The Atom Station (2 page)

“What sins?” I asked.

“I was a simply terrible person,” she said. “But the Reverend Domselius says that I can hop after two years.”

According to the Smaland-American faith people started hopping, as it were, when they became holy. But sins so burdened this big-boned woman that she had difficulty in rising off the ground. When I said that I had no sins she looked at me with pity and dismay but offered to pray for me nevertheless and claimed that this would help, for she reckoned that the god of the Smaland-American group paid special regard to her and followed her advice. She had been forbidden to take the child with her to evening meetings, but before she went out she would drag the poor thing out of bed and make her kneel on the floor for a long time in her spotted nightdress, hands clasped under her chin, and recite terrible litanies to Jesus, confessing to countless crimes and beseeching the Saviour not to take vengeance on her, until finally the tears were streaming down the child's cheeks.

All life fled from the house in the evening, and I was left alone in this new world which in a single day had made my previous life a dim memory—I am tempted to say a story in an old book. There were three public rooms, forming an L-shape together, crammed full of treasures. These thousand lovely objects seemed to have come there of their own accord, without any effort, in the way that livestock make for an unfenced meadow in the growing season. Here there was not one chair so cheap that it could be bought for our autumn milch cow; and all our sheep would not fetch nearly enough to seat this whole family at once. I am sure that the carpet in the big sitting-room cost more than our farm, even including all the buildings. We only owned one article of furniture, the sagging divan that my father bought in an auction some years ago, and only the one picture, a portrait of Picture-Grim, as we children used to call old Hallgrim Petursson
*
in his pulpit surrounded by his holy pictures; and also, of course, the old harmonium, my dream, but that had been out of order unfortunately for as long as I could remember, because there was no stove in the room. The wild ponies were our only luxury. Why do those who labor never own anything? Or was I a Communist to ask such a question, the ugliest of all that is ugly, the only thing one had to take care to avoid? I fingered a note on the piano in the house—and what a paradise of tone if it was played in harmony! If there is any such thing as sin, then it is a sin not to be able to play a musical instrument; and yet I had told the old woman that I had no sins. But the worst was when I went into the master's study near the front door, nothing but books from floor to ceiling: no matter where my hand paused, I could not understand a word; if there is any such thing as crime, then it is a crime to be uneducated.

CORPSE IN THE NIGHT

Finally I went up to my room and played on my new harmonium the two or three tunes I knew from the north, as well as the tune that only those who know nothing know: it is played with crossed hands. I was disgusted at myself for being so uneducated, and took out one of those dreary educational books published by
Mal og Menning
*
which eventually, one hopes, would make something of anyone who could be bothered to read them.

Thus the evening passed, and the people began to straggle home one by one; first the cook from the Smaland-American absolution business, then the middle children, separately, and finally the master and mistress; soon everything was quiet. But the one I was waiting up for with hot food in the oven did not come and then it was three o'clock, with me wandering about the house to keep myself awake, until at last I dropped off in one of those deep armchairs downstairs. At about four o'clock the doorbell rang, and I went to the door heavy-eyed with sleep and opened it. There were two policemen standing there, carrying between them a horizontal figure. They bade me Good evening, formally, and asked if I lived there and whether they could just dump a small corpse into the hall.

“That depends,” I replied. “Whose is the corpse?”

They said that I would find out soon enough, tossed the corpse on to the floor, saluted, said Good night as formally as they had made their greeting, started up their car, and were gone; and I closed the door.

The man lay on the floor, if you could call him a man; he was more or less just at the shaving stage, his hair still bright with childhood, and he had his father's head. His coat and new shoes were covered with mud, as was one of his cheeks, as if he had fallen asleep in a puddle or had been rolled through a swamp; and there was vomit down his front. What was I to do? When I bent over him I heard him breathe. In addition to the stink of vomit, he reeked of poison—tobacco and schnapps. Luckily I had sometimes seen men paralyzed by Black Death
*
at public festivities out in the country, so I knew what was up, and decided to try to bundle him up to his room on my own rather than rouse such splendid and cultivated parents—and they the owners of this wonderful house, too, more perfect than Heaven. I shook him lightly but he only moaned a little, and his eyes did not open except for a thin glimpse of white between his eyelids. I soaked a sponge in cold water and wiped his face, and he was utterly innocent and utterly good and only sixteen, seventeen at the most, and his hand lay open. But he was absolutely dead, except that he breathed. His head lolled back helplessly when I tried to raise him up. Finally I picked him up and carried him in my arms to his room, all the way to his bed. His brother was asleep in the other bed and never stirred. I relieved him of his coat and took off his shoes and loosened his clothing here and there, but could not bring myself to undress a sixteen-year-old youth completely, even though he were dead. Instead, I went up to my room to sleep.

*
Iceland's greatest and best-loved hymn-writer (1614–74).

*
An Icelandic cultural publishing house: literally, “Language and Culture.”

*
Icelandic schnapps (brennivin), made from concentrated alcohol and water, flavored with aniseed oil; about as potent as whisky. The nickname comes from the black label on the bottle.

3.
The house behind the buildings

Behind the largest buildings in the town center there stood a small house which could not be seen from any street, and which no one would imagine existed. A stranger would argue, even swear on oath, that there was no house there. But there was one nevertheless, a ribbed wooden house, just one little story and loft, sagging with age—a relic of the old market-town of Reikevig. Angelica and chervil, tansies and dock, ran riot in the garden, so that one could just make out the tumble-down moldering palings here and there amongst this tall forest of weeds, still green and juicy although autumn was now well advanced. I never thought I would find this house, but in the end I did.

At first there seemed to be no sign of life about it, but on a closer look a pale streak of light could be seen at a window. I looked for the front door, but the house was set at an angle to the other buildings; at last I found the entrance, round at the back opposite the retaining wall of a large building—the street had probably lain that way in days gone by when the house was originally built. I opened the door and entered a dark passageway. At one point a gleam of light showed through a crack between door and jamb, and I knocked. After a brief moment the door was opened, and there stood a slim man of indeterminate age except that every other hair was going grey; and somehow I felt that he knew me the moment he looked at me with those clear expressive eyes, at once mocking and affectionate, from under his bushy eyebrows. I took off my glove and greeted him, and he bade me please enter.

“Was it here?” I asked.

“Yes, here it was,” he said, and laughed as if he were making fun of me, or rather of himself perhaps, but quite without malice. I hesitated about walking in and repeated, in the form of a question, the words of the newspaper advertisement:

“Organ-playing for beginners after ten at night?”

“Organ-playing,” he said, and kept on looking at me with a smile, “the organ-play of life.”

Inside, he had a coal-fire burning in a stove; he did not use the town central-heating system. The furniture consisted merely of a host of green plants, some of them in bloom, and a battered three-legged sofa with torn upholstery; and a little harmonium in the corner. A door into another room stood ajar and through it came streaming an aroma of many perfumes; the door to the kitchen was wide open and through it could be seen a table and a few backless chairs and stools, and a kettle on the boil. The air was a little heavy from the flowers, and there was more than a suggestion of smoke seeping from the stove. On one wall hung a colored print of some creature that might have been a girl had the head not been cleft down to the shoulders; she was bald, her eyes were closed, her profile was superimposed on one half of her face, and she was kissing herself on the mouth. And she had eleven fingers. I stared at the picture dumbfounded.

“Are you a farm girl?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed I am,” I replied.

“Why do you want to learn the organ?”

At first I said that I had always listened to music on the wireless, but when I thought it over I felt that this answer was too ordinary, so I corrected myself and added, “I am thinking of playing in our church at home in the north when it is completed.”

“May I see your hand?” he said. I consented, and he studied my hand and said, “You have a good hand, but on the large side for music.” He himself had a slim, long-fingered hand, very soft to the touch but somehow quite neutral and uncharged with electricity, so that I did not blush even when he fondled the joints of my fingers; nor indeed did I find it disagreeable, either.

“Excuse me, but what faith is to be preached in this church at your home in the north?” he asked.

“Oh, I don't suppose it will be anything very remarkable,” I said. “Just the same old Lutheran faith, I suppose.”

“I don't know what is remarkable if it isn't meeting a girl who is an adherent of Lutheranism,” he said. “It has never happened to me before. Do have a seat.”

“Luther?” I asked hesitantly as I sat down. “Isn't he ours?”

“I don't know,” said the man. “I have only known one man who read Luther; he was a psychologist and was writing a thesis on pornography. Luther, as a matter of fact, is considered the most obscene writer in world literature. A few years ago, when a translation was made of a treatise he wrote about the poor Pope, it was impossible to get it published anywhere, on the grounds of indecency. Won't you have a cup of coffee?”

I thanked him but said it was really quite unnecessary, and added that perhaps I would stop playing for this scandalous person Luther if he was such a coarse man, and decide just to play for myself instead. “But that picture over there,” I said, for I could not take my eyes off it. “What is it meant to be?”

“Don't you feel it is marvelous?” he said.

“I feel I could do that sort of thing myself—if … Excuse me, but is it meant to be a person?”

He replied, “Some say it is Skarp-Hedin
*
after he had been cleft to the shoulders by the axe
Battle-Troll;
others say it is the birth of Cleopatra.”

I said it could hardly be Skarp-Hedin, for he died, as everyone knew, with his axe beside him in the Burning of Njal. “But who's Cleopatra?” I asked. “It wouldn't be the queen that Julius Caesar married just before he was murdered?”

“No, it's the other Cleopatra,” said the organist, “the one Napoleon went to visit at Waterloo. When he saw the battle was lost he said ‘
Merde
' and put on his white gloves and went to visit a woman in a house nearby.”

Through the half-open door, from the inner room, came a woman's voice: “He never speaks the truth.” And out sailed a large handsome woman, heavily made up and with belladonna in her eyes, wearing sheer stockings, red shoes, and a hat so wide-brimmed that she had to tilt her head to get through the door. She kissed the organist on the ear in farewell as she walked past, and said to me as if in explanation of why he never spoke the truth, “As a matter of fact, he is above God and men. And now I'm off to the Yanks.”

The organist brought out a white handkerchief, wiped the moist lipstick from his ear, smiling, and said, “That was she.”

At first I thought this was his wife or at least his sweetheart, but when he said “That was she” I was not very clear what he was getting at, for we had been talking about the woman Napoleon went to visit when he saw that the battle was lost.

But while I was pondering this, another woman came through the same door; this one was very old and lame, wearing a soiled flannel nightgown with her grey hair done up in two meager plaits, and she was toothless. She brought out a cheese-rind and a teaspoon on a patterned cake-dish, laid this offering on my knee and called me her dear one, bade me please eat and asked me about the weather. And when she saw that I was in difficulties with the cheese-rind and teaspoon she patted me pityingly on both cheeks with the back of her hand, looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Poor blessed creature.” These words of compassion she repeated over and over again.

The organist went to her, kissed her, and led her gently and affectionately back into her room; then he relieved me of the cake-dish with its cheese-rind and teaspoon and said. “I am her child.”

TWO GODS

He laid a cloth over the kitchen table and put out a few cups and saucers, mostly unmatching; then he brought some twisted dried-up pastries cut into slices, a few broken biscuits, some sugar, but no cream. I knew from the smell of the coffee-pot that he had not been sparing with the coffee. He said that I was to have the only matching cup and saucer. I asked if he were expecting visitors, for he had laid the table for many, but this he flatly denied, except that two gods had promised to make an appearance around midnight. We began to drink the coffee. He urged the meager baking on me like a hospitable country woman, but laughed at me when I tasted some of it just to please him.