World Light (19 page)

“Am I the parish officer in this village or not?” said the parish officer.

“Am I the manager of the Regeneration Company or not?” said the horseman.

“Whatever you are, it’s as the agent of the parish council and the community, and this good-for-nothing here has been a particularly heavy burden on the taxpayers, and I direct the Regeneration Company to assist the parish under these circumstances.”

“You can look after your damned parish paupers yourself, my lad; those who are in debt to the Regeneration Company will have preference in quarry-work for as long as I’m in charge,” said the manager.

“What’s the sense in giving well-to-do people these advantages and extra earnings, instead of trying to ease the burdens of the parish?”

“The Regeneration Company must have its due; otherwise it isn’t a Regeneration Company at all,” said the manager.

“The parish must have its due, too, otherwise it isn’t a parish,” said the parish officer.

“I’m busy breaking in horses,” said the manager of the Regeneration Company, and did not want to listen to any more unnecessary talk. He made to mount again.

“Just one more word,” said the parish officer. “I don’t know whether you’re aware of the fact that some people here on the estate are saying that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if a few minor details in the management of the Regeneration Company were investigated a little more closely.”

“And it won’t be very long,” replied the manager promptly, “before it’s proved in court that you have misappropriated funds which have been squeezed out of the county for poor-law relief here in the parish, both by making out excessive bills for pauper funerals and by charging full clothing and footwear for bedridden lunatics, yes, and even coffee!”

“It’s dangerous to blow with oatmeal in your mouth, Pétur,” said the parish officer, and grinned. “Who was it who started life by selling the same horse to three different people? And if you think that the Regeneration Company is your private company, to which you can sell worthless merchandise and nonexistent goods and falsify all the accounts, and pocket the grant that the township gets from the state towards the building of a harbor, then it might well happen, my lad, that. . . .”

“No, my lad,” the manager interrupted, and smiled. “If we’re going to start discussing which of us is to be the first to have the honor of getting to know the locks in a certain public building, then one could introduce various matters which the parish paupers might enjoy hearing about!”

The parish officer shot a warning glance at the manager and gave him a furtive signal to stop.

“We can drop the subject if you like,” said the manager, and smiled.

“I don’t want any filthy language in front of youngsters,” said the parish officer. He put his hand in his pocket, brought out a plug of tobacco, bit off a generous wad, and then offered the tobacco to the manager of the Regeneration Company.

“That’s quite another matter!” said Pétur
ríhross, and put his hand into his breast pocket, brought out a flask of brennivín, took a pull, and then passed it to the parish officer with this mild reproof: “The trouble with you, I always think, old friend, is that you’ve never learned to think like an educated person.”

The parish officer cheered up when he had had some brennivín, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hairy hand.

“Well, Pétur,” he said, “what are you paying me for my fish this autumn?”

“These are difficult times,” said the manager, gutturally.

“Yes, you can say that again,” said the parish officer.

“You’ll get a fair price for it if you let me have it wet-salted,” said the manager.

“No, thanks, my lad; that’s where you’re wrong. You’ll never get it wet-salted,” said the parish officer. “I’ve got plenty of layabouts and good-for-nothings to cure the fish this summer for their keep, people who would otherwise have to be supported by the parish.”

“Do you think I, too, haven’t got plenty of free labor to cure all the fish I care to buy?” asked the manager.

They went on haggling over their business transactions for a long time, while the boy stood there forgotten on the path without knowing what fate would be chosen for him; he was much too tall, and still felt uncomfortable when he had to stand upright for any length of time. Finally he resorted to lying down among the grassy hummocks while the others continued their bargaining. They were so engrossed that they did not notice for some time that he had lain down. The poet’s mind immediately wandered off into space. At last they noticed that he had lain down.

“What the devil!” said the parish officer. “He’s lying down! We can’t have him lying down. Listen, Pétur, my dear old friend, do me a favor because I’m in difficulties, and give this wretch a job at the quarrying.”

“It’s quite a different matter, what I would do for you as a Christian and an Icelander, my lad,” said the manager of the Regeneration Company. “Especially when it’s the poor who are concerned.”

The manager called out to the boy and said that Providence had looked mercifully upon him and was prepared, for special reasons, to allow him to shift a little government rock, even though he had no rightful claim to it. He told him to give his name to the foreman so that he could enter it in his book.

The township’s leaders sat down, each on his hummock, and carried on discussing their business affairs after the boy had gone down to the foreshore. When everything was said and done it was apparently not a punishment and evil fate after all to have to carry rock to and fro along the shore in the fertile glory of spring: it was a blessing and a favor.

3

Although grace comes from above, that is not to say that everyone has the ability to accept it. The young poet, for instance, when it came to the bit, simply was not capable of carrying rocks. Providence may have the best intentions, no one would deny that, but it avails nothing if the person concerned is not worthy of it. The rock-bearers looked on and grinned wryly as he sagged at the knees; some of them laughed callously, perhaps it was the only amusement these men had had for a long time—hahaha, the man could not even carry rocks! However small the load that was placed on the barrow, however much he gritted his teeth in an effort of will, he just doubled up like a nail being driven into stone. They put him to loosening the rocks, but that was no better: his center of gravity moved into the upper part of his body and he fell forward onto his face.

“Have you got the staggers?” they said.

“Yes,” he replied.

Here where every individual was judged by the load he could carry, Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík could not carry anything; it took all his efforts to carry himself upright and, what was worse, he no longer knew what he himself was. His mind was dull-witted and vacant among all this abominable, accursed rock. The foreman came over and said, “You’d better go home.”

“Home?” said Ólafur Kárason, in amazement.

“Yes,” said the foreman. “Home.”

It was time to eat. Women and children came and brought their menfolk boiled fish in jars and flasks of coffee in a sock. No one brought anything for Ólafur Kárason. He stood some distance away and watched the men sit down on the rocks and start eating.

“Aren’t you eating anything?” they said.

“No,” he replied.

“Why not?” they asked.

“Because I haven’t got any food,” he replied.

“What’s that you’ve got in your kerchief?” they asked.

“It’s my things,” he said.

“What sort of things?” they asked.

“The things I own,” he said. “Mainly books.”

“Books!” they said. “What sort of books?”

“A few books of poetry,” he said. “And
The Felsenburg Stories.
”

“Poetry books? And The Felsenburg Stories?” they said, and looked at one another in baffled astonishment.

One of them put an end to the matter by saying, “Stop asking the boy these silly questions. Can’t you see he’s a bit lacking? He’s eccentric. Reimar fetched him from Fjörður on a stretcher for the parish council, and he was lodged with old
uríður at Skálholt. We all ought to give him a share of our food.”

So the eccentric was given food by more than twenty men, and drank coffee from twenty flasks. Apart from that the men paid no more attention to him than to a stray dog. But he felt uncomfortable in a crowd, and as soon as he had eaten his fill he shuffled unobtrusively away with his bundle, greatly relieved that he had stopped work. He stole away from the shore, and soon the men were out of sight. The two high-ups were no longer sitting on their grassy hummocks on the moor, but had gone. The village was a short distance away. Ólafur Kárason took to his heels and ran; all of a sudden his legs were of the right length, and he was quick to rise to his feet whenever he fell. He headed away from human habitation, over the hillocks of the moor, over the marshy bogs, over a hill and over a ridge below the mountain, and then he was out of sight. He came to a halt in a hollow and got his breath back. He felt himself freed of a great burden by getting out of sight of other people. The previous days and nights had been eventful, and he had lost himself. But now he was sure he would find himself again, like a dead man who finds himself, little by little, in the next world. In spite of everything, and although he was in reality a newborn babe in this new world, it was delightful to be born anew and to own a share of the sun like others instead of having to wait half the year perhaps for one little ray of sunshine.

He turned his face toward the sun like a lover, and there was really nothing now that separated them any more. Yes, he was undoubtedly a new being and no longer beholden to anyone; perhaps when all was said and done it was he who owned this world that others quarreled over and thought they owned. It was wonderful to be young and to let the sun shine upon one’s face. He lifted his arms to heaven in rejoicing, as he had done when he was a child, exalted over the rest of mankind.

Yes, he was born anew, and stood up and started walking, and the ewes on the slopes looked at him with sympathetic eyes.

No, there is probably no way of making something cease to exist once it has come into existence. He was no longer afraid of the immortality of the soul, that doctrine which for a time had seemed to him the height of human cruelty. Today it was the many and varied abodes of the Creator which enchanted the mind. Over there was a little spring-water stream, as clear and pure as all streams; it had its source far up the valley and flowed by in quiet, almost pious, joy, a breath from perhaps an even higher sphere; its happiness was of the same kind as the poet’s; the stream and the poet, they loved, and the sun shone upon them and death did not exist.

He walked on a long way beside the stream, far from all humanity. Finally the valley ended in a gorge with steep sides and a hollow under a shelf of cliffs; but at the head of the valley there was a turf-roofed sheep shed on a little, grassy hillock, and there the boy sat down at last, drunk with joy, among the dandelions and buttercups; there were also gentians, blue and white.

When he lay there among the flowers in that green lamb-field and looked up at the blue sky, while the brooks rippled by and the birds chirped at midday in tranquil contentment and the lambs dozed smiling beside their mothers in the noon quiet, and the mountains on the other side of the sparkling fjord merged into a mystical blue haze, he understood that Nature was all one loving Mother, and he himself and everything that lives were of the one spirit, and there was nothing ugly any more, nothing evil. He pulled out his poetry book and began to write about these exalted mystical perceptions, these lofty visions. He forgot the Edda and everything else he had learned from the time of the sloping ceiling and the bed in the corner, he forgot all his tendencies to adopt postures; the brook below the hillock gave him the note; it was not he himself who wrote, but essentially the impersonal joy of blueness and green:

So bright the day,
And glad the flowers whose thirst the dews allay!
O life’s green land!
O green land of life, O Iceland’s verdure mine!
O let me love thee, and be mine.

So sweet the day,
And in the stream the little birds do play!
O life’s precious land!
O precious land of life, O land of my brother,
Of every little bird—O dream of our mother.

He went on composing poetry in this vein for most of the day, and reciting his poems to Nature and lying on his back on the grass and loving the sky. Late in the afternoon he drank some water from the brook. He was sure that the birds of the sky would bring him tidbits in their beaks whenever he got hungry. He was sure that just as Nature was the height of all grandeur and beauty, so was She also the height of all human love and magnanimity, not least when he had composed a eulogy in Her honor; no, he could not imagine that She would let a young and loving poet ever lack for anything hereafter.

And so the day passed in rejoicing over his regained contact with eternity and the inexpressible. The sun sank lower in the west, the shadows of the mountain lengthened; trustingly, his eyelids grew heavy in a healthy and natural way, until he woke up with a start, shivering with cold, and realized that he had slept. The night was certainly clear, but mist shrouded the landscape so that he could not even see the mountain, and his clothes were white with webs of dew. The purling of the brook was not as cheerful as it had been before he fell asleep; and no birds sang. He crawled into the sheep shed to the mushrooms, pulled out some hay from an old stack, lay down on it, and went to sleep.

When he awoke the birds had begun to chirp again, to be sure, but there was little enchantment about it now. There was a fine drizzle. His throat was a little sore, as if he were catching a cold. The glory of nature that had reigned in his soul before he fell asleep was over; he felt he had slept for ages and ages, and fingered his chin to see if he had not grown a long beard while he slept. One thing was certain—however determined he had previously been to take all his needs from divine Mother Nature, he was now equally eager to seek succor from men, even though no one was more aware than he how lacking these much-discussed beings were in both magnanimity and grandeur, to say nothing of beauty. He trudged back along the mountainside the way he had come, dull-witted and queer after a night’s sleep in the darkness of old hay and mushrooms.

He racked his brains about where to go, where he should ask for help; but however much he thought about it, the only conclusion he came to was to give a wide berth to the household at Skálholt—Gísli the landowner, the naked heathen, the monster, and the happy old woman. “Anything, anything,” he said, “except that!” But this conclusion was as impractical as it was negative; it was no solution.

His mind turned to the parish officer in the hope that even though the quarry work had failed, this great man would perhaps take pity on him and give him bread and coffee. But when he reached the village, it was empty and desolate. The life of the community had been wiped out. Even the children who had filled the village with their yelling had disappeared. Someone had passed through this place, either Doomsday itself or the Turks, and laid this famous estate waste instead of buying it and giving the people honey and new ships: not a wisp of smoke from a chimney, white webs of dew in the ruts of the road, the story ended. It was strange to wake up in an empty township, not knowing where one came from or where one was going—not even who one was. He sat down at the side of the road, helpless in an empty universe, with his hand under his chin and shivering inside, and he felt that God had deceived him. When he had sat for a while, he shuffled off again through that empty eternity. Thank heavens, one tern had been left behind, hovering over a nearby cabbage patch. Then he caught sight of a shapeless heap lying across the road not far away. He thought at first it was a sack, but when he came closer he saw it was a man. It was the man who had been left behind alone in the universe on the day after Judgment Day, at the end of the mystical Doomsday Turkish raid, the man who was overlooked on the road at Ragnarok,* the one who did not rise when the Last Trump sounded; he was lying there right across the roadway when God had finished judging the world, and he was dead, or at least sleeping. The poet bent down over him to see how dead he was. This was a small man with a moustache, and blood and dirt on his face. He lay directly across the muddy road, as if in a vain and forlorn hope that he would be run over by horses and carts, men and dogs. He had a tattered shoe on one foot, but only a ragged sock and much mud on the other. Ólafur Kárason decided to haul the corpse off the road and lay it out properly, and managed to drag it over to the verge between the road and the ditch. But when he had almost finished crossing the dead man’s arms over his chest, the corpse sat up. It opened its dead, lusterless eyes, red-rimmed and bloodshot, and started to look around.

“Are you alive?” asked Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík.

The corpse had difficulty in replying but fumbled inside its clothes for a flask and took out the cork and began to revive itself, and a powerful stink of medicine assailed the poet’s nostrils. When the corpse had taken a gulp of the medicine, it began to revive; strange spasms convulsed its body here and there, particularly the face, limbs, and fingers, and at the same time the mouth and moustache began to writhe in various ways, and suddenly the man had jumped to his feet as if someone had touched a spring. He was a stocky fellow; his internal mechanism had been only temporarily out of order; but otherwise he was one of those who stayed on their feet for most of the time. He greeted the poet with a long, convulsive handshake, and blinked and grimaced, but no sound came for a long time. Ólafur Kárason watched carefully the way the man rose from the dead. Hosanna, this was undoubtedly one of the miracles; gradually the man began to utter sounds. He talked a strange language, mostly without syllables, though one could occasionally distinguish intelligible words like submerged skerries in this extraordinary surf of inarticulate angel-language, grimaces, blinks and finger-signs.

“What’s your name?” asked the boy.

The man grimaced for a long time and mumbled something over and over again, but no matter how carefully the poet strained his ears, he could only make out one word in all the mumbling: “Jesus!”

“Where do you live?” asked the boy.

The man was so deeply moved by this that he was nearly beside himself, but no matter how he tried he could not manage any other answer than to gesticulate with his fingers and say, “Heave-up!”

The boy pondered for a long time over this incomprehensible reply, but finally gave up.