The Atom Station (7 page)

“I was taught never to believe a single word that is written in the papers, and nothing except what is written in the Icelandic Sagas,” I replied.

“I unhitched the hack from the mower at noon one day in the middle of the hay-making,” he said. “And went south.”

“To do what?”

“It was the vocation,” he said. “And now I have stumbled into the misfortune of being taught to play the harmonium—by that man.”

“Misfortune?”

“Yes, he sees through the whole swindle,” he said. “What am I to do?”

“Aren't you in the police?” I asked.

“That's a minor detail,” he said.

“What's the main thing?”

“That's exactly what I'm trying to find out,” he said.

“We are just like any other country people in town,” I said. “But you who have a vocation …”

“Look at Two Hundred Thousand Pliers,” he said, “that superannuated alcoholic who could once only screech. Now he has become both pious and the manager of a Thieves' Company for Snorredda in New York. He would have bought a genuine Rolls-Royce if the British had not refused to service such a vehicle for an Icelander; so he had to buy a Cadillac. Why should I be mowing hay which refuses to dry out? Or chasing up mountains after some wild old ewe? Why can I not have F.F.F. for Snorredda in New York, like him? We are at least from the same district. Why can I not build a church in the north to provoke these sheep farmers? Why can I not become the leader of a psychical research society? Why don't the papers print what I have to say about God, and the soul, and the next world? Why can't I have an atom poet for a message boy? And a brilliantined god for a storekeeper? I at least went to grammar school in Akureyri; and he didn't; and in addition to that I'm a composer.”

“I'm sure our organist knows what we all ought to do,” I said.

“That is precisely the misfortune,” he said. “What frightens me most of all is the thought that the same thing will happen to me as has happened to the two gods: merely from learning scales from him and drinking coffee afterwards, they have in barely a year lost their vocations; and if from lifelong habit they happen to do a burglary somewhere, they bring the money home to his house and tear it all up, singing, and throw it on the floor.”

“Yes, he is the man I most want to understand,” I said. “I have only been with him a few half-hours, but each time he gives me a flower. Tell me about him.”

“I have barely got through his scales yet,” he replied, “and I have scarcely started on all the coffee. But already I am almost a ruined man, whatever worse there is to follow. He makes terrible demands.”

“Moral demands?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “You are at liberty to commit every crime in the world. He regards crime as a tasteless joke, although in fact he finds bourgeois ideals, everyday ordinary conduct, even more absurd; and heroism, whether for good or evil, he acknowledges no more than the Book of the Way. But …”

“What sort of demands then?” I asked.

“Briefly, the first demand is that you base poetry on objective psychology and biochemistry; secondly, that you have followed in detail every development in art since the days of cubism; and thirdly, that you acknowledge both quarter-tones and discords and moreover can find the point in a drum solo. In this man's presence I feel like some disgusting insect. And yet he can say to an outcast like me, ‘Look on my house as if it were your own.'”

“You must be more than a little educated yourself,” I said, “to be able to understand him. I certainly wouldn't understand him if he started to talk like that. What's a quarter-tone? Or cubism? Or the Book of the Way?”

After a moment's silence he replied, “You make me talk, and now I have talked too much. It's a sign of weakness.”

“But you still haven't told me what you yourself think,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. “The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”

If this man had a million, I said to myself, and if he were about fifteen years older, then there would not be much difference between him and the Doctor, perhaps none at all—their souls were of the same color; except that I did not feel weak in the knees from talking to this one as I did with the other. Both of them had in generous measure that Icelandic talent, straight from the Sagas, of speaking mockingly of what was nearest to their hearts—this one about his vocation, the other about his children. The boy I lay with for a few nights once, he never said anything. And I never knew what my father was thinking. A man who says what he is thinking is absurd; at least in a woman's eyes.

“May I see your patterned mittens?” I asked.

He let me see his patterned mittens in the light of a street-lamp in the night.

*
The garden square in the middle of the administrative centre of Reykjavik, in front of Parliament House; a favorite spot for strollers.

7.
At a cell-meeting

Next day I met the girl and the young man in the baker's. The girl gave me a friendly smile, and the boy solemnly raised his hat.

“I want to settle up,” I said, and handed over the money for the lottery tickets. “But you will pardon me if I doubt whether the Youth Center will be built.”

“Why not?” said the girl and looked at me a little grieved; and I felt that I had been beastly to her by owning to this doubt.

“I don't know,” I said, because I did not want to grieve her further.

She looked at the young man and said, “You've lived in such a Center, haven't you?”

“No,” he said, “but for three years I spent all my leisure in such a Center.”

“In Russia?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “In the Soviet Union.”

Then the girl started to laugh, she thought it so funny that I should have confused Russia and the Soviet Union.

“Russia,” he said in explanation, “was the land of the emperors: that Satanic prison of the nations.”

I thought it strange that he should say
“that,”
for I had never heard anyone use it in that way before. So I asked, “Why do you say
‘that'?
Are you quoting from a book? Or is it Communist jargon?”

He thought about it and mumbled somehting over to himself, then finally he said, “‘
That
?'—as far as I know it's perfectly good grammar:
that
young Iceland.”

“I'm sorry for picking you up on it,” I said. “Tell me more about the Youth Center.”

He had such a clear and spiritual look in his eyes that I asked myself: can such innocent-looking people belong to a cell? He did not know the difference between the spoken word and books, but that was the only false note in what he said.

“In a Youth Center youth meets in a civilized and organized fashion to enjoy all the different aspects of culture,” he said, “there is a swimming pool and a gymnasium, studios for acting and art, a tower for parachutists; rehearsal rooms for orchestras and soloists, general and specialized libraries; a workshop where boys and girls can learn welding, a printing works to teach hand printing as an art, a comprehensive technical college, a laboratory and a botany department, projection rooms, lecture rooms, refreshment rooms, sitting rooms …”

“And a room for flirting,” I said.

“Of course,” said the girl before she had realized it; and the boy stopped short in his list, cleared his throat and looked at her censoriously, and his mouth hardened a little.

“Icelandic youth should not lie in schnapps-spew under the feet of men and dogs,” he declaimed. “Icelandic youth should not be nurtured on murder films and pornographic thrillers, Icelandic youth should not live in the streets where it learns to blaspheme, to shriek, and to steal. Icelandic youth …”

“One white loaf and a kilo of biscuits,” I said.

“You don't believe him,” said the girl, and served me sorrowfully. I saw that I had hurt her to the quick with my frivolousness. I paid for what I had bought and was about to leave.

“Perhaps I'll have a few more tickets, come to think of it,” I said, before I knew I was saying it; and I felt myself go white the way one does when one embarks on a secret, strictly forbidden affair. And as always in having an affair, the moment one lifts one's foot the step is taken. “There's one thing I would like most of all,” I said, and I even got palpitations and laughed unnaturally: “and that is to attend a cell-meeting.”

There—it was said!

The boy and the girl looked at one another, in twofold seriousness this time, I am almost inclined to say in double-twice solemnity; there was a problem.

At last he said, “You aren't in the Party.”

“What party?” I asked.

“The Party,” he replied.

“I'm not in any party,” I said. “But if I like the cell-meeting I might become a Communist.”

Now they both started laughing again, and the girl said, “I've never heard anything like it: if she likes the cell-meeting! This is literally the funniest thing I have ever heard.”

I walked out of that baker's an utter fool, not even knowing the reason why until later—until after I had attended a cell-meeting.

For although they had received my request with less than alacrity at first, thinking it complete nonsense, they changed their attitude after I had gone, or perhaps they referred the matter to the Party leadership. Next day the bakery girl took me aside and said she had been deputed to inform me that I might attend. She said I was to come with her the following evening. That night I slept uneasily, troubled by thoughts of the alarming debauchery which my curiosity or congenital depravity was drawing me into. And seldom have I suffered such a disappointment as when I actually attended a cell-meeting; or rather, seldom has anything been such a relief to me.

In a low-ceilinged basement flat some men and women had gathered, most of them rather elderly; they had all come straight from work and had not had time to change their clothes. There were not enough seats for all of them; some stood leaning against the walls, and a few sat on the floor. The youngest child was sick on the floor. And this was the full extent of the debauchery and all the murder.

The business of the meeting was to debate the Central Committee's draft of Party policy for the Town Council elections. There was a long discussion on whether certain marshland in Mosfell District should be turned into arable land or not. Most of them advocated a system of milk transport and milk distribution different from the one then in operation. An old man made a well-ordered speech about the necessity of inserting into the policy declaration a clause about improving the landing facilities for small boats at Reykjavik harbour: it had now come to the point that Reykjavik Corporation was quite literally evicting the little men who did their fishing in tiny inshore-boats here in the bay; the men who provided the inhabitants of the capital with good fresh fish from the bay had no place of their own along the whole length of the sea front controlled by the Corporation. Then the next item on the agenda was dealt with, the question of a day nursery. I was sitting with five others on a divan, crushed into a corner, and shame on me if I do not think I fell asleep; at least I cannot remember what decision was reached on the day nursery question.

Then a young man asked leave to speak and began to discuss the newspaper, it was the bakery girl's friend. Yet again it had come to the point where the Party had to make a new effort for the paper, appeal to the Party members, collect new subscribers, collect money, find regular backers. Last week it had been mere chance that the paper had not closed down. The Government had ceased to advertise in the paper because the paper had exposed the Government's plan to steal the country from the people and sell it; and for saying that these salesmen, moreover, were then going to freshen up their reputations by exhuming the bones of the Nation's Darling from his grave in Denmark and giving him a tile-hat funeral in Iceland. The wholesalers had stopped advertising in the paper because it had said that they had F.F.F. in New York. The cinemas refused to advertise because the paper had said that Hollywood did not know how to make pictures. In other words, the truth had touched a nerve, the class-enemy feared nothing except the truth; feared lest the people hear the truth. Now once again the working classes had to make some sacrifices for the sake of their paper. The paper was the poor man's cow; if he slaughtered her or let her waste away to death, the family would die. During this speech I woke up again.

And when I saw these penniless worn people, as worn and poor as my own people home in the valley, reach into their pockets for their purses and open them with these worn hands which all at once I felt I could, weeping, have kissed, and then take out that famous widow's mite, some of them even emptying their purses on the table and those without purses scrawling their names on a list—when I saw this I felt I was utterly and completely in sympathy with these people and would always be so, however dreary the matters they discussed, whether they wanted to reclaim some marsh-land in Mosfell District or hold on to their country against the tile-hats who wanted to betray it from under them and sell it from them. So I too scrawled my name on the list and pledged myself to subscribe ten kronur a month to the paper's funds even though I had never seen it.

The woman of the house wanted us to have some coffee before we went, but many, including myself, said they were in a hurry to get home; some said they had not even had a wash yet, and anyway it was getting late. The master of the house accompanied me to the door; he was the cell-leader. He said I was welcome to come again the next time, and that I must then stay on for coffee.

And now I had attended a cell-meeting.

ANOTHER MEETING

The Cadillac was standing outside.

I could not remember exactly the name of the smell that met me when I opened the back door, I scarcely even knew whether I liked the smell or not; a smell is good or bad according to its associations in one's mind. This was at least no worse than that of tobacco-smoke. Was something on fire?