World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  He made no reply, but shrugged his shoulders, snorted, and pulled a face.

  She came after him to the door: “I won’t have you going out barefoot and bare-necked, child! What d’you think people would say?”

  He replied in his deep voice: “My feet are my own. And my neck, too.”

  The mother: “You know you’ve got a weak chest, child.”

  This child of beauty and renouncer of it—could anyone imagine a more alien guest in this tottering hovel, where the horrid hallmark of penury was branded on the living and the dead alike? No, he preferred to walk barefoot rather than to disgrace his feet with tattered shoes, and to go about bare-necked rather than cover his young chest with rags.

  They sat together for hours on the sea crags at the foot of the mountain and looked back towards the village, and he told the Ljósvíkingur all about the conditions of the people who waited there to be bought and sold. It was well into the night before they realized it, but he went on talking. He went into great detail about everything; in the end it was as if his narrative became one with the expanse of the summer night itself, so broadly and quietly did he speak, and yet always in the background was the wild surf of midwinter. The destinies of nameless people, uneventful and monotonous, of people who were nothing, who did not even have a face in the world—suddenly they had begun to take shape, gradually they were beginning to rise up sonorously, beginning to matter, even to shout. There was no longer any escape, one had to listen, one had to answer, one even had to defend oneself; before one knew it, their pointless destinies had forced themselves into one’s own blood.

  A young woman came walking toward him on the road and peered at him, and the daylight gleamed in her white, crystalline eyes that seemed to reflect both red and green. Yes, she had recognized him all right. She halted on the road in front of him and smiled.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No,” he said. “Hallo.”

  “You were going to walk right past me.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes, you were,” she said. “Fie on you!”

  At that he said solemnly, “órunn, you are the last person I would pass by on the road. I owe you my life.”

  She looked at him with her ambiguous eyes, as she had done once before, first at his hair, then at his hands, then into his eyes, and finally away from him, sideways, in another direction, suddenly absentminded, and hummed a few bars from a new melody. But although she did not look directly at him he felt all too clearly that she had not let go of him, and his heart beat a little faster and he felt a little frightened, because the thought occurred to him that she might perhaps take his health away from him again.

  “I’ve heard that you just say what anyone wants to hear,” she said.

  “You yourself know better than anyone what I have to thank you for, órunn,” he said, but to be honest, he no longer understood the person (if he could call himself that) who had come to visit this strange semi-albino on a stretcher across the mountains to receive his life from her.

  “Why do you look at me like that?” she asked. “You don’t even shake hands with me. You’re frightened.”

  Why did she keep on accusing him of being afraid? Did she have some evil intention? Surely she was not going to take his health away from him again? He gave her his hand.

  “I simply don’t know you any more,” she said, and directed the cold light of her eyes on him, sideways. “How stupid it is to go to all that trouble for strangers! Even though you raise them from the dead, they’ve forgotten all about you in a week; they don’t even recognize you in the road.”

  “You who get gold coins from all over the country for curing people!” he said.

  “Shut up!” she said.

  He shut up. Her new melody was much more restless than the old waltz, and not nearly so agreeable; he did not like to hear people singing while they were talking to you.

  “Why don’t you want to have a stroll with me,” she said, “since I have given you your life?” And when they had moved off: “How very strange you are!”

  He did not say anything.

  “Why don’t you say something?” she asked.

  “You told me to shut up,” he replied.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

  “What am I to say?” he said.

  “Anything at all,” she said. “Say something to me because it’s me. And because you’re a poet. Say something so that I can find myself because you’re a poet.”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  She hummed a snatch of her tune, absently. Then, out of the blue: “We’ve lost the farm. We couldn’t pay. We were evicted yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “When you can’t pay, you get evicted.”

  “Couldn’t Friðrik help you?” he asked innocently.

  She halted abruptly on the road, slapped him on the face, and said angrily, “Shut up, you should be ashamed of yourself!”

  He put his hand to his cheek, even though it did not hurt very much, and said, “Why do you strike me?”

  There was some blend of hatred and other suffering around her mouth, and he was afraid of it.

  “Is that jibe to be the thanks I get for making him call you back to life when you were more dead than death itself?” she asked.

  “órunn, I thank you with all my heart, all my soul, all . . .”

  “Oh, shut your trap,” she said.

  They walked on for a while in silence, she did not even hum her tune. Suddenly she put her face on his arm and said with childlike sincerity, looking up at his face, almost pleadingly, “Ólafur, if you love truth at all, will you tell me the absolute truth about one thing?”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Do you really and truly believe that I cured you? Will you tell me the truth? Just one word, just this once. Then I’ll never ask you again. Then you’ll never have to tell the truth about anything again.”

  “What is truth?” he asked.

  “Yes, I knew you’d be a damned Herod!” she said. “You’re a damned Herod!”

  “I came to you, a crossbearer on a stretcher and an outcast from humanity, and I went from you a conquerer of life,” he said.

  “I don’t understand poetry,” she said. “I’m asking for yes or no.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “All right, then you can pay me ten krónur,” she said.

  At this unexpected suggestion he became acutely embarrassed and blushed to the roots of his hair. “To be absolutely honest, órunn, I’ve never had any money in my life. I’ve never earned ten krónur all my life. As you yourself know, I haven’t been able to work at all for the last two years. But if I can get a job with the Regeneration Company this summer, then I can perhaps hope to have some money by the autumn.”

  “Work, work, work! It makes me sick listening to you,” she said. “If you can’t get hold of ten krónur at once, then I don’t look upon you as a man.”

  “How am I to do that, órunn? Doesn’t one perhaps always have to work first and get paid afterwards?”

  “How incredibly stupid you are!” she said. “What d’you think you’ll get out of working? D’you think I myself don’t know what it is to work? It’s ludicrous to work.”

  “But it’s still the only way to earn money,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” she said. “Working only teaches you to hate those who don’t work, that’s to say those who have the money. To work is to hate. To work is to be bored. To work is to have nothing to eat, it’s to be unable to pay, it’s to lose your farm, it’s to be evicted. You are quite unbelievably stupid.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s true that I’m stupid. When I was little, I was always beaten with a birch for shirking. And if I said what I thought, my supper was taken from me and I was told I would go to hell. It may well be that I’m not independent enough to see the truth, much less to tell it if I happen to see it. One can’t help the way one was brought up, órunn. You y
ourself know best what I was only a fortnight ago, when you called me back to life.”

  “Anyone who values his own life at all can always get hold of ten krónur, however useless he might be in other respects,” she said. “I need ten krónur. From you.”

  “órunn,” he said pleadingly. “What am I to do?”

  “What if I strike you sick again unless you bring me ten krónur?” she asked.

  At that he went weak at the knees and began to see a white fog before his eyes and broke into a sweat. This encounter was becoming an anguished dream, a nightmare. The time had to come when he would have to suffer his punishment for betraying God and Jesus, as he had suspected up on the mountain the moment he first heard about órunn and Friðrik. That time was now at hand. His life and his health were in the hands of irresponsible mystical powers; this Norn* could strike him down whenever she wished. . . .

  “Well, if it isn’t the spirit-girl with an earthly man on her arm, hahaha!”

  He was startled out of his despair in front of Fagrabrekka, and there was Vegmey Hansdóttir standing in the doorway, jeering at them.

  “What’s the bitch of Fagrabrekka yelping about?” said the spirit-girl.

  The girl in the doorway called out to a dozen children in the nearby ditches and fences and said, “D’you see the freak and the angel-girl, children?”

  The children pursued them for a while with obscenities and abuse and dirt-throwing, and became twice as boisterous when the spirit-girl turned on them and gave them a taste of superior upbringing. But after a time the children could not be bothered chasing them any farther.

  “Only ten krónur—from you; so that I can find myself. Even if it’s only five krónur—for the truth.”

  “I wish I had a thousand krónur, órunn.”

  “Then I wouldn’t want to talk to you,” she said.

  “I have an idea,” he said, “and that is to go and see Pétur, the manager. . . .”

  “I could get ten krónur from Pétur ríhross myself,” she said, “a hundred krónur, a thousand krónur. That’s the one thing I don’t want. Anything but that.”

  “I’ll give you everything I have,” he said.

  “What have you got?”

  “A few books,” he said.

  They were down on the shore road now, and when they reached the Privy Councillor’s castle he asked her to wait while he went inside. He came out again with The Felsenburg Stories.

  “This is my biggest book,” he said, “and in many ways the most remarkable. It must be possible to sell it for five krónur or even ten.”

  They sat down on a boulder on the beach.

  “This is just a tattered old book,” she said. “Who d’you think would want to buy this old thing?”

  “You’ve no idea of all the things that are contained in this book, órunn,” he said.

  “Are you fond of it?” she asked.

  “This is a book of destiny; both the hopes and disappointments of life are bound up in this book,” he said, and indeed he greatly regretted parting with the book, but would gladly sacrifice it for his health. “I wouldn’t give this book to anyone but you.”

  “I wouldn’t accept a tattered old thing like this from anyone,” she said, and held it absentmindedly on her lap and began to hum her new tune again, which was not nearly so agreeable as the old tune. The fringes of the waves lapped at the boulder.

  “You have reddish hair,” she said in the middle of the tune and looked at him sideways, and her crystalline ambiguous look and her inscrutable smile shone on him as they had done that memorable night at Kambar. But it no longer enchanted him; on the contrary, the longer she looked at him the harder it was to bear it.

  “Let me touch your hand,” she said, and touched his long, slim hand, leaned forward over his hands and touched the palms and backs. “I’ve never seen a hand like that in my life. Do you remember the night at home at Kambar, when we sat in the homefield and you laid your head here?”—and she pointed to the place where he had laid his head.

  He simply could not understand how it had ever occurred to him to lay his head there, and he looked away.

  She said, “It isn’t true what Reimar said about six men. I was once with a man a little bit, but I was just a child then. For a whole winter after that, I was determined to kill myself. But then I began to see into another world. Since then I have seen only into another world. As God is above us, you’re quite safe in believing that I’m telling you the truth. Listen, is it true that there’s something between you and that hussy at Fagrabrekka?”

  “She’s no hussy,” he said evenly, but he went pale and something inside him began to quiver.

  “So she’s not a hussy? Well, if that’s what you say, then it’s quite obvious you’re sleeping with her at night, like everyone says.”

  “No. It’s not true.”

  “Then why was she jeering at me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you say something?” she said.

  “What am I to say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and tossed her head and made a grimace of impatience. “You’re so damned boring, what the devil am I doing here with you?”

  “We happened to meet on the road,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “that’s a lie, I was looking for you. You were the only person in the village I wanted to meet; it’s because you have hair and eyes and hands that remind me of something, I haven’t the faintest idea what. And because I woke you up from the dead. I hoped you would help me today, because if it doesn’t happen today—listen, I want so much to ask you about one thing. Do you really think there is another world? Isn’t it all just a lie? And do you think there is such a thing as truth, on the whole? Don’t you think that spiritualism is just a lot of piffle? Don’t you think you just pop off, just like any other damned carcass, which is all we really are, when you eventually expire?”

  “I have often asked myself the same question,” he said.

  “Tcha, you just don’t want to say it,” she said. “You don’t want to tell me. D’you know that last night I was offered a hundred krónur, a thousand krónur, a million? I was offered the chance of becoming a scientist and being famous all over the world.”

  “Really?” he said.

  But when he was no more impressed than that, she became sad, buried her face in her hands and shook her head in despair. “You won’t help me,” she half-sobbed into her hands. “I’ll die.”

  Then she took her hands away from her face and leaned over, staring at him.

  “Your face!” she groaned helplessly, and was suddenly not a sorceress any more. “It’s as if it were engraved inside me; I hate it. I don’t care about anything now; d’you hear me? Anything!”

  Then the look in his eyes turned as cold as ice; there was a hard grimace on her face, at once rude and malevolent; he had seldom seen anything so loathsome.

  “And now you can go and be ill again!” she said, and hit him in the face with the book and then threw it into the sea as far as she could, and a few gulls dipped in their flight and thought it might be something for them.

  She stood up and walked rapidly away toward the village.

  13

  That night he stood at the paneless window and looked at the drops dripping from the roof, because it had now started to rain; there was no wind, and the drops fell straight to the ground with a gentle sound that boded peace. He struck his chest with his fist, kneaded his abdomen and rapped his brow and temples with his knuckles to see if he could detect any signs of illness, but he did not even have a headache, let alone anything worse. He was dejected over having been unable to do anything for órunn of Kambar, apart from giving her that tattered old story book which he had not even bothered to read right through to the end; indeed the girl had not cared to own it and had thrown it at once to the illiterate gulls of the sea. On the other hand the boy was relieved that he was no longer beholden to this girl or to the mystical powers she controlled
; and he was perhaps even happier because God, whom he still believed to be the most powerful of all the mystical forces, had not punished him for turning to secret mystical powers which were bound to be in more or less forbidden competition with the One. Yet the strangest thing of all was that the stronger this young poet felt, the more often it occurred to him that perhaps, when all was said and done, he had some mystical power within himself, just as it says in the old Sagas about long-gone heroes, who had a remarkable mystical power within themselves which they called their might and main, and in which they believed, and their faith was justified no less than that of others, even though this power seemed to be of exclusively earthly origin.

  But at the end of this day one memory remained in his consciousness like a wound. How could she have brought herself to call him a freak again, when he was walking innocently past her house with a girl from another world, yes, and what’s more, after she had given him to understand that she had not meant anything by kissing him the other day? How could she bring herself to set all these awful children on a defenseless man, since she had not meant anything at all? Are human beings so inconsistent, not just in love and hatred (which is a different matter), but also when they do not care at all? Or do human beings, when it comes to that, not deserve to have people look up to them and expect great things of them and believe in them, the way dogs do? Luckily the gentle, peaceful rain of an early summer night conquered the pain and conjured a dreamless sleep into the poet’s breast instead of filling it with philosophical conclusions.

  And he woke up from this deep sleep at the touch of someone’s hand on his brow.

  It could not have been long past midnight, because there was still no sign of that lightening which heralds the dawn, even in a clouded sky. It was just that time of a spring night when things are not real but unreal, the moment in which the consciousness has the greatest difficulty in believing and calls in question when day is begun. The girl from the doorway was sitting on the edge of his bed, and had put her hand on his brow. He opened his eyes and asked, “Am I awake, or am I dead?”