The Atom Station (15 page)

“What a sight you are, Fruit-blood, what damned cinema shark are you copying, child?” I said. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

She did not look at me, but went on gliding down the stairs in the same trance, then past me through the hall on her way out through the vestibule without seeing or hearing. But as she took hold of the door handle I put my hand over hers: “Fruit-blood, are you walking in your sleep, child?”

She stared at me with those piercing unearthly-cold night-eyes and said, “Leave me alone. Let me go.”

“I can't believe you're going out, child, alone; it's nearly morning.”

“Yes,” she said calmly. “I was just coming in. And now I am going out. I was at a dance. And now I am going to a dance.”

“Walking—in that get-up? I said. “In sleet and slush?”

She stared at me with those eyes in which I could never distinguish cinema from insanity, and then replied very calmly, “If you wish to know where I am going, I am going to walk into the sea.”

“Fruit-blood,” I said. “What's the point of this foolery?”

“Foolery?” she said. “Do you call it foolery to die?”

She tried to turn the door-handle, but I still held on to her hand.

“You're not in your right mind, child,” I said, still keeping her away from the door. “I'm not letting you go until I've asked your father.”

“Ha ha, do you imagine he's at home for festivities?” she said. “In this loathsome house? With these loathsome people?”

“Now you're going to talk to me, Fruit-blood,” I said, “and I to you.”

“That shall never be,” she said, and then tried to compensate for the hollowness of that old Saga phrase in her mouth by assaulting me. She beat me a few times with her clenched fists, not with the knuckles but like a child, with the soft edge of her hands, and then she tried to bite; but I would not let her out. She did not bother to fight me for long; when she saw she was not my match she turned back into the hall, and as she stood there in the middle of the floor after the struggle she let the huge fur sink, as if she were losing hold of it, down off her slight shoulders to the floor, where she let it lie like some sort of discarded magic cloak, and became once more a slimly-built girl with awkward, loose-jointed calf-movements in her body. Then she huddled herself into a ball in the corner of a sofa so that her knees touched her chin, knuckled her hands into her eyes, and wept—at first with huge convulsions and great sighs, but changing soon into the squealing of a child. Then I realized that this was not all pure play-acting. Or was it such good play-acting?

I tried to approach her as cautiously as I could: “What's wrong? Can nothing be done to make it better? Can't I do something?”

She took her fists from her eyes and waved them about in the air as if she were whipping two churns simultaneously, screwed up her face and bawled, “Ah-a-a-ah, I'm pregnant as hell.”

“Oh the soundrels!” I blurted out. “That's just like them!”

“And he didn't dance with me all night, didn't even look at me, and just imagine, what a swine—he went home from the dance with his wife; he could at least have controlled himself over that, he could have spared me that. I didn't think I deserved rudeness from him on top of everything—with his wife, can you imagine it?—And me pregnant for six weeks.”

“I thank you for telling me this, Fruit-blood,” I said. “Now we shall put our heads together.”

“I will, I
will
go into the sea,” she said. “How is a girl like me to live? The children will hiss at me in school, my mother will kill me in New York, the Prime Minister will sell me to a brothel in Rio de Janeiro, and my grandfather would rather lose his fish oil factory. My father will be jeered at in Parliament and the University, and the people in Snorredda will snigger into the adding machines as he walks past; and the Communists will stage a protest march past the house and say: There's the little pregnant bitch of a Capitalist brat.”

“I can swear to you that such a wicked word as you used just now doesn't exist in the whole Communist Party,” I said. “It is called in the language of all decent folk to be ‘blessedly in the family way.' In your shoes I would go straight to my father, that man of no prejudice.”

“Never as long as I live shall I do my father that shame,” she said.

“As if he hasn't found a way out of greater difficulties than this,” I said. “Genteel people with morals and sensitive nerves send their daughters abroad when they get into trouble, even though uncouth people like us don't understand that sort of thing and just have our children where we are. And now I shall tell you a little story, my girl: I think, you see, that I am pregnant myself.”

“Are you telling the truth, Ugla?” said the girl. She sat up on the sofa and embraced me. “Can you swear it on oath? And are you not going to kill yourself?”

“Far from it,” I replied. “But the time is coming when I shall have to go north, for my baby's day-nursery is with Wild-ponies Fal of Eystridale.”

She leant back from me again and said, “I'm sure you're trying to trick me. What's more, you're just trying to comfort me, and that's a hundred thousand times more humiliating than letting oneself be tricked.”

“Now I'll tell you, Fruit-blood, what your father will do if you go to him and tell him everything,” I said. “He will write out a dollar order for you and send you with the next plane across the Atlantic to your mother. And no one need try to tell me that such a woman does not understand her children. And so you're in America. No one suspects anything, you're in America and you have the child, and afterwards you stay on in America for one, two three years, and finally you come home, a reinstated virgin as we say in the country, and the best match in the whole of Iceland.”

“But what about the baby?” she asked.

“After two-three years, when the news gets about, the story will by then be too old for anyone to say anything, and everyone will love the child—yourself most of all. And it's a common saying that the children of children are fortune's favorites.”

“Shall I then give up the idea of killing myself?” she asked. “And I who had been so looking forward to returning as a ghost and haunting that swine who went home with his wife!”

“Men don't care in the least if women kill themselves,” I said. “If anything, they feel relieved. They are rid of all the fuss.”

After some thought she asked, “Don't you think he would feel then that it was he who had killed me?” But she answered herself, “I could best believe he doesn't have a conscience at all. In actual fact, I ought to kill him. What do you think? Shouldn't I attack him, as in the Sagas, and kill him this very night?”

“Women never did that in the Sagas,” I said. “On the other hand, they sometimes got betrothed a second time and then, when opportunity arose, they sent this second lover to an encounter with the former one. It was their custom to make the one they loved less slay the one they loved the more. But in the Sagas things did not happen all in the one day, Fruit-blood.”

Eventually, the result of our discussion was that the maiden Fruit-blood neither went out to die on that occasion, nor to murder her lover either, but asked if she could not sleep with me up in my room for the rest of the night, because she was slim and shaky in the nerves and I sturdy and from the north.

16. To Australia

The girl slept till late the next day. When she got up she did not bid me Good day, but dressed herself up and went to a New Year party. I behaved as if nothing had happened. But I had no idea whether she might not yet run into the sea when least expected, for no one could be certain about that child. In the evening the phone rang; it was her. She talked with a hot palpitating breathlessness as if she had been drinking, in a feverishly rapid torrent: “You musn't say anything to Daddy. Daddy must never know a thing. I'm going to run away.”

“Run away?” I said. “Where to?”

“To Australia,” she said. “I'm engaged.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said. “The plane goes at five til midnight.”

“And have you nothing to get ready?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Except that I haven't got a toothbrush; and no nightdress either, in fact. But that doesn't matter.”

“It is perhaps forward of me to ask whom you are engaged to, Fruit-blood,” I said.

“It's an Australian officer, and he's leaving tonight,” she replied. “We're going to get married in London tomorrow.”

“Hmm, Fruit-blood,” I said. “If you'll tell me one single word of sense then I won't tell anything. But if you behave like a lunatic I shall tell everyone everything, and first of all your father. It's my duty. Where are you, child?”

“I can't tell you that,” she said. “Goodbye. And all the best. And thank you for last night. Though I live to be a hundred thousand years old I shall never forget you for that.”

And with these words she hung up.

Some time at the beginning of my stay here it had been impressed on me not to put down the receiver if there were mysterious anonymous phone calls, but to report the fact, so that the connection with the rogue's number should be kept unbroken. I laid the receiver down on the table, beside the telephone, and called the master. I said that Fruit-blood was ill in town and would be glad if he could go to see her: her number was still connected.

In fact, the girl had left the phone when he came into the room, but the number was still connected, and he was careful not to disconnect it.

“Did you say Gudney was ill?” he repeated. “What is wrong with her?”

“She was not very well last night,” I replied. “And I think not fully recovered yet.”

“Drunk?” he asked bluntly—and without a smile.

“No,” I said.

Then he smiled again. “Yes, what does a person not ask these days?” he said. “When I was growing up there was in the whole town only one old fishwife who drank. We street-boys were always after her. Now it is considered quite the thing for a better-class citizen of Reykjavik to ask about his newly confirmed daughter: Was she drunk?”

Was he accusing someone? Or excusing? And if so, whom? I was silent. I kept silent, moreover, in the face of all his further questions, except to repeat that the girl was undoubtedly not feeling well and that in his place I would try to trace her.

He stopped smiling again, looked at me searchingly, lifted his eyebrows, took off his spectacles and held them between his fingers, breathed on the lenses and polished them; and there was more than a hint of unsteadiness in his fingers. Then he put his spectacles on again and said, “I thank you.”

He put on his coat and hat and went out, saying at the door, “Please let the phone stay connected.”

I heard him backing the car out.

MOTHER OF MINE IN THE SHEEP-PEN

That night I went to sleep early; and when I awoke again I thought it must be morning or even broad daylight and that I had slept in, for the master himself stood in the doorway. I sprang up in bed and said “Huh?”, panic-stricken.

“I know it is wicked to wake people in the middle of the night,” he said, with that tranquil night-vigil calm which has so uncanny an effect on a person awakening; and went on, “It was as you said, little Gudny was not feeling very well; she is still not feeling very well. I searched until I found her and took her to a friend of mine, a doctor. She will be feeling better soon. You are her confidante. She trusts you. Will you go in to her and sit with her?”

It was four o'clock.

Her father must have carried her from the car up to her room in his arms, for she was in no condition to walk. She lay on a sofa, pale as death and with her eyes shut, child's face and tangled hair, the dark red wiped from her lips and the coloring from her cheeks. Her father had taken off her shoes but not her coat. She never moved nor fluttered an eyelash when she heard me enter. I went over to her and sat down beside her and took her hand and said, “Fruit-blood.” After a moment she opened her eyes and whispered, “It's all over, Ugla. Daddy made me go to a doctor. It's all over.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He pushed irons up me. He killed me. There were bloody shreds of something in the bowl.”

“In the bowl? What bowl?”

“In an enamel bowl.”

I took off her clothes and put on a nightdress and laid her into her bed. She was drained of strength by the drugs, and half-delirious much of the time, moaning in a weak and fluttering voice; but when I thought she was asleep at last she suddenly said out of the blue, opening her eyes and smiling, “Now I too shall hear
Mother of mine in the sheep-pen
sung when I am big.”
*

“Dearest little Fruit-blood,” I said. “I wish I could do something for you.”

“I should have gone to Australia,” she said.

Then she slipped back into a stupor, far away from me, and the thought fluttered through my mind that she might die; until she said, “Ugla, will you tell me a story about the country?”

“About the country?” I said. “What can you want to hear about the country?”

“Tell me about the lambs …”

I saw the girl's eyes begin to twitch with weeping; and then the tears. And he who weeps does not die; weeping is a sign of life; weep, and your life is worth something again.

So I started to tell her about the lambs.

*
From the folk tale about a farm girl who killed her illegitimate baby in a sheep pen in order to be free to go to a dance. The baby appeared to her mother as a ghost and sang this song to her.

17. Girl at night

By the month of Thorri,
*
a month which does not in fact exist in towns, I had become quite convinced—and indeed much earlier than that. The symptoms all matched; all the things were going on inside me that you read about in books for women, and much more besides, I think. I dreamed about the man all night sometimes, often nightmares, and started up from sleep and had to switch on the light, and could not go to sleep again before I had promised myself to go to him and beg his forgiveness for having shut him out on New Year's Eve; and invite him to provide for me in whatever way he thought best.