Heaven and Hell (6 page)

The storm is approaching and will be upon them soon.

Árni, says Pétur, and he says nothing else because Árni sees where the skipper is looking, lays aside his knife and starts to help Bárður pull, the sea has grown restless, its lenience toward this boat, these men, is at an end. The waves grow larger, higher, the wind blows cold, Bárður’s movements are slower, the cold has started to take away his power, the joy over a good catch is warming to some extent, but is still not much and is certainly not enough. Joy, happiness, burning-hot love form the trinity that makes us people, which justifies life and makes it larger than death, and still it grants no more shelter from the arctic wind than this. My love for a waterproof, my joy and happiness for another sweater. The wind blows over the Polar Sea, strengthening every minute and spitting out snowflakes. Gvendur and Einar now need to use all their strength to hold the boat reasonably steady, the waves rise around them, the land is long gone, the horizon gone, there is nothing in the world any longer but six men in a cockleshell, pulling fish and dreams from the cold deep. Pétur holds firm, hooks the fish aboard, looks first at Bárður and then at the weather around them, Árni and Bárður have started to haul in the fifth line, Gvendur’s, he holds tightly to his oar, so huge next to Einar but small and frightened inside because it must be awful to drown, and the Polar Sea no longer cares for this boat, about this piece of wood with its men, and now the storm breaks. The snowfall thickens. Yet it was hardly possible to call this a snowfall. The wind whips the snowflakes into the men’s faces, forcing them to squint, or rather to look away. The waves break around the boat, seawater dashes over them, not much but it only takes a little to drench a man who leaves his waterproof on land, Bárður gasps for breath. And at almost the same moment Árni looks at Pétur, who nods, throws the gaff into the pile of fish, just under two hundred fish, Árni reaches for the knife, cuts Gvendur’s line, much of which they had already hauled in, partly bent over the work, neither sitting nor standing, it’s high time, sighs the boy, who has vomited twice, vomited the whey, vomited the rye bread he ate in the night, some into the boat, some into the sea, the rest taken by the wind. The snowfall thickens around them and diminishes the world, their visibility is limited to just a few meters, and the only thing they see are rising waves, deepening troughs. The boat is lifted, it plunges, Bárður’s sweater has turned into a byrnie of ice, he sits down on a thwart, plunks himself down, punches himself furiously. The boy tries to tear himself away from his seasickness, which continues to grow stronger despite the Chinese Vital Elixir that is a world-famous and highly scientific product, hangs rather than sits on the thwart and rubs his friend weakly, offers to loan him his waterproof but Bárður shakes his head, the boy’s waterproof is far too small, nor would it improve matters to have them both soaked. Damn, damn, damn, mutters Bárður. What about my line?! Einar shouts, looking madly at Pétur and Árni. We can’t wait any longer! Pétur shouts back, a space of only three meters between them, but if one wants to be heard here on the Polar Sea, one must shout, scream, yet it’s not certain that this will suffice. Einar shouts, he twists his head as if in torment, as if to calm the violence that threatens to explode his head, then clenches his teeth with all his might and manages to hold back the words that howl inside him. Pétur is skipper, his words are law, whoever disagrees can go elsewhere, but it’s still a damned shame, makes Einar so angry that he literally sees blood when all of the lines but his are hauled in, heavy with fish, this is the blackest injustice, this is pitch-black Hell. More than three hours of intense rowing, another three hours pushing against the wind and tide and what does one get, nothing, the fish left behind down in the sea, hanging on their hooks. Einar looks with murderous eyes at Bárður trying to punch away the cold, and at the deathly pale boy rubbing his friend, it isn’t the weather that robs Einar of fish, it’s Bárður. The sail! croaks Pétur into the wind and the ceaseless snow, one word and Einar and Gvendur pull in the oars, Bárður and the boy straighten up, the men move quickly but cautiously, an inattentive movement, ill-considered, and the boat could lose the balance that separates life from death. The two masts rise, the sail stretched between them, Pétur has set out the rudder, has had to crawl toward it, and the wind seems to attack the sail, dive violently over it, finally some resistance, finally something other than the empty air, the boat lies nearly on its side. They look straight down into the surging sea. The sky above them disappeared long ago, here there is no longer a sky, no horizon. The boat regains its balance, there are practiced hand movements and Pétur steers skillfully. The sea has started to heave, it gushes and sprays over the men, they all gasp for breath except for Bárður, who is silent and tries to bail out the boat but has difficulty holding onto the bail because of the cold that slips through his byrnie of ice, the wind whips them on, they sail with the arctic wind at their heels, the snowstorm pursues them, snow piles up on the boat and the sails and freezes there. The men try to punch the snow off, their task is to live and they all work like mad except for Pétur, who steers doubled over by cold, numb in the face, nothing ahead but the raging sea and the snow, but Pétur doesn’t need to see anything, the directions dwell deep within him and he tries to steer them on the right course, as far as the wind permits. They work like mad. Punch snow and frost off the boat. They try to punch death away and need to use all their strength and it is entirely unsure whether that will suffice, Bárður’s condition decreases the likelihood, but it would be a death sentence for them all if one of them loaned him his waterproof, even for a moment, then two of them would be unable to work, not just one. A man without a waterproof is drenched, thoroughly drenched, in the briefest space of time, the cold gets a firm grasp on him and does not let go, not out here on the open sea. Try to fight, shouts the boy at Bárður, who punches frost and snow feebly from the sail above him, stops suddenly and looks at his friend. It’s almost as if Bárður is smiling, he draws nearer, so close that there are just a few centimeters between them, one pale and weak from seasickness, the other blue-white from cold. Bárður moves his head right up next to the boy’s, his brown eyes filled with something the boy does not understand, Bárður’s lips pucker, he struggles to form words, conquer the cold, and he manages to do so, the words come, distorted of course but comprehensible to those who know whence they arise, and this the boy does know: sweet is the breath of morn, sweet the coming of day, accompanied by notes, charmed,
of early-rising birds, a delight to the ears.
The boy tries to smile through the seasickness and cold, through the fear. Bárður comes even closer, the brim of his sou’wester bends and their foreheads touch, nothing is sweet to me, without thee, mumbles Bárður, the line of poetry written in the letter Bárður finished last evening, addressed to Sigríður, who perhaps is standing at the butter churn in the countryside somewhere behind the storm, if something exists besides this storm, this yawl, and this snowfall that the wind tears apart and throws into their faces. The boy continues to punch the frost off the sail and the boat, it’s easier for him to breathe. The certainty that Bárður will not let the frost defeat him gives him increased strength, sweet is the breath of morn, and for a time he forgets everything but the effort to punch frost and snow from the sail, except for the fight for life, but when he next looks over, Bárður has crawled into the bow and lain down there. The boy totters, half-crawls, and pushes Einar to one side so he can get to Bárður, Einar shouts in his ear, do you want us all to be killed, you damned piss-pup! Because the man who doesn’t do his job puts everyone in danger, but so what, there lies Bárður, has drawn his knees up to his chest and hooked his arms around them. The boy crouches next to him and calls out, Bárður! He calls the name that means more than all the other names in the world combined, more than a boat with two hundred fish, comes so close that he breathes on Bárður’s brown eyes. Bárður looks back at him, completely expressionless because the cold has paralyzed the muscles in his face, but still he looks. The boy’s collar is grabbed. Einar pulls him up roughly, the boy looks across the boat, Pétur and Árni shout at them but he hears nothing, the only thing that can be heard is the din of the wind. The boy looks at Einar and then strikes at him with ice-cold fury, hits him on the chin. Einar jerks back at the blow, but no less at the fury that makes the boy unrecognizable, he falls to his knees, rips off his waterproof, tries futilely to put it on Bárður, rubs Bárður’s face, punches his shoulders and breathes on his eyes because life is there, he shouts, he punches more, and he rubs harder but it makes no difference, it is useless, Bárður has stopped looking, there is no longer any expression in his eyes. The boy has taken off his mittens and rubs the cold face of his friend, stares into his eyes, breathes on them, whispers, says something, strokes his cheeks, he slaps them and he shouts and waits and whispers but nothing happens, the connection between them has broken, the cold has claimed Bárður. The boy looks over his shoulder, at the four men fighting for their lives, fighting united, looks back at Bárður who is alone, nothing can touch him anymore, except the cold. Nothing is sweet to me, without thee.

V

It is ridiculously good to have solid ground beneath one’s
feet. Then you haven’t drowned and can have something to eat after twelve hours on the Polar Sea within the gales and ragged snowfall. Eat many slices of rye bread with a mound of butter and pâté and drink pitch-black coffee with brown sugar. It doesn’t get much better than that. The hunger having started to gnaw at the men’s insides, the exhaustion quivering in their muscles, at such a moment coffee and rye bread are Heaven itself. And then, when the catch has been worked, fresh-boiled fish with suet gravy. Happiness is having something to eat, to have escaped the storm, come through the breakers that roar just beyond the land, to hit them at precisely the right second required to sail through them, otherwise the surf topples the boat or fills it and then six men who cannot swim are in the sea with two hundred dead fish, the catch destroyed and a considerable likelihood that the men are drowned, but Pétur is a genius, he knows the moment, they slide through and have escaped.

Gvendur and Einar jump overboard, land in the knee-deep sea, Guðmundur and one of his crew splash out to meet them. They did not row, Guðmundur decided not to go at the last minute, the very last, two of his crew sat in their waterproofs in the boat, the others had started to push when Guðmundur called it off, there was a play of colors out on the horizon that he did not like. And those on shore do not passively watch the boats land but instead lend a hand, there is a law beyond man-made laws because here it is a question of life and death, and most choose the former. Life also has an advantage over death in the way you have some idea of what you’re dealing with, death on the other hand is the great uncertainty, and there is little more antipathetic to human beings than uncertainty; it is the worst of all.

Four men from Guðmundur’s crew stand at the winch along with Gvendur and Einar and haul the boat up the landing, the others push, out beyond them crashes the fuming surf, even further out rages the storm. The weather is considerably better here, although there is a whine in the mountains above the huts and the wind is so strong that Andrea has to stand with her legs spread and sometimes to lean into it. The coffee is ready inside the hut and she stands there, leans into the wind, doesn’t understand what’s going on inside her, should have gone down to the boats, pushed the final meters, picked two fish from the catch to boil, then gone with the men up to the hut where they would sit happily over the aroma of coffee and old bread from their boxes, happiness can be found in small things. Those are good times, sitting among the men, asking about the voyage, sensing the smell of the ocean filling the loft, yet she stands there, unmoving. She squints, tries to protect her eyes from the ragged snowfall. Something is wrong. She feels it. And the same sense of foreboding she felt that morning, when her eyes fell on Bárður’s waterproof, swells up inside her. It’s as if she dare not move, as if the slightest movement would confirm her worst fear.

A living body is amazing. But at the same time as the heart ceases to beat, no longer pumps blood, and memories and thoughts no longer sparkle within the skull, it ceases to be amazing and turns into something for which we would prefer not to have to find words. Best let science do that. And then the ground. Andrea squints, turns her head away from the obtrusive snowflakes, finally comes up with the idea of counting the men. There are Gvendur and Einar at the winch, Pétur holds onto the prow, there is Árni, there is the boy, and now she sees that their movements are heavy, not from fatigue but from something entirely different, and Bárður is nowhere to be seen. Where is Bárður, she says involuntarily, asks the wind, asks the snowflakes, but neither replies, they do not need to, the wind just blows, it comes and is as quickly gone and the snowflakes are born of the heavens, that is why they are white and shaped like angels’ wings. The heavens have never needed to explain anything, they arch high over our heads, over our lives, and are always as distant, we never come close to them whether we are standing on the roof of a house or on a mountain, try to chase them down with words or in vehicles. Andrea gives a start, as if she were going to take her first step, and then another, start walking, start striding, run down to the boat, down to the men who have finished dragging the boat ashore, the weather quite nasty but still not so bad that they need to secure the boat any further, not yet, because the storm is out at sea, two elements that drown the humans who risk them. Now they should set off for the hut, find happiness in the coffee, pleasure in the rye bread, the pâté, the butter, delight in the short rest, and Guðmundur should be plodding off to his own hut so as not to remain any longer than necessary under the same sky as his brother, dammit, someone should at least be moving, someone other than the continual wind, the snowflakes from the heavens. The men at the winch straighten up and look down into the boat. Those who pushed or pulled stand motionless, awkward, hands at their sides, stand like that for a long time, surely many minutes or hours, Andrea feels, but it is scarcely more than a few seconds. The hours are numerous and the clock seldom measures the time that passes inside us, the real lifetime, and because of this many days can fit into a few hours, and vice versa, and numbers of years can be an imprecise measure of a man’s lifetime, he who dies at forty has perhaps actually lived much longer than he who dies at ninety. A few seconds or hours; the boy has heaved himself into the boat. He crouches down in the bow, then he rises slowly and has something large in his arms, something larger than a cod, even larger than a king cod, since this is not a cod but a man, the boy screams something and finally the lethargy falls away from the others. Árni is aboard in one movement, Gvendur and Einar come down the landing, and they take hold of Bárður and head toward the hut. It’s almost as if the ground bends beneath the weight, yet it is hard with frost, rocks, and millions of years, but a dead man is so much heavier than one who lives, the sparkling memories have become dark, heavy metal. No one says anything. Guðmundur and his men stand motionless. They have taken off their woolen caps. Guðrún comes out the door, sees and then looks as if someone has punched her with a hard fist. Andrea has come into the hut, rushes up and then down again with
brennivín
, sweeps everything off the baiting table, they come in, lay Bárður on the table and the mountains above the huts whine. He lies with open eyes, stares upward, ice-cold, and yet does not want
brennivín
, wants nothing at all because he no longer is anything. Except for uncertainty. The cold had reached his heart, entered it, and then everything that had made him who he was vanished. The body that was strong, supple, and invincible in its youth is now ice-cold and, to be honest, problematic. Now it is necessary to bring him away, to his home, if in fact the dead, or their bodies, have some sort of home. Death changes everything. Selfishness was something no one could connect with Bárður while he lived with such brown eyes, but now his body lies on a baiting table and expects to be cared for, expects to be carried here or there, and besides that seems to blame his former shipmates and Andrea for living.

They eat in silence up in the loft. Almost restlessly. As if they were committing a crime, and they eat less than the sizes of their stomachs demand.

The boy doesn’t touch his box, doesn’t look at the coffee, he sits on the bed, his and Bárður’s bed, a narrow bed that has become uncomfortably wide and far too long, he sits there alone with his waterproof and the book. Then Andrea sits down next to him. Simply sits and stares. The other four finish their bread, finish their coffee, even Einar tries to slurp as little as possible and doesn’t complain even though his jaw hurts like hell from the blow. Gvendur has little appetite for his bread, he forces half of it down, then puts it aside as if it were filthy. Pétur stands up, the other three also stand up immediately and go down, Einar grabs Gvendur’s slice of bread as he goes down. Pétur pauses, looks at the boy and wants to say something, something about Bárður, something good about Bárður, and then to ask the boy to come down, ask, not order, but they need to work the catch, decapitate, gut, open, flatten, salt, and the boy has his own job in this, he decapitates and guts, cuts the livers out and puts them in barrels, the work is good, it cures all illness. But Pétur is prevented from saying this about the work, that it helps, that we’re nothing without it, because Andrea looks at him and her glance says, let him be and go down. And Pétur goes down, with an unexpected lump in his throat. I am losing her, he thinks, no, doesn’t think it, feels it, senses it, because between people lie invisible threads and we feel it when they break. They go out to work the catch. Everyone’s catch except for Einar’s, his line is in the sea, his fish hang on hooks several meters below the storm and do not remember life any differently. Einar is unhappy, it’s unfair that he gets nothing while the others get theirs, even Bárður who no longer has any need for it, dead fish for a dead man. They walk out, past the baiting table and the body that once answered to the name of Bárður.

Between those who go to do their duty, their work, to secure their sustenance, and those who sit up in the loft lies a dead man, frozen to death, his eyes are open but have lost their color and look at nothing. A dead body is useless, we can just as well throw it out. The boy looks away, the trapdoor is up, it opens down to death. Hell is a dead person. He moves his right hand to one side, strokes the book that made Bárður forget his waterproof. It is perilous to read poems. The book was printed in Copenhagen in 1828, an epic poem that Reverend Jón translated, reworded, put fifteen years of his life into, an epic composed in England by a blind poet, composed to come closer to God, who is, however, like the sky, the rainbow, and the core, he avoids us even as we seek him out.

Paradise Lost.

Is it a loss of Paradise to die?

Andrea thinks about the smell of Bárður’s body. That obtrusive blend of warmth and scent. She puts her hand behind her, moves it carefully, and her palm strokes the place where Bárður’s head rested in the night. The boy just sits numbly. Once there was a woman who wrote a letter about the moon, once there was a little girl who was proud of having older brothers, once there was a man to whom it was possible to tell everything and he told everything in return, and now they’re all dead, except for the moon, and that is just a clod in space, of stone-dead rock and meteorites that have shattered on its surface.

Could it be that a woman’s feelings lie higher and thus closer to the skin than a man’s? That because a woman can bear life she is in some way more sensitive to it, and to the pain that is only possible to measure in tears, regret, sorrow?

Andrea moves her hand from the end of the bed where Bárður’s head lay and places it on the boy’s right shoulder. She does this without thinking. This is a movement that comes from within, sympathy and sorrow come together in one hand, and shortly afterward the boy cries. The tears stream forth when the words are useless stones. He lies like a conch, half in the bed, half in her lap, which will soon be wet with tears. The tears ease the pain and are good but they are still not good enough. It’s not possible to thread the tears together and then let them sink like a glittering rope down into the dark deep and pull up those who died but ought to have lived.

It doesn’t take the boy long to gather the things he’s going to take with him. Andrea helps him, makes him eat something, packs pieces of salted meat for him, the last bits, they were supposed to go into the soup next Sunday, they’ll survive without it, she thinks, and quickly feels hot anger toward those outside who have started to work the catch, almost feels hatred that they should be alive, all four of them. Her apron still dark from the tears, perhaps the spot would never disappear, hopefully not, she thinks. They wrap
Paradise Lost
carefully, this book shall be taken along, then enough flatbread and pâté, a handful of sugar cubes. First, however, the boy opens the book and his face twitches when he sees the letter to Sigríður. Nothing is sweet to me, without thee. Words to her who breathes behind the mountains and heaths, and still doesn’t know that the possibilities of life have decreased significantly, she who is startled every time she sees someone heading toward the farm and hopes it is the fishing-station postman with a letter for her, a word to bridge distances, words that ease regret, magnify it at the same time and feed it. The next letter she receives will be bulky, passionate words from a dead man. The boy hands Andrea the letter and says, see to it that it goes with him, and Andrea says, poor girl, and that is also what we say, because the frost and the poem took the most precious thing from her.

Then the boy is ready to go.

Of course you’re going, Andrea had said, because he couldn’t think of lying back down to sleep in the bed without Bárður there, of sitting down on the thwart without Bárður there. Bárður is gone and a frozen body is all that’s left. It would be a betrayal, the boy had said, I couldn’t bear it.

Two explanations, two excuses, everything has at least two sides.

They hurry because Pétur isn’t going to take this well, a man doesn’t leave his crew, that’s simply absurd, I’ll deal with Pétur, Andrea says, just go, you don’t belong here, and the boy goes where he and Bárður had headed in the spring, here to the Village, the center, the hub of the world.

Be careful on that damned Impassable, no doubt the waves are breaking well over it by now, Andrea says, and the boy says, yes, I’ll be careful, but doesn’t say that he plans to take a different route, through the valley that cleaves between the mountains, he’s going up onto the heath and then the plateau, wants to come as far from the sea as possible, though it might only be for one night or two, it’s a long way and dangerous in such weather, at this time of year, but what does it matter since most of them are dead, who cares whether I live, thinks the boy, but he says nothing, promises to take care about the surf, Andrea would never let him go if she knew the route he was planning to take. And what then, she asks. I’ll return the book, he says simply. She strokes his face with both hands, she kisses his forehead, she kisses both his eyebrows, don’t forget me, boy, she says, never, he says, and vanishes into the snowdrift.