Iceland's Bell

by Halldor Laxness

  He couldn’t make heads or tails of Rotterdam by night. When it grew light he found a road leading out of the place and headed north, hoping that he would find the realm of the Danish king. The countryside reminded him of a potful of porridge: there wasn’t a hill or even a hillock in sight—there were only church steeples and wind-mills afloat here and there. The fields were pasturable, however, and the farmers seemed to be doing well. He saw herds of grazing cows everywhere, hefty livestock, and noticed that the natives didn’t seem to be too inclined toward sheep farming. Most of the farmhouses and barns were in excellent condition, with high timbered walls like the buildings at Bessastaðir, though there were quite a few crofters’ cottages, either clustered together or scattered about, with dirt walls, straw roofs, and hens pecking around outside—this bird clucks like a swan and is unable to fly. Other monstrously sized birds gaggled before men’s doors; they looked like swans but had shorter necks, and they were vicious, ruffling their feathers and attacking strangers with a great screech. He guessed that these were the birds the ancient poems and ballads called geese. The dogs here looked fairly dangerous as well, but luckily most of them were chained. Haymaking and harvesting were in full swing, and the farmer thought it a great sight to see folk transporting their loads home on cattle-drawn wagons, though he did see a few people here and there carrying the hay on their backs. Seawater was diverged into deep lakes and canals throughout the whole land, causing it to resemble a large lung. The canals were filled with flat-bottomed cargo boats drawn by oxen or horses walking along the banks. Some of the boats had roofed houses with windows containing curtains and flowers, and chimneys poking up from the roofs, and smoke wafting up from the chimneys as the womenfolk cooked inside. The men sat out on deck and smoked tobacco while they urged on the beasts and steered the boat, and the children played, and sometimes fat, bare-legged girls could be seen, sunburned and radiant, as well as picturesque women plucking fowl. It looked to Jón Hreggviðsson like a very agreeable way of life.

  The roads here were unlike those in Iceland; here they were made by men’s hands, not horses’ hooves, and the wagons drove easily along. He encountered wheeled contraptions of all different shapes and sizes, and great aristocrats riding comfortably in fluttering cloaks, and troops of soldiers with muskets and swords. Whenever he encountered a crossroads Jón Hreggviðsson automatically chose the road that seemed to go farthest north, but the day passed by here differently than in Iceland and in the end he lost track of time—and thereby lost his bearings.

  They’d forgotten to throw his sabots out the door after him at the priest’s wife’s, but actually it didn’t matter—he’d run barefoot over Iceland’s hard ground, so why couldn’t he do the same over Holland’s soft ground? On the other hand, he’d been traveling for so long in the calm, dry air that he was starting to feel thirsty, but the muddy canals contained only saltwater. A man who was branding livestock in his farmyard gave him water, and a little later a woman at a well did the same, but both of them gave him fearful looks. He’d passed through so many crossroads by now that he no longer had any clue as to which road led to the realm of the Danish king. He sat down flat on the ground, brushed himself off, and looked questioningly at his feet. One scoundrel who came down the road shouted at him, and another cracked his whip over his head. Two middle-aged farmers drove by in a wagon full of cabbage-stalks, roots, and bundles of hay. Jón Hreggviðsson stood up, walked out in front of them, and asked:

  “Where’s Denmark?”

  The men stopped and looked at him in surprise, but they obviously weren’t familiar with the country he named.

  “Denmark,” he said, and he pointed at the road. “Denmark. Copenhagen.”

  The men looked at each other and shook their heads, having heard neither of the country nor the city.

  “King Kristján,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “King Kristján.”

  The men looked at each other.

  It suddenly occurred to Jón Hreggviðsson that he might have misremembered the name of His Most Gracious Majesty, so he corrected himself and said:

  “King Friðrik. King Friðrik.”

  But the men hadn’t heard of King Kristján or King Friðrik.

  He availed himself of more wayfarers but very few of them answered him; most of them started walking faster or spurred on their horses when they saw this black-haired savage approaching. The few who did stop were entirely ignorant of Jón Hreggviðsson’s king. Finally an impressive-looking gentleman came driving up, wearing an ample cassock, a ruff, a peruke, and a tall hat, his blue jowls hanging down around his collar and a prayer book resting upon his potbelly. If this man wasn’t the bishop of Holland himself, then he was at least the provost of the district of Rotterdam, and Jón Hreggviðsson walked out in front of him and started weeping bitterly.

  The wayfarer ordered his driver to halt and said a few reproachful but inobstinate words to Jón Hreggviðsson, and the stray traveler got the impression that he wanted to know who he was and why he was walking upon the roads of Holland.

  “Iceland,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, drying his tears and pointing at himself: “Iceland.”

  The man scratched himself delicately behind one ear, obviously having a difficult time making sense of this, but Jón Hreggviðsson continued.

  “Iceland; Gunnar of Hlíðarendi,” he said.

  Suddenly the bishop’s eyes widened and his face displayed more than a little panic. He gave Jón Hreggviðsson a consternated look and asked:

  “Hekkenfeld?”

  Jón Hreggviðsson didn’t know what Hekkenfeld was and tried again with the name of the Danish king, Kristján.

  “Christianus,” repeated the honorable gentleman, and his manner relaxed considerably. He understood the matter thusly: although this miscreant had indeed come from Hekkenfeld, he was a Christian. “Jesus Christus,” he added cheerfully, and he nodded his head toward the beggar.

  Jón Hreggviðsson was for his own part so pleased with the fact that they’d hit on a name they both knew that he forgot everything he’d been planning to ask and resorted to repeating that name: the name of his landlord, Jesus Christ. Then he signed himself in the name of the Holy Trinity to show that he was a true farmer of Christ, and the gentleman took his purse from his belt, took out a little silver coin and gave it to Jón Hreggviðsson, then ordered his driver to continue.

  Near sunset he strolled into a great farmyard that looked to him to be owned by hospitable folk, since it was teeming with wagons, horses, and drivers. Fat, well-dressed travelers walked out onto the flagstones and stroked their potbellies after their meal. Some smoked tobacco from long pipes. One member of a packtrain noticed Jón Hreggviðsson and started gaping at him, and then the others did the same. Jón Hreggviðsson said that he was an Icelander but no one understood. Little by little a mob of people gathered around him and chattered at him in different languages. Finally he decided to try out the words that had done so well for him with the nobleman on the road:

  “Hekkenfeld. Jesus Christus.”

  Some of them thought he was a heretic and a blasphemer from Welschland* and one invoked Mary and Joseph and shook his fist at him.

  Jón Hreggviðsson continued to repeat the words “Jesus Christus Hekkenfeld” and to make the sign of the cross.

  More and more people kept joining the group: large-loined housemaids in short skirts and hoods, chefs with leather aprons, stout aristocrats with huge codpieces, ruffs, and ruffled sleeves, wearing feathered hats on top of their perukes—they pushed their way into the innermost ring to see what was happening but found nothing but a foreign beggar committing blasphemy. The meeting was concluded when a certain cavalier wearing a feathered hat, topboots, and a sword pushed his way through the throng, raised his whip, and started thrashing Jón Hreggviðsson, each lash smarter than the next. First he struck the man right across the face and then over the neck and shoulders, until he sunk to his knees and fell forward with his hands covering his face. The massive cavalier or
dered the people to get back to work, and only a small portion of them kicked at the fallen man as they walked away. Jón Hreggviðsson came to his senses after the crowd dispersed, and he felt around to see if he was bleeding anywhere, but luckily he was just a bit bruised. Afterward he continued on his way.

  In the evening a man and woman who owned a small field gave him something to eat. He gave their child the silver coin since the farmer refused to take it in payment. After eating his fill he went out to the hedge and lay down to go to sleep, since the weather was warm and looked as if it would stay that way. The Dutchman pointed him toward the loft of the cowshed, and the traveler took this as an admonition and slept in the straw during the night. Next morning he was woken by the screeching of a strange bird that flew back and forth before the window, letting its feet hang down as it flew—it had a nest up under a crossbeam. The Dutchman came down and Jón Hreggviðsson went out to the field with him and they harvested grain the whole day. Neither of them spared himself and the Dutchman let him know that he thought him a good man. Jón Hreggviðsson took it sorely that he couldn’t tell the man the story of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi. He harvested grain for two days and on the third learned to use a flail on the threshing floor. He was given enough to eat but when he let them know that he needed money it turned out that the Dutchman was too poor to be able to keep a hired hand, so Jón Hreggviðsson decided to leave. The whole family cried at the thought of losing this two-footed beast of burden. Jón Hreggviðsson cried a bit in return for courtesy’s sake, then kissed the people in farewell. The man gave him sabots, the woman gave him socks, and the child gave him a blue bead, as if it were a pearl.

  Jón Hreggviðsson continued on in the same direction as before, but the gifts of these respectable people didn’t really help to get him anywhere. Within two days he had to hire himself out again. This time he worked for a powerful count who owned several districts in the region, and who had in his service a thousand crofters, slaves and half-slaves, servants, overseers, and viscounts, but who himself was not to be seen—everyone said he lived in Spain. Jón Hreggviðsson worked here for what was left of the summer at various jobs that required a great deal of physical strength and persistence, and he learned enough Dutch to be able to tell people how he’d come to be traveling in this corner of the world. Everyone in Holland was familiar with Hekkenfeld in Iceland, under which burn the fires of Hell, and they were very eager to hear tales of this mountain. They called the man van Hekkenfeld.

  Naturally, the invisible count in Spain cheated him of his pay. The viscounts said he ought to praise God that they didn’t hang him, but several poor God-fearing men in Holland collected some small silver and copper coins for van Hekkenfeld so that he could journey onward to meet his king. When he left he stored his coins in one of his socks, and he twisted the other one around his neck like a shepherd, so that he wouldn’t lose his way. He tied the sabots together and carried them over his shoulder, one in front and one in back, but he had already lost the pearl.

  14

  AN ADVENTURE WITH THE GERMANS

  It was well into winter by the time Jón Hreggviðsson reached Germany. He’d worked time and time again as a drudge for the Dutch in order to support himself, but still had only barely managed to scrape by. Although the Dutch were wealthy enough they were also misers, like almost all well-to-do farmers and other such reluctant wage-payers. On the other hand, a lucky man could occasionally get his hands on something decent without too much trouble—because of their prosperity the Dutch weren’t as afraid of thieves as the Icelanders. Jón Hreggviðsson himself was able to steal a pair of sturdy boots from a duke who had control of three rural districts. He’d been working as an errand-boy for this man, who was invisible like all the other important men in Holland, but he ran away because he was starving. The rich men in Holland were as stingy with food as those in Iceland. He found the boots in a pile of garbage and hid them in a thornbush for half a month before he left. He didn’t dare to put them on before he’d gone about forty miles, but instead carried them in a sack upon his back. But when the weather worsened and the going got rough the boots came in handy, because although Holland is naturally more supple, its mud is cold, especially in the fall.

  The weather was drizzly and the sun was beginning to set. The traveler was soaked and the duke’s boots were waterlogged, which made the going even worse. In the cold fog and darkness ahead loomed Germany, home to the most warlike men in the world. Jón Hreggviðsson wasn’t even carrying a staff. He ached for food. The border-post consisted of a few rows of houses, a church, and an inn with provisions for long-distance travelers. Huge carriages hung with lanterns left the inn in the evening on their way to the empire, drawn by teams of eight snorting horses and full of brawny, well-dressed travelers with genteel wives and loads of cash. The womenfolk settled comfortably in their seats in nests of pillows and blankets, and the men, all of them highborn, hung their belts and swords and feathered hats on hooks over the seats and drove away. Jón Hreggviðsson had a few coins on him and was thinking of buying himself a small cup of tea, an excellent drink from Asia, but he was not allowed inside the inn.

  He was standing in front of the church, cursing, when he suddenly caught a whiff of warm bread. He started looking around and followed his nose to a bakery where a man and a woman were taking loaves of bread from an oven. He bought a loaf, then knocked on the door of a poor-looking house and scrounged warm beer to wash down the bread. He ate and drank sitting upon the threshold, since the folk there could see that he was a thief and murderer and refused to let him in. The whelp yapped furiously at him from the kitchen and woke up the hens, and the cock, the hens’ husband, started crowing.

  He stuck what was left of the bread under his shirt, bade the people there good night, and walked out into the rain refreshed, in the trail of the postal carriages. They drove out through a gate where two Dutch soldiers were standing with pistols and muskets, letting folk pass through unimpeded. There was a small wooded area on the other side of the gate, and beyond this stood a castle on a barren patch of ground encircled by a moat. There was a bridge over the moat, and the road ran right through the middle of the castle. Conical black lanterns hanging on either side of the castle’s huge stone portal gave off faint gleams of light, which appeared through the drizzle like golden-colored, blue-tinged wisps of wool. The road through the portal was cobbled, causing the iron-reinforced carriage wheels to clatter and spark as they rolled over the stones. The castle’s roof was flat and edged with breastwork, with gaps for the catapults and cannons. This was the gateway to Germany.

  A number of men brandishing weapons stood at the portal. Behind them were several others in colored clothing, with registers, scrolls, and feathered pens, taking down people’s names and occupations. The postal carriages had gone through. The German soldiers were huge and wore enormous helmets topped with spikes shaped like spear-blades, and their twisted beards looked similar to rams’ horns. Jón Hreggviðsson stood before these men and looked through the gate, intending to continue on his way, but they immediately pointed two spears at his chest and interrogated him in German. Whatever he answered did him no good. They grabbed him and frisked him, but found nothing on him except for a few Dutch coins that they promptly divided amongst themselves. Then they blew their trumpets. Soon another man joined them: a fat, blue giant. The others wanted to hand Jón Hreggviðsson over to this man but he obviously wasn’t interested, if one could tell by the harsh tone of his reply. A heated argument followed, in which the only word that Jón Hreggviðsson understood was “hen-gen”: “Let’s hang him.” The others finally prevailed and the newcomer was compelled to take Jón Hreggviðsson into custody. He pressed the point of his sword up against the farmer’s back and drove him into the castle and up a long, dimly lit flight of steps, then along platforms and passageways out into some distant wing of the castle, until they came to a large chamber with a number of windows that let in both wind and rain. The ruffian pushed Jón Hreggvið
sson through the doorway. It was dark but for the dim light of the ruffian’s lantern. When he moved to shut the door Jón Hreggviðsson thrust his foot into the doorway and demanded an explanation in Dutch. As is frequently the case amongst border-folk, this man could understand both languages when he felt like it, and he answered that Jón Hreggviðsson wouldn’t walk through this doorway a second time. Unfortunately, he said, the man whose job it was to hang people wasn’t available; he and his assistant had already hung so many people today that they were worn-out and had gone home to bed. This being said, the big lout pressed the point of his sword against Jón Hreggviðsson’s stomach to make him move out of the doorway, then bade him good night.