World Light (61 page)

“Yes, he was always full of ideas,” said Ólafur Kárason. “And perhaps a greater poet than both of us put together, even though he never understood the secret of poetic form.”

“You’ve no doubt heard of the National and Cultural Drawers Society?” said Reimar the poet.

No, unfortunately, that was something Ólafur Kárason had not heard about.

“It so happened that the year before last, a society was formed in Sviðinsvík with the object of providing destitute children in the village with footwear; it was Faroese-Jens and his wife, Jórunn of Veghús, who organized it. Through this organization they managed to provide poor children and youngsters with socks and shoes at very reasonable prices. Pétur
ríhross, of course, realized at once that a society of this kind must have been inspired by Danes, Russians and poets, and hastened to seek a grant from Júel Júel to start a society to provide Sviðinsvík kings with free drawers. ‘If the Danes, Russians, and Poets start a Socks Society, then I’m starting a Drawers Society,’ said Pétur
ríhross. ‘I insist that everyone, both old and young, men and women, go around in free drawers from me. And my society won’t be any treasonable Socks Society but a True-Icelandic, High-Cultural and National Drawers Society. And my Drawers Society will crush all socks and shoes in Sviðinsvík; it will grind all socks and shoes; it will have the guts out of all socks and shoes!’ ”

“The name of Pétur
ríhross will live for so long as Iceland is inhabited,” said Ólafur Kárason.

“And yet he will have to share his fame with Jón the snuffmaker for a long time,” said Reimar the poet. “Or did you never hear of the ballot that was held in the Society of True Icelanders in Sviðinsvík last fall?”

Far too many things had passed Ólafur Kárason by in that remote corner of the world, Bervík, including this particular ballot.

“Good heavens, yes!” said Reimar the poet. “They held a ballot in the Society about who was the most exemplary man who had ever been born. Now, I know you’ll think it was Pétur
ríhross who got the most votes, but you’re wrong there, my lad. Out of almost two hundred votes, Jón the snuffmaker got sixty-one, and Pétur
ríhross only sixty. Napoleon the Great got seventeen, Júel Júel Júel fifteen, and the secretary five. Jesus Christ got only one.”

But by now Ólafur Kárason was growing tired of hearing about Sviðinsvík and regretted that he had ever started talking about this place which he had at one time done his best to forget.

“Well, Reimar,” he said, “changing the subject for a moment, you haven’t told me anything about yourself. What’s the news of you and yours, and above all, what poetry have you been composing? This would be just the time to hear a good ballad.”

“Then I’ll have to untie you from the mare’s tail,” said Reimar the poet. “I’m not reciting poetry to a bound man. Free men, free poetry! We’ll let the damned sheriff get out of sight.”

They lingered for a while until the sheriff and his companions disappeared round the shoulder of a hill. Then his escort freed Ólafur Kárason from the horse’s tail and unfastened the rope around his wrists.

When Ólafur Kárason was free, Reimar the poet said, “I’ve made it a habit never to criticize someone in fetters, but now that you’re free I can’t contain myself any longer. What a damned silly ass you are, man!”

“Oh?” said Ólafur Kárason, not quite sure what he had done wrong this time.

“You had an affair with a gabber,” said Reimar the poet.

Olaf Kárason was greatly disappointed in his friend at this, and said sadly, “You, too, Reimar!”

“Yes, and I’m not taking it back; the Lord forgives people everything except their own stupidity,” said Reimar.

“May I remind you, Reimar, that it’s only a few years since a pregnant girl was confirmed in Grenivík Church. And what’s more, it’s an old saying in this country that the children of children are fortune’s favorites.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” said Reimar the poet. “No one feels sorry for gabbers as such. Gabbers are no good, as it says in the Sagas. But if one wants to commit a crime, one should do it in accordance with the law, because all major crimes are done in accordance with the law. A man of your age should know that law and justice apply only to idiots. A man of experience always plays it safe, my lad. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever got it signed and sealed that a gabber would keep her mouth shut over trivialities.”

“Everything that God protects is spared,” said Ólafur Kárason. “I have never been spared. But it doesn’t matter so much for myself; it only really matters when one’s own transgressions hurt those who are dependent upon one.”

Then Reimar the poet said, “Please don’t think I’m being an old pastor’s wife. The sin is not in being unfaithful, far from it. Those who aren’t unfaithful are usually villains and scoundrels towards others, especially towards their wives. The sin lies in being unfaithful in such a way that before you know it, you find yourself tied to a horse’s tail.”

“How very different we are as poets, Reimar Vagnsson!” said Ólafur Kárason. “I have always had one ideal as far as love is concerned: one woman. I only love one woman, and could never love anyone but her. All other women are a crime or a misfortune in my life.”

“Who is she?” asked Reimar the poet.

“I don’t know,” said Ólafur Kárason. “Fortune hasn’t allowed me to find her yet.”

“You’ll never find her,” said Reimar the poet. “No one ever finds her. Monogamy is a mixture of monasticism and self-deception.”

“Every man is his own world,” said Ólafur Kárason. “My world is my law, your world is yours. I love one girl and haven’t found her, but am tied to my wife through compassion, which is perhaps stronger than love. My whole life is like the mind of a man who has lost his way on a fogbound mountain.”

Then Reimar the poet said, “I’m now as old as my beard suggests, my lad, and I haven’t yet strayed from the right road in life—never composed a verse with half-rhymes or failed to find a word to rhyme with another. And if I’ve sometimes been a bit malicious in my versifying, it’s not because I’ve ever felt any malice towards anyone, but because they were an easy target. I’ve been married to my old woman for nearly thirty years, and we’ve had seven strong and happy children whom we have given a good start in life, and I’d like to see the father who has been better to his children and his old woman than Reimar the poet. For instance, I’m going to use this journey to get hold of some stockfish at Aðalfjörður, and a man on the Kaldsvík coast has half promised me a side of beef.”

“This is another point where we are miles apart,” said Ólafur Kárason. “I have never provided for the home. To bring up fat, contented children is an ambition I have never understood. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s my nature to retreat from the belief that true love between a man and a woman is indivisible. That’s how I regard my responsibilities—and mourn my shortcomings.”

“You could well be a tolerable hymn-writer and satirist some day, my dear Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík,” said Reimar the poet. “But someone who has no notion of a man’s duty towards a woman can never be a great poet. The moment a woman is in flower, she wants children and yet more children, that’s what a woman wants. A man’s love doesn’t give a woman her fulfillment; it’s first and foremost children: five children, ten children, fifteen children to bear in her womb and bring forth in pain and bring up in riot and disorder, children to wake over at night, to spank and caress in turn, children who either scatter all over the country and settle in far-off places or die of all sorts of ailments, children to bury in the ground and sing hymns over. A married man has only one duty towards his wife in order to make her happy, and that is to ensure that she is constantly pregnant, and with a child in her arms.”

“What a very happily married man you have been, Reimar!” said Ólafur Kárason.

“My old woman’s a good old woman who has always looked upon me as a great poet and a great traveler and has always been ready to take my side,” said Reimar the poet. “She has always looked askance at the women who turned up their noses at me; she thought it showed bad taste and was therefore an affront to herself.”

They had the wind behind them, these two old acquaintances, fellow poets and traveling companions, who were no doubt just as far apart today as when they had traveled together for the first time. Yet this was the second time that Reimar the poet had had a hand in freeing Ólafur Kárason from his bonds: the latter had changed places with the black mare, despite the wishes of the authorities.

“Two people can never understand one another’s lives,” said Ólafur Kárason. “But poetry is the Redeemer of us all.”

And then the ballads began.

10

When Ólafur Kárason the poet had been kept in the cold and dark so-called prison at Kaldsvík for three days, and faced two more court hearings, he began to weaken. The sheriff’s frowns and whisky bass got the upper hand. Finally he was ready to confess. He made his confession with the preamble that he had not held out from fear of punishment—that was neither here nor there. He had been thinking of his wife and son; he said he had shrunk from causing them humiliation and sorrow. Whatever a crime might be in reality, and human behavior generally, crimes had to be proved and admitted in order to be called by that name. On the other hand it is a minor issue whether a person knows that be has committed it or whether a person actually has committed it, or whether other people know that one has committed it, or whether crimes actually do exist: with the proof and the confession, the crime becomes a fact. And Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir and Jón Ólafsson were sacrificed.

He said it was quite true that on the morning before Christmas Eve he had woken up when the widow at Syðrivík had gone out to tend the livestock with her older children. Jasína Gottfreðlína, whom he regarded as a grown-up girl however little she might know about the Christian faith, was lying in the next bed; he had gone into her bed, turned down the lamp, lain down beside her, and slept with her. And she had received him willingly for the simple reason that a grown-up girl in love with a man thinks that nothing is more natural or inevitable. And that was all.

He found himself standing that evening in the county town, in the dim light of the scattered streetlamps.

It was here, to this place, that he had dreamed of coming in the old days; it was here that he had intended to go to school and become a man of learning and a famous poet; and last but not least, it was here that he had hopes of a mother who lived in a real house with a window on each side of the door. It was to her, over countless mountains, that he had wanted to flee when he was in distress in alien places.

He wandered about for a long time in this big place, no longer a weeping child, unfortunately, but an unshaven, hungry law-breaker with a cold, who had forfeited his right to a mother. The days were gone forever when he had been so happy that he believed that the height of unhappiness was to carry heavy buckets from an icy spring.

But even though his situation was now such that he no longer had any claim to a mother in a real house, nevertheless an old defiance against this more or less imaginary woman arose in him, anger over her treatment of the little boy who was put in a sack and taken away in a snowstorm, a lack of any desire to whitewash her even though she was a great and noble woman while he was a convicted criminal. If he knocked at her door and she resented meeting a forgotten past in the person of a son awaiting sentence, he was going to say: If such things had happened to him in the snowstorm of life, who was it then who had sent him out into that snowstorm, crying in a sack, when all he had wanted was to have a mother and to rest against her bosom? That’s how he was going to justify himself in relation to this woman.

Of course the house where she lived was not anything like the real house of his hopeful dreams; on the doorstep he felt he had lost his way and that his dream-mother was not only better but also truer than reality. The shadow of the house convinced him that the woman he had dreamed about did not exist. But he had already knocked on the door, and all forebodings were too late.

He was shown up long, narrow stairs where the permanent smell of boiled fish from years gone by assaulted him. In an untidy attic under a sloping ceiling he was directed to the apartment of the woman he had asked for.

She was short and bloated, her face with its plump, shiny cheeks reminded one of enameled clay; her eyes were like fractures in old iron. Never had Ólafur Kárason suspected that he had a fat mother. He asked if he had the name right and she said Yes, and then he offered his hand and said Hullo, and she replied curtly and asked who this person might be.

“My name is Ólafur Kárason,” he said.

“Ólafur Ká . . . ?” she said, wide-eyed with surprise.

“Yes,” he said. “I am your son.”

“Well, I never!” said the woman, and there was no doubt that she almost fainted at the visitor’s unexpected news; but she recovered quickly and gave him her hand. “Do come in,” she said.

“Many thanks,” he said.

She shut the door and looked at him.

“Well, I’m absolutely flabbergasted!” she said. “Do have a seat.”

“Thank you,” he said and sat down, and brushed the hair from his forehead.

“I would never have thought you looked like that,” said the woman. “How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-one,” he said.

“My God, was I only seventeen when I had you!” she said, and the words seemed to him to be a blend of self-reproach and excuse. “Am I seeing right? Are you red-haired?”

She came right over to him and ran her fingers through his hair and had a good look to see if he was red-haired all the way down to roots. “Yes, you really are red-haired! My God, no one in my family has ever been red-haired! I’m simply speechless!”

“How is your health?” he asked.

“Health?” she said. “Don’t even mention it. I haven’t any health at all.”

“Haven’t you been to see a doctor?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been to every doctor I can get hold of. Whenever I hear of a new doctor somewhere I either write to him or go there myself. They’ll soon have tried on me every mixture there is, but nothing helps. I’ve often thought of having an operation. It’s no life at all.”

She had a bed, a sofa, a chest of drawers, and a broken-down sewing machine. There was no sign of any work in hand; but there was a picture on the wall of a noble lady in a broad-brimmed hat meeting a huntsman at a gate in the road, and there were some other foreign pictures in color, but no family portraits. On a corner-shelf there stood an oil stove and some tin jars and ladles.

She did not ask him any personal questions, which he interpreted as meaning that she knew his circumstances and did not want to know any more. The silence was fraught with embarrassment on both sides.

“You’re a seamstress, I’m told,” said Ólafur Kárason.

“That’s all over,” she said. “Some are in fashion, I’ve never been in fashion. I’ve always been misunderstood all my life. Nobody has ever been so misunderstood as I’ve been. Actually, I’ve never been anybody at all.”

“Yes, you’re not the only one,” said Ólafur Kárason.

“Your father was the one who misunderstood me first. My God, how that man misunderstood me! And everyone else. Yet he misunderstood himself most of all.”

“I’ve no way of judging that,” said Ólafur Kárason. “I have never seen him. What news can you give me of him, by the way?”

“News? Of him? Me? No, I can’t give you any news of him, for the simple reason that there has never been any news of him; and never will be. He really wasn’t a person at all. I never knew what he was. I think he wasn’t anything.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, perhaps,” said the poet.

“It’s at least twenty years since I heard his name mentioned,” said the woman. “He must surely be dead long ago; or else gone to the north.”

“He sometimes sent me writing materials when I was small,” said Ólafur Kárason.

“Yes, of course, that’s right,” she said. “You’re said to be a poet. Won’t you have some coffee?”

“Thank you,” he said. “There’s really no need.”

“You’ve never sent me a poem,” she said when she had put the kettle on. “I really would have loved to get a poem!”

She had false teeth, like a woman of importance, and that helped to widen the gulf between them.

“I often thought of sending you a poem,” he said. “I was even thinking of coming myself. I was often in distress.”

“You should use the opportunity to write a poem about me while you’re in town. How long are you thinking of staying?”

“I’m going home tomorrow,” he said. “If I only knew where to stay the night.”

It was noticeable that she did not need to ask where he had been staying the last few nights. In his shoes, she said, she would stay at the Salvation Army; she had heard that a bed cost twenty-five
aurar
.

“I have a poetry book,” she said. “You ought to compose something for it while I’m making the coffee; a lot of poets have written something in it.”

He said it took him a long time to compose poetry, and that he had to be in a very special mood for it.

“I know lots of poets who can make poetry wherever they are,” she said.

“Just so,” he said.

“I’m so terribly fond of poetry,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve inherited your gifts from me and my family. You should go and see the editor of
The Alfirðing
at once tomorrow, he’s got a black beard, and get him to publish a book of your poems so that you’ll be famous. He has a big printing plant.”

The visitor made no reply to this suggestion but stared vacantly into the blue, and she looked at him sideways, half furtively; how pale he was and haggard, and though his eyes were almost unnaturally bright, there lurked in them such grief that it was difficult to imagine that this man had ever known a moment’s happiness all his life.

“It isn’t really enough just to be a poet, I suppose, far from it,” she said at last. “Why have you never thought of being something?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You should have become something,” she said.

He was very hungry because he had had nothing to eat except coffee and hardtack biscuits in the prison that morning before the court hearing. “Mummy, give me a piece of bread” was really the only thing he wanted to say, but between him and this woman were thirty years with thirty winters of snowstorms and innumerable mountains. The kettle was coming to the boil, and she had started to crumble the chicory into the coffeepot.

They heard noises on the stair and in the attic, coming closer and closer; then the door was thrown open and an unsightly drunk appeared in the doorway. He growled a little at the visitor at first, then lurched across the room, cursing, turned to Ólafur Kárason, grabbed him by the lapels and started to shake him.

“Who the devil are you, eh? What the devil d’you want, eh?”

“My name is Ólafur Kárason,” said the poet.

The newcomer lost control of himself so completely now that he might have been called a comparatively peaceable and courteous man hitherto. He started to heap on the poet the worst abuse and the most obscene insults imaginable, and ended by saying that a man who had brought upon his mother’s name such everlasting disgrace should get out of her sight at once. He did not stop at mere words, but hauled Ólafur Kárason out of his seat and across the floor, and threw him out of the room; then he threw him down the stairs as well.

And the Ljósvíkingur’s old dream of having a mother came to an end.