Iceland's Bell (25 page)

“This summer people were rumoring that you have an excessive fondness for brennivín, dear Magnús,” said Reverend Sigurður. “So I came to your wife, my dear Snæfríður, to learn whether there was any truth to the rumor.”

“So what,” said the squire. “What do you care if I drink? Who doesn’t drink?”

“People have different opinions about brennivín,” said Reverend Sigurður. “You know it yourself, dear Magnús. Some find it disgusting. Some do not care for more than a small sip. Others drink a bit to relax or perhaps to get tipsy, and then stop. There are also those who are able to drink themselves out of their wits and wisdom day after day, and yet do not admire brennivín so much that they will sacrifice the things they value for it. These men are not fond of brennivín.”

“I see you haven’t lost your old habit of going in circles around a question,” said Magnús from Bræðratunga. “Just between us, I don’t understand you and never have. What I asked was, who besides me really cares whether I’ve enjoyed a drink of brennivín in the past? No one knows it better than my wife and she hasn’t once in all of our married life criticized me for it.”

“A man who does not put much stock in brennivín,” said Reverend Sigurður, “would not be prepared to let his estate crumble to ruins for it. And he would not be prepared to sell his wife for it, and his children if he had any. Even if his wife might fetch him the handsomest price of all the women in Iceland.”

“It’s a lie,” said Magnús from Bræðratunga. “If there’s one thing I despise, it’s brennivín.”

“I should think it to be the voice of the Lord and not your own that speaks these words, dear Magnús,” said the archpriest. “People should be able to distinguish between the two. It is not a man’s admission of certain deeds but rather the deeds themselves that reveal which voice he heeds.”

“I’ve made a solemn vow never to let my lips touch brennivín again,” said the husband. He had come all the way up to the horse and took its mane in both of his hands. Finally he looked up with fervent eyes at the mounted priest and said: “I’ve kept vigil and prayed to God every night since my wife left home, though I know you would never believe it. My mother taught me to read in the
Book
of Seven Words.
And there no longer exists within me a single spark of longing for brennivín. I’ve been offered brennivín time and again these days, and what do you think I’ve really wanted to do? I’ve wanted to spit in it. If you speak to her, Reverend Sigurður, you can tell her that.”

“I think it might be better if you tell her yourself, dear Magnús,” said the priest. “But if you want to send her any messages, there are others more fitting to bring them to her than I.”

“They’ve all slammed the door in my face,” said the husband. “Finally I went to see the man who’s even higher now than the householder himself, and they sicked the dogs on me as soon as I left him and threatened to hurt me if I ever came back.”

“These men of the world!” said the priest.

The squire leaned up against the horse’s neck and looked even more fervently into the rider’s face as he asked:

“Tell me truthfully, my dear Reverend Sigurður: do you think that she’s having an affair with him?”

Reverend Sigurður had given the horse rein.

“Forgive me for hindering you,” he said as he prepared to ride away.

“I thought you might have had business with me. And when I saw you, I wanted to tell you that whatever might be happening now, it was as recently as when Snæfríður and I talked in the homefield that she was willing to overlook all of your faults, since she loved the man who would sell her for nothing more deeply than the man who would give everything to have her.”

The squire stood there in the storm and called out after him: “Siggi, dear Siggi, I have some business with you, let’s speak together for a moment or two!”

“I often keep vigil at night—after the dogs are asleep,” said the archpriest. “I shall open the door for you if you stand by my window and say quietly, ‘God be here!’ ”

12

Breiðafjörður is a beautiful region: eiderducks crowd the inlets, seals sleep on the rocks, salmon hurdle the falls, seabirds throng on the isles. The seashore is bounded by meadows, the slopes are covered with shrub and the mountain ravines with grass; heathery moors, streams, and falls fill the upper expanses. Farmhouses stand on grassy banks overlooking the pastures and the fjord, and in calm weather the holms and the skerries cast quivering, flossy-soft shadows, lucid like shade on springwaters—it is Arnæus, speaking to her one evening; she has come to him to ask what her husband wanted from him. “As I recall, you own a farm in the area?”

“So what?” she said.

“If you care to household there, I shall send you timber.”

“The renowned cosmopolitan,” she said. “Are you really such a child?”

“Yes,” he said, “I am such a child. First impressions have a lasting effect. The first time I saw you we were at such a farm. In my mind I shall see Breiðafjörður around you forever; and I shall see the folk in Breiðafjörður, whose faces convey a nobility that can never be overcome by sorrow nor effaced by trial.”

“I have no idea where I come from,” she said emptily.

“May I tell you a story?” he asked.

She nodded her head, her mind elsewhere.

“Once there was a wedding feast in Breiðafjörður. It was late in the spring, around the time of the summer sun’s return, when everything in Iceland that did not die quickens. Late one evening two travelers came riding into the yard. They were not allowed to continue on their way until they had eaten. A tent had been set up in the homefield and the folk sat there joyously drinking their cares into oblivion. The travelers were invited into the farmhouse, where the more prudent farmers were sitting with their wives. Several young girls brought food and drink. These unbidden guests who had stopped for a short time at a nighttime feast were brothers, the first a man of some distinction, a bailiff from the far side of the fjord. The other was a young man who had dwelt an entire decade abroad. The elder brother had gone to meet his ship in Stykkishólmur, and they had planned to ride on through the night. The returnee once again beheld the gray folk he remembered from his youth, how their charming manners served only to make their grayness more poignant and their sorrow more unfortunate. A number of people tumbled down the grassy slope dead drunk. The travelers sat for some time in the farmhouse, surrounded by more sensible men, when it so happened that a face passed before the eyes of the traveler from afar. The face immediately wakened in him such an intense astonishment that the others were transformed into specters at the same moment—and though he had previously been entertained in king’s halls, he knew then that he had never before experienced such a thing.”

“You frighten me,” she said.

“I realize that when I say such things I violate all the rules of propriety governing polite conversation,” he said. “But no matter how often the visitor has thought upon that vision, he has not yet found words propitious enough to describe the image, the aura in the veiled gleam of a summer night. He still asks himself the same questions he asked then: ‘How can such a thing be? How can such a gulf exist between one person’s countenance and those of all the others?’ Later he often reproached himself, saying: ‘Haven’t you encountered enough illustrious women out in the world to enable you to withstand the aura of a single maiden from Breiðafjörður? Your derangement springs from within, from the kind of illumination that can fill the soul in a moment of bliss, though the intellect might seek false grounds for it in the outer world.’ This glimmer, however, became ever more fixed as time passed by, until finally the illustriousness and beauty of foreign women were exiled from the visitor’s mind into the realm of shadows: and only she remained.”

“Perhaps this foreign traveler was most surprised at how widely a girl from Breiðafjörður could open her eyes the first time she saw a man!”

He did not let her interjection distract him.

“There is only one moment in a man’s life that stays with him and will always stay with him throughout the march of time. Everything he does afterward, for good or for ill, he does in the reflected light of that moment, as he fights his lifelong battles—and there is nothing that he can do to resist it. For certain, it is always one pair of eyes that reigns over such a moment, the eyes for which all poets are born, and yet their poet is never born, for upon the day that their true name is spoken the world will perish. What happened, what was said? At such a moment nothing happens, nothing is said. But suddenly they are down in the meadow by the river, and the estuary is flooded. Golden clouds shine behind her. The night breeze breathes through her fair hair. Traces of the day remain in the pale blush upon her rose-petal cheeks.”

“How did it ever occur to the friend of queens to ask this muddleheaded girl to walk with him out in the meadow? She had seen only fifteen winters.”

“She had seen only fifteen springs.”

“She herself scarcely understood she existed. She thought that because the visitor was a nobleman he was going to ask her to take a message to her father, who had left the feast. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized he had given her the ring—that he had given it to her.”

“What might she have thought of such a peculiar guest?”

“She was the magistrate’s daughter and everyone gives gifts to the rich. She simply thought that magistrates’ daughters were given gifts.”

“When the ring came back to him he gave it to Jón Hreggviðsson so that the farmer could buy himself a drink. He had burnt his ship. Promises, oaths, our fondest wishes: ephemera. He had sold the young rose petal of a fair spring night for shriveled parchment books. They were his life.”

“You told me that once before,” she said. “But you’ve skipped ahead, Árni. You’ve skipped over two summers.”

“Tell me, Snæfríður.”

“I don’t have the words.”

“The one who has the words cannot tell the tale, Snæfríður—the only one who can is the one who truly breathes. Breathe.”

She sat for a long time and stared straight ahead, trancelike, breathing.

“When you came to stay with us to have a look at my father’s old books, I don’t remember rejoicing; but I might have been just a bit curious. I never dared to tell my mother that a strange man had given me a ring, but that was because she had forbidden me to accept gifts from strangers without her consent. She was of the opinion that an unfamiliar man who gave a magistrate’s daughter gifts harbored evil thoughts. Actually, young girls have a hard time believing what their mothers say, but all the same, I took precautions to make sure that no unpleasant witness against me would reach her ears; so I hid the ring.”

“Please continue,” he said.

“With what?” she said. “Am I telling a story?”

“I will not interrupt you.”

She looked down and said distractedly, dimly: “What happened? You came. I was fifteen. You left. Nothing at all.”

“I stayed at your father’s for half a month that summer to browse through his books. He had quite a few paper editions and several good vellum manuscripts. Some of them I copied, others I bought from him, some he gave to me. He is a model Icelandic scholar and is particularly knowledgeable in genealogy. We spent many late summer evenings chatting for hours about the folk who have lived in this country.”

“I often eavesdropped,” she said. “Never before had I wanted to listen to adults. But then I couldn’t tear myself away, though I understood little of what you were discussing. I was spying on you. I was terribly anxious to examine this man, how he was clothed, his boots, his bearing, to hear him speak no matter what he talked about, yet first and last to listen to the tone of his voice. Then you left. The house was empty. How lucky that he’s not more distant than on the other side of the fjord, thought this fool; oh, who was to eavesdrop now in the evenings? One day in the autumn she heard that he had sailed from Hólmur.”

“That winter the king sent me south to Saxony to examine some books that he wished to purchase. I stayed in the palace of a count. But in a country where even a fat, happy commoner could enter the concert hall for two shillings after his day’s work, or could go and listen to great masters perform their cantatas on Sundays in church, where do you think the thoughts of the visitor were but in the one country in the world’s north that was oppressed by famine, its folk labeled by learned men gens paene barbara?* While I was studying those precious volumina* made by the greatest printers, some by Plantino the arch-printer, some by Gutenberg* himself, ornate books, lavishly illuminated, beautifully bound, some with clasps of silver, the books my lord was planning to purchase for his library in Copenhagen, all my thoughts were in the country where the most precious treasure in the Nordic lands had its origin—and which was now consigned to rot in an earthen hovel somewhere. Every evening as I lay down to sleep, this was my insomniac thought: today the mold has fastened itself to yet another page of the
Skálda.
”

“And in Breiðafjörður a little girl suffers through Þorri and Góa*— fortunately you weren’t thinking about that.”

“In the sagas one often reads that Icelanders at the courts of kings grew silent as winter came on. I booked passage on the first spring ship from Glückstadt to Iceland.”

“She didn’t understand the reasons why, but she was always thinking about only one man. There’s an old niggard in Grundarfjörður who doesn’t sleep at night—he just sits awake, staring at a gold ducat—maybe she was insane like this pitiful man. Why this disturbance? This trembling anxiety? This emptiness? This fear of a cold verdict, to be stranded, without ever again being able to return home, like the folk in Greenland. Old Helga Álfsdóttir sits on a trunk outside the couple’s bedroom, stitching lace in the twilight while the others sleep. She has long since stopped telling me fairy tales, because she thinks that I’m a big girl. More often now she tells me stories about folk who have encountered hardships. Her own memory of the countryfolk goes back many generations, and nothing a man can experience in his life surprised her. When she told her stories, it was as if the history of the country and its people passed before my eyes. And finally I snuck to her bedcloset one evening, took heart, and bade her draw the curtain, since I was going to tell her a secret. I told her that there was a little something needling my mind, and because of this I could not live a happy day, and I begged her not to call me the magistrate’s daughter, but instead to call me her dear child as she did when I was a little girl. And then she asked, ‘What’s the matter, dear child?’

“ ‘It’s a man,’ said I.

“ ‘Who is it?’ said she.

“ ‘It’s a grown man who means nothing to me, whom I don’t know. I’m most likely insane.’

“ ‘God help us,’ said old Helga Álfsdóttir, ‘if it’s one of the riffraff.’

“ ‘It’s the man who was wearing English boots,’ I said, because I’d never seen a man wearing polished boots before. I showed her the ring you’d given me the night we saw each other. And then I went on, describing for her in detail how this man who meant nothing to me and whom I did not know and whom I would never see again would not leave my mind day or night, and how frightened I was. And after I told her all of my secrets, she placed the palm of her hand on the back of mine, leaned toward me, and whispered in my ear so faintly that I didn’t grasp what she’d said until she’d leaned away from me again.

“ ‘Do not fear, dear child—it’s love.’

“I think I blacked out. I had no idea how I could escape. Love—it was one of those words one could never say; in the magistrate’s family no such thing was ever mentioned—we didn’t know it existed, and when my sister Jórunn married the bishop in Skálholt seven years prior there was nothing more preposterous than to connect that act with such an idea. When other folk married it was either like any other economic arrangement in the countryside, or else they did it in response to impulses foreign to a magistrate’s family. My dear father had taught me to read from Cicero’s arithmetic, and when I began to read the
Aeneid,
the farthest I ever got in the world of grammatica, it never occurred to me that Dido’s overwhelming emotions were only poetry, contrary to reality. So when I learned from old Helga Álfsdóttir what had happened to me, it was no great wonder that it took me by more than surprise. I snuck back to my bed and of course dampened one or two pillows; then I prayed all the Bjarni-prayers and all the Þórður-prayers,* and finally when nothing else worked I prayed the Hail Mary twelve times in Latin from an old Catholic tome, ‘Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.’* And then I was soothed.”

Arnæus said: “My first day back in Breiðafjörður at your home, I knew it the moment we saw each other. We both knew it. On that day all other knowledge seemed insignificant and unnecessary.”

“And,” she said, “I came to you for the first time. No one knew it. I came in a trance because you had told me to, and because my will was not mine, it was yours. I would have come even if I had been forced to wade through powerful waterfalls or commit deadly sins. And then I had come to you. I didn’t know what you did to me. I had no awareness of what happened. I knew only this: I was yours. And because of this everything was good; everything right.”

“I remember what you asked that first time,” he said. “ ‘Aren’t you the finest man in the whole world?’ you asked, and you looked at me as if to see whether you would be safe. Then you said nothing more.”

“Yes, I did—in the autumn,” said she. “In the autumn when you left, when we said farewell here in Skálholt, I said to you: ‘Now there is no need for me to ask, now I know.’ ”

“The moonlight shone in my little room. I made all the promises a man can make. I had seas to sail.”

“Yes, I should have known,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” he said, “ ‘Nulla viro juranti femina credat.’* Ships can be delayed and still reach home, Snæfríður.”

“When the ships returned to Greenland,” she said, “the people there were long since gone. The settlement was deserted.”