“I ought to give you a punch on the nose,” said Örn Úlfar. “I’m ashamed of even knowing you.”
“You are welcome to do that, Örn,” said the Ljósvíkingur; he admired this friend of his so blindly that he could willingly suffer his anger after the blows he had had to take from the wicked. “But can I just ask you one thing before you strike me: Do you consider all those who believe in God and the soul, and the next world, to be criminals and liars?”
“The next world is cheap; it doesn’t cost anything to dispense it with both hands. When they have sunk the people’s ship in order to pay their debts with the insurance money, they give us a whole fleet in heaven.”
“I don’t care what you say about Pétur the manager,” said the poet. “I don’t believe he is a wicked person.”
“What are you talking about?” said Örn.
“In fact I don’t believe that any wicked people exist.”
“What do you mean by wicked people?”
“I don’t know,” said the Ljósvíkingur. “Nothing, really.”
“You are so stupid that it’s practically impossible to talk to you,” said his friend. “You suddenly come out with something you profess to advocate, but when you’re asked about it, you’ve no idea what you mean or what you’re talking about. You say that Pétur ríhross isn’t a wicked man; well and good, say I—but who’s saying that he is a wicked man? Here in Sviðinsvík there are three kinds of wicked men: fish thieves, loud-mouthed drunks, and lechers who have children at the taxpayers’ expense. None of them steals from the poor or lies to them. There is no more innocent phenomenon in our parish community than wicked people. If I accused Pétur ríhross of being a wicked man, I’d be a fool. I accuse him of being a good man, a loving man, a noble-minded man, a spiritual pioneer, a friend of education, a champion of the faith and a benefactor of penniless poets.”
“You are much more intelligent than I, Örn,” said the poet. “That’s obvious from the way you have never believed anything you have been told. I, on the other hand, have always believed everything I have been told. And when the world around me has been full of harshness and cruelty, I haven’t had the courage to clench my teeth like you; instead I have instinctively withdrawn into myself and tried to live for beauty and the spirit.”
Örn Úlfar made no reply, but laughed. It was not the kind of laughter that expressed joy, nor even mockery, nor pity, least of all kindness, just a primitive masculine antagonism to a helpless admission, to wretchedness. He was no longer angry. They walked along the road together. There was silence, and for a long time they listened to their footsteps on the road. Then Örn Úlfar began to talk: “You told me once about Hólsbúðar-Dísa, as we called her, Dísa from Skálholt, the crippled, naked wretch who crawled screeching from behind the partition on your first morning in the village. You thought she was going to attack you, and this picture haunted you, waking and sleeping, for a long time afterwards. You still haven’t forgotten it. It’s not so long since you told me that you found it quite incomprehensible that such creatures should exist. Yes, it is quite incomprehensible. I’m not going to try to explain it for you, but because you say you want to investigate whatever you don’t understand, I shall tell you a story.
“When I was a small boy and sat here astride the fence with other boys in order to jeer at people walking along the road, because our life was nothing but one continuous shout of misery, Hólsbúðar-Dísa was a young girl with long, raven hair and these expressive dark eyes which concealed all the mystery of youth; she walked past wearing a shawl. We shouted at her the name of the man she loved, but she didn’t look round, just held her head higher. Later, when her youth had been ruined and her life had been made an unbearable disgrace, I saw her being taken along this same road through the village, in fetters. It was on this very road we are walking on now. They had charged her with a crime and were getting ready to judge her, as they always do with the innocent when they have been struck down. They would gladly have given her jail for life, but when she went mad on their hands, they suddenly realized that they were poor and couldn’t afford to send her to a mental hospital. The taxpayers couldn’t afford the luxury of sending her to an asylum.
“Instead they farmed her out with the late Jón the murderer, because he was reckoned to have the strength of four men and therefore was the only man in the village they could trust to wrestle with her and beat her when she had her fits. He built a hutch round her in a corner of his bait shed, and there she languished on hard boards under a few tattered sacks for two years. When there was a thaw, the water dripped down on her; in frosty weather the walls of her hutch were covered with ice; her food was thrown to her through a hole. They have seldom been so lucky with their parish paupers here. You see, she could no more protest against anything that happened to her than a dumb animal. She just curled up like a snail under her rags, with her knees up to her chin, and she lay like that in cold and darkness for two years and was forgotten until old Jón the murderer died. When the bait shed was pulled down after his death, they hauled this hunched animal out of the hutch, and the people who saw her called upon the authorities to send her to a mental institution. But when the doctor and the parish council had examined her and ascertained that it would never be possible to straighten her again, they were so ashamed about her that they didn’t dare to send her away from the village. They had such refined feelings that they couldn’t bring themselves to let others see what the good men who ran a parish could do to a human being if they were only good enough, loving and noble-minded enough, pioneering enough in spiritual and educational matters, great enough champions of the faith and benefactors of penniless poets. So they were content with setting up a stall for her at the far end of the living room at Skálholt.”
They walked for a long time after the story was finished, and still heard their own footsteps on the road; then Örn Úlfar turned off, with the Ljósvíkingur following. Örn Úlfar sat down on the grass and the Ljósvíkingur looked at him, in fear, then sat down on the grass as well. After a long pause he asked, “Why are you telling me this story?” And added, “I’m sure I shall never get over it.”
“I hope you never will get over it,” said Örn Úlfar. “But unfortunately you will get over it, and pretty quickly, too.”
“When all’s said and done, Hólsbúðar-Dísa is only one person in distress,” said the Ljósvíkingur, “and luckily doesn’t even know how much she is suffering.”
“Hólsbúðar-Dísa is the village itself,” said Örn Úlfar, without further explanation.
“I can’t bear this,” said the Ljósvíkingur and stood up and was going to run away. “I yearn for beauty, beauty, the spirit,” he said and gazed almost in tears into the blue of the sky at the white clouds of midsummer which clustered into banks and then drifted apart again. But he did not turn away; he sat down again instead.
“I remember you once said that what you were most frightened of in Sviðinsvík were the children in the streets,” said Örn. “So I can’t expect you to enjoy listening to me. I am the children in the streets. I am the child who was brought up in the ditches and on the fences, the child who had everything stolen from him before he was born, the child who was yet another misfortune on top of all the other misfortunes of the family, one handful of dirt to add to the midden on which the cockerels stand and crow. But because of that, there’s no need to talk to me as if no one has ever recognized the need for a more beautiful world except you. I know just as well as you what beauty is and even what the spirit is, even though you are the Ljósvíkingur himself and I am only called after the eagle and the wolf. Beauty—that is the earth; it is the grass on the earth. The spirit—that is the heaven with its light above us, the sky with these white summer clouds which cluster together in banks and then drift apart again. If there were any justice in the world I would have just one wish—to be allowed to lie on my back on the grass, in this heavenly light, and look at the clouds.
“But whoever think
s that beauty is something he can enjoy exclusively for himself just by abandoning other people and closing his eyes to the human life of which he is a part—he is not the friend of beauty. He ends up either as Pétur ríhross’s poet, or his secretary. He who doesn’t fight every day of his life to the last breath against the representatives of evil, against the living images of evil who rule Sviðinsvík—he blasphemes by taking the word beauty into his mouth.”
Two young poets sitting on the grass one midsummer day, talking about human life. Then there was a long silence. Örn Úlfar stared into the distance with that long-sighted look of his, the corners of his mouth pulled down, his face bearing an expression of unremitting suffering. The Ljósvíkingur sat straight-legged on the ground, feverishly tearing at the grass, clawing into the roots, down to the bare soil, dirtying his fingers. Then he suddenly stopped tearing at the grass, looked up, gazed at his friend with his sincere blue eyes, and said with expectant, childlike simplicity: “It needs an awful lot of courage to be a man. Örn, do you think I have the courage for it?”
“You can think about that in the autumn when I’m gone,” said his friend.
17
One day Örn Úlfar was gone.
He went aboard a ship with a bag on his back, and traveled south in the hold. His mother said good-bye to him on the quayside with tears in her eyes, in the way in which all mothers have said good-bye to their sons who go away.
“Be sure to keep your scarf around your neck, child.”
His father prophesied good weather.
But when the ship was out of the harbor, Ólafur Kárason noticed that the weather was raw with leaden clouds and a rough sea, no music in the air. Autumn; the golden plovers were gathered in flocks in the homefields. He stood alone on the quayside, watching with troubled eyes the ship receding in the distance; she was now far down the fjord. He felt he no longer knew what to do with himself now that his friend was gone. What was he to do? It was already starting to rain; the first drops were being ripped from the heavy clouds as if in anger. He walked home to his palace and crawled in through the cellar window as usual. He hung a piece of sackcloth over the paneless window to keep out the rain. Seldom had he welcomed his sweetheart with such heartfelt joy and gratitude as he did that night.
How remote youth’s first sexual experience is from youth’s first love! It is as different as the dawn is from the day. Youth’s dream is the white glow of night on the mountain peaks when evening and morning, night and day, all become one without being anything. With experience, the romances of the imagination no longer belong to the world of poetry, fleshless and only half real. The meeting of two lovers makes the whole kernel of poetry a reality which is sufficient to itself; two lives have found one another, two bodies understand one another, and it is everything in one—dream, expectation, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, remembrance and sorrow. This fulfillment of reality is so potent that it carries with it the danger that the divine and eternal will never reveal themselves to the soul again.
The music of revelation, the soul’s secret, sacred dream of the Almighty’s embrace—ah, what ridiculous vanity! He had suddenly become a full-grown man, and it was her work. Her presence lived in his body night and day, waking or sleeping. As the gentle swell stirs on the beach on a clear-blue summer night, so he longed to rest against her sun-white, loving breast, those rounded voluptuous shapes which were the beginning and the end of all beauty, but at the same time the very image of transience itself; nothing is more natural than to die then and turn to dust. It was only a few hours since he had been standing on the quayside with tears in his eyes watching the ship sail away with his friend, but now he was suddenly glad that Örn Úlfar was gone, so that there was no longer anyone to order him to rise, to summon him to arms. Outside, it was raining.
“Oh, Jesus; no, there’s no Jesus about it. We’ve got to start thinking of something,” she said.
He woke up from a trance with a start, raised his head from that precious pillow, and said, “Yes, there is perhaps nothing further removed from reality than complete reality itself.”
“Eh?” she said. “Reality? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Neither do I,” he said.
“You’re such a great poet,” she said. “If only you knew how much I’ve dreamed of going with you to the Churchyard Ball!”
“Me, too,” he said.
“I promised to teach you to dance,” she said.
“We’ll start tonight,” he said. “I’ll dance better than anyone else.”
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t dance better than anyone else,” she said. “And shall I tell you why? It’s because no boy will have such deep blue eyes as my boy has, no one will have such golden hair and such small hands. And none, none of all the couples at the Churchyard Ball will be as happy as me and my boy.”
She hummed once again the song she had sung on the first day they met.
“Some get shoes from Aðalfjörður,” she said. “Some order them from the south. Some get them in any way they can.”
“I’ve no doubt you’ll get shoes,” he said.
She was silent for a long time, and he could hear nothing but the autumn rain falling outside, steadily and unceasingly.
“No,” she said at last. “I won’t get any shoes.”
“Why not?”
“And I won’t be going to the Churchyard Ball this autumn.”
“What’s this now?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
He raised himself on one elbow. He looked at her for a long time as she lay before him, young, white and loving, in the first darkness of the summer. He did not know whether to be happy or sad about the news, actually he just felt a little proud: I won’t even be eighteen until September, he thought to himself, it isn’t everyone who expects to be a father at that age. He leaned down over her and kissed her.
She said, “God in heaven, to think that I’m pregnant, that’s how much of a fool I am, hahaha!”
“Now I’ll publish my book of poems in Aðalfjörður this autumn and become a famous poet,” he said. “And then you’ll see whether you regret it!”
“I don’t regret anything,” she said. “But what are you going to say to the parish officer?”
“What’s it got to do with the parish officer?”
“We’re both on the parish. He’ll kill us.”
“Does he know about it?”
“Does he know about it? The whole village lies here outside the window every night counting the minutes I’m with you, as if they were the last drops of their lifeblood. Tonight Daddy threatened to tie me up.”
“We’ll get married,” he said.
“Hahaha,” she said.
“Don’t you want to marry me, then, Meya dearest?”
“Yes,” she said. “And then what?”
“Then no one can say anything.”
“Are we going to live on anything?” she said.
“I can set myself up as a poet,” he said. “Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík is said to take two or even three krónur for an elegy.”
She worked it out in her head for a while and then said, “So few people die, worse luck, that it’s not possible to live off that. And in addition, the few who die can’t afford to have elegies written for them. We couldn’t afford an elegy for my mother. You’re lucky if you get coffee at funerals nowadays.”
They were no nearer to a solution.
“Perhaps I’ll get some pay from Pétur Pálsson this autumn,” said the poet.
“Yes, but don’t you think you’ll have to buy some clothes if you get any money, man?—which you obviously won’t get, anyway, because Pétur ríhross never pays anyone anything. Perhaps at best he might give someone two krónur out of charity. And the Regeneration Company has gone broke.”
“What do you think we ought to do, then?” said the poet.
“That’s for you to work out,” she said. “You’re the father.”
His fingertips touc
hed her body cautiously, inquiringly, reverently.
“Is it really true?” he whispered. “How am I to be what you say?”
He looked at her for a long time on this late-summer night like a man watching a series of optical illusions and who cannot tear his eyes away from them, and his fingertips went on playing on her rounded form. Eventually his eyes filled with tears; he said, “I love you,” and buried his face in her bosom. Thus the night went on passing.
At last she whispered, “Once I was frightened, and thought it was wicked. D’you remember how frightened I was? It was probably because I thought it wasn’t true. Now I’ve lived it in my own life, and it’s true after all.”
“What is?” he said.
“Love,” she said. “I feel now that we’ll love one another for as long as we live.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “And never part again.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And never part again.”
A little later she was sitting on the edge of his bed and had put on her worn-out shoes.
“I must go now,” she said.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
She sat with her elbows on her lap and her fingers between her teeth and gazed out into the night.
“Farther down the fjord here, if you walk for about an hour, there’s a little cottage. It stands right down by the high-water mark, all on its own. And there’s a tiny little homefield round it and a teeny-weeny little cabbage patch that needs weeding. There are flowers growing on the roof. And there’s a landing place, and a boat on the beach, and a fishing line, and perhaps a bit of net. And there are flowers growing on the roof. Have you never walked past it?”
“Not yet,” he said. “What else?”
“And the mountain, it stands above the little cottage, but not right on top of it; there’s some level ground behind it which catches the snow avalanches, so there’s no danger. And the front of the house is painted red and faces the sea, and there’s white around the window, and the window needs a curtain; and there are flowers growing on the roof. And there’s a little barn behind the cottage, and the cow grazes on the slope, and she has a little calf, and the cow’s just called Skjalda, but the calf is called Ljómalind. And there are seven ewes with their lambs on the mountain.”
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