Heaven and Hell

by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

  They eat in silence up in the loft. Almost restlessly. As if they were committing a crime, and they eat less than the sizes of their stomachs demand.

  The boy doesn’t touch his box, doesn’t look at the coffee, he sits on the bed, his and Bárður’s bed, a narrow bed that has become uncomfortably wide and far too long, he sits there alone with his waterproof and the book. Then Andrea sits down next to him. Simply sits and stares. The other four finish their bread, finish their coffee, even Einar tries to slurp as little as possible and doesn’t complain even though his jaw hurts like hell from the blow. Gvendur has little appetite for his bread, he forces half of it down, then puts it aside as if it were filthy. Pétur stands up, the other three also stand up immediately and go down, Einar grabs Gvendur’s slice of bread as he goes down. Pétur pauses, looks at the boy and wants to say something, something about Bárður, something good about Bárður, and then to ask the boy to come down, ask, not order, but they need to work the catch, decapitate, gut, open, flatten, salt, and the boy has his own job in this, he decapitates and guts, cuts the livers out and puts them in barrels, the work is good, it cures all illness. But Pétur is prevented from saying this about the work, that it helps, that we’re nothing without it, because Andrea looks at him and her glance says, let him be and go down. And Pétur goes down, with an unexpected lump in his throat. I am losing her, he thinks, no, doesn’t think it, feels it, senses it, because between people lie invisible threads and we feel it when they break. They go out to work the catch. Everyone’s catch except for Einar’s, his line is in the sea, his fish hang on hooks several meters below the storm and do not remember life any differently. Einar is unhappy, it’s unfair that he gets nothing while the others get theirs, even Bárður who no longer has any need for it, dead fish for a dead man. They walk out, past the baiting table and the body that once answered to the name of Bárður.

  Between those who go to do their duty, their work, to secure their sustenance, and those who sit up in the loft lies a dead man, frozen to death, his eyes are open but have lost their color and look at nothing. A dead body is useless, we can just as well throw it out. The boy looks away, the trapdoor is up, it opens down to death. Hell is a dead person. He moves his right hand to one side, strokes the book that made Bárður forget his waterproof. It is perilous to read poems. The book was printed in Copenhagen in 1828, an epic poem that Reverend Jón translated, reworded, put fifteen years of his life into, an epic composed in England by a blind poet, composed to come closer to God, who is, however, like the sky, the rainbow, and the core, he avoids us even as we seek him out.

  Paradise Lost.

  Is it a loss of Paradise to die?

  Andrea thinks about the smell of Bárður’s body. That obtrusive blend of warmth and scent. She puts her hand behind her, moves it carefully, and her palm strokes the place where Bárður’s head rested in the night. The boy just sits numbly. Once there was a woman who wrote a letter about the moon, once there was a little girl who was proud of having older brothers, once there was a man to whom it was possible to tell everything and he told everything in return, and now they’re all dead, except for the moon, and that is just a clod in space, of stone-dead rock and meteorites that have shattered on its surface.

  Could it be that a woman’s feelings lie higher and thus closer to the skin than a man’s? That because a woman can bear life she is in some way more sensitive to it, and to the pain that is only possible to measure in tears, regret, sorrow?

  Andrea moves her hand from the end of the bed where Bárður’s head lay and places it on the boy’s right shoulder. She does this without thinking. This is a movement that comes from within, sympathy and sorrow come together in one hand, and shortly afterward the boy cries. The tears stream forth when the words are useless stones. He lies like a conch, half in the bed, half in her lap, which will soon be wet with tears. The tears ease the pain and are good but they are still not good enough. It’s not possible to thread the tears together and then let them sink like a glittering rope down into the dark deep and pull up those who died but ought to have lived.

  It doesn’t take the boy long to gather the things he’s going to take with him. Andrea helps him, makes him eat something, packs pieces of salted meat for him, the last bits, they were supposed to go into the soup next Sunday, they’ll survive without it, she thinks, and quickly feels hot anger toward those outside who have started to work the catch, almost feels hatred that they should be alive, all four of them. Her apron still dark from the tears, perhaps the spot would never disappear, hopefully not, she thinks. They wrap Paradise Lost carefully, this book shall be taken along, then enough flatbread and pâté, a handful of sugar cubes. First, however, the boy opens the book and his face twitches when he sees the letter to Sigríður. Nothing is sweet to me, without thee. Words to her who breathes behind the mountains and heaths, and still doesn’t know that the possibilities of life have decreased significantly, she who is startled every time she sees someone heading toward the farm and hopes it is the fishing-station postman with a letter for her, a word to bridge distances, words that ease regret, magnify it at the same time and feed it. The next letter she receives will be bulky, passionate words from a dead man. The boy hands Andrea the letter and says, see to it that it goes with him, and Andrea says, poor girl, and that is also what we say, because the frost and the poem took the most precious thing from her.

  Then the boy is ready to go.

  Of course you’re going, Andrea had said, because he couldn’t think of lying back down to sleep in the bed without Bárður there, of sitting down on the thwart without Bárður there. Bárður is gone and a frozen body is all that’s left. It would be a betrayal, the boy had said, I couldn’t bear it.

  Two explanations, two excuses, everything has at least two sides.

  They hurry because Pétur isn’t going to take this well, a man doesn’t leave his crew, that’s simply absurd, I’ll deal with Pétur, Andrea says, just go, you don’t belong here, and the boy goes where he and Bárður had headed in the spring, here to the Village, the center, the hub of the world.

  Be careful on that damned Impassable, no doubt the waves are breaking well over it by now, Andrea says, and the boy says, yes, I’ll be careful, but doesn’t say that he plans to take a different route, through the valley that cleaves between the mountains, he’s going up onto the heath and then the plateau, wants to come as far from the sea as possible, though it might only be for one night or two, it’s a long way and dangerous in such weather, at this time of year, but what does it matter since most of them are dead, who cares whether I live, thinks the boy, but he says nothing, promises to take care about the surf, Andrea would never let him go if she knew the route he was planning to take. And what then, she asks. I’ll return the book, he says simply. She strokes his face with both hands, she kisses his forehead, she kisses both his eyebrows, don’t forget me, boy, she says, never, he says, and vanishes into the snowdrift.

  VI

  Those who live in this valley see only a piece of the sky. Their horizon is mountains and dreams.

  The boy knows this valley, and knows that whoever follows it and then threads his way along a particular path between the mountainsides cut by ravines and crosses two plateaus comes down into the valley that Bárður had called his district and one farm in the valley his home. The boy doesn’t head toward home, how is it possible to head toward a place that doesn’t exist, not even in our heads? He doesn’t call the valley his district, although he’d slept and awakened there for most of his life, and no farm his home. Some need to live a long time to have the place that releases these big words, at home, from the fetters of language, and more and more die without having found it. He intends never to return to the district that contains the better part of his youth, the dreams that never came true and the regret for the life he never got to live, that contains the people he had lived with since his father drowned and came into possession of his dark abode in the sea, the people he grew up wit
h, fell asleep apart from and woke up among, not bad people, no, no, but he simply never got rid of the feeling that the farm and the valley were little more than stopping places for the night. One needs a place to sit down for a moment, linger while the body grows and the mind becomes large enough to deal with the world on its own. Otherwise it’s a beautiful district, unusually grassy and spacious, a considerable stretch to the sea from several farms and from the doorsteps of some of them not even a glimpse of it, which is unusual here, how is it possible to live without having the sea before one’s eyes? The sea is the wellspring of life, in it dwells the rhythm of death, and now the boy heads away from this, as far away as he can get, even if only for one night or two, just come so far that he no longer senses the sea.

  He trudges into the valley and Bárður is dead.

  Read a poem and froze to death because of it.

  Some poems take us places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness. Some poems change the day, the night, your life. Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you’re dead. The one who dies is changed immediately into the past. It doesn’t matter how important a person was, how much kindness and strength of will that person had and how life was inconceivable without him or her: death says, got you, life vanishes in a second and the person is changed into the past. Everything connected to that person becomes a memory you struggle to retain, and it is treachery to forget that. Forget how he drank coffee. Forget how he laughed. How he looked up. But still you forget. Life demands that you do. You forget slowly but surely, and it can be so painful that it pierces the heart.

  It’s an effort to wade through the snow.

  The boy walks straight ahead, thinks that he does.

  He walks and walks and walks, the snowfall is dense and swirling, visibility only a few meters, he stops once to eat, then starts walking again and it starts to grow dim, he sees and senses how the daylight is dwindling between snowflakes, how the wind is darkening. The only sensible thing to do would be to find a farm and ask for shelter, but he trudges on, caring not a whit for sensibility, only half caring whether he survives the night or not. Yet. He has this book on his back, Paradise Lost, and one should return one’s books. It’s likely the reason why Andrea ordered him to take the book with him, she knows him and this peculiar love of his for books. The boy suddenly feels warm inside when he thinks about Andrea, but the warmth cools quickly because Bárður froze to death, and right next to him. It’s also dark, from the evening, the dense snowfall and the gathering drifts.

  As a matter of fact the visibility does not decrease significantly with the onset of evening, yet darkness is always darkness, and evening is always evening. And the evening becomes night that settles on the eyes, sifts its way through the cornea, fills the optic nerve; slowly but surely this walking boy is filled with night. He wants most to lie down, just where he’s standing, relieve himself of his burden, lie down on his back with his eyes open, the world darkens except for the snowflakes nearest to him, they are white, cut like angels’ wings. The snow would cover him, he would die into the whiteness. It’s very tempting, the boy says to himself, out loud or silently, he has long since stopped making the distinction; whoever walks for a long time and alone in a ceaseless snowfall comes little by little to the feeling that he has left the world, walks in no man’s land, the surety of life leaves him. Then it stops snowing. It sounds incredible, but it always stops snowing in the end, and then he stands perhaps in front of a farm, the storm and the night had completely cut all human ties. Very tempting, the boy says to himself, to stop this tiring hike, lie down, sleep, yes, and then die. Of course it would be good to die, no more trouble, sorrow conquered, regret conquered. It’s also so short between life and death, actually just one piece of clothing, one waterproof.

  First there’s life, then there’s death:

  I live, she lives, they live, he dies.

  But if I die here, then the book I’m supposed to return will be damaged and I would disappoint some people, the old sea captain, whom I otherwise couldn’t care less about, Andrea and Bárður. Bárður is of course dead but not his presence: it has never been stronger. Yes, first I return the book, then I can walk off into the wilderness and the snow can cover me, thinks the boy, but he knows that then he will have to choose the place for this carefully. It’s easy to let oneself be covered with snow, easy to die, but let’s not forget that the night and the snowfall deceive, the boy thinks he lies down far from all human habitation, in the wilderness, but is then perhaps on a slope above a little farm, the snow melts after days or weeks, he appears dead beneath it, and a little girl or little boy comes across the corpse damaged by weather and insects, both eyes taken by the ravens, empty, dark holes, and he or she will never get over seeing such a thing. Dying has its responsibilities. Dammit, then I’ll go on, thinks the boy, disappointed, or says it out loud, and trudges forward, wades through the snow, senses with his feet whether the land is rising or falling, turns away from the slope and tries thereby to keep himself more or less in the middle of the valley. But the night becomes heavier and the snow becomes ever more difficult to cross, until finally he has no idea whether he is heading up or down, but still he walks southward, this he feels from the wind that presses constantly on his back, at some point however he needs to turn east to make it up to the heath and then the plateau. This is just so difficult. His feet have started to whimper with fatigue, best to rest. The boy feels his way forward, searching for a crag or rock large enough to shelter him from the northerly, which is cold and would have no trouble turning him to ice. He finds shelter, starts to pack the snow around him, keeps on until he has made a kind of wall and partial roof, in fact it’s more of a snow hole than a house, but he is no longer out in the wind and the snowfall and he is so tired. His fatigue is enormously heavy. It fills every cell, every thought. Probably twenty-four hours since he opened his eyes, since he woke to Pétur’s voice and into the world in which Bárður was alive, how many years ago was it actually, he thinks, and the wind blows outside. The boy’s face is stiff from the cold, the ice covering his sweater starts to thaw, he’s drenched and his face is wet, difficult to say whether he cries in his sleep or while awake, there isn’t always shelter in dreams, sometimes not at all. But be careful, boy, not to sleep too long or too soundly, because whoever sleeps soundly in such a snow hole, in such dark weather, never wakes again in this life. Then spring comes and a little girl goes to pick flowers above her farm but finds you and you’re no flower, you’re just a rotting body and the source of nightmares.

  Hell Is Not Knowing Whether We Are Alive or Dead

  Hell is not knowing whether we are alive or dead.

  I live, she lives, they live, he dies.

  This rough conjugation struck us like a mace on the head, because the story about the boy, the snow, the huts, almost made us forget our own deaths. We are no longer alive: the Unnameable is between us and you. The region that no one has crossed by any other means than losing their lives, and there is likely no greater loss. Yet there exist, as you know, countless stories about the dead crossing the Immeasurable and manifesting themselves among the living, yet they appear never to have brought any important messages, never told any great news of eternal life, and how does that happen?

  To die is the pure white movement, says one poem.

  It shall be admitted that we feared death until the last moment of life and fought against it as long as we could endure it, until something came and extinguished the lights, but mixed with the fear was curiosity, a hesitant, fearful inquisitiveness, because now all of the questions would be answered. Then we died and nothing happened. Our eyes closed and we opened them again in precisely the same place, we saw everything but no one saw us, we were in bodies and yet bodiless, we had voices and yet were voiceless. Weeks passe
d, months, years passed, and those who continued to live grew away from us and then died, we don’t know where they went. Ten years, twenty years, thirty years, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, how long do we need to count, how high is it possible to reach? Here we are, above ground, restless, terrified, and embittered, while our bones are likely peaceful down in the ground, with our names on crosses above them. The tedium can be total, even universal, and we would long ago have lost our minds if only we could have done. The only thing we can do, apart from following along with you and others who live, is to ask constantly, why are we here? Where did the others go? What can ease the sting? Where is God? We ask and ask but it seems there are no answers, it is likely just priests, politicians, and advertisers who have them at the ready.

  There is sometimes so much tranquillity here that our heartbeats are the only thing to be heard, which is simply deplorable; we die, close our eyes, and disappear to everything that matters, then open our eyes again and the heart still beats, the only organ that knows its job. Purpose, is that the blue sky we never touch? We roam around here and there is something invisible between us and you who live, we walk through walls, both ironbound and old wooden walls, we loiter in parlors and gape with you at the television, look over your shoulders when you read the papers, when you read a book. We sit entire nights in the churchyard with our backs against headstones, our legs drawn up to our chests and our hands around our knees, like Bárður when he felt the frost creep close to his heart. Occasionally a feeble sound carries to us in the still of the night, simple, half-broken notes that seem to come from a great distance. This is God, we then say hopefully, this is the sound that is heard when God comes and fetches those who have waited long enough and never doubted. This is what we say and we are optimistic, not entirely dismayed yet. But maybe this is not God, maybe someone is simply lying in the ground with a little music box, turning the handle when he’s bored.