by Frank Wynne
Everyone became very quiet as they said goodbye. Krein even got out of the car to embrace him. A minute later both cars drove off downhill, heavy with their loads, following each other closely.
That day, the sound of gunfire came from the other direction, from the northwest. In the sky, with a noise that had not been heard before, like a wail, swooped two German fighter planes.
AN INLAND FISHING TRIP
Halldór Laxness
Translated from the Icelandic by Alan Boucher
Halldór Laxness (1902–1998). Born in Reykjavík, the young Halldór Gudjónsson spent his early years with his family on Laxnes farm. At the age of seventeen, he published Child of Nature, his first novel, and left Iceland for Europe. After some years travelling, he converted to Catholicism, living at Clervaux Abbey in Luxembourg. His religious fervour was short-lived and, living in the USA, he was drawn to Socialism. His novel The Great Weaver from Kashmir saw him hailed in Iceland as “a literary giant”. His later novels revived the tradition of the Icelandic saga, exemplified in his trilogy, Iceland’s Bell. In 1955, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was praised by the Swedish Academy for having “renewed the great narrative art of Iceland”. He succumbed to Alzheimer’s and died in a nursing home at the age of ninety-five.
Dressed for travelling, his wife had kissed him goodbye and walked away from the double bed with her suitcase. She opened the door and closed it behind her. Meanwhile her husband stayed curled up in bed. He listened intently to her receding steps in the passage and hallway, until the front door latched sharply shut with a click. As when a catch is released from the spring in a child’s toy, the little man leaps from the box and stands erect with outstretched arms.
“I am free! Three days and three nights before me! Praise and glory to God in the highest!”
He sprang out of bed, singing, and executed one or two dance steps on the floor before brushing his teeth. Then he went to the telephone and dialled the branch manager’s number.
“Is Microbe at home? Still asleep? It doesn’t matter. It’s me, the cashier, his friend.”
Microbe took a long time to emerge and in the meanwhile his friend waited, totally emancipated, on the telephone. At last the former came, and the latter, remembering his position, assumed an attitude.
“Yes, good morning. Sorry to wake you so early, old man. But the wife has gone. This is the first time she has gone off on holiday on her own for twenty-five years. You remember I promised to ring as soon as she left. Have you got the tent and car ready for our fishing trip? If we leave very early tomorrow morning, camp that evening, and come back the following night, we’ll have two good long days up on the moors. What am I to bring? Hooks, is that all? Whisky, yes of course, that goes without saying. Shall I bring a whole case or half a case? No, a whole case will certainly not be too much. Worms, very well, you look after those. How many hooks shall I get? Seven hundred —as many as that? No, I understand, not worth buying smaller quantities. A few flies? Well, how many? About forty; very well. And food? I see my wife left me a smoked leg of lamb. What’s that you’re going to call me? Lambkin, indeed, hahaha! You’ve always been a comic Microbe! Well, my dear fellow, now the soul of Lambkin is really yearning for it! All these years how much I’ve longed to be where crystal-clear rivers run through long, deep, grassy dales. Grassdale? So you’re going to finish the job and give me a surname too! Lambkin Grassdale, eh? Anyway, you’re the best friend I have. And we’ll meet in good order here in the best room this evening and get everything ready for tomorrow.”
Microbe came that evening, as arranged. He was a man of unusual height and enormously fat and therefore had given himself this odd name that signifies something extremely small. He spoke few words at a time and moved little and seldom, but laughed deep inside himself, so that his belly shook. He considered other people funny, especially for being small and thin. Daily he had about him a flock of innocents to amuse him, but from time to time would be entrusted with the care of foreigners on fishing expeditions for his father, the branch manager, who had to do with lakes and salmon rivers. At other times he sat in the inner office with his father and addressed envelopes for the branch, after which he was allowed to stamp them and take them to the post. Privately he avenged himself on people’s ordinary names, changing them to accord with the light of a world that he alone inhabited.
Microbe surveyed the best room and saw that all he had commissioned his fellow-fisherman to provide for the journey was there.
“Lambkin Grassdale will not go short on his holiday: seven hundred hooks, forty flies, and a case of whisky. You’ll undoubtedly be made branch manager when Father and I are called south to run the head office.”
“I am delighted to see you, Microbe. No one has entered this room from time immemorial. The blessed committees on which my wife serves never get beyond the lobby.”
“But the paintings—are those supposed to be the rear ends of cows ?” enquired the guest.
“I know you’re making fun of them, but it doesn’t matter,” said his host. “Sit down, I’ll mix you a drink.”
“Mix what?” said Microbe. “Let me mix my own drink. Where’s the soda?”
“I am afraid the soda was simply stolen from me,” said Grassdale. “I’m ashamed to admit that I only have water. You know my wife ranks high in the temperance movement.”
“Aren’t you going to call the girls?” asked Microbe.
Grassdale: “Wouldn’t that be going a bit too far, in view of my position as cashier? But if you want to call anyone—womenfolk if you will—then please go ahead.”
“My dear fellow, not on my own account,” said Microbe. “They bore me. I just sit on them, as one sits on a cat. I meant that if you weren’t satisfied with your old woman, there were plenty more. In this day and age the opposite sex is just part of oneself.”
Grassdale: “As you know, Microbe, we’ve been married for twenty-five years. She’s the best of wives. She’s in child welfare, the Good Templars and the Churchyard Fellowship. But for women like her society would have collapsed long ago.
Microbe: “Has she a hump?”
Grassdale: “No, why should you think that?”
Microbe: “You said she was the best of wives. That’s as good as saying she has a hump.”
Grassdale: “I meant a fine woman.”
Microbe: “Isn’t that even worse?”
Grassdale: “It’s true, perhaps, that she’s a little dry. But she is clean. And she keeps everything dry and clean. She dusts the paintings every day with a feather duster. These things may not be great art, but that’s not her fault. No domestic fly has ever thrived here in all these twenty-five years. But now we can have a party, the two of us. What I’m most afraid of is that I may not wake up to my freedom until about the time when she returns.”
Microbe: “Let us hope she is tired of you and won’t return for a while.”
Grassdale: “Tired of me? That never occurred to me before. She is married to me in a correct and moral fashion and no spot has ever fallen upon this house, indoors or out. For twenty-five years I’ve thought of nothing except how well I was married. I could be promoted from cashier to branch manager any day on that score. Your health!”
Microbe: “I would pinch a woman like that.”
Grassdale: “My wife won’t be pinched. She’s a respectable woman. She would never tolerate a man’s hand anywhere near her. She has made me into a respectable man.”
Microbe: “Yes, it’s terrible. She must have spiky knees.”
Grassdale: “Won’t you sit down, my dear fellow, instead of circling round me like that while we talk ? I say, what’s this cold feeling I have on the back of my neck? I hope we haven’t started a leak anywhere.”
Microbe: “Have you never thought of robbing the till?”
Grassdale: “No—in fact that’s the only achievement I can claim.”
Microbe: “—that you can’t claim, you mean.”
Grassdale:
“I’m sure that if you knew a true woman, Microbe, she would make a respectable man of you, too. She would teach you the difference between good and evil. She would be not only the fulfilment of your life, but the lack of fulfilment also.”
Microbe: “Neither applies to me, old man. With me there’s neither fulfilment nor lack of fulfilment; never beauty or ugliness, and least of all anything to tell the neighbours about. That’s because all is one to me: I am divine. But are you sure your wife hasn’t gone to town to meet a man?”
Grassdale: “I know my wife—after twenty-five years.”
Microbe: “Their wives are those women whom men never know; least of all after living twenty-five years with them. In fact by then they have become completely incomprehensible.”
Grassdale: “I say, Microbe, now I drink without a toast. I’m standing up to scratch my back. Where’s that leak?”
Microbe: “Maybe it’s the kind of leak that always comes in dry weather.”
Grassdale: “Are you trying to tell me that I’m going out of my mind? You’re a very bad boy to be saying wicked things about a woman who is the best of women, a fine woman, and a respectable woman. I feel as though something had dripped down my neck in two places. It’s branching out and spreading all over my back. And now something cold seems to have got into one of my trouser-legs. Do me a favour and do stop this wandering about. Sit down instead, and drink, and shake your belly over our paintings.”
After a while Grassdale returned from a visit to the bathroom with a worm in his hand. “It found its way into my trousers,” he said.
“Only one?” said Microbe.
“I think I may have squashed another one in the small of my back. Will you see?”
“I can’t stand worms,” said Microbe.
“Never mind. Here’s to you. Sit down. I want to talk to you a little. I have been thinking about what you said. As always, you were quite right. Nobody knows anyone. The biggest fool of all is one who believes he knows a woman, not to mention his own wife—apart from the man who thinks he knows himself. Now I shall tell you the truth. The year before last my wife became very fond of a certain long-distance coach-driver. She travelled south with him to attend her mother’s funeral, and returned with him.”
“That’s it,” said Microbe, “it’s always in connexion with funerals or the like that women go astray.”
“Listen, now I’ll tell you a secret. By the way, what’s the time?” said Grassdale.
“The time? Aren’t we on a fishing trip, man?”
“Now then, here’s one in my hair,” said Grassdale. “Do they crawl from you, eh?”
“The man with a worm is drunk. Perhaps you want to go to sleep? It’s nearly eleven. I’ll call for you in the car at about five in the morning and hoot outside.”
“Did you say eleven? and Monday? I say, there’s a little something that happens up here in the attic on Mondays at eleven.”
Grassdale now took his friend by the hand and led him up the stairs to the attic. Here there was the usual prospect of rafters and a twenty-five-year accumulation of rubbish and junk. By squeezing between broken furniture and rusty iron bedsteads one reached a skylight which could be raised in its frame, opening a gap at the bottom through which one could peep.
“Take care not to show your nose,” whispered Grassdale.
A peep revealed the small attic window of the house at the back of the garden. It was now late summer and getting dark at night, and the light was on in the other attic.
“Oh, we’re too late,” said Grassdale, “she has almost finished.”
In the middle of the floor in the other attic a strong-limbed female was standing, engaged in removing her last stitches of clothing. She squeezed a pimple in front of the mirror. Then she put on her nightdress, got into bed, yawned, scratched her hip, and turned out the light. The stage-manager solemnly closed the skylight, the act being over, and looked triumphantly at his audience.
“There, see if I haven’t managed to temper the wind to the shorn lamb,” he said.
“I don’t understand you,” said his guest.
“Though my wife may have gone south to have an affair behind my back, I can tell you that I have played this game for years, with all the maidservants of the captain and his wife there in the house across the garden. Every night for the past twenty-five years, when they were not out with their young men, I have undressed them, stitch by stitch, and gone to bed with them. Sometimes I have had two or three in one year. My wife may leave me a smoked leg of lamb, but I have had my share in advance.”
But this momentous philandering made little impression on Microbe, who took the opportunity to slip more worms down his host’s neck while they were making their way back to resume their drinking.
“Shall I tell you what I have christened this house?” asked Microbe when they were seated. “Peephill. Lambkin Grassdale of Peephill, let’s drink to it.”
The next morning Lambkin Grassdale of Peephill woke with a headache, nausea, and a general feeling of lassitude. There were worms in the bed. He lay with his collar on, on top of the bedcover, but had taken off his jacket and shoes.
When he had pulled himself together and got up, and especially after he had applied a cold compress to his forehead, he began to recall what had happened. In fact nothing had happened. A good friend had come to visit him. They had chatted together over a drink. But had they bidden each other good night? Suddenly Grassdale remembered that he had planned to go on an inland fishing trip with his friend early that morning. What could the time be? His clock said nine, but was it nine o’clock today or yesterday? He went into the living-room and poured himself a whisky pick-me-up. Then he telephoned to the branch manager’s residence and asked for his friend.
He was told that the branch manager’s son had left early that morning for the wilderness, to fish for salmon with cabinet ministers and ambassadors.
“So have I really, more or less,” said Grassdale, and replaced the receiver. Only he couldn’t wake me! But what confounded insect is that on the furniture?
There was no denying it, there was an insect on the chaise-longue. What a state of affairs! he muttered. It was some kind of cross between a blow-fly, a hornet, a tiger-beetle, and a moth. And there was another, and a third. He looked about him and saw that the furniture was covered with them. How had this infernal pest got into the house—not to mention all those worms?—he asked himself. Maybe I have that delirium tremens my wife’s pamphlets are always going on about. As he was standing up from his drink, something caught his thigh and held him, tearing his trousers. And there wasn’t just the one hook, but wherever he touched the chair he pricked himself. I’m going off my head, said the man, and he drained his glass in horror.
But the pest was not in his mind, it was in a much more serious place: their show drawing-room. On the other hand the case of whisky was gone; only a single bottle left, as a mark of the noble nature of the friend who had passed by. He had wanted to spare my wife the shock of seeing a whole case of whisky, without leaving me totally parched, said the marooned fisherman. But that’s just like him, he continued, observing hook after hook in the plush covering of chairs and chaise-longue, and the forty flies to boot. There was also a swarm of the latter in the tablecloth, carpet, and curtains.
He began to try and extract them, but they had been hooked so carefully into the plush that there was no hope of removing them without a tool. But what kind of tool? Scissors? A terrible thought, and surely the last state would be worse than the first! All that he was able to cope with, after a fashion, were the worms, which were genuine; but they were well on the way to drying up, though one or two still showed signs of life about the floor.
After his pick-me-up the spirits of this good man improved and he began to search the telephone directory for the number that might save him. He spoke with the slow delivery of a storyteller nearing the climax of his tale, in a slightly weary, provincial-genteel tone with a touch of some kind of golden age abo
ut it.
“Is that the captain’s? Yes, how do you do, madam. This is the house at the back of you … yes, that one; and this is the branch cashier speaking. Thank you very much indeed, exceptionally well. How very right you are: my wife left the house with her suitcase yesterday morning. Yes, to the south. I hope she has a good time. Yes, she is a remarkable woman. Thank you, no, of course it isn’t too late to offer congratulations after twenty-five years. Some people say that a marriage doesn’t really begin before the silver wedding. Well now, you amaze me! You’ve been married to the captain thirty years today, and only just past fifty! May I take the opportunity of offering my heartiest congratulations. I know what an exceptional man the captain is; what a splendid man—a better husband couldn’t be found. Eight children. No, there you beat me, madam. Remarkable persons; I knew them by sight when they were small, but never realized there were so many—it’s not every day that we compare notes, madam. After all, our front doors face opposite directions and different streets, and one could say that our paths never cross, here or anywhere else, unless we go out by the back door, which is why I have not had the opportunity of taking off my hat to you in all these years. Yet I always nod to your husband, that splendid man, when he comes into the office. But this is not simply a courtesy call, after all these years, I regret to say. Although only a day has passed since my wife went away, there has been a small incident here. There were two anglers in the drawing-room last night, and they dropped something. Sick? Oh no, nothing like that. To tell the truth, a few worms escaped; but that’s going to be all right: the worms are beginning to dry up. On the other hand something has got fixed in the furniture. I am afraid that my wife would not be at all pleased if she saw it. Now since I am utterly inexperienced in the art of putting rooms to rights, whereas you have excellent girls at hand, and I have heard that you have one this summer—‘heard’, yes, I’m not surprised you say that, hahaha; the fact is that I haven’t exactly heard, but seen it and it’s natural you should laugh: she often stands at the back in the mornings, beating carpets on the line—I can see she’s an excellent girl, as I said before; I mean, excellent where her work is concerned, without being hunchbacked—so it occurred to me that you might be willing to let this girl slip across for a moment and tidy up the drawing-room for me …”
