“Look at him!” said órunn of Kambar. “I’ll even show you all of him.” She pulled the covers off him as if she were displaying a newborn child, and the poor fellow lay there completely naked and completely dead and snorting quietly; very short, with two breasts and straggling wisps of black hair between them, a potbelly like a round of tallow, thighs like a woman’s. Ólafur Kárason was filled with revulsion.
“Is it the cognac?” he whispered, for he had the strange idea that this liquid was the most dangerous poison known to mankind.
But she did not reply to questions about minor details; she covered her husband again, without a word, and the show was over.
“He was a chief steward on a Danish liner on the Icelandic run,” she said when they were sitting down again. “The poor wretch saved my life. I was standing weeping on the quayside in Copenhagen, and couldn’t get home.”
“Weeping? You?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They were real tears, as any analysis would have proved. What else do you think it was?”
There was roast meat on the table and silver cutlery and porcelain dishes, and for the first time a banquet was being given for this poet.
“I feel I don’t know how to eat,” he said.
“Let me pour you some red wine,” she said.
“Don’t you think our souls might suffer?” he asked.
“I know exactly where I stand,” she replied, and her bracelets jangled on her bright wrist as she lifted the bottle and poured the wine into the glass, and it poured in a jerky rhythm that reminded one of a heartbeat.
“If I didn’t know that the gold you wear is a symbol of human virtues, I would be frightened,” he said.
“There’s supposed to be good body in this wine,” she said, and raised her glass and drank to him.
But when he had gone to bed that night she came into his room and sat down in the armchair, as inscrutable as ever, and went on smoking and humming; the look in her eyes through the spectacles confused him because of its mixture of red and green on top of the wine he had drunk.
“I don’t suppose I could ask you to take off your glasses?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Once I asked you to tell me what truth was, and you wouldn’t tell me.”
“You yourself said that money was truth,” he said. “If I had had a hundred krónur I would have given them to you.”
“You asked me earlier,” she said, “whether Friðrik the elf doctor ever existed. The gods that we ourselves create exist, and no others.”
“I know,” he said. “And yet . . .”
“And yet what?”
“There exists one Music,” he said, “one Voice.”
“Why did you say a hundred krónur? I only asked you for five, at the most ten. But you gave me a useless old book. And it was another girl who came in through your window.”
“Haven’t you then forgiven me yet, órunn, you who have had all your soul’s wishes fulfilled? Excuse me, of whom is that picture hanging on the wall over there?”
“Oh, it’s that devil, Napoleon the Great,” she said. “He goes with all second-rate hotel bedrooms.”
She took off her glasses.
The dusk never grew any darker; this was the owl’s light. Outside the open window it had started to rain, and the soft and gentle rain of midsummer blended with the sound of footsteps in the street and the noise of carriages hurrying past in blissful, unrelated distance. órunn of Kambar’s eyes were green.
“Listen, Ólafur,” she said. “What did you think about me when they had sent me abroad?”
“I thought: she has cured the sick and raised the dead, she will one day become famous throughout the world.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “What you thought was this: she is mad and has hallucinations; she’s a criminal and has let herself be used to set fire to a house; she’s a whore, she . . . she . . . she . . . that’s what you thought.”
She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray, and the lines around her mouth twitched in a way he could not interpret, everything between hatred and grief, callousness and tenderness and yet none of these things. Then she began to take off her ornaments slowly, one by one, and throw them on the floor. This was the one true órunn of Kambar, of whom one never knew from which world she was being controlled; one never knew either when she was being genuine, and when artificial, nor where in her the dividing line between fiction and reality lay.
“If you didn’t know before what to think of me, you know it now,” she said, and kicked the last bracelet so that it rolled under the chair. He was as far as ever from knowing what to think of her. What will she look like when she starts gathering up her jewelry tomorrow morning when I’m gone, he thought, as she fell to her knees beside his bed, without any finery, and leaned against his breast, babbling deliriously.
15
In a village in Rumania there lives a man whose profession is swallowing knives, forks and other tableware. In Australia recently a calf was born with eight legs, six of them below, and two growing out his back. Rama the Fifth, king of Siam, had three thousand wives and three hundred and seventy children—a hundred and thirty-four sons and two hundred and thirty-six daughters. In England a dog has been taught to speak; in Germany a horse has learned to write. In one African state, betrothed girls are kept for three years in pitch-black cellars and forbidden to utter a word.
Ólafur Kárason had never suspected that such momentous events could be happening in the world as those one could read about in the family weekly Heimilið, which was an exceptionally popular publication in the prison. For the first few days, the poet never tired of pondering over the wonders and miracles that this periodical preached with a view to enlivening family life in the land. Just as the annalists of old used to record comets, he jotted down some of the more remarkable events printed in that family journal, with his own questions in brackets for closer attention at a more suitable opportunity.
In the family weekly Heimilið there were recorded also lengthy descriptions of bank robberies, burglaries, poisonings, and double murders, all of which seemed to be an indispensable condition for a happy family life. For the first few days the poet was far from being unconcerned about who had murdered whom. He read about these great tidings with genuine interest and sometimes sat up all night by the light of his little lamp in the hope that the right murderer and the real thief would be found, and suddenly the dawn would be breaking over a sleepless and exhausted man, almost with blood on his hands. But the more volumes of Heimilið he read, the less he was affected by the kind of news with which an ordinary family concerns itself. Soon it no longer upset him to hear about a murder; eventually a multiple murder evoked only a sleepy yawn in this poet’s face; finally he had reached the point where he was merely slightly irritated if someone mentioned murder, and instinctively sided with the murderer against the victim. This made him afraid that he was becoming a wicked man, and he decided to stop reading this family literature completely. The summer passed. He began to think about the flowers of late summer, and how blissful it would be now to be able to smell the fragrance of meadowsweet, to put a forget-me-not in one’s buttonhole, and to taste a mountain dandelion.
“Today there is peace and quiet and blessed calm in all God’s creation.” The voice was deep and warm, but rather brittle and extremely old. “But there is even more peace and quiet and blessed calm in the soul of a Christian person who acknowledges his Savior at a time of trial.”
Then the door opened. And after this preamble an elderly gentleman appeared, wearing a black overcoat in the sunshine and high galoshes in the dry weather, with a snowy-white, high, wing collar round his shriveled neck and a few pamphlets in his hand.
“My brother,” he said, and gave Ólafur Kárason his blue, silky-smooth old man’s hand and looked at him with mild, impersonal affection. The light in those old eyes was of the kind which knew no shadow. He had a large and manly beaked nose and thick, dark eyebrows, a skin like old parc
hment, and snow-white hair. Ólafur Kárason thought him a handsome man. He shook the visitor’s hand and said instinctively, “I can see that you are a friend of the heavens.”
“That’s far too high praise, my brother,” said the old man. “I’m only a poor cathedral pastor. But it’s certainly true, heaven is beautiful. And the Lord has bestowed his grace upon mankind.”
He asked the prisoner where he came from and who his parish pastor was, and asked Ólafur Kárason to give him his greetings when he returned home. He said he could not stay long this time, but to make up for the shortness of the visit he was going to leave a little booklet by a famous man in Norway: when the soul is sorely tried, it is often good to have beside one a little book about something beautiful. The poet thanked him.
“God sometimes leads a man along mysterious paths to meet his Redeemer,” said the cathedral pastor. “Nature in her midsummer finery is full of warmth and gentleness and blessed peace, and yet the grace of God can work the greatest wonders within cold walls. It is glorious, my brother.”
“It’s certainly very strange, at least,” said Ólafur Kárason. “Indeed, I’ve often thought how much God and Nature can be at variance with one another.”
“If Nature listens to God’s voice, heaven is our wealth, my brother,” said the cathedral pastor with his kindly, remote smile, a mild wayfarer who despite his many responsibilities in the town was never in too much of a hurry to say a kind word to his brother in passing. He promised to come again soon in order that they could talk more about God’s grace.
Ólafur Kárason was left with the cathedral pastor’s booklet, Komið á fund Jesú, and he opened it in two or three places before he put it on the shelf beside the New Testament. It was one of those Christian books in which everything was attributed to Matt, Luke, Cor, and Rev, and behind these names stood strange numbers with commas in between, like some kind of decimal fractions, and with brackets round them, as in algebra. He was far from feeling any ill will towards writings of this kind, but ever since he had grown up under the dominion of the Book of Sermons at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti it had become second nature to him to pay no regard to any books in which God and Jesus were mentioned.
The family that lived in this establishment was perhaps a little unhappy because they were far from meadowsweet and mountain dandelions, but they were not any unhappier than the rest of mankind, far from it, and as people they were undoubtedly no worse than the average run of people who are outside prison—with the exception of drunks. The drunks were a special category. No one had less business in this peaceful, civilized house than these lunatics who were thrown in here at night, fighting and cursing, and set the whole place by the ears. When they sobered up, they thought they were a cut above everyone else and behaved as if they had landed in here solely through the injustice of the authorities and the malevolence of the police. These monsters, who could not even be counted as people, let alone animals, dared to presume that this house was beneath their dignity, and that they as nonresidents were in some way better than other folk. The drunks were the criminals whom the others all agreed ought to be shot out of hand, without warning.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, perhaps,” said the newcomer.
It was the first day.
They were standing outside in the yard on a bright summer’s day, chatting together after their meal before going back to their cells. The drunks had kept them awake all night, and they were all rather bad-tempered, except Ólafur Kárason, who wanted to turn the conversation to other matters. There were tufts of grass growing beside the prison wall, and there the poet caught the eye of a little dandelion. He took the nearest man by the arm and pointed to the dandelion.
“Look at that little dandelion,” said the poet. “It’s the first hawk-weed I’ve seen this summer. It’s strange that this type of dandelion is never seen until well into the summer—I wonder if it’s because it grows so late? Or could it be because the other flowers are so beautiful that one doesn’t notice it until they are gone?”
But the man he turned to happened to be the murderer, the pride of the house; he was a man of under thirty, auburn-haired, pale and handsome, wearing a leather apron because he was the prison cobbler. The murderer made no reply.
“I don’t think he appreciates flowers,” said the household’s moonshiner. “What’s the point of talking about poetic matters to men like that, who can’t even see the sun shining from a clear sky?”
There was a short silence. Then Ólafur Kárason happened to look at the prison wall in front of him and said, “That’s a very high and well-built wall!”
“Hell’s bells, yes, eh!” said a conceited sneak thief; it was the only thing he knew.
Then the murderer said drily, “Only a useless wretch couldn’t get over the wall if he wanted to. That wall’s nothing.”
“He has no respect for anything,” the moonshiner said to Ólafur Kárason. “It doesn’t matter what you talk about. If it’s flowers, he doesn’t answer; walls, that’s nothing. He’s so proud of having done away with some useless creature that nothing impresses him.”
The murderer paid no attention and made no reply, but Ólafur Kárason was upset that people should always be throwing the murder in his teeth for no reason, and was at once ready to take his side.
“It’s an expensive luxury that a man pays for with twenty long years,” he said. “In my opinion he has every right to be proud.”
“That’s absolutely true,” said a forger. “It takes a lot of courage to get married, but even more to kill someone. The moonshiner needn’t talk. He stinks. He distilled his stuff behind his cows’ backsides, then buried the brew in a dunghill so that the authorities wouldn’t find it, and sold it out of the muck to his customers.”
“Hell’s bells, yes, eh!” said the sneak thief, and wriggled with pleasure.
“Aw, shut up,” said the forger. “Being an idiot is a poor reason for sitting in prison.”
“He’s only a youngster,” said Ólafur Kárason, and took the sneak thief under his wing. “Don’t be unkind to him.”
“Yes, I don’t know what youth’s coming to nowadays,” said the forger. “I spit on this small fry who breaks into shops to pinch biscuits, malt extract and shoelaces; or goes into workships at night and sneaks out with one file and a few three-inch nails; or runs off with a louse-ridden overcoat from someone’s vestibule. But it’s the last straw when this damned trash call themselves criminals. Sneak thieves should be put into homes for mental defectives.”
The moonshiner was a broad-minded man with a fondness for poetry, as is usual with people of his calling, and he asked Ólafur Kárason if it were true that he was a poet.
“Oh, nothing to speak of,” said Ólafur Kárason.
“What would it cost to make a poem about us?” asked the sneak thief.
“For friends and brothers, I do it for nothing,” said the poet.
“Make a poem about me,” said the sneak thief.
“My dear friend, I’m afraid I’m no good at composing poems about men,” said the poet. “But if you needed to write one to a beautiful girl who was your . . .”
“Hell’s bells, yes, eh! There was a new one scrubbing the corridor this morning,” said the sneak thief.
“It’s a crying scandal that decent men have to live with people of this kind!” said the forger. “People like that should be locked up in a box with the drunks.”
Soon the poet had become the main attraction of this bright company in the yard within the wall; they all came to him except the murderer, who stood aloof, and the sneak thief took hold of his sleeve and tried to pull him over.
“He can make poems,” said the sneak thief.
“Really,” said the murderer.
Ólafur Kárason was shy, and tried to get away. Several of them offered to recite poems they themselves had composed if Ólafur Kárason would recite one of his. The murderer made to go away.
“Don’t go,” they said to the murderer. “Stay
and listen; there’s some poetry coming.”
“Poetry bores me,” said the murderer, and headed inside to his work.
“Why?” they shouted.
“It’s meaningless,” said the murderer, and vanished into the house.
Not flowers, not walls, not even poetry. Was all human endeavor then, even the beautiful of the world, of so little consequence compared with murder? Were the flowers themselves so contemptible in comparison with this potent and mystical experience? He was at once the prison’s justification and its raison d’être, its man of distinction, its bishop, its millionaire, and its internal authority; his fate was a silent secret that made other men small.
It is strange how similar the inmates of a prison are to those outside; by the time the bell rang they were all falling over themselves to recite their own poems and had forgotten that they had been going to listen to the poet Ólafur Kárason’s poetry. In actual fact, each and every one of them liked his own poetry best and did not care a damn about the poet’s poetry. The murderer was the exception; he had said he did not want to listen to Ólafur Kárason’s poetry, but neither had he himself composed anything which he forced down other people’s throats at the first opportunity.
A little later the cathedral pastor came back. He was still wearing his heavy, black overcoat, galoshes and wing collar, and teetered along the corridor with short, old man’s strides, and his knees sagged with age at every step.
“How warm and bright the days are getting!” the cathedral pastor mumbled affectionately as the warder opened the door. He smiled with his good eyes and bad teeth, a man who in the endless chores of the day thought it his prime duty, and a necessity that overrode all other necessities, to stop in his brother’s house to say a kind word. It was not just the smile; his whole demeanor, together with that affectionate, habitual talk which did not seem to be directed at any particular person, had the same effect as a hearth in a cold house when a fragrant log fire suddenly starts burning in it; and the poet welcomed him.
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