Read Heaven and Hell Online

Authors: Jon Kalman Stefansson

Tags: #Historical, #Contemporary, #Fiction

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BOOK: Heaven and Hell
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Maybe Andrea knew about the letter that Árni had been carrying. The boy wrote it for him, and it wasn’t the first time Árni had asked him to write a letter to his wife, Sesselja, she reads it when we’re lying in bed together and everyone’s asleep, said Árni once, and reads it over and over when I’m away.
I miss you,
wrote the boy,
I miss you
when I wake, when I grab hold of the oars, I miss you when I bait the lines, when I flatten the fish, I miss hearing the children laugh and ask about something I can’t answer but you certainly can, I miss your lips, I miss your breasts and I miss your loins
—no, don’t write that, Árni had said as he looked over the boy’s shoulder. I can’t write
miss your loins
? Árni shook his head. But I just try to write what you think, as always, and surely you miss her loins? That’s none of your business, and besides, I would never say it like that, your loins. How would you say it, then? How would I say it . . . I would say . . . no, that’s none of your goddamn business! And the boy had to cross out the words
your loins
and wrote
your scent
in their place. But maybe, he thought, Sesselja tries to see what words have been crossed out, she knows I write the letters for Árni, she peers at the word and when she finally manages to read it, and read it she does, she thinks of me. The boy sits on the bed, peers at the paper and tries to push this image away: Sesselja reading these warm, soft, moist and forbidden words. She peers at and reads the words, whispers them to herself, a mild current flows through her and she thinks of me. He swallows, tries to focus on the paper, reads stories about Members of Parliament, reads about Gísli, the schoolmaster here in our village who had not felt well enough to show up at school for three days due to drink, a lot of pressure on the man, to have to teach in addition to his drinking, and Émile Zola had published a novel, a hundred thousand copies sold in the first three weeks. The boy looks up quickly and tries to imagine a hundred thousand people reading the same book, but it’s hardly possible to imagine such a throng, particularly not when one lives here, at the world’s northern outskirt. He gazes thoughtfully but looks hastily back down at the paper when he realizes that he has started thinking about Sesselja reading these words, thinking about him, he opens to another page of the paper and reads:
SIX
MEN
DROWNED
IN
FAXAFLÓI
BAY
. They were on their way from Akranes to Reykjavík in a sixereen.

Faxaflói Bay is wide.

How wide?

So wide that life cannot cross it.

Then it is evening.

They eat boiled fish with liver.

Einar and Gvendur tell the news from the fishing huts, the thirty to forty buildings huddled in small groups on the gravel bank above the broad beach. It is Einar who speaks, Gvendur grunts every now and then and laughs when he thinks it appropriate. Forty huts, four to five hundred fishermen, a mass of humanity. We wrestled, Einar says, hooked our fingers together and pulled, Einar says, damn straight, Einar says, and this one’s sick, goddamn intestinal complaint, will hardly survive the winter, this one’s a shitty mess, this one’s going to America in the spring. Einar’s beard is nearly as black as Pétur’s and reaches down to his chest, he scarcely has need of a scarf, and he speaks and tells of things, Andrea and Pétur listen. Bárður and the boy lie head-to-toe on the bed, they read, close their ears, look up briefly when a ship sails into the fjord and in the direction of the Village, no doubt a Norwegian steam-powered whaling ship, it sails in with a rumble and a racket, as if complaining about its lot. And the goddamn merchants have raised the price of salt, Einar says, suddenly remembers the most important news and stops telling about Jónas, who has composed ninety-two verses about one of the custodians, some of them quite lewd but so well composed that Einar can’t help but recite them twice, Pétur laughs but not Andrea, men seem generally inclined toward the coarser things in this world, whatever unveils itself in a rush, entirely, while women desire whatever needs to be chased, whatever reveals itself slowly. Raise the price of salt?! Pétur exclaims. Yes, those villains! Einar shouts, and his face darkens with anger. Soon we’ll be better off selling the fish wet, straight from the sea, as soon as they’re caught, Pétur says thoughtfully. Yes, Andrea says, because they want it that way, and that’s why they raise the price. Pétur stares at nothing and feels melancholy spreading through his mind and consciousness without fully realizing its cause. If they stop salting the fish then it’s finished for the stack out in the salting house, then where are Andrea and I supposed to go, he thinks, why does everything need to change, it’s not fair. Andrea has got to her feet, starts to tidy after the coffee, the boy looks up momentarily from Eiríkur’s travel diary, they catch each other’s eye, as sometimes happens, Bárður sunk in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, which Jón Þorláksson translated long before our day. The stove heats the loft, it’s cozy here, the evening condenses against the windows, the wind strokes the rooftop, Gvendur and Einar chew tobacco, rock in their seats, sigh well and
mmm hmm
alternately, the paraffin lamp gives a good light and makes the evening outside darker than it is, the more light, the more darkness, that’s the way of the world. Pétur stands up, clears his throat and spits, spits out his melancholy, and says, we’ll bait the lines when Árni gets here, then he goes down to make hasps and packsaddles and buckles, furious that the men aren’t working. Dammit, to see grown men and tools lying around, reading useless books, what a waste of light and time, he says, it’s only his head protruding from the floor. The boy looks up from Eiríkur at the black head poking out of the floor like a messenger from Hell. Einar nods, gives Bárður and the boy a sharp look, stands up, spits red, goes down after his skipper, who says to Einar, but loud enough for it to be heard upstairs, everything declines, and in a certain way he is correct, because we are all born to die. But now they’re waiting for Árni, he must be coming, Árni never fails.

I need to get going, says Árni to Sesselja.

Don’t let the sea swallow you up, she pleads. He laughs, puts on his boots and says, are you crazy, woman, I won’t drown while I’m wearing American boots!

Many astounding things happen.

Nowadays Árni hikes in dry clothing over wet heaths and meadows, over moors and streams, without getting his socks wet; this most resembles magic. Árni bought American boots just over a year ago, made a special trip down to the next fjord in order to do so, rowed out to a smack and bought the boots as well as chocolate bars for the kids and Sesselja, the youngest started to cry when he finished his chocolate and was completely inconsolable. What is sweet through and through often makes us sad in the end. American halibut fishermen come here in March or April, catch halibut off Greenland but outfit their ships from here, buy provisions and salt from us and pay cash, they sell us rifles, knives, biscuits, but nothing comes even halfway close to the rubber boots. American rubber boots are more expensive than an accordion, their price practically amounts to the yearly wage of a female farm laborer, they are so expensive that Árni needed months on end of denying himself
brennivín
and tobacco to save enough to afford them. But they’re worth it, Árni says, and wades through moors, he walks over streams but always has dry feet, trudges on, in wet and snow with bone-dry feet and the rubber boots certainly the best thing that has ever come from the American empire, they knock everything else sideways, and now you understand why it would have been unforgivable to drown in them. Unforgivable carelessness, Árni says, and kisses Sesselja and kisses the children and they kiss him, it’s a thousand times better to kiss and be kissed than to fish in open cockleshells far out upon the sea. His wife watches him leave, don’t let him drown, she whispers, doesn’t want the children to hear, doesn’t want to scare them; nor do we need to raise our voices when we pray for what is most important. She goes in, reads the letter again and now dares to have a better look at the words that have been crossed out, just something the boy was unhappy with, Árni had said, she peers at them for a long time and then manages to read them. There you are, Pétur says, because Árni has arrived in dry socks, they can go and bait the lines, will likely row out to fish tonight.

II

It’s different sleeping on the open sea than here in the Vi
llage, at the head of the fjord, between high mountains, actually at the bottom of the world, and the sea sometimes becomes so passive that we go down to the foreshore to stroke it, but it’s never passive beyond the huts, nothing seems able to ease the sea’s swell, not even the still nights, the star-strewn sky. The sea floods into the dreams of those who sleep on the open sea, their consciousness is filled with fish and drowned companions who wave sadly with fins in place of hands.

Pétur always wakes up first. He is also the skipper and wakes when everything is still dark, barely after two a.m., but he never looks at the clock, and anyway it’s kept downstairs, under some rubbish. Pétur goes out, looks up at the sky, and the density of the darkness tells him the time. He fumbles for his clothing, the stove doesn’t burn at night and the cold of March has sifted its way through the thin walls. Andrea breathes heavily by his side, sleeps soundly, she is at the bottom of her dreams, Einar snores and clenches his fists in his sleep, Árni sleeps head-to-toe with him, the boy and Bárður do not move, the giant Gvendur so incredibly lucky to have his own bed yet it’s too small for him, you’re two sizes too big for the world, Bárður said once, and Gvendur became so sad that he needed to step away for a moment. Pétur puts on his sweater, his pants, totters down and out into the night, a slow, gentle breeze from the east and the outlines of a few stars just visible, they twinkle with their age-old news, their thousands-of-years-old light. Pétur squints, waits until his drowsiness leaves him completely, until his dreams have vaporized and his senses gained clarity, stands bowed, crooked, like an incomprehensible beast, sniffs the air, peers into the dark clouds, listens, perceives messages in the wind, half grunts, half growls, goes in again, lifts the trapdoor with his black head, says, we’re rowing, doesn’t say it loudly yet it’s enough, his voice reaches down into the deepest dreams, sunders sleep and they are all awake.

Andrea dresses beneath the bedcover, gets up and lights the stove and the lamp, it glows, a gentle light, and for a long time no one says anything, they simply put on their clothes and yawn, Gvendur rocks sleepily at the edge of his bed, so muddleheaded on the border between sleep and waking that he doesn’t know where he is. They scratch their beards, except for the boy, he’s got nothing, one of the few who spends time scraping it off, of course not a great deal of work, it’s both thin and sparse, you need some manliness, Pétur said once, and Einar had laughed. Bárður has a thick brown beard, trims it regularly, he’s damned handsome, Andrea looks at him sometimes and then just to look, really, as we look at a beautiful picture, at the light over the sea. The coffee boils, they open their boxes, spread butter and pâté on rye bread with their thumbs, a lot of butter and pâté and the coffee is boiling hot and black as the darkest night but they put rock candy in it, if we could only put sugar into the night to make it sweet. Pétur breaks the silence, or rather the slurping, the smacking and the occasional fart, and says, the wind is from the east, gentle, slightly warm, but it’ll turn to the north sometime today, not until later, so we’ll row out deep.

Einar sighs happily. Row out deep, it’s like a hymn in his ears. Árni says, yes, of course, he actually expected this, I’m sure we’ll row out deep, he had said to Sesselja, who then said, oh, don’t let the sea take you.

The fish had been slow to bite in the shallower fishing grounds before the bad-weather days and it would be natural to try the deeper ones now, they all reach into their boxes for another slice. Row deep, that means up to four hours of continuous rowing, the wind too quiet for the sail, and at least eight or ten hours out on the sea, maybe twelve, which means there are exactly twelve hours until they eat next, the bread is good, the butter is good and it’s likely impossible to live without drinking coffee. They drink the last cup of coffee slowly, enjoy it, outside a half-dark night awaits them, it reaches from the bottom of the sea up to the sky where it kindles the stars. The sea breathes heavily, it is dark and silent, and when the sea is silent, everything is silent, even the mountain above them, alternately white and black. There is a dim light from the lamp, Andrea had turned it down a touch, one doesn’t need much light to drink one’s last drops of coffee. Each lost in his own thoughts, staring straight ahead, Pétur thinking about the voyage, goes over all the tasks in his mind, prepares himself, he always does this, Árni has become impatient, enthusiastic, wants to get to work, Einar is also thinking of the rowing, about the sheer toil of it, he sighs deeply and feels the serenity, the blood that is frequently too hot, which runs so uncomfortably fast through his veins that he’s itchy all the time, has changed into a river placid between grassy banks. The coffee, the hard slog ahead, Einar is thankful and almost feels affection for the men sitting there in the loft, half bowed over their last drops of coffee, he can even look at the two blockheads, Bárður and the boy, without feeling angry, sometimes they drive him completely crazy with their eternal goddamn reading, eternally quoting some poem to one another, a goddamn disgrace, goddamn psychological rot that makes you soft, but no, this doesn’t make his blood boil at all just now, it’s a placid river. Einar smacks his lips over his coffee and life is good.

Now comes evening

and a cowl the color

of dusk casts

over all,

accompanied by silence,

reads Bárður in
Paradise Lost
, tilting the book in such a way that the gleam from the lamp reaches it, light that can illuminate a good line of poetry has surely achieved its purpose. His lips move, he reads the lines again and again, and each time the world inside him becomes a bit larger, expands. The boy has finished his coffee, shakes out his mug, puts it in his box, watches Bárður out of the corner of his eye, sees his lips move, affection passes through him, and yesterday returns with all the brightness and intense presence that accompanies Bárður, that accompanies friendship, he sits on the edge of the bed and yesterday is within him. He fumbles for the bottle of Chinese Vital Elixir, which is a powerful, good digestive, a refreshing and strengthening medicine, which works well against tiresome wind in the intestines, heartburn, nausea, uneasiness in the diaphragm, everyone knows this, we read about it in the papers where it’s confirmed by foreigners as well as Icelanders, doctors, parish administrators, sea captains, everyone recommends this elixir, it has saved lives, children at death’s door after a bout of the flu have regained complete health after several spoonfuls, it also works perfectly for seasickness, five to seven tablespoonfuls before leaving shore and you’re totally free from seasickness. The boy takes a drink from the bottle. Hell is being seasick in a sixereen out on the open sea, needing to work and many hours from shore. He takes another drink because seasickness returns, many times worse than before after long stretches on shore. Andrea has taken her dose against the cough that weighs her head down unnecessarily, drink the elixir and the discomfort disappears or never finds you. Our existence is a relentless search for a solution, what comforts us, whatever gives us happiness, drives away all bad things. Some travel a long and difficult road and perhaps find nothing at all, except for some sort of purpose, a kind of liberation or relief in the search itself, the rest of us admire their tenacity but have enough trouble ourselves simply existing, so we take cure-alls instead of searching, continually asking what is the shortest path to happiness, and we find the answer in God, science,
brennivín
, Chinese Vital Elixir.

They have all come outside.

There is a considerable amount of snow around the huts but the beach is black. They turn the boats over. Light work for twelve hands to put a sixereen onto its keel, a heavier task to overturn it, then twelve hands scarcely suffice, they need an additional six, at least, but the other crew is fast asleep, the bastards, resting their tired hands in a dream-world, they always head out to the deep-sea banks and thus never leave before dawn. Guðmundur will wake up soon, of course, the skipper called Guðmundur the Strict, his men have to be at the hut before eight in the evening, the loafing and endless prattling poison in his veins, and they heed him unconditionally, all of them giants, have made it alive through the storms of the world and are so insolent that they could kill a dog with their language but turn into modest, fearful fellows if Guðmundur gets riled. The Custodian there is called Guðrún, short and dainty, with such bright hair and radiant laughter that it is never completely dark where she is, she is the equivalent of many bottles of elixir, she is beautiful, she is frisky and her cheeks so white and convex that they can make one’s heart ache, she sometimes dances a few peculiar steps and then something cracks inside the men in the hut, these rough and weathered men, affection and wild lust internal knots that are impossible to unravel. But Guðrún is Guðmundur’s and they would rather cool off in the deadly cold sea than try anything with his daughter, are you crazy, even the Devil himself wouldn’t dare touch her. She seems entirely unaware of her influence and perhaps that’s the worst, unless it’s the best in fact.

They work in silence.

Carry what needs to be carried down to the boat, the rigging, the baited lines, the waterproofs, the weather too mild to put them on immediately, the skin pants reach up to under their arms, the wool in their sweaters well fulled, ahead of them three or four hours of heavy rowing. Each man with his own specific task during the night, if only existence were always so direct and easily readable, if only we could escape the uncertainty that reaches out over graves and death. But what softens uncertainty if death does not? The snow will soon become densely packed from the hut down to the black beach. Andrea comes out and empties the chamber pot, the ground is stony around the hut and receives the liquid, urine, or rain, it disappears into the ground and it’s just as well that the roof of Hell doesn’t leak, unless one of the punishments is in fact to have wastewater and rain constantly pouring down on one. Andrea stands for a moment and watches them work, hardly a footstep of theirs can be heard, the sea sleeps, the mountain dozes and the sky is silent, no one awake there, the hour no doubt approaching three and Bárður gives a sudden jump, disappears once more into the hut. Andrea shakes her head but also smiles weakly, knows he is standing on the ladder, reaches into the bed, opens
Paradise Lost
and reads the lines he wishes to memorize and recite for himself and the boy out on the sea, now comes evening,

and a cowl the color

of dusk casts

over all,

accompanied by silence

and already are

beasts in burrows

and birds in nests

for the night

reposed

Bárður had been the last one out. Sunk in a verse by a blind Englishman that a poor priest rewrote in Icelandic when time went by another name. He reads the verse again, shuts his eyes briefly and his heart beats. Words still seem able to move people, it is unbelievable, and perhaps the light is thus not completely extinguished within them, perhaps some hope yet remains, despite everything. But here comes the moon, sailing slowly into a black hole in the sky with white light in its sails, it is just barely half, waxing to the left, yet the night will still be bright for a time. The light of the moon is of a different family than the light of the sun, it makes the shadows darker, the world more mysterious. The boy looks up, looks at the moon. It takes the moon just as long to make one rotation as to revolve around the Earth, and because of that we always see the same side, it is just over three hundred thousand kilometers away, it would take a very long time to row there in a sixereen, even Einar would be put off by the distance.

The boy’s mother had written to him about the moon. About the distance to it, about its mysterious far side, but she never mentioned a sixereen in that context, nor Einar, didn’t even know of his existence, neither his beard nor the anger that boils like an eternal engine inside him. But Einar isn’t angry now. The tranquil moonlit night seeps into the six men and the woman watching them. No, Andrea isn’t watching any longer, she has gone up to the hut, hurrying to meet Bárður in the narrow doorway. Am I crazy, thinks Andrea, there are twenty years between us! But why deny oneself the chance to gaze into such brown eyes on a March night, think about the soft and supple movements beneath his clothing, white, straight teeth between his lips, free from brown tobacco stains. Bárður doesn’t chew tobacco, they’re strange some of these young people, to deny themselves such delights as accompany tobacco. They meet in the doorway, his head full of poetry and loss of Paradise, oh, how beautiful you are, my poor thing, she says, and strokes his beard with both hands, then down his bare neck, strokes harder and tighter than she intended and feels the warmth of his body streaming up from his neck. Just for you, Andrea, he says, and smiles. Are you sleeping, you little shit?! Pétur calls out in the night. They are startled, Andrea jerks her hands back, looks at the boy and sees him confused beneath the moon.

Moonlight can leave us defenseless.

It causes us to remember, wounds tear open and we bleed.

His mother wrote to him about the moon and the heavens, about the ages of the stars and the distance to Jupiter. She knew many things, despite having been raised by folk outside her own family, had had it hard there, was reprimanded for thirsting after knowledge but learned to read by following along when the boys on the farm were at their lessons, then read everything she could lay her hands on, which was a great deal despite the poverty and indifference of the household. It was reading and the desire for knowledge that drew his parents together, both of them lacking means but managing to scrape their way up from working as farm hands to purchase their own farm, although it is perhaps too ceremonious to refer to the little cottage by such a big name, but all right, the tenant farm was theirs; one cow, fifty sheep, not much for a family. A small home field and so tussocky that it was no doubt quicker to gnaw it down than to mow it, and the pastures were wet. The sea kept them alive, it keeps all of us alive who live here at the outer limit of the world. His father went to sea from fishing stations, four to five months of the year.
My Lord, how I missed him!
is written in one of the letters she sent the boy,
of course I had you three but I still missed Björgvin every day, and even more in the evenings when you were asleep.
The months that he was away from home were packed with work, the struggle to live and to keep poverty at bay, while free time went into reading.
We were hopeless. We thought continuously about books, about being educated, became fervent, frantic, if we heard of some new and interesting book, imagined what it might be like, spoke about its possible contents in the evenings, after you’d gone to bed. And later we’d read it in turns, or together, when and if we managed to get hold of it, or a handwritten copy of it.
But what can we say, his father was out on a sixereen, they are common here, just over eight meters, and he was certainly not the only one to drown that night. That March night, the boy looks again at the moon and counts in his mind, ten years and seventeen days ago. No, no, two boats lost and both their crews, twelve lives, twenty-four hands groping in the sea, a southeasterly flared up and the sea drowned them all. A whole week passed before they received the dark tidings. Is it cruelty or comfort that he lived seven days longer in the minds of those most important to him, dead yet still alive? It was a neighbor who came and extinguished the light of the world. The boy sat on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him, his sister between them, but his mother stood and stared straight ahead, her hands hung down at her sides, as if dead, Hell is having arms but no one to embrace. The air quivered as if something great had been torn, then a crashing sound was heard when the sun fell and landed on the Earth. People are alive, have their moments, their kisses, laughter, their embraces, words of endearment, their joys and sorrows, each life is a universe that then collapses and leaves nothing behind but a few objects that acquire attractive power through the deaths of their owners, become important, sometimes sacred, as if pieces of the life that has left us have been transferred to the coffee cup, the saw, the hairbrush, the scarf. But everything fades in the end, memories are wiped out after a time, and everything dies. Where once was life and light are darkness and oblivion. The boy’s father dies, the sea swallows him and never brings him back. Where are your eyes that made me beautiful, the hands that tickled the children, the voice that kept the darkness away? He drowns and the family is broken up. The boy goes to one place, his brother to another, five hours of vigorous marching between them, their mother and a sister just over a year old end up in a completely different valley. One day all four of them are lying in the same bed, it’s crowded but it’s good, almost the only good thing in the midst of the regret, then a seven-hundred-meter-high mountain rises between them, steep and barren, the boy still hates it, boundlessly. But it is so feeble to hate mountains, they are larger than we are, they stand in their places and do not move for tens of thousands of years while we come and go quicker than the eye can focus. Mountains, however, seldom stop letters. His mother wrote. She described his father so he wouldn’t be forgotten, so he would live on in the mind of the son, a light by which to warm himself, a light to miss, she wrote to save her husband from oblivion. She described how the two of them spoke together, read together, how he was with the children, what pet names he used for them, what he sang to them, how he was when he stood alone on the slope by the home field and looked out into the blue . . .
your sister is growing up, is proud to have two big brothers. I know you won’t forget her. Are you brothers able to visit each other? You mustn’t neglect to do this. You mustn’t let the world tear you apart! Next summer we’ll
certainly come to visit you, I’ve already received permission and have started to gather shoes for our hike. Your sister asks nearly every morning, are we going today? When are we going?

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