World Light (45 page)

“Ólafur Kárason,” she said. “Will you tell me just one thing. Are you for us or against us?”

“I don’t want to harm anyone,” he said.

“Ólafur, say Yes or No.”

“Yes or No, I am here only as a visitor . . .”

“Oh, shut up!” she said. “The fish yards have become a battlefield. The battle will be fought tomorrow and you will have to side with one or the other. Either you fight for the Laborers Union or you fight for Pétur
ríhross. There is no third choice.”

“I shall be at home,” he said. “I have a sick child.”

“In other words, you’re going to send poor Jarþrúður into the battle, while you yourself stay at home.”

“You must be off your head,” he said. And when they had walked a little farther in silence: “Am I to be torn apart once again?”

“It’s your move,” she said. “It’s your choice.”

“Let me say Good-bye to you here,” he said. “I’m a little pressed for time.”

She gave him her strong hand.

“Are we friends or enemies?” she said.

He left the road and jumped over the ditch. “I have something to do up the hill.”

“Are you angry?” she asked.

“I’m undoubtedly a fool,” he replied, and climbed over the barbed-wire fence at the roadside. “And probably also what you said earlier—a villain.”

“Why are you so angry?” she called out to him from the road.

He walked away quickly across the moor, toward the mountain, without replying.

7

Five years ago, when she had come over the mountains with the autumn storms at her heels and sought him out and found him, a failed suicide, it had been her mission to nurse pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated and support him. She was not in such straits that it was enough for her to live for herself alone, and therefore she was determined to live for him. She said she had never forgotten his eyes; she was sure the world misunderstood them, she thought he stood above all other men, and said it was of vital importance for him to have a mother.

He said, “I once had a mother. She sent me away in a sack one winter’s day. I cried so hard in the storm that I haven’t recovered yet, and never will recover.”

“I shall never forsake you,” she said.

He looked at her. Youth had faded from her cheeks, and her brownish eyes had the moist sheen of seaweed and reminded him of the sea one cannot drown in.

“What I long for most of all, since I couldn’t drown, is to be allowed to hear the music of revelation anew,” he said.

“I shall ask Jesus to whisper in your ear night and day,” she said.

“Oh, where I was brought up, there was never really any Christmas,” he said, downcast. “My friend was Sigurður Breiðfjörð.”

It was as if the sun had clouded over a little. Perhaps this was the first time she had suspected that he did not stand above all other men, perhaps she had not understood him completely; it was her first disappointment over Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarated.

She had a cousin in the parish at the head of the fjord, where there was a vacancy for a very low-paid teacher to instruct children in reading, writing and Christian faith. Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir had come to fetch the poet and move him to this place.

He had not succeeded in catching pneumonia, certainly, but he had often shuddered at the thought of the murder that had failed, and he had some difficulty in getting used to the idea of being alive. He dreaded to think that a frustrated death should be followed by a frustrated life. The children in the parish looked at him with fear. He said he was in pain and asked if he could go to bed early; Jarþrúður had already taken over the duties of the barn.

He was shown to a bed in a semi-outhouse near the front door of the farm. Round about lay farm implements, packsaddles and seed potatoes. There was a strong smell of fulmar from the eiderdown, to be sure, but it was warm, and there was a lamp hanging from a post. When he had got under the covers he realized that one’s circumstances are never as bad as one imagines beforehand; he brought out his notebooks and pencils and began to write down what can happen to one individual. Within a short time the chill had gone out of him and poetic inspiration had taken its place; perhaps it was not impossible that he might yet hear the right music once again.

It was late in the evening and the farm had been quiet for a long time when he heard someone fumbling with the door handle. From old habit he hastily hid what he had been writing under the bedclothes. Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir pushed the door open, but only just enough to be able to squeeze herself through. He looked at her in alarm, but she said she just wanted to see to his clothes. Her colorless hair was braided into two plaits. She was pious and burdened with sins, but despite that she had hair, eyes and teeth which suggested an animal. There were holes in his socks and in his shoes, and she sat down on the edge of the bed and began to mend them. Nothing was said for a little while. Then she said, “You don’t say anything.”

“What am I to say?” he asked.

“Last spring you said so many things. I’ve thought of it all summer. Talk to me about the Voices of the Light. Talk about Jesus in human life.”

But he was no longer in the mood to talk about these things. He who had got to know Meya of Fagurbrekka since last spring, that earthly, natural girl who left sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints—how could he ever set his mind on Jesus in human life again?

There was silence for a while and he studied her pale cheek. Her neck and chin began to tremble, and then the tears came. Then he suddenly felt he was being cruel, because he had actually once written a hymn to this girl and proposed to her, even though the letter had gone astray. Was it not just as disgraceful to deceive a girl even though she was getting on in years? Or did the poet no longer appreciate this woman for having traveled all the way from another county to make a man of him again after things had gone so badly for him that he could not even have an accident any more—could not even catch pneumonia no matter how long he went around in wet clothes, nor die of starvation when he got nothing to eat, nor fall on the battlefield when he was shot at. Why, even the sea refused to accept him for drowning. Finally he made this confession, in utter despair about his own character:

“Unfortunately, I’m afraid I’m not Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated, Jarþrúður dear.”

She started to cry aloud at that, and asked Jesus if He were determined to deprive a sinful woman of her last hope. Ólafur Kárason was more and more moved. Finally he asked if she could not possibly imagine having someone other than Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson for a son, and at that she looked up with a new gleam of hope in her moist, seaweed eyes and whispered, “Yes.” And since that was the case, he brought out his poetry book from under the eiderdown and said she was more than welcome to hear the poems. She recovered completely at that and stopped crying. But while she listened to his poetry, he was sure she saw something quite different in him from the person he was; perhaps he also saw something quite different in her from the person she was. But when she had listened with staring eyes for a while, she suddenly fell to her knees beside his bed, put her hands on his naked body and said, “Shouldn’t we pray?” This was in the middle of a poem, and he winced a little at the touch of her cold hands, and put down the poetry book in amazement.

“Eh?” he said.

“Pray,” she said.

“You pray, I’ll listen,” he said.

So she prayed.

He was now called Ólafur Kárason the schoolteacher, and had attained thereby a certain standing. He was not expected to share the work in the house, and so he often had time on hand to pursue his own studies. Every second day he went to the next farm to give religious instruction, and there was a young girl there who sometimes looked at him. He talked to her for the first time by the farm brook one day at dusk when she was rinsing out some clothes. Later he met her in the doorway of the farm; then he met her in the kitchen where he was getting coffee. She talked easily. The weather was often wet at midwinter and two young, scintillating eyes were just as good as the sun. When he got back home the memory of those eyes inspired him to write a poem about freedom and the blue expanse of spring which beckons us with infinite promise; such eyes were enough to abolish the thought that spring was just a folktale and a pleasant fantasy about a Golden Age which in reality had never existed in Iceland. Then someone called to him as he sat working at his poems and he was told to come quickly: Jarþrúður had had a fit. She was lying in the mud between the barn and the farmhouse, this always fastidious woman who could not bear to see dirt anywhere, and her cousin, the housewife, was standing over her and had thrust a nail between her teeth. The poet got muddied from carrying her into the farmhouse. When he had laid her down, he looked in amazement at how the holy sickness that had struck her down had given her another soul, another body and another face, the face of ecstasy; he would not have recognized the woman had it not been for the claw-like hands which had seized the chance of touching his naked body in the middle of the prayer and laid claim to dominion over a poet. That night he lay awake with the seed potatoes and saw mysterious islands beyond the mouth of the fjord, far out to sea, toward which two young men made their way as the sun ascended the heavens, in order to find freedom; and found nobler people than are to be found in the Sviðinsvík district; and more beauty. Complete happiness reigned there. It was the beginning of the novel
The Outer Isles Settlement.

It was no use denying it, the answers he got from the girl on the next farm had the hot rush of the blood in them. One says Hallo shyly and gets a smile in return, one feels one’s way with an observation about the weather and gets a snatch of verse or a proverb in return, or even a paradox; and the game is on. But did she not forget one again the moment one disappeared round the corner of the house?

On a moonlit night one evening when he was on his way home he met her behind the farmhouse; she was carrying the usual cinders out, and had spread her sacking apron over the ash trough so as not to get ash in her eyes.

He said, “You are too lovely to be carrying ashes.”

“I’m nothing more than dust and ashes,” she said, and laughed.

“What do you think of the evening?” he said.

“It’s like porcelain,” she said, for the moon was glittering on the frozen snow.

“Then it’s the first time that dust and ashes have turned to porcelain,” he said.

“Tomorrow the porcelain will be broken,” she said.

“You’re so intelligent I think you ought to come for a walk with a poet, beyond the homefield,” he said.

She undid her sacking apron and forgot about the ash trough, and made a slide over a frozen puddle with a poet, and laughed. When they were beyond the homefield she said, “Well, now I’m going back before the blessed housewife starts getting any ideas.”

“Walk over to the boundary brook,” he said. “When I meet someone high-spirited I am reborn.”

“Why should one worry?” asked the girl. “The world surely isn’t as serious as some people think.”

“But if it had nevertheless been created in all seriousness in the beginning?” replied the poet.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Nothing will make me hobnob with any but the cheerful ones.”

“Even though you’re dust and ashes?” he asked.

“Precisely because of that,” she answered.

When one hears pretty girls talking, one cannot help thinking that even their most light-hearted replies contain some deep, deep meaning: yes, even some hidden wisdom, and perhaps they do; perhaps it is only beauty that contains the highest wisdom—that remains to be proved. He felt she was uttering a special wisdom which she was playing against his own wisdom, in the same way, moreover, that she was playing her own life against his life, with a definite purpose.

“Be careful what you say,” he said. “Who knows, I might also own an island out in the ocean where happiness reigns entire and intact. Perhaps I’ll write to you one day from a famous island.”

“The woman will be starting to get ideas now if I don’t turn back,” she said.

She was eighteen years old.

A little farther on there was a small lake covered with mirror-smooth ice. They could not resist running over to it and having a slide, because they were the same age. They crossed it twice one way and twice the other, and she held on to his arm, but there was nothing in her grip that suggested wantonness, nor wanting to lean up against him and dally. She was just companionable and straightforward, totally free of that duplicity and dishonesty on which love is built. So they had yet another slide, and five, and ten, and her face was flushed in the moonlight.

They noticed nothing until someone was standing at the side of the lake and calling angrily to Ólafur Kárason. Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir said that a person in delicate health should be at home in bed rather than indulging in this tomfoolery in the middle of the night with folk he knew nothing about.

“Folk?” said the girl from the next farm, and laughed. “Am I folk?”

“What do you want with this boy?” asked Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir. “Have you any right to him?”

“Have I any right to him?” said the girl. “I thought people had a right to themselves.”

“Oh, so you’re one of those!” said Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir. “Ólafur, as your mother and sister, I order you to come away from this person.”

“Mother and sister!” repeated the girl from the next farm, and burst out laughing, but it was not a laugh of derision; it was a laugh of sheer amusement as when one laughs at a joke. And it was precisely this—that she should find it funny—that hurt Ólafur more than malice and derision would have done. He felt he was ridiculous in the eyes of the girl from the next farm suddenly to have such a mother and sister, and he walked away alone without saying Good-bye. Jarþrúður stayed on for a while and heaped abuse on the girl. When she had satisfied herself, she came running after him.

“So you had to make me suffer this, too, Ólafur,” she said when she caught up on him.

He did not reply.

“Aren’t you ashamed of letting me find you in the clutches of that wanton creature?” she asked.

“I’m not in anyone’s clutches,” he said. “And she’s not a wanton creature.”

“Yes, go on, take her side against me!” said Jarþrúður, and started crying in the frost. “D’you think I need to do more than look into her eyes to see what she is? The time will come someday when you will reap such punishment from God that you will realize properly what you have done.”

He had certainly realized for a long time that she and God were allies, but though he was sorely tried he could never bring himself to utter a wounding word to a grief-stricken human being and her God. And moreover it could well be right, however hard it might be to understand, that it was advisable for a poet not to go sliding on the ice with a carefree young girl.

She often stayed up late at night, knitting for him, or sewing new clothes for him out of old garments she got hold of, and there was never a crease or a speck to be seen on his clothing, let alone a hole; she never tired of washing, she enveloped him in an atmosphere of soft soap. And many was the tidbit she came by for him both late and early. But it was not long before he discovered that she was keeping a constant watch on him. During the daytime when he was teaching he would suddenly see a glimpse of her at the living room door; when he was at the next farm giving religious instruction it happened more and more frequently that she would be waiting for him at the homefield fence of the next farm or behind the farmhouse, and then she would lend him her protection on the way home. But when the days began to lengthen and the realm of the sun expanded, he was often overwhelmed by a throttling melancholy, like a prisoner. The mountains called him and said it was better for a poet to die of exposure in their embrace than to live as a slave on a farm. The summer sky used every opportunity of whispering to him like a dangerous lover who is trying to entice a young girl all day. Even the late-winter snowstorms were just the lover’s disguises and strategems. The poet Grettir Ásmundarson* lived in the wildlands and died on an uninhabited island, but earned himself immortality thereby in the hearts of the nation.