The Atom Station (12 page)

And when I was upstairs, and by myself, I suddenly became so alone in all the world that I started thinking that I must be in love; and not merely in love, but literally unhappy, a manless maiden, tortured by the sort of love-sorrow which one thinks there can be no word for except in Danish, but which it is possible to establish and analyse with a simple urine test. I felt within myself all the strange humors that can rage within a woman, felt how this my own body was stirred by the enlarged and intensified presence of the soul, with the soul that was once merely a theological abstraction becoming a component of the body, and life becoming a strange greedy joy bordering on unhappiness as if one were wanting to eat and vomit at the same time; and not only could I see a difference every day in how I was swelling up, but there was also a taste in my mouth which I could not recognize, a glint in my eyes and a color on my skin as in someone who has had two drinks, a slackness round the mouth and puffiness of the face which suspicion and anxiety magnified for me when I looked at myself in the mirror: the woman who swallowed the trout. Catching my breath, and with palpitating heart, I stared at myself in the mirror. Some moments have the color of dreams of extreme peril, but this was not a dream: I had awoken halfway up a beetling precipice. Would the rope hold?

So I fell to tramping the harmonium, tramping and tramping with all the ignorance with which a country person can tramp in the hope of being able to hear yet again the echo that was in life before; until I was tired; and fell asleep; and slept for a long time, it seemed, until I woke up to a clamor.

There was a pounding on the door and shrieks; weeping; and my name being called over and over again, and then, “Murder, murder!”

It was the first time I had ever heard the word Murder used in earnest, and I was panic-striken.

But it was only those blessed children of mine that I had just acquired.

“What's all that noise?” I said.

“He's going to shoot me,” came a wail from outside. “He's a murderer.”

I jumped out in my night-dress and opened the door. There stood my Gold-ram with genuine terror in his eyes, and both hands raised above his head as in American films when people are being killed. Down on the stairs stood World-glow with a revolver in each hand, calmly sighting at his brother. I think, to tell the truth, that I swore. World-glow apologized and said, “I'm getting tired of fellows like him.”

“Is there any need to shoot them?” I said.

“They stole revolvers,” he said. “I have decided to shoot them with the revolvers they have stolen.”

“I was in bed and asleep,” sobbed Gold-ram. “And knew nothing before he came home drunk and stole my revolvers, and was going to murder me. I've never tried to murder him.”

I walked to the stairs towards the revolver barrels, right up to the intending murder, and said, “I know perfectly well you're not going to shoot that child.”

“Child?” said the philosopher, and stopped aiming the revolvers at his brother. “He's in his thirteenth year. I had long since stopped getting pleasure out of stealing at his age.”

I went for him and wrested the weapons from him. He did not offer any real resistance, but dived into his pocket for a cigarette as soon as his hands were free of them. He was spent with liquor, and sat down on the stairs and started to smoke.

“When I was nine,” he said, “I stole half of all the spare parts for mechanical excavators which the Agricultural Society of Iceland managed to import that year. Let others beat that. And then—finished. A fellow who carries on stealing when he is grown up suffers from a disease we call in pyschology infantilism: Immanuel Kant, Charles the Twelfth. Their glands are stopped up. I had started wenching when I was twelve.”

“Give me my guns,” said Gold-ram, no longer frightened.

“Where did you get hold of these guns?” I asked.

“None of your business,” he said. “Give me them.”

“Are you being cheeky, my lad?” I said. “Have I just saved your life or have I not just saved your life?”

World-glow had subsided into a forlorn huddle, with the cigarette smoldering between his lips and the whites of his eyes just showing; in his father's house of plenty he was a living portrait of the despair of the times, a homeless refugee in a hopeless station.

It was finally agreed that the brothers should go to bed and that I should keep the guns in my room; the elder one, however, sat on the stairs for a good while yet, smoking gloomily; I did not hear him reply when I bade him good night. I went to bed and switched out the light. But just when I was drifting into unconsciousness again my door was suddenly opened before I was aware of it, and someone sat down beside me and began to fumble with me. I quickly pressed the light switch above the headboard, and who should it be but this young philosopher?

“What are you doing here, boy?” I said.

“I'm going to sleep with you,” he said, and took off his jacket.

“Are you mad, child, taking your jacket off in here?” I said. “Put it on again at once.”

“I am neither a child nor a boy,” he said. “I want to sleep with you.”

“Yes, but you're a philosopher,” I said. “Philosophers don't sleep with people.”

“This isn't a world to philosophize about,” he said, “so the next step is to abandon philosophy. The only thing I know is that you attacked me just now and I felt you; so the next step is to sleep with you. Let me into bed.”

“That's not the way to go about it if a man wants to sleep with a woman,” I said.

“How then?” he asked.

“There, you see, my lad,” I said. “You don't even know how.”

“I'm none of your lad,” he said. “And I shall sleep with you if I like; if not willingly, then forcibly.”

“All right, my dear,” I said. “But you overlook the fact that I'm strong.”

It was taking me all my time to ward off his fumblings.

“I'm not your dear,” he said. “I'm a man. I've slept hundreds of times with every damned thing there is. Aren't you in love with me at all?”

“I was once in love with you,” I said. “It was my first night in this house. The police threw you into the hall. You were dead; stone dead; yes, absolutely wonderfully dead; a dead unweaned infant, and your soul with God, quite certainly. Next day you had come to life; and your face had once again tightened up in that horrible way that makes death beautiful by comparison. But now you aren't drunk enough. Drink some more. Drink until you are utterly helpless and don't even know of it when you are rolled through a puddle. Then I shall fall in love with you again. Then I shall do everything for you that is best for you: carry you to your room, wash you; perhaps even put you to bed completely, even though I didn't dare do that once; but quite certainly tuck you in.”

*
A common motif in folk-tales: the barren woman swallows an enchanted fish and becomes pregnant.

12. The maiden Fruit-blood

The maiden Fruit-blood often stared at me in a trance until I became afraid; sometimes I seemed to see refracted in her eyes all the life that exists in plants from the time that a little seed manages to germinate despite all the accumulated disadvantages of Iceland and Greenland, right up to the point where the god starts looking at you with those burning lustful murderer's eyes of his from the deep. Sometimes I would stamp my foot and say curtly, “Why are you staring like that, child?” But she would go on staring and chewing her chewing gum slowly and calmly. Sometimes she would start gliding through the rooms with a cigarette smoldering in a long tube, just like a cinema shark. Sometimes she would flip through her lessons with a great deal of smoking and chewing, or scribble a composition in enormous vertical lettering, and the scratching of the pen could be heard a long way away like canvas being torn; but soon she would be back into some American light reading with a cover picture of a masked murderer with blood-stained knife and a terrified bare-thighed girl with high insteps and slender ankles wearing stiletto heels; or start leafing through the pile of fashion magazines which arrived for the mother and daughter from all over the world every week and sometimes every day. A young sprig of a tree, nothing but springiness and sap, a mirage in female form, a parlor-reared Naiad-shape; and I, this lump from the far valleys; was it any wonder that sometimes I felt uneasy in her presence?

I cannot forget the first morning that I went in to her with coffee, and stood in front of the bed in which she lay sleeping.

“Good morning,” I said.

She woke up and opened her eyes and looked at me from out of another world.

“Good morning,” I said again.

She looked at me for a long time in silence, but when I was just about to say it for the third time she sprang up and interrupted me hysterically—“No, don't say it, don't say it. Oh, don't say it, I beg of you.”

“May one not wish you good morning?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I can't bear it. They are the two most disgusting and horrible and frantic words I have ever heard in my whole life. Will you never, never say it?”

Next morning I laid the coffee silently on her bedside table and was going out again. But then she flung aside the eiderdown, sprang out of bed and ran after me, and fastened her nails into me.

“Why don't you say it?” she demanded.

“Say what?” I asked.

“Good morning,” she said. “I'm yearning to hear you say it.”

One day when I was going about my work she had laid aside her lessons before I knew it and had started gazing at me. All at once she stood up, came right over to me, fastened her nails into me, and said, “Say something.”

I asked, “What?”

She went on pinching me slowly and calmly, digging her nails in and gazing at me with a smile, watching carefully to see how I was standing the pain.

“Shall I crush you?” she asked.

“Try it,” I said.

“Let me kill you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I thought that was something girls never said to one another,” I said.

“I could eat you.”

“You would soon have your fill of that.”

“Don't you feel it at all, then?” she said, and stopped smiling, losing interest.

“A little,” I replied. “Not much.”

Her interest revived at that, and she dug her dark-painted nails yet deeper into my arm and said, “How do you feel it? Oh, tell me how you feel it.”

I think that in the beginning she had considered me an animal in the same way that I had thought her a plant. The plant wanted to know how the animal felt things. On the other hand, I was never aware of any dislike from her towards me; naturally, she thought it ridiculous that a great clod-hopper should drag so vulgar an object as a harmonium into a civilized house and start pounding out on it the child's exercises which she herself had learned at the age of four, before she could even read; but she bore no more ill will towards a north-country girl than a tulip does towards a cow.

Another day: she came over to me when I was in the middle of my bondwoman work, put her arms round me, nestled up close to me, bit me, and said, “Damn you”; and then walked away.

Yet another day: when she had been silently scrutinizing me for a long time she said, right out of the blue, “What are you thinking about?”

I said, “Nothing.”

“Tell me, won't you tell me? I beg you to.”

But I felt that the gulf between us was so deep and so broad that even though I had been thinking something, and even if it had been something innocent, I would not have told her it.

“I was thinking of a brown sheep,” I said.

“You're lying,” she said.

“Well, well. It's a good thing someone knows better than I myself do what I'm thinking.”

“I know all right,” she said.

“You were thinking about him,” she said.

“Whom?”

“The one you sleep with.”

“And what if I don't sleep with anyone?” I asked.

“Then you were thinking of the other thing,” she said.

“What other thing?”

“That soon you will die,” said the girl.

“Thanks very much,” I said. “So now I know. I didn't know it before.”

“Yes, so now you know.” She slammed shut the book she had been reading, stood up, and sat down at the piano and began to play one of those heart-rendingly lovely soulful mazurkas by Chopin. But only the beginning; when least expected she dashed headlong into some demented jazz.

13.
Orgy

The master of the house, too, had flown off for a while with that soft fragrant yellow-creaking briefcase of his, and I was left with the children. And as soon as his presence ceased to be felt, the house ceased to be a house and became a public square. First came the children's friends, the accepted ones and the secret ones, then the friends of the children's friends, and then
their
friends; and with that, the whole of Harbour Street. A case of liquor lay in the hall; I had no idea who had paid for it. Some of the guests had brought musical instruments with them, and a female was dancing on the grand piano. About midnight, food was delivered on platters from a delicatessen store; I had no idea who paid for that either. But at least the domestic staff was not expected to wait on them, the guests served themselves; indeed, the female sinner Jona had long since retired to her bed, and through those leather eardrums no discord other than the voice of conscience could ever penetrate. I roamed through the house, keeping in the background.

I imagine that this was to have been a dance, but it was only very halfheartedly that a pair or two trailed on to the floor to jitterbug for a while; on the other hand there was much singing of
Fellows were in fettle
and
O'er the icy sandy wastes
, but more especially and in particular they vied with each other to produce the weirdest sounds without words imaginable; never in my life had I heard in one single night such a medley of inarticulate human sounds. Then came the vomiting, first in the bathrooms, then in the stairs and passageways, and finally on the carpets and over the furniture and into the musical instruments. It was as if everyone were engaged to everybody else, couples were slobbering over each other indiscriminately; but I think that no one was in fact engaged to anyone, and that the kissing was just a variation of jitterbugging—with the exception of the maiden Fruit-blood, who, in an ecstasy, with childish movements in her body, clung on to a lanky American-looking guy at least twice her age and already going bald, and finally disappeared with this scoundrel into her room and locked it from the inside.