Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  Jæja, shorty, said Bragi the bookseller to us as he transcribed the prices written in pencil in the books’ flyleaves; I had mentally tallied that the amount was getting pretty high, something which caused me anxiety. What studies are you completing? Bragi asked.

  We’re self-educators, said The Regular, answering for both of us.

  Jæja, of course, Bragi responded.

  What do we owe for this stack? The Regular asked.

  Nothing at all, said Bragi.

  No, how can that be?

  You’ve brought us your custom long enough, replied Bragi.

  I never have to pay for books here, said The Regular, except something nominal, it is I who must owe you after getting free books for twenty years, how can you make a living with such a bad business model?

  Just pay something next time, said Bragi, sucking up a tremendous heap of Icelandic snuff from the back of his hand.

  Maybe there will be no next time! The Regular said angrily.

  Jæja, anything else, lads? Bragi said politely, then faded into a pyramid of books.

  Since then, I’ve thought a lot about this singular Icelandic word, jæja, and I had it in mind to write a short essay about it as something of a “place name” in the language, a landmark denoting the end of travel, the city limits, as it were. You always know you’re close to your base port in conversation when someone says jæja; it’s the last communicative landmark, the last cairn, before you reach home, the first as you set out from home. Perhaps it’s a sign one is lost.

  Jæja, said The Regular, this is a good haul, he’s so generous, Bragi the bookseller, as you saw, now let’s quench our thirst, I always get thirsty for beer when I go to bookshops, especially second-hand bookstores, most likely it’s the dust, but I’ve also heard there’s a particular fungus that lives in the bodies of ancient books and humans alike, and it is that and not the human himself which wants its thirst satisfied with a beer; this fungus which lives inside people is itself a person, truly, I’ve started calling him Gerjólf Yeastwolf, because yeast—ger—and hops are important food for this fungus: white sugar and white flour and white paper are his favorite food, and words, too, I’ve named this word-fungus Gerjólf as a play on Germania, Germany’s the site of the greatest ger-mania, total yeast-fervor, in Germania there’s a lot of beer and the fungus is strong there, the people sour.

  When we walked back into Circus again, the place had radically altered. Huh, they’ve completely renovated, said The Regular, and it was true, Bernharður said, there were now dizzyingly high ceilings and expansive space from wall to wall; in the heights crystal chandeliers hung, their bling glittering; around the crowns circled canaries and butterflies and dragonflies all singing hymns and patriotic verses in chorus. There was a cross-vaulted-ceiling made from Iceland spar; obsidian pillars descended to a floor cut from gabbro rock; on the vaulted ceilings you could see frescos by Jóhannes Kjarval depicting the settlement of Iceland, the establishment of Parliament at Þingvellir, the conversion to Christianity, Snorri Sturluson at his studies and being beheaded, the civil war during the Age of the Sturlungs replete with rock-throwing, rapes, eye-gouging, castrations and the resulting loss of independence into the hands of the Norwegian king. On the walls, large pictures hung in gold-adorned frames showing ancient heroes and queens of Nordic countries; the walls themselves were carved with story motifs from large wars that had been fought in ancient times, images so polished that they reflected one another in a set of distorted self-images. This calls for champagne! The Regular said, not some damn beer swill. We perched ourselves at the glass-encrusted bar which extended as far as the eye could see, curving at the ends toward a hall of mirrors; one got dizzy looking along it. Such mirror scenes are known in Gauloise as mise en abyme, said The Regular, one of the very greatest wonders of the world, a gap in eternity. The servers were dressed in red tuxedos made from Icelandic twill colored with the blood of wild animals, the blood of the wild sheep at Núpsstaðar, a color so pure and mellow that it was almost as though the servers were transparent, smears of red fog, the silver trays seemed to fly themselves around the room like UFOs. The servers’ hair was slicked back with brilliantine and they had tremendous sideburns; monkeys clambered up to whisper orders into their ears in Turkish. All around the drinking hall well-to-do people sat and poured champagne and nibbled on sheeps’ heads from bellwethers who had enjoyed extremely good lives; all day long the country’s leading intellectuals sat there reading the papers alongside solitary winos while misfortunates bumbled in, having procured a drink. Everyone was welcome. The server returned with a bottle of champagne and he slowly and carefully vacuumed the bottle with a hand vacuum before washing it with 8.2 degree Celsius temperature water and telling us in Latin that the bottle had been stored at the bottom of Gvendarbrunna for 1100 years to cool, that it was the champagne bottle the settler Ingólfur Arnarson brought to the land with him then lost when trying to toast the settlement in Reykjavík and never found, as Landnámabók records, and everything has gone downhill from that moment, but Ingólf made a head start on getting merry before the feasting. The bottle was found in a spring during the anniversary year, 1974, when citizens were celebrating 1100 years of settlement in Iceland and some went diving in search of the old money that gets thrown into Gvendarbrunna, the Reykjavík wells. Extraordinary amounts of all kinds of debris were found, enough to explode the capacity of the National Museum; this was among the bottles found but the staff at the National Museum did not pay attention to this particular bottle and planned to smash it against the wall, this was before recycling was in the picture; the owner of Circus got to pick it up instead, and it’s been down in the cellar here since, 200 meters deep for thirty years, collecting substantial dust though the president of the republic has called every day asking after it and offering ever larger and more terrifying sums for it because all the world’s kings and queens and princesses and emperors and their spouses are on the way to visit him at Bessastaðir and he lacks any decent champagne and he wants to be fashionable …We’ll take it, said The Regular to the server, gratie, vale, bitte sehr! inflammatus et accensus!1 …Then the server said with panache: Quando corpus morietur fac ut animae donetur paradisi gloria.2 Amen, said The Regular.

  The champagne was ruthless and we became very merry. I’m not going to read all the books for you, The Regular said at Circus, but will begin by directing you to the chapter “Among Wild Sheep” in the book Mountains and Wilderness, there, Árni Óli has written down the story of the mountain hero, the giant of stories, Stefán Filippusson: Once upon a time in the autumn, translated The Regular, I got a message from Jón on Núpsstaður, that I should go for him to Eystrafjall and make coals. There were bunches of wood from the spring. This struck me as a beautiful start, exciting me; The Regular read the whole chapter for me, translating wild sheep into English, because he distrusted my Icelandic knowledge, The Regular was unbudging, which I guess is the nature of regulars; even as more and more people came to the drinking house and the babble the people were making inside rose steadily, intensifying the joy of life until the murmuring enveloped the room and reverberated around the walls, he was determined to continue translating, reading me selected sections of the books we had bought in the secondhand bookshop, Bragi, he read me the story of Sigurður from Tvísker out of the book Hikes and Round-Ups I, subtitled Night Under a Glacier, about the time Sigurður sang a paean to life the time he got stuck deep inside a glacial fissure. In the fall of 1936, when Sigurður was a young boy, he and a companion were out seeking two sheep that had not come down from the cliffs; there was significant snow on the mountain and the paths were dangerous and that morning Sigurður’s mother had said he needed two scarves and so he did; Sigurður tied a second scarf on his head on top of his thick, goat-skin-lined hat; he was wearing two new socks, sealskin shoes with the fur on the inside, thick woolen underwear, an overshirt made of thick khaki, a wool sweater, overalls made of coarse Nankin cotton, a waterproof storm jacket on top
of all this; under everything, against his chest, he’d stuffed hay for the sheep to chew, and thus Sigurður was excellently warmly dressed, so much that his companion laughed when they met at six in the morning, saying he looked like a pregnant cod. There was snow on the ground, it was 6 degrees below zero with a biting north wind, according to Sigurður’s account, and though the sheep were on the cliff, thanks to the amount of snow and the impassible path they had great difficulty getting to them without going under the cliffs, where they had to contend with steep scree and loose-graveled rocks as well as narrow channels filled with snow, occasional turfs of heather and patches of grass, all extremely steep and unstable; a belt of steep cliffs ran down the slopes and, on the other side, gliding far below, slept the glittering green creeping glacier, marked and ugly with its countless cracks, leaks, and incomprehensible hollows. There in the channels between the ridges Sigurður said to his companion: anyone who fell down there would probably be done for. Yes, his companion replied, he would certainly tell no more stories. Just then Sigurður heard a crack; looking up he saw the snowdrift above breaking, he heard his companion say Well. And then the avalanche took Sigurður and hurled him down the hillside bundled in snow; he let go of the rope so he would not pull his partner with him in the flood, he lost his staff so he couldn’t steer himself, Sigurður rushed down head first and launched with catastrophic speed toward the belt of rocks, everyone has to die sometime, he thought amid the avalanche, seeing the cliffs hurtling past him, and suddenly he was wondering if people were less severely injured in a fall if they were completely powerless, so Sigurður made himself completely powerless, as he reached the belt of rocks he thrust his hips slightly and then he was in the air, head first, he ended up far below the cliffs in the first fissure between the mountains and the glacier, one millimeter either way and it would all have been very different. He startled, breathless and coughing, having hardly breathed on the way down. He had been forced into a narrow space, and he began to try to move, but it was like concrete poured into a mold; he discovered, however, that he was unharmed and knew he was under a glacier. I will certainly not get to tell any more tales, he thought. Then he decided to spend his time in spiritual reflection and began to sing hymns, full-throated and with all his heart, this kept him warm and his mind came back into balance: the days were short and no one would look for him until the next morning, night lay ahead and he was restrained here, face down in this fissure, the ice a cold comforter—but the fact that he was so well dressed came in handy now, he had not even lost his hat because the second scarf secured it to his head. Still, he was not optimistic he would live through the night; many days might elapse before he was found, perhaps he’d never be found, would slowly and quietly die a natural death and be crushed under the glacier, that would doubtless be a painless death, thought Sigurður, he would fall asleep and never wake up again, he felt for the people at home, his mother, he would prefer never to be found if he wasn’t going to survive this, that there be no signs he had survived the fall, it was devastating to think his friends and families might realize he had survived a long time down there. It was so black at night that it didn’t make a difference whether he had his eyes open or closed, and then the ice around him began to melt a little and he was able to get partly free; he managed to slip both hands together and sang Now I Lay My Eyes Again, then fell asleep, waking up, intensely cold, to the sight of a bright beam on the glacier as he looked down, his chest facing the surface; he thought the light a sign of death and uttered the psalmist Hallgrím Pétursson’s words: Come to me, as you list. It is even possible, he thought, I will die here, let it be swift. But this was not death coming, at least not for Sigurður, it was the northern lights in the deep darkness of night, illuminating the glacier, and he let the light course through him, he sang hymns with all his might and quickly warmed up, then it was midnight and he started to get wet, he passed the night this way, falling asleep several times but singing in between them; in the morning he was able to rip off his backpack and free himself a little more; the day began to brighten, the snow melted above him and he could look around a bit; his right foot, however, was as in a vise, he felt a cold wind all around him and saw that he had come to rest in a narrow crevasse, his ice cave. Sometime in the morning, as he was singing Praise Be to God, he heard his name called, he heard his brother calling and he immediately called back, some time later he saw his brother lowered into the crevasse, are you all right, he asked, yes, I think so, said Sigurður, immediately work started to free him from his prison and it took a while, the frozen ground was hard and difficult to break apart, then his brother reached into the cave and extended his hand and pulled him nearer; he tied a band under his shoulders, then the others dragged the two up, rescued Sigurður from the fissure where he had been confined upside down a whole day and night, twenty-eight meters down. His mother had dreamed that night that he lay in a channel, able to breathe but suffering badly. Sigurður was driven home on a sleigh, helpless but chattering away, and the farm was joyful that evening; he was able to write again by the fourth day and walk unassisted after a week; within the month, he was practically as good as before.