The Atom Station (20 page)

“Why are you behaving like this?” he said.

“Tell me more of the south,” I said. “Tell me at least what you have become. I don't even know whom I'm talking to.”

“Tell me what you want to become,” he said.

“I want to learn children's nursing,” I said, and thereby made him the first to hear what I had long been thinking to myself.

“Nursing other people's children?” he asked.

“All children belong to society,” I said. “But obviously society will have to be changed in order to make it treat its children better.”

“Change society!” he said contemptuously. “I've become tired of such talk.”

“You've also become a criminal, just as I thought.”

He said, “When I was at home, as a boy, I discovered Communism on my own, without reading about it in books. Perhaps all poor boys in the country and towns do it, if they are right in the head and are fond of music. Then I went to school and forgot Communism. Finally I got my vocation and unhitched the hack, as I told you last year. Now comes the test of whether I am a man in the society in which I live.”

“We live in a criminal society, and everyone knows it; those who gain by it know it, just as well as those who lose by it,” I said.

“I don't care in the least,” he said. “I only live once. I shall show them that an educated person who is fond of music does not need to become their lackey if he himself doesn't want to.” I contemplated him for a long time across the table as he ate and drank.

“Who are you?” I asked finally.

“The Cadillac's at the other side of the gully,” he said. “If you want to, drive away with me tonight.”

“I could best believe that you are the Deacon of Myrkriver,”
*
I said.

He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a bulging wallet, opened it beside his coffee-cup, and pulled out half of its contents, bunches of hundred-kronur bills and five-hundred-kronur bills like new packs of playing cards, fresh from a bank: “The Northern Trading Company,” he said. “Cars, bulldozers, tractors, mixing machines, vacuum cleaners, floor-polishers: everything that whirls, everything that makes a noise; modern times. I'm on my way south from my first trading trip.”

I reached out my hand for the notes and said, “I'll burn them for you, my lad.”

He pushed them back into his wallet and returned it to his pocket.

“I'm not above men, as the gods are, much less above gods, as the organist is,” he said. “I am a man, money is the only reality. The reason I show you my wallet is so that you should not think me mad.”

“Anyone who thinks that money is reality is mad,” I said. “That's why the organist burned the money and then borrowed a krona off me for boiled sweets. And now I shall let you into a secret in return: there is another man who affects me even more powerfully than you, I have only to know of him a hundred kilometers away for my knees to go weak. But do you know what makes me afraid of him? He has a thousand times more money than you; and he has offered to buy me anything in the world that money can buy. But I have no wish to become a million-kronur lie in female form. I am what I can be on my own earnings. I would perhaps have invited you to stay the night if you had come here penniless, yes, perhaps even have gone away with you tomorrow morning, on foot. But now I cannot invite you to stay the night; nor drive away with you, either.”

*
Folk-tale: a deacon from Myrkriver was drowned when riding to fetch his sweetheart to a Christmas party. His ghost arrived to pick up the young woman, and tried to take her with him into his grave. She escaped with difficulty, “and was never the same again afterwards.”

22. Spiritual visitors

One autumn night I woke up in the greyness that precedes dawn; and to the best of my knowledge it was our pastor outside on the paving talking to my father through the living room window. Soon I heard the footsteps of visitors at the farm door. I dressed in a flash and put the child away, but while I was tidying up the spare room, where my daughter and I stayed, the visitors came in.

It seemed at first glance an ominous sight to see a pastor, sober, and without warning, in a remote parish-of-ease at that time of day, but the balance was restored by the fact that on this occasion he had picked himself companions who well became a true pastor on an unexpected journey—the gods themselves. I am not going to describe the shock it gave me to see the two so-and-so's, those phenomena who had done most to turn the tarmac into folk tale in my memories, crossing a threshold north of the mountains in the flesh. But this was clearly not the time and place to indulge in stupid witticisms: the Joint-Stock Company Earnest was deeply imprinted on the expressions of the visitors—I am tempted to say, the Murder Corporation Solemnity; the atom poet Benjamin strode through the mountains with his face to the skies, and in Brilliantine's eyes there lurked that unique shallow stab of insanity which is practically made for bewitching a pastor, yes, even for beguiling a girl in a garden behind a house.

“Where are the twins?” I asked.

“I promised the wife to shoot them a lamb,” said Brilliantine, and bared those smooth glistening front teeth.

“Fancy you up here in the country,” I said to the atom poet, who had flopped exhausted on to our divan.

“The whole world—one station,” he replied. “And I Benjamin, this little brother.”

“They do not come empty-handed,” said the pastor.

“We were sent,” they said.

I asked by whom, but the pastor was quicker and said, “They have a mission.”

“We were sent by the godhead,” they said.

“Which godhead?” I asked.

“These young men are instruments,” said the pastor. “Remarkable instruments. Hmm. In response to inspiration they have brought with them here to the north the earthly remains of the Darling. They have received a command of a kind I do not care to call into question. And at the same time, our dear district's age-old dream seems about to be fulfilled.”

“Well, well, is that so?” said my father, and looked at the visitors with a benevolent smile. “And who are your people, boys?”

“We belong to the atom bomb,” they said.

At this reply my father's face stiffened and his smile vanished as if he had heard something flippant and cheap.

The pastor said that the boys were rather sleepy.

“One is a poet and singer and former message boy with the joint stock company Snorredda,” I said, “and the other is a model family man and owner of twins, former storekeeper with the same enterprise: both friends of mine from the south.”

“Great believers, and they have had a remarkable experience,” said the pastor. “I do not call anything of that kind into question.”

“We don't believe,” corrected the god Brilliantine. “We are. We have direct contact. We could, moreover, have become millionaires long ago if we had so wished; perhaps got to Hollywood, what's more.”

“We are at war,” said Benjamin. “He who does not believe in us shall first be crushed, then wiped out. We shall not cease before we have stolen everything and broken everything. Then we shall burn everything. Down with Two Hundred Thousand Pliers! We shall not even spare Portuguese Sardines nor Danish Dirt. Am I mad or am I not mad?”

My father had gone out. The pastor nodded to himself over these remarkable instruments of the Almighty, and offered them a pinch of snuff, but they only wanted to puff their own cigarettes; on the other hand, the pastor was allowed to light them for them.

“This silence will drive me mad,” said Benjamin.

“Isn't there a wireless?” asked Brilliantine.

After a short while they were both asleep, one on the divan and the other on the bed. I removed their cigarettes, from the mouth of the one and the fingers of the other, so that they would not set themselves on fire while they slept.

PORTUGUESE SARDINES AND D.L.

“A symbolic event of historical significance has taken place in the life of this nation,” said the pastor. “Today this remote valley is once again the center of national life, as it once was long ago in the day when the Nation's Darling was brought in swaddling clothes here to this Eystridale church. The champion of Icelandic freedom and the poet of our spirit is once again home in his valley; our trinity—star of love, ptarmigan, and dandelion slope—welcome anew that friend whom a blind nation lost in a foreign graveyard for a hundred years. But while he lay there hidden under no stone all his ideals were realized, and Iceland's every cause did triumph. The Icelandic people greet …”

There could be little doubt about it—our pastor had already composed his funeral speech, and started trying it out on me.

“But my dear Reverend Traustik,” I said, when he had rattled on for a bit, “in our minds he has never died. That's why we have never made a fuss about his so-called bones nor his lack of a stone in Denmark. He dwells in the blue mountain peaks we can always see when the weather is fine.”

In the back of a big truck at the other side of the gully were two crates, each of about the capacity of a barrel; and when it was broad daylight my father and I walked over with the pastor to examine these wares.

“Two crates,” I said. “He hasn't half grown bulky from not existing for a hundred years.”

“Yes, it is undeniably a little odd,” said the pastor. “But they set off in a great hurry. They say that one of the crates is undoubtedly the right one.”

We examined the crates and found addresses printed on them: “Prime Minister of Iceland” on the one, and “Snorredda Wholesale Company” on the other—two names for the same enterprise. Then my father noticed that on one crate the following words had been tarred in Danish—“
Dansk Ler
.”

“What do these words mean?” he asked.

“
Dansk Ler, Dansk Ler,
” muttered the pastor pensively. “That is just like the Danes. That nation invariably tries to insult us Icelanders.”

“It means, at its best, Danish Clay,” I said. “Should we not first take a look into the other crate? It looks more promising to me even though I don't understand the foreign writing on it.”

We forced up one of the planks of the lid with a crowbar, and I groped amongst the packing for the contents; and what did I pull out but a small tin, about two hundred grams in weight, wrapped in semi-transparent paper. I recognized the merchandise quickly enough from my pantry work in the south: Portuguese Sardines imported from America, that fish which the papers said was the only fish that could scale the highest tariff walls in the world and yet be sold when ten years old at a thousand percent profit in the greatest fish country in the world, where even the dogs walk out and vomit at the mere mention of salmon.

“Miracle fish, to be sure,” I said, “but not quite the miracle we expected.”

“We shall not open the other crate,” the pastor said then. “We shall let faith prevail there. In actual fact it is irrelevant what the crates contain. This is a symbolic consignment. At a funeral it is not the chemical contents of the coffin that matter, but the memory of the deceased that lives on in men's hearts.”

But by then my father had opened the second crate and taken the packing out through the opening. And it was just as I had suspected—in that crate too there was not much that was likely to enhance the nation's prestige. But yet, if one believes that man is dust and dirt, as the Christians believe, then this was a man the same as any other; but not an Icelandic man, for this was not Icelandic dirt; it was not the gravel nor earth, sand nor clay, which we know from our own country, but a dry, greyish calcareous devil like nothing else so much as old dog's dirt.

“Well,” I said, “is the Nation's Darling Danish Clay or Portuguese Sardines?”

“Do you believe in nothing, little girl?” said the pastor.

“A prank!” said my father, and walked off to see to his ponies.

“Do you believe?” I asked the pastor.

Suddenly there was a hard expression round the mouth of this cheerful kindly man who was normally the least orthodox of men, something adamant and dogmatic—I am inclined to say hard-hearted—so that I scarcely knew him for the same person; and there came a cold gleam of fanaticism into his eyes.

“I believe,” he said.

“Do you believe in just the same way, when you can touch it and see clearly that it is the opposite of what you thought?” I asked.

“I believe,” he said.

“Is it then belief to believe what one knows with absolute certainty is not so?” I asked.

“I believe,” said the Reverend Trausti, “in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland. This clay, which perhaps preserves the sap from the bones of the freedom hero and great poet, is to me a sacred symbol. From now on it shall be an article of faith for Iceland that the Nation's Darling is once more back in his own valley. The Holy Spirit in my breast enlightens me in this Icelandic belief. I hope that our district will never again let go of this symbol of its faith in itself.”

Then he looked out over the valley between the mountains and said in a solemn altar voice, with an exalted glow in his eyes: “May the Lord for ever bless this our district of districts.”

THE PONIES

The silence woke the gods after a short while, and my mother brought them hot coffee. When they had inhaled a few more cigarettes they went out with a gun.

It was one of those tranquil autumn days which sometimes come to the valleys, when a tiny sound awakens echoes out of distant cliffs. It was not long before the mountains on both sides of the valleys reverberated with gunfire, and this peaceful valley behind the world was stricken with panic: autumn birds dashed past in violent flight, sheep halfway up the mountain slopes formed into file and headed for the wilderness; and the snorting ponies surged away up and down the mountain.