“My hero is and always will be Thorgeir Havarsson,” said Geiri of Midhouses. “And why? It is because he had the smallest heart in all the Sagas put together. When they cut out that heart of his which had never known fear, not even in Greenland, it was no larger than the gizzard of a sparrow”—and with that he laughed one of those laughs that would suffice to raise a cathedral.
The pastor thought nothing of calling in from farther down in the district, a five-hour ride, to take snuff and drive in a few nails with these entertaining believers. And now when the moulds were removed from the concrete walls it was seen that by far the largest window was on the east side, over the altar, looking out on to the slope where the meadow began to climb the hillside.
The pastor’s expression was solemn that day, until at last he declared over the coffee: “A tremendous revolution has taken place here—one of the greatest that has ever occurred in the history of mankind; and like all great revolutions it has happened silently, without anyone taking any notice of it.”
We had no idea where this was leading to, and waited.
“I do not know precisely how many churches have been built in the world since the introduction of Christianity,” said the pastor. “But this is the first time in the history of mankind that any man has dared to design a church with a window over the altar. Previously, any church-builder who made so bold as to dare to do that would have been boiled alive.”
Gieri of Midhouses brightened up and roared with laughter, for he thought the pastor was making yet another of his jokes.
Bard-Jon said, “It would not have been much of a window-horse if there had only been blank wall there.”
“How lovely the slopes are,” said my father.*
“How lovely the slopes are,” echoed the pastor. “There, you see, the paganism in the Sagas suddenly breaks through. The purpose of Christianity is that men should not see the slopes; and the purpose of a church is to shutter Nature from man’s eyes, at least during divine service. In old churches, all windows were painted. And above the altar in every church in the world, even in our Lutheran churches, in all except this one, there hangs a picture of a symbol that leads man’s thoughts towards the mysteries of holy faith and away from the delusions of Creation.”
“Why then are you having a church?” I asked them. “What do you believe in?”
At that the pastor rose and came over to me and patted me on the cheek and said, “That’s just the thing, my dear: we believe in the land that God has given us; in the district where our people have lived for a thousand years; we believe in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland; we believe in the green slope where Life lives.”
THE GOD
Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them Saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at in the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all its problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither Nature nor mirage, no link with folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river-gulleys and out beyond the grass-plains, no landmarks from the Sagas?—only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.
“How can it occur to you, Father,” I said, when the pastor and the church-builders had gone, “that it is possible to live off 45 lambs when you know that a lamb only provides one laborer’s single day-wage? When you have received these 45 day-wages for your efforts there are still 320 days of the year left.”
“We live,” he said. “We live.”
“And only two milk-meager cows, dry in turns for half the year? And it says here in the paper that in America it is only considered an average day’s work to make a hundred horse-loads of hay and look after a hundred and twenty cows and milk them.”
“It also says in the paper there that in America forty million people would be blown to shreds on the first day of a nuclear war. All their milk would not help them then. It is better then to be an Eystridale man in a dry grave and rise from it again in one piece beside one’s church.”
“Do you all then farm solely to be able to lie in a dry grave?” I asked.
“I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholastic books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low-yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-off districts. And what you are now carrying under your heart will also live and be welcome, little one, despite all the arithmetic and scholastic books. Here, moreover, life will be lived off one cow, and the child will thrive on it, long after Paris, London, and Rome have become insignificant moss-grown heaps of rubble.”
“But apart from the nuclear bomb, Father,” I said, “I still feel that you would be better to own even one stallion the fewer and build yourself a privy instead.”
“I know they have these privies in the south,” he said. “But we have Nature. If one considers human life from that particular standpoint, then Nature is the best privy. And the ponies, little one, they live in the mountains.”
“I heard it said in the south that you actually believed in wild ponies, Father,” I said.
“They say the most unlikely things sometimes, our friends in the towns,” he said. “But it is quite true, on the other hand, that here in these parts it has long been the custom to reckon a man’s worth in ponies. No one ever thought much of a man in these parts who did not have a choice of ponies if he had a journey to make. It’s a fine sight in summer, the herd of brood mares; and a splendid beast, the stallion.”
“It’s even harder to understand that men who can use Nature for their privy and who worship ponies should build a church before anything else,” I said.
“Man is that animal species that rides a pony and has a God,” said my father.
“And builds a roof over God and lets the ponies go roofless,” I added.
“The herd looks after itself,” said my father. “But the God is a domestic animal,” he said, giving the word a neuter inflection.
“The God?” I said.
“The God.” said my father. “Snorri Sturluson* inflected ‘god’ as a neuter, and I am not going to pretend to know better than he.”
“What God is that, if I may ask?” I said.
“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one,” said my father.
“It can hardly be a Lutheran God,” I said.
“Icelanders have always been taught that Lutheranism was forced on us by a German robber, King Christian the Third of Denmark,” said my father. “His Danish stewards beheaded Bishop Jon Arason.* We who work our farms up in the valleys of Iceland do not much care what Gods are thought up by Germans and preached with murder by Danes.”
“Perhaps then it was the late Papal God,” I said.
“Rather Jon Arason than German Luther and those Danish kings,” said my father. ‘But still that is not it.”
I asked if he did not then want to change the church into a temple dedicated Thor, Odin, and Frey.
My father repeated their names slowly and thoughtfully, and his face softened again as if at the memory of departed friends: “Thor, Odin, and Frey. Be blessed for naming them. But still it is not they.”
“I think you do not know yourself what you believe in, Father,” I said.
“Oh yes, little girl, I believe in my God, we believe in our God,” replied this unfanatical believer, and smiled at our innocent chatter. “It is certainly neither a Lutheran God nor Papal God; still less a Jesus God, although that happens to be the one most often named in
the pastor’s prescribed reading; neither is it Thor, Odin, and Frey; nor even the stallion himself, as they think in the south. Our God is that which is left when all Gods have been listed and marked No, not him, not him.”
* The famous words spoken by Gunnar of Hlidarend, in Njal’s Saga, when he decided not to go into exile but to remain at home and brave his enemies instead.
* The great Icelandic historian, poet, and saga-writer of the thirteenth century. He wrote Heimskringla (a history of the kings of Norway) and Snorri’s Edda, a textbook of poetry and mythology.
* The last Catholic bishop of Holar, one of the two sees in Iceland. He and his two sons fought bitterly against the Reformation and Danish oppression, and were executed in 1550.
20. The country sold
The hammering faded into its own echoes and melted into the quiet of the mountain valleys; and still the plover was heard. Why not live for ever in tranquillity and peace, and fetch water from the stream instead of making it gush from an indoor tap? And no mixing machine? And the question of a privy still undecided?
Unfortunately, peace and tranquillity are only a poem to be recited in cities, the poem of country folk who have straggled into the towns through lack of money and there been infected by the great world-bacteria; and soon not even a contemporary poem any longer, but a poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson. Would it strike any chord in a modern poet to hear a church being hammered together in a far valley and the golden plover calling in between the hammer-blows? And the southeast breeze, which does not in fact exist in the south—where is the poet now who knows it?
Until the calm was suddenly shattered: the politicians had started screeching, there was to be an election. This unpleasant crew, which it was impossible to get rid of by any known device (the only consolation being to know it far away), had now migrated to us for a while. Their words of abuse and mutual insinuations of crimes filled this tranquil, discreet-tongued valley. And the story repeated itself: even though country people heard them outlaw one another all day, and always with irrefutable evidence, it never occured to them to believe any of this mutual smearing, any more than it occurred to them to believe what the pastor said in the pulpit. When the candidates had concluded their addresses, the country people greeted them smilingly just as if they were ordinary plain folk.
A man who slaughters the wrong ewe in a district is excluded from the genealogies after his death, and his descendants, moreover, are branded for two hundred years; so it is little wonder that country people are sceptical of the misdeeds that the politicians prove against each other; indeed, they listen to the crime-stories of political meetings in the same frame of mind as to Saga-tales of throat-biting, vomit-squirting, and the gouging out of eyes. And inasmuch as they are themselves guiltless, whether because they have never had the opportunity to commit crimes or because they are holy men by nature, they find it as easy to forgive crimes as they find it difficult to believe them.
No power could have forced my father to believe, even had it been proved with hard facts before his very eyes, that there existed in Iceland men who wanted to hand over her sovereignty to foreigners the year after the establishing of the Republic, or, as it is called in modern terms: Sell the country. Right enough, it had happened once before in the Sagas, Gissur Thorvaldsson and his associates had handed over her sovereignty to foreigners: sold the country. That crime, which the men of the valleys would have refused to believe in the year 1263,* they had now, after a 700-year-long struggle for independence, forgiven with an historical forgiveness. If now there arose new politicians to sell their country, they would not believe it even though they saw it, but would forgive the crime with an historical forgiveness again when their descendants had struggled for another 700 years.
The politicians swore solemn oaths in the north that summer, no less than they had done in the south that winter: Iceland shall not be sold nor the nation betrayed, no atom station shall be built where Icelanders can be wiped out in a single day; at the very most a resting place will be allowed, out on Reykjaness in the south, for foreign welfare missions. They swore it on the country, on the nation, and on history, swore it on all the gods and sacred relics they claimed to believe in; swore it on their members; but first and foremost they swore it on their honor. And then I knew that now it had been done.
There was one further thing that gave me an indication: they had started the bones rigmarole again. They made fervent speeches about the Nation’s Darling and called him our fellow-parishioner, the freedom of the Icelandic nation had been his life, nothing would be left undone to find his grave and raise his bones from foreign soil and give them a stone because they had not been given bread while they were alive.
THE MAN THEY DID NOT UNDERSTAND AND OUR MEMBER
The church-builders thought that the ones they supported, and their opponents too, had all spoken well, just as much when they denounced one another’s crimes as when they flocked together and swore oaths. Of course politicians, like everything else in their eyes, were just a type of Saga, varyingly stout-hearted sea-raiders and clever brigands, who fought for other people’s possessions with terms of abuse and false accusations instead of sword and spear; a modern Saga, much duller, of course, then Egil’s Saga or Njal’s Saga, but one which had to be read with the same kind of objective attitude. They recognized all the candidates, understood them all and forgave them all—all except the Communist. They could not understand a man who claimed to be the spokesman of the poor, and they felt it downright treachery against themselves even to say that poor people existed. They knew not only Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga but also the Legendary Sagas. They were descended not only from the heroes of the Sagas but from the prehistoric kings too. They were themselves Vikings in disguise with invisible swords, even helmsmen of splendid ships. They got worked up whenever they referred to the Communist. They would much prefer to have forbidden such a man the right of speech. Did they, then suspect him of wanting to make alliance with the wolf Fenrir* fettered in their own selves, which threatened to tear off the false Saga-beards glued to their cheeks, strip them of the invisible sword of the champion and ditto the ship of the Viking who ran breathlessly up the hillsides after a ewe and had never even set eyes on the sea?
“Did our Member … swear?” I asked.
“It was easy to understand what he was getting at, even though he did not put much in his mouth, the blessed old worthy,” they replied, and from their answer I suddenly saw the mask he wore for his tired, penniless voters in the valleys of the north: an old worthy, something like an old and impotent bishop. But such men indeed would never have understood that he was himself too wearied of the sunshine of good days to have any ideals, too cultured to be affected by any accusations; that he looked on life an an empty farce, or, much more likely, an accident; and was bored.
“By the way, he came over to me and asked me to greet the Good Stepmother,” said my father. “And mentioned, moreover, that he would pay a visit up the valley to have a look at our church before he returned south.”
I am not going to describe the mist that descended on me, or how the strength drained from my limbs; I was beside myself all day, and did I not dream all night that he was standing outside with the wooden ladle ladling water out of the well? What well? There is no well there. Next day I heard nothing but hammer blows and no plover; until I said to my mother, “If he comes, I shall run up into the mountains.”
“And what do you want up in the mountains, my dear?” asked my mother.
“He shall never see me with a belly,” I said.
Then my mother answered, “You do not have such a father that you cannot hold up your head before any man, whatever condition you are in; and, I hope, not such a mother neither.”
I am not going to describe how relieved I was when news came that he had flown south, without warning, on urgent business. But the next day brought a visitor to our door from down in the district, who had with him a letter for me, and on it the words: To Ugla.
&
nbsp; His visiting card, with no signature, but with a new telephone number—that was all the letter; and these words hastily scribbled in pencil: “When you come, come to me; all that you ask for, you shall have.”
* In that year, after a long period of power seeking and civil strife, Iceland entered into a confederate union with Norway, under the Norwegian crown.
* In Scandinavian mythology, one of the monsters of darkness. He was fettered by the gods until, at the Ragnarok (destruction of the gods) he burst free and killed Odin.
21. All that you ask for
All that you ask for; you shall have: little Gudrun was born in the middle of August, or, by the way my father reckoned time, in the seventeenth week of summer. My mother said that the girl weighed ten pounds. I was scarcely aware of the birth until she had been delivered; perhaps I am one of those who can have ten-pound babies ten times over without feeling it much. When my mother showed her to me I felt I did not know her, but I felt a little fond of her at once because she was so little and large. And my father, who never laughs, laughed when he saw her.
The church was completed at about the same time. While I was still confined they brought the altar from the old church out of the storage attic where it had been kept since the nineteenth century. Throughout my childhood that altar had stood in there amongst old lumber, and although it had become so faded that one could only just make our traces of an occasional saint and half a word of Latin here and there, I had always as a child been afraid of this relic which had some mysterious link with the Pope. When I was on my feet again the altar had been placed under that untheological gable-window in the church, and they had painted it red so that neither saint nor Latin could be glimpsed any more.
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