2
Other children had fathers and mothers and honored them, and they prospered and lived to a ripe old age; but he was often bitter towards his father and mother and dishonored them in his heart. His mother had cuckolded his father, and his father had betrayed his mother, and both of them had betrayed the boy. The only consolation was that he had a Father in heaven. And yet—it would have been better to have a father on earth.
All winter and far into spring there were readings about his Father in heaven, from devotional homilies each evening and from the
Book
of Sermons
on Sundays. His foster mother would assume a solemn, frozen expression and begin to read; she read in a chant that slackened at every pause, rather like a melody ending on a falling note; up and down, up and down, over and over again, until eventually the lesson came to an end. These readings had nothing to do with everyday life, and at other times, indeed, no one on the farm seemed to have any love for God or expect anything of Him except Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík. The brothers sprawled back during the lesson and sometimes kicked one another and cursed one another between their teeth, as each thought the other was in the way; the women stared wide-eyed into the blue as if all this great talk about God struck no answering chord in them. But then the foster mother’s sight began to fail, and little Óli was barely ten years old when he was given the task of reading the lesson on less important occasions. “What a lot of damned rubbish the brat talks!” the brothers would say during the reading, as if the boy himself were responsible for what the man in the
Book of Sermons
had written. On the other hand it was true that he never achieved his foster mother’s peculiar chant, far less the special expression on her face. But at least he understood God, and there was no one in that house who understood God except him. And though the devotional homilies were tedious and the
Book of Sermons
much worse, it did not matter, because Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík, you see, appreciated God not according to any devotional homily or
Book of Sermons,
not according to any gospel or doctrine, but in another and much more remarkable way.
He was not quite nine years old, in fact, when he first began to have spiritual experiences. He would be standing down by the bay, perhaps, in the early days of spring, or up on the headland to the west of the bay where there was a mound with a rich green tussock on top, or perhaps up on the hill above the homefield when the grass was high and ready for mowing. Then suddenly he felt he saw God’s image open before him. He felt the deity reveal itself in Nature in an inexpressible music, the sonic revelation of the deity; and before he knew it he himself had become a trembling voice in a celestial chorus of glory. His soul seemed to be rising out of his body like frothing milk brimming over the edge of a basin; it was as if his soul were flowing into an unfathomable ocean of higher life, beyond words, beyond all perception, his body suffused by some surging light that was beyond all light. Sighing, he became aware of his own insignificance in the midst of this infinite chorus of glory and radiance; his whole consciousness dissolved into one sacred, tearful yearning to be allowed to be one with the Highest and be no longer any part of himself. He lay for a long time on the sand or on the grass, and wept tears of deep and fervent happiness, face to face with the inexpressible. “God, God, God!” he cried, trembling with love and reverence, and kissed the ground and dug his fingers into the turf. The feeling of well-being stayed with him after he began to come round; he went on lying there; he lay in a tranquil trance and felt that never again could there be any shadows in his life, that all adversity was merely chaff, that nothing could matter any more, that everything was good. He had perceived the One. His Father in heaven had taken him to His heart by the farthest northern seas.
No one in the house had any suspicion that the boy was in direct communication with the deity, nor would anyone in the house have understood it. Everyone in the house went on listening to God’s Word out of a book. He alone knew that even if these people listened to God’s Word for a thousand years they would never understand God, and anyway it would probably never occur to God to take them to His heart. The boy read aloud from the
Book of Sermons,
and the people stared vacantly and scratched themselves and dozed and suspected nothing. They thought he knew no more about God than they themselves did.
It was the practice there to load him with far more work than he was fit for. During the winter when he was ten years old, he had to carry all the water for the house and the barn. He was slightly built and delicate, pale, with large blue eyes and a reddish tinge to his hair. He very seldom had enough to eat, but he lacked the courage to steal from the larder like Kristjána, the farm girl, who could do as she pleased because she had a mother and had started making eyes at the brothers, besides. Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík was extremely honest, because he had no one on his side in anything. Often he was not served until the others had finished and gone out, just because he was alone in the world. And as anyone who has ever been a child knows, it is a great ordeal to have to wait until the others have finished and not be allowed to say anything, either; he was not allowed to say anything because he had no one. But sometimes it happened that Magnína, the daughter of the house, would give him her leftovers when everyone else had gone out, and sometimes there was a tasty morsel left in her bowl, although no one had noticed how it had got there. In general, the members of the family did most of their eating, in secret, between meals.
Carrying water: after the first two buckets the boy would be very tired, but that was just the beginning. He carried and carried. He had to fill two large barrels and also carry two buckets for the rams. Before long he would begin to stagger, and his knees and arms would tremble with exhaustion. Often the weather was bad; snow and sleet and storm. The wind tore at the buckets; sometimes it was as if he were going to take off completely, buckets and all. But he did not take off. He put the buckets down while the gust roared past. He tried to tie his green hat tighter under his chin with frozen fingers that were numb from the bucket handles. He asked God to give him supernatural strength, but God was too busy to respond. Onwards, onwards! Twenty more trips to go. The water splashed from the buckets over his feet, all the way up to his knees; he was soaking wet, and there was a frost. He slipped on the icy path, and the water spilled out of both buckets; it spilled underneath him and over him. He began to cry, but he was only crying for himself; nobody paid any attention to what happened to him. He felt that the world was avenging itself on him for something he had never done, perhaps just for the fact that his mother had had an extra child, or that his father had run away from his mother. Then one of the brothers would appear between the barn and the house and shout, “Having a nap, then?” So he would stand up soaking wet in the frost and start to adjust his green hat which had been knocked askew when he fell. And thus each day he was taxed beyond his strength. Every morning he woke up with dread in his heart and nausea in his throat; the divinely merciful hand of sleep was withdrawn, and the day faced him with new water-carrying, new storms, new hunger, weariness, exhaustion, chivvying, cursing, blows, kicks, thrashings. His whole life in childhood was one endless ordeal, like those fairy tales in which men fight with giants and dragons and devils.
Sometimes he was momentarily seized by a realization, like some deeper insight into existence, that he had a mother; he would stop suddenly, in midbreath perhaps, as this realization pierced him so sharply that he felt faint. He had an overwhelming urge to throw away whatever he was holding and take to his heels, away, away, over mountains and moors, fjords and valleys, through towns and parishes, until he found her. But his feet were fettered. He had to content himself with leaning against God’s bosom. And when least expected, Magnína might give him a piece of flatbread with butter on it. Sometimes when he was toiling outside and she was sitting inside in the warmth of the living room, all fat and comfortable, he would make up his mind to go to her sometime and lean against her bosom and weep. But when he was alone with her in the loft he lost all desire to do so. He doubted then whether she had a human bosom. She really had no body at all, you see, much less an actual figure; she was merely a trunk. There was a smell off her. She was like a wall of treble thickness. He gazed at her and wondered to himself, Can it possibly be that deep, deep inside all that there lurks a soul?
During the season, one or both of the brothers went to the fishing at the nearest fishing-village and lived away from home. It was the only time of year that there were no sulks and tempers on the farm; the brothers were always spiteful to one another, because each of them wanted to be in sole charge. No one ever knew who was master on the farm; people came and went, the hired hands for the haymaking or for the spring work, but no one knew who was the master. Brother Júst thought that Jónas, who was older, did not have the brains to run a farm, and Jónas thought that Júst was not old enough to run a farm. Each countermanded the other’s orders. They did not often come to blows in real earnest in front of other people, but they often made threats and looked daggers at one another; it would have done no harm if the Christian ideal of brotherly love had been a little stronger. The housewife herself was evasive when asked to intervene; she was a widow, and the estate was still undivided. The hired hands often walked out. The housekeeper, Karítas, and her daughter were the only ones who had the knack of dealing with both masters without trouble.
One winter’s morning in his eleventh year the boy was sent to drive the horses out to the pastures. The dog came up behind one of the horses and sank his teeth into its fetlock. The horse took fright and kicked out; the boy was standing just behind, and the hoof caught him a terrible blow on the forehead just above the temple and knocked him unconscious. Someone from another farm happened to pass by and found the boy lying stunned on the ice and thought him dead and carried him home; but he was alive, not dead, worse luck, and came round again. But he was dazed for a long time, his mind in a fog, with terrible headaches and loss of appetite and weakness. He lay in bed for a long time, and no one was particularly unpleasant to him for a while. For more than a whole week the brothers did not curse him to hell, and his foster mother called him her poor little scamp. One day Magnína handed him a piece of buttered flatbread between meals, as if it were a matter of course, and sat down beside him and read to him out of a book she had borrowed from somewhere. It was poetry and he did not understand it, but that did not matter; what was more important was that he now realized what sort of a person this bulky, self-contained girl really was.
But after a while the same old attitudes reasserted themselves, and people began to express openly their opinions of that pauper who lay there stuffing himself and imagining he was ill while other people had to slave for him. The housewife, Kamarilla, wrote to the boy’s father in some distant town and demanded increased maintenance for him. Then the boy began to get up and about again and started carrying water once more. He often had unbearable headaches, but no one listened to any nonsense about illness any more. Spring was coming and there was plenty of work to do, mucking out the sheep shed, carting manure to the homefield and spreading it. He scarcely ever had an opportunity to make contact with the deity.
Then Magnína had a birthday, and Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík was determined to reward her for having been so good to him that winter. He composed a poem about her. He took an old ditty as a model and tried to compose something using rhymes and kennings. These were two of the lines in the poem:
Brightest star of paradise,
Eden’s purest sapling.
He was so elated when he had composed the poem that he felt there was nothing in heaven or earth he could not do. He was convinced that in the poem there lay hidden some deep poetic meaning, even though on the surface, perhaps, it was difficult to understand. He approached Magnína with thudding heart as she stood in the field with her dung rake, and asked her hastily and without looking up if she would like to hear a birthday poem—and gasped it out. She stopped raking and looked at him in amazement.
“Say it again,” she said.
He recited it again. She sniffed, turned away, and started raking again. No, she did not even thank him for it. He was about to go.
“Listen,” she said. “Let me hear it once again.”
He recited it once more.
“I think you’re off your head,” she said. “Who’s ‘Eden’s purest sapling’? Is that me?”
It was quite obvious that she did not understand poetry. She was treble thickness after all. Probably she had only been reading for her own amusement during the winter when she had read to him. Probably she had only given him the remains of her buttered flatbread because she could not finish it herself.
“I really ought to thrash you!” she said. “Pretending to be composing poetry, and you don’t even know what it means yourself! Who knows you haven’t cast some evil spell on me?”
He started to cry, and said, “You mustn’t tell my foster mother about it.”
“Fie on you!” she said.
He was crimson with shame and felt he could never look anyone in the face again for the rest of his life. Yes, he should have known all along what kind of person she really was—you only had to look at her standing there in the field with her head scarf down behind her ears, purple in the cheeks and sweating, with her skirts hitched up and her stockings down, and the dog sneezing whenever he went near her. How on earth had it ever occurred to him to call her Eden’s purest sapling?
By nighttime they had all heard the poem. And they all set about the poet, each in his own way.
“What a little brat, started on the smut already!” said the brothers.
“Yes, and blaspheming, too!” said the housekeeper, Karítas. “They start early enough, these unfortunates!”