World Light (16 page)

“Gold dust?” he asked in amazement, very red in the face, and she colored a little at seeing him blush, and almost laughed, and said:

“Shall I tell you the story about the gold dust and the flower?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“It was last winter, at Christmas, some three months after Friðrik had performed his first miracle through me. There was a woman in the north of Iceland, a wealthy woman and a very fine person, and she was so ill that there was nothing left for her but to die. She suffered from some strange and frightful disease and had been bedridden for many years and had sought help from all the most famous doctors, and all the most important doctors in the land had examined her and no one knew what was wrong with her. Every conceivable medicine from innumerable pharmacies had been tried, and still the blessed woman got worse and worse, and finally the doctors gave her up for lost and no less a person than the Medical Officer of Health for Iceland, moreover, gave her a signed certificate to the effect that she had just three months to live and not a day more. And now she had only a month left to live—just try to put yourself in her place, just one single month. It was then that she got to hear about me,
órunn of Kambar, and my friend Friðrik the doctor. She reckoned since she had tried all the others she might as well try us too— we couldn’t do worse than kill her, anyway. So she set about having a letter written, giving a detailed description of the house where she lived, and what’s more an excellent description of the district where the farm was, along with a drawing of all the highest mountains in the vicinity to make quite sure that Friðrik wouldn’t get lost and would find the right valley. I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the description, but it was a lovely district, one of those big, important districts in the north where people are so cultured and so well-to-do. And on her farm was a modern house, with pipes for clean water and other pipes for dirty water, so there wasn’t any need to wear yourself out fetching water, I can tell you, to say nothing of these damned bloody slops! Yes, and a modern kitchen range.

“But what do you think was enclosed in the letter? A bank note, man, yes, two enormous bank notes, what’s more, as true as I sit here. So you can bet your life I wasn’t slow in going to see my Friðrik and describing to him the farm and the district where she lived, and that she slept upstairs in a big room and the door was at the far end to the right, if I remember correctly, and there was a dormer window on the west side if he preferred to enter through the roof. So of course Friðrik asked me to send his greetings, and fixed a night on which he would visit her, and gave instructions that the doors were to be left unlocked and the window off the catch. And naturally it didn’t take long for Friðrik to see what was wrong with the woman: she had both cancer and consumption. But because both these illnesses were so advanced that there was no possibility of curing them separately, Friðrik said he saw no alternative but to make a difficult current-experiment on the woman with a view to shifting the consumption into the cancer in the hope that the cancer would die of consumption. And this cure he performed on the eve of the twenty-eighth of December last, at half-past three after midnight. No one knows what took place, except that the woman says she woke up all of a sudden at a strange current that went through her whole body, and within a short time she had begun to shiver all over. And she felt again and again that something strange was being done to her internally, but she couldn’t see who was doing it. You see, no one is allowed to see Friðrik except me, myself, but I can tell you, because it’s you, that he has black eyes and a cap and a dark moustache turned up at the ends, and always wears a blue cheviot suit and polished shoes, yes, and a thousand-krónur diamond ring on his forefinger. The woman remembers nothing more of what happened, except that she thinks she must have fallen asleep from it all.

“But on the morning of the twenty-eighth of December, when people got up to make coffee, there was one of those really fierce snowstorms you get in the north and a biting, searing frost—note that. But the doomed woman—what had happened to her? She was sitting up in bed resting on one elbow, perfectly well, with a blissful smile on her lips and a lovely, fragrant, newly opened spring flower in her hand, and the crown of the flower was sprinkled with gold dust.”

órunn of Kambar closed her eyes, put her head back, raised her clasped hands to her breast, and repeated in a whisper, “And the crown of the flower was sprinkled with gold dust.”

She sat like that for a while, in silent ecstasy, with eyes closed and hands clasped at her breast; at last she opened her eyes again, looked at him, and said, “My friend, wait for just a moment, I’m going out now to talk to him.”

He lay there alone in the room, opposite that handsome porcelain dog, his life in the balance, being weighed by secret forces, with a marvelous smell of baking and sounds of cheerful laughter from the kitchen.

She came back after a moment. She was carrying a tray laden with hot pancakes and a pint bottle with only some dregs of medicine in the bottom, but no coffee or milk. She laid the tray on the table with great ceremony, looked at the boy with her ambiguous, crystalline smile that was like the refraction of light in a prism, and said confidentially, “You have nothing more to fear; your stretcher can stay here. He doesn’t think it’s necessary to come himself, but says you are to take this medicine. And he gave me a current for you.”

She took the big medicine bottle, tilted it carefully and poured a trickle into a teaspoon, counting the drops exactly; the bottle had a gummed label on which was printed in large capital letters the words BORACIC ACID SOLUTION. Then she walked over to him, smiling, and gave him the medicine.

“Lie back now for a little, while it’s taking effect,” she said. “Then I’ll give you the current.”

He had scarcely got the medicine down before the effects began to make themselves felt. The medicine gave him some previously unknown strength which went through his body in waves and streamed from the innermost recesses of his heart to the outermost nerves of his skin and filled his soul with a strange new joy; and besides, the girl was now sitting beside him with eyes closed and head thrown back, and had placed the tips of her fingers on his temples. With every breath he felt lighter and lighter; an unknown power was possessing his earthly substance and irradiating it.

“Do you feel the current?” whispered
órunn of Kambar, and her fingers had begun to tremble on his temples. “Look, now it’s coming! Don’t you feel yourself trembling, too?”

He distinctly felt the current from her trembling fingers, and this current went on growing until her whole body had begun to tremble and she no longer had control of her hands. Soon the trembling affected the boy’s body, too, and within a short time they were both shaking from head to toe, like a leaf in a hurricane, and there was some magnetic force between them so that for a time it seemed as if they would never be able to free themselves from one another, and the boy’s mind became more and more dulled and threatened to dissolve completely in this meaningless vibration.

When he came to again, the current had stopped, the trembling was gone, and she was standing in front of him calling his name in fear; but luckily he was not dead, he had just fainted for a moment. She moistened his brow with a drop or two of that excellent medicine.

“There we are,” she said. “It’s finished now. Help yourself to some pancakes.”

Never in his whole life had he tasted anything which even remotely compared with the deliciousness of these pancakes, and indeed he never tasted anything for the rest of his life that could compare with them. One after another he gulped down these matchless apogees of the baker’s art, while
órunn of Kambar sat beside him and looked on, and ran her hand every now and again over his red-tinged hair which reminded her of the flower with the gold dust. Then the pancakes were all eaten, and she reached out her hand to him and said:

“Now let us walk into the spring night.”

She put her arm under his, and they stood up and walked out of the house, side by side; out through the passage; out into the yard; out into the homefield.

The night was a transparent veil, just like her own eyes, bluish and cool; there were calm clouds glowing in the east, placid ewes in the homefield, the dogs asleep, the lowland dissolved in mist which hugged the slopes of the mountain and reached all the way up to the crags, a flat calm on the white fjord, terns. They stood like that in the homefield, amid the wise sheep, gazing, almost dissolving, and practically no reality left, only the trance-like state of the spring night, far from sleep, beyond waking; a world; consciousness.

He had laid his face against her shoulder.

“God,” he whispered, because now he heard again the revelation of the deity. “I am not worthy of this!”

She ran her hand caressingly over his golden locks.

“God,” he groaned. “Yes, I have always known!”

He felt he was now standing after long wanderings at the well of life itself, and would have nothing to fear, ever, for all eternity.

25

Next morning they were given cold pancakes by the old woman, while the daughters slept. They gave the farmer the stretcher towards their board and lodging and rode away.

It was the same enchanting weather. When there are two fineweather mornings in succession in Iceland, it is as if all the cares of life have vanished for good. The air was saturated with the fragrance of land and sea. There was a ceaseless murmur of love song in the calling of the seabirds. In the sunshine there was a tranquil, maternal, oblivious delight. It was as if the luxuriant hay of the homefield and the more humble grass of the bogs would never again be able to wither. The sea was so still and mirror-smooth that it was impossible for such a sea ever to become turbulent again from now on. The clear-blue, loving sky looked as if it could never again become the arena of pitiless storms.

They did not ride hard, but let the horses jog along at their own pace; they were pack horses and had been borrowed from somewhere out by the fjord. Reimar was not as exuberant as he had been the previous day, and was mostly silent; and what surprised the boy was that after all his enthusiasm yesterday he should today turn out to be quite unmoved by the instant spiritual boracic cures and the miracles wrought by currents and vibrations. They rode along the seashore and there were hosts of terns, and this unspiritual poet was no more impressed by the supernatural than if a tern had landed some droppings on his head.

It was a very different matter with the boy. His thoughts could not stop dwelling on the blissful memory of the night, when he had rested his head against the breast of this supernatural maiden and had drunk from it the life-giving strength of the Hidden People. He chose her as his life and truth, his well of health and resurrection. To know her was the same kind of joy as to flower, to part from her was as beautiful as an incurable sorrow.

But incredibly enough he simply could not recall the image of her to mind, this magically blissful spring morning after that unreal night. Even her hands had not stayed in his memory, however rich in miracles they were. Her image was a blurred apparition, a transient refraction of light in a transparent vessel on a clear blue night in spring, while the landscape all around was dissolving.

“Why is it,” he asked, “that I find it impossible to remember what the girls at Kambar look like?”

“As if it matters a damn what the damned wenches look like!” said Reimar the poet. “The eldest has been publicly disgraced and has a two-year-old brat, the middle one’s a nymphomaniac, and the third is just a common or garden witch if I’m to tell you the absolute truth, my friend; yes, and has been involved with six that I know of, and that’s the least of it.”

Ólafur Kárason gaped at his escort like an idiot, opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

“Believe me, I know our
órunn of Kambar!” Reimar continued. “Witches like her can go riding on their broomsticks all night as far as I’m concerned; I’m not after them.”

But luckily Ólafur Kárason remembered the promise he had made to
órunn of Kambar that night, to believe nothing that Reimar might say about her, and therefore the radiant, shimmering, crystalline memory of the girl which he treasured in his mind could not fade.

No, no, no. Nothing could cast a shadow on the gladness of this day.

But what was most wonderful of all was that he now felt he would be a genius and would one day enrich unborn generations with immortal masterpieces, like Sigurður Breiðfjörð. From now on he would never need to beseech God to stretch out his life for the length of one poem; now he was completely well and at the same time capable of composing a whole ballad cycle at a single sitting for the nation which waited for continuing epic events in literature, yes, even of writing the history of a whole district, if it came to that, from the Age of Settlement to the present day.

But Reimar the poet, who had a wife and six children in Sviðinsvík, was in no hurry today; he laboriously followed every wind and bend of the path—he called it just jogging along harmlessly—and wanted to stop at as many farms as possible and take the opportunity of talking to decent people. But the younger poet was a little vexed that the older poet should not think it worth relating anywhere they went that he was escorting a man who had experienced a miracle the night before, and did not even mention their visit to Kambar except to say they had stayed overnight farther up the fjord.

“And now we ought to look in at old Guðmundur’s shack and ask to see the medal,” he said.

The dilapidated door of Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík’s cottage faced down towards the stony shore, but above it was carved in Gothic capital lettering the name of the dwelling of the gods— GIMLI. Three brown old tatterdemalions with caps pulled down to their noses asked whom they wanted an elegy composed for, and said that the time had come to sing the parish council at Sviðinsvík down to Hell. Reimar now became witty and said that unfortunately he did not have a dead man with him, but a man who had newly been raised from the dead, and asked if he could come in; but the old crones would not allow it without the master’s permission since no one was dead and there was no prospect of profit from the visitors. But they promised to ask, and one by one disappeared from the yard. The travelers remained outside by the wall of the cottage and looked up at the precipitous mountain with the sheer cliff-walls looming over the house, no fewer than twenty layers of rock ledges rearing, one above the other, and the low-lying land between mountain and sea just a notional flatness that had no substance in reality.

“It’s quite astonishing that the snow avalanches haven’t swept this wretched little shack far out to sea long ago,” said Reimar, “or that the rocks that come raining down from the cliff ledges the whole time haven’t crushed it to smithereens. And look down there at the shore; see how the surf has worn these huge boulders smooth, right on the threshold of the cottage. Yet he has sat here peacefully with his tattered old books and his writing desk for fifty years.”

But Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík did not think it at all astonishing that this little house should still stand, because he who yesterday had been cured in a supernatural way of an incurable illness was convinced that the gods whose dwelling was carved above the door gave special protection to Icelandic literature, and one fine day, when their time came, would redeem the whole world.

Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík sat in his house surrounded by many walls of books; his helmet-like face with bushy eyebrows, huge cheekbones, eagle nose and doggedly set mouth reared above the stacks of books as awesome as if the sheer cliff-walls of the mountains which towered over the farthest sea in the world had been personalized in this human countenance. Most of the books were from the past, some bound in skin-clad wooden boards with brass clasps, some wrapped in dressed hide and tied with thongs or string, others locked away in sealskin-covered chests. When the visitors asked his permission to look at his books, he replied that no one could look at his books: Iceland’s ages were embalmed in them, one cannot look at something like that; it takes a long life, eighty years at least, to live oneself into Iceland’s literature, even if it is only to be able to realize how little it is possible to know of it and how much less one can understand.

Since he would not allow them to look at his books, Reimar asked whether he would show them the gold medal he got from abroad, and tell them the story of it.

Guðmundur Grímsson explained that he had written two hundred and thirty books. He said he had never received any recognition here in Iceland, which arose firstly from the fact that he was against the modern culture and secondly from the fact that he had never written a single syllable in pursuit of his own fame but only for his own pleasure and to rescue from oblivion much learned historical and literary material. But once, just for fun, he had written a textbook of the Gascon language as it had been spoken in the Pyrenees about two hundred years ago; he prepared this book from the journals of an old pastor who had given shelter for a whole winter to some survivors of a Gascon shipwreck in the century before last. The sheriff had bought this book from him and later sent it to Copenhagen, and from there it had been sent to France, where it had been published, and one world-famous professor in that country had written a doctoral thesis on it, and the French Academy had then decorated Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík with a gold medal to honor his achievement. In this way he had rescued the cultural heritage of a foreign country in his spare time, without really having intended to do anything with it. He unbuttoned his oilskin and put his hand inside his shirt and drew out a medal; on one side was a picture of the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, in whom they believe in France, on the other side an inscription in Latin. Ólafur Kárason had often heard people talking about gold, he had dreamed about gold and, what is more, often mentioned it in his poetry; but this was the first time he had ever actually seen gold. Its luster made his eyes blur with joy and struck him dumb with enchantment. He had never imagined that gold was so beautiful; he wished that this moment would never end—and then it ended. The old man put the medal back into his shirt without having let go of it, and buttoned up his oilskin with his bluish hands. The boy thought he was growing taller and taller with every breath.

Guðmundur Grímsson of Grunnavík had reached the age when new acquaintances brought him nothing any more. He had long since grown tired of talking about his books to new people; they were only a repetition of a thousand other people he had known before, and most of them talked in the same way about the books which were his life for a thousand years. It could well be that in his young days he had been the most human of men—nothing was more likely, in fact. No one could know which of his friends he perhaps remembered when the drops dripped from the roof at night, drop after drop. Now he had long since ceased to be a man; he was the sage of the ages, the writer, whom no threat from the elements could force to lay aside his book and his quill pen; this massive face which was the unconquerable face of Iceland. And at this moment Ólafur Kárason felt it had been worthwhile to endure everything in order to have had the good fortune to see this face. Illness of body and soul, hunger, beatings, calumnies, false accusations, misunderstandings, lies, deceit— they all meant nothing. When the visitors walked out into the open air again the boy was so weak and trembling that Reimar thought he had become ill again. But he was not ill; it was only that he had just seen the greatest living master and sage in Scandinavia.

“Now we’ll return the hacks to where they belong,” said Reimar, “and then we’ll get ourselves ferried over to Sviðinsvík.”

The afterglow of sunset lay on the green turf of the place from which they set sail that evening, and on the cliffs and the dead-calm sea. There were two strangers at the oars, and Reimar steered, while Ólafur Kárason sat in the stern. And with that their handsomeprowed boat set out.

The boy looked at the splendid rays of the sunset on the white creamy water, feeling as brave and optimistic as Iceland’s first settler in the morning of time, without experience, new. It was a broad fjord and the shore on the other side was far away. He felt he had died and had awoken to eternal life, and was sailing to the unknown land on the other side. The sun had set; white mist rose from the valleys and nestled against the green slopes of the mountains. It was as if the land were dissolving in one dizzying, elf-like night-vision without reality. The solid and the liquid became one, the sky stepped down and the earth up, an unreal aura of some incredibly distant future or past was over everything, another time over the world. Even the men in front of him in the boat were dissolving into the blue and gold harmonies of color; their rhythmic movements at the oars obeyed the laws of another sphere, a higher seamanship. Then the land disappeared altogether into the mist except for glimpses of the highest cliffs of the mountains away, away up, like a world of trolls we have left behind and which does not concern us any more.