Several months after the operation, when she was supposed to have been healed and I went to check on her, it turned out that she’d been stitched up in such a way that her nether regions couldn’t be touched without her experiencing intense pain. That’s how they’d left her, those damned white coats. Sewn up so tightly inside that nothing could get in there. Lucky they didn’t just suture it all shut! Those were difficult days. She felt so ashamed that burning tears poured from her eyes.
Once she ran out onto the homefield in her nightgown, crying out in a kind of fit of rage, with me following in only my boots and long underwear. What was I to say to her? It might have appeared that I was threatening her and she was fleeing my brandished knife, while what in fact happened was that I’d foolishly mentioned the operation after we’d gone to bed. Luckily no one was looking out the window that night. That I can tell you.
I told you that I’d suggested she let other doctors examine her to find out if this could be fixed, but it didn’t make any difference. She gave me an earful. Said that I could slaughter her like any other gelded yearling. Got into the bedroom closet and started sobbing so loudly that all the rafters creaked. And I stared bewilderedly at the knots. Never in my life had I witnessed such behavior.
And then you said it, as I lamented these things at your breast. It wasn’t the words themselves that enflamed me, but rather how you said it; in the heavy, sweet scent of stale urine you pressed my head to your bosom, your holy tussocks, and said softly, deeply, like a draft through a gully: “Love her—through me.”
Love her through you! And then you drove my head into your heavy breasts—and what man could have withstood such treatment?
Maybe you’ll find it crude of me to bring this up, to put it in words to you, my dear Helga. Reputation, respect, it’s all the same to me. What’s a man to do with such things when all is said and done? When it comes right down to it, I’d have to admit that I can’t recall ever knowing any such earthly bliss as during our lovemaking there in the barn that eternal spring day. When I finally got the chance to touch your smooth curves and drown in the fullness of your lips during that joyous, fleeting rut of my life. What happened, happened. I pulled down my trousers, and you shucked off every piece of clothing and bared your breasts and triangular tuft and ran into the barn with me after you, so exceptionally aroused and lustful. Your body trembled and quivered beneath me in the hay pile. It was like touching life itself. You moaned so loudly that I was afraid it could be heard at the farm, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have given a damn even if the entire slanderous parish of Hörgár came to the barn door drooling and slobbering to witness plain as day what we were up to there in the hay. How your breasts undulated like surging white ground swells beneath your skin. A fairer sight I have never seen. For which I’d waited so long.
I hitched up my trousers. Spoke not a word. Looked away. You said I shouldn’t be ashamed. Smiled blissfully as if you didn’t know what a sin was. Sat up on your elbow with straw in your hair and said heartily that such things happened on the best of farms, and smiled and sought my eyes for assent. You were impeccable there in the hay. I poured out the bathtub’s contents and bore it out to the hay wagon. Put on my balaclava and started up the tractor. Puttered my way down the old road by the sea so as not to risk meeting anyone. My inner thighs sticky. The lant vat on the back of the wagon and my soul spun and twisted like a ghost in a washing machine.
It never happened. This had never taken place. That’s how my soul responded to the onslaught of the flesh. My body had become meek, but my soul hardened! No one was ever to discover that the rumor had been confirmed. My heart ached that night, feeling of course that I’d betrayed my Unnur and it was an ugly thing to do—my body knew it. But I’d also been given a glimpse through the doorway to heaven.
Yet as paradoxical as it might sound, it was as if the rumor ceased after it became a reality. As if the slander had been a shout of encouragement from the natural will that desired our union. Yes, mightn’t the will of creation have found a mouthpiece in the slanderous windpipes of the parish? And then fallen silent as soon as it was released. I actually found it easier to be among my neighbors afterward. As if I’d fulfilled their will. Damned if Unnur didn’t simply look a bit more relaxed. It wasn’t so dangerous, then.
Several weeks passed. I put everything I had into being loving to Unnur and didn’t mention the operation, and she neither hid in the closet nor shouted to the rafters that she was a gelded yearling that would be best slaughtered. Everything settled down somehow as if after a storm. Beloved be all that settles down, and beloved be human kindness. I’m out in the sheep shed feeding the sheep. Your loins are silhouetted against the hay trough. Your breasts are tossed about in the hay. Your blissful moans resound in the silo. Your eyes are in the pleading, hungry eyes of the ewes. I look at the spiderweb in the window where a sunbeam plays on a blowfly’s shimmering green. But I don’t see it. I don’t see anything. Except for your simmering white loins, your veins with their ever-present thirst, and your breasts staring at me from the knots in the barn walls. Everywhere I see you in my mind’s eye, with the same “mental vigor” that sheep are said to have in old breeding booklets.
Then it was time for the required annual dips, and I started becoming your regular caller, as Katla in Eyrbyggja saga might have said.
6
The next year was the most glorious I ever lived. The year that I have called the rut of my life. It snowed a great deal that winter; exceptionally severe frosts crusted the drifts, and pack ice lined the northern coasts. Under these conditions, between Christmas and New Year, old Sigríður from up north in Hólmanes kicked the bucket; the Grim Reaper didn’t choose the most convenient time for his assault. “When the call comes, no one buys his way out,” as Hallgrímur said. I recall that the sorrow over this loss gave way entirely to concerns over how on earth we were supposed to bury the old woman. Though folk often say how tough it is to live in those northerly parts in the winter, it’s a sight worse to die there. Jósteinn of Karlsey and I were given the task of retrieving the body and bringing it to church.
We took Jósteinn’s boat over on the day before New Year’s Eve. There was a northerly swell but calm weather as we set out for the place that the wags call the backside of beyond and which at the time had neither a road nor a decent landing. A proper road to the place wasn’t constructed until after it was deserted—as strange as that sounds. It’s no wonder that the Hólmanes farm was the first to be abandoned in our parish; the hayfields there are quite small and exposed to the open sea. But despite the straitened conditions, love always flourished between Sigríður and Gísli. Visiting them made me think of the old couple on the moorland farm in Halldór Laxness’s World Light, toiling in poverty for forty years. They were like two of the same stamp. People make fun of the most miserly of farms, saying they lie beyond the bounds of civilization, but mightn’t it be that there was more civilization found there than anywhere else?
Old Gísli brewed coffee and even added a drop or two of spirits. We talked there in the kitchen about the day to day—whether the lambs had gotten the scours, the agenda of the Progressive Party, and the last parish council meeting. I took the opportunity and inspected the hay and assessed the sheep and still recall the handsome horn-growth on Gísli’s ewes.
Then we said a few “yessirs” and “well nows.” As we were leaving, I kept feeling as if we were forgetting something, though I couldn’t determine what. We stood out in front of Gísli’s farmhouse and watched the murky clouds approach from the north, tongues of sleet licking the surface of the sea, and saw the waves breaking out at Hvalsker Skerry; a gale was clearly blowing in. It also looked as if the boat were about to slip from the landing, which provided only a little shelter from northwesterlies; so, Jósteinn and I said our hasty good-byes and hurried down to it, although I still felt as if I were forgetting something. The feeling, however, was quickly pushed aside, because we had to work fast to avoid being stu
ck at old Gísli’s or lose the boat on the rocks.
After we’d rowed out with the wind somewhat and put more than half the fjord behind us, Jósteinn lets out a horrendous shout! Then he gives me something of an astonished look, sitting there on his thwart, and says, “We forgot the old woman!”
But there was no way to turn back, what with the waves breaking on both sides. We agreed that Sigríður hadn’t wanted to leave her beloved husband and made herself invisible in order not to—well, at least in our minds. When we asked Gísli in the spring whether it had slipped his mind as well, he replied that he simply hadn’t had the faintest idea that the wet and wind from the north would last so long. So polite was Gísli that in our agitated rush when we realized the wind was blowing in, he couldn’t bring himself to interrupt us and remind us of why we’d come.
After this famous corpse-forgetting trip of ours, there came such exceptionally fierce, freezing gales from the north—absolutely monstrous, thought most—that it was impossible to go north by boat for months on end. By late March this started weighing heavily on us, since it was Jósteinn and I who forgot the body and were responsible for its transportation; the matter was raised at a parish council meeting, and we were finally allotted a motorboat with a dinghy and a captain from down south in Hólar Parish. This time, four of us from the parish council went to fetch blessed Sigríður: Jósteinn, Hjörtur, Gunnar of Hjarðarnes, and I, and we cast anchor in Helguvík, which is considerably south of Hólmanes and decently protected from the ocean waves. We rowed ashore in the dinghy, four men in long underwear, knee-high wool socks, and winter scarves. We landed at Sandvík, walked up the beach, and then inland toward Hólmanes. The weather was tolerable, though I recall that there was a considerable amount of blowing, drifting snow; we were relieved to be able to pause at Gísli’s fishing huts to brush off the snow and gather our strength before heading up the slope to the farm. The first thing we set eyes on was Sigríður’s coffin. Hjörtur asked whether it would be impolite to check whether Sigríður was in the coffin, the dear woman, and in the incredible absence of any odor someone threw out the idea that maybe she’d just held up well in the cold from the north. Hjörtur lifted the lid. The coffin was empty.
“She can’t have become a ghost,” sighed Jósteinn in his hoarse voice, which always sounded like a distant shout from somewhere up on a heath.
“Listen, mate!” came Gunnar of Hjarðarnes’s same old refrain, before he wondered out loud whether Gísli could have found a place to put her in the ground—if he’d buried her without the coffin, he must have put her in a snowdrift; but then Hjörtur suggested we spend no more time there contemplating the coffin, because that wasn’t what we came there for. We needed to get back before dark, which wouldn’t give us much time if we had to start by digging her up. As the old verse said, “Day gave men barely any precious light.”
I recall that Gísli was wearing a spotless white shirt and welcomed us warmly, offering us tasty oatmeal cookies that he’d baked the day before. Naturally, he’d dreamed the future or perceived somehow that we were on our way, long before we arrived. I imagined that that’s the way it was. It seemed as if such sensitivity disappeared simultaneous to the spread of the telephone; that this instrument killed real communication between people, the same way that ghosts and spirits seemed to have retreated when people started polluting the air with radio broadcasts and other radio waves. Folk from remote areas who are used to isolation have sharper senses than others. I’ve read that some tribes in Africa still possess such sensitivity and sense visits from people or animals long beforehand.
Gísli thanked us over and over for sacrificing so much to come back out there, and poured delicious caraway coffee into cups on the covered kitchen table. The weather conditions were the first topic of discussion—such an unparalleled bad spell. Then the condition of lambs, news of the district, the military occupation and whether it wasn’t a calamity for the nation, and so on. I suppose we’ll all end up becoming crofters again. Not of chieftains and temple priests or bishops. Of the big foreign nations instead. Yes, just like in the Middle Ages. It would be best to go on the dole immediately. That’s what I say. Yes, I’m afraid so. Hmm, most likely. Then the kitchen fell silent. Delicate whiffs of snow drifted over the frozen gravel bank above the farm.
Hjörtur cut the matter short: “We came up the beach to get here and took a little breather at the fishing huts. We saw the coffin there, and you know what our task is, so we were curious to know whether you’d maybe buried the late Sigríður, or, well, how you might have dealt with this difficult situation that’s come up.”
“Aw,” said old Gísli, “now I wouldn’t…say that…I’d already buried her.” He spoke hesitantly, sighing now and then, making it difficult to get to the bottom of it. He explained to us that his only option had been to do what he could to try to prepare the body of his Sigríður decently. Then he said, using the common northern term for what elsewhere is called the smokehouse: “I made a little covering for her and tied it with a hempen string and put her up in the rafters…ehhh…in the meat house.”
“The meat house?” I shouted involuntarily, and regretted it immediately.
Old Gísli looked even more embarrassed and stared at the floor as he said, all choked up, that he’d seen no other way out, but that he’d had, on the other hand, enough store of fragrant, fine, dry hay for smoking, so he’d just tried to fix things that way.
Then Hjörtur went to him and embraced this forlorn man whom it was so easy to like: “My dear man. That’s what I call sorting things out! What a genius idea.”
And as everyone was saying nice things about this solution of Gísli’s—to smoke the late Sigríður—Hjörtur pulled out a bottle of rum from his winter coat and proposed that we drink a little funeral toast to her.
And I remember as if it were yesterday how moved I was when I went out to the smokehouse and saw how carefully old Gísli had completed his task. I remember that I thought this procedure should be made into a special Icelandic funereal tradition, you know, for when people were grieving their loved ones. How the smoke would help the tears flow. Although it wouldn’t be particularly easy to smoke people in Reykjavík. So it would have to be a kind of deluxe countryside tradition. But anyhow. Gísli had built a frame around Sigríður and was careful not to wrap the hempen cord too tightly, allowing the smoke to slip through. He’d dressed her in a coarse burlap sack that also allowed the smoke through and covered her nakedness at the same time. He constructed this cage, rather than a stretcher, in order to make it easier to turn her over on the crossbeam and smoke her body back and front.
We helped him take her down off the crossbeam, and the entire time that we busied ourselves with this, Gísli spoke to his Sigríður as if she were still alive and kicking: “Well, my dear, they’ve finally come up here to get you. Now you’re going to go for a little boat trip, my good woman.” That’s how he spoke to this woman, whose dead body he’d so affectionately prepared for burial. Gunnar of Hjarðarnes couldn’t refrain from saying something that we were naturally all thinking, as we lifted her carefully from the cage and over into the coffin, her skin rosy brown, smelling like the best smoked lamb meat; I swear she had a smile on her face. Gunnar said, “Well, mate, I don’t know what you say, but I think Sigríður has never looked better!”
The tears glistened on Gísli’s cheeks as he loosely nailed the coffin lid shut again. He’d asked to be allowed to do this himself and spoke constantly to his Sigríður as he did so. Gísli came back with us, and Sigríður’s funeral took place the following Sunday.
I don’t remember a single word of Reverend Hjálmar’s eulogy, but it’s certain that no church ceremony smelled as good in my memory as Sigríður’s funeral. Gísli was always a model farmer. He never lacked for hay and his ewes generally bore two lambs, were easy to herd, horned and clean. He ran a model farm at Hólmanes after the death of Sigríður, just as before, until he was found dead in the feeding trough, his arms
full of hay. That was several years after this story took place. Much later we heard that the gable had blown off the farmhouse in a southwesterly gale, and in the summers hikers were constantly having a look inside. So the farmhouse was torn down and, shortly afterward, the sheep sheds.
Last time I passed by Hólmanes, there was nothing to see there but the fresh green rise where the farmhouse stood. A breeze in the green grass and a memory of people’s lives. And that, my dear Helga, will be the fate of our farmsteads as well.
7
But anyhow, where was I? Yes, I was discussing the rut of my life. While Hallgrímur was off breaking horses, leaving you to wrestle with the farm work and me around to serve you hand and foot, if I might put it that way in doting jest, well, “the road to Steinastaðir wasn’t long,” as the old verse about Gaukur Trandilsson says. That was the year I reprimanded the farm advisor, telling him in a letter that he should reconsider his grading standards, because Ingjaldur from Hóll’s ram was absolutely useless for servicing the ewes.
In the spring, a ram exhibition was held in Eyri. A bright yellow light played over the mountains and a strong, warm west wind blew into the fjord. I wore a shirt and my striped jacket and put my newly carded Kútur in the back of the Land Rover, lit a Commander cigarette, and drove off with a certain expectant feeling. Kútur was the most splendid ram that I have ever owned, you know, Helga, and we certainly used him a lot for breeding. In that we were both at our best, Kútur and I. I’d bought him from down south in Fljót, bred from a champion German ram and with the Jökuldalur bloodline in him as well. Short-horned, broad-muzzled, an exceptionally full loin; his legs were incredibly thick down to his hocks and with an inverted U-shaped twist, providing him a damned stable foothold. His breast had good curvature; his chest was well muscled and wide, meaning his knees didn’t knock together when he walked, unlike Ingjaldur from Hóll’s rams. His fleece had thick underwool and was free of kemp, the outer coat curly yet moderately coarse; his eyes were dark and lively. He weighed in at a hundred kilos. A large number of people had gathered at Eyri, and there was a lot to discuss out in front of the meeting house. They’d come from deep throughout the Firðir region and from out east in the Tunga district. People chatted about the weather, the scours, the Progressive Party’s agenda, the association, and the military occupation. Blew their noses. Took snuff. A flask or two was passed around, and Steinar and Bragi, the brothers from the Eyri farms, recited poetry by Kristján Ólason, that genius versifier, with such a lovely rhythm, so effortless, their harmonies softly flowing:
Reply to a Letter from Helga Page 3
