by Sjón
Sóla G— gives the boy a conspiratorial smile—gestures to her neck and from there to the red scarf that is knotted around Máni Steinn’s own—then lowers herself nimbly through the stair opening.
As the boy is drifting off again, he hears the old lady pestering the doctor to take the packet of cigarettes in return for his help; his need is greater than hers.
Dr. Garibaldi replies that it is more important she herself stays fit and sees to it that as soon as the boy is back on his feet he presents himself at the emergency hospital in the Midtown School, where they could use some stout lads.
xvii
The morning the boy was up and about again it was officially announced in Paris that an armistice had been signed between the Allies and the Germans. According to the handbills circulating the news, the announcement was accompanied by a salvo of gunfire and scenes of wild jubilation.
In Reykjavík the cessation of hostilities was greeted with the same indifference as the cessation of the Katla eruption a few days before. And indeed the sight that confronts the boy’s eyes when he arrives in the yard of the Midtown School resembles nothing so much as scenes from a field hospital in a Pathé newsreel. There has been no cease-fire in the influenza’s war on the inhabitants of the town.
The school is simultaneously orphanage and hospital, lunatic asylum and mortuary. Charabancs and horse-drawn carts come and go in a constant stream: bringing in critically ill patients for admission and cure; carrying away corpses to the cemetery chapel to be laid in coffins and buried.
All is performed with well-oiled efficiency, so swiftly has necessity taught people to service the sick and the dead.
* * *
The boy hasn’t set foot on the school grounds since he left at age twelve, at the bottom of his class.
Before he knows it, he is standing at the foot of the high wall along Laufásvegur, in the “invisible spot” that used to be his refuge during break, where he could watch his fellow pupils from a safe distance—for it had dawned on him that the choice was his; that it was he who declined to take part in the other children’s games before they had a chance to leave him out. The day has yet to come when he will voluntarily mingle with his contemporaries.
Now here he is, back in his old lookout, and despite the appalling state of affairs, he is, as he was then, unmoved by the scenes unfolding before his eyes.
* * *
—Are you just going to stand there like a spare part, boy?
Three men are waiting beside a boxlike stretcher that is sticking halfway off the back of a truck. They are short a fourth man to support the foot end on the left-hand side. With them is a nurse, and it is she who calls to ask if the boy is going to make himself useful.
The yellow box would look just like a coffin were it not for the window in the lid, which admits light and air, and allows the invalid to see out. Ashen-gray fingers with purple nails grope at the edge of this opening, as tentatively as the petals of a small flower awakening, and suddenly a delicate hand emerges onto the lid. The white lace at the wrist is stiff with blood.
Next thing he knows, the boy is shouldering the box with the other three men, and they are carrying it in through the main entrance of the school.
* * *
On the way to the emergency room, the boy notices that the assembly hall and all the classrooms on the ground floor have been converted into hospital wards. Every bed contains a patient far gone with the disease. Groans of suffering and anguish, and the sounds of adults and children weeping, can be heard out in the corridor. There are gas rings for heating water on tables here and there, and steam rises from large cauldrons.
In the classroom where the boy had failed to learn to read, they hold the box steady so the latest victim can be lifted onto the examination table. The nurse and a young doctor remove the lid. And the boy discovers that inside is the elder sister of one of his former classmates.
Her face is blotchy; her eyes are glazed.
By giving the boy a hard stare, the nurse manages to drag his attention away from the corpse. She points to a basin containing bloodstained sheets:
—Take this to the laundry, dear; then come back up here and I’ll tell you what to do next.
xviii
The Angel of Death has entered among us with the great epidemic and cast a pall of the deepest despair over many of our homes.
Men and women of all ages and stations have been snatched away. Death makes no distinction, and one often feels that it strikes where it least should. It is beyond comprehension that parents should be carried off from their children, or that the elderly, with one foot in the grave, should be deprived of their sole support. If only people could be brought to a better understanding of their duties toward others beside themselves, then death’s choice, which appears to us so harsh and unjust, would not be so impossible to understand. If only loving-kindness were a more potent force among us, a new provider and a new friend would come forward for all those who are bereft. And if only the devastating wave of grief could induce people to make more effort to bear goodwill to all men and show greater love and charity than before, it would not have broken over us in vain.
The great upsurge in loving-kindness that has been experienced around the world as a result of the late hostilities has barely touched us here. Will it not then occur to all those who believe in Divine Providence to wonder whether this terrible scourge has been released upon our nation expressly to awaken among us the same sentiment? Could any exhortation to give more thought to eternity be more memorable than that which our community has lately received?
Most of those who have crossed over to the other side were in their prime and had service yet to perform for the public good, however different they were in outward appearance. Most had friends and relatives who now bear a heavy burden of grief; parents bowed with age weep for their dashed hopes; those left alone in the world for their mainstay; children for their loving parents.
But happy in their grief are all those who, through their faith, are certain of a life hereafter. They know that this is but a brief parting, and that those who are gone have merely attained a higher plane of existence and have not vanished forever into dark graves.
* * *
Below these words of consolation in Morgunbladid are printed the names of the eighty-two townsmen and -women who had died by the time the paper went to press on the eve of November 17.
The boy glances around the classroom, which is used as a rest area for the volunteers. His fellow workers are exhausted from the day’s labors; no one is paying him any attention.
He folds the newspaper and tucks it inside his clothes, thinking it looks like something the old lady would enjoy.
Above the text there is a cross, bordered in black.
* * *
As the cinemas are still closed, he heads for home.
But first he is going to pay a visit to the National Library on Arnarhóll.
The basement is the refuge of Sívert Thordal, D.Phil., a stooping, downy-haired manuscript scholar. One would be forgiven for thinking that he was hiding away down there from the pestilence, but in fact, ever since the large white edifice was built, he has been allowed to dwell in a cubbyhole in its depths—for he is married to his research—and so Dr. Thordal always speaks of himself as the peculiar Atlas “of the Icelandic literary world, whose bowed spine bends but does not break beneath the weight of its heritage.”
The boy sometimes allows this genial hunchback to suck him off for two krónur.
* * *
He quickens his pace. He must get to bed in good time; he needs to be well rested for tomorrow’s exertions.
The situation is now so desperate that there is barely anyone left in most homes with the strength to help the doctors’ drivers to carry the worst cases. So a strapping fellow is to be assigned to every vehicle to assist them.
Máni Steinn has shown that he has what it takes.
Tomorrow morning he is to commence home visits with Dr. Garibal
di Árnason and his driver.
Dr. Garibaldi’s driver is Sóla G—.
VII
(November 25–26, 1918)
xix
From morning to evening, from evening to night and through to the early hours, for nine days running, the boy accompanies Dr. Garibaldi Árnason and Sóla G— on visits to the sick.
They do the rounds in a vehicle borrowed from the Reykjavík Automobile Association, which the boy recognized immediately from the engine sound as belonging to the man who had winked at him in the garage yard. The man had died early that month, and when no driver was left at the station to take his place in the Ford, Sóla G— was called in and put behind the wheel, though she had no license: her skill at riding the red Indian was well known, and it did no harm either that Dr. Garibaldi had been at school with her father.
Every day the boy presents himself at the garage, where Sóla G— awaits him with a full tank and the engine growling in the gray dawn. They pick up the doctor, and then their first port of call is the health station, where Dr. Garibaldi fetches the list of the day’s home visits, arranged according to the severity of the emergency.
The symptoms of the Spanish flu are as follows:
A raging fever (rising to 109), headache, earache, soreness in the throat and chest; a dry cough producing slimy mucus, either yellow or streaked with blood; pains in the muscles and joints; and diarrhea. Nosebleeds are common, especially among adolescents, and almost impossible to stanch. The blood gushes not only from the nostrils but from the ears and gums as well, coming up from the lungs and stomach, or down from the intestines and out through the urethra. And on top of this, the most lethal complications of all: acute bronchitis and pneumonia, even when people have made every effort to take care and stay in their beds.
The majority of the afflicted lie in a daze; the rest are unable to sleep. Men can run amok in their delirium—a danger to themselves and other members of their household—and cannot be restrained by any means other than an injection of scopolamine. All pregnant women fall ill and many go on to miscarry.
Often, once the pneumonia has abated and the fever has dropped, or even gone away altogether, the heart begins to race, and in no time at all the victim is finished off by a cardiac arrest, or else the face and limbs swell up and death comes about by suffocation.
In many cases the skin takes on a bluish tinge. Corpses turn blue-black.
There are ten thousand stricken townspeople, ten doctors, three overflowing hospitals, and one pharmacy, which is closed due to the illness of the druggist and all his dispensers.
All over town flu victims lie in a huddle, racked by coughs, aches, and dehydration, too delirious to fetch water to quench their thirst; in the more affluent homes, the medicine bottles stand within reach, untouched.
In one turf-roofed farmhouse on Brádrædisholt, in the west of town, they find the stiffened body of a man lying in the marital bed, and beside it a desperately ill woman with the corpse of an infant in the crook of each arm. Along the walls are cots, each with one or two heads peeping over the sides. The husband had died leaving five young children, and his wife had fallen ill before she could raise the alarm. Shortly afterward she gave birth to stillborn twins. A neighbor came upon her by chance.
While Dr. Garibaldi tends to the mother, Sóla and Máni shroud the bodies of the twins in pillowcases and carry them out to the car.
An hour later, on Grettisgata, they hear the death rattle of the solitary occupant at the very instant they enter the damp little basement room.
* * *
No matter how distressing the scenes, the boy remains impassive. Scarcely a word falls from his lips over the nine days.
Reykjavík has, for the first time, assumed a form that reflects his inner life: a fact he would not confide to anyone.
xx
Sóla G—! She is as magnificent up close as from afar!
On their drives around town, Máni Steinn sits beside her in the front. Behind them Dr. Garibaldi Árnason sprawls on the leather-upholstered passenger seat. Between visits he leafs through reports or writes comments in a notebook. He has strictly forbidden his driver and assistant to talk so he can concentrate on his reading and jotting and hear himself think—after all, the motor-car makes enough of a racket without the addition of young people’s idle chatter.
The boy watches the girl’s every move:
How she holds the steering wheel; how she changes gear; how she climbs out of the vehicle and into it; how she rests her booted right foot on the running board on the driver’s side while they are waiting for the doctor; how she wedges a cigarette in her plastic holder; how she inhales the smoke; how she spits a flake of tobacco from her tongue.
What impresses him most is how unaffectedly she performs all these actions; how easy it is for her to be Sóla G—.
Now he is watching her open the door of an apartment on the first floor of a house on one of the town’s more prosperous streets, on the last visit of the day.
—Hello, anybody home?
Dr. Garibaldi calls in through the door. It is dark inside; an electric lamp in the stairwell casts a faint light into the hall. When no answer is heard, the doctor nods to the boy to enter first.
—There should be a man in here …
The boy gropes his way inside in the gloom. Curtains are pulled across all the windows, and the air is thick with the stench of vomit, blood, urine, and excrement. He pauses, takes a Lysol-soaked cloth from his pocket, and holds it up to his mouth and nose before proceeding.
There is no one in the kitchen, no one in the bedroom, no one in the bathroom, no one in the sitting room. He calls to the doctor:
—There’s nobody here!
But just as the boy is about to go back into the hall he notices a strip of light in the wallpaper in the corner of the room beside the stove. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is a door concealed in the wall, which would by daylight be invisible to all except those who knew it was there.
He pushes it open. There is a compartment inside.
By the dim illumination of a reading lamp on a small desk, the boy makes out a chair and bookcase, artfully fitted into the space; walls lined with tight ranks of pictures featuring timeless motifs—Adonis and Pan, satyrs and shepherds, Saint Sebastian—and, at the edge of the pool of light, a divan bed containing a shadowy figure under a thick quilt.
The boy recognizes the man. One of his first gentlemen—the kindest of all until he met the foreigner—from whom he no longer demands payment. And who, after their last meeting, had gazed deep into his eyes and said with a catch in his voice:
Had we but another world and time
Our passionate embraces were no crime.
Dr. Garibaldi and Sóla G— appear behind the boy. The shadowy form on the divan stirs. The doctor squeezes into the compartment, pauses beside the desk on which lies a pale-blue book with two poppies on the cover, and mutters the title:
—Mikael.
The occupant of the compartment waves a hand at him, saying hoarsely:
—Never mind that I read Herman Bang, Doctor—be my savior and restore me to life.
The boy backs out the door before the man can spot him.
Sóla G— follows him into the passage.
There in the gloom, Máni Steinn watches as the girl places a bracing hand on his shoulder. She’s well acquainted with the comings and goings of Reykjavík’s evening walkers on Öskjuhlíd.
He knows all about her; she knows only this about him.
xxi
In the course of his home visits, Dr. Garibaldi Árnason has been collecting a variety of information about the pattern of the Spanish flu, asking patients, among other things, where and how they believe they caught the disease.
A fair number think it must have been “at the pictures.”
Once the doctor is convinced of the role played by the picture houses in the spread of the disease, he arranges, through the Board of Health, for the cinemas to be sp
ecially fumigated and for a public announcement to be made:
To make people stop and think about what sort of buildings these are and what goes on inside them, and to question whether such goings-on are desirable.
For Dr. Garibaldi has long endeavored to persuade his countrymen of the dangers inherent in gawking at films.
* * *
One factor that renders film such an irresistible experience is the opportunity it affords the audience to observe other people without shame. From the safety of his seat in the darkened auditorium, the cinemagoer can, besides taking in the story that is being shown, subject the “men” and “women” on screen to a close scrutiny of the sort that would be unthinkable in society at large; on the streets, in places of employment, in cafés, in shops, in churches, or even in theaters, since in the latter the actor can, at any moment, turn on the audience and reprimand any person he feels is ogling him rather than attending to the fate of his character.
The distinction, in other words, lies in the fact that what is presented to the gaze of the cinema viewer is not real flesh-and-blood human beings but only moving pictures of people, “simulacra” created from light and shadow at the moment when the actor is filmed lending his body and emotions to the puppet that is then placed on view.
Anyone who has observed a child playing with a doll will know how intently the child examines it by touch as well as gaze. Fingers and eyes probe the physical form with the precision of a master surgeon who has been assigned the task of dissecting a body to the bone. Every nook and cranny is inspected; nape of neck and ear, groin and instep are caressed.
In the same fashion, the cinema audience scrutinizes the light-puppets on the silver screen, and whether it is the curve of Asta Nielsen’s back, Theda Bara’s naked shoulders, Pina Menichelli’s sensual eyelids, Clara Kimball Young’s slim ankles, Musidora’s Cupid’s bow, Gunnar Tolnæs’s strong fingernails, Douglas Fairbanks’s firm thighs, or Max Linder’s soft eyes, the body part in question and its position will become the focus of the viewer’s existence and etch itself into his psyche, while the size of the image and the repeated close-ups of lips, teeth, and even tongues will exacerbate the effects until few have the strength to resist them.
