World Light (36 page)

27

“My dearest beloved, whom I nevertheless scarcely dare to address as I do because you stand as high above me in faith in God’s mercy and redemption as the sun stands above the earth.

“When I heard this summer that you had had to endure martyrdom for my sake, and evil people had driven you away on a stretcher over mountains and deserts because your light had shone upon me, then I said: God be merciful to me, a sinner, and give me health to lay down my life for Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated.

“I haven’t seen your letter nor heard the hymn you composed in my honor, because both were torn up, but since the mighty heavenly Father hears even the prayers of this sinner, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, how much the more must he keep the Ljósvíkingur’s own poetry in his all-knowing heart!

“All summer I have been looking for someone I could trust to write to you, because although I can read, particularly religious matter, I am very bad at writing because I was brought up beneath the feet of men and dogs that I would rather choose death than the humiliation of letting a great poet see anything so terrible, and now I have at last got to know a young pastor’s wife whom I dare trust with a secret.

“I have always been looking for someone to love, like everyone else, but it’s now ten years since I began to turn to Jesus and pray to him to forgive my sins, for seldom has any person sinned as I have done, and that’s because I lay beneath the feet of men and dogs, as I said earlier, and couldn’t provide for myself because of ill health. I have never managed to rise above just earning my keep. I had often heard you spoken of as an example to all those in distress, and I had always wanted so much to see you and hear something from your own lips, but when I saw you for the first time on our wedding day this spring, I understood then what it was to have found what one no longer dared to look for. The moment you spoke your first words to me I felt I was your mother. Jesus Christ, oh, you who laid down your life for me, give me strength to lay down my life for him! Help me to come to him and I shall never, never forsake him again.

“Since you love me, I don’t care in the least how small our hovel is. I can do a great deal of work. I am accustomed both to baiting hooks and mending nets and everything else to do with fish; yes, and I’ve even been out fishing, what’s more. I can also do everything connected with sheep and cattle and even horses. I can do all manner of washing, and I also know all about working wool, even spinning yarn, for that matter, although unfortunately I have seldom had the opportunity to do it. I can also do all the jobs involved in haymaking, and have spent many a summer at the scythe. I have also had to work at land reclamation, both cutting turf, digging trenches and carrying stones for drainage. All these tasks I have carried out under constant threat of terrible bouts of illness and with a heavy burden of sin in my heart, but from now on I shall do everything that’s required with a glad smile so that you can compose immortal hymns about God’s mercy and the redemption of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I have now given in my notice here at Gil, so you can expect me at the end of the harvest season; I am going to try to come to you over the mountains directly, before the weather gets worse.”

A turbulent sea, yellow moors, rain showers billowing over the withered grass, pastures bitten down to the roots, not a single flower, two ravens. He roamed about in the rain, and the letter burned in his hand like a punishment. The brook from springtime now poured past, muddy from the autumn rains, and the little lamb field from springtime was cropped close by cattle; no hay had been cut for the stack, but someone had torn off the roof of the shed and taken away the timbers, and only the roofless walls remained standing. He tried to find shelter there from the stormy squalls of autumn.

Once upon a time there was a destitute poet in a corner and although he was not considered to be a human being, he was sometimes asked to compose a poem when much was at stake, for instance if someone wanted to conquer an impregnable heart. He himself was not allowed to come near the festivities he had instigated with his poems; someone delivered his poem to his beloved and conquered her heart with it completely and utterly; but when the invitations went out for the wedding no one remembered this living corpse in the corner under the sloping ceiling. And when other people’s wedding celebrations were at their height, another soul had appeared through the hatch at last, someone as unhappy as he himself, and they had found one another. “Poor blessed birds”—and she had sat down on the edge of his bed. A few days later he rose from the dead, a new man to a new life. A straw is of great value in sea peril, but of little value on dry land—and she was such a straw. Yes, it was impossible to deny that he had composed a hymn in her honor; he had written her a letter of proposal; yes, he had even married her, what’s more, in a supernatural way, and for that matter she referred to her wedding day as if it were an accepted fact. But nonetheless he had forgotten her as swiftly as he had married her. Is it then perhaps the intention that one should love all the women one marries? No, thank you, he thought. All summer he had not even remembered she existed. One sees a particular woman in a particular place at a particular time. One loves her above all because of the place and the time, because a woman in the first instance is a place and a time. It is like a surf that rages over the beach one day and even blots out the stars in the vault of heaven. Next day it is calm. The waves throw themselves ashore with less and less force, at longer and longer intervals, until finally the sea is stilled and the stars mirror themselves again in the flat calm.

This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.

If the poetess had been willing to kiss me that night, she would have saved me, he thought. She would have left in my heart a seed that would have survived the winter, and this seed would have sprouted in a new spring and become the loveliest flower on earth.

But she had not been willing to kiss him. Her eyes were the same unresolved riddle in the darkness of autumn as in the day-bright nights of spring. But even though she had no soul, like the mermaid about which Jónas Hallgrímsson wrote somewhere, he still felt that she alone could protect him from the autumn sweetheart who was coming to him over the mountains with the stormy weather.

28

He had had his morning coffee in the loft early that morning and everything had been as usual—the woman at her morning tasks, the husband still in bed. When he came back at dusk, hungry and wet from having roamed around in the open all day, the loft was empty of people, all the couple’s household belongings gone. He looked round the kitchen that had been the living room of the home, and although the furnishings had never been extensive and certainly never luxurious, suddenly it was as if a whole fortune had been removed. No plates in the rack, the kettle gone from the stove, the ladle vanished from the wall, the woman’s knitting gone, likewise the cat, the friendly blue-checked curtains removed from the window. The little bench at the window was gone, too, where the poet had sat for his meals, where he had also been allowed to sit on Sundays, and the sun had shone in and white gulls had hovered over the blue fjord. He had also sat there in late summer when the nights had become longer and the moon had lent its reflection to the sea. The atmosphere of tranquil security and culture which creates a home and is above all worldly wealth had reigned there in that room that morning. When he came there tonight it was like any old closet in the loft of an outhouse. Yet the stove was still warm. It was like the corpse of a dead room.

Ólafur Kárason was told that at noon that day the new owner of the Sviðinsvík estate, Pétur Pálsson the manager, had summoned the couple into his presence and dismissed them. The former owner who had employed them was bankrupt and sequestered, and his documents burnt. The new owner could not allow himself the luxury of having unreliable drunkards in his service in these difficult times, much less a poetess who not only refused to support the cultural efforts of the place but was also suspected of corrupting young men and even conspiring against her employer and benefactor. The couple had collected their things in haste and put out to sea in a small boat in bad weather, with one companion.

Everything comes and goes in succession, there is no point in praying for anything, nor in begging to be saved from anything; that was how the summer passed away with everything it had given to the poet Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. In the end there was nothing left; perhaps they had even been caught by a squall and their boat had capsized. He was left standing alone on the beach; and it was autumn.

That night he crawled into the barn and bedded down in the warm hay as on previous nights. His clothes gradually dried on him while he was thinking about the impasse his life had reached. When he eventually fell asleep he dreamed that he found himself in dire straits on a precipice. He hauled himself along narrow ledges in a vain search for a path, the cliff beetled out above him, the abyss yawned below. Again and again he woke up gasping for breath and felt he was falling. Once he thought it was day and crawled out to look at the sky, but it was pitch-dark and still raining. His disquiet and anxiety had increased rather than diminished with sleep. He wandered off to try to calm himself down, but there was no one about. It rained and rained, and he sought shelter beside a wall.

At last it began to lighten. Other people got up, each in their own homes, and started to drink their hot coffee-water or milk-blend, or perhaps eat bread, and some, even, to have biscuits. Now when he no longer had any hope of coffee, it dawned upon him who it was who had kept him alive that summer. In fact he had never thought about the woman in the loft from this point of view before; in his eyes she had above all been the poetess, and he had never dared to associate her with the more primitive needs of human life. Now he realized that it was precisely these primitive needs of his that she had looked after at the same time as she was refusing to attend to his higher desires; yes, she had even burnt her poems rather than let him hear them.

She had seen to his needs in such a natural and simple way that he had not noticed it. She gave him an eiderdown and bed sheets and a pillow and a blanket. Then she gave him an alarm clock so that he would not oversleep. She had given him a change of clothing, inner and outer, socks, shoes, a cap, even a handkerchief. His dirty clothes had vanished without his noticing and come back clean. If there was a hole in his socks, it had been darned before he knew it; if there was a hole in his shoes, it was patched; if his hair got too long, she cut it for him. At her table he ate better than he had ever known before, milk, whey, cream, cheese, butter, sugar, fresh fish, potatoes, flatbread, meat, sugared pancakes on Sundays, sometimes doughnuts. Yes, she had even given him paper and writing utensils with which to compose his immortal poems for the fire, and to write his life story. It was she who had held a summer-long banquet for him in her taciturn, tranquil way. She inhabits a higher sphere, he had thought; but the reason why she was raised above the humdrum plane was simply that she did not shrink from any humdrum work but had it all under control without difficulty—a poet who dwelt in the high halls of beauty at the same time as her hand was automatically writing down the stupid, monotonous letters in the alphabet of human speech.

At breakfast, when he had not tasted food for twenty-four hours, he plucked up courage and went to see Pétur Pálsson the manager. There was a new doorkeeper now and it was no longer as easy to reach the manager as it had sometimes been before—but then the estate no longer owned him any more, he owned the estate. The woman who came to the door seemed to have spent all her life as a doorkeeper for Privy Councillors. She told the visitor to wait until the manager was ready to receive him; then closed the door in his face. He tried to press himself as hard as possible against the outer door to take advantage of the shelter of the eaves. There was a smell of coffee from inside the house. His fingers were numb with cold. Finally he plucked up courage and knocked again. The same woman came to the door and looked at him as if she had never seen him before.

“Could I perhaps have a word with Pétur?” asked the poet.

“If it’s the manager you’re referring to, I don’t know whether he’s ready to receive visitors,” she said, as if the manager were some kind of duchess.

Eventually the poet was allowed in to see the manager as he sat in his private office poring over large documents and muttering figures in an undertone, with his new hat on his head, sucking a cigar with a lordly expression of hauteur which seemed to have been borrowed from the south because it did not really belong on his own face. The poet felt he did not know this man; he was almost becoming afraid of this new manager in advance. Finally, though, he had the nerve to clear his throat, take off his wet cap, brush his hair from his forehead, and say, “Good-day.”

The manager went on for a long time mumbling tens and hundreds of thousands and writing these figures down on various sheets of paper with an authoritative and responsible expression and groaning. The poet counted up to two hundred. Eventually the manager laid down his pen and said sharply, “Good-day.”

“Good-day,” said the poet again.

“Yes, have I not just said Good-day, man?” asked the manager. “As far as I’m aware I’ve already said Good-day. Where are you from? And what d’you want?

“D–don’t you recognize me?” said the poet. “My name is Ólafur Kárason. I’ve been with you this summer.”

“Ólafur what?” asked the manager. “With me? What’s all this drivel; no one’s been with me this summer. Tell me what you want quickly; I haven’t any time.”

“Have you then forgotten that you’re my benefactor?” said the poet.

The benefactor sucked at his half-chewed cigar and let out a cloud of smoke.

“I was going to ask you if it was possible for you to do something for me this autumn, as you did in spring,” said the poet.

The manager replied, “I have always been prepared to sacrifice everything for a good cause. But those who have no soul, I reckon it’s best to bury at once. That’s always been my opinion, my lad.”

He stuck the half-cigar into his mouth and pulled again with all his might so that the smoke lay like a fogbank round his head.

“I composed a long poem this summer, but no one wanted to hear it, so I thought perhaps the same thing would happen this autumn,” said the poet, who realized at once which way the wind was blowing.

It then transpired that the manager recognized the boy perfectly well. He said that all excuses were unnecessary—“I know exactly what words you used in front of my right-hand man about this matter. Those who work against the cause of the estate have to support themselves. I’m no idiot, if you must know.”

Until now, Pétur had been speaking in a rather impersonal managerial style, but now he abandoned this boring tone, banged the table, and went on: “D’you think I don’t know that you and that p–person I’ve been keeping off the parish for two years have been conspiring to make me look ridiculous here on my own estate and to mock my most sacred ideals, and using the opportunity while other poets who are a thousand times better poets are not yet back from working at the hay harvest or the herring, like for instance Reimar Vagnsson, and refusing to compose an ode in honor of those whom God has forgiven, and calling them ghosts and saying to my right-hand man that the soul doesn’t exist? You must think I’m just one of these damned small fry! But you’ll find out that those who won’t use their poetic talents for the spiritual rebirth of the nation, and who betray me at a sacred hour—they’ll learn what it’s all about. I hold you on a par with that wh-whore and her drunkard who didn’t even have the energy to spread dung on the homefields, to say nothing of making people work. It was reckoned an achievement this summer if you were seen straggling into the meadow before midday, while he himself was lying in bed with a hangover. No, from now on there won’t be any kid-glove treatment on my estate, if you must know, my lad. And incidentally, since you’ve got the effrontery to show your face in front of me, let me ask you one thing—who set fire to the house?”

The poet felt giddy and replied in falsetto, “I don’t understand it; it’s quite incomprehensible. I was out for a walk along the seashore with
órunn of Kambar . . .”

“I’m not concerned about any
órunn of Kambar, and anyway that girl’s left this estate and is going abroad. I ask, what do you know about it, as the only person who went near the building that night?”

“I didn’t go near the building that night.”

“That’s a lie!”

“I swear it. I sat all evening in the loft with Hólmfríður, and was reading a book.”

“Yes, d’you think I don’t know that you’ve corrupted one another with lies, slanders, insinuations, and gossip about me, that wh–wh . . .”

Then the poet interrupted with a sob in his throat and tears in his eyes: “That’s not true, Pétur; I’ve never known a more honest person in word or deed than Hólmfríður in the loft.”

Pétur Pálsson removed the cigar from his mouth, absolutely flabbergasted, and sat open-mouthed for a moment. “It isn’t true?” he asked in amazement. Then he went on with growing force: “So what I say isn’t true? Here? In my own house? Then what is true, may I ask? No, if a fellow like you is going to tell me what’s true and what isn’t true at home, here in my own private house, then the time has undoubtedly come for the sheriff to have a word with you in court, and with a vengeance, so that no one is left in any doubt where materialism leads the individual. You can stop thinking, you so-called intelligentsia who are nevertheless the most useless riffraff of all the riffraff, that I’m such small fry and such an idiot that you can tell me this is true or that isn’t true at your pleasure. It’s I, and not you, who owns this estate, and it’s I, and not you, who decides what’s true and what isn’t true here on this estate; and those who don’t want to sacrifice anything for me and my own cause on my own estate, they’ll sooner or later get to hear the voice of the law, and with a vengeance. Who knows but that the law will look with different eyes on my cause than you so-called intelligentsia, my lad.”

“I see,” whispered the poet, and leaned back exhausted against the wall like a man about to be shot. “So perhaps I set fire to the house, too.”

“I won’t express any opinion about that; it’s the law that determines that,” said the manager and was not angry any longer, because he saw that the poet was on the point of collapse. “Here’s two krónur, and out you go.”