World Light (40 page)

“Yes, that’s just like you!” said the poet’s intended. “To the best of my knowledge you never believed in the victory of Goodness, neither in small things nor great.”

“Jarþrúður,” he said. “I feel that birds ought to fly in the air. I repeat that I can scarcely call any creatures birds if they cannot fly in the air. Do you remember, Jarþrúður, when we first met, there were birds flying past the window at Fótur-undír-Fótarfæti? They were free birds. They were birds that could fly in the air.”

“In the eyes of those who love God, hens are the most beautiful birds on earth,” said the poet’s intended. “When I first saw you, I was stupid and ignorant and thought you were Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated. But when all’s said and done, you think you’re cleverer than both the Heavenly Father and the Savior put together, and you look for excuses to sit idly at home on your bed when you’re offered work, and I’m not even allowed to call a hen a bird.”

“Little Maggie and I are going to go down to the beach to look for shells when we’re better, and perhaps even sea snails,” said the poet. “Then we’ll meet a bow-wow and a miaow-miaow. Jarþrúður dear, in the five years we’ve lived together I’ve always wanted so much to have a dog and a cat . . .”

“Yes,” his intended interrupted, “it’s not enough to be on the parish yourself, you have to have a dog and a cat on the parish as well! Wouldn’t it be more to the point to have a few sheep, and try to provide one’s own meat?”

“Excuse me, Jarþrúður dear, I hadn’t finished what I was saying— you can see I’m sure little Maggie would enjoy having a dog and a cat, and I myself think a house isn’t complete without a dog and a cat; a dog and a cat are part of man himself, you see. But if I’m to tell you my honest opinion of sheep, then I don’t think it’s nice to have sheep except at the very most one or two sheep for one’s own enjoyment inside and around the house. And I think one ought to allow them to die a natural death when they’re old. I think it’s a sin to raise animals around one in order to kill them; it’s like making friends with people in order to make it easier to murder them. But when you say that I look for excuses to sit idly at home on my bed, I would permit myself to point out to you that I have earned five krónur today in cash by composing a poem for somebody. And when everything’s said and done, I doubt whether many poets have produced more than I have in such a short lifetime. I’m only twenty-three years old, and yet my poems now top the thousand mark and a bit more if I count everything I’ve composed for others. In addition, there’s my novel,
The Outer Isles Settlement,
which I wrote in my twentieth year. Further, there’s the
Register of Poets
in this county for the past hundred and fifty years, with the fullest biographies possible, which is a work of nearly eight hundred pages; and at present I’m in the middle of the
Stories of Strange Men.
”

At this the poet’s intended, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, buried her face in her sooty hands, near to tears: “That’s not much consolation to me, who has been allotted nothing but sin and remorse and the righteous anger of God while others have been pretending to write famous works! You still refuse to make an honest woman of me; instead you leave me to burn in this terrible sin, and the child’s obviously caught the same disease as the boy had, what’s more, and nothing but damp seaweed to put under the pot. How can any person who nevertheless believed in God fall into such terrible sin? What was I being punished for, dear Jesus, to have got to know such an awful person, yes, and even think he could be Hallgrímur Pétursson!”

When the little girl saw that her mother was starting to cry, she started to cry, too.

If it ever happened that the poet felt a little obstinate and complacent, perhaps even touched with a certain arrogance at being a poet, such feelings vanished the moment his intended started to cry—not to mention if the little girl started crying as well. It was hard to say which was strongest in the poet’s soul—the desire to please or the fear of hurting. When happiness came to this poet in his solitary moments, he was free and did not have a house. When he saw before him their tear-stained faces, he suddenly had a house. To be alone, that is to be a poet. To be involved in the unhappiness of others, that is to have a house. He took the little girl in his arms and repeated foolishly that now we shall be going down to the sea to collect shells, mussels, cockles, scallops, even sea snails. And then a bow-wow will come along and then a miaow-miaow. Dearest little darling. He put his arm around his intended’s shoulders and said, “Jarþrúður dear, remember that Hallgrímur Pétursson had leprosy. And his wife was a Mohammedan. Aren’t we perhaps happier than they?”

And thus the poet went on consoling them in turn, until they stopped crying.

“And you’re going to make an honest woman of me, then?” she asked, and looked at him imploringly, and the tears still shone in her dark eyes. “And we’ll put an end to this living in sin?”

That night he sat at the window very late and imagined to himself that he was alone. He was composing in his mind, revising lines over and over again without being satisfied. Eventually he lit a small lamp and wrote down a few verses. Underneath he scribbled the words, “Love poem for Jens the Faroese, paid.” Then he put out the lamp again, and sat at the window for a long time and looked at the mountains on the other side of the fjord outlined against the sky of the spring night.

Here where our late Privy Councillor
Once dried his fish on pegs,
Now grow only weeds and wild madder,
And the tern now lays her eggs.

Helpless in his homeland
The sturdy patriot grieves,
Since all that he owns and works for
Is secretly paid to thieves.

While some people worked for the catches
And others stole their part,
A third one came sweet from the southlands
And stole away my heart.

Oh, where is the champion to strengthen
These wretched people’s hand,
Who are fighting a desperate battle
Against this robber band?

It was here that the late Privy Councillor
Once tried to shape our part.
Oh, where is the champion to strengthen
My trembling little heart?

2

Hauling fish from the sea—what endless toil. One could almost say what an eternal problem.

Every conceivable effort had been made by the men of Sviðinsvík to lure these strange, tapering creatures from the depths of the ocean, and yet these people were still as far from a satisfactory solution to the problem as ever before. The Privy Councillor had had fishing smacks, cutters and finally trawlers, but just when the fish were well on the way to dragging a million krónur of his fortune into the deeps, not counting the human lives they had managed to lure down into those cold, wet places, the man had come to his senses and fled to Denmark to a warm, dry place. Since then the men of Sviðinsvík had made many desperate efforts to trick the fish, but they had all ended in the same way—the fish had tricked them. Nor had the fish been content with dragging men down into the deeps; all these adventurous attempts by the latter to catch the former had been the direct cause of loading one and all with such a crushing burden of debt to the bank that there was no hope of rising above it in this life, and very little in the next, unless people were made to repay it with the soul’s eternal sojourn in a very hot place. Everyone ought to remember vividly how the trawler
Númi
had sunk from rust, rats and revenants here in the anchorage a few years ago, with the result that the high-ups of the estate had seen no alternative but to establish an afterlife here on dry land in order to answer the demands of the shipwrecked about footwear, potatoes and peat. When the men of Sviðinsvík then elected Júel J. Júel to Parliament the following year, it was because both Pétur Pálsson the manager and the station owner himself had convinced the people that they would never have another opportunity of catching fish unless they voted for money. Not everyone gave his vote to money, of course, nothing like it, but enough did, all the same.

Twenty picked voters were rewarded by being invited south to the fishing the winter after Júel became Sviðinsvík’s representative. A new Golden Age was in prospect. Unfortunately, twelve of these voters were left behind in the watery ballot box of the sea, and played no further part in elections at Sviðinsvík. When it came to the bit, Júel’s ships turned out to be no better able to grapple with the fish of the deeps than the little Sviðinsvík dinghies, perhaps even worse; the fish went on having the better of it and catching men.

At this time Ólafur Kárason was living in extreme poverty and enjoying little fame as a poet, since Pétur Pálsson the manager had suspected him for a long time of being against the Soul, which was just about the only asset which the people of Sviðinsvík could call their own at the time after the demise of the Regeneration Company. On the other hand, Pétur Pálsson the manager had appointed the poet Reimar as the folk poet of the estate that year, and had declared that this gentleman supported the Soul in his poetry. For this reason he had obtained for the poet an official post carrying the mails. But one day Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir went in tears to see Pétur Pálsson and begged him to take pity on her fiancé. The manager explained to the fiancée that this wretch of a versifier had not been very loyal to his interests and had instead supported those who worked against the Soul, but he said that there would soon be a turning of the tide here on the estate, and therefore it was not entirely out of the question that he might give this poetaster and wretch another opportunity of becoming a major poet and a somebody. He then explained that he had decided to hold a big religious ceremony here at his own expense, in memory of the twelve people of Sviðinsvík who had been lost on trawlers in the south, and to mark the occasion he had decided to commission a personal elegy for each of the drowned trawlermen, as well as one short but heartrending epitaph for all of them together.

Finally the manager asked the fiancée which of the two tasks she would choose for her intended if the opportunity arose—the twelve elegies or the one epitaph. The fiancée reckoned that twelve poems were bound to make at least twelve krónur, but one poem only one króna, and was quick to choose the twelve elegies. Thereupon the poet Ólafur Kárason set to work and toiled like a slave to compose twelve elegies. He tackled the task extremely conscientiously, interviewing the survivors’ mothers, wives and sisters to establish what good and fine things one could truthfully say about each of these men, and then tried to introduce a special individual expression of sorrow into every poem, as well as trying to squeeze out all the spiritual inspiration he had at his command. The result was that these poems were considered some of the finest elegies that had ever been composed in Sviðinsvík.

Reimar the folk poet had been away on a journey when the elegies were being allocated. When he returned he was told the news that Ólafur Kárason had now composed twelve elegies for the manager, and that only the one collective epitaph remained for him to write. The poet Reimar did not think much of these tidings, but composed the epitaph in a trice and delivered it to the manager, with the message that he would not be requiring any payment. But the outcome of it all was that Ólafur Kárason’s twelve elaborate elegies were forgotten even though they were brimming with artistry and inspiration, and each one was enhanced by a particularly personalized mourning; rather, they never went into circulation. No one recited them for real consolation in sorrow even though Pétur Pálsson had valued each one of them at two krónur. But the one free-of-charge epitaph by the poet Reimar spread through the whole county like wildfire and was sung in season and out by old and young alike until it ended up as a cradlesong. This is how the epitaph went:

There once were twelve good fellows,
And each one had the vote,
And off they went a-fishing
In the leakiest tub afloat.
And none of them returned,
And every widow weeps,
The fish pulled all the fishers
Into the watery deeps.

After this, Pétur Pálsson the manager announced that the poet Reimar was a poetaster with a filthy tongue and an even filthier mind who poisoned the thoughts of the young and besmirched the Icelandic language as well as Sviðinsvík’s reputation. He said that as a democrat, a Christian and a socialist he could not countenance this kind of libel being composed about the common people when they drowned; and the folk poet was promptly dismissed from his job of carrying the mails. Soon afterwards he was also evicted from his house, so that he was left destitute with all his brood in the middle of winter. On the other hand, Pétur Pálsson now let it be known that Ólafur Kárason had a real talent for rhyming and would probably become a major poet in time, and gave him a shack which he told him to move farther up the hillside so that he could keep himself to himself, and then chose for the poet’s house that lofty name of The Heights.

But while the struggle between men and fish had brought no more positive results than a change of poets on the estate, people from far-off countries continued to have their own opinions about the Sviðinsvík fishing grounds and to stand by them. They reckoned that these fishing grounds were neither more nor less than the finest in the whole world, without exception. Could that be right? One thing was certain—the foreign fishing vessels frequented these fishing grounds incessantly, and there scooped up catches worth one million after another while the fish continued to drag the men of Sviðinsvík down to the bottom of the sea or, what was worse, into that morass of debt which had no known bottom. And while the trawlers which were associated with Sviðinsvík’s trusted Member of Parliament were either sunk or sold, or mortgaged against debts of millions at the state bank, the day never passed without a foreign fishing boat sailing away from the fishing grounds of these destitute people, laden to the gunwales with wealth for the benefit of foreign millionaires.

There is no denying that at this time some grumbling was heard in Sviðinsvík, because people thought that the station owner, Júel, perhaps did not own as much money as they had thought when they elected him. Rumor also reached Sviðinsvík that Grímur Loðinkinni Ltd. would soon perhaps be declared bankrupt. It was at this time that Pétur Pálsson the manager first put forward his idea that it was essential for the people of Sviðinsvík to build a new church to commemorate the fact that Guðmundur
goðl
(the Good)* had broken his leg there in a storm at sea some seven hundred years ago; he also said it was imperative for them to get an airplane, or at least to secure the use of an airplane, and talked about floating a company for this purpose. But a few people who were getting tired of Pétur Pálsson’s ideas now took the bit between their teeth and went all the way south to have a word with Júel himself. They told him frankly that they would not elect him to Parliament again if he did not have enough money. Júel at once pulled out his checkbook and asked, How much? They said they wanted to catch fish. That was the first of the drafts endorsed by Júel for a number of people in Sviðinsvík to enable them to indulge in the luxury of losing money on fishing enterprises. People were satisfied with their representative again for another year. But no sooner had Júel paid up their drafts than they started to become restless again. On top of everything else it transpired that the two trawlers which Grímur Loðinkinni still managed to keep afloat had more than once, according to what people asserted, joined company with the foreign poachers fishing within the Sviðinsvík territorial waters.

That is how the estate’s fishing problems stood one April morning soon after the Faroese’s love poem had been composed, when the poet Ólafur Kárason wandered down to the fish yards at the manager’s invitation and his intended’s promptings to take part in the day’s work. His way led past the parish officer’s house. There were four men standing at the gate talking to the parish officer in the morning quiet, and the poet raised his cap and said Good-morning. But as he walked past them he suddenly felt they were looking at him in a peculiar way, so that he became a little afraid of them and began to wonder what he might have done wrong now.

When he had gone a stone’s throw past them, one of them called out to him and said they wanted to talk to him. He turned and walked back to them, raised his cap again, and said Good-morning. He thought they looked a little odd. The parish officer stood there, bowed and dejected, with sawdust in his eyebrows and chewing a chip of wood, his face and hands smeared with pitch. Two of them were boat-owners, two were quarrymen.

One of the quarrymen said, “You’re getting work at the fish. I don’t get any work at the fish.”

“Really?” said the poet.

The other quarryman: “What does Pétur
ríhross mean by letting you work at the fish?”

“I don’t know,” said the poet.

“I do,” said one of the boat-owners. “Pétur
ríhross doesn’t keep poets in food unless he needs to bribe them—either to speak or to be silent.”

Then the parish officer said, “There must be some reason why you get work at the fish yards for full pay while men with large families to provide for have nothing, and a pay cut in prospect for those who work for the government.”

“Pétur Pálsson the manager has always been good to me,” said the poet.

“Yes, it’s obvious enough he’s got you in his pocket,” said one.

“Tell me, Ólafur,” said the parish officer, “why did you make the parish pay your food bill at midwinter when you’re so well in with Pétur
ríhross? Why didn’t you make
ríhross supply you from the shop without my intervention?”