World Light (41 page)

The poet: “I had already got so much on credit from him before Christmas, he thought it was reasonable for the parish to pay the midwinter bill since I couldn’t meet it myself. And this spring he allowed me more credit once again without the intervention of the parish. And after that my intended, Jarþrúður, began to get work from him on odd days, splitting fish and suchlike. I hope to be able to pay off all my debts some time, both to the parish and to him.”

“So you don’t consider yourself under an obligation to him?” said one.

The poet said, “I don’t consider myself under an obligation to anyone, except perhaps to my little house, if you can call it a house.”

“What do you say to looking in at Guðmundur’s here tonight?” said one.

“It’s an unexpected honor,” said the poet, “especially if it’s the parish officer himself who is giving the invitation.”

The parish officer said nothing.

“He’s good at writing,” said one of the quarryman.

“Oh, I don’t suppose there will be all that much writing to do,” said one of the boat-owners.

“Poets get a lot of good ideas,” said the other quarryman.

“Yes, but can they use their fists?” asked the other boat-owner.

“I hope there isn’t going to be any fighting?” said the poet.

“No,” said the parish officer. “But you’re not being invited to a party, either, if that’s what you think. And there’s no need to say that anyone’s spoken to you.”

“I don’t understand,” said the poet.

“You’re to keep quiet,” said the man.

“I’m going to be late for work,” said the poet.

“After eight o’clock tonight,” they said.

He raised his cap and went.

At the fish yards there was a girl whom the poet did not know. She wore her head scarf differently from other girls, she wore it farther forward, and yet one could not help noticing her eyes—some eyes interest you even before you can describe them, or were they just unusually wide open? She was strongly built, solid but not stout, but otherwise dressed in the usual way for fish work, so that the clothing gave only a hint of the figure underneath. He did not look at her, really, and would not have admitted to anyone having seen her. He was thinking about something else: he was deep in thought about the conversation at the parish officer’s gate that morning; but even so he could not help wondering why she pulled her head scarf farther forward than the other girls. It struck him as a protest—but a protest against what? Was this perhaps a nun? Or had she been beguiled, but only once, and was now determined never to let such a thing happen again?

But he was really thinking about something else, and it did not occur to him to ask who she was. He avoided talking to anyone for fear of becoming embroiled in other people’s affairs any more than he already was; perhaps his gullibility had got him into trouble already. As the day wore on he became more and more worried— what on earth had he pledged himself to keep silent about? Had he perhaps allowed himself to be snared, had he already been trapped into keeping his word about something, or tricked into supporting something or opposing something, and thereby losing his freedom, his independence and peace of mind? Perhaps he was already a member of a conspiracy or a criminal band, perhaps at war with Júel J. Júel; perhaps he had already become an opponent of the government?

With an old woman he carried fish on a barrow until early evening, but his mind was yearning for unrelated values. He wished that the evening were over with its cares, and everyone asleep except him. Then suddenly the foreman had turned on him and was asking what he thought people were being paid wages for here? It was very far from Ólafur Kárason’s mind to shirk his work, and if he refrained from overloading the barrow it was the kind of accident caused by his subconscious regard for fish. “I’m afraid I didn’t notice that there was too little on the barrow,” he said politely. The foreman called the poet a lazy layabout and a moron and ordered him to turn back and add at least half as much again to the barrow. The poet turned back at once, with the old woman muttering behind him. Somewhere a burst of laughter was heard. But when he had put the barrow down again to add to the load, full of shame at this humiliation, the girl he did not know was standing in front of him. Her eyes beneath her wide, thick eyebrows were large and piercing, hooded by strong lids and long lashes. She looked at him.

True repentance is the feeling of shame at having been punished. He felt much worse about being sent back with the barrow than about having cheated over loading it. Committing a crime is nothing compared to being caught at it, and to let oneself be turned back before the eyes of an unknown girl was a greater disgrace than persevering in obduracy without accepting correction: anything is better than a woman’s scorn. The worth of any deed depends on how it is assessed by the onlookers. To load too little onto a barrow is good if one gets away with it, bad if the foreman sees it, a calamity if the bystanders laugh; because once you have made yourself ridiculous you go on being ridiculous whatever you do, perhaps for the rest of your life. But your deed only becomes an eternal humiliation when you meet ridicule in the eyes you have maybe dreamt about without knowing it, or even compassion for your uselessness, perhaps contempt. Thank goodness, that was not the case now. In that unknown girl’s look there was challenge and encouragement. And she said to him these words:

“Do you let yourself be turned back?”

That was all she said.

3

Work on the one side, the home on the other—they were two walls in the one prison. Every time he was allowed to go out, and not on some routine errand connected with his livelihood or his home, it was as if he were being given the world for a little while. However small a digression it was from his everyday routine, the Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice as of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned. He no longer knew its name now—far from it; just that its music sounded ever sweeter in his ears as time went by, so much so that he sometimes felt that the day might come when he would abandon everything to listen to it alone. Ah, sweet Voice, he said, and filled his lungs with the cool evening breeze of the north, but he did not dare open his arms to it for fear that people might think he was mad.

In the parish officer’s room there was a crowd of men and a few women. There was a lot of talking going on; everyone was so engrossed that no one noticed when the poet joined them. People were all talking without any attempt at order, sometimes many at a time and all eager to have their say, but for some reason or other it was not made to look like a formal meeting. Some were agitated and angry, others despondent and grim; only a few seemed to be enjoying themselves. The poet had difficulty in making out the subject under discussion at first, and although he asked two people on either side of him what it was all about, he got no reply. After he had listened for a while, he came to the conclusion that the debate concerned Pétur
ríhross’s family, but especially his grandmother. It was little wonder that the poet began to prick up his ears.

There were not many who could have boasted before now of knowing much about Pétur Pálsson’s ancestry—even genealogists reckoned that some of the most important branches of his family tree were uncertain. The only thing the public knew for sure about his family was that his grandmother, Madame Sophie Sørensen, had occasionally made herself heard at seances during the time when the Psychic Research Society of Sviðinsvík was flourishing. About the lady’s nationality there seemed to be some ambiguity. When Pétur Pálsson was drunk he asserted that she was Danish and that he was therefore no Icelander; but at the Psychic Research Society, learned people had thought that the old lady’s speech had inclined more toward some unidentified language such as Faroese or Norwegian, and on the only occasion on which Madame Sophie’s mother, the manager’s great-grandmother, had appeared at the Psychic Research Society, there had been various indications that the ancestry was French. The poet Ólafur Kárason had been present when the ladies had made themselves heard from the next world; it therefore came as a considerable surprise to him suddenly to hear Madame Sophie Sørensen now being talked about as if she were still alive, and so for a long time he could not believe his own ears. He got the impression that the woman was not nearly as deceased as she had pretended to be at the Psychic Research Society, but was somehow present in this part of the country, even here in the village, although she unfortunately did not seem to enjoy the best of health. He realized, certainly that there was no little secrecy about the elderly lady’s health, and indeed about her whole existence; but often when the postmaster became extremely drunk he would allow some of his closest cronies to see copies of the telegrams concerning Madame Sophie Sørensen’s health that Pétur Pálsson was now sending to his relatives in the south, sometimes daily, sometimes at intervals of only a few hours.

When the postmaster was questioned more closely about these telegrams he did not reply directly, but let it be understood that he knew more about the affairs of the
ríhross kin than was good for anyone outside the family circle to know. In this way he had for years had knowledge of the grandmother’s health from one day to the next, and knew every detail of her multifarious setbacks and recoveries. People believed that a not unusual day in Madame Sophie Sørensen’s life went like this: at dawn she woke up with an epileptic fit, by midmorning she had dyspnea, at noon she had a slight stroke, by midafternoon she had broken both thighs, but by evening she had gone out for a stroll to Aðalfjörður and sent her greetings to her friends and acquaintances. . . .

“What’s all this damned nonsense!” said one man. “As if any person in their right mind would set off for a stroll just before nightfall over mountains and deserts to Aðalfjörður and with both thighs broken at that!”

The man who had got the story from a friend of the postmaster’s replied by asserting that there could be no mistake about it, for on the very next day a telegram had come for Pétur Pálsson from relatives in Aðalfjörður to the effect that grandmother had arrived there last night and was feeling well, but that she could easily take a turn for the worse in the morning. No sooner had Pétur
ríhross received this telegram than he had wired to relatives in the south: “Grandmother in good health in Aðalfjörður, could perhaps get a touch of appendicitis tomorrow.”

One person laughed louder than anyone else over Madame Sophie Sørensen’s health. He laughed in ascending cascades, and in between he looked around with tears in his eyes, ready to laugh more; he made no other contribution to the discussion. This was Hjörtur of Veghús.

Beside him sat a fair-haired girl in a blue dress, with a large face and a complexion that had a suggestion of coarseness, slightly oblong dimples, and brilliant eyes under those strong, thick eyebrows. Her expression bore witness to a passionate temperament; her silence was full of vehemence, almost articulate. It was the unknown girl who had spoken to Ólafur Kárason at the fish yards. Across from her, three seats away, sat Jens the Faroese, gazing at her in wonder as if he scarcely believed that such a girl could be true. Then Ólafur Kárason realized that this must be the girl to whom he had composed the love poem, the Jórunn Hjartardóttir of Veghús who was a greater thief than all the foreign and inland trawlers put together. She had powerful shoulders and a sturdy bosom, curved breasts that sat high.

“Had I known she looked like that, I would have written a very different poem,” thought the poet.

Someone said it would surely be easy to get the postmaster drunk enough to pump him of everything he knew. But that was no longer possible. Someone else explained that Pétur Pálsson the manager had recently signed the pledge with the postmaster.

“What, has Pétur
ríhross taken the pledge now?” asked one man, thunderstruck, as if a comet had been sighted and the Last Day were at hand.

“Yes, and even given up tobacco and coffee,” said someone else.

“Good God!” said many of them. “Has he gone completely mad?”

“He says it’s to keep the aura pure.”

“Aura? What the devil’s that?”

“It’s a halo, like the one round the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary; it vanishes if you take snuff.”

“Poor fellow,” said one man. “I know for a fact that since he gave up tobacco he goes around with a quid under his tongue and secretly swallows the juice.”

Then someone else said, “You’ll all have heard, of course, about this new stuff he’s got; it’s called vitamins and it’s meant to be better than anything else that’s ever been known before, including snuff, chewing tobacco, women and brennivín.”

Hjörtur of Veghús laughed so much you could see right down his throat, but his daughter frowned and clucked her tongue with displeasure. Someone had heard that this vitamins business was a new way of fooling the people.

“No, it’s not entirely a hoax,” said one, “because otherwise he wouldn’t be eating the stuff himself all day. He’s even got hold of some litmus ribbon from Germany which he has to moisten in a particular way which I would describe more fully if there weren’t any ladies present; if the moisture produces the right color in the ribbon, the body and the soul have had their fill of vitamins and have regained complete health.”

Now everyone who could laugh began laughing, but Hjörtur of Veghús sat with tears in his eyes and his mouth open and could not laugh any more, while his daughter snorted and bridled.

The parish officer now began to speak and said he had not intended people to come here to amuse themselves; he said that on the whole he himself did not feel like laughing, and indeed it was not right under any circumstances to be facetious in these very grave times for the whole nation. He said he had been building boats for people here so that they could make a living, not to have their living stolen from them. He said that if people had well-founded suspicions that a conspiracy was at work here with the object of helping poachers to evade the fishery patrol boats and starve out the nation, then he would do his best to bring the sheriff into the matter, but he said he did not care in the slightest how Pétur
ríhross passed his water.

“Hear, hear!” people said, and became serious again.

One other matter was no less urgent than the violation of the fishing limits, and Pétur Pálsson was involved in that as in everything else. As everyone knew, the manager was the government’s agent as regards the estate, and the estate’s agent as regards the government. He had never been so firmly in the saddle as since Júel J. Júel had become his Member of Parliament and stood in his stirrups down south. Among other things he had a completely free hand with all government enterprises here on the estate. At long last they were about to start building a breakwater, and for that, cement and iron had to be bought with the government grant; that would lead to reduced employment; it would lead to a reduction in wages. The parish officer said that this was tantamount to forbidding people to reduce their debts to the parish, apart from the fact that it could be the beginning of total destitution in the village.