The boy sat bolt upright in bed, terror-stricken, in the middle of the night, because he thought someone was whispering, “Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík is a corpse.” In other words he felt that it was he himself who lay dead at last, on the bed opposite, after this purposeless life of his, with all its dreams unfulfilled. It was so real, so vivid, that he felt compelled to deny it aloud: “My God, my God, no, no, no!” he cried aloud, over and over again in the middle of the night. Someone at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep, and the boy cowered down under the bedclothes with his heart beating furiously. He called upon God hundreds of times because he thought it so terrible to have been struck and pushed into the mud in his old age and to be dead at last without having become a poet. Gradually he became less agitated.
No, he was not dead. “I shall get well,” he said to himself. “I
shall
. Some day. Arise,” he thought. “Become a great poet.” He tried to forget this autumn night, looking forward instead to the day when he would arise. One morning he would wake up early. That morning he would suddenly have recovered his health. He would get dressed as if the past were over, and walk carefree out into the spring. There would be this strong, tranquil clarity over land and sea, this glossy sheen on the ocean, velvet-smooth clouds off the coast, the uninterrupted sound of birdsong, a thrush up on the hillside. The flowers would be blossoming in the homefield. And no one would be up and about except him, so unsullied was this morning; no one had set foot in the dew of this morning, no one; no one had seen this morning except him. Glorious vistas opened their arms to him alone; and he walked smiling towards the beauty of this day.
Yes, one spring morning he would wake up early.
10
Some people from another district who had got themselves ferried over the fjord brought a letter and a small parcel for the moribund soul who lay yearning in the corner under the sloping ceiling. “My dear son . . .” It was a letter from his father, writing to him from a distant fjord. So after all it was his father who remembered him even though he had once deserted his mother. His father told him to be of good heart. Unfortunately, his father said, he could not come to see him, but he said he was asking God to be with him. His father said he was in great difficulties himself, from poverty and ill health, and that he was in receipt of parish support himself, but he said that God was with him. That was why he was thinking about his son. On the other hand his mother was now an important person at Aðalfjörður and did not remember him at all, and the boy was angry with his mother and wished he could have some other mother, sometime; it could still make him weep to think that his very own mother should have sent him away in a sack in the middle of winter.
In the parcel there were three books. One was a book of poems by his father, called
New Poetics
, a little book, all in ballad form. There were poems about skippers, congratulatory odes to merchants and pastors, verses on tobacco and the weather, as well as a narrative poem about a remarkable and unusual drunken brawl that took place in Aðalfjörður some years back in which one man lost his front teeth, and so on. The second book was the
Núma Ballads
by Sigurður Breiðfjörð, printed in the old Gothic lettering.* And finally there was a notebook with a hundred blank pages, a penholder, three pen nibs, and a little bottle of ink.
At first glance, the writing materials were to him the most precious of these gifts. With them he was at last given the long-desired opportunity of becoming an intellectual and making his words immortal. Thereafter, when he himself was dead, he imagined that his poems would be published in some mysterious way, and the nation would read them for comfort in adversity, as it had read the poems of other poets before him; it was his highest wish that his poems could help those as unfortunate as himself to have patience to endure. They would say, “He has bequeathed to us sublime psalms with kennings, so that we could find the spirit.” Perhaps even his mother would then begin to feel fond of him, although it would be too late then.
It was not until he began leafing through the
Núma Ballads
that he began to feel doubt about the value of his own unwritten books. Acquaintaince with Sigurður Breiðfjörð’s poetry brought a new dawn of experience, brighter than any that had been before. The artificial vocabulary of the kennings in the
Ordeals of Johánna
and the other masterpieces by Pastor Snorri of Húsafell, which the late Jósep had liked best, at once seemed poverty-stricken and dreary now, compared with Sigurður Breiðfjörð’s pure Eddaic style and his clearly comprehensible subject matter, and above all that enchanting gift of expression that roused in the heart an incurable awareness of beauty and sorrow. Previously he had thought that all poets were glorious and that all poetry was of equal worth provided that it dealt chiefly with heroic exploits, or especially with Jesus Christ’s feats of redemption, in either a sufficiently intricate or a sufficiently religious way. “The motherland where men were born”—now he discovered in a flash that there were differences between poets. And wherein did this difference lie? Mainly in the fact that other poets seemed to have only the vaguest notion about the way that leads to the heart, whereas Sigurður Breiðfjörð followed this mysterious path quite instinctively— but without leaving behind him any signposts for other poets to follow; yes, he found his way into every heart and touched it with beauty and sorrow.
When there was no one else in the loft, the boy would sit up hastily, bring out the
Núma Ballads
, from under his pillow, and swallow a few verses, forgetting for the moment all his sufferings. If he heard someone on the stairs, he would hastily thrust the book under the pillow and lie back again. But the lovely lines did not fade in his mind even though someone arrived; they continued to echo and seethe there. Toward the end of winter he knew all the poems by heart, and Sigurður Breiðfjörð reigned supreme over his soul and was his refuge in all his sufferings. And so it came about that on the first sunny days of February the poet himself stepped down from the little sunbeam on the ceiling, as if from a heavenly golden chariot, rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, and laid his gentle master’s hand on the pain-racked head of Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík and said, “You are the light of the world.” It was one of those dreams that make the dreamer a happy man, ready to bear with a happy heart anything that might happen to him. Tirelessly the boy thought about the poet and his golden chariot whenever he was in distress; such can be the therapeutic effect of one single dream. One day in the dark of winter, in the middle of this dreary world which was so hostile to a sensitive heart, the great poet himself had come to him in his golden chariot and had baptized him into the light:
Beaten, bruised, in fetters bound,
In darkness when in bed I lie,
To me o’er the sunlit sound
Comes Sigurður Breiðfjörð from the sky.
In his eyes a smile I see
Gleam from his chariot of gold,
The smile which once, from sorrow free,
I sang to my love of old.
In the darkness of the barn at night
I hear his voice, I see his eyes;
He summons me toward the light,
The golden chambers of the skies.
11
When the parish pauper started writing out his own poetry in a book on Sundays, it was hardly surprising that the members of the family began to look at him askance.
“He’s healthy enough for that sort of rubbish, the damned malingerer,” said the elder brother, Jónas.
“Oh, you never know, perhaps our little friend’s book might just happen to get torn to pieces one day,” said Júst.
But when they looked at him writing, their irritation was mingled with fear, as when a dog eyes a cat. Sometimes the boy felt that the dread with which the written word filled them was even stronger than the hatred they felt for mankind. And now, as ill luck would have it, a scrap of paper with the poem about Sigurður Breiðfjörð on it was blown by a draft down the stairs and fell into the family’s hands.
“Never in my whole life have I ever seen or heard such filth!” said the housewife, Kamarilla. “Nor did I ever dream that I had reared such a viper at my breast, who dares to accuse us of beating him and maltreating him and says he is made to sleep in the barn—yes, and other lies of this sort that I and the rest of us here will be quick to refute with witnesses and oaths if it’s your intention to let other people see these scraps of paper. But what you say about us is as nothing to the way you blaspheme about God, and you’d better know now, if you didn’t know it before, that I shall not suffer blasphemy to go unpunished in my house which the Lord has blessed for so long. And I must say that never in my whole life have I heard such depraved ideas in a young rascal, uttering the name of Sigurður Breiðfjörð in the same breath as that of our Father, for if there was ever a drunkard and lecher and dishonest rogue in Iceland it was him—not content with being sentenced to twenty-seven strokes of the birch for lechery, he even sold his own wife to a Dane in the Vestmannaeyjar Islands for a dog! And how did he end up? Little wonder that he himself died like a dog in Reykjavík and was buried there like a dog, unnoticed and unmourned.”
Ólafur Kárason, on the other hand, was convinced that this shocking tale was told not so much to let the truth be known as from a desire to make the listener a better person, for he had his own unshakable religious experience as proof that Sigurður Breiðfjörð had come to him in a golden chariot from the heavens. But what distressed him far more, not unnaturally, was the fact that he was given nothing to eat that evening. Instead, Magnína found cause to make several visits to the loft, where she huffed and snorted as if there were a bad smell in the room, and cursed the abomination and lechery that went on among some people and particularly among weaklings and wretches who could not even go to the privy without help. And when he eventually plucked up courage and remarked that someone had forgotten to bring him his supper that evening, she said, “You can just let your sweetheart in the golden chariot bring you your supper. Why should I bother myself with that? I see nothing to smile about.”
Later that evening the brothers came in and ate in front of him, smacking their lips enthusiastically, and sucking at their teeth long after they had finished their meal.
“What should one do, exactly, with a lewd blasphemer like this?” said the elder brother. “To Hell with having such a creature in one’s own home.”
“Oh, I should think the best thing is to take our dear friend into the darkness of the barn,” said the younger brother sweetly.
For three days no one spoke to him except for gibes in the third person—“Strange how people who are beaten and bruised and bound in fetters don’t just stand up and go where they would be better treated.” “Extraordinary that someone can be brought up among Christian people and never learn a sense of shame.” “Incomprehensible morality some wretches have, composing filthy lampoons about their benefactors—not content with composing harmless nonsense and rubbish, but mixing in obscenity and heresy with it.”
His supper was withheld from him altogether in the hope that such measures would teach him to write poetry that would commend itself to Christian folk; everyone avoided him as if he were a leper, and in the evenings no one came into the loft and no light was lit, just to help him to realize how wicked he was and to let him experience literally what it was like to lie in darkness; and so he lay there alone and helpless in the darkness, ravenously hungry, racked with unbearable headaches and trembling with agony of soul.
Then the elder brother, Jónas, came up to the loft one evening, lit a small lamp, rummaged behind his bed, brought out his shaving tackle, and began to hone his razor. The boy was seized by ice-cold terror, because whenever he heard a knife being sharpened he always feared the worst. But on this occasion Jónas was not planning to cut anybody’s throat, but only to have a shave. This was only small consolation, however, because the boy knew from experience that shaving, for these brothers, was always performed with the utmost ferocity and accompanied by the most foul language reminiscent of bloodbaths and cattle-slaughtering, if not of downright crime. He could never feel himself to be safe while this butchery was going on anywhere near him; it was as if a great weight were lifted from him when the champion finally sheathed his greedy weapon again. He devoutly hoped that Jónas would slouch off when he had finished shaving; he made himself as inconspicuous as possible, pulled the bedclothes over his head, and pretended to be asleep. There was no one else in the loft. But Jónas showed no signs of slouching off; he went on preening himself in front of the mirror, pulling his face into various horrible grimaces, and cursing and swearing under his breath. Finally he put the mirror back on the shelf—but he did not go out. He began to peer toward the boy at the far end of the loft, clearing his throat and spitting in his direction, as if he were addressing him. Finally he came slouching over to him, right to his bedside. The boy smelled everything that was happening through a corner of his blanket. Now Jónas was right beside the bed. He laid his terrible paw on his shoulder, and for a moment the boy was convinced he was holding an open knife in his other hand, and he let out a scream.
“What are you yelling for?” said Jónas. “I don’t see anything to yell about.”
“Dear, dear Jónas,” he implored tearfully. “Let me live. Don’t hurt me, I’m so terribly ill. In God’s name.”
“I’ll be damned, always composing obscenities and blasphemies.”
“I’ll never do it again, dearest Jónas,” said the poet. “But it seems to relieve my pains when I think about literature.”
“It’s all the same to me,” said Jónas. “The parish pays, not me. And I’ve never beaten you. Or are you daring to suggest that I’ve ever beaten you?”
“No, no, God in Heaven above knows that you’ve never beaten me, Jónas.”
“No—at least, never very much.”
“Never at all, dear Jónas.”
“At least I never knocked you out.”
“I call Jesus to witness that you’ve never beaten me, Jónas,” said the boy.
“Well, then,” said Jónas. “So why can’t you keep your bloody mouth shut instead of composing filthy lampoons about all of us here and accusing us and telling lies about us maltreating you? We who treat you so well that there is no one else in the whole parish who lives in such luxury as you?”
“Would you like me to compose a eulogy in your honor, Jónas?” asked the poet.
“Listen, aren’t you just a bloody doggerel merchant?” asked Jónas.
“Yes,” said the poet. “But when a man is both spiritually and physically ill, one becomes a poet involuntarily; you simply can’t help it.”
“Yes, you’re just a useless wretch like all the others.”
Now there was a short pause in the conversation, until to the boy’s astonishment Jónas asked directly: “Have you ever in your whole life heard a more rubbishy bit of poetry than this?
“ ‘Your love I never sought to buy
With words as precious tokens.
Your heart knew what in mine did lie—
In silence love was spoken.’ ”
The boy recognized at once the verse from Sigurður Breiðfjörð’s
Núma Ballads
but did not dare to express an opinion, for he understood that Jónas was against the poem.
“Can’t you open your trap to answer, or do you want me to give you a hiding? If you don’t say at once whether it’s good or bad I’ll soon show you what you’ll get for it.”
“It’s good,” the boy whispered in a trembling voice.
“No, to Hell with that, I’m not going to let myself be treated like this in my own house! It would serve you right if I gave you such a hiding that there wouldn’t be a bone left unbroken in your body—to say that this wretched doggerel and obscenity about an honorable girl who is no damned concern of yours is good poetry, when it’s by that lecher and good-for-nothing Júst, what’s more, who’ll never be master of this household!”
“But that poem,” said the boy. “It’s by Sigurður Breiðfjörð; I saw it in print in the
Núma Ballads
.”
Jónas stopped cursing for a moment and his face became completely expressionless, as if the news had paralyzed him; and finally he said dully, “No, you’re lying.”
“As I live, it’s the truth,” said the boy.
“Never in all my born days have I heard anything so filthy! To think that a wretched swine like that should be called one’s own brother—stealing poetry from a man lying dead in his grave in order to buy his way into her favor! You see, she promised to sleep with the one who first composed a poem about her. And that’s the difference between us brothers, I’m honest but he’s a thief, and if it isn’t breaking the law to steal poetry from a dead man, then I don’t know what stealing is; and stealing’s not the right word for it either. It’s grave robbing, and what a bloody fool I’ve been, I could just as easily have done it myself.”
When Jónas had reproached himself for his folly for a while, he pulled a plug of tobacco out of his pocket, bit off a piece, and then offered the plug to the boy. “I order you to take a bite,” he said, and the boy did not dare to refuse.
“Listen,” he then whispered, his mouth bulging with tobacco, and leaned over the invalid. “Listen, have you ever tried your hand at composing a proposal to a woman?”
Ólafur Kárason was covered in confusion and answered inaudibly. “No, I suppose it’s too much to expect you to have the brains for that,” said Jónas. “Obviously you’re impotent, like all invalids. But it can be hellishly difficult, even though you’re as fully virile as I am, to put together a poem to a woman and get it to rhyme properly—even when she’s more or less offered to sleep with you. To get it to rhyme properly, man, that’s the hardest thing about poetry, even when you’re going mad with frustration, even though you start the moment you get up and try all day and lie awake far into the night. I would rather pay my worst enemy twenty-five
aurar
than have to toil at that myself.”
“I’d be more than happy to compose a little poem to her for you, if you like, Jónas,” said the poet. “And it won’t cost you a thing, either. That’s the least I owe you for having been so good to me always.”
“I insist on paying,” said Jónas. “I’m an honest man. I’m no grave robber. At the very least I shall order Magnína to give you some food at once tomorrow morning, like any other person outside the family. But if you put any obscenity into it I’ll kill you; make it so that it’s easy to understand, and remember to work her name into the poem, and mine too, Jónas Bjarnason, sheep-farmer and boat-owner at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti here in this parish, so that she can see that I composed the poem to her myself, and that my poem wasn’t stolen from a dead man in his grave like my brother Júst’s poem, do you hear me?”
“What’s the girl’s name, if I may ask?” said the poet.
“What’s that got to do with you, you fool? It’s me who’s composing the poem, not you. It’s me who’s the poet, in fact, not the devil Júst, and I command you to put into the poem that Júst is both a reactionary, a thief, a traitor, and a rebel against me and his mother, and that he will never succeed in having charge of this farm. And put into the poem that he would soon ruin this farm completely with his extravagance and improvidence if he was ever allowed to run it. And she’ll soon be for it if she lets my brother Júst take her, lock, stock, and barrel, before his mother’s very eyes, as she did last night, and all for a poem he stole from a dead man; and for God’s sake don’t forget to put it into the poem that she’s a bloody mare who’s been playing merry hell from morning to night ever since she came of age and never given a clean-living fellow a moment’s peace, always biting and kicking; and that my brother Júst is a year and a half younger than I am, and that I’m the rightful head of this household, and that she can have plenty of figs from me, and brennivín as well, but never to excess up in the hayloft until she’s as tight as a tick, as she was with Júst, who will undoubtedly end up on the parish; and tell her that she’ll only have herself to blame if she lets him drag her into destitution, and you can be as coarse as you like to her and say that I’ll kill her stone dead, so help me—do you hear me?”
When Jónas was gone, Ólafur Kárason composed in the darkness this “Poem to the Dearly Beloved”:
I know a girl who far outshines all others,
A lively filly in a herd of mothers;
With lovely eyes and legs so neat,
She neighs and bites and kicks her feet,
Oh, maiden sweet!
Sweet buds of Christian love will flower
Around her bower.
They’ve all been trying hard, I know, to win her,
But none has managed yet, I think, to pin her;
Until she found a man to keep,
A boat-owner who handles sheep,
Both wise and deep.
Sweet buds of Christian love will flower
Around her bower.
He’ll give her brennivín in moderation,
Sweets and figs and fruit from every nation;
If she doesn’t lose her charm,
He will give her Fótur, his farm,
And his strong arm.
Sweet buds of Christian love will flower
Around her bower.
Next morning the pauper was given food to eat, like other people.