The Atom Station (11 page)

And that was all that I had lived, a girl long fully grown, until the night I lost the key.

*
A medieval Icelandic collection of Scandinavian heroic and mythological poetry.

10. I
am dismissed

While I was filling the cups at the breakfast table, Madam asked me in a cold courtroom voice, bluntly, and without looking at me: “Where were you last night?”

“At a cell-meeting,” I replied.

First she gave a little gasp, but quickly controlled the twitching of her mouth; she made a squeezed, high-pitched sound and then said with remarkable calm, although her face had gone white: “Just so, indeed. And what matters were on the agenda there, pray?”

“The day-nursery,” I said.

“What day-nursery?”

“We need a day-nursery,” I said.

“Who needs a day-nursery?” she asked.

“I do.”

“And who is to build it?” she asked.

“The public,” I replied.

“The public!” she said. “And what manner of creature is that, pray?”

It was quite remarkable how icily ironical the blessed woman could be, considering how deeply she felt. But she could conceal her feelings no longer.

“Are you so shameless,” she began, “that you can tell me straight to my face that you have been at a cell-meeting; admit it in my own hearing in my own house; announce it at our table, in front of these two innocent children, yes, even go so far as to present Communist demands here at this table, demands that we taxpayers should start subsidizing the debauchery of Communists?”

“Come now, my dear,” her husband interrupted, smiling. “Who is demanding that? Thank the Lord, we subsidize our own debauchery first of all before we start subsidizing the debauchery of others.”

“Yes, is that not typical of you bourgeois political cowards to be always ready to side against your own class? To flourish only in an atmosphere of intrigue, in some morass of deceit? But now it is I who say, Here and no further! I and others like me who have given birth to our children according to the laws of God and man, brought them up on moral principles and created for them a model home—the very idea that we should start to pay for the debauchery of those who want to pull down the houses on our children's heads!”—and here Madam rose from her chair, shook her fist in my face so that the bracelets rattled, and said, “No thank you! And get out!”

The little girl looked at her mother open-mouthed and had started to clasp her hands, but the little fat one filled his cheeks with air. The master went on eating his porridge, and puckered up his eyes and raised his eyebrows, the way people do at cards so as not to reveal what sort of hand they are holding.

Where could I have thought that I was? Had I imagined that this house was just a hillock that had come into being in the landscape by accident? That here one could talk about things with the frivolity of the poor? Had I imagined that in this house talk of cells was some sort of innocent family whimsy, a refrain one has grown accustomed to hum when the mind is blank? If so, I had made a grave mistake. I was thunderstruck. So hopelessly incapable was I of understanding better folk that I did not even know how to keep a servile tongue in my head. In a flash there appeared before my mind the difference between the two worlds in which we lived, this woman and I; although I was staying under her roof we were such poles apart from one another that it was only with half justification possible to classify us together as human beings; we were both vertebrates, certainly, even mammals, but there all resemblance ended; any human society of which both of us were members was merely an empty phrase. I asked, with a sort of idiotic grimace, if I was to consider myself no longer employed in this household?

“My dear,” said the man to the woman, “I think we shall find ourselves in difficulties. You are about to go to America. Who is going to look after the house for a whole year? You know that our Jona is more than half away with the Smaland-American gods.”

“I can get a hundred maids who are not impertinent to me to my face in my own house,” she said. “I can get a thousand maids who either have the grace to tell a lie, or at least say nothing, if they have been up to something the night before. This woman has given me nothing but insolence ever since she came into this house, full of some sort of northishness as if she were my superior. I cannot stand her.”

After a moment's thought I realized that I had no further obligations in this house and walked up to my room to gather up my few belongings, determined to go out into the cold rather than stay in this place another minute.

I AM ASKED TO STAY ON

Just then footsteps came pounding towards my door, there was a violent knocking and the door burst open simultaneously; the little fat boy stood there breathlessly in the doorway.

“Daddy says you're to stay until he's talked it over with you,” he said.

“How nice it is to be such a chubby little daddy's-boy,” I said and patted him, and then went on with my packing.

I expected him to leave when he had delivered his message, for he had always had little enough to say to me before, except when he sat on a wall with the Prime Minister's children and the other better-class children of the neighbourhood, shouting at me, “Organist, Coal-bum, O my blessed countryside!” Now he waited and watched me folding my Sunday dress and laying it topmost on my trunk, until he said in a funny mixture of impudence and wheedling, “Can I come with you to a cell meeting?”

“You'll get spanked, dearie,” I said.

“Shut up and lemme come to a cell meeting,” he said. “The damned Communists will never let a chap come.”

“You're surely not thinking of becoming a damned Communist, a sweet little dumpling like you?” I said.

He bristled and said, “You've no right to say anything to me while you're here in this house.”

“Now I can say both Yes and No in this house, for I'm leaving,” I said.

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a few crumpled hundred-kronur notes: “If I give you a hundred kronur will you let me come to a cell-meeting?”

“Do you think I'm going to make a damned Communist out of such a sweet little dumpling for a hundred kronur?”

“Two hundred,” he said.

I kissed him and he rubbed it off with his hand. But when he had raised his offer to the equivalent of a month's pay for a maid I could no longer restrain myself and said, “Away with you now and think shame on yourself, my poor little thing. I really ought to take down your trousers and spank you. A mite like you, trying to bribe grown-up folk—I should like to know where you've learned that trick, and you with such a wonderful man for a father.”

“D'you think my father doesn't offer bribes if he needs to?” said the boy.

I gave him a box on the ears.

“You'll be put in prison,” he said.

“And who's still got a bandage on his hand since the day he was slaughtering stolen minks?” I said.

“Are you stupid enough to think that anything will happen to me or my cousin Bubb?” he said. “We can do anything, and we can even be Communists if the damned Communists would allow it.”

“Communists only want to have good boys,” I said.

“I want to see everything and try everything,” said the boy. “I'm against everything.”

And then I took a look at this child. This was a twelve-year-old boy with blue eyes and curly hair. He stared back at me.

“Why do you always shout names at me when I walk down the street?” I asked.

“We're amusing ourselves,” he said. “We get bored. We want to be Communists.”

Ready to go, I shook my head.

“Daddy says you're to stay. To wait,” said the boy.

“What for?” I asked.

“Wait until Mummy leaves,” he said.

“Go downstairs and say that I have nothing to wait for,” I said.

I was busy for a moment turning the key in the lock of my trunk, for the catch had jammed. When I looked up again the boy was still standing there in the middle of the floor, with that silken hair, still staring at me with those clear blue eyes. He has stuffed the hundred-kronur bills back in his pocket and was biting his nails furiously; I had caught him at last in the act his nails bore witness to, always bitten down to the quick.

“Don't go, stay,” he said, without threats and without bribes this time, just in a sincere childish way, plaintively and a little shyly.

And now somehow I felt terribly irresolute, suddenly so sorry for the child; I sat down half-helplessly on my trunk and took hold of his hands and held them tight to stop him maltreating his nail like that, and pulled him close to me and said, “My poor little boy.”

11.
The children I acquired, and their souls

Madam flew with Pliers to America one day, and I had the children: their father bequeathed them to me, rather than fathered them upon me, at dinner that evening, smiling and preoccupied; it was a case of immaculate conception, as in the fairy tale about swallowing the fish.
*

“Then from now on you shall be called by your proper names,” I said.

“We shall reply by crushing you. We shall break your bones. We shall grind you,” said the beautiful daughter in a slow intense voice, savoring the words in her mouth like sweets—Crush, Break, Grind.

“Very well, then,” I said, “if you don't want to be called by your own lovely names I shall re-christen you out of my own head, for I shall never address you in African. Arngrim shall be called World-glow, Gudney, Fruit-blood, Thord Goldram, and Jona's little Christmas-card child shall be called Day-beam; and now come in out of the kitchen, Thorgunn dear, and eat with the rest of us.”

“The child's mother has entrusted me with teaching the child Good,” shouted the cook through the doorway.

“I have no intention of teaching her Evil,” I said.

“That's something new, then,” she said, “If salvation of the soul comes from the north.”

Doctor Bui Arland's face lit up on hearing this reply, and he stopped reading his paper.

The cook through the opening: “Does the Doctor and master want to countermand his wife's wishes on the very day she flies away—for the sake of northerners?”

“Hm,” said the Doctor. “I happen to be the Member of Parliament for these terrible people in the north: my constituency, you understand, my good woman?”

“Yes, but is it the constituency of the soul, pray, if I may make so bold as to ask the Doctor and master?”

The children's faces lit up, the whole table lit up.

“What says Ugla, who has newly acquired all these children?” said the Doctor, and scratched the nape of his neck, putting on a careworn expression. “Does she think it healthier for the soul to eat in the dining room or in the kitchen?”

“If the soul lives in the stomach …” I began, but the cook was quick to interrupt me.

“And that's a lie,” she said, “there's no soul that lives in the stomach, the soul that my blessed Saviour suffered for doesn't live in any stomach, so help me; on the other hand Sin has its origins there, for whatever happens below the waist is of the devil. And that's why the mistress of this house and Doctor's lady told me in so many words that this child should receive its nourishment through here with me with suitable prayers and thanks in the kitchen, so that this house shall have someone to redeem it in the same way as the righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Yes, well, I think the soul finds salvation in the dining room,” I said, “and not in the kitchen.”

“There, you see,” said the master. “It is no fun having to adjudicate between Pakistan and Hindustan. The one state is founded on the thesis that the salvation of the soul started with the Hegira, on the day that Mohammed departed from Mecca; the other state claims that the soul cannot be saved unless we transmigrate at least into a bull, if not an ass or even all the way down to a fish. Such problems can be solved in no other way than by each person equipping himself with a dagger. As far as I can see, my dear Jona, we shall just have to equip ourselves with daggers.”

The cook's foster child had adopted the habit, in order to counterbalance all the preaching, of missing no opportunity of cursing and swearing when the woman was not looking. I had sometimes been astonished at how long the child could sit in our privy behind the kitchen; she would be muttering something there in undertones for hours at a time. I thought at first that it was prayers, but when I applied my ear I discovered that she was, as far as I could hear, stringing together swear words. The poor thing, she only knew about three or four oaths, really, in addition to a few words for various tabooed parts of the body; these she had managed to discover by some unknown means. And when the darling little saint had cursed everything to Hell and back again in private on the seat for a good half hour she felt much better and came out uplifted, and began to tend her piddle-dolls. After a while she began to take advantage of the cook's dullness of hearing; she would sit in the corner of the kitchen with clasped hands watching her foster mother at work, and move her lips constantly as if she were reciting prayers, while in fact she was striving to say Hell and arse-hole a hundred times in the one breath. Sometimes she would raise her voice a little, just to see how far she could go without the Saviour's agent suspecting any wickedness.

MURDER, MURDER

The master continued to have the problems of the nation and other countries on his conscience, and for that reason he was always absent even when he was present, a stranger at his family's table—or was he merely bored? He left when the meal was over. World-glow, whom I had so christened because he was the son of all darkness that existed in the world, was away with his friends somewhere. Gold-ram had gone out to jeer at strangers with his cousins, the Prime Minister's children, down the street, or perhaps to examine locks for fun for an hour before bedtime. And the maiden Fruit-blood swayed silently through the open doorways like a river-trout. There was prayer-recitation going on in the cook's place when I went up to my room.