The Atom Station (3 page)

How I was beginning to long to know this man better, converse with him at length, ask him many things about this world and other worlds!—but especially about himself, who he was and why he was the way he was. But my tongue tied itself in knots. It was he who took up the thread again: “As we were saying, I have no time during the day, but you are welcome to come late in the evening or early in the morning.”

I said, “Excuse me, but what is your work during the day?”

“I dream,” he said.

“All day?” I asked.

“I get up late,” he said. “Would you care to hear something on the gramophone?”

He went into the inner room and I heard him winding up a gramophone, and then the needle started running and sound came. At first I thought the instrument was out of order, for nothing could be heard except thuds and thumps, rattle and clatter; but when the organist came back with such an air of sincerity, and exulting as if he himself were the composer, I was sure that everything was as it should be. But none the less I started sweating; again and again all sorts of tearing sounds rose above the growling background, and all at once I understood what a dog feels like when it hears a mouth-organ being played and starts to howl. I wanted to yell and at any rate I would have panted and screwed up my face if the organist had not been sitting on the other side of the table, looking devout and alight with joy.

“Well then?” he asked, when he had stopped the gramophone.

I said, “I don't know what I am to say.”

“Did you not feel you could have done that sort of thing yourself?”

“Yes, I can't deny that—if I had had a few tin cans and a couple of pot lids, say. And a cat.”

He said, smiling, “It is a characteristic of great art that people who know nothing feel they could have done it themselves—if they were stupid enough.”

“Was that beautiful, then?” I asked. “Have I such an ugly soul?”

“Our times, our life—that is our beauty,” he said. “Now you have heard the dance of the fire-worshippers.”

As these words were being spoken the front door was opened and there came a sound of much traffic in the passageway, until a pram was wheeled into the room by a young man; and this was god number one.

This incarnate spirit was tall and well-built and handsome in his way, wearing a herring-bone overcoat and with his tie carefully knotted in the way that only town people can do it and country people can never learn; he was bare-headed, with wavy hair parted in the middle, gleaming and smelling strongly of brilliantine. He nodded to me and looked directly at me; his eyes glowed piercingly, and he gave me the savage smile that people smile at those they are going to murder—later; and bared those splendid teeth. He steered the pram into the middle of the room and then propped up amongst the flowers a long flat triangular object wrapped in paper and tied up with pack-thread. Then he came over and offered me a clammy hand and mumbled something which sounded to me like “Jesus Christ”; I thought he smelled of fish. Perhaps he said “Jens Kristinsson”; anyway I returned his greeting and stood up according to the custom of country women. Then I peeped into the pram, and there slept a pair of real twins.

“This is the god Brilliantine,” said the organist.

“My goodness, to have these darling little children out so late at night!” I said. “Where's their mother?”

“She's south in Keflavik,” said the god. “There's a Yank dance.”

“Children survive everything,” said the organist. “Some think it harmful for children to lose their mother, but that is a fallacy. Even though they lose their father it has no ill effect on them. Here's some coffee. Where's the atom poet, if I may ask?”

“He's in the Cadillac,” said the god.

“And where is Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?” asked the organist.

“F.F.F.,” said the god. “New York, Thirty-Fourth Street, twelve-fifty.”

“No new metaphysical discoveries, no great mystic visions, no religious revelations?” asked the organist.

“Bugger-all,” said the god. “Except this character Oli Figure. He says he's made contact with the Nation's Darling.
*
The snot's dribbling from his nose. Who's this girl?”

“You as a god should not ask about people,” said the organist. “It is ungodly. It is a secret who a person is. And even more of a secret what a person is called. The old God never asked who a person was and what he was called.”

“Is Cleopatra better of the clap yet?” asked the god.

“Better, in what way?” asked the organist.

“I visited her in hospital,” said the god. “She was bad.”

“I do not know what you mean,” said the organist.

“Ill,” said the god.

“A person is never too ill,” said the organist.

“She was screaming,” said the god.

“Suffering and happiness are two matters so alike that it is impossible to distinguish between them,” said the organist. “The greatest enjoyment I know is to be ill, especially very ill.”

Then a voice was heard from the doorway, saying in fanatically religious tones, “How I wish I could at last get that cancer now.”

The newcomer was so young that his face was the color of ivory, with only a trace of down on his cheeks: a youthful portrait of a foreign genius, a postcard like the ones that hang above the harmonium in the country and which can be bought in the village of Krok—a mixture of Schiller, Schubert, and Lord Byron, with a bright red tie and dirty shoes. He looked around with the sudden strained expression of the sleepwalker, and every object, whether animate or inanimate, affected him like an overwhelming mystical vision. He offered me his long thin hand, which was so limp that I felt I could crush it into pulp, and said, “I am Benjamin.”

I looked at him.

“Yes, I know it,” he said. “But I can't help it. This little brother, it is I; this terrible tribe, it is my people; this desert—my country.”

“They have read the Holy Scriptures,” said the organist, “and the Holy Spirit has enlightened them in their reading, in accordance with the precepts of our friend Luther: they have found the godhead without the mediation of the Pope. Have a cup of coffee, atom poet.”

“Where's Cleopatra?” asked Benjamin the atom poet.

“Never mind that,” said the organist. “Help yourselves to sugar with your coffee.”

“I admire her,” said the atom poet.

“And I need to see her too,” said the god Brilliantine.

“Why should she be wanting to run around with two gods?” said the organist. “She wants to have her thirty men.”

I could no longer contain myself and blurted out, “Now really!—I am no model of virtue, but never have I heard tell of so immoral a woman, and I permit myself to doubt whether such a woman exists.”

“Immoral women do not exist,” said the organist. “That is only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.”

“And women who don't sleep with a man at all,” I said, meaning myself in fact, and had begun to sweat; and there was a mist before my eyes and I was undoubtedly blushing all the way down to my neck and making myself utterly absurd.

“Augustine, one of the Fathers of the Church, says that the sexual urge is beyond the will,” said the organist. “Saint Benedict gratified it by throwing himself naked into a bed of nettles. There are no sexual perversions other than celibacy.”

“May I see you home?” said the god Brilliantine.

“What for?” I asked.

“There are Yanks around at night,” he said.

“What does that matter?” I said.

“They have guns.”

“I'm not scared of guns.”

“They will rape you,” he said.

“Are you going to fight for me?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled his piercing smile.

“What about the children?”

“Benjamin can take them in the Cadillac,” he said. “Or if you like I shall beat Benjamin up and take the Cadillac off him. I have just as much right to steal the Cadillac as he has.”

“I'm going to look for Cleopatra,” said Benjamin the atom poet.

“One tune first,” said the organist, “There's no hurry.”

The god Brilliantine rose to his feet and brought out the flat triangular object which he had propped up amongst the flowers, loosened the twine and unwrapped the paper. It was a salted fish. He tied the twine most artistically to make two strings running the length of the fish, and started strumming on them. With his right hand he made agile flourishes as if he were striking the strings, and one could hear a sound like a guitar being played, a Hawaiian guitar. He was crooning limply through his mouth and nose, and the guitar-sound was made by plucking his nose between his thumb and forefinger in mid-flourish and checking the air in his nostrils. The atom poet stepped to the middle of the floor and began to strike an attitude. He had all the gestures of the world's greatest. It had not occurred to me that he could sing, and I was all the more surprised when he opened his mouth: a singer, with the bright and the sombre blended in his voice; an actor, moreover, who knew the anguish of the soul and could imitate the sobbing of the Italians. He turned to face me:

You are a dream but a little too plump
,

You are virtuous but just for a time
,

You are an innocent country lump

Closely akin to the awfullest crime;

And I hate you just about none
,

The same at the last as the first
,

I break out to you, in I burst
,

Through atom and moon, earth and the sun
.

While the accompaniment was ending he put his hand casually into his pocket; and it seemed as if he had been carrying eggs in it and they had broken and his hand had become all covered with muck—was this play-acting? The only certain thing was that he began to pull out of his pockets vast sums of money, bunch after bunch of bank-notes, ten-kronur bills, fifty-kronur, hundred-kronur bills;
*
and in a sudden fit he began to tear the notes in two, crumpling up the pieces and throwing them on the floor and grinding them down like a man killing an insect. Then he sat down and lit himself a cigarette.

The god Brilliantine continued to play until the postlude was finished. The organist first laughed, rather affectionately, then fetched a brush and dustpan and swept the floor, emptied the dustpan into the fire, thanked them for the song, and offered more coffee. The twins had woken up and started crying.

THEOLOGICAL NIGHT-WALK

The atom poet drove away in the Cadillac, that aristocratic car the like of which I had never seen. The god Brilliantine was left behind with the crying twins; and myself.

“Now I shall see you home,” he said.

“Would it not be more like it for me to help you with the twins?” I said.

“Leave them to themselves,” he said.

“Whose are these twins, if I may ask?” I said. “Aren't they yours?”

“They are my wife's,” he said.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “there's no sense in letting them cry.”

I tried as far as I could to console the poor things out there in the street in the drizzle in the middle of the night. A crowd of drunks gathered round us. After a little while the mites went to sleep. I wanted to go off on my own then, but it turned out that the god and I were going the same way westwards.

When we had walked for a while along the road I could not restrain myself from asking, “Was that real money, or was it fake?”

“There is no such thing as real money,” he said. “All money is fake. We gods spit on money.”

“But the atom poet must surely be well off to be driving such a cat.”

“All those who know how to steal are well off,” said the god. “All those who don't know how to steal are badly off. The problem is to know how to steal.”

I wanted to know where and how that little poet had stolen that huge car.

“From whom but our master, Pliers?” said the god. “What, you haven't heard of Pliers? Two Hundred Thousand Pliers? F.F.F.? The man who sits in New York and fakes the figures for the joint-stock company Snorredda and the rest? And wrote an article in the papers about the next world and built a church in the north?”

“You must forgive me if I'm a little slow in the uptake,” I said. “I'm from the country.”

“There's no difficulty in understanding it,” he said. “F.F.F.: in English, the Federation of Fulminating Fish, New York; in Icelandic, the Figures-Faking-Federation. One button costs half an eyrir over there in the west, but you have a company in New York, the F.F.F., which sells you the button at two kronur and writes on the invoice: button, two kronur. You make a profit of four thousand per cent. After a month you're a millionaire. You can understand that?”

Suddenly we heard someone hailing us, and a man came running up behind us, bare-headed. It was the organist.

“Sorry,” he said, out of breath with running. “I forgot something. I don't suppose one of you could possibly lend me a krona?”

The god found nothing in his pockets, but I had a krona in my coat-pocket and let the organist have it. He thanked me and apologized and said that he would repay me the next time: “You see, I need to buy myself fifty grams of boiled sweets tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he bade us goodnight and left.

We walked on in silence for a while with the pram, and now it was past midnight. I was busy with my thoughts, trying to fathom the night's events, until my companion said, “Don't you think I'm rather different from other men, actually?”

He was certainly very handsome and must undoubtedly have charmed many girls with those piercing eyes and that moist murderer's smile, but somehow he had no effect on me at all; I scarcely even heard him when he was saying something.