by Sjón
The sailors put their arms around my father’s shoulders and yell, one in each ear:
— Kalt?
The invalid grasps what they mean, but before he can answer they lead him between them inside the ship and it’s warm there.
From below decks rises the cheerful sound of dance music and a babble of drunken voices.
My father looks enquiringly at the sailors but they shrug their shoulders and push him before them down a narrow passage, round a corner and down some stairs, down more stairs, down more stairs.
The noise of partying grows louder the deeper they descend into the bowels of the ship, until it is a fantastic hubbub, and when they reach the saloon the invalid gets a brief glimpse through a sand-blasted glass door of a man in a monkey-suit leapfrogging over a two-metre-tall Negro wearing a bowler hat. He is relieved when they continue down the passage; however ridiculous a figure he may cut, he’s simply not dressed for a party like that.
Two men stand in the cabin doorway.
Inside the cabin a ragged-looking man kneels before an open suitcase.
Taking a few small things out of the case, he proceeds to show them a knotted root that resembles a man with crossed legs, a copper etching of a white adder and a troll without legs, and a jar containing a golden herb.
They shake their heads.
He holds up his palms and raises his brows, and there is a flash from the ring he’s wearing on the little finger of his left hand. They point to the ring and nod.
He gives them the ring.
They break it in two.
He lies down on the bunk, clutching the hatbox to his chest. They leave.
He waits for the whistle to blow for departure.
The whistle blows for departure.’
‘The ship cleft the world-night and headed north. I was in the hatbox.’
‘And now you’re here.’
PART II
ICELAND’S THOUSAND YEARS
a crime story
I
(In the Beginning)
1
‘Once upon a time there was a berserker who had such a wicked temper that he couldn’t bear the presence of any living thing. At first he made do with attacking the life around him – this was in the south of Asia – but after he had killed everything within reach he packed up his few personal belongings, which consisted of a pair of tongs the size of a fully grown oak tree and a henhouse on wheels, harnessed himself to the henhouse, grasped the tongs in both hands and set off on his great journey of destruction.
Now some may find it perplexing that the brute should have spared the chickens he kept in the battered hutch. But this was because he lost his appetite in his murderous frenzies and couldn’t bring himself to eat his kill. Instead he dragged the corpses into piles, strewn here and there over the bloody field. This was a most wasteful way of working and by the time he had finished he was too exhausted to start slaughtering chickens with all the effort that entails. And so the years passed without the berserker ever finding time to tear apart his hens. Gradually he learned the knack of eating their eggs, gaining great satisfaction from gobbling down whole generations of unborn poultry. His method of eating eggs was as unnatural as the thoughts that accompanied it. As soon as the poor feathered creatures began their broody clucking he would seize them one after another and suck the eggs out of their rumps.
Ah yes, his nature was godless and cruel.
Anyway, the story of the berserker’s travels tells that he stormed across the Continent, henhouse in tow and tongs aloft, beating and crushing everything in his path. He leapt over the Bosphorus and strode up through Europe. There he encountered a river, the Elbe, and decided to follow it to the sea. Fair and abundant was the life on its banks. But the heaps of the slain piled up in his wake, the river water became tainted with blood, and from its mouth a crimson slick spread all the way to the ends of the earth where the island of Thule, or at least the West Fjords peninsula, was then in the process of forming.
One morning the berserker woke up and began to suck at his hens. Now it so happened that when he raised the final hen’s rump to his lips it was not an egg that he sucked up into his ugly chops but a chick that was very much alive. This miracle had come about because the berserker’s method of egg-collecting had stretched the creatures’ backsides so wide that the chick had hatched inside its mother.
If the berserker had paid more heed during his killing spree the day before, he would have noticed the chick living contentedly in its mother’s backside and poking its yellow head out of her behind to feed. But he didn’t and so the inevitable happened: the chick was hoovered up into the berserker’s jaws. And if the berserker hadn’t hesitated a moment at the ticklish feeling that a feathered chick is apt to create on the tongue, the chick would have ended up in his stomach and given up the ghost among all the egg yolks, shells and whites.
The berserker’s jaw dropped; he rolled his thick tongue around his chops in search of the alien object, he cleared his throat, he spat, he gave a sudden snort, he coughed, he put his fingers down his throat, he stuck out his tongue, he panted like a dog, he screeched, he opened his jaws wide and examined his reflection in the shiny surface of the tongs. All in vain, for you see the chick had ducked into a deep cavity in the berserker’s wisdom tooth where it remained cowering during the fearful upheavals. The berserker would no doubt have stayed there for ever and a day, belching and grimacing, if just then some butterflies hadn’t wafted over to him on the morning breeze. They captured his attention with their bewildered fluttering over the hop fields and called him back to his daily chores.
The berserker was filled with enthusiasm for his work. He ripped and tore on every side in pitched battle with the butterflies which, in addition to being tediously careless of their fate, kept seeking out the orifices in the berserker’s body for all the world as if there were something good to be found there. By the time evening fell, the sun began to bleed over the wasteland and the berserker rested his weary bones after the day’s toil, decisive victory in his battle with the butterflies and the piling up of the slain in the aftermath, he had forgotten all about the interloper who had made itself at home in his mouth.
The chick meanwhile was snug in its crazed host’s wisdom tooth. Like other young creatures it was naively accepting of the trials that life has to offer, whether these consisted of the exile of its people, regular growth spurts, or simply being swept willy-nilly from its mother’s warm posterior into a berserker’s fetid gob. Indeed, the transformation in the chick’s circumstances preoccupied it less than the fact that it was mastering the art of cheeping.
The only thing the chick missed from its former abode was the possibility of peeping out at the world from time to time. Now it only got a glimpse of the big wide world when the berserker launched screaming into battle with his adversary, life, while the chick sat in his hollow wisdom tooth like a poor student in the upper circle at the final rehearsal of Götterdämmerung. But as it did not dare on its little life to stick its head out between the berserker’s teeth, what it saw was not worth the telling: the odd panic-stricken human being, a fleeing family of hares, a shivering juniper bush.
The chick was not merely inquisitive, it was young and inquisitive, and so this paltry ration came nowhere near to satisfying it. When the berserker ground his teeth over the construction of the piles or slept with jaws clenched, which he did for fear of being invaded by creepy-crawlies, the chick would cheep with all its might and main:
— Can I see, can I see?
Until the berserker stirred and gaped in astonishment.
— Can I see, can I see?
The berserker couldn’t gather his wits. He not only lacked the brains to get to the bottom of the voice that was interfering with his killing – he could barely finish wringing some creature’s neck before the refrain would start up:
— Can I see, can I see?
No, it also contradicted his sense of identity to be driven on by something other than h
imself. He was seized by bewilderment and found himself utterly at a loss when his enemies lay, lifeless corpses, at his feet, yet the cheeping continued to reverberate in his head:
— Can I see, can I see?
And so one day the thought lanced into his thick skull and put down roots there: that this must be his “inner voice”.
He put on a self-important face and announced loud and clear:
— I have heard my inner voice. And my inner voice is curious. It wants to see, it wants to examine. I want to see. I want to examine. To know more and more things. I’m curious about everything that lives or dies – though perhaps more about what dies – and above all it is curiosity that drives me on my otherwise inexplicable travels.
Before the chick entered the scene, the clock that ticked in the berserker’s heart had not been some creature that said “eter-nity”. No, it was a formidable mechanism that thundered:
That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!
That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!
That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!
That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!
That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, at this point in the story the berserker was near the mouth of the River Elbe. His journey had taken longer than he’d have liked because nowadays he was no longer remotely satisfied with merely piling up his victims in artistic heaps; on the contrary he felt absolutely compelled to dissect and study them in minute detail before embarking on any pile-building.
But nothing seemed to satisfy the inquisitive chick that the berserker was allowing to run the show. The berserker was by now utterly worn out with splitting bones, tearing apart tree trunks and crushing stones.
— Can I see, can I see?
Shrilled the chick, and the berserker toiled away. One imagines that these labours would have been the death of the berserker had it not been for an event that saved him from such a plebeian fate.
The berserker had cast himself down in exhaustion to sleep and he must have been a ridiculous sight lying there on his back with his mouth open wide – it was the only way he could get any peace from his persistent inner voice, which could be heard chirping reedily:
— Can I see, can I see?
But it grew quieter as sleep overcame the chick. Next morning the berserker and chick awoke in an onion field – the onion crop was coming on nicely in Lower Saxony at the time – which was at the foot of a hill that separated it from a nameless cluster of huts around a patch of dirt.
Anyway, the berserker and chick had awoken, the former to further feats in his battle against life, the latter to new discoveries about this same life. The berserker leapt to his feet with sleep in his eyes and a strong reek of onion in his nose. The dew shone on the stiff onion stalks as far as his bleary eyes could see. The fresh earth and those green shoots poking up from it irritated every nerve in his body before running up to his brain and ringing all the alarm bells there. In a flash he pictured the vegetation sprouting from the soil and growing into a ludicrous tangle that would wind itself around his feet and trip him up. The aftermath would be an easy matter for his enemy: there he would lie, helpless, until the onion plants smothered him and the earth piled up over his body.
He would die.
The berserker went crazy. The doomsday clock boomed in his heart: “That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger! That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger! That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!”
The chick braced itself in the wisdom tooth; the killer’s hour had come, and the berserker tore round the onion field like a tornado. He kicked up onions, ploughing them from the earth with hands and feet, sending showers of soil soaring into the sky like Gothic spires. In no time at all the berserker had managed to defeat the enemy, and once he had quite literally turned the field upside down he embarked on expunging all life from the onions that lay around him, like a sniper whose cover has been blown.
Under normal circumstances, that is to say if the berserker had been himself, he would have made light work of the onion butchery. But as he was busy crushing one bulb after another in his fist the chick could no longer restrain itself, and the berserker heard his piping inner voice urging him to investigate the onion:
— Can I see, can I see?
The berserker opened his jaws to hear better, the onion appeared before the chick’s eyes and it immediately wanted to see what was inside – it had never seen an onion before – so it cheeped with genuine, youthful curiosity:
— Can I see, can I see!
The chick watched enthralled as the berserker’s stubby fingers peeled layer after layer from the onion, and it was beside itself with excitement as every new layer appeared:
— Can I see, can I see!
The berserker was becoming anxious; he sweated and had difficulty getting the onion off the onion. His inner voice, that inquisitive inner man he had discovered within himself, had begun to grate on his nerves: what the hell was there to see in a blasted onion?
— Can I see, can I see!
The chick went into overdrive, flapping its wing stubs, popping its eyes, craning its yellow neck and squawking:
— Can I see, can I see!
When the berserker managed with trembling fingers to peel away the final layer – and it transpired that there was nothing there, yet the voice continued to yell for more – he lost his wits. He wept, he laughed, he spun in circles, he stamped his feet, he wailed, he quietly sniffed, he seized his head, he flung himself flat on the ground, he beat the earth, he swore, he counted his fingers, he whined, he tore off his clothes, he recalled his childhood, he barked, he whistled a tune, he grabbed his penis and swung it in circles. He stiffened, he sighed.
The berserker stood rigid in the ploughed-up mire that until a short time ago had been a field; a naked, lost troll. The mink-like nature had been extinguished in his breast, the mechanism had worn out, and no “That-whidge-duvn’t-deftroy-me-makef-me-ftronger!” sounded there any more. The peace of madness had descended upon him. He hung his ugly head, a mild expression on his face, and rubbed together the thumb and forefinger of his right hand as if fondling the nothing that the onion had contained, muttering, “Eter-nity, eter-nity.”
Then he raised his eyes, as surprised and dopey-looking as anyone would be if they had nothing left in life but these three questions – “Who am I?”, “Where do I come from?” and “Where am I going?” – aware that the answers lay in the history of his life up to that fateful moment which, in addition to teaching him to ask these questions, had robbed him of his memory.
The chick, which had been quiet during the mayhem, huddling down in the root of the wisdom tooth, now saw its chance and broke the silence with a short, hesitant cheep.
— Can I see, can I see?
Which probably meant something like: “Is everything all right, foster-father? The world has returned to normal, hasn’t it?” Because few things trouble the young more than disorder; that is to say, it doesn’t matter how absurd or unfair the world is, so long as things proceed as normal. But it couldn’t find words for this in any other way than to cheep:
— Can I see?
The berserker went berserk. He took to his heels in mad flight from his inner self, launching himself off the hill and hurtling in a great arc over the cluster of huts, all the way north to the Arctic Circle where he landed in such a violent belly-flop that every single bone in his body was smashed to smithereens. There he lay rotting for nearly forty years, to the great benefit of all animal life. His spine still juts up from the sea and is known today as Trolls’ Cape.
Meanwhile what of the chick? When the berserker soared in a great leap over the rooftops, his face a death mask, every muscle strained in a greedy cry of: “Death, come to me now!”, the chick flew out of his gaping jaws and landed in the middle of the village. And naturally it survived the fall.
The v
illagers knew that if the chick hadn’t driven the berserker mad their days would have been numbered, and they were not content merely to name the place “Kükenstadt” after their saviour, no, they even raised a memorial to it on the patch of dirt that later became the town square. And there the statue of a chick stood, as one can see from old photographs, until the town was razed to the ground towards the end of the Second World War.’
II
(17 June 1944)
2
‘By 1944 the art of making ocean voyages was taken for granted by mankind to the extent that few things seemed more natural than putting to sea, even when the destination lay beyond the horizon.
There were many reasons for this.
People were no longer afraid of sailing over the edge of the world. The earth was no longer as flat as it looked. Scientists had long ago proved that it would be more accurate to describe it as a ball floating in space and revolving on its own axis at the same time as it revolves around the sun. The moon and planets do the same. They revolve simultaneously around themselves and around the sun.
To begin with, adults were rendered as dizzy as children by the notion that the world was like one gigantic ballgame; it went against every instinct. Their eyes could no longer be trusted, plains had turned into slopes, and if anyone happened to say that he had stayed in one place or another he was laughed at. Not to imply that the public had this knowledge on the brain. No, when it came to daily life this world view amounted to little more than mental gymnastics for experts to amuse themselves with in specially built institutions. Ordinary people didn’t have the time; they were too busy with other things, such as eating soup made of carrots, onion and cabbage parcels.
Or sailing ships.
