World Light (55 page)

“Yes,” said the poet. “He asked me to deliver this poem.”

If my poor heart is all that is most fickle,
That’s how I’m made,
And I must be as destiny has shaped me,
As fate ordained.
Yet never since the gods of old, my darling,
First came down here,
Has any girl so sweet as you, my darling,
Been loved so dear.

But understand my fickle heart, my darling—
How hard it is
To love, and hope, and trust, and wish, my darling—
And then know this:
That my half-heart, inconstancy’s true symbol,
And my whole life,
Will never disappoint, nor harm, nor hurt you,
Nor cause you strife.

2

But when the summer had passed and autumn weather was raging, and the grassy slope with its expanse of sky was no longer a sanctuary for other people’s animals or for anyone who longed to live in luxury, the householder at Little Bervík realized that he had forgotten to lay in supplies for the winter. As a children’s teacher, the poet was to get free kerosine from the parish, but the rumor got around at once that he was using a light in the evenings after bedtime, and the bailiff called on him officially and solemnly announced that the parish council would not be responsible for paying out money for such extravagance in these critical times for the nation. In the first snowstorms the snow came in through the eaves, in rainy weather the roof leaked, and on top of that there was no fuel. One evening during a snowstorm, the poet and his wife were intensely cold. At his wife’s request, the poet then went to see the bailiff in Greater Bervík and said they needed fuel and matches, and asked for the loan of a few peats.

The parish office replied promptly, “You’ll get damn all peat from me! Those who can’t make provision for themselves in the autumn can stew in their own juice.”

But after some moralizing, he said that the poet could go out to the moor and take twenty-five peats from a stack he owned there— against payment. Thereupon the poet asked the parish officer if he would be so good as to sell him a box of matches for cash.

“No,” said the bailiff. “If one knows one has fuel, there’s no need to light a fire.”

That evening the poet and his wife had to burn the mattress from their bed to cook their porridge, since it was impossible to fetch the peat from the bailiff’s stack because of the weather.

Some time later the education committee called on the children’s teacher to discuss the start of a school term. There were three of them: the bailiff, Pastor Janus, and
órður of Horn—old Bervíkings every one, coarse-tongued and practically fossilized. The pastor was a totally godless man, living entirely in ancient learning, with only a limited interest in modern times and none at all in everyday life.
órður of Horn sat rocking to and fro, his mind full of disasters and other catastrophes which he wanted to have taken down in writing, including the life of his mother-in-law. The bailiff was endowed with official dignity and social conscience. When these three men were all together, it was as if three deaf men had met; they did not appear to see one another, either. In the same room, they talked as if they were in different corners of the country and had never met, and would never meet, had never heard one another, and not even heard of one another; and yet they all gave the impression of being the same person. Ólafur Kárason was the fourth deaf man in this gathering, the fourth sightless man, the fourth corner of the country.

“My men tell me that not just twenty-five peats are missing from the moor, but a whole stack,” said the bailiff. “What have you to say to that, Ólafur?”

“I wouldn’t like to swear to it that the occasional lumps of peat weren’t frozen together; it was freezing hard and I couldn’t always break them apart.”

“If one wants to steal, dear boy,” said the pastor, “then for God’s sake one should never steal from the rich. A rich man has a hundred peats, and then suddenly he has only ninety-nine left: one of them has been stolen. He won’t forget that even on his deathbed. A poor man has only one peat and is just as poor if it’s stolen; and by the next day he has forgotten all about it. The wealthy man will inevitably get you into trouble if you steal from him; the poor man doesn’t even bother to mention it. That’s why all genuine thieves have the good sense to steal from the poor. The only really dangerous thing to do in Iceland is to steal from the rich, and the only really profitable thing to do in Iceland is to steal from the poor, dear boy.”

“I shall pay in full for every single peat,” said the poet.

órður of Horn: “My wife and I have wanted so much to meet someone who could compose a nice elegy for my late mother-in-law who perished in the great snow avalanche at Eyrarfjörður a few years ago, and preferably someone who could write up her whole life story. I’m a bit short of fuel myself, of course, but one can always spare a load of sheep-droppings if there’s a chance of a good poem, lads.”

“What we need in this district above all isn’t poetry,” said the bailiff. “We need honest people, not intellectual people and not educated people either, but truly Christian and industrious people; people who are content with little. We need people who don’t indulge in amusements in these critical times; people who don’t go to the moor and burn other people’s peats. That’s what has to be impressed on our children. We want a serious society. We don’t want to have the sort of society they have at Kaldsvík over on the other side of the mountain: at the last Faroese Ball there, two men had their noses bitten off, a third had his ear torn off, and women were lifted up by the legs in the middle of the dance floor and various other offenses.”

“Hlaupa-Halla had nine children in twelve parishes over more than thirty years, and was forgiven everything until she became a sheep-stealer, dear boy, but then she was sent to prison,” said the pastor. “No crime has ever been recognized in Iceland except sheep-stealing.”

“I really think there’s an urgent need to write a poem about the snow avalanche in Eyrarfjörður while there are still people alive who remember it,” said
òrður of Horn.

“The most important thing in life is not to be a burden upon others,” said the bailiff. “Not to be dependent upon anyone, never to need to ask anyone for anything—that’s as good as being given every human virtue as a christening gift.”

“If one wants to become somebody,” said the pastor, “it’s a good idea to start early collecting useless bits of string, rotten sticks, rusty nails, old whetstones, dried dog muck, and so on. But some people have grown rich from killing the survivors of shipwrecks. Many people favor witchcraft in order to acquire wealth. For instance, the late Finnbogi Bæringsson always went about with a pocket in his shirt where he kept a few krónur that had been stolen from a poor widow, as well as a heron’s claw, a mermaid’s purse, a wishing-stone, an orchis and an abracadabra. Others reckon that using a wren is an infallible way of becoming well-off: you have to catch it alive, then it’s split in two, dear boy, and the one half is placed in the chest where you keep your money, while the other half is buried in the ground according to certain prescribed procedures. Actually, the person who catches the bird catches ill luck, too, but there’s a way round that. You only have to get someone poor to do it for you, dear boy.”

“Four farms were destroyed in that avalanche,” said
òrður of Horn. “In Syðrivík one eighty-five-year-old man suddenly woke up with snow in his mouth—he was the only one on the farm to survive. At Steinar only a cat survived. At Hólm a woman in confinement christened her newborn baby in the darkness under the avalanche, and named it after her husband and son, both of whom perished. I don’t know what’s worth writing about if it isn’t that sort of thing, lads.”

“And the use of kerosine beyond reasonable needs I have always criticized, and reserve to myself the right to criticize in the future and take such steps as may be necessary,” said the bailiff. “I am not aware that it is written anywhere that the Icelandic nation should provide lighting and heating for people who, under the pretext of making poetry, think they’re too good to make provision for themselves in the autumn. To the best of my knowledge, the Icelandic nation has never asked for poetry from anyone.”

“You can take everything from me,” said the poet, “except the freedom to look up at the sky occasionally.”

The pastor, who until now had been rattling on about various ways of acquiring money, abruptly dropped the subject for the time being and fixed his peering eyes on the poet, not unlike an actor who suddenly forgets his part because of an accident in the auditorium; and into his eyes there came an expression of that rare presence of human characteristics which perhaps belongs nowhere so indubitably and eternally as in the eyes of an old boar squinting momentarily up from its swill.

“By the way, dear boy, who are your people?” asked the pastor.

Ólafur Kárason named his parents and grandparents, which was all he knew. But he had no need to go any further back, the pastor had the rest of the family tree at his fingertips. He started droning on again in the same style as before, with the expression of someone reading aloud from a boring book, with occasional grunts and groans in between. “It’s positively a lineage of the highest distinction on both sides, further back, dear boy,” said the pastor, “alternating sheriffs, pastors, and factors of royal estates. You are, like me, descended from Bishop Jón Arason, and at least two other bishops of Hólar. Your poetic gifts you’ve probably inherited from Björn, the son of a bishop, who was the best versifier of his time at Hólar, and sailed to France to study and was drowned at sea. But I haven’t yet mentioned the most important part: your ancestor is the same man as the ancestor of Queen Victoria of England and that family—Auðunn
skökull
(Shaft), who lived at Auðunarstaðîr in Víðidalur, the father of
óra
mosháls
(Moss-Neck)—and the line of descent from her has been worked out in the newspapers and published in England, although little has been heard from the English on all this.”