The Blue Fox: A Novel

by Sjón

  Reverend Baldur embarked conscientiously on his programme. He sang and recited all he knew, even the psalms of David. But he had nothing left but Reverend Jochumsson’s ‘big bang’ and a comic verse by his colleague Thorarensen, which he meant to leave out and instead start all over again, when he discovered to his amazement that everything that had dropped from his lips up to this point had been wiped from his memory. Not a single word, not a single letter remained.

  He reacted quickly, testing whether this was really the case; he thundered all the verses of Jochumsson’s ‘Song of Praise’ to himself – and, would you know it?, once he had finished the rendition he couldn’t remember a thing.

  Then he came to Reverend Gisli’s verses.

  ***

  SHOPPING LIST FOR THE MERCHANT’S

  Paper and ink and pens and wax,

  raisins and prunes and hemp and flax,

  baccy, pepper and camphor oil,

  a hundredweight of coffee, hooks and foil,

  anvil, window glass, fencing twine,

  ginger and rum and good red wine,

  from this my need will be quite plain,

  the day I meet old Thorgrimsen.

  Now my wife comes after, to wit,

  and buys a cask of aquavit,

  silk cloth, soap, a whistling kettle,

  six plates, a chamber pot of metal,

  cards and baubles, a cinnamon roll,

  she buys as if for life and soul,

  I think that if she had her way,

  she’d take the merchant any day.

  ***

  The poem droned c-c-constantly in the m-man’s h-head like a fly under glass, with-without his being able to resist it. H-he was b-both h-hot and c-cold, ice-hot and boiling-cold at o-once. He t-tried what he c-could to recall oth-other stohories, oth-other p-poems, but it was all-all lost and forgotten, lohost and for-gotten from his deep-frozen memory, he w-was st-stuck with this on h-his b-b-b-boiling b-brain:

  Oh, o-o-oh, h-how sham-shaming to d-die with this ab-absurd shopping list, shohopping list, o-on, on m-my li-hip-lihips, thought the pre-pre-hiest.

  He p-pursed to-togehether his m-mouhouth to p-prevent, his, his d-dying wohords fr-from behing, for example: ‘a hundredweight of coffee’. Though ih-it w-was truhue that-that he had no-ho witness to his hour of deheath b-but ‘Aitch Tee’ – the H-holy T-trinity – he didn’t ca-hare. And j-just f-for a m-moment, Reverend Baldur f-felt s-s-sorry for h-hims-self, self.

  H-he wh-whispered to-the dark-darkness:

  ‘Thi-his is an ug-ugly h-hole ...’

  He felt instantly better.

  He closed his eyes.

  And awaited his death.

  ‘Ho! Reverend Baldur! Baldur Skuggason! Ho!’

  The calls which carried to the ears of the dying man sounded as if they came from the belly of a whale; the voice was muffled, and distance even made it, if anything, even shriller:

  ‘Ho, Reverend Baldur, ho!’

  The priest was jolted out of his deathly lethargy:

  ‘Ho! I’m here! Ho!’

  He fell instantly silent to listen for a response:

  ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’

  He tore off his balaclava and turned his right ear to the livid ice wall, but heard nothing – he turned the left ear: not a sound.

  ‘Down here! Ho! Down here!’

  He shouted and yelled, then pricked his ears, moving with great care so the creaking of his leather clothing would not drown out any noises from outside. Yes! There it was; nearer. A reedy voice was calling:

  ‘Are you there? Ho!’

  ‘HO! HERE! HO!’ Reverend Baldur howled with all his life and soul.

  ***

  ‘Do you want to deafen me?’

  Reverend Baldur’s heart missed a beat. The enquiry did not come from some searcher outside on the snowfield, no, the impertinent enquiry came from someone inside the fissure with him, and not only inside the fissure with him, but right up against him, or to be more precise, from inside his own clothes.

  The priest squawked with terror when the vixen stirred at his breast. He writhed on his wet pallet, tearing off his leather coat with such violence that the whalebone buttons popped off and were lost. (Which was a great pity as they were fine articles which Haraldur, Reverend Baldur’s half-brother, had carved with his own hand and given him as a confirmation gift.)

  The vixen sprang forth on to the floor of the cave. She spun in a circle, plumped down on her rump – and began to lick herself like a house cat.

  ***

  Reverend Baldur was quick to recover, a man with a priestly training; the naturalist rose up in him. He watched the beast’s behaviour with scientific detachment.

  She was damn sprightly, considering she had been out cold for six days and nights. It was ridiculous how she worked away at herself so frantically. She licked the bloodstains from her pelt and bored her muzzle to the roots of her fur, gnawing at herself as if she were de-lousing for Doomsday.

  The nature-observer shut one eye.

  ‘Look at the creature, faugh!’

  He slapped his thigh.

  ‘Hah, a vampire drinking its own blood!’

  At that point the vixen spat out the first piece of shot. It pinged against the priest’s cheek. He moaned aloud and swore. But the vixen ignored him. She continued to preen herself until she had cleaned from her flesh all that the rifle had delivered to her: bloodstained lead ricocheted around the fissure, and great sparks flew from the rock where the shot struck.

  The priest was hard-pushed to avoid the hail of lead that whined around him like a swarm of midges.

  ***

  The vixen now began to pace back and forth, to and fro, here and there. Reverend Baldur sat quietly in his place, with his hands in his lap. He avoided meeting the beast’s eyes; it seemed edgy and incalculable.

  Time passed.

  At first light next day the vixen stopped and said:

  ‘Well, Parson, what do we do now?’

  ‘We could argue,’ he answered.

  ‘What should we argue about?’ she asked.

  ‘Electricity,’ said the priest.

  The vixen regarded him as if he were a fool:

  ‘If you think a wild beast like me knows the first thing about electricity, you’re sadly mistaken ...’

  But Reverend Baldur was so insistent that he suggested to the vixen that if she could solve a riddle he knew, she would be allowed to decide the topic of argument; if not, they would argue about electricity. The vixen agreed:

  ‘Out with it, then ...’

  ‘I’m born with a loud noise, and yet I have no voice.’

  The vixen took thought – for far too long, in Reverend Baldur’s opinion, but he said nothing, he didn’t dare alarm her – and in the end she gave in.

  ‘Do you give in?’

  The priest laughed at the beast’s stupidity: ‘It’s a fart!’

  And he broke wind in support of his point.

  ‘How predictable,’ replied the vixen, dryly:

  ‘Go on then, argue about electricity.’

  ***

  By rights the electricity debate should have taken place in a grander setting than the stony crack in a glacier’s backside. The fact of the case was that Reverend Baldur had been invited to Reykjavik to talk about this interest of his at a public, advertised meeting. There he meant to oppose some Icelandic-Canadian émigré who was preaching Edison’s great tidings to his former countrymen.

  If the avalanche had not taken him, the priest would have returned home to Dalbotn the morning after the fox hunt. He would have put the finishing touches on his speech and then reached the capital four days later, at noon on 15th January, and that evening he would have wiped both his nose and his arse with his opponent. By his calculations, the meeting must have taken place three days ago; quarrelling about the matter with the vixen was some compensation.

  So, the priest expounded his religious theories for the beast, for against electricity he had th
eological arguments. These theories were highly modern, because Reverend Baldur believed in a material God, self-created, both visible and tangible – compare: ‘When it snows on man, it rains on God.’

  Consequently he could not accept that electricity, which is created by the friction of the smallest atoms of the world, which form the kernel of God, should be transmitted via wires and cables, here, there and everywhere, even into factories where it would be used to drive machines which, for example, might spit out meat-balls, yes, or mustard.

  What had she to say to that?

  ***

  The vixen decided to meet the priest on his home ground:

  ‘But if electricity is the building material of the world, and light its revelation, compare the first book of Moses, and God himself is a being of light, though perhaps we can’t see this with the naked eye – like the pitch-black rock that surrounds us – well, couldn’t you say then that in reality it is one all-embracing world mission to bring God into people’s homes via electric power lines; even illuminate whole cities with him – n’est-ce pas?’

  She looked enquiringly at the priest. He returned her look in silence; she tweaked the argument:

  ‘Surely the transmission of electric power ought to be desirable in the eyes of the Church, and its servants, if it is the Almighty Himself who shines in the lamps.’

  He did not reply. Had she stumped him, then? No, the little fox had not noticed that while she was talking, Reverend Baldur had drawn the knife from its sheath and hidden it in his hand; the one facing the rock wall.

  Then he said gently:

  ‘Do you really believe, Madam Vixen, that the radiance from these electric bulbs of yours can penetrate the human soul?’

  Before she had a chance to answer, the man plunged his knife deep into the vixen’s breast.

  ***

  He raised the vixen’s remains on the blade of his knife and stared into her dull eyes; the pupils were filmy like moorland tarns in the first freeze of winter, but all the priest saw was that she was dead at last.

  The corpse lay limp in his hands and he discovered that the skin was strangely loose on the body; a sure sign of a witch’s familiar – since the night she had tried to drive him mad by dividing herself into four, he had suspected that that is exactly what she was: a witch’s familiar. His ruse of luring her into talk had been successful. The sender had been careless, he had put too much of himself into her, spoken unwittingly through her. Yes, the use of French at the end of her speech about the city of lights had given the beast away. The priest was in no doubt as to who had sent him Vixen Reynard’s-daughter.

  The demon bore every sign of having been raised against him by that fool of a sheriff from Fjord, Valdimar Skuggason, his elder brother. This upstart had never forgiven Reverend Baldur for the fact that in her widowhood their mother Nal had chosen to live at the Botn parsonage, taking with her their patrimony, the hymnbook collection of ‘Old’ Skuggi Haraldsson from Saurar.

  No, she wasn’t put off by the fact that her Baldur had never left these shores nor that he had received all his education from an Icelandic priest’s school.

  ***

  Reverend Baldur Skuggason skinned the vixen, thinking of his brother Valdi with quiet vengeance all the while, cutting along the animal’s back, hacking a groove beside the spine, from ruff to tail: yes, he’d get his just deserts; he groped inside the body with his hands, down along the flanks, squeezing his fingers between flesh and hide, leaving the fat behind in the belly: he would bring a charge against him at the high court for attempted murder; he snapped the outer limbs from their sockets, cut a ring round the paws and forced the legs out of their socks, he jabbed his forefinger into the muzzle, tore the nose from the skull with his nail; he would go to the gallows, the damn mountebank – and so the man tugged and tore and toiled until he had ripped the animal from its blue pelt.

  The priest stripped naked. He gouged the fat out of the skin bag and greased himself from top to toe. Then he dressed himself in the hide, which proved so roomy that its forelegs reached the ground. The vixen herself wasn’t much to look at where she lay on the stones, naked as a foetus in the womb. The man stuck his finger into her ribcage, plucked out her heart and laid it on his tongue:

  It’s like ptarmigan, thought Reverend Baldur, pulling the skin over his head. He swallowed the slimy fox heart, and as if he’d been struck by lightning the thought flashed through him – OUT!

  ***

  Reverend Baldur dug himself out of the avalanche. He used both jaws and claws, he no longer knew his name, he just scratched and gnawed, gnawed and scratched.

  The blood throbbed in his temples.

  ‘Light, more light!’

  But the closer the priest came to his goal, the less man there was in him, the more beast.

  He stands shivering on the glacial moraine, gulping down the refreshing mountain air. The morning sun blesses and restores him.

  Below his feet lies a long, quite narrow, green valley. There are fair slopes, grown with grass and willow scrub. A river runs down the middle; a char flashes under the surface, a phalarope floats above. Field mice scamper over the moor, a whimbrel whistles in the marshes, ptarmigan busy themselves building nests among the tussocks, a honey bee growls in the moss and plovers wait to be caught. Everything is greener and bluer, larger and fatter than he has ever seen before.

  Then a fox barks from the stony ground at the mouth of the valley.

  ‘Argh, argh!’

  Skugga-Baldur pricks his ears at the call.

  There’s no mistaking the scent; it’s a vixen on heat. Lust burns in his eyes, he puts his best paw forward and sets off down the fair valley; he will be the first to reach her.

  It is spring before the days of man.

  IV

  (23 March 1883)

  Brekka in the Dale, 23 March 1883

  My dear friend,

  Forgive me for replying so late to your last letter, but various things have happened in this part of the world since New Year. They would not be thought particularly newsworthy in your world, but they are considered quite something here: a woman died, and a man was lost.

  Yes, my Abba is dead. It happened on the fourth day of the New Year; she had a peaceful passing and was composed in her death. I have missed her a great deal, which is not to be wondered at, since I have had her by me all these years. She was not old, maybe thirty, which I gather is common with people of her sort. It was as if she aged more rapidly than I myself; she had turned grey and was becoming a little forgetful lately. Now, of course, you will ask yourself whether she received your feather. She did so, and it gave her much joy. She thought it quite something to possess the feather of a Danish cygnet, indeed she knew Herr Andersen’s stories well – and she put it in her book straightaway on Christmas night.

  I thank you also for my part. You are well versed in the French poets, though you are of the opinion that they cannot write, n’est-ce pas? Mallarmé affects me like a flowering cherry tree reflected in an eye, a scented handkerchief, or a dragonfly settling on the shoulder of a swimmer in a smooth river. Well, well, there you can see in black and white what a great inspiration he is!

  A man was lost, I wrote, and I shall not keep you any longer in suspense over that news. It is the Parson of Botn who has vanished, Reverend Baldur Skuggason, brother of Valdimar ‘Bollocks’ who danced with the lamp-post at The Leather Trousers. He was seized by the wild notion, foolish man, of rushing off on a fox hunt in the mountains, although it was the depths of winter and everyone knew that a great blizzard was in the offing. (An old cat scratched itself on New Year’s Eve, and that means fearsome gales; this is the sort of ‘meteorologia’ we practise here.) That is to say, he has not been seen since and it does not take a lively imagination to guess what has become of him.

  People believe that this will result in a review of the living conditions of country priests. Reverend Baldur monopolised all foxhole work here in the parish to eke out his income, as t
he skins fetch a high price. Certainly things have come to a pretty pass if priests have begun to throw away their lives on foxhunting, from purest penury.

  ‘Good riddance’ is all I have to say concerning the disappearance of Reverend Baldur; I thought him a terrible stupidus.

  Abba means: Hafdis.

  Itza means: God.

  Itza ha-am means: God wills.

  Itza um means: God may not.

  Itz-umba uba-hara means: God’s light,

  the sun or soul.

  Ufa-hara ho-fakk means: the moon.

  Ut-da-da ho-fakk means: the stars.

  Iff-itz means: light.

  Fuffa huya means: angels.

  Iffa ku-ku means: heaven.

  Itza i-addiga means: God knows all.

  Otzina-maeya means: Christmas.

  Itza ro-ro means: Jesus.

  Otzina-huya means: Easter.

  Otzina-mortha means: Sunday.

  Avv-avv means: talk.

  Ko-ko means: sing.

  Andha ha-am ko-ko means: let us sing.

  Umm avv-avv means: doesn’t want to talk.

  Umra means: don’t know.

  Amh-amh means: beautiful, good.

  Offo-ker means: ugly.

  Futzu means: man.

  Hall-hall means: girl.

  Fuffa-ro means: child.

  Furru means: person.

  Mamba means: bird.

  Morthana-huya means: day.

  Ho-fakk means: night.

  Sa-odo means: the sea.

  Fadi-fad means: rain.

  Huyera means: snow.

  Mah-mah means: summer.

  Mah-mah huyera means: winter.

  Ka means: fire.

  Faff-faff means: priest.