The Atom Station (6 page)

“I'm beginning to want that coffee,” she said.

The organist: “Cleopatra, you own the whole of Brazil, and Turkey, and Java”—and I cannot remember what other coffee-lands he listed.

“Yes, but she hasn't got eleven fingers,” I said, and looked at the picture on the wall.

“Who knows,” said the organist, “but what the eleventh finger is the very finger she lacks even though she deserves to have it?”

“A picture is still a picture,” I said.

“And nothing else,” he said. “The other day I saw a photograph of a typist, and she has thirty-five fingers.”

“Shall I go into the kitchen and count Cleopatra's fingers?” I said.

He said, “A picture is not a girl, even though it is the picture of a girl. One can even say that the more closely a picture resembles a girl, so much the further it is from being a girl. Everyone wants to sleep with a girl, but no one wants to sleep with the image of a girl. Even an exact wax model of Cleopatra has no blood-stream, and no vagina. You do not like the eleventh finger, but now I shall tell you something: the eleventh finger takes the place of these two things.”

When he had said this he looked at me and laughed. Then he leaned over to me and whispered, “Now I am going to let you into the most remarkable secret of all: the image of Cleopatra that resembles her more closely than all other images, namely the person who has just walked through this room and into the kitchen to make some coffee—she of course has a blood-stream and many other nice things, but even so, she is furthest of all from being Cleopatra. Nothing tells one less about Cleopatra than this apparently haphazard but yet logical biochemical synthesis. Even the man who celebrates a silver wedding anniversary with her after twenty-five years of marriage will not know more about her than the one who lay with her for half an hour, or than you who see her for a few seconds crossing a room; the fact is, she is not even a likeness of herself. And this is what the artist knows; and that is why he paints her with eleven fingers.”

THE PICTURES IN THE HOUSE

Next day I stood in the middle of the room beside two domestic animals—an electric floor polisher and a vacuum cleaner—and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.

In this house there hung, so to speak, mountains and mountains and yet more mountains, mountains with glacial caps, mountains by the sea, ravines in mountains, lava below mountains, birds in front of mountains; and still more mountains; until finally these wastelands had the effect of a total flight from habitation, almost a denial of human life. I would not dream of trying to argue that this was not art, especially since I do not have the faintest idea what art is; but if this was art, it was first and foremost the art of those who had sinned against humanity and fled into the wilderness, the art of outlaws. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as a painting of Nature. I touched the waterfall and did not get wet, and there was no sound of cascade; over there was a little white cloud, standing still instead of breaking up; and if I sniffed that mountain slope I bumped my nose against a congealed mass and found only a smell of chemicals, at best a whiff of linseed oil; and where were the birds? And the flies? And the sun, so that one's eyes were dazzled? Or the mist, so that one only saw a faint glimmer of the nearest willow shrub? Yes, certainly this was meant to be a farmhouse, but where, pray, was the smell of the cow dung? What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everyone knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be? Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? Those who know Nature hear it rather than see it, feel it rather than hear it; smell it, good heavens, yes—but first and foremost eat it. Certainly Nature is in front of us, and behind us; Nature is under and over us, yes, and in us; but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same; and never in a rectangular frame.

A farmhouse with a turf roof is not what it looks like from a distance some sunshine night in July; nothing is further from being a farmhouse. I had spent all my childhood in a farm opposite a mountain; it would be no use for anyone who wanted to paint my farm to start from the turf roof, he would have to start from the inside and not the outside, start from the minds of those who lived there. And a bird, I also know what a bird is. Oh, those dear divine birds! It may well be that this picture of a bird cost many thousands of kronur, but, may I ask, could any honorable person, or any person who appreciates birds at all, justify to his own conscience painting a bird sitting on a stone for all eternity, motionless as a convicted criminal or a country person posing for the photographer at Krok? For a bird is first and foremost movement; the sky is part of a bird, or rather, the air and the bird are one; a long journey in a straight line into space, that is a bird; and heat, for a bird is warmer than a man and has a quicker heartbeat, and is happier besides, as one can hear from its call—for there is no sound like the chirp of a bird and it is not a bird at all if it does not chirp. This soundless bird on a stone, this picture of no movement, no long journey in a straight line, might have been meant to represent the dead stuffed bird that stood on top of a cabinet in our pastor's house at home; or the tin birds one could buy at Krok when I was small. But a picture of a dead bird is not that of a bird, but of death; stuffed death; tin death.

6.
The mink farm

One of the most promising mink farms in the vicinity had suffered a great loss: fifty minks had been stolen. When I arrived for my organ lesson in the evening, two close friends of the organist's were sitting there, both of them policemen, the one self-conscious and other unself-conscious, both organ pupils. They had come straight from duty and were drinking coffee in the kitchen and arguing over this business.

“What does it matter if fifty minks are stolen?” said the organist.

“What does it matter!” said the unself-conscious policeman. “The rascals didn't even have the sense to cut off their heads, the beasts are roaming around at large. A mink is a mink. It kills chickens. And destroys trout and birds. And attacks lambs. Do you want to have everything in the country stolen? Do you want to have your chamber pot stolen from you?”

“People should have solid and immovable privies,” said the organist, “not loose chamber pots.”

“Yes, but what if you had a gold chamber pot? Or at any rate a silver chamber pot?” said the unself-conscious policeman.

“Some penniless innocent manages, after violent efforts, to break into a small shop and steal some shoelaces and malt extract,” said the organist. “Or manages to remove an old coat from a vestibule, or sneak into a dairy through the back door and grab the loose change left over in the till the night before, or pinch the wallet off a drunken seaman, or dip into a farm hand's travel box and collect his summer pay. It is perhaps possible to steal our tin chamber pots, although only by special dispensation of God's grace. But it is impossible to steal our gold chamber pots, or even our silver ones; for they are properly guarded. No, life would be fun if one could just walk out and steal a million whenever one was broke.”

“There's no need to go as far as saying they empty all the banks and the Treasury,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

“I have two friends who never spurned a carelessly locked door or a back window off the hook at night,” said the organist. “By constant night-vigils for two years, and all the diligence and conscientiousness it is possible to apply to one's work, they managed to scrape together a sum equivalent to half a year's pay for a dustman. Then they spent another two years in jail; eight man-years' work, all told. If such people are dangerous, then at least they are a danger to no one but themselves. I am rather afraid that my friend Bui Arland and the others in F.F.F. would think that a poor return over eight years.”

“But yet his son goes out and steals fifty minks,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

“My God!” I said. “Bui Arland's son!”

They noticed me than for the first time, and the organist came over to me and greeted me, and the two men introduced themselves; one of them was a cheery, broad-beamed man, the other a serious young man with hot eyes that peered at you stealthily. The police had got wind that little Thord Arland, the one called Bobo, and a friend of his, had stolen these fifty beasts; they had slaughtered some of them down by Ellid River, but the rest had escaped.

“When the good children of better people go out in the evenings before bedtime,” said the organist, “and steal fifty minks to amuse themselves, or a few crates of spare parts for mechanical excavators, or the telephone wires to Mosfell District, that is just as logical a reaction against their environment as the actions of my two friends—and just as innocent. It is impossible to escape the fact that an object which lies in salt water will absorb salt. The thievery that really matters, on the other hand, takes place elsewhere. You asked whether I wanted to have everything in the country stolen; now I shall tell you a secret: everything in the country
is
being stolen. And soon the country itself will be stolen.”

I was still standing with my gloves on in the middle of the room, gaping.

“What will happen to the poor child?” I asked.

“Nothing at all, fortunately,” said the organist, and laughed. “Unless of course the Chief of Police phones up his daddy and they chat about the younger generation for a while and laugh and then fix up the next bridge night.”

“Worse luck,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “Brats like that should be publicly thrashed at Austurvoll.”
*

The organist laughed, amiably and sympathetically, but thought this observation too naive to answer.

Then the self-conscious policeman uttered his first words and addressed his colleague: “Have I not often told you that they indoctrinate you with whatever sense of justice it suits them best for you to have? You have a
petit-bourgeois
sense of justice.”

I was going to say something more, but the organist came over to me and put his arm round me and walked me out of the kitchen into the living room, closed the door behind us, and made me sit down at the harmonium.

When the half hour was up and the organist opened the door to the kitchen again, the self-conscious policeman was still sitting there reading a book, but the unself-conscious one had gone away home.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I couldn't be bothered going home to my suitcase. But now I'm on my way.”

His teeth were whole, and when he smiled he looked positively childlike, but before you knew it he started frowning again and began to peer at everything in that stealthy way that makes a girl say to herself and mean perhaps something rather special: “He's different from the others.” But yet somehow I had the impression that I knew him. Did he know me?

“Stay as long as you like,” said the organist. “I'm going to make some more coffee now.”

“No more coffee for the time being,” said the self-conscious policeman. “I'm off now. It's quite true what you said: there is no sense in being a petty thief, that's only a pastime for children—and for wretches who go on being children after they have grown up.”

“The only conclusion not to be drawn from this fact is that one ought therefore to become a legal thief,” said the organist.

“Ah well. I'm on my way.”

I accompanied him out. We were going in the same direction. He was no good at starting a conversation, and I did not know what to say either. Our silence was like a fire glowing under a spit; until he said, “Do you recognize me?” and I replied, “Yes, but I don't know who you are.”

“I know you,” he said.

“Have you seen me before?” I asked, and he said that he had. Then I said, “The difference is that I know you but haven't seen you before.”

“Of course you've seen me,” he said. “I was one of the men who threw the corpse into your hall the other night.”

“Oh yes, now I remember,” I said, but yet it was not so much this that I remembered; rather I was meaning some indefinable secret relationship between us that lay much deeper, an acquaintanceship that it would not be proper to put into words. So I hurried away from that subject and started discussing the other: “Don't you think it strange to have everything—youth, good looks, health, education, intelligence, and money—and yet go out like Arngrim Arland and be carried home in a paralysis of poison?”

“So-called daddy-boys,” he said, “the sons of men who have cheated the populace of vast wealth—they know by instinct that they are born receivers. What are such boys to do? They have no vocation to become criminals, and no necessity to become anything else, so they go out to eat and drink poison. That is their philosophy.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“From the north,” he said. “From Hunavatn County, where all the best thieves and murderers in the country come from.”

“Really?” I said. “Then we both own everything on the other side of Holtavard Heath; I am from the north too, you see.”

“But have you a vocation?” he asked.

“A vocation?” I said. “What's that?”

“Have you not read in the papers that country people have to have a vocation?” he asked. “The papers are always saying so.”