fed beast; but physically she was more full-grown than half-grown. She brought with her an atmosphere of horse-flesh, fulmar and fish roes as she stood there in the poet’s living room with her coarse stockings round her ankles, and sniffing.

  “Jasína Gottfreðlína has had a little instruction in reading and writing, but has had little opportunity of practicing it,” said her father, a big, thickset, coarse-tongued man. “And I’ve told her a little about the Sagas, so that at least she knows something about the Ramstad people in Norway and the most important of the ancient kings of Scandinavia.” But now the poor thing had to be confirmed in the spring, he went on, and therefore it was very important for her to learn this so-called Christian faith this winter so that she would not need to feel ashamed about it in front of others.

  The girl’s father had put her up at his sister’s, a widow living in one of the Eyrar cottages on the other side of the river down by the estuary, and he asked the teacher to give the po
or thing shelter if the river was ever impassable during a thaw. He offered extra payment if he would give her special tuition in the Christian faith early that winter, in the hope that she could catch up with her contemporaries in this subject and keep pace with them by the spring.

  Ólafur Kárason looked in amazement at this untamed daughter of the Outer Nesses, this overgrown, pagan child, and brushed his hair back from his forehead in perplexity. To tell the truth, he could see no point whatsoever in trying to cram Jewish adages and fables about Jesus into such a hump; Christianity was the last thing one would think of teaching Jasía Gottfreðlína.

  When she took her seat in class among the other children, she stood out because of her strength and physical maturity. She seemed to have her origins in chemistry, charged with an impersonal power from the earth and the sea that was completely unrelated to any concept of the soul. She overwhelmed the school, so that the other children vanished in her shadow, gray and skinny, or dissolved into patches of mist.

  This pupil knew how to handle every living creature that moved on Iceland’s coasts or in its seas, whether it had cold blood or hot, and knew its nature alive or dead; but unfortunately she could not answer the simplest question about natural history. On scores of mountains and moors there was no fog so thick that she would ever lose her way when herding sheep. She knew every landmark by name, not only on her father’s land but much farther afield as well, both wastelands and mountain pastures: names of hills, hollows, brooks, bogs, marshes, moors, earthbanks, sheep sheds, ruins, cliffs, boulders, mountain peaks. In the same way, she also knew the fishing grounds, but to try to din into her head the most simple elements of geography—that was out of the question.

  Perhaps she was at no higher or lower a stage of maturity in relation to the supernatural, not to mention the fundamentals of morality, than the nation has ever reached since this country was first inhabited, but her reluctance first came to a head when the subject of Christianity was raised, because she thought that Christ had been some sort of ancestor of the Danish merchant Kristinsen at Kaldsvík. She had never even heard of God, did not know that he existed, and did not believe it, either, even when she was told. But she did not know how to feel ashamed of her ignorance, and when everyone was laughing all around her it did not occur to her that she could be the cause of it. Often, Ólafur Kárason felt that actually he was the fool, to carry on pestering and questioning someone over and over again about vain trifles—a person whose only fault it was to be more original, more genuine, than other people.

  During the breaks, the poet stood at the window and looked at the children playing tag. Jasína Gottfreðlína was always “it.” No amount of agility could match her purposeful, impetuous energy; and after the game she would stand in the yard, glowing with health, with a horse-like gleam in her eyes, hot, her braids undone, her stockings down. And though the children jeered at her she paid no attention; she tidied herself where she stood, pulled her skirt up over that coarse knee, and adjusted her garters quite openly.

  The teacher took her to his house that evening to explain the Creation of the world to her, the Fall and the unusual downpour that this Fall caused in Armenia in Noah’s time, together with the other main points of this subject in which she knew less than other women.

  The pupil stared into the blue.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not thinking about it.”

  He became a little uneasy at this and said, “What do you think your father will say if you don’t think about the things you have to learn? Who went into the Ark?”

  But she had forgotten by then what the man was called, it was such an unusual name—“Ach, that fellow you were talking about,” she said.

  “And why did Noah go into the Ark?” asked the poet.

  “The rain came,” she said.

  “Rain?” said the poet.

  “Yes, but not as much as you said, I’m quite sure,” she said.

  “Why did the rain come?” he said.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said. “I don’t suppose it could have stayed dry much longer.”

  “What do you think your father will say if he hears the way you answer?” said the teacher.

  “I’ve heard my daddy say that everything in the Bible is just a pack of lies,” she said. “I don’t believe any stories except the Sagas. I don’t want to go to school. I want to go home.”

  Into her face there came an expression of boredom and despair, and he was both sorry for her and angry with her for being such a simpleton. And at that moment his little son Jón woke up crying.

  Jasína Gottfreðlína stood up with a start, went over to the baby’s cot as if she were suddenly at home here, picked him up in her arms and began to dandle him. In a twinkling, Ólafur Kárason saw God and Noah vanish completely from the girl’s face, together with the unusual downpour associated with these two preposterous characters. The reluctance was gone; the obstinacy was suddenly replaced by its opposite. She knew how to hold a child to her breast in the classic and immortal fashion beyond Christianity, beyond education and civilization, to bend down over it, to stand rocking on her feet while she lulled it, to croon a nursery rhyme which contained more of the magic of the race in its cadences than any poetry. Soon the child was asleep. But she could not bring herself to put it down again, and went on dandling it and rocking back and forth on her feet and crooning the same rhyme, the same cadence, without melody or meaning, over and over again for a while, as if she had rocked herself into a trance. The poet put the Bible stories under his pillow and went out.

  Some time afterwards there came a thaw after a snowstorm, and the river was in spate. It was for this kind of disastrous weather that it had been arranged that the pupil would spend the night in the teacher’s cottage and at the same time have the benefit of special tuition from him. On such a day she sat behind after school in the living room at Little Bervík, and had to answer questions about God’s Ten Commandments.

  “Thou shalt have none other gods but Me,” said Ólafur Kárason. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve no idea,” said the pupil.

  “The God of the Jews was an absolute God, who believed in other gods himself, to be sure, but forbade me to obey them, contrary to our own beliefs in the North. We have many gods and obey them all, and they us, the god of the sea and the god of the land, the god of thunder and the god of poetry . . .”

  She stared dully into the blue, but when he had been harping on about the Commandments for a while she lost patience and said: “Can I go over to Greater Bervík and stay up with a cow tonight? The bailiff’s Skjalda is about to calve.”

  He heaved a sigh, rose to his feet, and was about to say something serious, but changed his mind and gave the girl a light blow with the catechism. “Oh, off you go, for heaven’s sake,” he said.

  Smacking her was like tapping a rock-cliff. She did not understand humor, but put on an injured expression, as if her dignity had been offended. Then she was gone, and he was left standing there with the catechism, not knowing what on earth to do. Since she did not understand even the Old Testament, which after all speaks to the lower senses, it was not very likely that he would succeed in explaining the New Testament to her, which after all speaks to the soul. Luck seemed to have turned against the poet, by sending him such a pupil; indeed, this was the first time in his life that he had ever wanted to strike a living creature.

  But next day the river was still in spate, and before he knew it he was listening to his own voice once again trying to explain the fundamental principles of the faith. He talked rapidly and without pause, to conceal from her his own lack of interest; he told her the most fantastic stories about the deity in hope of arousing wonder in her, of how the Lord was His own Father and Son at once, as well as being born of an immaculate virgin, and of how the Holy Ghost was elected to the Trinity by a majority of one vote after fierce argument at a famous Synod. But not even divine
tokens and miracles were potent enough to move this strange pupil.

  “Are you paying any attention to what I’m saying?” he asked at last.

  “Oh, I suppose I hear you all right,” she said.

  “You seem to be so absentminded, somehow,” he said. “Perhaps I’m not explaining it properly?”

  “Why are people always talking to one about these gods?” she asked.

  “You’re probably too old to start on Christianity,” he replied. “One probably has to learn Christianity in infancy.”

  “Do you think I can’t tell from your face that you’re making it all up?” she said.

  He fell silent. Perhaps the explanation of her slowness lay in the fact that the doctrine he was teaching was not true. This simple, natural girl sensed intuitively his duplicity; she listened out of politeness for as long as she could endure it, like someone sitting through a tedious sermon or an unsuccessful play, but saw through his words to what he was really thinking. He had an urge to laugh, which he had the greatest difficulty in keeping down; he rose to his feet, closed the catechism, and gave the girl another cuff to signify that he gave up.

  But now she had had enough. She came of an Outer Nesses aristocracy that knew neither oppression nor inferiority, well-practiced in wrestling not only with her younger brothers and sisters but also with her father, brought up in the spirit of the kings and heroes of old. She sprang at the teacher and started wrestling with him.

  This was something that Ólafur Kárason was not prepared for. In actual fact, he had never been in a fight. Physical exertion was not at all to his liking and he was in the habit of avoiding it, but suddenly his dignity was in jeopardy against this young giantess who preferred strength to intellect, and understood only physical things. As a man, he had no right to let himself be worsted in this exchange, either as an adult against a child or as a teacher against a pupil, least of all as a man against a woman. One thing was certain; she was in deadly earnest. He had no alternative, under the circumstances, than to meet the challenge. So they fought.