Under the Glacier (9 page)

Pastor Jón smiles: I am prepared to guarantee they have never been as good as now.

Pulpit
. Sometime or other a bundle of desiccated sticks painted in olden times had been placed on the floor against a wall; there are still some remnants of figures and lettering on them.

Embi: What is that pile of sticks, if I may ask?

Pastor Jón: That is the pulpit.

Embi: In somewhat strange condition, is it not?

Pastor Jón: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Don’t all pulpits get like this? I don’t suppose it makes much difference. A well-to-do farmer nearby had run out of sticks like so many others in the spring of the great snows. He was feeling rather sorry for himself, poor devil. He said everyone had been given wood except he. So I said he could have the pulpit. He had finished dismantling it and had split the boards and tied them up with string, was going to fetch them the next day. But then the thaw arrived and the roads were becoming passable and one could fetch things from town.

Chandelier
(Danish,
lysekrone
). In a corner, a heap of scrap-silver, or rather of some sort of grey-gilt metal, probably silver-mixed copper, fragments of repoussé and embossed silverwork. A quantity of links and scraps of broken-off chain-hangings, along with a number of matching candlesticks with not very intelligent-looking lion-heads; furthermore, wings, heads, and feet of angels: rather late German Romanesque style (spätbarok). Pastor Jón volunteered the information that this was the church chandelier and called it by the Danish name, and used the word “she” about these said fragments.

Pastor Jón: She hung from the ceiling. She was too heavy for the ceiling. She fell to the floor.

Embi: And no one had time to hang her up again?

Pastor Jón: She is unfortunately in 133 pieces. But my friend the bishop is welcome to hang her up again.

Embi: And you’re supposed to be so good at mending primuses, pastor Jón!

Pastor Jón: And correspondingly bad at Baroque art.

Embi: How do you know there are 133 pieces? Who has had time to dismantle this work of art so carefully? Or to count the bits?

Pastor Jón: No one is so busy that he hasn’t the time to dismantle a work of art. Then scholars wake up and count the pieces. There have been untold thousands of churches in Iceland down the ages, all full of works of art. Where are these works of art now? A’ b’oken, say the children.

Embi: In other words, the children have ruined everything!

Pastor Jón: As a matter of fact, others are ready to help. There is for instance the Weather; and there is the Law of Gravity; and last but not least, Time. These are tough fellows. Night and day, always at it. And at it still. No one is a match for them.

Musical instruments
. The pastor says that everyone agrees that there was an organ here once. It disappeared. No one knows when. No one knows who saw it last.

Church bell
. Not possible to examine the bell; the stair to the belfry was taken away during the spring of the great snows.

15

Le Cimetière Délirant,
i.e., the Best
Churchyard in the Land

We went out into the drunken churchyard and sat down on a tombstone under a reeling cross that was trying not to fall on its back in the withered grass. The sun shines on the glacier; it has once again moved closer. It was tantalising this morning as it was tearing off the last shreds of fog; by midday it had come quite close, and yet one wanted it to come even closer. But when it is as close as this, it is as if one suddenly sees the sweat-pores on a girl one has loved at a distance. One no longer wants to go nearer. Here’s hoping it doesn’t now lead to contempt! At any rate, the eye becomes dull and thought stands still.

Embi (using pocket recorder and shorthand notebook): I know it’s unnecessary to make the point that this churchyard is only fair to middling, pastor Jón, and barely that.

Pastor Jón: Best churchyard in the land.

Embi: You realise, pastor Jón, that it is my duty to describe the church and churchyard for the bishop to the best of my conscience and ability as I see it.

Pastor Jón: Please yourself.

Embi: I suppose for the record I ought to set down your answers to a few questions concerning congregational life and the administration of the parish. Easier to get it from your own lips than piecing it all together from here and there. Now, the churchyard and church are so-so, as we know. But a building has gone up over there so close to the church that its corner almost collides with it, and would block the view and the sunlight in God’s House had there been a window there. Who built this house?

Pastor Jón: Has it never occurred to you that the word
house
doesn’t mean
house
and has nothing to do with a house?

Embi: I hope that you are nonetheless pastor Jón?

Pastor Jón: Out of the question.

At first Embi says: Well, that complicates matters; then he sighs and adds: What can we do about it?

We both gaze perplexed into the blue for a while. Finally pastor Jón says: Should we not come to an agreement like little children do when they start playing? Otherwise there could be disagreement. Shall we not say, This is to pretend to be a house? And I am to pretend to be called pastor Jón Prímus?

Embi: Thank you very much, pastor Jón. That was an excellent idea. It’s going to be all right now. Might I then ask what is the man who built that house to pretend to be called?

Pastor Jón: Godman Sýngmann.

Embi: Any relation of Syngmann Rhee?

Pastor Jón: Professor and Doctor.

Embi: German?

Pastor Jón: What, Mundi Mundason? Oh no, no. A lot of things can be said about Mundi, both good and bad, but German he has never been to the best of my knowledge.

Embi: Professor Doctor is a German title.

Pastor Jón: Perhaps such titles can be acquired somewhere, for cash down. The late pastor Jens of Setberg used never to reply to anyone who called him pastor.

Embi: Is he an Icelander, this man? And if so, who are his people and where is he from?

Pastor Jón: We were comrades, though he was almost ten years older than I and had become an engineer and inventor all over the world by the time I eventually graduated. He is descended from corner-shops and all manner of business agencies in the Vestfirðir (Westfjords) for centuries back. We owned the glacier together, each from his own side. No one in these parts doubts that the glacier is the centre of the universe. After that I received the benefice here at Glacier. He was home on leave that spring. I invited him to come and pitch his tent behind the church once I was settled in and married. When I had been installed in office here, I went back south to fetch my bride and my guest. But he was gone. I did not see him again for thirty-three years, until suddenly he was standing there in my house with a fishing rod and a gun, and said he was here to pitch his tent.

Embi: What do you wish to say about this peculiar building on the glebe here?

Pastor Jón: They can set off with that thing whenever they like and wherever they like, as far as I’m concerned. I look upon it as a tent.

Embi: Can it be set on record that this building has been erected without the pastor’s permission, and that the church authorities may remove it whenever they wish?

Pastor Jón: You can set down what you like.

16

Marital Status of
Pastor J. Prímus

Embi: One further detail: there’s been some talk in higher places about the marital status of pastor Jón Prímus. I’m not going to start interfering in that. But what causes a clergyman to attract unbecoming gossip arising out of his private life?

Pastor Jón: I have no private life. Let alone secrets. What are you trying to ask?

Embi: You said you had gone south to fetch your bride.

Pastor Jón: At the time I was ordained to this living thirtyfive years ago, then three years short of thirty, I knew a girl. She was one of those phenomena where it’s difficult to tell whether it’s a mirage or an earthly being, and that has never been possible to explain except in the light of Jón Árnason’s folktales.

Embi: English, Spanish, Irish?

Pastor Jón: Just from a croft down on the coast to the east. The parents of such girls send them away at confirmation age to earn their living as Cinderellas in the capital. Then suddenly it emerges that they are supernatural beings. When they are divested of their rags they are queens. They gain dominion everywhere around them wherever they are placed. They cannot help it. They transcend all other people. Men find satisfaction in kneeling before them; the lady of the house starts emptying their chamber pots for them. That was the kind of girl she was. Her name was Úa.

Embi: What’s the derivation?

Pastor Jón: Someone said it was compounded from the first and last letters of Úrsúla, which means
she-bear
; or even Úranía, who is goddess of the astral world. One theologian thought it was the Greek letters alpha and omega—in reverse order. Perhaps the name came about because when men happen to look at such women they start to ooh-a, like male eiderduck.

Embi glances through his notes from the morning, written in indistinct shorthand with the pages all mixed up: Is it one of those women who are said never to have washed?

Pastor Jón: She was always clean.

Embi: Never read a book?

Pastor Jón: Knew everything.

Embi: And no one ever saw her eat?

Pastor Jón: Always satisfied. Always happy.

Embi: Did you see her sleep, pastor Jón?

Pastor Jón: No, that I did not see.

Embi: Hmm, never slept either?

Pastor Jón: Always awake.

Embi: I’ll set that down.

Pastor Jón: Please yourself.

Embi: Did I understand it correctly that she had been your bride?

Pastor Jón: Yes, she was my bride.

Embi: And therefore is your wife by law?

Pastor Jón: Well, that might be putting it too strongly. The wedding night never happened. Such women are a miracle.

Embi: The alpha and omega of power-lust!

Pastor Jón: In the same way as the mother’s womb.

Embi: I really cannot set that down. The bishop would think I had gone mad.

Pastor Jón: I wish you could get to know this woman some time, young man.

Embi: What for?

Pastor Jón: You would understand life.

Embi: Life? What life?

Pastor Jón: What life? Yes, that’s just it! I did not understand it until my bride had vanished with my friend.

Embi: A miracle—is that the same as a sign from heaven?

Pastor Jón: As you please!

Embi: In other words, Sýngmann stole the thunder? Pastor Jón: In actual fact she was not stolen. Sometimes we lead the devil into temptation, as the late pastor Jens used to say; and that one should not do. It can result in God taking us. And that was probably not the intention.

Embi: I am a young man and it’s easy to fill me up with lies. But I hope the story you’ve been telling me has some truth in it.

Pastor Jón: Isn’t that expecting too much of pastor Jón Prímus?

Embi: You have studied history!

Pastor Jón: Oh, that never came to very much.

Embi: One final point, which hardly concerns your office except perhaps indirectly: it’s said that a coffin was taken up onto the glacier some years ago. Is there any truth in that? And if there were, would there be anything crooked about it? What’s in the coffin?

Pastor Jón: I do not know. I never heard.

Embi: I’m not suggesting there was any felony involved—if there had been, the police would have been sent here instead of me long ago. But I would like to hear from your own lips if there is any truth in the rumour that someone has lodged a corpse in the glacier behind the parish pastor’s back.

Pastor Jón: My parish clerk Tumi Jónsen and all those folk are historians. I am a theologian.

Embi: You have been to university, pastor Jón.

Pastor Jón: When I discovered that history is a fable, and a poor one at that, I started looking for a better fable, and found theology.

17

Philosophy at Glacier

We seem to have strayed into philosophy unintentionally, so I propose we take trivialities off the agenda. I noticed when we were drinking our coffee that you said you were an adherent of the lilies of the field, and the glacier. Are these miracles too? Or a key to a German theory of cognition? Perhaps a revelation as well?

Pastor Jón: It’s a pity we don’t whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading. I am always trying to forget words. That is why I contemplate the lilies of the field, but in particular the glacier. If one looks at the glacier for long enough, words cease to have any meaning on God’s earth.

Embi: Doesn’t the dazzle cause paralysis of the parasympathetic nervous system?

Pastor Jón: I once had a dog that was a stray for so long that he had forgotten his name. He didn’t respond when I called him. When I barked he came to me, right enough, but he didn’t know me. I am a little like that dog.

Embi: Forgive me if I don’t entirely agree with the comparison you have applied to yourself, pastor Jón. You remind me rather of those blissful people in religious paintings—the ones who smile while they are being hacked to pieces. In other respects, I wouldn’t dream of contradicting what you say.

Pastor Jón: Sometimes I feel it’s too early to use words until the world has been created.

Embi: Hasn’t the world been created, then?

Pastor Jón: I thought the Creation was still going on. Have you heard that it’s been completed?

Embi: Whether the world has been created or is still in the process of being created, must we not, since we are here, whistle at one another in that strange dissonance called human speech? Or should we be silent?

Pastor Jón: You must not think I am asking the bishop’s representative to be silent. I merely think that words, words, words and the Creation of the world are two different things, two incompatible things. I do not see how the Creation can be turned into words, let alone letters, hardly even a fiction. History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish out of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth.