Iceland's Bell (40 page)

12

Late one autumn evening, at Goldsmith’s guesthouse in Nyhavn, a sojourning gentlewoman and her maidservant prepare for departure. Moored ships from faraway places bob gently in the narrow canal outside, their bows touching the embankment momentarily before swinging out again. They pack their belongings, their valuables, and their clothing into boxes and trunks, the lady assigning everything its particular place, yet distractedly. She even forgets her task for a time, and turns away to stand lost in her own private vision at the window. Her middle-aged maidservant follows suit: she stops what she is doing and watches her mistress in secret, compassionately.

Finally everything is packed, with the exception of one item. Lying upon the windowsill, half-wrapped in a red silken handkerchief, is an ancient, shriveled parchment book, darkened by soot, begrimed by the oily fingers of men dead for so long that no trace of their lives on earth remained except for these fingerprints. Again and again the maidservant hesitantly picks up this artifact, fumblingly unwraps the red silk and wraps it around anew, or else puts it down in another place before returning it after a moment to where it had originally lain. Still her mistress has not told her where this book is to go; in fact she hasn’t mentioned it at all. Night falls and the streets grow silent; the seagulls that hover back and forth around the rigging of the ships increase in number, and the lady still stands at the window, staring out.

Until finally the maidservant pipes up: “Would you like me to venture out onto the streets, though it’s so late, and return the book to where it belongs?”

“Do you have any idea where this book belongs?” asked her mistress in a low voice, its tones golden-dusky and distant.

“I remember you saying before we left Iceland that this book belonged in only one place; hm; with one man.”

“That man is more distant from us in Copenhagen in the fall than he was in Iceland in the spring,” said the lady.

The maidservant busied herself with some small task or other and answered, without looking up: “My deceased mistress, your blessed mother, often told us girls a story about one of your foremothers, a woman who kissed no man more warmly than her father’s enemy, nor treated anyone more openhandedly than she did him, though she sent a man after him to kill him after he’d ridden out of the yard.”

Snæfríður did not look at her maidservant, but answered luke-warmly, from somewhere deep within her distraction: “It may be that my sagalike great-grandmother killed her father’s enemy after having first given him gifts. But she did not send him gifts after having had him killed.”

“And my deceased mistress’s daughter hasn’t killed anyone yet,” said the maidservant. “And now we have nothing left but one night in this city, and there’s not much left of this night either, and it’s fall and any kind of weather is possible, and in just a few moments we’re supposed to sail out onto that raging sea that most resembles the rushing rivers in the south of Iceland. And whether we perish or not, time is running out, and if she doesn’t pull herself together and take advantage of this final night then she’ll never return the book to him; his book.”

“I have no idea what you’re trying to imply,” said the lady, and she looked with surprise at her maidservant. “I don’t expect that you’re talking about the rigger who’s been going back and forth, back and forth, this entire day and all day yesterday and all day the day before yesterday, all day, all night, doing his work on the far side of the canal?”

The maidservant said nothing. After a moment she started gasping and panting as she stood stooping over an open trunk, and when her mistress looked over she saw the woman’s tears falling.

“I have succeeded—he is to be convicted by my friends Beyer and Jón Eyjólfsson at Öxará in the spring,” said the gentlewoman coldly. “The rescript from the king is in that trunk.”

“He hasn’t been convicted yet,” said the maidservant. “Those papers didn’t come until today. He won’t hear about it until after you’ve gone. You can give him the gift tonight.”

“You are a child, dear Guðríður, though you are twenty-five years older than me,” said the gentlewoman. “Do you really imagine that he didn’t know everything about my errand from the moment I stepped on shore here in the summer? He is not deceived by baubles.”

“But you yourself know best why you brought this book with you from Iceland this summer,” said the maidservant.

“If I had been rebuffed and forced to sail back to Iceland having accomplished nothing, I might have given him this gift,” said the lady. “But the victor cannot give gifts to those whom he defeats. And in the end I almost gave the book to that devil Jón Marteinsson, who showed up here today while you were out. He tried extortion: he said I had him to thank for Bræðratunga.”

“God be with us! What would your dear departed mother have said?” said the maidservant as she wiped away tears. “I’m sure you would have preferred to die rather than to give that miserable lout gifts! He’s put your name in who knows how many documents here in Copenhagen, all to the amusement of the Danes.”

“We’ll let the Danes laugh, dear Guðríður. Put the old book under the lid of that trunk there and lock it up well. It’s bedtime for us travelers.”

The lamp flame had dwindled, but it was useless to clip the wick: they would shortly extinguish it and go to sleep. In the morning they would be gone. Their room was divided into two, the walls of the outermost chamber paneled halfway up with green-painted wood and whitewashed the rest of the way. Hanging on the walls were embossed bronze bowls and enameled dishes decorated with colorful paintings, as well as two copperplates, one obtained from Romanian Jews, the other from the Cathedral of St. Mark in Venice. Stacked upon the shelves of an open, painted cabinet against the wall were the dishes, bowls, cups, and other tableware that they had used for their meals. The lady did not join her host at his table, but rather requested that her meals be brought to her room. Further in was the bedroom, where the lady’s bed, made up with snow-white bedclothes, was located beneath a window; the maidservant slept upon a bench near the doorway.

Although the lady had said it was bedtime, she continued to stand lost in thought at the window, forcing the maidservant to find something to do in the meantime since she would not retire before her mistress. It was midnight. The silence was so deep that they were nearly shocked when a knock came upon the door. The drowsy night watchman had come up to inform the lady that a foreign gentleman was standing downstairs, wishing to speak to her Excellency.

She turned pale and her pupils widened. “Go and make sure that it is indeed me he is searching for,” she said, “and if that is the case, then show him in.”

As he stood there now at her doorway in this guesthouse in Copenhagen on her last night in the city, after all that had happened and all the trial of distance, he felt as self-assured as if he had left this room just a short time ago to take a stroll in the king’s park in pleasant weather.

“Good evening,” he said.

He held his hat in his hands. The man was still clothed in his fine old style, but he had grown stouter, the lines in his face had deepened, and the shine in his eyes had been dimmed from overwork and exhaustion. His carefully curled argent peruke glistened.

She did not immediately return the visitor’s greeting as she stood there at the window, but instead looked sharply at her maidservant and said:

“Go down to your friend the cook and say good-bye to her.”

He waited just beyond the threshold until the maidservant walked out past him, then he stepped over and entered her room. She said nothing, but went to the door and shut it, took one step forward and welcomed her guest with a kiss, then wrapped both arms around his neck and pressed her face to his cheek. He ran the palm of his hand over her long, fair hair, which had started to pale. She buried her face in his chest for some time before looking up at him.

“I didn’t think that you would come, Árni,” she said. “Yet somehow I knew that you would.”

“Some come late,” said he.

“I have a book for you,” said she.

“That’s like you,” said he.

She asked him to sit down upon the bench. Then she opened the lid of the trunk where the book lay wrapped in red silk, took it out, and handed it to him.

“This was my blessed father’s dearest book,” she said.

He started unwrapping the silk gently and slowly, and she waited anxiously to behold the gleam that newly acquired antique books always ignited in his eyes. Suddenly he paused in his unveiling, looked up, smiled, and said:

“I’ve lost my dearest book.”

“Which one?” she said.

“The one we found together,” he said—“in Jón Hreggviðsson’s house.”

He explained to her casually and resignedly how he had lost the
Skálda.

“It’s a terrible loss,” she said.

“Most terrible,” he said, “is when a man loses his love for precious books.”

“I thought that a man could love a lost treasure for as long as he missed it,” she said.

“A man doesn’t know precisely when the longing disappears,” he said. “In its own way it’s like a wound that’s been healed; or like death. A man doesn’t know precisely when the wound ceased to cause him pain; nor does he know precisely when he dies. Suddenly a man is healed; suddenly dead.”

She looked at him aloofly.

Finally she said: “You have the countenance of a dead man who appears to his friend in a dream: it is he and yet it is not he.”

He smiled. And in the silence that followed he began again to unwrap the book.

When he was finished he set the silken cover aside, nodded his head, and said, “I know this book. I offered to acquire Holt in Önundarfjörður for your father in exchange for this poor lawbook— it is namely considered to be the most important source in existence concerning Germanic society, even more important than the old
Lex
Salica
* of the Franks. Yes, that was at the time when the Treasury considered my counsel about as useful as a leak in the roof. I had also intended to wait and offer him Viðey* if he didn’t think Holt sufficient enough payment for this poor old thing. But although he seldom refused an opportunity to acquire real property if he could get it for a reasonable price, he knew as well as I that all the estates in Iceland are worth next to nothing compared to old Icelandic manuscripts; so he would not let himself be persuaded in this case. Later I wrote to him and offered to deposit into his account with the Company here in Copenhagen as much silver or gold as he decided, whatever the amount, for this worn-out old book. The following spring he sent me as a gift a copy of the book, made in the customary haphazard way that such things are done in Iceland: either the scribe himself misreads the original text, or else he works himself into difficulties trying to correct his predecessors’ mistakes. I myself already owned several higher quality copies of the book.”

“Are you still of the opinion that no Iceland exists any longer except for the Iceland that’s preserved in these old books?” she asked. “And are we, the inhabitants of that country, only an ache in your heart that you would be happy to get rid of in any way possible? Or perhaps we aren’t even as much as that any longer?”

He said: “The soul of the Nordic peoples is to be found in Icelandic books, but not in the folk who currently live in the Nordic countries or in Iceland itself. On the other hand, a sibyl once prophesied that the golden game pieces of old will be found in the grass before it all ends.”*

“I hear that there’s been talk here of sending us to the heaths of Jylland,” she said.

“If you wish, this can be prevented,” he said, and he smiled.

“If I wish,” she repeated. “What can one pitiable woman do? The last time I saw you I was a beggar at Þingvellir by Öxará.”

“I was in the service of the defenseless,” he said. “I saw you sitting out by the path—”

“—wearing the rags of those whom you had exonerated,” she added.

He spoke darkly, without looking up, entirely lost in his own thoughts as if reciting an old refrain:

“Where are the lowly whom I wished to raise? They are lower now than ever. And the defenseless whom I wished to defend? Even their sighs are no longer heard.”

“You have Jón Hreggviðsson,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I have Jón Hreggviðsson. And that’s all I have. And it’s possible that he’ll be taken away from me and hanged before the winter has passed.”

“Oh, no,” she said, and she inched herself closer toward him. “We’re not supposed to be talking about Jón Hreggviðsson. I’m sorry that I mentioned his name. I’m going to go wake the landlord and ask him to bring us a pitcher of wine.”

“No,” he said. “No wine from the landlord; nothing from anyone. As long as we are sitting here together we have everything.”

She leaned back and quietly repeated the final word:

“Everything.”

“In any case, only one thing exists in our lives,” said he.

She whispered: “One thing.”

“Do you know why I have come?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “So that you will never part from me again.”

She stood up, went over to a sturdy medium-sized ironclad trunk, and took out from a small end compartment some impressive-looking documents affixed with the seal of the supreme governmental authority.

She held out the documents, gripping them between her thumb and index finger like a man holding a rat by its tail.

“These rescripts,” said she, “these orders and subpoenas, dispensations and permits, are nothing but vanity and hypocrisy.”

The king’s seal hung by a thread from one of the documents, and he went over and weighed it in the palm of his hand. His hand movements were like those of a man who dangles a spider by its silken line and says, “Up, up if you know something good, down, down if you know something bad.”

“Your business here has been successful,” he said.

“I came here in the hope of finding you,” she said. “Nothing else matters. Now I can tear up this rubbish.”

He said: “It doesn’t matter whether these deeds are intact or torn to pieces. All of the decrees made by the Danish king will no longer be valid in Iceland before the next Alþingi is convened at Öxará.”