“He’s only pretending he composed it,” said the girl, Kristjána. “He’s obviously heard it somewhere and stolen it.”
“If I ever hear of your using filthy doggerel here in my house again, you’re for the birch; that’s for sure!” said his foster mother. “And now you’ll have no meat for supper for a week, just to teach you that all poets are damned good-for-nothings and criminals, except for the late Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson.”*
Only Magnína said nothing; she was quite content to have learned the poem and got all this started.
Later that evening young Kristjána went down to do the milking. Dusk was falling. The boy was sitting almost invisible beside the stairway, hunched over his bowl of gruel, as she walked past him. His foster mother was sitting farther in, at her window, knitting. But as Kristjána was going past him on her way down the stairs, she stopped on the top step and bent over him.
“Listen, Lafi, would you compose a little poem about me?” she whispered to him confidentially.
He made no reply.
“Will you?” she said. “Just one?”
He crouched lower over his gruel and kept silent with all his might.
“Just one tiny one?” she wheedled, and bent right down to him as if she were going to go down his throat; her eyes were very protruding.
“Shut up!” he said, and started to cry.
At that she drew herself up again and said aloud, so that his foster mother could easily hear: “What a damned little wretch, the brat, nothing but smut and blaspheming already, and stealing poems from other people and pretending to have composed them himself, and to a grown-up woman at that! He’ll turn out well, I must say! Yes, they start early enough, these criminals!”
3
And so the years went by without any change in the established ratio between the orphan’s age and the labor expected of him. In summer he was roused at five o’clock in the morning with the adults and was kept at work for as long as able-bodied men. He said he had terrible headaches—but there is no limit to the querulous excuses that idlers can dream up. The brothers gave him contradictory orders in turn; the one threatened to kill him if he did not do something, the other said that the dear little chap knew what to expect if he did; and young Kristjána laughed. Then they called one another liar, thief, and wencher. Kristjána laughed and laughed and was against them both and for them both. Sometimes it ended with their coming to blows instead of killing Ó. Kárason of Ljósavík; and then all was quiet for a while.
In winter his morning call to go out to the barn was reckoned by the Seven Stars. He used to spend most of the morning pottering about in the barn. You see, he could not stand cow dung and did not dare to let it touch him anywhere, not even the rags he wore, and he was always thinking up new and different methods of keeping clean—which only delayed him even more. For instance, he invented a method of hauling out the dung in an old bucket by means of strings he fixed to the roof, whereby the bucket of dung was hoisted up to the rafters; but either it got stuck there because of some mysterious fault in the contraption and he would have to apply great ingenuity to get it down again, or else the string would break and the bucket would come hurtling down onto the floor, or splash over some innocent cow or over the inventor himself. His working methods in the barn were called “dawdling” and “idling” and “loafing” and various other names.
It happened less and less frequently now that Magnína, the daughter of the house, would give him a slice of rolled tripe or pickled brisket, not to mention buttered flatbread, because he was no longer a child. A big girl can do this or that for a child, and perhaps a little for a grown man, too, but a half-grown brat of a boy deserved no better than to make do with skimmed milk, hash and bits of pickled sheep’s lung, not to mention excellent boiled fish, just like any other outsider. And his foster mother, Kamarilla, had almost stopped thrashing him after he was thirteen, which showed that she, too, no longer cared about him. He often wished that she would thrash him a little, as in the old days, and then be a little kind to him afterwards. He would have died of loneliness and other things if the divine Omnipotence had not called him whenever It had the chance and invited him to become one with the radiant glory of heaven and earth. He tried whenever the opportunity occurred to obey this call and allow his soul to become one with a higher world beyond this world. He did not compose poetry openly now—his first experience at that had taught him a lesson; he resolved not to compose poetry openly until he was grown up and living among good and high-minded men, who he imagined must exist somewhere. But that did not stop him composing poetry; he composed just for himself now. Sometimes he scratched out a whole verse on the ice. He committed to memory every scrap of poetry he heard, and absorbed everything to do with knowledge, and was determined to write it all down in books later on—you see, he had the idea that there were too few books in the world, and that somewhere in the world there were people waiting impatiently, hungry for more books to be written.
Soon the time came for him to be confirmed, and he was given the catechism and told to learn it. He was placed at the table under the window upstairs and the book was put in front of him. His foster mother sat on the other side of the table and kept a close watch on him; she made sure that he looked neither to right nor left, neither up nor down, but absolutely straight at the text. If he tried to stretch his neck a little for relief or to shake away his headache when he felt faint, that was called “letting his eyes rove in all directions,” or “gaping into the blue like an idiot,” or else “Just look at him goggling away like that—he’s useless at everything he turns his hand or mind to!”
The God of the catechism was not the God of ecstasy and revelation; this was the old acquaintance from the
Book of Sermons,
and the boy had difficulty in understanding Him and caring for Him. Magnína was given the task of supervising his lessons. The text had to be learned by heart: there was a danger that some vital part of God would be lost if one missed a single word. Nor could one ask any questions about God, because God had no time for idle chatter: “I am your God,” He says. “What more do you want?”
Among other things, the catechism said: “Ill treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart.”
The boy recited, “A hundred and eleven treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart.”
“Carry on,” she said. “What next?”
“Shouldn’t it be ‘the hundred and eleventh treatment of animals’?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Magnína, “the hundred and eleventh treatment of animals; you’ve done that bit. Go on.”
“What is the hundred and eleventh treatment of animals?” he asked.
“What?” she said. “Haven’t you been told over and over again that you mustn’t ask questions about godly matters? Only simpletons do that. The hundred and eleventh treatment of animals—now then, go on.”
Nevertheless she thought there was something a bit dubious about this; she frowned and began to peer at the book and was not quite satisfied, but paid no attention when he carried on reciting; she even interrupted him.
“The hundred and eleventh treatment is obviously cruel and godless treatment,” she said. “You should have known that without being told.”
“What kind of treatment is that?” he asked.
“I’m not obliged to tell you that,” she said. “Go on.”
He went on reciting, and recited for a long time, but she paid no attention to what he was saying; finally she interrupted him again.
“The hundred and eleventh treatment of animals is, for instance, forgetting to feed the dog,” she said.
The church stood farther out, down the fjord, and in the spring the children attended at the pastor’s from both directions, out from the valley and in from the headland.
The boy often had pains in the stomach, in addition to the headaches; he was pale and dull-witted, and when people around him were talking, he did not know what they were talking about. There were other children as stupid as he was, and those who were quick on the uptake often laughed out loud at those who were slow; it was like a stab, quick and searing. Those who were quick-witted formed a group and understood one another; those who were pale and dull-witted and ill and slow did not form a group and did not understand one another. Some were big and strong and ruddy faced and knew a lot and talked a lot; he did not know how to talk. When they laughed, it frightened him. He did not know how to play games and could not perform any tricks; they could perform tricks. When he was alone he felt he could do everything they could do, and more besides; but when he was with others, everything was befogged for him. It was never clear around him except when he was alone.
He was examined in the passage about the ill treatment of animals.
“The hundred and eleventh treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart,” he said.
“Eh?” said the pastor. “What’s that?”
“It’s forgetting to feed the dog,” he replied.
The pastor laughed, and then all the children began to laugh as well. They went on laughing for the rest of the period, spasms of giggling that seemingly could not be suppressed, and he sat through this humiliation, dripping with sweat and scarlet with shame, in a white fog. What were all the birchings of childhood compared to this? Finally he began to cry. This startled the other children, and some of them stopped laughing. The pastor came over to him and patted his cheek, and said it could happen to anyone to give a wrong answer about God’s Word; it did not matter at all, he himself often did not know how to answer questions about God’s Word.
It was now late in the afternoon, and the children were allowed to go home. When they went outside, some of them came over to him to be nice to him, wanting to make up for having laughed at him; others came to question him further about the hundred and eleventh treatment of animals. He tied his handkerchief round his catechism, put on his cap without answering, and took to his heels homewards. They went on laughing and ran after him and jeered at him, because it is such fun to tease those who are peculiar and alone. The crowd overtook him on the gravel plain to the east of the parsonage. No, they could not leave him alone; they had to pester him, in fun or in earnest, because he was so funny and had misunderstood the Christian faith. He sat down on a stone and held on tightly to his catechism in the handkerchief.
Then a voice said, “You should be ashamed of yourselves, children, for not leaving him alone. What harm has he done you? Go on home and leave him in peace.”
Soon they had all drifted away, up the valley. He stood up and shuffled along behind them, alone. Then he noticed that there were two girls from the confirmation class walking in front of him. They were walking arm in arm and going very slowly, and he wished they would walk faster because on no account did he want to catch up with them. Finally they stopped, looked back, and waited for him. He saw only one of them. It was Guðrún from Grænhóll; it was she who had chased the other children away when they were pestering him. He came closer to them and did not dare to look up, but he could feel her looking at him.
“It didn’t matter at all,” she said.
“Eh?” he said.
“I mean when you gave the wrong answer; lots of people make mistakes,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter at all.”
She lived a little farther up the fjord, and she was nearly home. So there were people in the world after all who wanted to help others for no reason at all except the goodness of their hearts! He could not say anything; but it was as if his grief had melted away at the kindness in her eyes.
“Where does your father live?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“And haven’t you got a mother, either?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Where is she?”
He nearly started to cry all over again, because she was asking him about that. He still could not believe that anyone should actually care whether he, a foster child at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti, had a mother and a father. But when she saw that he was going to cry again, she said hastily, “If you’d like to come home with me to Grænhóll, I’ll ask Mummy to make you some coffee.”
He was extremely grateful to her, but was too shy to accept right away; and he was not supposed to linger on the way home.
“I know it’s terrible to be an orphan,” she said, “but Lauga and I want you to be happy. Isn’t that true, Lauga? Don’t we want him to be happy?”
“Yes,” said the other girl.
“We’ll always take your side whenever the other children start teasing you. Won’t we, Lauga?”
“Yes,” said Lauga.
“Just you tell us if someone’s teasing you,” she said. “I’ll soon deal with those boys, whichever of them it is.”
Soon afterwards they shook hands with him and said good-bye and turned off the path and walked up by the river; their farms were right at the roots of the mountain. She forgot to repeat the invitation to coffee. He gazed after her as she walked away, tall and fair, bareheaded and rosy-cheeked, with a firm stride like a grown-up girl’s. She did not look back at him. They walked farther and farther up by the river. In his mind’s eye from then on she was always associated with running water, and he threw himself down on the riverbank and cried out to God. “God, God, God!” he said. For a long time he never thought about any other human being. In the parsonage or in church he was aware of no one else; other people were nothing but smoke. He felt it every time she moved, even though he had his back to her. He saw her skipping across a little stream in midafternoon: she—and the clear running water of spring at the start of the growing-season—and sunshine.
On another occasion they were all playing on the riverbank, all the children, with the towering mountains on one side and the fjord on the other. It was evening. Guðrún was hot and flushed and just like a grown-up girl, and she had undone her top button, and the river flowed past, broad and calm. Her blonde braids had been tossed forward over her breast and one of them had become loosened, and her eyes sparkled. Then someone from one of the farms called out to the children that it was time to come in. He walked home alone and cried out to God. It was no doubt true; he was just the dregs of humanity and living under the yoke of slavery, a foster child who had no one and who misunderstood the Christian faith to an important extent. But all the same, let them beat him and scold him; God had revealed much to him. No one had ever perceived such immense visions as he had seen. Guðrún of Grænhóll! Then they were confirmed. Some of them did not see one another again for twenty or thirty years; some never met again. She never spoke to him except on that one occasion.