4
One day in February a snowstorm blew up. It was low tide, and the sheep were out on the nesses and the skerries of the isthmus, and the boy was sent out to bring them in. It was not the first time he had got soaked running through the seaweed, nor was it the first time that the bitter winter cold had sliced through his threadbare woolen jacket. But on this occasion the storm was exceptionally severe, and it was freezing very hard. He had had a cold all winter and at times had been unable to speak for hoarseness. When he came in out of the snowstorm that evening, he was ill. At least, he said he was ill. He complained of pains in his back, and said he was sweating and shivering by turns.
“It’s growing-pains,” said his foster mother, Kamarilla.
“There’s no end to what our sweet little friend can dream up,” said the younger brother, Júst.
That night the boy said he was drenched in sweat and had a stitch and could not get his breath, and he cried aloud to God.
“It’s lovely to hear our sweet little friend singing in the middle of the night,” said Júst.
Next morning when the brothers rose, the elder brother said that this was the latest method of avoiding going to the barn and touching cow dung. “Out of bed, you little devil!” he said. “You’re no more ill than I am!”
But the foster mother, Kamarilla, put her hand on his forehead and found it very hot. She thought it best to let the poor wretch stay in bed that morning.
So he lay there hovering between life and death, and time passed— or rather, time ceased to pass. Day and night, weekdays and Sundays, no longer succeeded one another in the order laid down by the calendar issued by the Icelandic National Society; there was no longer any distinction between one and two. The narrow became broad and the long became short of its own accord and without natural cause; there was no relationship between things. The fever pushed life and all consciousness on to another plane where all measures of time were wiped out, where one did not know what one was nor what one had been nor what one would become, nor what would come next; one was a compound of the greatest dissimilarities of existence, one was God, one was eternity, one was a glowing spark or a strange rhythm, one was the stream or the river or a girl, one was a bay down by the sea and there was a bird, one was the part of the homefield wall that faced the mountain. Events were always incredibly varied, one novelty after another, without rule or logic.
Occasionally he was washed up on the shores of reality, but only for a short spell at a time; he just had time to wonder at how quiet and uneventful everything was in reality. He could not understand how people could live a whole lifetime in this dreary sphere of consciousness called reality, where one thing corresponds to another and night separates the days and everything happens according to the laws of nature, and this is such and such, and that follows this. But fortunately he soon drifted back into the realm of improbability where no one knew what followed which, where nothing corresponded to anything, where everything was possible, particularly the incredible and the incomprehensible. Before he knew it, his being had once again become a welter of hallucination and consolation and lightning flashes and God and release from reality and from human strife and human reason, from life and from death.
But then he opened his eyes one day and it was all over. It was just like waking up in the normal way, the day was like any other day, and there was a tiny patch of sunshine on the sloping ceiling above him. Magnína had her back to him and was bending over a basin, washing herself and combing her hair, and her outer stockings reached only up to her knees—there were no garters on them and that was why they had slipped down. He thought of sitting up as usual, but he was now so weak that he could not even move an arm. It took an incredible effort even to move one finger; it was best not to move at all, best just to look at that friendly little sunbeam on the ceiling! But he felt he had to say something. He remembered dimly that something had happened but he did not properly know what he ought to say, and he really could not be bothered thinking about it. He was so tired and this was so pleasant. What was it that had happened? It was best to wait. And he waited. At long last Magnína finished washing herself; surely she would turn around now? Then she turned around. She was only halfway through the second braid. She looked at him and saw that his eyes were open.
“Are you awake?” she asked, and went on braiding her hair.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Have you recovered then?” she said, and put one strand of the braid into her mouth while she combed out the other.
“Yes,” he said.
He wanted to ask something but could not find the right question; so he said nothing for fear of asking a wrong one.
“It’s God’s mercy you didn’t die on our hands,” she said.
“What?” he said. “Am I not going to die?”
“No,” she replied.
“I thought I was,” he said apologetically—he had asked the wrong question after all, and he was sorry.
“We were quite sure you were going to die, but now I can see it in your eyes that you’re alive,” said the girl.
He said no more and did not mind not having died. Actually he was a little disappointed, even though that patch of sunshine was on the ceiling; the world of perception was unbelievably poor compared with the world of hallucination.
“Perhaps you’d like a cup of milk?” asked Magnína. “It’s awful to see how skinny you’ve become.”
She brought him some warm fresh milk and bent over him and raised his head from the pillow; the smell that gushed up from inside her dress was the same smell as before. Yes, he was sorry he had not died.
Then he began to get better. His recovery was very slow, certainly; he could not eat much and he dozed a lot, but when he was awake his senses were all there. He was on his way to life again, to stay here for a little longer, the same lonely orphan as before, in the same place on earth, out by the farthest seas. There was peace around him for a time while he was getting better; no one threatened to beat him. When he looked at the sunbeam on the ceiling above him, he was sometimes seized by an unnatural optimism: “Blessed sun!” he thought to himself, and felt that life was worth living, and was thankful to God for having created the sun to shine upon mankind. The days were rapidly getting longer. He sat up in bed and gazed enraptured at the sun-beams of life. Once again the old harmonies began to stir in his soul, the sounds he knew from his boyhood, the harp of the universe. He stared into the blue for a long time, he was for a time quite oblivious to his surroundings, his soul took part in this divine concert in enthralled gratitude, beyond words; for a moment he felt that he was living the very love of God, everything was perfect and good. He did not come to until Magnína had called his name three times.
“Are you having an attack?” she asked.
“No,” he replied.
He lay down and pulled the tattered cover up over his eyes. A few days went by, and the revelation of the deity continued to echo in his soul when he was alone with the sunbeam on the ceiling. He was given pure fresh milk, sometimes even buttered flatbread. No one said “Go there!” or “Do that!” in bad weather, each countermanding the other’s orders, or “There won’t be a bone left unbroken in your body if you shirk!” He was hoping and praying that he would not recover too quickly.
But not all the days were days of sunshine, far from it. There were also sunless days, no divine music, no rapture, no consoling memory, no redeeming hope, only a colorless everyday perception, a dreary consciousness of self which dreaded most of all the prospect of eternal life, a dumb yearning like a leaden ache for something which could save him from the terrible immortality of the soul that stretched before him.
He had long since finished reading the few books in the house, and there was no longer anything new in them—except for
The
Felsenburg Stories,
which he had not dared to mention for many years for fear of being thrashed. This book was kept deep in Magnína’s clothes chest, and he could count the number of times he had been allowed to look at its outer covers, never inside it. It was a secret book; he had heard Kamarilla scolding her daughter for keeping the light burning, reading it at night.
“I do so want to read a book,” he said.
“There aren’t any books here,” Magnína said. “Not that kind of books. Not for reading.”
“What about
The Felsenburg Stories?
” he asked, in the hope that she would not thrash someone who was ill in bed and past the age of confirmation, besides.
At that she became solemn and put her head to one side and pressed her lips together and looked severely down at her darning.
“
The Felsenburg Stories,
” she said. “Let me just tell you that that’s not light reading. It’s a Christian book.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter? Of course it matters. It’s a book about human life in the world. It could lead you into sin at your age.”
“I’ve been confirmed,” he said.
“Yes, any idiot can be confirmed,” she retorted. “But do you think it brings a great understanding of Jesus in human life? I don’t know what sins I might have committed if I had read such a book before I began to understand. When you’re older, perhaps.”
But even so she came with
The Felsenburg Stories
the following day, in midafternoon, when no one else was in the loft. The expectation in his eyes was like an ocean. She almost smiled for a moment at the sight of those huge, yearning eyes; then she sat down on the edge of his bed and opened the book. No, he was not allowed to handle the book. It was obvious from its thickness that it was an extremely Christian book, and yet there was about it a quality that filled the heart with disquiet and made one feel on tenterhooks.
“ ‘I, Eberhard Julius, first saw the light of this world in the year 1706, during the great eclipse which filled my father, who was a wealthy merchant, and other people, with great fear.’ ”
There were footsteps downstairs and she suddenly stopped reading without going any farther. She had the kind of face that has fat cheeks and impersonal eyes that make very little effort to think and very little effort to dare, and there is some hidden master in the soul who slams the door and forestalls any decision when it comes to the bit, so that apathy settles over the flesh once again, humdrum and hopeless.
“God help me, I must be out of my mind!” she said, and shut the book and looked at the covers for a moment in panic, as if it were a book of witchcraft; then she thrust it hastily under her apron and went away.
Next day when he mentioned the book again, she became angry.
“Hold your tongue or I’ll tell my mother on you!” she said.
He did not know what he had done, but he had no doubt it was something wicked, and he was afraid. But soon he had other matters to think about. His foster mother, Kamarilla, handed him his rags the next day, all newly washed and the stockings darned; when he fainted she laid a cold cloth on his brow and helped him to his feet. The brothers had gone to the fishing; there could be no more lying in bed now. A few days later they began to rouse him to go out to the barn. The water-carrying started again, and the water splashed over his feet. There were the usual storms at Easter. Kristjána and Karítas told his foster mother that he was always shirking; but sometimes Kristjána secretly gave him a morsel of brown-sugar candy warm from her bosom.
Magnína said nothing—for a long time.
5
Winter was almost over. The brothers were away from home all week, and so the boy was not subjected to the usual beatings and abuse. But sometimes they came home on Saturday nights, particularly if the weather were bad, and then they were usually drunk; so the boy preferred to linger in the barn as long as he possibly could, watering the cows over and over again. On Sunday mornings the brothers had a long lie, each in his own bed on either side of the loft, and talked together in an obscene language of their own from under the bedclothes. They laughed a lot, and their laughter seemed to come from deep down in their throats, or even deeper. Kristjána often had occasion to slip up to the loft during these morning devotions. When she walked between the beds, the brothers always stuck their legs out from under the bedclothes to try to trip her up; she always let out piercing shrieks as if she were in dire peril. The brothers enjoyed this hugely, but if the boy were nearby and saw and heard what was going on, he could not help taking the girl’s side in his mind, even though she was so seldom on his side. But though the girl shrieked, she was not too afraid to have a go at their legs in turn, and either she won or lost and then slipped downstairs again crimson in the face; but it was not long before she had found urgent cause to go back up to the loft again.
One Sunday morning, as so often before, the younger brother, Júst, stuck his leg up under her skirts and she let out a loud shriek, and her skirts went up past her knees.
But this time the elder brother, Jónas, said, “What the devil are you doing with your leg up her skirts?”
“Take it easy, brother,” said Júst.
“You’ve no right to put your leg up her skirts, I tell you! Remove it at once!”
Young Kristjána went on shrieking at intervals, until the elder brother, Jónas, got out of bed, fastened his underpants, and rescued her. And then the fight started. The brothers did not fight very often, but when they did, it was in grim earnest. They fought just as they were when they jumped out of bed, rather scantily clad. The girl retreated halfway down the stairs and gaped at the battle and clapped her hands every time one of them seemed about to get the better of the other, squealing with delight and alarm rather like a wild mare. But she moved farther and farther down the stairs the lower the breeches slipped down the brothers’ buttocks; her eyes became wilder and wilder, and now instead of screaming she gasped. Finally she had disappeared down the hatchway entirely except for her eyes.
The boy, Ólafur Kárason, had been sitting at the far end of the loft, swallowing his pickled tripe after his morning work in the barn. But when he realized that the fighting was in deadly earnest, he stopped looking at what was going on, for fear that he might somehow be involved in the struggle and punished. He sat in the corner of his bed, quivering with neutrality, and concentrated on his food with all his might.
Finally the younger brother, Júst, lay on the floor and could not get up again, with the elder brother, Jónas, on top of him, his backside in the air.
“I could do with a knife for this damned skirt-lifter,” the elder brother hissed between his teeth, not forgetting to mention the rather special use to which he wanted to put the knife under these particular circumstances.
Ó. Kárason drew his legs in and shrank into a huddle, and forgot to chew his black-pudding or to close his eyes. And just at that moment, Jónas commanded, “Ólafur, get me that knife under the rafters there, or I’ll kill you!”
The boy had no time for any moral or other reflections. The reflex of obedience overwhelmed everything else. With a convulsive start he pushed away his bowl, reached up, and drew the knife out from under the rafters. It was a butcher knife.
But as he was handing Jónas the butcher knife the maiden Kristjána, who had almost disappeared down the hatchway a short time ago, suddenly leapt back into the loft again, this time with real terror in her face as if she had fully understood, despite her youth, the questionable side of the particular operation that the elder brother felt himself constrained to perform upon his younger brother. With the maiden’s understanding of this central point, the Judgment of Solomon was given. The tears welled up in her eyes. She threw herself down on her knees in front of the brothers and put her arms around the neck of the victor.
“Dearest darling Jónas,” she begged, “I beseech you by all that is most sacred, do it to me instead!”
At that, Jónas released his younger brother, dropped the butcher knife on the floor, fastened his underpants, took the girl into bed and embraced her, and drew the bedclothes up over them.
What would now have been more natural and obvious than for the younger brother, Júst, to pick up the knife from the floor and turn with single-minded purpose on his brother and the girl in the bed? But no, that is not what he did. Certainly, he stood up and reached for the knife, but he paid no attention to what was going on in the bed. Instead he turned toward Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. He took his time; he hitched his trousers up with great care, and then walked with magnificent restraint to the far end of the loft, and stopped in front of the boy.
“And now we’ll just chop your head off, my friend,” he said, in that warm, loving tone that people use when they have an enemy at their mercy.
The ice-cold anguish of death pierced through Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík: first through his spine, then through all his nerves, into all his limbs and out to his fingertips, for now he knew that his last moment had come and that he would never again be able to stand at his bay and look at the waves breaking as they came in. Almighty God had forsaken him—that is all one gets for being neutral. Brother Júst took hold of him calmly with one hand, laid his head on the edge of the bed, and made ready to cut his throat there and then.
But by God’s grace, just as these momentous events were about to take place, the foster mother Kamarilla appeared in the loft, seized her son by the shoulder, wrenched the knife from him and put it carefully away in its place under the rafters, then dragged the eiderdown off the elder brother’s bed and hauled the maiden out. The girl hastily smoothed her skirts down with one hand and covered her face with the other as she fled weeping down the stairs. The foster mother had a few well-chosen words to say about the younger generation, and ordered her sons to get up. Then she called the whole household together, brought out the
Book of Sermons,
and read the lesson. Then they all sat down to their meal.