World Light (25 page)

12

Örn Úlfar was, in the eyes of his softhearted friend, the rock against which the injustice of the world would be broken, a mighty, beautiful and awe-inspiring willpower. He did not have one view of life when the sun shone and another when the darkness fell; nothing could shake his convictions, his philosophy provided his feelings with a clear framework and was never their pendulum. Ólafur Kárason was like water which trickles through in various places but has no regular channel.

Admiration for this new friend, and the longing for his company, was a new state of mind, and with it came anxiety about disappointing his hopes, the gnawing certainty that he was not his equal in anything, and the fear of earning his contempt because of his worthlessness. If more than a day passed without their meeting, he gave up all hope, and thought, “He never wants to see me again.” He set out in a kind of restlessness, but when he realized that he was on the way to see his friend, he turned back and walked in the opposite direction. When he stood at last in front of the tottering hovel at Skjól, he tried to persuade himself that it was by accident. He stopped at the gate, which scarcely reached up to his knees, and looked around in some embarrassment, like a stranger who has lost his way and finds himself at the wrong house.

“Wonderful weather,” said the old fisherman. Because of poor health he was now incapable of doing quarry work, and was pottering about in his tiny cabbage patch.

Ólafur Kárason agreed, and could not take his eyes off him—he found it so odd that this should be his friend’s father.

“Yes, such blessed fine weather in the skies,” said the old man, still amazed at it all.

“Yes, it’s strange,” said the poet.

“One thought the night before last that it was clouding over and veering to landward, but it looks as if it will turn out fine after all.”

“Yes, it’s absolutely amazing,” said Ólafur Kárason, and could not understand all this fine weather, either.

Örn Úlfar appeared in the doorway, barefoot in trousers and shirt, ran his fingers through his hair, drew down the corners of his mouth in a haughty horseshoe, knitted his brows and looked out to sea with the far-sighted eyes of a mariner; his face was an inscrutable contradiction to the surroundings. The words of the poetess came to the Ljósvíkingur’s mind; face to face with his friend, he could not help asking himself whether it was only men like these who were doomed to become drunkards because they were not clever enough to become criminals, and because society was too abject to be able to create heroes.

His mother called out from somewhere inside, “Fie on you and put your shoes on, I say, and see that you keep your shirt buttoned up to the neck!”

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?”