Snow is drifting outside. A chill wind presses in upon a wayward man standing in the dooryard of the bishop’s residence one evening. He turns his back to the wind like a horse left outside, one blue hand at his neckline, holding together the collar of his coat since he’s too aristocratic to wear a scarf, and stares up at the little windows just above the Grand Salon, but the curtains have been let down and it is dark inside; she is taking her twilight nap. He stands there shivering for a while before a man with a few dogs steps out from the passageway between the buildings and shouts at him through the snow-storm, saying that that damned villain Magnús from Bræðratunga was to vacate the premises of Skálholt immediately or he would sic the dogs on him; and if he tried to go on behaving in the same way, skulking around here day and night, he would be tied to a post and flogged the very next time he showed his face. It looked as if the steward, who up until now had acted benignly toward the husband and had frequently assigned him various jobs to do around the see, had recently received orders outlining the novel attitude toward this pilgrim that was to be adopted by the see’s inhabitants.
The husband said nothing. He was too great a squire to bandy words with nobodies, especially when sober, and amongst other things he was hungry. He walked straight into the winds coursing between the estate’s buildings and the gusts tore through his clothing; his legs had never felt more weak or his knees more bowed than now. Once upon a time he had ridden his horse over these lordly flagstones on late spring nights as fair as any described in the lais; horses were not allowed in the yard during the day. Unfortunately he no longer owned a single shoed horse. On the other hand, coming toward him now is a man riding a black horse with calked shoes; he has been out on the Hundapollur, giving his black minion a twilight run. The squire pretended not to notice the rider and continued on against the wind, but the latter stopped a short distance behind him and reined in his wild mount, which champed its bit, dripping foam. The rider turned in the saddle and called out to the walker:
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” said the squire.
“Do you by chance have business with me?”
“No.”
“Then with whom?”
“My wife.”
“So she is still here in Skálholt,” said the priest. “I hope that her visit has done my dearly beloved friend well.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it if you already knew best yourself how things are going for folk here in Skálholt,” said the walker. He could be pert with the rider because they’d been schoolmates here a long time ago. “You’ve all done a good job of duping my wife into leaving me. And you certainly can’t be said to have neglected your own interests.”
“I always assumed that it was beyond my ability, dear Magnús, to lure a woman away from someone as charming as you,” said the priest.
“I have it on good authority that you had a long conversation with her out in my homefield last summer.”
“Oh, I never heard it was a crime, dear Magnús, for rectors to hold open conversations with their beloved parishioners out in a homefield in the light of day. If I were you I would probably consider more noteworthy those conversations that might be taking place elsewhere than out in the open in a homefield in the light of day.”
“I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m sick, and I have no desire to stand here out in the open in frost and storm and listen to your prattle. Farewell, I’m gone,” said the husband.
“Otherwise I make no secret of the business that I had with your wife last summer, dear Magnús,” said Reverend Sigurður. “If it is important for you to hear it I will be glad to tell it to you right away.”
“Is that so?” said the husband.
“This summer people were rumoring that you have an excessive fondness for brennivín, dear Magnús,” said Reverend Sigurður. “So I came to your wife, my dear Snæfríður, to learn whether there was any truth to the rumor.”
“So what,” said the squire. “What do you care if I drink? Who doesn’t drink?”
“People have different opinions about brennivín,” said Reverend Sigurður. “You know it yourself, dear Magnús. Some find it disgusting. Some do not care for more than a small sip. Others drink a bit to relax or perhaps to get tipsy, and then stop. There are also those who are able to drink themselves out of their wits and wisdom day after day, and yet do not admire brennivín so much that they will sacrifice the things they value for it. These men are not fond of brennivín.”
“I see you haven’t lost your old habit of going in circles around a question,” said Magnús from Bræðratunga. “Just between us, I don’t understand you and never have. What I asked was, who besides me really cares whether I’ve enjoyed a drink of brennivín in the past? No one knows it better than my wife and she hasn’t once in all of our married life criticized me for it.”
“A man who does not put much stock in brennivín,” said Reverend Sigurður, “would not be prepared to let his estate crumble to ruins for it. And he would not be prepared to sell his wife for it, and his children if he had any. Even if his wife might fetch him the handsomest price of all the women in Iceland.”
“It’s a lie,” said Magnús from Bræðratunga. “If there’s one thing I despise, it’s brennivín.”
“I should think it to be the voice of the Lord and not your own that speaks these words, dear Magnús,” said the archpriest. “People should be able to distinguish between the two. It is not a man’s admission of certain deeds but rather the deeds themselves that reveal which voice he heeds.”
“I’ve made a solemn vow never to let my lips touch brennivín again,” said the husband. He had come all the way up to the horse and took its mane in both of his hands. Finally he looked up with fervent eyes at the mounted priest and said: “I’ve kept vigil and prayed to God every night since my wife left home, though I know you would never believe it. My mother taught me to read in the Book of Seven Words. And there no longer exists within me a single spark of longing for brennivín. I’ve been offered brennivín time and again these days, and what do you think I’ve really wanted to do? I’ve wanted to spit in it. If you speak to her, Reverend Sigurður, you can tell her that.”
“I think it might be better if you tell her yourself, dear Magnús,” said the priest. “But if you want to send her any messages, there are others more fitting to bring them to her than I.”
“They’ve all slammed the door in my face,” said the husband. “Finally I went to see the man who’s even higher now than the householder himself, and they sicked the dogs on me as soon as I left him and threatened to hurt me if I ever came back.”
“These men of the world!” said the priest.
The squire leaned up against the horse’s neck and looked even more fervently into the rider’s face as he asked:
“Tell me truthfully, my dear Reverend Sigurður: do you think that she’s having an affair with him?”
Reverend Sigurður had given the horse rein.
“Forgive me for hindering you,” he said as he prepared to ride away.
“I thought you might have had business with me. And when I saw you, I wanted to tell you that whatever might be happening now, it was as recently as when Snæfríður and I talked in the homefield that she was willing to overlook all of your faults, since she loved the man who would sell her for nothing more deeply than the man who would give everything to have her.”
The squire stood there in the storm and called out after him: “Siggi, dear Siggi, I have some business with you, let’s speak together for a moment or two!”
“I often keep vigil at night—after the dogs are asleep,” said the archpriest. “I shall open the door for you if you stand by my window and say quietly, ‘God be here!’ ”
12
Breiðafjörður is a beautiful region: eiderducks crowd the inlets, seals sleep on the rocks, salmon hurdle the falls, seabirds throng on the isles. The seashore is bounded by meadows, the slopes are covered with shrub and the mountain ravines with grass; hea
thery moors, streams, and falls fill the upper expanses. Farmhouses stand on grassy banks overlooking the pastures and the fjord, and in calm weather the holms and the skerries cast quivering, flossy-soft shadows, lucid like shade on springwaters—it is Arnæus, speaking to her one evening; she has come to him to ask what her husband wanted from him. “As I recall, you own a farm in the area?”
“So what?” she said.
“If you care to household there, I shall send you timber.”
“The renowned cosmopolitan,” she said. “Are you really such a child?”
“Yes,” he said, “I am such a child. First impressions have a lasting effect. The first time I saw you we were at such a farm. In my mind I shall see Breiðafjörður around you forever; and I shall see the folk in Breiðafjörður, whose faces convey a nobility that can never be overcome by sorrow nor effaced by trial.”
“I have no idea where I come from,” she said emptily.
“May I tell you a story?” he asked.
She nodded her head, her mind elsewhere.
“Once there was a wedding feast in Breiðafjörður. It was late in the spring, around the time of the summer sun’s return, when everything in Iceland that did not die quickens. Late one evening two travelers came riding into the yard. They were not allowed to continue on their way until they had eaten. A tent had been set up in the homefield and the folk sat there joyously drinking their cares into oblivion. The travelers were invited into the farmhouse, where the more prudent farmers were sitting with their wives. Several young girls brought food and drink. These unbidden guests who had stopped for a short time at a nighttime feast were brothers, the first a man of some distinction, a bailiff from the far side of the fjord. The other was a young man who had dwelt an entire decade abroad. The elder brother had gone to meet his ship in Stykkishólmur, and they had planned to ride on through the night. The returnee once again beheld the gray folk he remembered from his youth, how their charming manners served only to make their grayness more poignant and their sorrow more unfortunate. A number of people tumbled down the grassy slope dead drunk. The travelers sat for some time in the farmhouse, surrounded by more sensible men, when it so happened that a face passed before the eyes of the traveler from afar. The face immediately wakened in him such an intense astonishment that the others were transformed into specters at the same moment—and though he had previously been entertained in king’s halls, he knew then that he had never before experienced such a thing.”
“You frighten me,” she said.
“I realize that when I say such things I violate all the rules of propriety governing polite conversation,” he said. “But no matter how often the visitor has thought upon that vision, he has not yet found words propitious enough to describe the image, the aura in the veiled gleam of a summer night. He still asks himself the same questions he asked then: ‘How can such a thing be? How can such a gulf exist between one person’s countenance and those of all the others?’ Later he often reproached himself, saying: ‘Haven’t you encountered enough illustrious women out in the world to enable you to withstand the aura of a single maiden from Breiðafjörður? Your derangement springs from within, from the kind of illumination that can fill the soul in a moment of bliss, though the intellect might seek false grounds for it in the outer world.’ This glimmer, however, became ever more fixed as time passed by, until finally the illustriousness and beauty of foreign women were exiled from the visitor’s mind into the realm of shadows: and only she remained.”
“Perhaps this foreign traveler was most surprised at how widely a girl from Breiðafjörður could open her eyes the first time she saw a man!”
He did not let her interjection distract him.
“There is only one moment in a man’s life that stays with him and will always stay with him throughout the march of time. Everything he does afterward, for good or for ill, he does in the reflected light of that moment, as he fights his lifelong battles—and there is nothing that he can do to resist it. For certain, it is always one pair of eyes that reigns over such a moment, the eyes for which all poets are born, and yet their poet is never born, for upon the day that their true name is spoken the world will perish. What happened, what was said? At such a moment nothing happens, nothing is said. But suddenly they are down in the meadow by the river, and the estuary is flooded. Golden clouds shine behind her. The night breeze breathes through her fair hair. Traces of the day remain in the pale blush upon her rose-petal cheeks.”
“How did it ever occur to the friend of queens to ask this muddleheaded girl to walk with him out in the meadow? She had seen only fifteen winters.”
“She had seen only fifteen springs.”
“She herself scarcely understood she existed. She thought that because the visitor was a nobleman he was going to ask her to take a message to her father, who had left the feast. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized he had given her the ring—that he had given it to her.”
“What might she have thought of such a peculiar guest?”
“She was the magistrate’s daughter and everyone gives gifts to the rich. She simply thought that magistrates’ daughters were given gifts.”
“When the ring came back to him he gave it to Jón Hreggviðsson so that the farmer could buy himself a drink. He had burnt his ship. Promises, oaths, our fondest wishes: ephemera. He had sold the young rose petal of a fair spring night for shriveled parchment books. They were his life.”
“You told me that once before,” she said. “But you’ve skipped ahead, Árni. You’ve skipped over two summers.”
“Tell me, Snæfríður.”
“I don’t have the words.”
“The one who has the words cannot tell the tale, Snæfríður—the only one who can is the one who truly breathes. Breathe.”
She sat for a long time and stared straight ahead, trancelike, breathing.
“When you came to stay with us to have a look at my father’s old books, I don’t remember rejoicing; but I might have been just a bit curious. I never dared to tell my mother that a strange man had given me a ring, but that was because she had forbidden me to accept gifts from strangers without her consent. She was of the opinion that an unfamiliar man who gave a magistrate’s daughter gifts harbored evil thoughts. Actually, young girls have a hard time believing what their mothers say, but all the same, I took precautions to make sure that no unpleasant witness against me would reach her ears; so I hid the ring.”
“Please continue,” he said.
“With what?” she said. “Am I telling a story?”
“I will not interrupt you.”
She looked down and said distractedly, dimly: “What happened? You came. I was fifteen. You left. Nothing at all.”
“I stayed at your father’s for half a month that summer to browse through his books. He had quite a few paper editions and several good vellum manuscripts. Some of them I copied, others I bought from him, some he gave to me. He is a model Icelandic scholar and is particularly knowledgeable in genealogy. We spent many late summer evenings chatting for hours about the folk who have lived in this country.”
“I often eavesdropped,” she said. “Never before had I wanted to listen to adults. But then I couldn’t tear myself away, though I understood little of what you were discussing. I was spying on you. I was terribly anxious to examine this man, how he was clothed, his boots, his bearing, to hear him speak no matter what he talked about, yet first and last to listen to the tone of his voice. Then you left. The house was empty. How lucky that he’s not more distant than on the other side of the fjord, thought this fool; oh, who was to eavesdrop now in the evenings? One day in the autumn she heard that he had sailed from Hólmur.”
“That winter the king sent me south to Saxony to examine some books that he wished to purchase. I stayed in the palace of a count. But in a country where even a fat, happy commoner could enter the concert hall for two shillings after his day’s work, or could go and listen to great masters perform their c
antatas on Sundays in church, where do you think the thoughts of the visitor were but in the one country in the world’s north that was oppressed by famine, its folk labeled by learned men gens paene barbara?* While I was studying those precious volumina* made by the greatest printers, some by Plantino the arch-printer, some by Gutenberg* himself, ornate books, lavishly illuminated, beautifully bound, some with clasps of silver, the books my lord was planning to purchase for his library in Copenhagen, all my thoughts were in the country where the most precious treasure in the Nordic lands had its origin—and which was now consigned to rot in an earthen hovel somewhere. Every evening as I lay down to sleep, this was my insomniac thought: today the mold has fastened itself to yet another page of the Skálda.”
“And in Breiðafjörður a little girl suffers through Þorri and Góa*— fortunately you weren’t thinking about that.”
“In the sagas one often reads that Icelanders at the courts of kings grew silent as winter came on. I booked passage on the first spring ship from Glückstadt to Iceland.”
“She didn’t understand the reasons why, but she was always thinking about only one man. There’s an old niggard in Grundarfjörður who doesn’t sleep at night—he just sits awake, staring at a gold ducat—maybe she was insane like this pitiful man. Why this disturbance? This trembling anxiety? This emptiness? This fear of a cold verdict, to be stranded, without ever again being able to return home, like the folk in Greenland. Old Helga Álfsdóttir sits on a trunk outside the couple’s bedroom, stitching lace in the twilight while the others sleep. She has long since stopped telling me fairy tales, because she thinks that I’m a big girl. More often now she tells me stories about folk who have encountered hardships. Her own memory of the countryfolk goes back many generations, and nothing a man can experience in his life surprised her. When she told her stories, it was as if the history of the country and its people passed before my eyes. And finally I snuck to her bedcloset one evening, took heart, and bade her draw the curtain, since I was going to tell her a secret. I told her that there was a little something needling my mind, and because of this I could not live a happy day, and I begged her not to call me the magistrate’s daughter, but instead to call me her dear child as she did when I was a little girl. And then she asked, ‘What’s the matter, dear child?’
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