World Light (26 page)

“How incredibly stupid you are!” she said. “What d’you think you’ll get out of working? D’you think I myself don’t know what it is to work? It’s ludicrous to work.”

“But it’s still the only way to earn money,” he said.

“On the contrary,” she said. “Working only teaches you to hate those who don’t work, that’s to say those who have the money. To work is to hate. To work is to be bored. To work is to have nothing to eat, it’s to be unable to pay, it’s to lose your farm, it’s to be evicted. You are quite unbelievably stupid.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s true that I’m stupid. When I was little, I was always beaten with a birch for shirking. And if I said what I thought, my supper was taken from me and I was told I would go to hell. It may well be that I’m not independent enough to see the truth, much less to tell it if I happen to see it. One can’t help the way one was brought up,
órunn. You yourself know best what I was only a fortnight ago, when you called me back to life.”

“Anyone who values his own life at all can always get hold of ten krónur, however useless he might be in other respects,” she said. “I need ten krónur. From you.”

“
órunn,” he said pleadingly. “What am I to do?”

“What if I strike you sick again unless you bring me ten krónur?” she asked.

At that he went weak at the knees and began to see a white fog before his eyes and broke into a sweat. This encounter was becoming an anguished dream, a nightmare. The time had to come when he would have to suffer his punishment for betraying God and Jesus, as he had suspected up on the mountain the moment he first heard about
órunn and Friðrik. That time was now at hand. His life and his health were in the hands of irresponsible mystical powers; this Norn* could strike him down whenever she wished. . . .

“Well, if it isn’t the spirit-girl with an earthly man on her arm, hahaha!”

He was startled out of his despair in front of Fagrabrekka, and there was Vegmey Hansdóttir standing in the doorway, jeering at them.

“What’s the bitch of Fagrabrekka yelping about?” said the spirit-girl.

The girl in the doorway called out to a dozen children in the nearby ditches and fences and said, “D’you see the freak and the angel-girl, children?”

The children pursued them for a while with obscenities and abuse and dirt-throwing, and became twice as boisterous when the spirit-girl turned on them and gave them a taste of superior upbringing. But after a time the children could not be bothered chasing them any farther.

“Only ten krónur—from you; so that I can find myself. Even if it’s only five krónur—for the truth.”

“I wish I had a thousand krónur,
órunn.”

“Then I wouldn’t want to talk to you,” she said.

“I have an idea,” he said, “and that is to go and see Pétur, the manager. . . .”

“I could get ten krónur from Pétur
ríhross myself,” she said, “a hundred krónur, a thousand krónur. That’s the one thing I don’t want. Anything but that.”

“I’ll give you everything I have,” he said.

“What have you got?”

“A few books,” he said.

They were down on the shore road now, and when they reached the Privy Councillor’s castle he asked her to wait while he went inside. He came out again with
The Felsenburg Stories.

“This is my biggest book,” he said, “and in many ways the most remarkable. It must be possible to sell it for five krónur or even ten.”

They sat down on a boulder on the beach.

“This is just a tattered old book,” she said. “Who d’you think would want to buy this old thing?”

“You’ve no idea of all the things that are contained in this book,
órunn,” he said.

“Are you fond of it?” she asked.

“This is a book of destiny; both the hopes and disappointments of life are bound up in this book,” he said, and indeed he greatly regretted parting with the book, but would gladly sacrifice it for his health. “I wouldn’t give this book to anyone but you.”

“I wouldn’t accept a tattered old thing like this from anyone,” she said, and held it absentmindedly on her lap and began to hum her new tune again, which was not nearly so agreeable as the old tune. The fringes of the waves lapped at the boulder.

“You have reddish hair,” she said in the middle of the tune and looked at him sideways, and her crystalline ambiguous look and her inscrutable smile shone on him as they had done that memorable night at Kambar. But it no longer enchanted him; on the contrary, the longer she looked at him the harder it was to bear it.

“Let me touch your hand,” she said, and touched his long, slim hand, leaned forward over his hands and touched the palms and backs. “I’ve never seen a hand like that in my life. Do you remember the night at home at Kambar, when we sat in the homefield and you laid your head here?”—and she pointed to the place where he had laid his head.

He simply could not understand how it had ever occurred to him to lay his head there, and he looked away.

She said, “It isn’t true what Reimar said about six men. I was once with a man a little bit, but I was just a child then. For a whole winter after that, I was determined to kill myself. But then I began to see into another world. Since then I have seen only into another world. As God is above us, you’re quite safe in believing that I’m telling you the truth. Listen, is it true that there’s something between you and that hussy at Fagrabrekka?”

“She’s no hussy,” he said evenly, but he went pale and something inside him began to quiver.

“So she’s not a hussy? Well, if that’s what you say, then it’s quite obvious you’re sleeping with her at night, like everyone says.”

“No. It’s not true.”

“Then why was she jeering at me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you say something?” she said.

“What am I to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and tossed her head and made a grimace of impatience. “You’re so damned boring, what the devil am I doing here with you?”

“We happened to meet on the road,” he said.

“No,” she said, “that’s a lie, I was looking for you. You were the only person in the village I wanted to meet; it’s because you have hair and eyes and hands that remind me of something, I haven’t the faintest idea what. And because I woke you up from the dead. I hoped you would help me today, because if it doesn’t happen today—listen, I want so much to ask you about one thing. Do you really think there is another world? Isn’t it all just a lie? And do you think there is such a thing as truth, on the whole? Don’t you think that spiritualism is just a lot of piffle? Don’t you think you just pop off, just like any other damned carcass, which is all we really are, when you eventually expire?”

“I have often asked myself the same question,” he said.

“Tcha, you just don’t want to say it,” she said. “You don’t want to tell me. D’you know that last night I was offered a hundred krónur, a thousand krónur, a million? I was offered the chance of becoming a scientist and being famous all over the world.”

“Really?” he said.

But when he was no more impressed than that, she became sad, buried her face in her hands and shook her head in despair. “You won’t help me,” she half-sobbed into her hands. “I’ll die.”

Then she took her hands away from her face and leaned over, staring at him.

“Your face!” she groaned helplessly, and was suddenly not a sorceress any more. “It’s as if it were engraved inside me; I hate it. I don’t care about anything now; d’you hear me? Anything!”

Then the look in his eyes turned as cold as ice; there was a hard grimace on her face, at once rude and malevolent; he had seldom seen anything so loathsome.

“And now you can go and be ill again!” she said, and hit him in the face with the book and then threw it into the sea as far as she could, and a few gulls dipped in their flight and thought it might be something for them.

She stood up and walked rapidly away toward the village.

13

That night he stood at the paneless window and looked at the drops dripping from the roof, because it had now started to rain; there was no wind, and the drops fell straight to the ground with a gentle sound that boded peace. He struck his chest with his fist, kneaded his abdomen and rapped his brow and temples with his knuckles to see if he could detect any signs of illness, but he did not even have a headache, let alone anything worse. He was dejected over having been unable to do anything for
órunn of Kambar, apart from giving her that tattered old story book which he had not even bothered to read right through to the end; indeed the girl had not cared to own it and had thrown it at once to the illiterate gulls of the sea. On the other hand the boy was relieved that he was no longer beholden to this girl or to the mystical powers she controlled; and he was perhaps even happier because God, whom he still believed to be the most powerful of all the mystical forces, had not punished him for turning to secret mystical powers which were bound to be in more or less forbidden competition with the One. Yet the strangest thing of all was that the stronger this young poet felt, the more often it occurred to him that perhaps, when all was said and done, he had some mystical power within himself, just as it says in the old Sagas about long-gone heroes, who had a remarkable mystical power within themselves which they called their might and main, and in which they believed, and their faith was justified no less than that of others, even though this power seemed to be of exclusively earthly origin.

But at the end of this day one memory remained in his consciousness like a wound. How could she have brought herself to call him a freak again, when he was walking innocently past her house with a girl from another world, yes, and what’s more, after she had given him to understand that she had not meant anything by kissing him the other day? How could she bring herself to set all these awful children on a defenseless man, since she had not meant anything at all? Are human beings so inconsistent, not just in love and hatred (which is a different matter), but also when they do not care at all? Or do human beings, when it comes to that, not deserve to have people look up to them and expect great things of them and believe in them, the way dogs do? Luckily the gentle, peaceful rain of an early summer night conquered the pain and conjured a dreamless sleep into the poet’s breast instead of filling it with philosophical conclusions.

And he woke up from this deep sleep at the touch of someone’s hand on his brow.

It could not have been long past midnight, because there was still no sign of that lightening which heralds the dawn, even in a clouded sky. It was just that time of a spring night when things are not real but unreal, the moment in which the consciousness has the greatest difficulty in believing and calls in question when day is begun. The girl from the doorway was sitting on the edge of his bed, and had put her hand on his brow. He opened his eyes and asked, “Am I awake, or am I dead?”

“Will you forgive me?” she asked, and stroked his hair, then took her hand away again.

She spoke softly, not loud and shrill, and she did not laugh at all. She was flushed and breathless from running, her feet were wet from the sea, and there was sand in her footprints. She stared at him with large, wild eyes as if in anguish, and that cheerful, saucy expression was gone from her mouth.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered.

He murmured her name, sat up, and put his arms round her, and when she felt him touch her she quickly moved right up against him.

“I wish I didn’t exist,” she whispered, and buried her face in his shoulder. “Didn’t exist.”

“What has happened?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. Nothing. I couldn’t sleep. Will you forgive me?”

“Will you kiss me?” he said.

When they had kissed for a while, she said, “You haven’t got a crush on that spirit-girl, have you? Say no.”

“No,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “that’s all right then. A phony, pretentious angel-woman like her! When I get some flour I’ll bake you a hundred thousand times better pancakes than at Kambar. But I haven’t any boracic acid.”

“It isn’t very kind of you to speak so badly of the poor girl,” said Ólafur Kárason. “If I hadn’t been cured at her hands, I might never have got to know you.”

“If she can cure one single person of so much as a cold, then I’ll save the whole world from death and the devil!”

“It still wasn’t very kind of you to jeer at us when we were walking innocently along the road, and to call me a freak. . . .”

“Will you forgive me, or do you hate me?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said.

“What did she want with you?” asked the girl.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She didn’t want anything with me. Just to talk to me about something, be–because I stayed the night at Kambar the other day. Don’t ask any more about it. Just kiss.”

But the girl in the doorway did not want to kiss any more: “So you know how to lie after all? Who would have believed that of those blue eyes?” she said.

“No,” he said, “I don’t know how to lie. But I don’t know what truth is, either. I always try to speak the way I think will cause least trouble to God and men.”

“Oh, I know well enough what she wanted; there’s only one thing she wants, that spirit-girl! I’ve known her to leave a Churchyard Ball here at Sviðinsvík with a man in a snowstorm and darkness at night.”

“Leave?” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Of course she wanted to sleep with you!” she said.

“How can you think such a wicked thing of any girl?” he asked.

At that she nestled closer to him and said, “I really must be out of my mind. Oh, Jesus, I wish I didn’t exist,” and kissed him.

He loved her with all his heart, eternally, and was ready to sacrifice his life for her and walk through fire and sea, and nothing, nothing, would ever, ever separate them, but she had become anxious again, even frightened, and moved away from him with a start, opened her eyes wide and asked, panic-stricken, into the blue—“Is it wicked?”

“No,” he said, without knowing what it was he was answering. “It is beautiful.”

“Why do I exist?” she asked.

“To love,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus!” she said.

“No,” he said blasphemously. “Just you and I.”

“Tell me I’m out of my mind,” she said. “And I’ll go.”

“Love is always right,” he said. “Everything you do is right.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about you. I had got the children to bed and wasn’t thinking about you at all, and daddy had started snoring long ago, and I wasn’t thinking about you at all; you didn’t even cross my mind. I was in bed and had been lying in bed for a long time. And all of a sudden I was up. Had I then been thinking about you all the time?”

“You were thinking of making this haven of the winds the Palace of the Summerland,” said the poet.

“I thought to myself that since the whole village says that he comes to me at night, then it’s best that I go to him one night for a change! I opened the window above my bed and jumped out, so that daddy and the children wouldn’t wake up when I went to the door. I ran straight down to the beach with a sack as if I were going to gather seaweed. Who was talking about wading through the sea? It was me who waded through the sea. I crawled round beneath the cliffs when the tide was coming in so that no one should see me, and waded through the water, can’t you see that my feet are all wet, man? I really must be out of my mind, doing that on a bright spring night!”

“You came to bring me the greatest treasure in life and make me king over it,” said the poet.

“No,” she said. “I came to hear you breathe. Breathe for me.”

“Oh, you who hasn’t even wanted to laugh for me for days on end, and told me to go home instead,” he whispered in her ear.

“You don’t laugh when you’ve got a crush; if you laugh, then you don’t have a crush,” she said, and added hahaha from old habit, but it was not laughter.

“And today you jeered at me and set the children on me.”

“Oh, you’re such a great poet that you understand everything, and yet you haven’t the faintest idea about anything. There’s no one like you; I can’t help the effect you have on me. I’ve never known anything so stupid, and I know perfectly well that I shouldn’t and don’t want to and won’t. You’re only seventeen and I’m eighteen, and where’s the money to come from, and yet I love you so much that I hate you, yes, God help me. Love is such a wild beast, I’m not even myself; I waded up to the knees in seawater beneath the cliffs so that no one should see me. When you’ve got a crush you’re like a criminal, God help me; I could kill someone and steal; that’s how wicked I am—can’t you feel I’m not wearing anything under my dress, man?”

The poetess gave him his morning coffee in silence and busied herself with her housework. He did not dare to look at her, but heard her clearing her throat in that high-pitched, silver-strung voice, it was as if she were far away. All the same he felt her nearness more than ever before. He had gained new perception from his experience of the night. The world was different from what it had been; he saw no man, no woman, in the same light as before. Suddenly he was beginning to think of how this woman would be, and was at once seized by a feeling of guilt. Her face, that indefinable blend of distance and nearness, yearning and denial, curiosity and indifference, that insolubly bewitching discord of to be or not to be—all at once he felt that no face had ever mattered so much to him, that this face really mattered more to him than his own face; and he had betrayed it; betrayed her; and he was convinced that she knew it, that she knew everything.

Yes, it was true; love was more precious than anything else. The supernatural was frankly ridiculous in comparison with the natural, in the same way in which miracles are contemptible in comparison with deeds. The living form of a young, loving woman—that is the key to beauty itself, the undertone of the world’s poetry. And the sun shone on the face of this young man, and the clamor of the gulls was carried through the open window on the fresh sea breeze; but nevertheless in his consciousness there lingered a certain sense of loss, as if he had betrayed something that was more precious even than all this.