Independent People (25 page)

Oh dear, wasn’t it getting any lighter yet?

Very cautiously, so as not to disturb the spectres in the dark, he would raise his head and peep over the foot of the bed.

The further it wore on towards morning, the more obvious did it become that the kitchen things were gradually exhausting their night’s supply of wisdom. And as soon as their conversation dwindled, the boy’s ears were free for other voices. The sheep below would scramble to their feet and, grunting a little, would ease themselves after the night. Some of them would rear on their hind legs to sniff the leavings of last night’s hay, stick their horns into the mangers, or push each other about. As soon as the boy heard them get to their feet, hope would wake in his breast

But of all the morning’s time-signals the most reliable were his father’s snores.

At dawn when the boy awoke, he would still be snoring with long, long, deep, deep snores. This kind really belonged not to morning but to the night itself. These snores bore no relation to the world we live and wake in; they were an alien excursion over tilted space, immeasurable time, extravagant existences; yes, the horses of this cavalcade had little in common with the horses of our world, and still less was the landscape of the snoring life akin to the landscape of day.

But as morning came nearer, his father’s snores gradually lost their resonance, the resounding chest-notes dissolved on a slowly ascending scale, moved by degrees into the throat, from the throat into the nose and mouth, on to the lips with a whistle, sometimes only with a restless puff—the destination was near, the horses prancing with the joy of traversing scatheless the sounding wastes of infinity. The homeland lay spread before the eyes.

The breathing of the others lacked altogether the range and the magnificence of his father’s snores, and was, moreover, heedless of time. Take Grandmother’s breathing for instance. Who would ever imagine from her breathing that it was a living being that was sleeping beside the boy? She breathed so low and stirred so seldom that for hours on end nothing seemed more likely than that she had stopped altogether. But if he leaned over her and
listened intently, he might occasionally hear signs of life, for her lips sometimes emitted a very faint puff. She had another trick too. After having lain for hours as if dead, life would rise to the surface in her like the slow little bubbles rising at long intervals from the bottom of the stagnant pools down in the marshes—life revealed in strange mutterings, whisperings, and grumblings, in odious psalms from another world. For she, too, had a world of her own which was unintelligible to others, a world of prayers and hymns, those long tiresome verses which his father detested so much, the world of the merciful and compassionate God, the forbearing Father and the terrors of hell. Of this world she never gave any description, unless, indeed, it was to mumble another prayer even more incomprehensible. No one who sang so many hymns and knew so much about the joys of the eternal life and so on could be more devoid of missionary fervour that was his grandmother. True, she had taught him to lie down to sleep with its language on his lips, but her world of prayer remained as bewilderingly isolated from human reality as his father’s world of snores; he discerned nothing of its landscape through the words and still less of its unsubstantial inhabitants. The alien life of the hymns, as it rose to his grandmother’s unconscious lips, aroused in him the same dread as the pools in the marshes with their muddy, acrid water, their slime, and their shaggy, loathsome plants, their water-beetles.

Opposite their parents’ bed slept the three older children, Helgi and Gvendur at the head, Asta Sollilja at the foot. To what world did Helgi’s sleep-language belong, to what world the weeping of Asta Sollilja, the grating of her teeth?—a language without words or meaning, lacking all save imbecile fury; a weeping that had no tears to accompany it, no sob, only a sudden tearing pain that came without warning and vanished without trace, as if some frightful summons had been flashed through her limbs from world to world. None of these worlds, none of these voices, observed the laws of day or the feelings of this world.

Where was his mother on these mornings of winter when no one was at home and all were far away, each in his own sleep, while the shadows of other worlds pregnant with wonders brooded over the little living-room in Summerhouses? Was she asleep or awake? Were they her waking groans that were drowned again and again in his father’s snores, or was the soothing hand of oblivion forbidden even in her world of sleep? Great was his longing for day as he lay there alone, surrounded by alien, cold-hearted worlds
which did not even know that he existed—but greater still for his mother’s arms.

There was one terrible night that he would always remember, no matter how long he lived. It must have been very early when it happened, yes, long before winter day made his first effort to open his weary eye, for the boy himself was still asleep, still abroad in the drifting landlessness of his own dream-worlds. So pleasant was his absence, so sweet and heavy the drowsiness of midnight pervading all his limbs, that he was reluctant to leave, but presently there came a moment when he felt he must cast off his lethargy and return—there was someone calling.

Who could it be? At first the cry was so distant that he did not seek to inquire, paying it as little attention as if it had been news from another shire. But gradually the noise came nearer; groans and wails, coming nearer and ever nearer. For a while it was as if they had even reached the mansion at Rauthsmyri, but they did not stop there, they came nearer and nearer still, until finally he found that they had come all the way into the room in which he was lying. They came from his mother. He was wide awake now. He was lying alone in his grandmother’s bed. There was a candle burning in the room. His grandmother, mumbling, bent, and shaky-handed, was wrestling away with something over by the parents’ bedside, while sitting on the edge was his father, holding his mother’s hand. The children in the other bed had covered up their heads, but now and then staring, terrified eyes peeped out from under the blankets. But they did not dare to look at one another, they pretended to be asleep. Mother was dreadfully ill tonight. The groans became sharper and sharper, more and more painful to hear; it was the suffering of the world; the boy had been thinking of rising to ask about it, but now he thought no more of asking, he huddled down under the clothes. Then after a while his mother stopped groaning. His grandmother began to struggle with the fire in the little range, her endless struggle; for many generations now she had been struggling to kindle fires and heat water. A few moments passed. The boy’s understanding ebbed away, the whispering voices of his father and his grandmother dwindled away up-country, vanished into another county. His father went creaking noisily down the staircase of a distant building, most probably the church at Rauthsmyri, or some church even more distant, and, closing the trapdoor after him, hurried away out into the night. But no sooner had he closed the door than his mother started screaming again, more painfully than ever; and
again it was as if a cold paw with sharpened talons gripped the boy’s heart. Why should those of whom one is fondest have to suffer the most, and why is it that one can never do anything for them?

Across the boy’s mind, involuntarily, there flashed the idea that his father was to blame for all his mother’s troubles. It was he who always slept with her, he who imagined he was her owner and her master. There must have been something on his conscience to make him so attentive to her tonight: he had held her hand, a thing he had never been seen to do before, and then he had rushed off somewhere in the middle of the night, as if he were afraid.

Few things are so inconstant, so unstable, as a loving heart, and yet it is the only place in the world where one can find sympathy. Sleep is stronger than the noblest instinct of a loving heart. In the middle of his mother’s agony the light began to grow dim. The kettle’s gurgling receded; the crackling of the fire, the bustling of his grandmother, her muttering and grumbling, her snatches of forgotten hymns, everything dissolved into fleeting half-wakeful dreams that no longer had beaks or claws, dreams empty of passion and suffering, blithe and desirable as the lives of the elves in the crags. The drowsiness of midnight, so sweet, so heavy, began again to flow through his limbs; and little by little, like a hundred grains of sand, his consciousness filtered down into the abyss of his sleep-world until oblivion had once more filled it full.

Yesterday his father had taken the little baby away over to Rauthsmyri to bury it.

Was his mother happy again, then? Was she again, like the children, reconciled to the monotony of horizonless winter days? Or were her groans still drowned in the pitilessness of depths that do not know the individual heart? Pain came to the children and was gone after a short while, but the mother’s suffering was eternal. Never had the boy known the family to sleep so long as on this morning. The sheep had long since scrambled to their feet; he could hear them butting one another every few moments. His father had covered mile upon mile of chest-snores, the crockery was silent at the approach of morning, and winter day’s eye was opening in bluish pallor on the window. Were they afraid to wake up, or what? He began tapping quietly with his fingernails on the sloping roof, a thing he could never, in spite of threats, restrain himself from doing when he felt that the morning was being prolonged too far. When this had no effect he began to squeak, first
like a little mouse, then sharper and higher, like the squeal of the dog when you tread on its tail, and finally higher still, like a land wind shrieking through the open door.

“Now then, that’s enough of your nonsense.”

It was his grandmother. The boy had succeeded, then. Mumbling away to herself, the old woman gathered her strength and, after one or two fruitless efforts to rise, managed finally to scramble out of bed with all the gasps and groans which always accompanied that task. She put on her sackcloth skirt and her short coat Then the search for the matches began. It always ended with the matches being found. In the uncertain light of the wall-lamp he saw her bending bareheaded over the range, saw her mahogany rune-carved skin and her protruding cheek-bones, her sunken mouth and scraggy neck, her thin wisps of grey hair—and was afraid of her, and felt that morning would not come until she had tied her woollen shawl round her head. Presently she tied her woollen shawl round her head. In these tottering movements and twitching eyes he greeted each new day, greeted afresh the return of concrete reality in this age-old, closed-up face which peeped mumbling and grumbling from its hood as, toiling, straining, and wrestling, she once more set about her endless task of lighting the fire. Then, without warning, his father started scratching himself, clearing his throat, spitting, and taking snuff. He put on his trousers. It was time to think of feeding the sheep.

That part of morning which belonged to reality had at last come round. It was comforting to reflect that one thing at least never varied from day to day: his grandmother’s desperate wrestling with the fire. The brushwood was always equally damp; and although she broke the peat up into little pieces and laid the bits with the most wood in them nearest the kindling, the only result for long enough would be a dreary crackling and a damp, offensive reek that filled every cranny and stung one’s nose and eyes with a smarting pain. And even if the boy put his head under the clothes, the smoke would have got there too. The flame in the wall-lamp would gutter low on the wick. But his grandmother’s ritual grumbling was never so protracted that it did not carry with it the promise of coffee. Never was the smoke so thick or so blue, never did it penetrate the eyes, the nose, the throat, the lungs so deeply that it could be forgotten as the precursor of that fragrance which fills the soul with optimism and faith, the fragrance of the crushed beans beneath the jet of boiling water curving from the kettle, the smell of coffee.

The longer the kindling took and the more acrid the smoke that eddied about the room, the longer the anticipation, the stronger the anticipation. To pass the time away he always made an examination of the roof. True, it was the same examination every morning, and it was, moreover, an examination the result of which he knew to a nicety beforehand, but all the same it was an inevitable examination every morning, provided his eyes were open. There were two knots especially that always drew his attention; when the smoke grew thin enough and the light bright enough for him to make out the features of these knots, it was a sign that the fire was drawing as it should and the water heating. What were those two knots, then? They were two men, two brothers. Each of them had one eye in the middle of his forehead and was plump in the face, like his mother. How was it that they were like his mother? It was because they were his mother’s brothers, who had sailed away to far-off countries and found everything they wanted, long before he was born.

“What things the child sees!” his mother once said when alone with her, he had told her of this in confidence. They were whispering together of various things that no one else might know about; of song; of far-off countries.

“If you go far, far away,” he said, holding her hand as he sat there on the edge of her bed, “can you get everything you want?”

“Yes, my darling,” she said wearily.

“And be whatever you’d like to be?”

“Yes,” she answered, abstractedly.

“When the spring comes,” he said, “I think I'll climb to the top of our mountain and see if I can see the other countries.”

Silence.

“Mamma. Once last summer I saw the waterfall in the gully flowing backwards in the wind. The water was being blown back over the edge.”

“Listen, my dear,” she said then, “I dreamed something about you the other night.”

“Me?”

“I dreamed that the elf-lady took me into the big rock and gave me a bowl of milk and told me to drink it, and when I had drunk it the elf-lady said: “Be good to little Nonni, because when he grows older he will sing for the whole world.”