32
SKÁLHOLT, ANCIENT ALTARS amid sulphur springs and greenish lichen, rotted beams of the old church that gave way a few years earlier, graffiti of disasters, earthquakes and eruptions. A crater yawns, the land is the mouth of a shark; the only thing is to slide between the teeth, like the heroes of the fairy tale who end up in the big fish’s belly but alive. This is the place where, in ancient times, the last Catholic bishop of Iceland, Jon Arason, was executed along with his two children, who were punished for his double sin of false religion and lust. But the piglet, they say, has to suffer for the piggery of the porker. No, the revolution puts an end to unnecessary sacrifices to the curse of living, to that obscene, voracious mouth that doesn’t deserve tears. I climb on top of the crater, look down and pee into those dark depths; the jet gushes to the centre of the earth, a golden tribute to the old laboratory of life and death. The fleece too would be better off gilded with piss than reddened with blood.
When we reach Almannagiá, after pushing on to the slopes of Hekla, it’s evening, a rainy sleet batters our faces and cloaks. I’ve been riding the horse for hours; it’s like being up on the rigging, when the wind and water lash your face and you can’t imagine why you don’t fall off; your numb hands do not loosen their grip, maybe they don’t have the strength to open. Once, during battle, there was a sailor standing stock-still beside the barrel of a cannon, wick in hand, leaning against the gun, and only when the firing had ceased did we realize that he was dead and just then he slid to the deck and we tossed him into the sea.
Maybe we too are dead, and this riding under a watery snow, in the pallid evening, is eternity and its punishment. In Goli Otok the chill is more biting, corroding the heart and mind as well. But in Vorkuta, in the Arctic Gulag, hell is even more frozen—I heard it from Julius, many years later. Julius Sattler, the Party sent him to the Soviet Union and he ended up in those searing pincers of ice—even he never knew why, what crime had sent him up there, I met him many years later, one of the few who came back. We became experts on ice; the History we experienced is absolute zero, the death of matter. Even in there, inside those screens I mean, it must be very cold … Cyberia, Siberia … In Dachau Dr. Rascher, SS Hauptsturmführer, plunges prisoners into icy water, to see if he is able to revive them afterwards by rubbing their lifeless bodies against the naked bodies of convicts sent from Ravensbruck for that purpose. The Christiansborg fire …
In the old house the pastor, an albino with sunken eyes, offered us trout and milk.
“Yes, it’s my coffin,” he indicated a chest in a corner of the church. “There are so few people, when the time comes you can’t expect them to see to everything, it’s enough for them to hoist it on their shoulders and carry it to the cemetery. In fact, when I know the time is near, I will lie down in there with the Bible in my hand, as did my predecessor, Sera Asmundur Sveinsson, who now lies beneath a lava flow. For two years, my lord, ash darkened the sky almost every day; then torrents of lava, flaming rivers rushed down from Hekla, the sun was dark as blood, those black birds that are found only on Hekla fell stone-dead in the smouldering air.
“We had just buried Sera Sveinsson, when that cloud and fiery mud came from the volcano, a noxious green spattered with blood. They named me pastor then and there, young though I was and a stable boy, because Sera Sveinsson had taught me to sing the psalms and I was the only one who knew a few passages of the Bible. So we buried him as befits a Christian and a priest, beneath God’s vengeance raining down from the heavens. The Lord had already wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah, there were few sins here because there were few people; however Sera Sveinsson hoped that amid all that ash and lava his sin with the youth Einar, who was also deaf, would remain hidden, but nothing remains hidden, not even under this fluid rock and this dark pall. If you look carefully you can see everything that lies beneath, like reading an open book. This ruptured land is like the heart of a man when it bursts—a spongy blob that hardens, turns to stone, and bears all the stories of that heart inscribed in runes.
“Don’t be fooled by this dusky light; everything is clear, even the sun seems dark as clotted blood when Hekla heaves up so much ash, but those capable of looking beyond that murk see it as clear and bright as on the day of Creation. There’s no reason to be so cruel. Einar had not yet grown a beard and they called him limp dick, people insulted him brutally when he came to gather lichen for the parish, but in church I had him sit next to me. It’s pointless to tear each other apart when we are all in the claws of the Beast, plus he was gentle, in the spring he would sometimes bring wild geraniums and snowy gentians to church, which he picked on Hekla’s slopes.
“Being deaf and also slow-witted, he didn’t understand what Sera Sveinsson was after the first time, and even afterwards he lacked the courage to say no because he was afraid of him, since the cleric had threatened to do the same thing to his sister, she too a halfwit, and this the Lord’s ire certainly did not forget, in Sera Sveinsson’s reckoning, because it’s a cravenly thing to intimidate a man like a beast for slaughter, though the pastor was also fond of him, he could not be without him and sometimes he even caressed him gently, the chaste caress of a brother. Men are like that, cruel and good; animals don’t sin, but they are not better. It was Einar who made me this coffin; he was good with wood, but it fell to me to say the Dies Irae for him. Deaf as he was, he didn’t hear the rumble, and that piece of mountain that slid down fell on him.
“Many things happen here, you know. It’s not all emptiness and silence as it seems, but full of events, sorrows, passions and sins,” he gesticulated excitedly, his eyes blazing, their watery blue darkened like flame, his hands clutched at the air as if snatching birds, then they grabbed me and squeezed my arm, “living in this church among the two or three houses scattered in this barren land is like reading the Book of Kings, the son who rises up against his father, the brother who lies with his sister, the women drowned for their sins—when the executioner whips the offender, he recites the Our Father, when he decapitates him, on the other hand, he says the Apostles’ Creed. Here there’s the world, my lord, with all its tribulations and foulness as well as the hope that God has instilled in the human heart, the green of the grass that not even Hekla with its fire and ash can wither forever. Don’t leave,” he said to me, “stay here, you must learn to hold the sceptre that God has placed in your hand, here you can see everything, solitude, baseness, perseverance, lawfulness and guilt, the retribution of things that leaves no one unpunished—you who wish to rule, look at those volcanoes and the wrath of God and the infinite compassion that flourishes on that wrath, like lichen on lava …”
You too, Doctor, you who insist on ruling, commanding, directing, keeping us locked inside or telling us when we can go for an hour’s walk, forgive me, Doctor, if I grabbed you by the arm like that, I certainly didn’t mean to take liberties, of course not, neither did that pastor, for that matter, in fact I’m sorry I pushed him away, but you too, Doctor, let me go, and you, Comrade Blasich, and you, Commander Carlos, all of you whom the Furies compel to give orders, look around you, look at the frigidity and desolation and death that is the damnation of commanding.
When I shook him off—not you, Doctor, I mean the pastor, who didn’t want to let go of my arm, it’s distasteful …—I went to the back of the church, where a kind of langeldur, a firepit, had been dug within the wooden walls, and stretched out on a fur that I pulled over my head. The wind battered against the church, black shadows lengthened in the flickering flames, Hekla’s huge black birds, wings gliding in the dark, eyelids blinking more and more slowly …
33
THE NIGHT IS WHITE, clear; there is no night, only a perpetual day, in which the sun always seems to have set but never disappears. Snorri, the poet who sang about swords but was afraid of them, says that, in the order of things, man comes immediately after summer. I leafed through that old book of his that talks about man, the gods and the metaphors that incessantly transform men, the gods and eve
rything in the world, making them change colour and flow into one another. Provost Magnussen showed it to me, in the library in Bessastadir, translating a few verses here and there for me. The skalds, he explained, the ancient poets of Iceland, sang about destiny and death and called everything by another name. Maybe it was also a way to escape death. I too am used to having many names—they die one after another, but after each one there is another; if one is dead, the other is alive and so on and so forth, confusing police records throughout the world.
That’s why they won’t catch me, at least until the end, when the eternal arctic night will fall, that final darkness in which metaphors die and therefore I too, but for now it is summer, the long day of the Nordic summer, my day as king. In the hierarchy of names, according to old Snorri’s book, the gods and goddesses, poetry, the sky, land, sea, sun, wind, fire, winter and summer come before man. I come right after summer. I made Provost Magnussen read and reread those verses to me a number of times, promising to further increase the school’s appanage and its lecturers’ stipend.
I move forward in this summer, in this perpetual lingering of twilight. When they transported us to Dachau it was always night in the sealed boxcar. In that boxcar I was in the arctic night of the world, in the blackest black that there has ever been. I knew that, for life to be worth living, we had to scrape that blackness off the face of the earth. And, by God, we succeeded and that counts more than anything. Yes, Jason is a liar and a thief and, after the victory, he behaved like a swine. Yes, I too am a swine. But I slayed the dragon, which would have crushed and devoured the world; it proclaimed itself millennial, that dragon’s reign, it promised a thousand years of Dachau, but I destroyed it after twelve, I smashed it to pieces like a chamber pot. I speared the dragon and I deserve, we deserve the fleece, Comrades; it’s true that later we defiled it, but that fleece red with our blood and with that of the monster is the red flag of summer. The black inside those sealed boxcars seemed eternal and indelible, but in Stalingrad the snow covered it in white and cleansed it like any other filth. I like white, the whiteness of snow, of Iceland.
I rode through that opaque light listening to Brarnsen. He told me that he was once on a tethered balloon for three days—in Berlin, I think, I don’t remember—with an English gentleman who had taken him into service when he arrived in Iceland with Sir Joseph Banks’s expedition, many years earlier. It’s beautiful up there, he says. Clouds break up like walls, huge black swells in the sky scattered by a ray of sunlight, the earth racing away dark and swift.
I listen to him distractedly as I look around. Rivers of solidified lava, blisters that proliferate in the desert of ash and lichens, malignant growths. That trapped mephitic breath is the flatulence of the abyss, the belch of the furnace that pulverizes life and death. The stench is the herald of death. Just getting a whiff of the dragon’s stinking breath, Jason backs away, the arm with the drawn sword drops. It’s hard not to be afraid when you smell that stench. When the wind suddenly blew not from the direction of the Lager’s huts, in Dachau, but from near the SS barracks, bringing the horrible stench that came out of the chimney of the cremation ovens along with the smoke, the canaries in the cages stopped singing and went limp. That’s why the jailers kept them, to know when to turn off the ovens, before that stench reached them. It wasn’t just revulsion; it was also fear, I think, and a good deal of it, as in all revulsion.
Even those citizens of Munich—that time when they protested a train full of bodies gassed in Schloss Hartheim, near there, which had been left abandoned—those people must have been afraid of those corpses and their stench. They even spoke up against the Leichenkommandos, the death squads who weren’t doing their job well.
Yes, the dragon’s stink is frightening. Even Jason would have fled without Medea. Without Maria, I too would perhaps have fled and maybe it would have been better for me. In Dachau, I feared torture and death, like everyone else, but the way you fear lightning when it strikes all around you, or the nevèra at sea, still, I was a man—frightened, terrified, but a man, while they, the executioners, had not been men since time immemorial. Perhaps they never had been, perhaps they were born swine and did not need to visit Circe’s bed to become animals. They can only inspire pity, though they must be butchered so they won’t do any more harm.
Yes, in Dachau I was afraid of dying and it wrung my heart to see so many friends and comrades die. How can you avoid shitting your pants when, to obtain useful data for aeronautical training, they seize your neighbour and throw him in a decompression chamber so dramatically accelerated that it makes him burst? Do you think I could help being afraid? Only the fatigue and hunger that exhausted me dulled the fear a little. But, when I managed to think, at least I knew what I would have wanted to fight for and what I would have wanted to fight against, had I been able to. When the SS forced several prisoners to accompany a condemned man to his execution, playing the violin, it turned my stomach, but I was also proud of the man who, unbeknownst to his wretched torturers, was headed for glory, and of that music that encircled him.
34
I MUST SAY you bend over backward for us. Now, on Saturday evening, even gambling to keep us entertained. Never mind that the ward keeper gives us free chips, the fever is still the same. The ball spins on the roulette wheel, the days and weeks spin and disappear, the pause is brief and the number is the wrong one every time … The ball rolls along, a gleaming flash, Maria’s smile—maybe it’s a crystal from that transparent, shattered door at the Café Lloyd in Fiume that bounced onto this green table. How Maria loved green meadows, and glades—I reach out a hand to her, but she’s already gone, she rolls along the curved surface, down the slope, disappears. I wager everything, on all the numbers, even zero, to be sure, but she doesn’t stop, she’s vanished, slipped away in the dark, into the smoke that hangs over the table in the room—the ball went on spinning and spinning, swiftly, I couldn’t see it until it stopped on that number, the Lager’s serial number …
35
SING THE SWORD, wield the sword. While I’m riding through this barren, fissured emptiness, Magnus Finnusen, as he promised me in Bessastadir, is composing his poem, the song of Jorgen, Protector of Iceland, master of the sword and ash tree of the lineage, the bear brought by the ice floes, the king who came from the sea with sword and scales. I want a proper poem and if necessary I’ll give him a hand, old Pistorius’s school is not unworthy of that of Bessastadir. A fine poem about my complete life—complete, therefore including my death.
Writing and performing one’s own death, like an actor who has studied his part. Then I will know who I am, since it’s death, the pyre, the grave, that tells the life story of a man, even to himself, more so than biographies and autobiographies. In Reykjavík I will prepare my funeral beer in any case, as solemn funeral rites require. The horses continue on, the future is a painted canvas and life tears it to shreds without regard. Maybe I’ll drink up that funeral beer of mine beforehand.
36
ON A FARM, not far from the lava caves of Stefán Hellir, there is a pole of infamy, a post with the head of a horse. The farmer, a bony, scrofulous man, doesn’t remember whom it’s for. There are so many infamies committed, it’s only fitting to plant a pole and hold them up to disgrace. Even his sinful daughter was put to death in the swamp where women were drowned. The girls scream when they shove their heads under, once one managed to escape, swimming to the opposite shore. I’ll take their bastards under my protection, I’ll make them my guard, like the sultan and the janissaries. And the mothers will get aid, as long as they stay away.
37
ALMOST AT THE BOUNDARIES of my kingdom. Of the world? In Myvátn, ice and scalding mud. Jets of lava erupt and plummet into the icy water, rocks cling together, an interrupted embrace. Sadness hangs over things, veins of blue streak the grey sky—an aperture toward that cerulean light, toward North … The icy sea rages, white crests, a realm of snow. North is that poignant light, like in Nyhavn. The sea … blac
k, white, untamed. The grey seeps from the sky, unbearable.
38
WITH MARIA, in Lussino, we would take a boat, often from Cigale bay, the most beautiful one of the island, and go out to the open water. I’m going with you, I don’t trust waiting for you, who knows if you’ll come back later, she said laughing, because it was in that bay—in Croatian it’s called Cikat, cekati means to wait—that women awaited the return of their men who had gone to sea. Leave, return, await the return—When I set ashore in Iceland for the first time, in January, there was a statue of snow behind a house, a woman with an exquisite, fearless face, looking up, a figurehead made of ice, some children were playing around her. She’ll wait for me, I thought as I was leaving, she’ll await my return. But in June, when I returned, she was no longer there, a moist mud stuck to my shoes.
39
DO YOU LIKE IT? Look at that face—beautiful and generic, the caption says, like beauty should be, purified of every incidental, particular dross, of any doleful individual expressivity If only I could erase the lines carved by my heart, that are mine and accursedly mine alone, from my own face as well, the way I plane and smooth them from the face of this figurehead. A good idea, Doctor, this idea of making us work, of not letting us grow melancholy, twiddling our thumbs; to each his own task, his specialty. Ergotherapy, Arbeit macht frei, I’m familiar with the treatment. I can’t complain, since I enjoy sculpting and carving these women of wood. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t even need those beautiful illustrated catalogues you give me to copy the figures from. I’m no novice, I even earned a few bucks making or repairing a couple of figureheads for ships that reached Hobart Town with their prow and its figure in bad shape. I also take pleasure in having those wooden breasts beneath my hands, planing them until they become smooth and it’s a joy to caress them, oh nothing lewd, for heaven’s sake, it’s that they remind me of those odd jobs of those days, I’ve even tried to model those pouting lips of Norah’s, eager and impelling up until the end, but … I realized that the faces of these women who accompany men at sea must be polished, serene, imperturbable; woe if they were to show passion, personality. Besides, who could afford to display a personality? Only a fool, made of phony, interchangeable flesh rather than of good wood that doesn’t con you—if it’s oak it’s oak and if it’s pine it’s pine, there’s no ruse, while flesh, especially human flesh, is always deceptive. In any case, men suspended over the depths already have too much fury in their hearts and require serenity, namely, impersonality as colourless as water.
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 15
