Independent People (26 page)

“How?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said his mother.

Then he rested on his mother’s breast for a while and was conscious of nothing in all the world but the beating of his mother’s heart. At length he rose up and asked:

“Mamma, why shall I sing for the whole world?”

“It’s a dream,” she replied.

“Shall I sing for the heath?”

“Yes.”

“For the marshes?”

“Yes.”

“And shall I sing for the mountain, too?”

“The elf-lady says so,” replied his mother.

“I shall have to sing for the folk in Rauthsmyri church too, then, I suppose,” he said thoughtfully.

“I suppose so.”

He nestled up to his mother again, turning it over in his mind, wrapped in the glamour of this prophecy, the winged words.

“Mamma,” he said at length, “will you teach me to sing for the whole world?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “When the spring comes.”

And closed her eyes wearily.

And so, if he let his eyes wander from the knots in the roof to the dishes in the cupboard and on the shelves, or to the pot-stick hanging on the wall and the pan standing on the floor, all of them with the strangely guileless expression that cooking utensils alone can assume in the helplessness of day; or if he caught the glitter of the flowery, extravagant cup-women, fragile and afraid of being laughed at; then he would always feel so noble that he would promise never to tell tales of any of them and, closing one eye out of politeness, would gaze at them with the other one only. “I too am altogether different from what I seem,” he would say; and meant the unsung songs and the great countries, distant as the courses of day, which awaited him.

And so at last would be heard from the kettle the far-famed gurgle which proclaims that the water is on the point of boiling. By this time the boy was usually famished enough to feel that he could eat anything he could get his teeth into, not only hay, but peat and dung as well. So it was no wonder that he waited longingly to see what his slice of bread would be like: whether his grandmother had cut it right across the loaf, or whether she had given him only half a slice and that perhaps with one edge thin as paper. And how would she spread it? Would she just dab a lump
of tallow and cod-liver oil in the middle so that the crust was as dry as it had been yesterday? Of this delicious mixture the boy could never have enough, it left such a pungent flavour in the mouth; and if there was one thing to his grandmother’s credit, it was that she was rarely stingy with it, but smeared on liberal quantities with her right thumb. She was inclined to be sparing with the sugar, however, and had an unfortunate habit of breaking different-sized pieces from the lump, in which case he might easily be the one to get the smallest. The consideration of these matters was never without its elements of anxiety and suspense.

Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room. This was morning’s hallowed moment. In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten and the soul is inspired with faith in the future; when all was said and done, it was probably true that there really were far-off places, even foreign countries. Some day, incredible though it might
seem,
spring would come with its birds, its buttercups in the home-field. And very likely Mother would get up too when the days began to lengthen, just as she had done last year and the year before.

As the steaming jet curved down into the coffee-pot, the first words of the day were heard in the croft: the prelude employed by his grandmother to conjure Asta Sollilja from her depths of sleep. This ceremony was repeated morning after morning in accordance with an unvarying rule, and though to Asta herself it seemed every morning equally strange, the boy knew it well enough to remember it his whole life through.

“Merciful heavens, what an awful sight! Just look at her lying there, a half-grown woman, fast asleep at this time of day! When in the name of heaven will they ever begin to show some sense?”

Was his grandmother really so silly as to believe she could wake anyone with a feeble, quavering rigmarole like that? It was for all the world as if she were just gabbling away to herself in between her morning hymns. Anyway, Asta Sollilja slept on, her head
in
the corner, mouth open, chin up, and head back, with one hand under her ear and the other half-open on the coverlet as if she thought in her sleep that someone would come and lay happiness in her palm. Her shift was patched at the neck. After a few moments the prelude was resumed:

“It’s plain enough to see that these poor wretches haven’t a thought in their heads. How anyone is ever going to make anything out of them”—she often used the plural of Asta Sollilja—
“and hardly a shirt to their backs!” (Higher) “Sollilja, your needles are waiting, woman! It’s nearly nine o’clock and soon midday.”

His grandmother’s idea of time was for the boy an endless source of wonder.

The water followed its fascinating curve from the kettle into the bag, making a heavy, hollow sound and sending up a cloud of rich, aromatic vapour. And Asta Sollilja slept on. But as the coffee filtered through the bag, the old woman went on with her task of waking her:

“You’ll be a lazy good-for-nothing all your life long, Asta Sollilja.”

But Asta Sollilja slept on.

“You needn’t think you’re going to get your coffee in bed like somebody grand, a twelve-year-old girl, nearly thirteen and soon confirmed. I’ll have your father take the whip to your back before that, my lady.”

But these matins had no visible effect on Asta Sollilja.

Only when old Hallbera went over to the bed and shook her did the girl open her
eyes.
She opened them with difficulty, her lids fluttering in terror as she stared wildly round her. At last she realized where she was, and hiding her forehead in the crook of her elbow, she started snivelling.

She was a dark-haired maiden, pale, with a long jaw and strong chin and a slight cast in one eye. Her eyebrows and lashes were dark, but the pupils were the grey of broken iron. Hers was the only face in the croft that had color and form; and it was because of that that the boy used often to stare at his sister as though wondering where she came from. She was very pale; the long, mature face was stamped with concern, almost with experience of life. For as long as the boy could remember, Asta Sollilja had been his big sister. But though breast and shoulders lacked the budding form of childhood, had outgrown it by now, or had never attained it, she lacked no less the rounded softness of maturity; child she was not, but she was equally far from being a woman.

There’s your coffee for you, Sollilja,” said the grandmother as she placed her cup in the farthest corner of the room. That’s as near as I care to carry it for you.”

The girl scratched her head for a while, yawning and tasting her mouth; then she pulled her petticoat from under the pillow and put it on in the warmth between the blankets. Slipping her
long, slim legs from under the clothes, she thrust her unwashed feet into thick woollen stockings and crossed one ankle over her knee, without shame, and in such a manner that when the boy considered her immature limbs, it was as always only to arrive once more at the conclusion that though she was his big sister, she was nevertheless, as far as form was concerned, a much inferior being to the brothers.

But now the period of speculation was at an end, for at that moment, the grandmother brought him his coffee and woke his elder brothers. At last the boy would know from what part of the loaf his slice had been cut, whether the dripping reached all the way to the crusts, whether his lump of sugar was a big one or a little one. By this time there was light on the window. Once more winter morning had succeeded in opening his heavy eyelids.

Now day began.

M
EALS
in this family were eaten as a rule in silence and in an atmosphere of almost furtive solemnity, as though some dark impressive rite were being performed. Each and every one huddled intently over the plate on his knees and picked the bones from his fish with a precision worthy of a watchmaker, or, holding the bowl up under his chin, swallowed his porridge with undivided attention. It was marvellous how much porridge the boy’s father could guzzle in a very short time. The old woman, her back turned on the others, would eat, without a knife, near the fire. For the morning meal there was always hot oatmeal porridge, black pudding, a slice of bread, the cold leavings of yesterday’s salt fish, and coffee warmed up and served with a piece of sugar. The sugar was the object of most anticipation. The mother, who had not the appetite of a small bird, would raise herself with difficulty to a half-sitting position in bed and get herself some medicine from one of the eighty bottles supplied her by her Member of Parliament. Her face was grey and flaccid, her eyes large and fevered; she could not chew because of an infection of her mouth. Sometimes the youngest son felt that it was unkind of his father to sit right in front of her there and slop so much porridge into himself when she was nibbling at her bite of fish with such obvious distaste and swallowing the food with a pitiful shudder. Never did the children long so much for a nice juicy piece of meat or a
thick slice of rye bread and dripping as when they had finished eating.

After the morning meal Bjartur would lie down on the bed, a childish habit, snore cruelly for a moment or two, then spring up with the eyes of a man dogged by incredible peril and disappear to look to his sheep. A hut, now full to capacity, had been built at one end of the croft for the ewes, but the lambs and the two-year-olds were still housed under the same roof as the family. The elder brothers swept the mangers, raked out the muck on the floor, and cleared pathways round the house, which the stubbornly falling snow filled up again. The sheep had to negotiate eighteen steps cut in the snow to climb out of the drift in front of the door, the folk after them, and a cleft had also to be cut in the drift over the window to admit daylight.

And after the morning meal, when father and the elder brothers had gone to see to the sheep, then first was day begun in the croft, begun in all earnest, begun in its length, its breadth, day with its evening that no one could foresee. The light was scanty because of the small window and the thickness of the snow. Two of the beds had been made; in the third lay the mother, motionless, her confinement coincident as usual with the illness, lasting rarely less than three months, which laid her up every winter with such dutiful regularity. She had had a baby for the Bailiff and the minister the year before last also, and on that occasion had been bedfast for four months. She would turn over to a fresh position occasionally, suppressing her groans and moving slowly and cautiously because of her bedsores. On the edge of her bed, by the window, Asta Sollilja was sitting, knitting herself a vest. She was sitting so far back on her bed that her feet were dangling out of reach of the floor, but in this position of course she could rest her head against the wall occasionally. Now and then she would let herself slump against the wall and fall asleep.

Grandma took her wheel and spun.

And the wheel-whir of the long days filled the croft; and this one wheel spinning was like the wheel of time, which carries our souls away to its own land.

Little Nonni might now play for a short while. So he herded his sheep-horns into pasture up on all the beds, sticking some of them under the rafters, which represented mountain peaks, though actually the sheep were climbing the inside of the mountain peaks, and tethering the jaw-bones, his cows, to the feet of the range, for that was where he and Bjartur of Summerhouses
differed: little Nonni had ten cows. Then he set off on long journeys on the leg-bones, taking his bearings in unknown places behind the moors and the mountains and riding his horses to the fjords, long journeys and stiff, for in this room there were distances past all reckoning, if a journey followed the laws that only he could understand. Even the bed-ends were dangerous mountain paths, complete with ravines, snowdrifts, and ghosts. He had to stay overnight at one place on the way (under the table near the window). It was not before spring, when the distances of reality reappeared with thawing snow and an improvement in his mother’s health, that the room’s distances began to dissolve. And so obscure were these distances that, in spite of the length of the journey, the destination by the hatchway was not more than a hand’s breadth from his own cow-shed.

Arriving in town, he had a chat with the doctor and the merchant. He bought an enormous load of raisins, for in his household they lived exclusively on such things, raisins in cases, raisins in sacks, likewise loaf-sugar. In his dispensary the doctor had about as many bottles of medicine as the Bailiff had ewes, five hundred or thereabouts, but, strange as it may seem, the boy bought not a single drop. He therefore refused to promise the doctor his vote in return for medicine as his father had done. He had never come across anything so rank-smelling or so bitter as this medicine of the doctor’s. He suspected at bottom that it prevented his mother from getting better, even that his father bought it to make sure that his mother would not get up, and that the doctor was party to the conspiracy. For this reason he did not like the doctor and refused to vote such a man into Parliament. He voted for the merchant instead, out of respect for his raisins. And now the doctor grew angry and threatened to call in the Sheriff. But the boy was not at all afraid; he promised to pay his debt by giving the doctor an old dog, a sheep’s ankle-bone, and this started a mighty quarrel in Fjord.

‘What in the name of goodness is all the row about there?” exclaimed his grandmother; but the boy made no reply for the moment, because Grandma belonged to another plane, other dimensions. Should she say anything further, it would be at most a light flurry of snow from the north.

“If you can’t live in peace with yourself, I'll have to give you a taste of the belt.”

“Grandma,” said the boy then, “you don’t exist. You’re only a storm in the air. I’m on a trip to town.”